When you’re eight years old you think life will be full of big acts of love, but looking back now I don’t think anything really came close to that rainbow ever again. Not until Shannon came along anyway.
‘There’s so little personality in here,’ said Ed Kowalsky, and once again I knew he was thinking about his own kids’ bedrooms at home. Since we’d got to the house, he’d dropped his authoritative, teeth-flashing persona and in its place was a diffident man who seemed to have shrunk physically.
‘What does it tell you, Anne, that this little girl was able to so subliminate all traces of herself?’
‘That she has learned how to suppress her true nature?’
‘Or maybe she has learned how to adapt?’
We stood for a moment looking around and I think we were both relieved when Sergeant Cavanagh asked if we’d seen enough.
‘Right, folks,’ he said, as we followed his lumbering frame back down the stairs. ‘Are you ready for the pièce de résistance?’
He pronounced pièce as if it was an acronym: ‘PS’.
At the back of the hallway, under the stairs, was a doorway. I’d noticed it on the way in, but had studiously avoided thinking about it. As Sergeant Cavanagh turned the handle, I fought back an overwhelming urge to yell, ‘Stop!’ Suddenly, it felt too much. I knew that by going through that doorway I’d be crossing a rubicon. Despite my training and my ambition and my curiosity, I wasn’t ready. I didn’t want to see what human beings are capable of doing to each other, or of enduring. But Sergeant Cavanagh was already squeezing himself through the narrow doorway.
‘This woulda been kept locked at all times. See how heavy that door is? It’s reinforced with steel on the inside.’
We were in a cramped store-room lined with shelves which housed all manner of household items – various tools, an iron, tins of used paint, a stack of lightbulbs in their boxes. Multi-packs of washing powder. As you’d expect, everything was neatly arranged with different shelves for different categories of stuff, all with their labels facing out. At the end of the room was what looked at first glance like a wall with yet more shelves. Only when Sergeant Cavanagh reached up under a shelf in the top left corner and slid open a bolt did I realize that the whole wall was actually another door. To the left of it was a plastic bottle on a small purpose-built shelf. As the burly cop reached down, with obvious effort, to slide open another bolt at the bottom of the door, I peered closely at the label on the bottle. Antiseptic handwash. Something way down in the pit of my stomach lurched to the side.
We all stepped back as the door swung open, revealing steps going downwards into what appeared to be a fathomless black hole. Even Sergeant Cavanagh was silenced by the wave of damp, stale air that rose to greet us and the overpowering smell of something decaying under rotten floorboards. The only light came from the three vented bricks I’d seen from the outside which were ahead and to the left, the air vents covered over with a thick sheet of clear safety glass.
‘There’s a switch around here somewhere,’ said Cavanagh eventually, feeling around on the wall to the left of the staircase. There was a clicking noise and suddenly the whole scene was illuminated in a brutal white light. I instinctively closed my eyes, and when I opened them again the world tilted and it has never been straight since.
20
Chloe
It was Wednesday morning and Ewan had been ignoring her for the best part of two days now. Not quite ignoring her but doing that thing where you smile but let your eyes slide off a person as if they’re made of soap and address your comments in a bright, shiny voice to a point by their shoulder.
Chloe was beside herself.
She’d always been secure in her own attractiveness to the type of man she wanted to be attractive to. After spending the night of Gill’s leaving do squashed together with Ewan in his narrow, frankly rather rank-smelling bed, she’d noticed he seemed subdued the next morning, but put it down to a hangover. Her own head had felt like her skull was shrink-wrapping itself over her bruised brain.
So she tried not to read anything into the way Ewan hadn’t bothered to get up, simply calling out, ‘Bye, babe,’ leaving her to let herself out, or the fact that he hadn’t asked her what she was doing for the rest of the weekend. And when he didn’t call or text that day, she reasoned he was still shaking off the night before. She was happy to snuggle with her mum on the sofa in her onesie, watching non-stop telly and listening to her dad shouting at the football in the next room and remembering with a warm thrill in the bottom of her stomach the things they’d done on Ewan’s unwashed sheets the night before.