Emilia feels tears prick her eyes and sips her wine to hide her feelings. ‘We can’t all be super-confident like you,’ she says, trying to sound light. ‘It’s easy to be confident when you’re five foot nine and look like Claudia Schiffer.’
‘I wish! I don’t look like Claudia Schiffer. And I have my insecurities as you well know. Maybe I made a mistake finishing with Stefan.’ She sips her wine. ‘I’d love to have what you have. Obviously not your current situation with this creeper.’
Emilia laughs despite herself. With Ottilie here things don’t seem quite as foreboding. She has a way of making Emilia feel lighter.
Ottilie sighs. ‘I’m a bit worried about my business, to be honest. Dad, thankfully, has lent me some money but I don’t know how much longer I can prop it up.’
‘Have things still not picked up?’
‘A bit. The woman in Hampton I saw this afternoon has a huge house and wants help with every room, so that will tide me over for a while. Maybe I’m just tiring of it, I dunno.’ She sits back against the cushions.
‘It would seem a shame if you stopped. You’ve been doing it now for nearly twelve years. I’m proud of you for sticking at it as long as you have,’ says Emilia.
Ottilie doesn’t have a great track record for sticking at things. She took a few years out before deciding to go to university, but then managed just one term before realizing a degree wasn’t for her. A myriad of dead-end jobs followed before she opted to do an interior-design course in her late twenties. There’s always been something restless about her friend. At school they’d bonded over their similar childhoods with parents who were physically and emotionally distant, Emilia’s because of her father’s job in the RAF and Ottilie’s due to her mum’s early death and a father who decided to move to Germany. Although they are the same age, Ottilie always seemed older to Emilia back then. More worldly and knowing, almost like a big sister, but she sensed that Ottilie was never really fulfilled, that she was always looking for some unobtainable thing to complete her.
They go to bed too late – Ottilie always was a night owl – and Emilia has only just dropped off to sleep when she’s woken by loud music blasting through the house. She sits up in bed, disoriented for a few seconds, and then her heart is banging, adrenaline pumping through her. What the hell?
The music sounds like it’s filtering through all the speakers that Elliot has set up around the house. Talking Heads’ ‘Psycho Killer’ of all things. She jumps out of bed and rushes onto the landing. Jasmine and Wilfie wander out of their respective bedrooms with bed hair and puzzled expressions, and the three stand in mutual shock until Ottilie darts down the stairs, resplendent in a long silk nightdress. ‘What the fuck – Oops, sorry.’ She claps a hand over her mouth and looks at Wilfie.
Emilia has to shout over the music to instruct Alexa to stop playing and the house falls mercifully silent.
‘Why has the music gone off in the middle of the night?’ Wilfie cries, staring up at Emilia with his big brown eyes.
She hugs him to her and kisses the top of his head. ‘She must have got confused. It’s okay.’
‘Perhaps it’s on the blink,’ says Ottilie, glancing at her with concern over the top of Wilfie’s head.
‘Is there a way to disconnect the speakers?’ asks Jasmine. ‘And why is it so cold?’
Emilia turns towards the staircase that leads to the attic and the back of her neck prickles. ‘Stay here,’ she instructs the kids. She can hear Ottilie close behind her as she runs up to the second floor. Just as she feared, the skylight is wide open.
Emilia wants to cry. ‘But I checked it so many times. I …’ She can feel the blood draining from her face.
Ottilie places a reassuring hand on her arm. ‘There’s got to be an explanation.’
They head back to the children, who are still hovering on the landing. Even Jasmine looks worried and has her arm around Wilfie’s shoulders.
Emilia tries to keep the panic from her voice. ‘It’s okay. It’s sorted now. You both go back to bed.’
Once she’s settled an anxious Wilfie in his top bunk, reassured Jasmine, and closed the skylight on the attic landing, she and Ottilie head down to the kitchen.
‘Your skylights? They’re connected to Alexa too, right?’ says Ottilie, bending down and examining the white Echo on the kitchen shelf above the sink.
‘Yes. Elliot set it all up through the app.’
Ottilie stands back, her hands on her hips, her eyes still on Alexa. ‘Hmm. It sounds to me like it’s been hacked and someone’s instructing your Echo to do these things.’
Of course. Why didn’t she think of that? After all, she wrote it in book four, Who Lies Beneath. The killer in that book was living in the basement of a family’s house and terrorizing them through their digital home assistants.
‘Thank goodness you don’t have a basement,’ says Ottilie, ominously, as though reading her mind.
18
Daisy,
2005
So now here Daisy was, eighteen years old and living with her dad and stepmother, Shannon, in a town far away from where she’d spent her first ten years. Happy, she supposed, although she’d lived nearly half of her life without her lovely mum. She’d tried to find out everything she could about her mother’s murder, but there was surprisingly little information. Her dad had shielded her from all of it, orchestrating a move away from their little seaside town in Devon to Pocklington in Yorkshire.
At first she’d been too young to fully understand what had happened to her mother, but from snatches of hushed conversations, police visits and phone calls, she knew she’d been murdered. And the marking on her ankle, she was sure, had been made by the secret boyfriend. She’d shown her father the newspaper with the doodles in the margin, had told him her suspicions about her mother’s secret boyfriend. Her dad had listened and had taken her observations seriously. He’d even set up an interview with a grave-faced female detective who, it had been obvious, found it hard to know exactly how to talk to ten-year-old girls. She’d heard whispers bandied about between the grown-ups of a ‘cereal killer’， which always made her imagine the murderer eating lots of cornflakes. Finding him had consumed her throughout her teenage years.
‘He’s killed other women,’ her dad admitted one day, when she was about fifteen, and had begged him to tell her more about her mother’s murder. ‘One woman before your mother and several after. The police will catch him eventually.’
It baffled her that this man was getting away with it. Killing in plain sight, and all in Devon. It hadn’t been a coincidence that she’d chosen Exeter University. She knew she had to be around the south-west again – she couldn’t do anything from North Yorkshire.
The day her father had driven her to university he had turned the radio down and said, in his most serious voice, ‘I hope you don’t have any silly ideas about trying to find the man you think killed your mother. You leave anything like that to the police, do you hear, Daise? It’s not safe.’
‘Of course I will,’ she had scoffed in reply. And what could she really do, except on occasion take the bus from the university to her old seaside town on the outskirts of Plymouth to scan the streets, the shops, the arcades, the seafront for any sightings of the Doodle Man. Because she had something the police, and nobody else, had. She had seen him. She had watched her mother sneak him into the house and sneak him out again. She had seen the doodles in the newspapers he’d left behind. And, okay, she hadn’t had a good glimpse of his face, but she’d told the police about his fair sticky-out hair that was caused by his two crowns, his ham-like neck. They’d told her they would try to find out the identity of her mother’s mystery lover, if for no other reason than to eliminate him from their enquiries. But as far as she knew, he had never been found.