‘Here,’ he says, when he returns. ‘Vodka soda.’
I take a sip, grimace, try to smile.
He sits down. Raises his eyebrows. ‘So …?’
‘I’ve been getting emails.’
‘What?’ His surprise is nearly comical. Whatever he was expecting me to say, it clearly wasn’t that.
‘Emails. A lot of them. Since two days after I got here.’ I look down at the table. ‘They’re clues. To pages from El’s old diaries. You know how she always used to—’
‘What?’
I flinch as his chair screeches backwards against the tiles.
‘El’s diaries? What the fuck?’ He starts to pace, running his fingers back and forth through his hair. ‘What are they about?’
‘Mostly when we lived here. El and I. About Mirrorland and—’
‘Who are they from?’ His voice is too high, his eyes suddenly furious. ‘For Christ’s sake, El’s gone missing, she was getting threats before she went missing, and now someone – they have El’s diaries and they—’ He stops, looks at me. ‘And you don’t ever think to tell anyone about it? What’s wrong with you, Cat?’
‘Ross, stop. Stop! I’m going to tell the police now. That’s why I’m telling you. Okay? And no one has the diaries. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. They’re here, they’re hidden all over this house like a treasure hunt. The emails are the clues. It’s El, Ross. It’s El.’ I stand up. I’m horribly nervous, I realise. I need him to accept this. I need him to finally believe me. And I’m worried he won’t. ‘When I told her I’d go to the police, she told me she was Mouse. Like the whole thing is just a joke to her. Like I’m a joke to her. So we can tell them, we can show Rafiq El’s emails—’
‘Mouse?’ His arms drop down by his sides. His mouth has gone slack, his face grey. ‘Mouse?’
My nervousness grows frightened wings. ‘Yes. You must remember. You and me and El and Mouse and Annie and Belle in Boomtown? On the Satisfaction? In the—’
‘Yeah, I remember Mouse. Fucking Mouse.’ He says it in a way that sends a shiver the length of my spine. Too angry, too overly familiar.
‘Ross—’
‘She turned up maybe six months ago. Biggest mistake of my life letting her back in this house. She was delusional. Completely obsessed with El. She started following us when—’
‘Wait, what …’ My breath is coming out in weird half gasps. ‘I don’t – you’re saying Mouse is real? An actual person? She isn’t – you’re saying she’s an actual person?’
Ross’s face changes. He looks at me with a dull kind of dislike, which might only be confusion. And when he finally opens his mouth to answer, I already know what he’s going to say. ‘Of course she is, Cat.’
CHAPTER 15
I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to think. What to even begin to think. And so I just keep shaking my head over and over again. ‘But she lived in Mirrorland. Like … like Annie and Belle and Chief Red Cloud and Old Joe Johnson … Of course she did! Come on, Ross! Ross?’ But I’m losing my certainty now, it’s draining away through a hole I can’t see, one I didn’t make, and I’m fast filling up with panic instead. Mostly for what being wrong about this means for me. Worse, what it means – what it could mean – for El. ‘She was called Mouse, for God’s sake!’
Instead of answering me, Ross marches from the room. I hear his boots stamping up the stairs. The rain is much heavier now; the whole kitchen has turned dark. My phone vibrates. It’s Vik. I don’t answer, look across at the two tiles in front of the Kitchener, the cracked line of grout that bisects them. Reach for the vodka and swallow all of it.
I don’t think Ross is going to come back until he does. His face looks no less grim, and when he drops something onto the table in front of me, I jump. ‘El found it in the loft.’
It’s a photo album, vaguely familiar, opened to a page with only one photograph. El and me, standing at the kitchen table making lemon cakes. We’re maybe eight, nine, wearing twin aprons and covered in flour. But I look at us for only a second, no more, because sitting on a chair, right on the edge of the shot, is a pale-faced, wide-eyed Mouse.
I realise that my fingers are pressed against my mouth only when I try to draw in a horrified breath. ‘My God.’ My body is too cold, my cheeks too hot. Shivers chase one another from the top of my scalp to the base of my spine. ‘God.’
Ross sits down. ‘You really thought she didn’t exist?’
I keep turning the pages of the album, my anxiety rising, afraid that I’ll see her again. As if that matters. As if seeing her once isn’t proof enough. The photos are few, each page containing one, sometimes two disparate shots. Some are black and white, some so old that the people in them are only silhouettes. Ghosts. I pause at an impossibly young Grandpa, just as impossibly handsome in a dark suit and bow tie, a blonde woman sitting alongside him, formal and unsmiling. Mum’s eyes. My grandmother.
And then, on the next page, a colour portrait taken outside the house, in the front garden. Mum, aproned and uncomfortable, grimacing a smile. And standing taller next to her, in head-to-toe black—
‘The Witch,’ Ross says, his mouth a grim line.
‘The Witch.’ My voice is unsteady. ‘Who is she?’
Ross glances at me. He looks worried, concerned. ‘Your aunt? I don’t know. She was Mouse’s mum. Do you really remember none of this?’
I shake my head. ‘We didn’t – don’t – have any other family. I’d remember that. I’d know that.’
Ross is quiet for too long, and then his reply is too careful. ‘You didn’t
