A floorboard creaks overhead and her blood runs cold.
Someone is in the house.
15
Daisy,
1998
Daisy remembers waking up early on the morning she found her mother dead. It was Sunday, 15 February 1998, and it was still dark. She doesn’t know what it was that filled her with a sense of dread as soon as she opened her eyes. It was as though something had shifted in the universe, alerting her to the horror she would soon face. For a few moments she lay there, still, her heart beating beneath her pink gingham duvet, as she remembered the noises she’d heard in the night, the muffled voices, knowing that once she got out of bed everything would change.
The first sign that something was off was the light that still glowed in the hallway. Her mum always turned the lights off before she went to bed but sometimes she would fall asleep in front of the television, and Daisy would hear her in the early hours making her way up the stairs. The second was the unmade bed in her mum’s room, the feeling that it hadn’t been occupied all night, the air too clean and not filled with sleep. In trepidation Daisy descended the stairs, hoping her mum had fallen asleep in front of the TV again, that she’d hear the reassuring sound of the early-morning presenters. Instead, she was met with an eerie silence. The hallway light might have been on, but the rest of downstairs was in darkness.
‘Mum?’ she said. Her voice sounded small. ‘Mum?’ she said again, louder this time. She pushed open the first door on the left, her eyes sweeping over the living room and adjusting to the gloom. It was unusually tidy: no cups or plates left out on the coffee-table, no empty crisps tubes rolling around on the floor, no biscuit wrappers or newspapers littering the surfaces or shoved down the sides of the chairs. For someone who cleaned other people’s houses, her mother wasn’t that bothered about their own. The heavy floral curtains were drawn, the television off. But lying on the sofa, on her side, fully dressed, her eyes closed, was her mum.
An overwhelming feeling of relief swept over Daisy. She’d just fallen asleep in front of the telly, that was all. She looked peaceful as Daisy approached her, a curl of her dark hair falling over one eye. Daisy was tempted to move it away and tuck it behind her ear, like her mum always did for her. Daisy pulled at her nightie so she could bend her knees to squat down, and gently shook her mother’s shoulder. ‘Mum. You fell asleep. Wake up.’
As soon as Daisy touched her mother, she knew. She was so cold, her skin a strange bluish-white that made her look like the pierrot doll she had. And then she saw it. The circle of dark red that had stained her mum’s favourite pale pink blouse. ‘Mum!’ Daisy screamed then, and began shaking her vigorously even though she knew it would be fruitless. ‘Mum! Wake up! Wake up! Please … Please …’ She sobbed, bending over her mother’s cold, still body. She didn’t know how long she stayed like that but eventually daylight was seeping in around the curtains.
There was only one person she could call. Her dad. He was there within ten minutes, prising her off her mother’s dead body and calling the police.
‘Yes,’ she heard him say into the phone, panic and fear in his voice. ‘It’s my ex-partner. Her name is Jennifer Radcliffe. She’s … ah …’ She heard the catch in his voice as he turned to his daughter, his eyes red. ‘There’s no pulse.’
It was all hectic after that, the cosy two-up-two-down she’d shared with her mother invaded by officials roaming around the house like rats. One lady with a kind face and a swishy ponytail tried to steer her out of the living room and away from her mother. She remembers kicking up a fuss – which was unlike her as she was always polite, unassuming, too shy even to put up her hand in class – as the kind-faced lady coaxed her away.
But not before she’d spotted it. A drawing of an insect’s head on her mum’s ankle that was definitely not a tattoo.
Her mother’s mysterious boyfriend flashed through her mind, with his double crown, his wide, ham-like neck and his penchant for doodling in the margins of newspapers.
And she knew – she just knew – that he was responsible for this. The Doodle Man, as she came to think of him, had killed her mother, and she vowed, right there at the age of ten, standing in that living room surrounded by police, that she wouldn’t rest until she had found him.
16
With a scream in her throat Emilia darts out of the front door, slamming it behind her, and calls the only person she knows who might be able to help.
‘Hello,’ says a familiar voice at the other end.
‘Trevor. I’m sorry to bother you at work but …’ Emilia hesitates. She’s standing in her driveway looking up at the house. Those windows didn’t open by themselves. ‘I’m worried someone is in the house.’ She explains about the skylights.
‘Don’t go back in. I’m coming straight over,’ he barks, ending the call before she’s even had the chance to reply.
She stares up at the windows. It begins to rain, light drizzle that settles on her coat and darkens the path. She feels impotent standing there, afraid to go into her own house. Her home has always been her sanctuary. The first place she and Elliot had owned together after a succession of rented flats. And now it’s tainted. Tainted by the unwanted packages turning up at her door, by the troll doll hanging from her tree. This invasion of her personal space, her life. The life she makes such an effort to keep separate, refusing to go on social media, not least because she has a phobia about anything she deems too technically complicated but mainly because she’s very private and always has been. And now her fiction is blending into her reality.
While she’s waiting for Trevor, she assesses her Ringcam app to see if it’s picked up anyone. Her heart is racing as she rewinds the footage on the cameras at the front and the back. But there is nothing. Could someone have got in by circumventing the cameras? She looks up at the roof. It’s high, with its two dormer windows and the skylight at the side. It would be easier to access the kitchen, with a single-storey roof at the back, but the culprit would have to climb over her neighbour’s wall to do so without being seen by the cameras.
By the time Trevor pulls up in his Honda Civic the rain has stopped, leaving behind the familiar earthy smell she’s recently learned from Jasmine’s science lessons is called petrichor. She breathes it in, feeling instantly calmer now she can see Trevor hurrying towards her, still in his security-guard uniform, fit and lithe at sixty-two. He’d been young, just twenty-three, when he had Elliot. His face is serious, but he gives a reassuring smile when he sees her. ‘You okay?’ he asks, patting her shoulder in a fatherly way （not that her own father ever did that. Physical affection seems to terrify Hugh Ward）。
She nods. ‘Thanks for coming, Trevor. I’ve not been back inside.’
‘Good. Stay here. If I’m not out within ten minutes call the police.’
Her insides fold over. ‘What?’
He raises his bushy eyebrows. ‘I’m sure it won’t come to that.’ He takes her front-door key and marches purposefully towards the house. She remembers all the times she’d left the porch door unlocked, feeling completely safe in this neighbourhood. A false sense of security in middle-class suburbia. What a fool she’d been.