line. “Hello,” she said again, and this time she was answered by a thick, heavy silence.
Feeling her heart swell in her chest, Lana waited. She knew who it was. There could be only one man who would call her so late, and project such a sense of menace down the line.
The line hummed. It sounded like distant wings, hundreds of them, beating so fast that it filled her ears with a single note.
“Do you have it?” His voice was like rocks splitting, concrete breaking under immense pressure.
There was no point in pretending, in playing dumb. “No. Not yet.” She closed her eyes. “But I will.”
She pretended that she could hear the sound of her own heart beating, and if she waited long enough it would rise in volume and drown out his words, silencing his threats.
“I want it tomorrow.” Again, that gritty voice: pure verbal hatred. “I’ll send a couple of the chaps round.”
Lana still could not open her eyes. If she did, she thought she might see him standing there, grinning, his hair slick with gel and his eyes blazing. “It’s too soon. I don’t have it. Please… just give me a few more days. A week.” She loathed the pleading tone in her voice, the fact that she was reduced to begging from scum like this, whining like a dog for scraps from the table.
“Tomorrow.” That humming. The sound was audible behind his voice. “The chaps’ll call on you. Be there or it’ll only be worse for you.” Then he hung up.
Lana stood there, bathed in distant firelight, her forehead sweating and her hand gripping the telephone receiver. She was unable to put the phone down. Her fingers refused to budge, to open and relax their grip.
“No,” she said, and the word was like an exhaled breath. It made as little impact on the world as a sigh. “I don’t have it.”
Finally, after what seemed like a long time, she was able to relinquish her grip on the handset. She put it back on the windowsill, carefully, delicately. She still had her eyes closed. Her lips were trembling. Darkness danced behind her eyelids. The world was unstable, as if someone had untied her from her moorings and she was beginning to drift, to move away from everything that had ever seemed safe. The darkness behind her eyes beckoned.
“Mum?” Hailey’s voice, behind her and filled with concern.
Lana opened her eyes and the fiery darkness flooded in… then, gradually, it receded, letting in the light. The sirens were louder.
“Mum? Are you okay?”
She turned round and faced her daughter. Hailey was standing in the doorway, the light from her bedroom forming a bright pool at her feet. She was wearing an oversized nightgown and clutching the ear of a ragged teddy bear — the one her father had given her, and which they had both, for some reason, christened Well-do. It was a private joke, one of the few things father and daughter had ever really shared.
“Hi, honey. Can’t you sleep?”
Hailey shook her head. She was fourteen years old, yet she often seemed a lot younger. Right now, standing there with her weight on one hip and Well-do in her hand, she looked about ten, maybe even younger than that.
“What’s wrong, Hay? Bad dreams?” Lana started to move across the room, towards her daughter, but Hailey flinched long before she even made it to her side. “What is it, honey? Tell me about it.”
Then, at last, she saw it: the dark stain at the crotch of Hailey’s nightdress, the way she was standing turned fractionally to one side to hide the damp patch. “Oh, Hailey. Oh, baby, come here…” She went down onto her knees and hugged her daughter close, ignoring the smell of urine and the way that Hailey shuddered at her touch. “It’s okay. Just an accident, that’s all.” She felt her eyes begin to prickle and blinked away the threat of tears. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
So for the second time that night Lana comforted her daughter, treating her as if she were an infant. She ran a hot bath and watched in silence as Hailey undressed, trying to hide her thin body in the steamy bathroom. Lana stared at her slight arms and legs, at her small mound of a tummy. She was aware of a strange sensation in her chest, like the slicing motion made by a thin blade, and she looked away, unsure of what it was she was feeling.
There was a soft splashing noise as Hailey climbed into the bath; a louder one as she sat down in the water and moved her hands through the bubbles.
“Everything’s going to be fine.” Lana heard herself say the words, but she couldn’t believe them. The lie came easily, like a gift, and she accepted it with good grace. Sometimes it was easier to let people hear what they wanted, and this was certainly one of those times. “
Lana ran the sponge across her daughter’s narrow shoulders, letting the hot water spill across her pale skin, turning it pink. Hailey said nothing. She just sat there in the bath, letting the water soak her, staring at the same spot on the tiles. She didn’t even blink.
A lot more than the murders and Timothy’s suicide had created a vast gap between them, pushing them and keeping them apart. There was something else — an unknown quantity — and Lana did not know what she was meant to do to fix the problem. She was not armed with all the facts; whatever Hailey was going through, she was keeping it to herself. For some reason, perhaps even fear, the girl would not come to her mother for help.
“Speak to me, honey.” Lana whispered through tight lips, her jaw aching from the tension. “Tell me what it is.”
But Hailey kept staring at the wall, at the stained white tiles, her eyes unfocused yet seeing something beyond the room, the flat, the entire estate. Whatever it was she was looking at, Lana felt that it was changing her daughter, transforming her into a stranger. Making her different. Turning her inside out.
The room was filled with steam, obscuring her vision, and Lana felt that she should open the window but she didn’t want to leave Hailey’s side. Something kept her there, near the body that had begun life curled up within her, the construct of skin and hair and bone she had built for nine months inside her womb.
Lana was afraid for her daughter, but she didn’t know why.
Hailey had not wet the bed since she was two years old, and even then it had been an accident. Even her father’s death had not caused this kind of physical reaction, just the expected crying and outbursts of rage.
So what, Lana thought, was so terrifying that Hailey was suddenly fainting in the street and pissing herself in her sleep? What the hell was scaring her this much?
The steam moved sinuously, as if it were hiding shapes within its cloudy mass. At last Lana was able to move away, and she walked to the window and opened it, letting in the cool night air. The steam shifted, breaking apart like a hacked sheet. There was nothing behind it, no monster hid within the folds of dissipating steam. Nobody was in the bathroom apart from the two women, mother and daughter, and the unmistakable presence of their shared fear.
“Please,” said Lana, once again hating the fact that she was forced to plead.
Hailey said nothing. She twitched her head to the side, one corner of her mouth turning up in an expression that was not quite a smile but something else, something unreadable. “It’s nothing,” she said, and her voice was like that of a small child, not much more than a baby. “I promise, Mum. There’s nothing wrong. Nothing at all.”
Lana stood by the window, the cold air kissing her neck, the sirens wailing in the night. In that moment, with the song of the estate ringing in her ears, she knew that Hailey was lying.
CHAPTER SIX
WHEN LANA WOKE she felt a strange sense of panicked urgency, as if she should be doing something important but couldn’t remember what it was that required her attention. She blinked at the daylight, opening her mouth to run her dry tongue across her even drier lips. She felt the beginnings of a headache flaring up behind her eyes.
The radio was playing at a low volume on the dressing table. There was make-up scattered across the
