Chapter 4: The Lights at the End of the West Corridor
All four of them at once, for about half a second.
I knew what that meant. I had lived there thirteen months and heard the wiring do it two hundred times.
The west corridor ran from the foyer to the back of the house, forty-one metres.
I had walked it with a sleeping child on my shoulder perhaps a thousand times.
Four wall lamps down its length, and a service door at the end onto the yard. Those lamps and the heater strip above that door shared one circuit, a piece of 1974 wiring nobody had paid to correct.
So when the door opened, the lamps dipped.
Everybody who worked there knew it. It was a doorbell nobody had installed on purpose.
Serena did not know it.
She had lived there since the twentieth of February and had never carried anything down that corridor.
So she went on looking at the place cards for another three seconds, and I did not.
Here is the thing I have thought about more than anything else from that night.
Nobody heard a car.
The drive is crushed granite for six hundred metres. You hear a car on it from inside with the windows shut, and from the nursery on the second floor.
I had heard that sound every evening for thirteen months and built my day around it. Ethan built his around it too.
That evening there was no sound on the drive.
There is a second thing, smaller, which took the lawyers eleven months to notice.
There is a panel in the butler’s pantry that chimes twice when the main gate is opened.
It is not loud. Two notes. You hear it in the foyer if the foyer is quiet.
The foyer had been quiet from a quarter past six until 7:38.
It did not chime.
I am not going to tell you now what that meant, because I did not know then. It would be dishonest to hand it to you early.
I put it in my statement that night, in one line. Nobody asked me about it for nearly a year.
What I did with that half second was pull the boy towards me.
I could reach him by then. My knees were under me and the three metres had become one.
I did not lift him. You do not lift a child who is holding an arm against his chest, not until you know.
I put my hand flat on his back and drew him in against my side.
I turned him so that whatever was coming down that corridor would arrive at my back and not at his face.
That was not courage. That was thirteen months of habit.
The footsteps started about two seconds after the lights came back.
Slow ones. Not hurrying and not creeping. A man walking down his own corridor at the end of a long day.
Leather soles on stone. You could hear the grit they had brought in from the yard.
There were three sets of feet. Two of them stayed behind the first.
Serena heard it then. I know, because the place cards stopped being interesting to her.
I heard her breathe in once through her nose. I heard the small scrape of a heel as she squared herself up to face the corridor.
After that I heard nothing from her at all.
She did not say anything to me. She did not need to.
Whatever she was going to say to him, she had already chosen it, in under four seconds.
She was very good at that. It was the thing she was best at.
Ethan’s crying dropped away almost entirely.
That is not a nice detail and I am going to put it in anyway.
He went quiet when he heard footsteps, because footsteps at that hour usually meant his father.
His father was the best thing that happened to him in a week.
Fourteen months old, hurt, on a marble floor, and he stopped crying in order to listen for the door.
I felt him go still under my hand. His whole back changed shape.
I said, “That’s Papa.”
He had a word for it. Not that word. I will come to his words.
The lamp at the far end came back properly, then the next, and the corridor filled up towards us.
And then he came out of the dark.
Victor Blackwood was forty-one, a big man who moved as though somebody had told him to be careful with the furniture.
He had his coat over his arm rather than on him.
Which meant he had taken it off outside, and had been outside long enough to think about it.
His shirt was wet through at both shoulders, in two dark patches the shape of hands.
It was raining. I had not known it was raining. The foyer of that house has no windows.
He stopped about four metres away.
The two men stopped six metres behind him. One looked at the ceiling. The other looked at me.
Nobody said anything for about five seconds, and five seconds is a long time to spend sitting on a floor.