36. In From the Cold

2020 January 4
Saturday

They’ve taken everything from her. Everything. Piece by miserable piece, torn from her over and over. And now here she stands, in the wreckage of the life she’s built.

Blood on her shoes. Again.

The carnage left for her in the hall of Stenordale Manor might as well be the scene she discovered in the old makeshift basement at Dorley Hall, long before they had anyone else, when it was just her, her fellow survivors, and the work. When she believed in the precision, the purity, the honour of their cause. When all it took was a little bloodshed for her allies to lose their collective nerve.

The end of everything.

It might even be the kitchen at Dorley Hall, renovated and made into a home, made into a fortress for the new work, the work that was begun when she realised that her place in the world was far from guaranteed. The work that was messy and satisfying. The work that fed her and her companions, body and soul, and thus had an honour of its own. The kitchen when that bitch Elle and her lapdog David strolled in as if the both of them were not beneath her. When not even Crispin Smyth-Farrow would help her take it back, when he told her to make her peace with it, when he laughed at her rage. Laughed as if at some private joke.

Always and forever, the end of everything.

Dead men at Dorothy’s feet.

While Jake was getting minimally cleaned up — and drunk — before running off to pleasure himself with his toy, Dorothy watched the footage from the front hall. The cameras are placed poorly and thus much of the footage is unclear, but from what she can see, Vincent was responsible for much of it. The worthless cunt got hold of a gun at some point, fired it at least once, and now… this. The last laugh of Crispin Smith-Farrow’s little joke.

Frankie and Callum turned on Jake and the Silver River delivery men. Hard to tell whether it happened during the fight or was premeditated, but that hardly means anything. And Callum she can understand; a wetter and more useless soldier Dorothy has never encountered, more so even than Trevor, and she had Trevor’s balls cut off. But Frankie? Frankie was… Frankie was like a daughter to her. Always so vicious. So meticulous. So beautifully and deliberately cruel to the boys in her care. She rose above her roots and found in the work a satisfaction Dorothy always saw as an echo of her own.

And now, here she is, on the bloody tape, betraying a woman she’s known longer than her own mother.

Why?

Stupid. It’s obvious. Why else would Frankie defect?

You’re going to lose, Dorothy.

You’re going to die, Dorothy.

For a moment she feels her age, pulling at her from the soles of her aching feet. Eighty-one years like gravity, like a promise, like a chain, wrapped around her neck and keeping her in this place. And then she pulls herself the fuck together. What does she gain, feeling sorry for herself? Absolutely nothing.

Frankie learned something. That must be it. She learned something that made her act in self-preservation. Something to do with the Smyth-Farrow kids; the Yanks. They have full control of Silver River now. They’ll have decided to cut them all out. To recall Callum and Jake and, most likely, murder Dorothy and Frankie. NDAs for the soldiers; ashes for the women. Business as per fucking usual.

Obviously, whatever it is hasn’t come through yet, but when Jake gets himself together enough to report, it’ll happen. He’ll execute the order and Silver River will get Stenordale and that will be the final end of everything.

Fuck that.

She’s not dead yet. She can make them bleed for it. Frankie, the Smyth-Farrows, Elle and Vincent and Trevor and David. Rage is her most precious possession, and always has been.

But she needs to get to Jake first.

 

* * *

 

Wet fingers. Familiar. Slick with him. Every night, always slick with him. Struggling out from under him. Rinsing him away. Coming back to find him asking for more. Demanding more. Taking more. And more. And more.

Not just taking but altering, too. Chipping away. Every night a new wound. Carefully made where not even the mirror can show it. And when he leaves there is nothing and no-one left behind. Just filthy hair. Sore muscles. Bruised shoulders.

Wet fingers.

A muscle twitches. Something falls messy to the floor, out of a weakened hand, and the sound of it, the disgusting damp thump of it, it’s a memory: of being hit, not like Monica used to, not even like Dad used to, because the target is wrong, because it’s h—

A hand striking a wound. A hand bruising a face. A hand probing and pulling and tearing off clothes and controlling, a raised finger that says do not disobey and another hand plunged deep and grasping, and it all flickers in and out and in the small room there is nowhere to go and no-one to cry out to, except to Mum, except to Monica, except sometimes even to Val.

Valerie.

Valerie.

Get it right. Have some respect. He never did.

Val-é-rie.

No; still too much emphasis on the first sound. Try again. Bring up the base of the tongue for the second sound. No, not sound, that’s not right, that’s not the word. There used to be words for this, there used to be a way to describe it, but school was too long ago and memory is failing, and anyway the teachers never bothered to call on h—

Enough. Fix it later. Focus on the second part of the word. Flatten it. Roll it a little. Not like the forgotten half-sound at the end of butter, of sister. It’s more lyrical than that.

Valérie.

Do it better!

Val-é-rie. That’s right. That’s it. Like a song.

Valérie.

She was kind. She was so kind. Kind until she found out.

Because of what was done.

Because of what h—

She looked for something. Spent days searching for it. Only silence in return but she kept looking. Wanted desperately to see it. But in the end, like everyone, like how it always goes, all she found was h—

Was him.

Was Declan.

Dec-lan. Ugly. Blunt. Never liked it. No song to it.

Valérie found him. Like Monica. Like Aunt Bea. Should have hidden it. Didn’t know better.

Face it.

It’s all over now.

What else is there to do?

What else must be done?

Face it. Face her.

It’s been there all this time. What he did to her. What he revelled in doing to her. Except now in memory it’s doubled, split, superimposed, an old film spiced with a new one, him and him, her and her, one and then the other. Old and new.

He didn’t think about it at the time. What he did. What he did to Tracy.

Not much.

Barely at all.

Hyped it after because that’s the done thing, isn’t it? That’s what you do, that’s how you get what’s really important, what really matters, isn’t it? You’ve got to be the one people respect, the one they listen to, don’t you? Or what else are you?

Found that out too late.

It would have been better if he’d wanted it from her. From Tracy. If he’d cared about her at all. If it had been about more than control, power, and the need, the endless, vicious, victorious need.

But she was there, even though it was all about him. She was there. Tracy. He played with her.

And then it all repeats. Backwards. Flipped. Shattered and broken and chipped away at.

Sometimes he fought, when there was anything left of him to fight.

But other times he didn’t, because he wasn’t looking out any more.

There’s a man and there’s a girl, and there’s always a man and there’s always a girl, and the man has power and the woman doesn’t, and he takes control of her and he uses her and he hurts her. And the man gets what he wants.

And the girl?

What does it matter what she wants? She can’t break free.

Him. Jake and— and him. Superimposed. Hands moving symmetrical. Faces a blur. Bodies inescapable. Pressing and trapping and keeping you down, keeping you from running, keeping you from screaming, keeping you, keeping you, keeping you.

Hand over your mouth / hand over your crotch / hand over your innocence.

They come apart. Her and him and everyone. Because innocence is a fucking joke. Because you never allowed it. Because you never wanted it, except for the pleasure of ruining it. And yet you venerated it anyway, because you ought.

Like Dad said.

You can only pluck a flower once, kid.

Like Dad always said.

It’s all running together now. Dad and Declan and Jake. Mum and Tracy and— and you.

You and Declan.

Wet fingers. Slick with him. And you know what he likes, don’t you? You know what he wants to see. You know what he needs you to do. What lights him up in drunken delight, because he knows he’s got you, he made you, he owns you. Lick it up, baby. Lick it up, darling. Lick it up, bitch. Always tastes like salt and yeast. And the demands are so comical but the laughter never comes because why would it? How can you laugh when he is all around you?

Wet fingers; lick it up, baby.

Tastes like copper.

Tastes like him.

Tastes like—

Someone’s coming. Someone’s here. Someone’s talking.

Down the corridor. The old woman. Dorothy. Grandmother. Probably a hundred other names besides. Another one of the same: Dad, Dorothy, Declan and Jake.

Yield. Control. Now. Get your shit together. Not for much longer but now.

Get it the fuck together.

And he’s standing there, the pieces of him that are left, barely enough to speak, to think, to move. He’s standing there with his tattered dress and his blood-smeared arms and the knife he hid under his bed, last gift of a dying man, cradled lovingly in his other hand.

Wet fucking fingers pressed into his eyes.

You can only pluck a flower once, kid.

Control, Declan.

The old woman’s armed. Should scare her. Show of strength.

Come and fucking try it.

He kicks the body. Kicks him. And it should feel good, he knows it should, but maybe Jake took that part of him already. Took it like he took the rest of him. Maybe it’s on the floor. Maybe it died with him.

He lowers his fingers and feels them smear on his chin and the old woman speaks to him from behind her shotgun and the barrel wobbles and she’s so far away down the corridor he thinks that even if she fires maybe one in a hundred pellets might actually hit him, he saw a programme once, one of his dad’s DVDs, late nights up with him, late nights up alone.

The memory fractures but it doesn’t matter because she’s talking and he has to find something in him that can pay attention.

She says,

What have you done.

You’ve killed him.

He could make it to her. She could fire once and he could make it to her before her second try. Just have to make sure the first shot goes wide, but even if it doesn’t, it’s one in a hundred.

She says,

Maybe you can still be useful.

She’s hard to hear. Muffled. Not just from distance. Not just from shock. He’s not sure if she’s saying anything. She might just be standing there, shotgun raised, ready for him. She might not even be there. He might be looking at nothing.

She says,

You’re a rapist, Declan Shaw.

It’s in all your files, Declan Shaw.

They’ll find you, Declan Shaw.

You’ll be thrown away, Declan Shaw.

She says,

And you’ll deserve it.

You’ll deserve it, Declan Shaw.

She points the gun at him still but it’s shaking even more than before and he could definitely get to her unharmed and then what? And then she turns and walks away and he could follow her, he could stop her, and he should because what she knows about him could lock him up forever. He should get to her and he should stop her.

But what would be the point?

You’re a rapist, Declan Shaw.

 

* * *

 

Realistically, it’s all going to land on her head, whatever happens. Whether she’s right about the Smyth-Farrows or not, this whole clusterfuck ends with her. Probably it ends on her corpse. She put all her eggs in Silver River’s basket, in the hands of the Smyth-Farrow kids and their backers, and now she has nothing. Everything taken from local storage to a Silver River facility. Data security, they told her.

Fuck, she’s an idiot. All she has now is what’s in her hand-written notes, and everything she can remember. Not enough to go after Elle Lambert and the Smyth-Farrows and everyone else. Not with her remaining resources, and especially not with Silver River, looking to take a head for this fucking debacle.

Okay, if she’s been stupid, it’s time to play smart. She knows Lambert’s been pissing herself at the thought that she might go scorched earth on them, that she might gamble her dwindling years on a last-ditch attempt to expose everyone, to persuade someone in authority whose pockets haven’t been lined by Lambert or by some other interested party that the basement below Dorley Hall is worth a quick look. And it’s tempting. God, it’s tempting.

But her mother lived to a hundred and two, she heard. Why die early in prison when she could live another two decades? When she still has a shot at personally ruining Elle Lambert’s deviant little heart?

And why die now, at the hands of Silver River and the fucking nouveau Yanks, when she could just disappear? When she could buy herself some time?

Christ. The boy Declan. Standing over the corpse with bloody fingers in his mouth and a knife in his hand, disgusting with gore. Didn’t seem to be able to understand her, though. Just stared at her. Nothing left of him. Nothing left of Jake, either, but fuck him; if he couldn’t defend himself against someone Dorothy’s been assiduously making helpless then he deserved the knife in his stomach, he deserved the horrible death his wretched plaything delivered.

You can’t trust a man in this job, anyway. They get attached. They don’t know when to cut their losses.

The boy Declan can stay. He’ll be useful, if he survives; he knows next to nothing about her, but quite a lot about Dorley Hall. Because if he survives, if he’s found, he’ll be a murderer as well as a rapist, and he’ll tell them anything in his desperation.

Maybe they’ll even believe him. Maybe that’ll be a little bit of heat for Lambert to deal with. Keep her occupied for a while.

Or maybe he’ll die.

Hey ho.

Whistling, she starts pouring out the contents of every bottle she can find. Soaks the curtains, covers the floor tiles, liberally douses antique wooden furniture and hyper-modern racks of computers alike.

This place will go up like a pile of dry tinder.

 

* * *

 

It hasn’t been more than a couple of days, but it feels like forever out in these woods, rationing the washing water and sleeping in shifts in the stupid campervan’s three beds. But this is where the boss put them, so this is where they will stay until told otherwise. They’re due to make a pass by the manor early tomorrow morning, and they’re ready for it. They’ve checked over their rambler disguises and their padded backpacks with the hidden compartments. They’re ready for anything.

The lieutenant wanted to go last night, but orders are orders and intel is intel, and in this case both things align: the Silver River pricks were due a delivery today, and the day after is likely to be the day they are most lax. Sure enough, the delivery van came and went, just as expected, and now there’s nothing to do but watch.

He kind of wants to take the telescope for a spin, see if he can make out Jupiter’s rings through the cloud cover, but orders are orders, and he’s to keep it focused on Stenordale Manor. Not that you can see much past the high walls, even from this altitude, but it’s enough to—

Shit.

Wait.

Is that—?

Thirty seconds later he’s waking the lieutenant. Ten minutes later they’re packed up and on their way, rambler costumes in place, tramping the planned route through the woods that runs close by the outer wall of the manor at Stenordale. Fifteen minutes later and they hear sirens and the lieutenant has ordered them to a jog, and then to a flat-out run, and he’s the first one there.

It immediately becomes clear that the two fire engines already on the scene will not be anything like enough to tackle the blaze that is consuming Stenordale Manor.

 

2020 January 5
Sunday

“You really think this is working?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, what was the point of this, then?”

“Because it should work, and it’s better than any of our other options!”

“We could’ve kept driving, Trev.”

“Not the way you drive. Did you have to take all those side roads?”

“Like I’ve been to this bloody town before!”

“Well, then.”

“So how are we supposed to know if it’s working or not?”

“No idea, Frankie. But as Silver River have continued to not jump out at us from the darkness, I’d say we’re doing okay.”

“Aren’t you supposed to have military training, and all that? Aren’t you supposed to know things?”

He winces, resisting once again the urge to tear off the duct tape wrapped twice around his neck and scratch at his wound. The thing itches like crazy, even worse since they got Val to stop staring out the windscreen and tape him up. It’s a good thing Jake only nicked him, or Val’d never’ve got her shit together in time and he’d be a strangely pretty corpse in the back of a stolen Silver River Solutions delivery van.

“Private military training, Frankie,” he says. “You’d be amazed the stuff we didn’t cover. Did you find anything back there?”

“Oh, sure,” Frankie says, vaulting out of the back of the van with unexpected energy and joining him on the concrete floor of the multi-storey. “I have tinned potatoes. You want a potato, Trev? We don’t have a can opener, mind.”

“They don’t even have energy bars or something? We used to live on those in Peckinville. Three of them’s lunch.”

Frankie hands him a tin. “Just potatoes.”

Once Trevor was strapped up and no longer bleeding — except under the tape, which feels horribly oozy — he took control of the radio, but the order to find them never came. Which meant either that Jake had inexplicably not called it in, or that Silver River isolated the van’s communications equipment immediately and didn’t, for example, give them a convenient heads up.

Either way, they’d needed to ditch the van, and Stenordale’s a small enough town that for a while, Trevor considered just abandoning it on the side of the road and running the three of them out into the woods. But without supplies, maps, GPS, it would have been pointless.

And then he spotted the shopping centre and practically screamed at Frankie until she drove them there, and they found what he hoped for: a concrete car park. Better yet, an underground car park. He’d said to Frankie, ever tried to get bars on your phone underground? And she’d said, obviously she has, and made him explain his point.

He’s far from certain that a few floors of concrete ceilings and a few more floors of Apple Stores and defunct Mothercares will dampen whatever signalling equipment Silver River equipped the van with, but it’s by far their best option.

He’d hoped to find a car they could switch to, as well, but the car park is empty aside from them and a couple of vehicles he assumes belong to the night security people.

So they’ve been taking a breather; quite literally, in his case.

He scratches at the outside of the duct tape.

“You’re sure we can’t just nick that one?” Frankie asks him again, pointing at one of the other cars.

“We can’t. Look, it’s parked right under a security camera; we’d be a police report in minutes. And it’s too modern. We need to get out of here and find something without computers and special locks and tracking devices of its own. Everything’s got bloody Find My Car or whatever these days. We need a car that can meaningfully go dark or we won’t make it halfway to Dorley Hall before Silver River knocks us off the road. Also, one that’s straightforward to hotwire would be nice.”

“So we need a car old enough that even Val can recognise it,” Frankie says.

“It’s not too late to accidentally kill you, Frances,” Val says, making herself known. “It can have happened during the escape. A stray bullet — zwip!”

“Bad taste, Val,” Trevor mutters.

“You okay?” Frankie asks, nodding at the dark corner from which Valérie emerged. “How did it go?”

“I hate urinating standing up,” she says.

“Really?” Trev says. “Isn’t it more convenient?”

“It’s not ladylike.”

“Okay,” Trev says, standing. “Fine. Come on, ladies. We have to go. We can’t be on the streets without a vehicle for very long, and dressed the way I am, we can’t be on the streets when the sun comes up, or Neighbourhood Watch will turn me in.”

She doesn’t want to tell him it’s just a sundress. Inappropriate for the time of year, yes, but hardly likely to get him picked up for soliciting.

“We have everything we need from the van?” Val asks.

“Yeah,” Frankie says. “I found some potatoes.”

“Ah. Good. What now?”

“We find a really old car to steal,” Trev says. “And maybe swipe me a set of clothes off any clotheslines we happen to see.”

“Are we likely to see any clotheslines?”

“No.”

“Can we not just smash a shop window and steal some clothes?” Val says as they exit onto the street. It’s uncomfortably brightly lit here in the town centre, and Trev immediately leads them towards the nearest side street.

“No,” Frankie says.

“Too many cameras,” Trev adds. “Also, clothes shops don’t really exist any more outside the big cities. Probably only a handful in the mall here. Most places have just closed.”

“What?” Val asks. “Why?”

“Amazon.”

“The rainforest?”

 

* * *

 

“She really just—?”

“Yeah. Right onto the concrete floor. She was in hospital for a while. Still has a slight mark on her temple. Don’t look for it.”

Rachel waves her hands in the most conciliatory manner she knows. “I won’t,” she says. The girl, Bethany, flippant to a fault the rest of the time, becomes unsettlingly earnest when the topic of Maria comes up, as it has a few times over the course of their very long… conversation? Movie session? Girls’ night?

That she is a girl was the first thing Rachel confirmed. Less than three months to claim her womanhood and her name; a basement record, if one discounts Steph. It’s not brainwashing, Bethany told her, gesticulating with her hot chocolate in a mug etched with the phrase, Nothing is impossible with the right attitude and a scalpel; it’s just the presentation of another option, and the promise that the man you’ve been doesn’t have to define you forever.

“I think she’s fully healed over,” Pippa says. She came down towards the end of the night, quietly informed Rachel that she does not need to apologise, and settled in on the far side of the bed, next to Steph, hands intertwined.

“It’s faint,” Bethany says. “You have to be close to see it. Can we change topic, please?”

Steph, her head currently barely propped up by a scattering of pillows and Pippa’s shoulder, her mug — which bears the line I never question my sister’s choices (she already kidnapped me once) — abandoned on the bedside table, opens her eyes for long enough to say, “Can we maybe go to sleep?”

“What time is it?” Rachel asks.

Bethany digs around in the bed for her phone, finds it and swears. “Um. It’s half one.”

“Whoops,” Rachel mutters. She starts assembling her things, and Bethany hops up to help her, fetching the mug Rachel’s been using — with a cartoon of a girl talking to a police officer and the caption I swear, officer, she was like that when I found him! — and sweeping the mess of paper pastry wrappings into a plastic bag.

“Don’t worry, Beth,” Pippa says, still intertwined with Steph. “It’s got to be me who takes her up, anyway.”

“I just want a quick chat with her,” Bethany says. “You stay with Steph for a sec, okay?”

Pippa shrugs, slightly dislodging Steph. “Okay.”

It takes a few moments for them to finish collecting everything together, and then Rachel and Bethany are out in the corridor, the door to Steph’s room closing quietly behind her.

“You’re safe, aren’t you?” Bethany says, as soon as the door is completely shut. “You won’t hurt Maria and the others, will you?”

Rachel doesn’t know how many times she’s going to have to promise that, but she’ll probably have to keep doing it until enough time has passed that they start feeling they can trust her. She’s still far from convinced about the place, but Bethany took her aside earlier, when she asked a pointed question about the supposed necessity of snatching a handful of tender lads off the streets.

“You’re not getting the urgency of it,” Bethany had said quietly. “You’re thinking of it like a thought experiment. I can tell because I’m cursed to know someone who treats everything like that. But you need to think of it like— Okay, look. Adam, right? They told you about him? I thought he was just another god-bothering weirdo, and then when I strained to listen hard enough, I realised he was actually a dangerous fucking headcase inside a quiet man’s body, whispering about demons and possession and how secular society will drain the earth of the mana required for the Rapture, and—”

Rachel had interrupted her, recognising already the signs that Bethany was about to veer off onto a complicated and lengthy tangent. “He really said that?”

“What? Yes. No. Sort of. Okay, so I tuned him out a lot and I’m filling in from a video game I played. But my point is, he was raised to be an extremist, right? You know, ‘One day my son, you shall nail bomb a gay bar.’ An extremist. And if you know that’s going to happen, and if you know there’s no way the police or social services can possibly step in because blah blah legal adult, blah blah no probable cause, blah blah no-one goes to gay bars any more, and crucially if you know how tied up all the horseshit he’s been fed is with—” she idly clicked her finger and thumb together, searching for the right words, “—masculine supremacy… Well, what would you do? Fuck it; what should you do? Step in?”

“I don’t know,” Rachel had replied.

Bethany had laughed at her. “You’re saying that because you don’t want to say yes. But you mean yes. You’re thinking about the things he would definitely have gone on to do, and you’re thinking yes. And if you’d been here at the start, if you’d seen us all at our most unfiltered, you wouldn’t even try to hide it, because you’d’ve seen us for what we are. Were. Steph did. Saw right through me. Saw right through all of us. Adam might have been the most literal time bomb, but we all had it in us. We were all going to hurt someone in a way they couldn’t recover from. And don’t tell me we weren’t, because, Rachel, I looked into my future and I hated the fucker I saw there so much I wanted to die to escape him. It’s entirely thanks to Maria that I didn’t have to do that; I became a girl instead.”

She hadn’t given her a chance to reply. Just returned to the bed and the movie. Steph had asked Bethany a question with her eyebrows, and Bethany had answered with a shake of her head.

Hours later, it’s that moment that’s stuck with her the most. The bond between the two of them. Formed in just three months, alongside Bethany’s new identity. It’s hard to deny the reality of it all, even if the efficacy is still questionable— Is it, Rachel? Is it? Please point to one girl upstairs who seems on the verge of recidivism! They’re less likely to commit an act of violence than they are to make you another bloody hot chocolate!

Damn it. Damn all of them and their stupid doe eyes and hot chocolates.

“I won’t hurt Maria,” she promises.

“Good,” Bethany says, nodding seriously for a moment and then breaking out in the mischievous smile she’s seen far too often tonight. “So, are you going to hug me, then? It’s how friendships are traditionally celebrated here. It gets a little stifling, but you can learn to sort of lean away with your sensitive spots so no-one inadvertently causes an accident.”

“We’re friends now?” Rachel asks, accepting the hug. It’s brief but tight.

“If you can’t beat them,” Bethany says, stepping back, “join them.”

“Right.”

Pippa emerges from Steph’s room, probably having sensed that the moment in the corridor has passed, and beckons to Rachel to follow. It’s an uncomfortable reminder that she can’t get out of this dungeon — or back in again — without the help of one of the sponsors, but then, she supposes, neither can Bethany. And she seems… kind of okay, overall.

“Thank you, Bethany,” Rachel says, as they turn to leave. “You’ve been very helpful.”

“Oh, shit. I am helping, aren’t I? Fuck! I’m helping. I’ve become a helper. This is the last straw. Where’s Maria? I need to tell her she’s warped my personality to an unacceptable degree.”

 

* * *

 

You can leave it all behind, Declan. Mum said it, back when he was moving up from primary school to secondary school. The stupid four-eyes fucker who made his life miserable was going on to grammar school and Declan was going on to the same place his mum and dad went, the place they met, and she told him he didn’t need to be afraid any more. Everyone’s new there, she said. Lots of people from all over. Everyone’s starting over. You can, too.

You can leave it all behind.

It was a woman firefighter who found him. She had to drag him out because he could barely walk and didn’t answer with a name when asked, so she led him to a pull-out shelter attached to one of the smaller vehicles and left him with another woman and he’s here now, with Dorothy’s words ringing in his ears.

You’re a rapist, Declan Shaw.

You’ll be thrown away.

But that’s not his only name. And does he want to be him in front of this woman, anyway? This kind woman, who handed him a fresh set of clothes and showed him how to pull down a cover on the shelter, does he want to be Declan with her?

If he ever sees Monica again, does he want to be Declan with her, too?

There was a time he wouldn’t even have thought to ask that question. Now, it’s… practical.

He pulls back the cover, and there’s the woman again. Not a firefighter, she said. An auxiliary worker. Call her Noor, she said. She said it when she gave him the clothes, when she eyed the remains of his dress, when she raised an eyebrow at the kind of dress it once had been.

“Feeling better?” she asks, and he nods. She points to a chair and he sits. “So, ready to tell me your name, love?”

You can leave it all behind.

You don’t have to be thrown away.

“Di—” Except no. No he fucking can’t. Not Dina. Not with Jake all over that name, all over that name the way Tracy’s all over Declan’s name. And worse: it’s not just Jake with his hands on him; it’s Jake with his eyes bloody and gone, Jake slipping and falling, Jake’s last liquid shudder.

“Diana,” he whispers, and then he repeats it, louder, enjoying for a moment the individual sounds of it, enjoying how it’s not either of the other names.

Noor smiles and she’s pretty, even with the bright night lights of the emergency vehicles on one side of her face and the dull glow of the fading fire on the other. She’s pretty like an older woman. Declan always hated that, hated the lines on their faces, hated the way they were around him, hated the things they said to him, when it was him and Dad.

“Like the princess?” Noor asks.

He hadn’t made the connection. But there it is, waiting for him. Mum used to like her. The princess. Had pictures up, a little corner of the living room. Taken from us too early, Mum always said. Too early. Met her on her nursing rounds. AIDS patients. The princess cared. Dad would laugh at that and Mum would shout at him, and Declan would laugh too, and Mum would just look at him, and sometimes she wouldn’t come home again until the day after.

Pictures in the living room. Mum’s candle every year. A memory to cling to. Taken too early.

Mum says you can leave it all behind.

“Yeah,” Diana says quietly. “Like the princess.”

 

* * *

 

“Thank you,” Pippa says as soon as they’ve cleared the lowest basement floor.

“Thank me?” Rachel says, looking back at Pippa and almost tripping. “For what?”

“For reassuring Bethany. I know she seems… how she seems, but she’s vulnerable. She’s still—” she waves her hands vaguely, “—coalescing.”

“Still becoming Bethany?” Rachel suggests.

“Exactly.”

“I still want to apologise to—”

“Don’t,” Pippa says, and brings Rachel to a stop with a gentle hand on her forearm. They’re halfway up the last flight of stairs now, with the dining hall almost in sight. “We have a habit here of dropping the world’s craziest bomb on people and… expecting them to field it like an effing baseball. I know you don’t actually think I’m dangerous, or you wouldn’t be here like this with me.”

Rachel can’t stop herself from frowning, but Pippa’s right, and Rachel just hadn’t realised it. She spent the whole evening with Steph and Bethany and a lot of it with Pippa, in a tiny room and with no way out and at no point did she feel threatened. Confused and maybe a little annoyed? Sure.

And now, here she is, in a cramped concrete stairwell, with Pippa. And she’s just… Pippa. To be wary of her seems absurd.

“I’m still sorry,” she says.

“Forgiven,” Pippa says instantly, and she makes to start walking again, but Rachel stops her.

“I meant to ask,” she says, “about Steph. Is she… okay? She’s not reconsidering any of this, is she?”

“No,” Pippa says, frowning.

“But she’s growing out her—”

Pippa interrupts her. “Oh! Oh. No. No, Rachel, it’s not that.” She’s holding back a laugh, and for a moment Rachel really is annoyed with her, because none of this is funny. “Electrolysis,” Pippa says. “She has to grow out her— her stubble so she can have it removed. She’s got a session tomorrow. Well, today, really.”

“She’s getting it… removed?”

“Yes.”

“Her… facial hair?”

“Yes?”

“I thought that just happened. Hormones, and all.”

“Afraid not. Getting rid of it all is super painful and takes ages.”

“Oh. Whoops.”

Pippa leans against the wall, looking as tired as Rachel suddenly feels.

“She’s doing so well,” Pippa says quietly. “She’s been helping out with the boys, she’s been there for Bethany, she’s been there for me… She’s a miracle, Rachel. And I didn’t even realise. For over a month, at the start.”

“What do you mean?”

“I didn’t know she was trans. I don’t know what you know about how she came to be here, but she found out about what we do here, sort of, and she faked being one of us so we’d help her transition. And she was—” a giggle momentarily breaks out, “—so bad at it. I was trying so hard to see bad things in her, bad things I had to help her break out of, and they just… weren’t there. And, Rachel, I hated what I was doing to her. I had nightmares. I was a mess. I bit my lip to shreds, I’d be half out of my room and realise I hadn’t done my hair or my face or even gotten out of my pyjamas. I lost count of all the times I wanted to just open all the locks and let her go.”

“So why didn’t you?”

Pippa smiles. “Because I had nothing when I came here. And I knew she had nothing, too. Nothing and no-one except me. And I knew that, in the end, it’s worth it. Being me? Being this?” She holds out an arm, flexes her fingers like a piano player. “It’s worth it.” Then she tugs on Rachel’s arm. “Why don’t you come with me up to the kitchen and I’ll make you a cup of tea and we can talk a little more, okay? Just you and me.”

“It’s late,” Rachel says.

“You want to go home?”

And wake Belinda? When she’s already in a foul fucking mood? “No. No, not really.” She’ll text her. Not that she’ll even read it until morning. Maybe not even then; Rachel’s had her phone out the whole time she’s been here, at least until she disappeared into the depths of the basement and lost all her bars, and Belinda’s replied to none of her texts. The one time her phone vibrated it was an email from Amazon, who are still apparently under the impression that she and Belinda are the kind of couple who need a new kettle every few weeks.

“Tea it is, then,” Pippa says, and they resume their climb, emerging quickly into the dining hall. Rachel’s surprised to note that they’re not the only people still up; there’s a huddle of girls by the fireplace, and Pippa crosses the floor to check in. Rachel follows at a distance.

“We got some news,” Maria says, her eyes flicking to Rachel and then back to Pippa, who shakes her head.

“Pretty big news,” says another woman, sat practically in Maria’s lap.

“Anything we need to worry about?” Pippa asks.

“No. I think, maybe, we can all be a bit relieved? Someone’ll tell you later, I’m sure.”

“Trust the rumour mill,” says the woman in Maria’s lap. “It knows all.”

“Um,” Rachel says, “what are you talking about?”

“Torture stuff,” Indira says. “Don’t worry about it.”

To her horror, Rachel laughs.

 

* * *

 

Noor gets beckoned away, so Diana sits there with her paper cup of tea and the jogging trousers and hoodie and basic tennis shoes she’s been given and thinks:

Is it okay for her to be Diana? Is it okay to think she might be allowed to survive this?

A strong memory: Monica, when she found out. Because he had to brag. Because he thought it was funny. Because he didn’t understand.

No. Diana can be honest. He didn’t bother to understand. He didn’t think it was important. He didn’t think Tracy was important. She was just his, and how dare she walk away?

The thought makes her quiver.

She shakes her head, looks back at the burning manor. Better to see it destroyed than to think about what happened inside. But it’s impossible not to.

Valérie, who helped her, until she knew. Just like Monica.

And Frankie, who helped her as well, a few times.

And Trevor, who seemed kind. Who rejected the name they tried to give him.

And Jake.

Jake—

She stuck her fingers in his eyes.

And they were her fingers. Declan wouldn’t have done that. Declan would have gone straight for the knife, and he would have lost.

“Hey, hey, sugar,” Noor says, running over, crouching down next to her. She must have made another noise or something, because Noor’s concerned again. But then the other woman’s there, and it’s the firefighter who pulled her out, and it’s something else to worry about. “You okay?”

Diana nods.

“We have to ask you a few things, okay?” the firefighter woman says. “First, though, I’m Judy. Pleased to meet you.”

“Di-a-na,” she says, sounding it out again. Pleasing.

“Are you ready to answer a few questions, sugar?” Noor asks.

Diana nods again.

“Are you transgender?” Judy asks.

Diana freezes. Of course they’d know. Why wouldn’t they know? He never learned how to be anything but Jake’s pliable toy, he never tried, he never thought, he never—

“We didn’t know immediately,” Noor says quickly. “But it’s your voice, sweetheart. It’s a little deep. And when you coughed, earlier—”

“I’m sorry,” Diana says, fighting the resurgence of that other identity, that fucking horror show. It’s too easy to be him because she knows how, because even now, even after Jake, sometimes he feels like he’s just a thought away. Other times he feels like he’s been dead for months.

Can’t be him. He’ll be thrown away. He’ll deserve it.

“We just needed to know,” Judy says. “Because, well, when I found you, the way you were dressed…”

“The man who was with you,” Noor says. “The one Judy found… next to you. You did that?”

Diana nods.

“Did he deserve it?”

Diana nods.

“What did he do to you?”

You don’t want to be him in front of these women? You want to survive? You want to be Diana? You want to be someone who won’t be thrown away? Then you need to say the word. You need to tell them. Because he wouldn’t.

Diana says, quietly and with a constricted throat, “He raped me.”

“Oh, honey,” Noor says, taking her hand.

“It happened a lot,” Diana continues. “And the clothes, and the— the—”

“We can see your bruises, Diana,” Judy says.

Diana nods.

“He’s not the only body,” Judy says. “We found more downstairs. Not too badly burned up yet. And bodies means police. Police means an investigation. And the fire was obviously set…”

Diana frowns. “Set?”

“Multiple ignition points. Clear as day. Was that you?”

“No.”

“Okay, sugar,” Noor says, still holding Diana’s hand, “Judy and I have talked it over, and you have a choice. Right now you’re a civilian. Rescued from a burning building. But when the police come… then you’re a suspect. So, you can stay here until the police come, and leave with them, or we can give you our emergency cash, everything we’ve got, and you can… go.”

“Go?”

“Go,” Judy confirms. “All we have on you is a first name, and we didn’t even write it down. There are guns with the other bodies, and without you in the picture, the conclusion will be different. Men shooting men. I wouldn’t go home, though. Not yet.”

Diana shakes her head. “Can’t, anyway.”

Noor squeezes her hand. “You don’t want to go with the police, Diana,” she says.

“You think I’ll go to jail?”

“I think you shouldn’t go to jail. Not if he deserved it. But you know what it’s like. Or maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re… too new? Women who kill men who were hurting them, it doesn’t always end well for them, Diana dear. And since you’re trans, that makes it worse for you. They won’t be sympathetic. They won’t understand. You should run. Right now. Before the police come. Before more of us come.”

“Go to town, take a taxi somewhere else,” Judy says. “Find a B&B, maybe. Get a burner phone— That is, get a cheap phone from a corner shop, one that takes credit. Call someone you trust. But not immediately. Leave it a couple of days.”

Noor lets go of Diana’s hand and stands. She pulls a small rucksack out of a side compartment in the vehicle, and then transfers a few things from her bag into it. She reaches back in, pulls out another bag and holds it up for Judy’s approval — she nods — and pulls out a purse, from which she empties the cash compartment.

“It’s a decent amount,” Judy says, handing it to Diana. “It’ll be enough. If you’re careful.”

“Run, Diana,” Noor says, smiling softly.

Diana runs.

 

* * *

 

The suburbs of the town of Stenordale aren’t anything to write home about, but at least they’re dark: rural enough to have few streetlights and plenty of foliage to jump into, should a suspiciously military-spec vehicle appear suddenly in their line of sight.

As predicted, they didn’t find any convenient clotheslines or shops with easily smashed windows, but they did pause behind a bush for a while, at Val’s suggestion, to swap garments. Young Trev’s much more confident in Frankie’s loose trousers and comfy cardie, even if he does still look more like a woman than a man, and if Val’s feeling the cold in Trev’s floaty summer dress and leggings, she’s not showing it. Frankie, meanwhile, is wearing Val’s ugliest maid uniform, one of the ones she somehow talked old Smyth-Farrow into getting for her, years ago, perhaps when he came to realise that if he ran into her in the hallway and all the blood rushed to his dick, he’d faint. It doesn’t even look like a maid uniform without the prim little apron, so Frankie’s pretty comfortable, despite how tight the skirt is even with the button left undone.

There’s blood on all the clothes, of course, but that’s part of why they waited until well after midnight to set out from the multi-storey, so no-one’d see them wandering around like fucking psychos out of a horror movie. And it’s not so bad now they’ve had a chance to clean themselves with wet wipes out of Frankie’s bag. Val even insisted on having a go at the clothes with the wipes, and got pretty good results, especially with certain items turned inside out and labels quickly cut off with Frankie’s nail scissors.

Frankie and Val’d both been antsy about waiting, but Trev said the Silver River lot were more likely to assume they’d disabled or removed any trackers in the van than to guess the truth: that none of them, not even the trained soldier, had the first fucking clue what to look for. They’d been as safe in the underground car park as they were anywhere, and at least they had the guns out of the lockbox from the van, which popped open when they rolled a tyre over it.

Frankie’s got one of them now, and the weight of it feels absurd in the main pocket of Val’s ugly maid uniform. Val’s carrying hers, her finger resting on the outside of the trigger guard, the way Trev showed her, and as Frankie glances over, Val twitches again, looks around them, looks behind them, and then realises she’s being watched.

Val shrugs and Frankie feels like even more of a cunt than she already did.

Valérie Barbier, perhaps the most genuinely strong person Frankie’s ever met, freezing up in the front of the van. Like just the sight of freedom, of the open countryside, had been too much for her. Val, reduced to nothing. Frankie, watching her, horrifyingly aware of just how small her world had been made, deliberately and with cruel intent. For decades upon decades.

And Frankie was there right at the start. She knew Vincent before she knew Valérie. She was there. She made this.

“What?” Val says, frowning under Frankie’s continued attention, and Frankie shakes her head. Firmly looks in front of her.

“Sorry, Val,” she says.

“Do I have blood on my face? I thought I got it all off, but—”

“No blood. You’re fine, Val.”

“I am clearly not if you are going to stare at me like that.”

Frankie stops, motions to Val for her to stop, too, and waits a moment for Trev to walk out of earshot. “Are you okay with all this, Val?”

“Are you asking me if I am going to freeze again?”

Frankie shrugs. “Yeah.”

“I will not. That is a promise.” And with that she starts walking again, more briskly than before, catching up with Trevor before Frankie can say anything else.

Probably a good thing, overall. She’d just put her foot in her mouth again. Ahead of her, Val guides Trevor under one of the few streetlights in this part of town and has him stop for her so she can fuss over his duct tape again. Frankie doesn’t know why, since all they can do for him if it comes off is tape him up better next time, but—

Oh yeah. Val doesn’t like being cared for. Doesn’t trust it. Prefers to care for others.

She’s making sense of the world again, in little bits.

Frankie catches up, and by the time she reaches them they’ve set off again, searching for a car old enough for Trevor’s purposes.

 

* * *

 

This’ll be something to tell Amy in the morning. ‘Hey, Ames, I stayed the night in a Dorley girl’s room and you were right: no-one molested anyone. High five?’ Perhaps not with that precise wording, though.

Pippa offered her the bed when she realised Rachel was here for the night, and it took some persuading from Rachel for Pippa to agree to share it; Pippa had wanted to freeze to death on the couch! And then Pippa said, obviously she’ll go into the bathroom to change into her PJs, and Rachel had to insist that if she wants to, it shouldn’t be on Rachel’s account. They’re both girls here, after all.

Overcompensating? Probably. Better than the alternative. And she gets to see a pretty girl in her underwear, so.

Pippa’s rustling around in her wardrobe looking for spare pyjamas, which gives Rachel the opportunity to look around, to see how a graduate of the vaunted Dorley Hall programme lives. Her conclusion is that Pippa’s room is, along with most other above-ground aspects of the Hall, boringly ordinary. The bed is home to a handful of stuffed animals, and the bedside tables have all the expected bedside table things: lamps, an e-reader, a laptop, and a handful of charging cables poking up from behind. There’s also a strange little metal stand with nothing on it, which Rachel puzzled over for several seconds. The room itself is larger than the one assigned to Melissa and Shahida, with walls painted cream and dotted with reproduction paintings; some are famous enough for Rachel to recognise, but most are too obscure for her. Several of them are of cats, painted in various styles.

“Um,” Pippa says, turning around from the wardrobe with a bundle of pyjamas in each hand, “I have choices.”

“Hit me.”

Pippa hefts the clothes in her left hand. “Bees,” she says, and switches to her right, “or rabbits.”

Rachel hides her laugh behind her hand. Pyjamas with cartoon animals on them! It’s either an incredibly consistent performance of innocence or it’s just… innocence.

“Hmm?” Pippa says, having spotted the laugh anyway.

“Oh,” Rachel says, and in the interest of honesty, owns up. “I was thinking that if I wanted to persuade a suspicious stranger of the inherent harmlessness of Dorley graduates, I’d put her in a room with one, and offer her cute PJs. Maybe watch movies all night with a trans girl and her nascent girlfriend.”

Pippa rolls her eyes. “I wish we were so organised. You fell in my lap. Happens a lot around here.”

“Well,” Rachel says, “if you ever do get sneaky enough, it should definitely be you. With your cat paintings and your animal PJs. You’re just…” She frowns, takes a moment to arrange her thoughts properly. “You’re just so innocent.”

“Me?” Pippa exclaims, and Rachel has the impression that if her arms weren’t full of pyjamas, she’d be raising one astonished hand to press against her chest. “Innocent? Oh, no, Rachel, no.” She drops the pyjamas in a single pile on the seat in front of her dresser and sits on the end of the bed, far from Rachel. “No, definitely not.”

Shit. Pippa’s mood’s collapsed. Triggery word? Or triggery assumption? “Sorry,” Rachel says quickly. “If I, um, poked something, I didn’t mean to.”

Pippa waves a hand in her direction but doesn’t look at her. “No, it’s okay. It’s just… Ugh. I’m not innocent.”

“What do you mean?”

Now Pippa looks at her. Her chest is fluttering; short breaths, quickly and shallowly taken. She hiccups quietly, and places a hand over her chest. Straightens up a little, so her airway isn’t twisted. Doesn’t speak for a little while; just breathes.

“I mean,” Pippa says eventually, “that if I tell you what I’m thinking, you’ll think I’m manipulating you. You’ll think I was chosen to talk to you. You’ll think I was instructed to mimic this stupid anxiety attack to guilt you into being sorry or whatever. But I wasn’t. We don’t think that far ahead. I don’t think we’ve ever had so many outsiders know about us. I don’t think there are procedures for this.” She smiles, though it doesn’t last long. “Steph likes to call our operation the ess-show. And she’s right.”

‘Ess-show’? Rachel doesn’t get it. But it doesn’t seem important. “Pippa,” she says quietly, “I didn’t mean to upset you. I definitely didn’t mean to trigger an anxiety attack.”

“I know.”

“You want to talk about it?”

Pippa swings her feet up onto the bed. “You know how Melissa can seem… sort of fragile?” she says. Rachel nods. Yeah, she’s noticed. “Abby thinks it’s because she didn’t open up while she was here, and I’m pretty sure Shahida thinks so, too, now she’s gotten more familiar with Melissa’s intake. But some of us are just like that, Rachel. Some of us are one wrong move away from collapsing. And I’m always afraid of what will come out of me if that ever happens.”

Rachel moves closer. “What will come out of you?” she asks.

“Not something innocent, that’s for sure.”

And Pippa tells Rachel a story. A story of a boy and his cousin. She tells Rachel of how angry the boy was, all the time. How lonely and how wrapped up in himself. And she tells Rachel how his cousin could pull him out of it. Humanise him. Make him like other people, while they were together.

She tells Rachel how much the boy loved his cousin. How much he wanted to protect her. How much he felt protected by her.

Then she tells Rachel what happened to the boy’s cousin, and it’s a familiar-enough story that Rachel can almost recite it with her. The manipulative boyfriend. The sexual assault. The girl clinging to him, siding with him. And the revenge from the young boy’s father, who — and Pippa never says it, but it seems obvious just from the way she talks about him — the young boy feared he was already too much like. Kind; proud; prone to intense rage.

The cousin and the boyfriend left together. The father went to prison. And the boy… never really grew up. Remained stranded in that time.

“I was boiling over,” Pippa says. “Without her to keep me safe, without Dad to help me be more… productive about it, I just kept losing it. I wasn’t safe.” She rolls her head on her knees, where she’s had it propped the last ten minutes. “And then I was brought here. Given to Eleanor Payton, my sponsor. And she made me understand… eventually… where my path was leading.”

“And now you’re… you,” Rachel says. “You’re Pippa.”

“Yes.”

“And you like it.” It’s obvious. Notwithstanding Pippa’s earlier exuberance about herself, it didn’t take Rachel five minutes in her company to make it abundantly clear.

Pippa smiles, her first since she started talking about it, and it shines. “I love it, Rachel,” she says. “I’m free.”

“So,” Rachel says, and she dares to poke Pippa in the knee, “what are you so scared of?”

She shrugs. “Of it all coming out again. It happens in little ways, you know. All the time. I get so ashamed.” She closes her eyes. “I get angry and I kick at the wall or I slap my hand on a table or something. Or I have to pace to burn off the energy. Or—”

“Pippa,” Rachel says sharply, to get her attention. When she has it, when the girl with the once-again fluttering chest is looking right at her, she asks, “Is that all?”

“Wh— What?”

“Pippa, when I get mad, I throw things. My wife and I had a dispute over some stupid bill last year and I threw a bloody vase out the back window. It went all the way across the garden and smashed on the shed. I had to go out there in the dark and pick it all up because Belinda was worried about the neighbour’s cats hurting their paws on it. There’s a perfect indentation of my knuckles in the plastic door cover in my car. And I yell. My goodness, do I yell.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying, you sound about as dangerous as I am,” Rachel says. “Which is, I suppose, mostly to car doors, vases, tables and walls. It’s normal, Pippa. Everyone has to let it out.”

“I’m not everyone.”

“You could be. Look,” Rachel adds, shuffling closer, “can I hug you? Because I really feel like you need to be hugged, and then when I tell you not to be so bloody stupid, you’ll still feel good about me from the hug, and— Oh, shit. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.” Suddenly cold to her spine, Rachel backs away from Pippa, withdraws her hands. “Pippa, I’m so sorry; I must have hurt you so bad. After everything that happened with your cousin, I accused you of being—”

“Rachel, no.” Pippa reaches for Rachel’s hands, manages to find one of them, and holds it with both of hers. “I don’t need an apology. I meant what I said before. You were on the spot. And you’re right; it hurt. But my— my friends helped me and I dealt with it.”

“But still—”

“And it’s what I meant when I said you’d think this is a deliberate thing, like we’re trying to guilt trip you. But it’s not. We’re not. At least, I’m not. But there’s one thing I think you need to understand about us.” Pippa moves closer again. “Most of us are like this in some way or another. Like me. When we were boys, we were violent — or socially violent, like Bethany was — but we also have bad stuff in our past. Neglect or abuse or violence. Reasons, not excuses. But still reasons. Stuff we never let go, stuff we should have learned from, but didn’t. We made all the mistakes healthier boys don’t make, we missed every road sign that said STOP BEING YOUR WORST POSSIBLE SELF, EXIT HALF A MILE, but we, um, we weren’t put on that road ourselves.” She smiles and rubs at the back of her neck with her free hand. “Terrible metaphor. Sorry. I think I picked those up from Steph, too. But what I mean is—”

“Circumstances,” Rachel says. “You all had circumstances.”

“Yeah. Pretty much. Some of us never had the right people. Some of us—” Pippa takes a quick breath at this point, and some of the flutter returns to her chest, “—had the right people, only to have them taken away. We were all— And believe me, it’s taken an inordinate number of discussions about this with the other girls for me to feel even vaguely okay about saying this about myself, but we were all failed. And we were picked because we’d been failed, and because, with some help, we could get better.”

Rachel’s nodding. “I still think there are other ways, though,” she says, after a moment.

She expects disagreement, but Pippa says, “Maybe. Probably. But we seem to be working, so far. In the end, we’re a mad experiment by a bunch of mad people. Maybe someone else might have found me and helped me, but they didn’t. So I don’t really think about it that much.” She chews on her lip for a second. “I’m very glad I didn’t end up having to do to Steph what was done to me, though. The methods can be… uncomfortable.” Then she looks up. “Hey, I never got that hug.”

“Right,” Rachel says. “Um. Bring it in?”

When they’re done, when Rachel’s expressed through a judicious squeeze all the apologies she hasn’t been permitted to say out loud, when they’ve sat back with mutually embarrassed reddened cheeks, Pippa says, “Now it’s my turn to apologise. Preemptively, I mean.”

“Oh?”

“I know Beth already asked you, but I’m a sponsor, so I need the truth from you, on the record: are we safe? When you go home in the morning, are we safe?”

Rachel smiles. “What would you do if you weren’t?”

“Me? Nothing. The woman in charge might be displeased, though.”

Sitting back on the bed, leaning into Pippa’s pillows and displacing a stuffie, Rachel says, “It’d be so easy to read that as a threat. I know it’s not, though. It’s just a fact, right? I’d be offered bribes and incentives and then maybe something else. But we can skip all of that: you’re safe. I’ll keep the secret. No extortion required.”

Pippa whistles through her teeth. Still looking at the floor, she says, “Sorry about that. I hate that I have to do things like that. I only said I’d be a stupid sponsor because… I don’t know. Pay it forward?”

Rachel laughs. “‘Pay it forward’? I get it, I do, because you all seem to see what you do as this big favour — and if I really tilt my head, I suppose I can, too — but you have to admit, it is funny.” She waves a hand in the air and remembers something one of the younger girls said once, something she lacked the context for at the time. “Pay it forward — with castration!”

“Yeah, I suppose,” Pippa says, holding back a giggle. “That should be a mug.”

“Oh yeah. What’s with those? Steph gave me one earlier, and they seem to be everywhere.”

Pippa shrugs. “They’re humanising, I think. For us, I mean. They remind us that we’re just dumb little people, trying to do our best. Personally, I think they’re a bit tacky.” Sheepishly, she looks away again. “I’m probably not the best person to explain our weird habits.”

“No,” Rachel insists, “you are. Better than Bethany, anyway. And don’t think I didn’t notice that I was paired up with the only boy — ex-boy, sorry — to have got with the programme already, by the way.” She pinches her fingers in the air. “That was a tiny bit manipulative.”

“I thought that was your idea?”

“I wanted to talk to Steph.”

“Ah,” Pippa says, “well, they’re sort of a package deal, these days. Now, if you want to talk to one of the boys who are still boys, you could try Will, but he’s just sort of depressing. And at a delicate point right now,” she adds with a scowl.

“Oh?”

“Long story.”

“Not a happy one, it looks like.”

“It was him who hurt Maria,” Pippa says, and chews briefly at her lip again. “And we all understand why,” she continues in a sing-song voice, “and we all know it won’t happen again and we all know she’s fine, but… It’s a process. For all of us. And I think I’m discovering I’m not entirely all the way through it.”

“Understandable.”

“The rest of them,” Pippa says, “well, they’re mostly still working through it. If you really want, I’m sure Maria can get you in with one of the less abrasive ones. Like Martin. I mean, his story is kind of awful as well, but—”

“It’s fine,” Rachel says. “I get enough human misery at my day job. I’m trying to quit seeking it out on my own time.”

Pippa nods soberly, and then her smile returns. “So,” she says, pointing at the bundled-up pyjamas, “bees or rabbits?”

 

* * *

 

It was raining the day Frankie first saw Valérie Barbier again. She remembers it clearly, first because Dorothy, the cheap old sow, wouldn’t shell out for a car service, and the train station café was closed, so Frankie had to wait around in the deluge for a local taxi to come pick her up; second because when she showed up at the front door of Stenordale Manor with her wheelie suitcase rattling along behind her and her work-branded sports bag slung uncomfortably over her shoulder, Val had taken one look at her and said, “Oh. It’s you.”

And then she’d kicked dismissively at the sad little wheelie suitcase, knocking it on its side, and said to Dorothy, “I’m not carrying that,” and left for the kitchen.

Their first interaction after decades. It had been all Frankie could do not to stare.

Frankie’d known she’d be there. Not from the start; though she knew that Dorothy and Karen had taken over old Smyth-Farrow’s place more or less right after it happened, both of them kept Val’s survival from her. She’s never known why, though she has her suspicions, most of them rooted in old Dotty’s well-exercised class prejudice, her patronising insistence on reminding Frankie how well she’s done, ‘considering’, but keeping her out of the inner circle, anyway. But when Dorothy called her in, shortly after Karen’s death, she told her there’d be an ‘old friend’ waiting for her at the manor. The cantankerous old nightmare had wanted to keep it a secret, to spring the surprise on her when she arrived, but Frankie insisted and Dorothy relented.

Valérie fucking Barbier.

It was bad enough when she thought Valérie’d been murdered by Smyth-Farrow. To find out from Dorothy that not only had she been alive the whole time, but that she’d been in service? Frankie had ended the call as quickly as possible so she could go throw up in her kitchen sink.

And then, three days later, she told the shelter she needed some time away. She packed up everything she could, and stepped out of her Newcastle flat for what she didn’t yet realise would likely be the last time.

Shit. She should call the shelter and apologise.

Soaking wet, shabby and shell-shocked, Frankie had watched Valérie tip-tap her way away. Realised she would remember that moment for the rest of her life. That effortlessly beautiful face, that perfect hair, that contemptuous curled lip. More than three decades held against her will and she moved like she owned the place, like Dorothy Marsden was some illegitimate squatter, like Frankie was just some new inconvenience to add to the list; barely worth thinking about.

Frankie had felt like a peasant brought before a queen.

She hadn’t realised how much comfort she’d drawn from that. It made it a lot easier to play beta bitch to Dorothy, that’s for fucking certain; if Val’d been a wreck, Frankie might’ve tried to shank Dorothy there and then. Or just gone straight for her own jugular.

No. No, she wouldn’t have. She has to be honest with herself: she was, for the longest time, a fucking coward. Content to piss about rescuing dogs and trying to forget the part she played in Grandmother’s Dorley.

Until Val. Val’s strength was Frankie’s strength. Val kept both of them on the path long enough to get all of them out. All of them minus Declan, anyway, but now that everyone anybody officially gives a shit about is out of the manor, maybe the Lambert woman can send some people in. Get the kid back. Do to him… whatever the hell they were going to do before Silver River intervened.

So yeah. Val’s strength was her strength. And now Val’s faltering, showing the weight of the decades of misery piled upon her, and Frankie feels sick again.

Trev’s left them to it, taking Val’s gun off her when she didn’t seem to have the energy even to hold it any more, and marching ahead of them in his borrowed clothes, checking side streets, signalling his failure to Frankie with a shake of his head. And that’s fine: he’s young; he can do all the running around. Especially because Val’s bent over, she’s hugging herself, and she’s not even looking where she’s going. Twice Frankie’s had to tug gently on her arm to pull her away from upcoming obstacles.

If a Silver River van showed up right now to take them back to Stenordale Manor, Val’d probably get in without a second thought.

But Frankie doesn’t know what to say. Doesn’t want to push too far again. Eventually, while Trev halts them so he can investigate a promising car, and while Val’s leaning against a fence under a dim and flickering streetlight, one cigarette away from looking like a doomed femme fatale, Frankie decides to give her a break.

“I’m just going to talk with young Trev, okay?” she says.

Val nods. Not a word.

The car Trev’s found doesn’t look like a total shitbox, but it’s pretty banged up and probably about as old as Trevor himself. He enthusiastically but quietly identifies it to her as some model of car she instantly forgets, and asks for her shoelace.

“What?”

“Your shoelace, Frankie,” he repeats.

She doesn’t bother asking why. She just unloops one of them and hands it over. He spends a minute or so in deep concentration, his tongue sticking out slightly — she’d tell him how adorably feminine he looks right now but she doesn’t want to get strangled with a shoelace so close to freedom — and then triumphantly produces a shoelace with a single loop knotted into it, two-thirds of the way along its length.

“Very nice,” she says.

He directs at her a withering look, and slides the shoelace into the gap between the dented and warped passenger-side door and the frame of the car. She can’t see exactly what he’s trying to do, but judging by the swearing, he’s not successful the first five times he tries.

She looks back at Val. Still just standing there.

“Why not smash a window?” she asks. “Quicker.”

He doesn’t stop working to reply to her. “You want to be even colder?” he asks, and he’s got a point: the only one of them who isn’t obviously feeling the cold is Val, and where Frankie originally thought she was regally ignoring it, she’s now inclined to believe she’s just… numb.

“Yeah, no,” she says, not looking at him. “Cold enough already, thanks.”

“Plus, an open window on a knackered old car on a cold day screams stolen. Whereas, doing it this way, I can— Fuck!”

“You can what?”

“Never mind. Just know that if it works, it’ll get us in with no noise and no broken anything.” He drops the shoelace back into the void between the door and the frame. “What’s up with Val?”

“What do you think?” Frankie snaps.

“I— Oh. Yeah.”

“Just open the fucking door, Trev.”

She leaves him to it. Ambles slowly back to Val, still standing under her flickering streetlight, and leans against the fence next to her.

“Trevor Darling nicked my shoelace,” she says.

Val says nothing.

“I don’t know what he’s doing with it,” Frankie continues. “Just constantly dropping it behind the— Oh. Yeah. I get it. He’s—” She hesitates in the face of Val’s silence. “Uh. You don’t care.”

“He’s trying to hook the loop around the door lock,” Val says, “so he can pull it up. One of the many reasons he wanted to find an old car.”

“Yeah.”

“We’re going back to Dorley Hall,” Val says. “My life is one big stupid circle.”

“You don’t want to see Beatrice again?” Frankie asks.

If Val were in a movie, she’d be stubbing her cigarette out with a heeled foot right now. As it is, she just fidgets.

“Who is she, Frances?” she says. “More to the point, who am I? Assuming you haven’t been lying all this time—”

“—promise I haven’t—”

“—then she has spent the last three decades living life, meeting people, building a family. Whereas I… Shit, Frances. Shit. I don’t want this.”

“You could, um…”

“Do not waste my time with unfeasible suggestions. There is no other place. I know this. So I’m going. But… Frances, I am a child. I am a fifty-three-year-old child.”

And she walks away from Frankie again. Doesn’t look back. Just returns to the car, snatches the shoelace from Trevor, and gets the door open on her second try.

 

* * *

 

“I thought about changing it. Kicking out the hyphen and all that. Respelling ‘Smyth’ without the archaic Y. Hated it when I was a girl, you know. Hated my father and hated his name. But it’s an advantage here. The Americans call me ‘Lady Smyth-Farrow’. Sometimes ‘Dame Smyth-Farrow’; they do get confused. I think, to a certain, more traditionally minded American, the presence of someone so… baldly aristocratic is reassuring. We represent authority, lineage, a history of exploitation no-one especially likes to talk about, et cetera. They look at us and feel that if their families hadn’t made the crossing, they would have been equally elevated. It’s a fantasy, but it does comfort them. Especially when we appear to share their beliefs. And for my part, I do so enjoy the weather here. Look at that! Midnight and it’s still ten degrees out. Sorry; fifty or so in Fahrenheit, I believe. Sometimes I forget you’re one of them. Oh, yes, I know, the humidity, well, I do suppose it’s rather a bear, but one can get used to anything with enough air conditioning and a morning and evening shower. And they build for the heat here; they don’t sit around in four-hundred-year-old brick boxes and melt in the summer and freeze in the winter.

“Rather a shame about the old pile, actually, while we’re on the subject. Alistair’s in shock; he was always rather more fond of it than I, though he pretended not to be. Men! Personally, if I’d thought of it, I might have lit the match myself. I certainly won’t say no to the insurance. Sadly, it does invite certain complications.

“It was all so inevitable, really. I mean, think about it: that Marsden woman was always too proud for her own good, always insisted on doing everything her own way, told us we wouldn’t be able to break people without her expert knowledge, and Alistair, well, he thought she had a jolly good point. And one has to indulge one’s siblings, doesn’t one? Still, we have the video files from her. You know, I showed you! Her two little pets, looking all terrified, and that marvellous specimen who served us our wine. More than enough. We tell them they used to be men, that we can produce this to spec, using whatever raw material they care to provide, and voilà! Investors are so easy to string along. Especially Americans.

“Hmm. Where was I? Ah. Yes. The manor at Stenordale. I gather it’s a burned-out shell, about which I’m rather pleased; I also gather it is positively packed to the brim with smoking corpses. All ours, too; all Silver River. Dorothy’s deputy, that wonderful maid and the two little fillies are all unaccounted for. As is Dorothy Marsden. Tremendous fuck-up, really, on her part. Unfortunately, there is also a considerable cache of bones under the central quad. Yes, yes, it was my father, of course, but he’s dead, God rest his rotten old soul, and the maid, the domestic — Valérie — can’t feasibly take the blame because even if they find her, all she has to do is lift up her skirt and tell the police my father had her mutilated on contract and Elle Lambert will back her to the hilt, probably through discreet side channels. The jig will be, as they say, up. No, whatever happens, the police will lay the blame at my father’s dead feet and the Smyth-Farrow name will be mud and a good dozen or so geriatric missing persons cases will be suddenly and unexpectedly closed. The good news is, Alistair and I can fairly claim to have been completely out of the loop; it’s not exactly news that we didn’t get on with Daddy. If we stay out of the country we needn’t even get involved, except at lawyers’-arms’ length.

“Oh, don’t worry about it! We’ll get someone in to scrub the servers, just in case any data survived. And we’ll have a good old look for Ms Marsden, while we’re at it; someone has to. You know what? I’ll bet you right now that if we do recover any data, it’ll show that one or both of the Silver River men turned on her and that she, in response, ran like a cowardly child. Five K? Absolutely. Honestly, I can’t believe you’re taking this one. Silver River doesn’t exactly have access to the cream of the bloody crop, you know, and I would assert that if you were to show your average red-blooded Englishman a quivering captive girl on one side and a foul old pensioner on the other, you’d have to pay them a bloody lot more money than we do to stay firmly on our side forever. Yes, I know, those quivering captive girls have penises, the lot of them, but our men were stuck in the English countryside! In Stenordale, of all places! If I were a young man in Stenordale, I’d call myself lucky if the thing I was shagging didn’t have a woolly coat and a bloody tag on its ear.

“Anyway, we do, at least, still have everything we need. So we don’t need her any more, nor the manor, nor her little playthings. We have the old client books; we have the old records. We even, despite her bleating to the contrary, have much of her methodology. And we have the idea, obviously. Oh, shush, I know you have objections, but I still think it’s delicious. You want to hunt a man like a fox? If you know the right people, you can do it. It’s not even especially complicated to arrange. But you want to break a man in precisely the correct way that he becomes your girly little servant forever? I’ve seen what it’s like when amateurs play this game; either the handlers end up dead, or the subjects do, or both. Only Dorothy Marsden has the decades of experience to make it work.

“And now, so do we.

“Ugh. Yes. The complication. Elle Lambert and her quaint little operation. Florence Nightingale-ing troublesome men into pretty, quiescent women. All very laudable, all very dull, dull, dull. But not to be underestimated; one of her people has already conducted a quiet little murder over here, I’m sure. Someone I was quite interested to meet. No, I don’t know it was her, not for certain. But her fingerprints are obvious.

“Yes. Elle Lambert is going to be a bloody problem.

“Oh? So soon? But it’s only nine o’clock there! Ah, well. Delightful to talk to you as always. Love to your daddy and step-mummy. Oh, do remind them about the church social next week, won’t you? I’m going to help feed the poor! Yes, I know; me! But we have to show we’re willing to get our hands truly dirty, or we’ll lose their trust.

“Hah! Don’t say that in front of the Reverend. What? No, any Reverend! They’re interchangeable, and some of them might try to wash your mouth out with soap, you know. They’re into old remedies over here. Herbs and spiritual healing, and so on and so forth, From God’s brain to Instagram to the hands of American evangelists.

“Okay. Bye bye. God bless, and all that.”

 

* * *

 

“We’re in luck,” Trev says, as he pulls the stolen hatchback out onto what passes for a main road in Stenordale and finally judges it time to turn on the headlights. “We’ve a bit more than half a tank, if the display is accurate. And it’d better be, since no-one thought to bring any cash—”

“Who carries cash any more?” Frankie says, from her position sprawled across the back seat. It’s probably not a particularly safe way to ride in the back of a car, but she discovered when she climbed in that there aren’t any seat belts in the back and, well, if anyone’s going to go through the windscreen, better her than Val or Trev. “Do you have any on you?”

“No. I was kidnapped, if you remember.”

“Yeah? I’ve been living off of debit cards for years.”

“Fine,” Trev says, taking the next left.

“Uh, Trev,” Frankie says, turning around to look behind them, “you just turned back off the main road.”

“We’re going to Almsworth, yes?” he says, and Frankie steals a look at Val — looking out of the passenger-side front window, unmoving — before nodding. “Then we need to go roughly south.” He jerks a thumb behind them. “That’s north. Actually, Valérie,” he adds, and he’s squinting at the road ahead when he does so, and thus hopefully misses the way Val goes momentarily somehow even more still than before, “can you check in the glove? See if there’s a road map or something?”

Credit to her, she doesn’t hesitate. “‘In the glove’? Oh. La boîte à gants.” She laughs drily. “Of course.” For a few seconds she fumbles at the dashboard, frowning, unable to find the opening mechanism for the glove compartment. “Sorry,” she says, sounding distant, “I am… unused to being in the front of vehicles.”

“Just push the—”

“Yes, yes,” Valérie mutters, “I’m not completely stupid. Ah. See?” She reaches inside. “Hmm. No map. Not much of anything, unless you want — let’s see — an extremely old Wine Gum.”

“Fine,” Trev says. “Fine. I’ll eyeball it.”

“You can eyeball south?” Frankie says.

“The sky’s lightening over that way—” he inclines his head, “—which makes that east and that north. It also makes it probably not that long until the roads start to fill up, so—”

“How is your neck?” Val asks, interrupting him. He’s been picking at it again, every time his left hand isn’t on the gear stick. And Val’s noticed, same as Frankie; that’s good, right? She’s as observant as ever; that’s a good thing, isn’t it?

Frankie wants to kick herself for her optimism. Better: she wants Val to kick her.

“My neck is horrible,” Trev says. “Don’t ask again.”

“Now that we have some time, I can take a proper look at it.”

“Val—”

Val’s reaching for him now. “I could perhaps sew it up, if we could find somewhere to buy a needle and—”

“Valérie,” Trevor says. “One, we need to keep moving. Two, we don’t have any money. Three, please, for the love of God, leave me alone. I’ll just— Look. Sorry. Okay, Val? I’m sorry. But I’ll keep the tape on now.” He laughs mirthlessly. “Maybe I’ll keep it forever. Kind of offsets the tits, don’t you think?”

“Careful, Trev,” Frankie mutters to herself.

“Trevor,” Val says, “if you are not okay—”

“I’m okay,” he says. “I am. But leave me to drive, please. I want something to concentrate on. Something to do. Never thought we’d get out of that fucking place,” he continues, shaking his head lightly as Val settles back in her seat and finally snaps her belt closed. “Thought we’d die trying. Now we’re out… Fuck.”

“I understand,” Val says, and Frankie’s thinking, yes, she understands a hell of a lot better than you, lad. She knows full well what would have happened to the both of you, and unless Jake had truly lost it, it wasn’t going to be die trying.

“Val,” Trevor says. “You don’t understand. You can’t. You’re— Fuck, Val, look at me! I look like a fucking woman! It was one thing when it was just the Silver River bastards and Dorothy who could see me like this, but now it’s fucking everyone, and you don’t understand because you’re good at this.”

“I was not always.”

Frankie doesn’t call that a lie, though it is. Frankie was there, and through the hissing, constricting guilt, she remembers Valérie as she was, before she became the woman she created for herself. Vincent Barbier, the defiant and beautiful boy, who faked half his torment to cover for the other half, who stabbed Karen Turner before it was fashionable. A boy she sometimes imagined standing over himself, his own shadow, his own ghost, waiting for someone new to inhabit.

And Valérie. New. Even more beautiful than Vincent had been; even more defiant. She’d stolen Beatrice out from under them before any of them worked out what she was doing. Created two women, not just one, in the slaughterhouse under Dorley Hall.

Trevor doesn’t have what Vincent had. He definitely doesn’t have it in him to become what Valérie did. And even now, timid and touchy and reduced in a way perhaps only Frankie can truly see, Trevor Darling doesn’t have a fraction of Valérie Barbier’s strength. The man can’t stand to look at himself in the mirror; Val prefers not to piss standing up because it’s not ladylike.

“Frances says they can fix you,” Val’s saying to him as he grips the wheel. “And although she has lied about much in her life, this is the truth. It may take a while—” and it fucking will; it won’t be safe to operate on him for quite some time, though Beatrice or Elle Lambert or whoever might get him on testosterone jabs sooner than that, if their pet endocrinologist agrees it won’t make his tits explode or something, “—but you will be fixed. And, before you say it, no, it is unfortunate, but you won’t be the way you once were. None of us ever will be.”

“She’s right,” Frankie says, daring to speak, hoping she’s picked her moment, and Val, at least, doesn’t glare at her. “I’ve looked into it. What it takes, I mean. To turn someone back. It’s a process. And it’s not a perfect one. But it’s better than nothing.”

Val nods. “And in the meantime,” she says, “if you would like to appear as a woman, for safety, for comfort, I can continue to teach you.”

“I’d like to drive, thank you,” Trevor says.

“Then we will leave you to drive,” Val says. “Frances, I think perhaps we should think about getting some sleep. In case we need to relieve him at the wheel.”

“Yeah,” Frankie says. “Yeah. You’re right.”

Fanciful, though. Frankie’s been wired since before the escape. She hasn’t felt as much of a bite of fatigue since they all climbed in the van together. But Val should sleep. Maybe on the other side of some rest, she won’t feel so… agoraphobic? Is that even the right word for someone who’s spent three decades under the complete control of a sadist?

A sadist Frankie basically fucking handed her to. Because it all keeps returning to that moment, doesn’t it? David/Dee/Beatrice on the kitchen floor, bloody nosed and wretched. Valérie in the grip of armed men, helpless. And Frankie could have put it all on the line, could have changed everything. She’d been armed, hadn’t she? Fuck, she could even have called the fucking police! She could at the very least have created enough confusion that Val might’ve been able to slip away.

Thirty years of hell. Her fault.

She wakes to a tap on the window, right at the point where she’s laid her head, and the unexpectedness is such that she jerks upright too fast and bruises something delicate. She looks around, gets her bearings as quickly as she can, and as her guilty, violent dreams fade she realises that it’s light out, that they’re parked… somewhere, and that Val is frowning at her through the window.

“Get out of the car,” Val says through the window, “and have a disgusting sausage.”

“What?”

Val taps on the window again with a knuckle, and in her hand she’s holding a hot dog in a paper wrapper. “Sausage,” she repeats.

A minute or so later and Frankie’s out of the car and on her feet and stretching away the cramps and sore muscles and trying to forget her dreams. She accepts her hot dog from Val and leans against the car next to her. Trevor, apparently done with his, squats by the boot, hands in pockets.

“How?” Frankie asks.

“We found a twenty in the ashtray,” Trevor whispers. “Can we get a move on? I don’t like being here?”

“Worried about Silver River?”

“He’s worried about being seen,” Valérie says. Whether or not she slept, she looks better than she did earlier. More like her usual self, in fact: unfairly, staggeringly gorgeous for a woman her age, despite the lack of makeup, hair brushes, and changes of clothes. “Not by Silver River, though.”

“There was a man,” Trevor says, “in the café. He kept looking at me. He probably still is.”

“Being looked at is easy,” Val says, and takes another delicate bite of sausage. Frankie follows her eyeline, and there is, indeed, a man watching them from inside a squat little café. Frankie wonders to what extent Valérie is performing for him. “And it is preferable to the alternative.”

“Not for me,” Trevor mutters.

“Where are we, anyway?” Frankie asks, because there are no clues that make any sense to her, beyond that they’re at a small service station, one of those non-chain ones that’s basically a car park and a petrol station and a place to buy bad sausages.

“We found the A1,” Val says. “Eventually.”

“How eventually?”

“I got us lost,” Trevor says. “We’re still several hours from Almsworth.”

“Trevor Darling, you took us in roughly the right direction with no map or compass and not even any sun after the clouds rolled in,” Val scolds him. “I would have dropped us into the sea, I’m sure.”

Trevor shrugs.

“You didn’t get us caught, Trev,” Frankie says, “and that’s all that matters. Will the petrol hold out?”

“Yeah,” Trevor says. “That’s why we have hot dogs. Cheapest item on the menu. The rest went into the tank.”

“Tell her about the discount,” Val says.

“You got a discount?” Frankie asks.

“Yeah,” Trevor says, though he doesn’t look happy about it, “and a free paper map.”

“It’s as I’ve been trying to tell him,” Val says. “Being looked at is easy.”

At that, Trevor just shrugs again. Frankie has to give him a few points: his first time out after being force feminised and he apparently managed to score petrol, a map, and sausages. Admittedly, he probably let Val do the actual flirting, since she’s more experienced, and she doesn’t have duct tape wrapped around her neck.

And Val’s doing better, too, despite her continued wariness. She’s almost never been less animated during a conversation, but Val’s still going; willpower could raise the Titanic.

Frankie finishes her hot dog, screws up the paper wrapping, collects Val and Trevor’s wrapping for good measure, and sets off across the car park to find a bin to dump it all in and a toilet to piss in. When she’s halfway to the ugly little café, Val calls across the lot that Frankie should use her feminine wiles to get them free Cokes, and the laugh Frankie has to suppress has more to do with her glee that Val’s feeling comfortable enough to do such a thing than anything particularly funny about the suggestion. And anyway, Frankie could have done it, back in the day. Yeah, she wasn’t the looker Val was — still is — but she wasn’t half bad, and men, honestly, are fucking suckers for a bit of attention. That, she learned from her sister.

Bless her soul.

She doesn’t try for the Cokes, but on her way back she wiggles her hips a little, for Val, and gets a laugh. Good enough.

By unspoken consensus they both take the front seats, so Trevor has no choice but to take the back. He doesn’t complain; he can barely sit up. Val’s nominated herself as the map reader, and at Trevor’s suggestion they’re not going to take the A1 any farther. They’re going to avoid motorways and dual carriageways altogether, and follow a longer, slower, but theoretically safer route, marked out while Frankie was still asleep. Dorley Hall’s the obvious choice, he said, and they’ll expect them to be heading there. By the time they get to Almsworth they won’t be able to obfuscate their route, but there’ll be people everywhere, and they’ll be safe enough even if they do pick up a Silver River tail. After all, no-one’s tried anything at Dorley Hall yet, to the best of everyone’s knowledge.

The car has a bit of a slippery first gear and no power steering, but Frankie gets the hang of it quickly enough. There’s a decent amount of traffic, and she checks the clock on the dash before she realises she has no reason to believe it’s set to the correct time, and none of them have a phone they want to risk switching on.

“Any idea what time it is?” she asks.

“A little after nine,” Trevor says, getting caught in a yawn before he can finish.

“Three or four hours since we set off,” Val says. She’s kicked off her shoes and is stretching her toes out in the footwell. “We asked in the café.”

“How long to Almsworth?”

“No idea,” Trevor says. “Just drive.”

And she does.

Half a mile down the road, Val starts unsuccessfully fiddling with the radio cassette, and makes a distracting enough meal of it that Frankie slaps her hand away to give it a try herself, to no avail. Val sits back and lets her play with it, though, returning to watching the B-road they’ve been motoring along at a sedate fifty.

“Why are there so many giant vehicles?” she asks.

“Hmm? What do you mean?”

“The cars! Every one of them. Or almost every one of them. They’re massive!”

Trevor briefly leans up from his sprawl and squints out of the rear window. “What are you talking about?” he says.

“No, wait,” Frankie says. “I know what she’s talking about. Uh, yeah, Val. Cars got big.”

“But people stayed the same size?” Val says.

“Mostly.”

“The twenty-first century is stupid. Here, let me try again.” She flaps at Frankie’s hand until she returns it to the wheel, and then raises her foot and jams her heel into the radio cassette. Absurdly, static starts crackling over the speakers. “Ah-ha!”

“Magic,” Trevor says, and shuffles around on the back seat, lying himself down. “Just keep the volume down, okay?”

“Yes, yes,” Val says, reverentially turning the dial, “I know you need your beauty sleep.”

“’uck you,” Trevor mumbles.

The radio passes through several songs Frankie vaguely recognises, a few talking voices, and a lot of static. Val keeps turning the dial, searching.

“Don’t worry about me, Frances,” she says quietly. “I think I’m looking forward to it. To seeing her again.”

“Yeah?”

“Overall, yes. I’ve been looking at it all wrong, Frances. Whoever she is, whoever she’s become… I lived. I lived, and I want to see what she’s built.”

“Good,” Frankie says. “And I know it’s worth nothing, but I’m sorry.”

“I know,” Valérie says.

Finally she alights on a song she knows, a track from one of the cassettes she was allowed in her little room in the servants’ quarters, and it’s one Frankie knows so well that even the opening chords send shivers up her spine, rip memories from her she’d rather keep buried, and inspire others, more recent, that she can never stop thinking about.

As Trevor sleeps and Frankie drives south, Val closes her eyes and quietly sings.

Life is a mystery

Everyone must stand alone

I hear you call my name

And it feels like home

 

* * *

 

She’s been debating where to go. It’s not like she has a lot of options. If only Karen hadn’t been killed! If only Dorothy knew exactly what happened to her!

Though it’s not hard to guess. Karen was supposed to embed. To prove herself. David’s former nurse, Richard — ‘Barbara’ — had finally been enticed out of the country by her pervert husband and Karen had been right there, ready and willing to take her old job back, to become one of the team. To get Dorothy her access back. The phone call where they discussed it, this boon that had appeared out of nowhere, had been the first time Dorothy felt hope in years.

And then Elle Lambert had Karen killed. There’s no denying it. And while it’s possible that Lambert did so on a whim, it’s not bloody likely; any action on either of their part risks mutually assured destruction. So what’s more likely is that Karen couldn’t fucking help herself. Made herself a problem.

She always did like to torture the boys. Perhaps the most out of all of them.

Stupid. And such a waste.

It’s been an indulgence to believe her missing, to imagine that she could one day saunter back through the front door of Stenordale Manor and return to work. But now the manor’s gone, at Dorothy’s hand, and Karen’s gone; at her own hand, ultimately.

So:

Karen’s dead, probably. Definitely.

Frankie’s turned. She’s probably delivering Vincent into Elle Lambert’s adoring arms right now.

Esther’s out of the country, as far as Dorothy knows, and anyway, the last time she called her, she got an earful.

Ruth?

Hmm. Ruth. Will anyone be watching her? Does anyone else even know where she is? Perhaps not; no-one’s been quite as assiduous at dropping off the grid as Ruth.

The highlands it is, then.

Dorothy checks her credentials again. For the next few days, weeks or months — however long it takes — she’s Constance Westerman, a woman of roughly Dorothy’s age, who keeps a small flat in Aberdeen and lives frugally off a dwindling nestegg. The state doesn’t know she died back in the sixties, killed at the Hall by one of her own subjects.

She thought about hiring a car, but Silver River, if they are looking for her, will be keeping an eye out for things like that. But they can’t watch every local bus service, nor can they follow up on every train ticket purchased within a thirty-mile radius of the manor. And the name on her debit card means nothing to anyone.

She’ll go north. She’ll empty Constance Westerman’s accounts. Sell her jewellery. She’ll reconnect with Ruth and hope she isn’t still holding too much of a grudge. And then, well… There are some people out there who remember how much damage Elle Lambert did. Probably some more who are suspicious of the rise of Silver River.

Dorothy can rebuild. She’s done it before; it’s practically the story of her life.

 

* * *

 

Noor and the firefighter woman, whose name she can’t remember or perhaps never learned, which is beyond frustrating because it feels like her name is there, just out of reach, and it’s like that’s happening with everything, like he remembers Jake and she remembers killing Jake and there’s a flicker of the old woman, of Dorothy/Grandmother/whoever, and then she’s outside with Noor and the jogging clothes she gave him, clothes which reminded him so much of his brief life at Dorley Hall she’d had to smother her laughter, and then couldn’t any more, and he’d hacked up poison from his smoke-blocked lungs, and then she was out there on the road on the other side of the woods, and

and

blanks

blanks and stuttered sensation

like a CD skipping

like a CD skipping on a broken portable player

cheap Argos shit

the other boys had iPods

fuck them

wait

go back

Shit.

Where is it all? Where did it all fucking go?

It’s there. It’s all there. It has to be. Think.

It’s all there. She just has to find it. She just has to know wh—

“Are you okay, sweetheart?”

“Yes,” she says, finding a scrap of herself with which to answer, “I’m okay.”

That was it! The thought she’s been picking at: Noor and the firefighter woman, whose name she wants to shout because she fucking remembers and it was Judy, they spotted her as a man because of her voice, and she thought about it as she walked, as she hiked through the forest, as she looked up at what stars were visible through the clouds, and she’d done a little practising. Because Val had said so, hadn’t she? Before she— Before she found out, when he had been so frozen by what had been taken from him, before he found out just how bad it could get…

Val said it’s possible to change your voice. Didn’t say how. Said she did it, though.

So she— So Diana—

So she practised.

It’s mostly a whisper. It sounds hoarse. It scratches at her throat and makes her cough. But that might be the smoke.

And it sounds nothing like him. Nothing like Declan.

Like

Fuck!

He keeps

keeps shattering her

he was so important

he was so right always and in every way

he was so strong

he

he fucking was

She closes her eyes from the effort of remembering, but she finds him in the place he was most proud, in the form room at school, when it was easy to be liked, when he wasn’t big like Jake or like Dad but just tall and built and she can see him there so clearly and she feels suddenly so sad for him

and who the fuck does she think she is, anyway? he knew what he liked, he knew what he wanted, and he fucking made sure he got it, didn’t matter if it was at school or at the club or with—

tracy

Diana doesn’t feel sad for him any more. She wants to rub him out. And what is this, anyway?

Val would call it context.

Val-é-rie. Musical, especially in her accent. Diana knows better than to try to imitate it. But maybe she’ll practise that, too. Maybe she’ll see her again somehow. Show her everything she’s learned. Everything she’s going to learn.

She feels unstable. Afloat on blackened memories. Like at the end of Tracy’s favourite movie, with the girl on the raft and the guy sinking into the sea. And that’s a stupid image. It’s — fuck, what’s the word? — clichéd.

Except Diana can start again, can’t she? That’s what she’s doing, isn’t it? He thought he was so strong, so much better than everyone else, and what did it get him? It was Diana who saved him, who put her fingers into the eyes of a man whose violence was so much a reflection of his own that she hated him all the more. So who gives a fuck what he thinks about anything?

Everything’s a fucking reflection. The blood she wiped away. The bruises on her face.

Everything’s a reflection, but it’s not a mirror, it’s not glass. It’s the sea, still and calm for now but with roiling potential, and there she is, clinging to the last shred of wood, clinging to life.

But still doing better than him.

“Diana, dear, would you like some tea? We could stop for a few minutes, if you’d like. We have a kettle in the caravan.”

She smiles. “No, thank you,” she says.

“Well,” says Mrs Carlisle, “let us know if you change your mind.”

“Not far to go now, anyway,” Mr Carlisle says. He doesn’t look away from the road for more than a moment, but when he catches her eye in the rear-view mirror, he smiles at her, that same reassuring smile he had when they stopped for her at the side of the road, topped by a thick grey moustache.

Diana would call it fatherly if the thought didn’t still her.

“I’m so sorry we can’t take you beyond Cherston, dear,” Mrs Carlisle says, “but you wouldn’t want to wait around until our son and his family shows up. They’ll be hours.”

“If we’re lucky,” Mr Carlisle says.

“Cherston’s absolutely fine,” Diana says. “Thank you again.”

They saw her bruises when they picked her up. She saw them looking. But they didn’t ask questions. Just asked if she was okay and if she needed a lift and Mrs Carlisle mentioned only the once that they have medical supplies in the caravan if she needs them.

And Diana said not to worry.

Cherston’s a good place to start again. On the east coast, apparently. Diana’s never heard of it before, and that means Declan’s a completely unknown face. And she has the cash from Noor and Judy, and Noor’s emergency number on a scrap of operations manual paper if she ever really needs it. And she has a new name and a new face. Everything she needs, at least for a while.

She’s going to start again.

 

* * *

 

A barrage of alto not-swearing wakes her, and Rachel slowly opens her eyes and rolls over in bed just in time to see Pippa leap out of it, throw her phone down onto her pillow, and get through a frustrated half-circle on the carpet. When she realises Rachel’s awake, she freezes, stock-still.

“It’s okay, Pippa,” Rachel says. “If you need to kick something, kick something.”

“I’d like to kick myself,” Pippa says. “I’m late! And I’m a terrible hostess, as well.”

“Late for what?”

Pippa gestures at her phone. The screen’s lit up with three reminders, in increasingly angry colours.

“A briefing!”

“Oh,” Rachel says, “like a torture briefing?”

“Yes,” Pippa says, slowing her panic enough to extract maximum sarcasm from her words, “like a torture briefing. Crap, and I don’t know if I should call or get dressed or— Sorry. Decision failure. I mess up; I lock up. And immediately after, I go a bit mental.” She breathes out and massages her wrist, which for now, Rachel realises, is free of its ever-present bracelet. She looks: it’s hanging on the little stand on Pippa’s bedside table.

“Hey,” Rachel says, “when I mess up, I make it everyone’s problem. Why not try that?”

“There are a lot of people in Dorley Hall,” Pippa mutters, “it would take a while. Hey, could you pass my phone? I won’t throw it again, I promise.”

Rachel lets herself into the bathroom so can Pippa make her anxious little phone call in peace. By the time she steps out, showered and wrapped in the towel Pippa showed her last night, Pippa’s looking more calm. She probably kicked something; Rachel looks discreetly around for dented furniture.

“It’s fine,” Pippa says. “It’s all fine. I’ve got time. We’re doing an early afternoon briefing instead. Exceptional circumstances.”

“Oh?” Rachel asks, patting herself dry and draping the towel over the back of the chair.

“You,” Pippa says, and when Rachel jerks her head around, Pippa’s smirking. “You can borrow something, if you like,” she adds, “rather than wear dirty stuff. We’re about the same size.”

As Rachel selects something from Pippa’s wardrobe — the girl has a lot of nice casual dresses, and Rachel borrows one in pastel-blue coral, adding leggings and a cardie — Pippa fills her in: Melissa, Shahida and Amy are all here and all downstairs, waiting for her. Pippa’s told Maria that she doesn’t think Rachel represents any kind of a risk to the Hall — “Don’t make a liar out of me,” she says, and Rachel zippers her lips and mimes throwing the key out of the window — and that in her opinion she should be added to the official guest list, with the usual thumbprint access privileges, and so on. Finally, Aunt Bea would like a word.

“With me?”

“That’s what I assumed,” Pippa says, disrobing. “She can talk to me any time she wants,” she adds, closing the bathroom door behind her.

Cheeky.

 

* * *

 

Two taps on the forehead means it’s time for Steph to pull out her earbuds, and as she does so, Tanya switches off the ring light and starts to massage aloe into Steph’s face.

“Ow,” Steph says, and Tanya grins at her.

“Sorry.”

“No, no. Good ow.”

Very good; for one thing, the stubble she’s been growing out for the last three days has all been violently electrocuted and then yanked out; for another, she doesn’t have to have this done again for weeks. And that’s the best part: today’s her first full-face clear, her first time lying on the table for as long as it takes, dosed up on painkillers and covered in numbing cream, and she’s not eager to repeat the experience any time soon. If she thought just one hour of it was bad…

“I hope you didn’t get bored,” Steph says, hopping off the table and stretching.

“Nope,” Tanya replies, massaging her fingers. “You have your audiobook, I have mine. I get a bit cramped, though.”

“Thanks for doing this.”

Laughing, Tanya says, “Don’t thank me. I remember when I had it done. Being ginger sucks. First, the other boys at school say you don’t have a soul, and then electrolysis.”

“Yeah,” Steph says, “those are definitely the two defining events of my life.”

“How are things, anyway?” Tanya asks, dumping her gloves in the bin and washing up at the little station in the corner. “I heard your girlfriend became, well, your girlfriend.”

“You weren’t at the Christmas Eve party?”

“Nope. Family. Not original family,” she adds quickly. “Current family.”

“Did you have a tree?”

Tanya fetches her jacket from the chair and holds open the door for Steph, and then follows her out into the basement one corridor. “We had a forest,” she says. “Gary never had proper Christmases as a kid, and he does like to spoil the kids. And now they’re getting old enough to know what’s going on?” She mimes an explosion with her hands, and does the sound effect to match. “Pchoo! Like those prank videos where they fill someone’s house with ball pit balls, only it’s our living room and it’s presents.”

“That’s cute,” Steph says.

“Speaking of cute…” Tanya prompts. “And you… And your girlfriend…”

Steph points down the stairs. “I was just going to go get her, actually. Atiena did her laser while you were doing me, and I think she’s probably just as sore as I am.”

“I thought I heard screaming.”

“We’re going to raid the sweets cupboard and see if we can steal any chocolate bars. And maybe see if Beth can look pathetic enough that one of the sponsors makes us a nicer lunch than whatever they had planned.”

“Devious,” Tanya says. “I’ll see you upstairs?”

Steph nods and they part ways. She practically skips down the stairs to the second basement and lets herself through into the main corridor with a wave through the window of the cell corridor door at Harmony; apparently Ollie did something requiring a time out while Steph was upstairs.

She pokes her head into the common room.

“Hey, Steph,” Raph says, looking up from his tablet. He’s sat at the metal table closest to the TV, clearly not paying the cooking show very much attention. Steph can’t see what’s on his tablet in any detail, except that it’s entirely text; a book?

“Hey,” Steph says cautiously. Raph’s been muted recently, but still very definitely not happy to be here.

“Your girl went to bed,” he says. “She said they shouldn’t be allowed to employ deceptively gorgeous women if they’re just going to let them hurt him. Sorry; her. She said she’s not coming out for a million years, and asked for you to bring her a biscuit.”

“Thanks, Raph,” Steph says, leaning against the door, propping it open. “You okay?”

He shrugs. “Jane told me the whole story this morning. I don’t think she meant to,” he adds, frowning, “but she was so excited.”

“Excited about Amy?”

“If there’s an Amy, you know more than I do. But, yeah, after she slipped up, Jane gave me her life’s story.”

“You don’t seem… agitated about it?”

Raph sighs and leans forward on his elbows. “I had my suspicions. I think we all did, except maybe Ollie.”

“Is that why Ollie’s in the cell again?”

“He threw a bread roll at Harmony. Didn’t even hit her. Pathetic, really. And no, he doesn’t know the secret. He’ll be the last. Or Adam will, if he ever comes out of his room. I dunno.”

“How do you… feel about it?” Steph asks.

“Are you sponsoring me, Riley?”

“Just curious.”

Raph closes his eyes. “I think…” he says. “I think… Oh, fuck it; I think it doesn’t change anything. They’re going to do to me what they’re going to do to me. To all of us.” He shrugs. “It’s reassuring to know Jane already did it. Feels a bit less stupidly fucking impossible than before. And…” His cheeks flush, but he doesn’t try to hide it. “And, I dunno. I feel less alone in this than before. You get it?”

“I do.”

“Sorry,” Raph says. “This is still weird.”

“You know, you could start laser. Since you’re going to have to have it done anyway. Get a head start?”

“Don’t push it.”

“Okay,” Steph says, straightening up. “I’ll bring you a biscuit as well.”

 

* * *

 

Mr and Mrs Carlisle drove her the scenic route into Cherston-on-Sea, along the river, and dropped her in the town centre. Mrs Carlisle hugged her, told her to be safe and to be careful around men, checked with her again that she has enough money to stay somewhere warm and dry, and eventually consented to be driven away by her husband.

Diana would tell herself she can’t remember the last time she was treated with such kindness, except she can. Things are clearer now, though not entirely unjumbled, and she can say for certain that Noor and Judy were just like that, and so was her mother, and so were the older women who buzzed around her mother at social functions, disapproved of her father and many of her older siblings, and eventually disapproved of her, too.

Strange to view memories this way. Same person. And not the same person. At once. And when she tries to square it, when she tries to place him, the boy and the man she still might be, back in those memories, the sudden violence of it threatens to shatter the stability she’s found. So she’s stopped trying.

There might be a man called Declan, and he might be part of her, and he might be her, and she might be fucking mad if she thinks she isn’t him, but he had a shape and he had an attitude and he had, more than anything else, an end, and she can’t push past that any more. She can’t get to him any more. Because she has to go through the thing that ended him.

And because she might not want to.

She dreamed of him. In the back seat of the Carlisles’ car, she dreamed of him. He took Jake’s place, holding her down. And sometimes she was him, and the girl below her was Tracy. And sometimes he took Jake’s place, and she killed him. And sometimes she was him, and she killed herself.

If she could cut him out.

If she could bury him.

Diana picks a sheltered spot out of the salt wind coming in from the sea, and she looks around to make sure the Carlisles are out of sight and no-one else has come round the corner, and she crouches down behind the bus stop, makes herself as small as she can, and she fucking cries. Thumps a fist against the dirty metal and cries. Buries her head in her knees and cries.

Monica was right. Aunt Bea was right. Val, she was right, too. And her Mum, if she knew, she’d agree with them all. She’d belt her around the fucking ear, and—

No. Honesty. Right now.

Mum wouldn’t belt her. Not for what he did. Not for how he revelled in it. Not for the way he protested that they just exaggerate it, don’t they? It’s just sex. It’s not like he cut her or anything, or even hit her that badly. She liked it, really. And she came back, didn’t she? So it was all just making a big deal out of nothing.

Mum wouldn’t belt him for that. She’d probably call the fucking police.

Stupid.

She’s stupid and she knows it. And he made himself stupid and that felt good, and that was a way to control people, and because he was tall and built and kind of good-looking, they expected it of him. And it felt good because he knew that if he tried, if he pushed himself, if he really fucking worked at it, he’d still be stupid. So why bother?

And then he left school and he got shit jobs and he lost his shape and Tracy would still come back but sometimes only after seeing other men and sometimes he knew and took it out on her and sometimes he pretended he didn’t because he knew she had a fucking point and because he was in many ways a fucking coward. And he never knew for sure whether she did or not, anyway.

He was stupid.

And she knows she’s stupid now.

But she knows she’s not a coward any more. She took on Jake and she won. Declan didn’t. Declan couldn’t. Declan was too busy fucking drowning. And Diana, or whoever she was then, remained.

And because she’s not a coward, she doesn’t have to be stupid any more. All towns have a library, right? She can learn. And maybe she won’t be Stephen Hawking, but she won’t be Declan Shaw, either.

She stands. Rubs her eyes and nose with the sleeves of her hoodie. Sniffs away the last of the snot, the stuff that didn’t come all the way out.

Declan Shaw was stupid.

Declan Shaw was a coward.

Declan Shaw was a rapist.

That last one she fucking spits.

And because she’s already less stupid than him, she knows she has no innocence to carry forward. She knows his actions stain her as clearly as the bruises on her skin. But she can be someone new, can be someone who would never again do the things Declan Shaw did, never do the things that were done to him. Eventually, Declan Shaw will be forgotten.

She walks the promenade for a while. She thinks that’s what it’s called; she’s been squinting for signs but hasn’t seen anything to say that it is— and she’s also realised over the last few months that she can’t do without glasses any more, not comfortably. She knows it’s called Sharrow’s Way, but that’s all she has to go on.

It’s pretty. It’s cold and there’s a haze over the water and the air smells sharp, but it’s not Stenordale Manor and it’s not a concrete basement and there’s no-one here who knows that a man named Declan Shaw ever existed. And he’d never let her call anything pretty, so she does so again, looking out over the water. Again and again and again.

Along the way and down a couple of side streets she finds a bed and breakfast, advertising vacancies. It’s a tall terraced house, five storeys at least, and it reminds her of home: lace curtains on the ground floor, steps down to a basement, and small balconies on the upper floors, not enough to stand on but fine to lean out of. Mum used to use them to dry clothes.

She counted the money she got from Noor and Judy. Even though they said it was for emergencies, for times like this, she still felt bad to take it, and worse when she pulled it out of the bag and flipped through it by faded starlight and found almost three hundred quid.

Enough for more than a week at the price on the door.

Inside, she rings the little bell.

She can’t pretend to herself that the reaction she gets is unexpected, particularly since the woman who bustles into the foyer is old enough to be her grandmother. She’s seen herself clearly in dozens of shop windows since the Carlisles dropped her off, and though most things about her appearance don’t have the power to shock her any more, the bruises do. Mostly Jake kept to the less visible parts of her, but in his final struggle, he used everything he had.

She knows what she looks like: a woman who has been severely battered by a man. And it shames her to deceive people, if that’s even what she’s doing any more, but it doesn’t shame her to be seen as a woman any more. Hasn’t for a little while. At least a woman has the power to make choices. At least a woman can name herself.

At least a woman can kill the man who tortures her.

“Oh, you look exhausted!” the old lady says. She’s Dorothy’s age or thereabouts but couldn’t be more different: she’s plump, she’s Black, she’s wearing a head covering Diana doesn’t (yet) know the name of, and her long dress billows out around her shape in a way that makes Diana think of breezy summer days. “Why don’t you sit down?”

“Thank you,” Diana says, in her hoarse whisper, “but I’m okay.” On impulse, she adds, “I’ve sat down a lot today. Hitchhiking. Still stretching my legs.”

The woman nods. “What’s your name, dear?”

“Diana.”

“I’m Chiamaka.”

“Chia-ma-ka,” Diana repeats, frowning in concentration. Important to get it right. She never did with Valérie. Not until after.

Chiamaka beams at her. “That’s right! Now, I’m not going to pry, and I’m not going to ask you about your bruises, but I’m guessing you’re here for a room?” Diana nods, and Chiamaka continues, “Then I do have to ask you, is he going to come looking for you? Will he come here? The man who did those?”

“No,” Diana says, as definitively as she can.

“I’ll trust you on that. So, Diana, do you have luggage? Is the person you hitched from waiting for you?”

“No. No luggage.” Diana spreads her arms, and can’t control a wince as she does so; Jake got her really bad in the ribs, several times, and she keeps forgetting. “J— Just me.”

“Hmm. Well, it’s thirty-two a night, and I know that doesn’t sound like a lot, but we’ve got to compete with the Premier Inn down the road. I think our service is better and our beds are softer, but people do like a name brand. It’s another fiver for breakfast, though, and another fiver on top of that for wifi.” She smiles. “That’s where we get them.”

Diana nods. “I don’t need wifi. I need breakfast, though.”

Chiamaka stares at her. “And dinner? And supper?”

“Breakfast’s fine,” Diana says, shrugging.

“Hmm,” Chiamaka says. “No luggage. No ride waiting for you outside. And no phone?” Diana shakes her head. “You’re stretching what money you have, so that’s why you want only breakfast, yes?” Diana nods. “You have ID? A number I can call? Do you want me to get someone here for you?”

“No!” Diana says, too loud, and her voice cracks, and she sounds wrong, and this is the thing she’s scared of being seen as. This is the thing that can still hurt her.

Chiamaka narrows her eyes. “I see. You have a surname, Diana?”

Something inside her, shrinking under Chiamaka’s gaze, says, “No.”

“Well, then!” the older woman says, clapping her hands together, stunning Diana with the sudden noise. “You need a place to stay, and I need help. Oh, my granddaughters, they come around sometimes and pitch in, and my daughter helps out on weekends, but I’m not getting any younger and the breakfasts don’t make themselves, so this is what I propose, Diana: keep your money. We’ve got a small room on the attic floor we don’t rent out because it’s so pokey, and my granddaughters will be annoyed they can’t use it while you’re here, but they’ll have to live with it because that’s where you’ll stay. You’ll have your own sink and toilet, but you’ll have to come down a flight to bathe. You’ll be up at five every morning to help me with breakfast and you’ll run the desk and answer the phone when I’m busy, and while I’m sure you want to keep working on your voice, if anyone gives you grief for it in the meantime, they’ll answer to me. You’ll help me with the cleaning and with turning the beds. It’s not the best deal in the world, but it’s the best you’ll get in this town. You want it?”

Diana has to bite her lip to keep from crying again, but it doesn’t work, and when she says, “Yes,” she’s so overwhelmed she can barely see. She almost jumps when a hand closes over her shoulder.

“You really are a tall girl, aren’t you?” Chiamaka says softly, and tugs gently on her, leading her towards a set of stairs at the back of the hall. With her free arm she turns around a sign on the desk that says Back In Ten Minutes! You Are Being WATCHED! “No matter. My granddaughters might have left something you can wear, if you don’t mind showing a bit of ankle.”

“Thank you,” Diana whispers, regaining some control.

“Thank me,” Chiamaka says, “by setting the alarm in your room to four-thirty and by being in the kitchen at five on the dot.”

They find her a few things. Simple and mostly a bit short on her, but Chiamaka says she can catch a bus to the big shopping centre in a few days when she’s got her bearings. There’s an outlet shop where a little money goes a long way, and maybe one of her granddaughters can go with her, if she’s never shopped for herself before. And here’s the toilet and sink, and here’s the bed and there’s the telly, and here’s a little desk and chair and an old computer the granddaughters use, and she can borrow it for a while. She won’t even have to put in the wifi password; it’s already saved.

And now Diana’s left alone, with a small pile of clothes and her own computer and a window out onto a windswept street. The walls here aren’t the thickest, and she can hear someone playing a flute and some kids kicking a ball about in the garden next door and several TVs, and she thinks she can hear the start of rain, coming in off the sea.

Later she’ll go down and have a shower and try on some of these clothes and maybe offer to help out a bit today, because she wants to show willing, but for now she’ll lie here and listen to absolutely nothing.

There’s one thing she knows: Chiamaka would never have done this for Declan. She would have turned him away. Maybe turned him in.

And she would have been right to do so.

 

* * *

 

Apologising to Rachel Gray-Wallace was easier than she thought. Yes, the woman’s been bouncing around the Hall for the last couple of days, and yes, Pippa and Stephanie were the mollifying influence she’d hoped they’d be, but Rachel had been mortified when Beatrice started winding up her apology, enough that Beatrice was, truthfully, a little put out.

It was all Beatrice’s fault. She’s been rather distracted for an awfully long time, what with Peckinville’s missing man and Dorothy’s mysterious plans and Elladine’s concerns and Stephanie putting the cat among the pigeons. Not to mention a dozen other little crises, all of them piling up and each of them contributing in their own special way to her perpetual stress headache. And she’d wanted to be there for Amy Woodley and Rachel Gray-Wallace. She’d wanted to provide the personal touch. She’d wanted to be involved, and not just hand the problem off to Maria and her stress headache.

Fat lot of good that did. She mishandled it horribly. Rather the same as with Stephanie’s revelation, come to think of it.

So she cleared out the kitchen and sat Rachel down and made them a cup of coffee each. A proper one, out of the cafetiere. Rachel expressed a desire for one of their speciality mugs, claiming she wanted to torture Pippa with it later, so Bea selected the most esoteric one she could find, one with a cartoon image of William Shakespeare on the side and the caption, in faux-vintage text, To quote Henry V, Act I, Scene 2, Line 408: “Balls, my liege.”

Rachel took it in stride.

Beatrice chose her favourite, Linda’s A Round Tuit, which of the two was the mug Rachel seemed to find the more baffling. At least, as Beatrice observed to Rachel, it has the benefit of not being in any way about testicles.

And then Rachel turned down her apology. Offered one of her own. Told her she’ll always have reservations, that she’ll be visiting often to check in, that she’ll be keeping an eye on them. But that she understands. That she sees in the programme at Dorley Hall something offered to few people who deserve it, fewer still who need it.

“Just don’t be cruel,” she said as she finished her coffee and stood up.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Beatrice said, slightly stunned.

Beatrice had to make another coffee after that. With a spot of brandy. And now she leans on the counter by the microwave and the odd little kitchen device Monica thought would be handy and Indira’s slow cooker and the sandwich toaster no-one ever uses, and very carefully does not drink her alcoholic coffee in one gulp.

“I take it that went well?” Maria says, walking in from the dining hall with Edy. She doesn’t sit down, nudges Beatrice aside instead, and flicks on the tea urn mounted on the wall; standard practice when one is making hot drinks for more than, say, a dozen people at once.

Beatrice, displaced and having to find herself a new place to stand, says, “Swimmingly,” and takes what she feels is an appropriately sarcastic and loudly slurpy sip from her Round Tuit.

“Rachel’s okay, then?” says another voice, and it’s Stephanie, dressed disappointingly in a standard basement outfit rather than in any of the nicer and more colourful items in her upstairs room. She’s also wearing a face mask, one from the boxes Beatrice has insisted always be kept in stock and fresh, ever since SARS, and after a moment, the reason for it becomes obvious: what’s visible of her cheeks and neck are covered in tiny red dots.

Beatrice winces in sympathy. Probably explains the frumpy clothes, too; no-one feels their best after that.

“She’s in some sort of awful five-way hug in the dining hall,” says Bethany, also masked and dully dressed and following Steph to the dry goods cupboards.

“Rachel is fine,” Beatrice says, and seriously regrets the amount of brandy she poured into her coffee; three to four times more would have been more appropriate. “I’m sorry, Bethany, but have we given you the run of the place?”

“No,” Maria says, frowning at her.

“Steph has the run of the place,” Bethany says, pointing. “I just nip through after her, before the doors close.”

The tea urn starts making the usual gurgling noises, and more people start wandering into the kitchen, possibly to get away from whatever’s happening with Rachel in the dining hall. Maria and Edy take drinks orders and fill mugs and Pippa surreptitiously hands Stephanie and Bethany a large chocolate bar each, and when Steph whispers for a packet of biscuits, too, for Raphael, Beatrice finishes most of the rest of her coffee and concentrates very hard on the floor and pretends not to have noticed.

It used to be so simple. A handful of sponsors, a basementful of rowdy boys, and a couple of years of decreasingly meek new girls to fill out the ranks. Now the boys are turning out to have been girls all along, or really rather into it despite having no prior inclination, and they’re popping up from the basement for chocolate bars and having sleepovers and guests from the outside world. And families are getting involved! Indira’s was carefully vetted, and Beatrice has known ever since Stephanie’s revelation that they’ll have to concoct airtight evidence for her when the time comes, but now Abigail’s reunited with her family in a completely unauthorised fashion and, wonderfully for young Abigail but tragically for Beatrice’s conscience, it seems to be going swimmingly.

Has she been doing everything wrong?

At least the girls are happy. At least none of them seem to be especially bitter about her, personally, or no more than usual, at any rate. At least something works. She accepts a refill — decaffeinated this time, and with milk but no added alcohol — and sips quietly on it, contributing nothing to the conversation but content to listen. Whatever else she’s done, whatever she’s done wrong, she can at least take responsibility for this little family, right here in this kitchen.

And then the conversation suddenly stills. Someone gasps and someone else whispers, “Maria, no!” and when Beatrice opens her eyes the tableau that greets her is of a dozen frozen bodies, of Edy holding Maria by the waist, and of Maria’s face, contorted with a hatred Beatrice hasn’t seen in over a decade.

And in the hallway, looking in through the large windows in the kitchen doors, are three women,

One she doesn’t recognise.

One is Frankie, of all people.

And the third…

The third is—

Beatrice drops her mug.