INHERITANCE OF LIES

Chapter 2

She walked.

It was not a decision, exactly. Decisions implied deliberation, the weighing of evidence, a rational process arriving at a considered conclusion. This was something more primitive: the letter said walk, and her body walked, and she was twenty feet from the car park exit before her mind caught up with her legs and asked what exactly she thought she was doing.

What she thought she was doing was following the instructions of a dead woman she hadn't spoken to in twelve years, written in a letter dated when Nora was three years old, which had materialised in her coat pocket between London and Wiltshire. This was not rational behaviour. She was aware of this.

She kept walking.

Behind her, she heard Daniel Marsh call her name. His voice was pleasant, puzzled, professionally concerned in a way that would read, to any observer, as perfectly reasonable. She did not turn around. She adjusted her bag on her shoulder and walked through the station exit into the cold March air, and she did not let herself look back until she had turned the corner onto the high street and the station was out of sight.

Then she stopped, and stood on the pavement, and breathed.

Around her was a market town doing what market towns do on a Friday lunchtime. A bakery with steamed windows. Two women with pushchairs navigating around each other on the narrow pavement, neither conceding. A man loading boxes from a white van, propping the doors open with his knee, talking into the phone wedged between his shoulder and his ear. Ordinary, ordinary, ordinary. The kind of ordinary she catalogued every single day, the unremarkable texture of other people's lives, observed through glass, held at a professional remove.

Her phone buzzed. A message from an unknown number:

Miss Voss. I apologise if I've done something to concern you. The car is here whenever you're ready.

D. Marsh

She put the phone away.

She found the estate agency on the high street and asked about taxis. Twenty minutes later she was in the back of a Vauxhall driven by a man called Terry who talked about the weather with the comfortable persistence of someone who had long since made his peace with it, and she watched the town give way to the B-road and the B-road give way to lanes, and the lanes become the particular kind of narrow that only happens when a road has been used for so long that the hedges on either side have had time to lean in and form opinions about it.

She did not take out the letter again. She knew what it said. She was an archivist. She had read it twice and the text was already indexed, catalogued, filed in the part of her mind that held important things she needed to be able to retrieve without looking.

What she did not know what to do with was the final line. The thing it revealed about Eleanor, which was not that she had possessed some impossible foreknowledge, Nora was not ready to think about that yet, was filing that under to be examined under better conditions, but rather what it revealed about Eleanor's relationship with Daniel Marsh. She knew his name. In a letter from 1997. She named him as a threat with the specific, unsentimental efficiency of a woman who had been managing threats for a long time and had stopped being surprised by them.

Nora had spent twelve years telling herself her grandmother was a cold, controlling woman who had interfered in her life without remorse. She had told this story so many times and in so many forms that it had become, for her, the truth. And it still was the truth, she was not revising it, not yet. But it was beginning to seem possible that it was not the whole truth. That Eleanor's coldness and Eleanor's control had been, for reasons not yet visible, pointed outward. Away from Nora. Like a shield held at the wrong angle, cutting the person it was meant to protect.

She was not sure what to do with this thought.

She filed it.

Haverstone sat at the end of a lane that did not appear on any road sign and only barely appeared on the map on her phone, rendered as a thin grey line with the uncertainty of a cartographer who had heard about it from someone else. The house itself emerged from the trees the way old houses do, reluctantly, incrementally, first the chimneys, then the roofline, then the whole of it resolving from grey winter branches into grey Cotswold stone, a Georgian farmhouse that had been added to and added to until the additions had developed feelings about each other.

It was bigger than she remembered. And colder-looking. And more unloved: the windows filmed with winter grime, the gravel of the front drive patchy and grass-invaded, a section of guttering at the east end hanging at an angle that suggested it had been hanging there for several years and had made its peace with it.

She paid Terry and stood in the drive and looked at it for a moment. She had been here last at twenty, arriving for what became the last visit, her grandmother already in the kitchen making tea with the particular efficient quietness that Nora now understood was not composure but vigil. The house had felt full then, full of things unsaid, full of the pressure of what was about to happen. Now it felt empty. Not peaceful-empty. Held-breath empty.

The front door opened before she reached it.

The woman in the doorway was somewhere in her seventies, small and upright with the quality of someone who had decided very early in life that good posture was the last line of defence and had been defending it ever since. She was wearing a grey cardigan and sensible shoes and had the face of someone who had worked in a large house long enough to know its moods better than its owners had.

"Miss Voss," she said. Not warmly. Not coldly. As though Nora were an expected delivery and the appropriate response was simple acknowledgement. "Mrs. Byrd. I've kept on since Mrs. Voss passed. She asked me to."

"She asked you to stay on?"

"In writing. In the letter she left with the instructions for the house." A brief pause. "There were quite a number of instructions."

Nora followed her inside.

The hall smelled of the house as she remembered it, beeswax and old paper and something faintly mineral she had never been able to place, but overlaid now with disuse, with the particular staleness of rooms that have been kept clean but not inhabited. Mrs. Byrd led her through to the kitchen, which alone felt lived-in, warm, with a kettle already working itself toward a boil, and told her that the study had been left exactly as her grandmother left it, that she was not to move anything without first examining it in place, and that dinner could be managed at whatever time suited her. Then she poured the tea, placed a key on the table beside the mug, old, heavy, the kind of key that knew what it was for, and left the room.

Nora looked at the key.

The study.

She drank the tea first. She was aware this was delay. She drank it anyway.

The study was at the back of the house, east-facing, looking out over the garden that now in early March was all bare earth and the skeletal architecture of things that would be alive again in two months. Eleanor's desk was positioned to face the window, which told you something about her, she had needed to see outside while she worked. Most people who spent their lives managing information faced walls. Eleanor had faced the garden. She had needed proof the world was continuing.

The letters were on the desk. Not in a box, not in a drawer but on the desk, in a stack, held together with a length of faded ribbon whose colour might once have been red, tied in the particular kind of knot that is not decorative but functional, the knot of someone who meant the thing they fastened. Beside the stack, a folded card in Eleanor's handwriting. Two words: In order.