The Girl Before

Well, let me put it this way. Is this separation final?

Simon thinks not, I admit. We’ve broken up before, but he always begs and begs until eventually it just seems easier to let him come back. This time it’s different, though. I’ve ditched all my old things—all that useless stuff. I think it’s given me the strength to get rid of him too.

But a human relationship is very different from stuff, she says.

I look at her sharply. Do you think I’m doing the wrong thing?

She thinks for a moment. One of the curious aspects of a traumatic experience like the one you’ve been through, she says at last, is how it sometimes results in a softening of your existing boundaries. Sometimes the changes are temporary. But sometimes the person finds they actually quite like this new aspect of their personality, and it becomes a part of them. Whether that’s a good thing or not isn’t for me to say, Emma. Only you can make that judgment.

—

After my therapy session I have an appointment with the lawyer who’s drawn up the deed of variation on the lease. Edward Monkford was right: I went to a local firm and it turned out they could do one for fifty pounds. The only catch, the lawyer I spoke to said, was that Simon might have to sign it too. For another fifty pounds he agreed to look through all the paperwork to see.

Today the same lawyer tells me he’s never seen an agreement like it. Whoever drew this up meant it to be completely watertight, he says. To be on the safe side, you should really ask Simon to sign the papers as well.

I doubt Simon will sign anything that formalizes us splitting up, but I take the documents anyway. As he finds me an envelope the lawyer says chattily, I looked the property up in the council archive, by the way. It’s rather fascinating.

Oh? I go. Why’s that?

It seems One Folgate Street has a somewhat tragic history, he says. The original house was destroyed by a German bomb during the war—all the occupants were killed, an entire family. There were no surviving relatives, so the council issued a compulsory purchase order to get the remains knocked down. After that the plot remained derelict until it was bought by this architect chap. His original plans were for a much more conventional building—some of the neighbors wrote to the council afterward, complaining they’d effectively been duped. Things got quite heated, from the look of it.

But it went ahead, I say, not really interested in the house’s past.

Indeed. And then, to add insult to injury, he applied for permission to bury someone there. Two people, actually.

Bury someone? I repeat, puzzled. Is that even legal?

The lawyer nods. It’s a surprisingly simple process. So long as the Environment Agency raises no objection, and there are no local bylaws against it, the council’s more or less obliged to grant permission. The only requirement is that the names of the deceased and their location have to be marked on the plans, for obvious reasons. Here they are.

He produces a stapled photocopy and unfolds a map from the back. Final resting place of Mrs. Elizabeth Domenica Monkford and Maximilian Monkford, he reads out loud.

He slips it into the envelope alongside the other documents and hands it to me. There. You can keep that, if you like.

NOW: JANE

When Mia’s gone I open my own laptop and type in “Elizabeth Mancari,” meaning to take another look without Mia hovering over my shoulder. But Housekeeper doesn’t bring up any of the pictures she found.

It’s true what I said to Mia: In the short time I’ve lived here, I’ve never found One Folgate Street a frightening place. But now the silence and the emptiness seem to take on a more sinister hue. Ridiculous, of course; like being scared after listening to a ghost story. But all the same, I select the brightest light setting and go around checking for—what? Not intruders, obviously. But for some reason the house no longer feels quite so protective.

It feels like I’m being watched.

I shake the feeling away. Even when I first moved in, I remind myself, it felt like a movie set. I enjoyed the sensation then. All that’s happened since is some stupid, abortive sex with Edward Monkford and the discovery that he prefers a certain type of woman.

Lying at the bottom of the stairs with her skull smashed in. Without quite meaning to, I go and stare at the spot. Is that a faint outline of a bloodstain, long since scrubbed clean? But of course, I don’t even know there was any blood.

I look up. Above me, at the top of the stairs, I see something. A chink of light that hasn’t been there before.

I go up the stairs cautiously, my eyes fixed on it. As I get nearer it takes on the outline of a small door, no more than five feet high—a hidden panel in the wall, similar in construction to the concealed cupboards in the bedroom and kitchen. I hadn’t even realized it was there.