A Game for All the Family Read online

  ‘Really?’ He sounds thrilled. ‘Justine, you are exceptionally cool.’

  ‘I’m not, George. I’m just … I have to get into the house.’

  ‘Where’s Ellen? School or home?’

  ‘What? No, you should stay here. I think your mum might be on her way back. She’s angry. She knows you came to our house.’

  ‘She’s always angry. Or crying, or worrying. Trust me, she’ll be at work all day. She’s never back before seven. Dad gets back around five.’

  ‘And they think it’s okay to leave you here alone all day?’

  ‘Well, Mum knows I can’t get out. Until recently they wouldn’t have left me unattended, but a state of emergency has been declared. I told my parents that Ellen and I are engaged.’

  ‘Yes, I … Right.’ Is he waiting for me to congratulate him?

  They can’t leave him locked in the house all day long. For how many days? What’s the plan?

  Instead of breaking and entering, I should ring Social Services. If I’m lucky, they’ll send someone to speak to me who doesn’t organise charity fun runs with Stephen Donbavand.

  ‘Can you smash the lounge window?’ George asks. ‘At the back, the furthest one on what will be your right. That will upset Mum most.’

  I release the letterbox and run round to the back garden. I nearly laugh when I see what’s lying on the grass: a large, mud-encrusted shovel. Stephen must have been exhausted after staying up all night digging a grave in my lawn. He came home, dropped his spade and hasn’t been able to bring himself to pick it up since.

  It’s too heavy for me to lift above my head, so I swing it upwards towards the glass. The window smashes instantly. George is standing on the other side, wide-eyed with what looks like joy. ‘Use the spade to go round the frame and push out all the jagged bits,’ he advises. ‘That’s it.’ There’s no question of me getting in before he’s out. He’s already got one foot up on the sill.

  ‘Careful,’ I say. ‘There might be fragments. Don’t cut yourself.’

  ‘I’m fine. Where’s Ellen? School?’ He propels himself out and lands on the grass next to me. He’s wearing dark blue jeans, red shoes and a khaki T-shirt, frayed at the neck. It looks as if it might once have had letters on it.

  I think of Germander – the three letters that fell off the sign.

  ‘I don’t know where Ellen is now,’ I say. ‘She was at home when I left – your mother paid us a visit, so she didn’t go to school on the bus.’

  ‘Ugh. I’m so sorry Mater inflicted herself on you.’

  ‘I think Alex will probably have taken Ellen to school by now, but I’m not sure. She might want to wait at home for me to come back. She knew I was coming here.’

  ‘Right. I’ll try school first, then Speedwell House,’ says George. ‘I’d better hurry or I’ll miss Lionel’s boat. Help yourself to tea and coffee.’ He laughs. ‘That’s funny, isn’t it? I mean, in the circumstances.’

  ‘It is. George, wait. Would you be able to hide something and get away with it? I mean … does your mum search your stuff?’

  ‘No. She wouldn’t bother. She knows I don’t have anything apart from “permitted items”.’ He makes air quotes with his fingers.

  I pull my mobile phone out of my bag and check to see if it’s getting a signal here. It is. I hand it to George. ‘Take this. There’s an envelope icon – that’s my email. Click on it and you’ll go to my inbox. You’ll find some emails Ellen sent me – click on reply and you can email her. Hide it in your room, somewhere your mum never goes, and you can email Ellen whenever you want. Do you know how to send emails?’

  George nods. ‘Ellen showed me, on her iPod.’ He turns the phone over, inspecting it from all angles. ‘But what about you? How will you manage without it?’

  ‘I’ll buy another one.’

  ‘But until you do, how will you ring people?’

  ‘I don’t want to ring anyone. I don’t want anyone to be able to ring me. The less time I spend communicating with other people, the better – Ellen and Alex not included.’

  ‘You’re the opposite of me. I just love people!’ George beams. ‘I want to talk to anyone and everyone, apart from my mother. Dad and Fleur don’t count. They’re just replicas of her. When I told them all about me and Ellen being engaged, they all said the exact same thing.’

  He wants me to ask, but I can’t face it. I nod, and try to look supportive – as if I’d have said something better.

  ‘So … Justine, are you sure about this?’ George asks. He’s weighing my phone in the palm of his hand as if it’s a bar of gold. ‘It’s so generous of you. Do I deserve it?’ He frowns. ‘What if I read all your personal emails? I promise I won’t!’

  ‘You’re welcome to. There’s nothing secret in there.’ I invented a different email address for my correspondence with Ops, and those messages don’t automatically upload to my phone. Even if George searched the internet history, he wouldn’t be able to get into the account. It’s password-protected. ‘If you dig deep enough and get to last year, you’ll find me ranting and swearing like a madwoman about injustices in the world of TV drama, but then you know all about that already: the Ben Lourenco business.’

  He looks worried. ‘How do you know I know about it? Did Ellen tell you?’

  Wait. My turn first. ‘George, who’s Lisette Ingrey?’

  His eyes widen. His Adam’s apple jerks up and down in his throat.

  ‘Did your mother tell you that was her name, before she changed it? Did she tell you your name was once Urban Ingrey?’

  ‘What do you mean did she tell me? Are you saying it’s not true?’

  I shouldn’t have brought it up. Terrible timing. Whatever George believes about her never getting home before seven, Anne might be on her way back. I may not have long.

  ‘It’s true, Justine – everything Ellen’s told you.’ George looks upset. ‘I hope you don’t believe in … bad blood or anything like that. I think that’s a silly superstition, with no scientific basis,’ he blurts out defensively. ‘Just because my aunt was who she was, that doesn’t tell you anything about me. I could no sooner murder anybody than rollerskate to Mars!’

  ‘George, I … really, I don’t think anything bad about you. Please don’t worry about that.’

  He hates his mother. He’s clever enough to see exactly how destructive she is. But he believes what she’s told him about her past history – believes it unquestioningly.

  It can’t be my job to tell him his mother’s as much of a liar as she is a tyrant. In an ideal world, that task would fall to Stephen Donbavand – useless waste of space that he is.

  ‘Thank you, Justine – for your faith in me. I promise you, I won’t let you down.’

  ‘We can’t have this conversation now, George,’ I say. I need to search your house. ‘Take the phone. Hide it.’

  ‘You are truly the loveliest of people.’

  My eyes fill with tears. It’s pathetic, no doubt, but I can’t help it.

  ‘Justine? When you’ve finished in the house, before you leave, make sure you don’t block up the window or anything. Leave it open or I won’t be able to get back in. I’m going to pretend I was upstairs all day and didn’t hear it smash.’

  I nod. George stuffs the phone into his jeans pocket, bows to me as if I’m the Queen and he’s my humble servant, and tears off down the hill to Lionel’s boat.

  I climb into his house through the window. The first thing I spot in the predominantly brown and beige lounge is a sideboard with open doors. There are board games and jigsaw puzzles inside it, and more piled high on top. In a corner, there’s a TV but no DVD player. Nondescript landscape paintings on the walls, two sofas that have an aged, crushed look about them. Two fat bookcases full of all kinds of books: novels, dictionaries, Assyriology tomes, books about economics. Why so many dictionaries? I wonder. There are more than ten, and none for foreign languages. Did Anne keep buying new editions in the hope that the meaning of ‘truth’ might
change – that suddenly, in 2010 or 2011, the word might be redefined in her favour?

  Truth: whatever shit you feel like inventing, to make everyone who knows you wonder if they’re going mad. Former meaning: that which is in accordance with fact or reality.

  There’s a dreary grey and black galley kitchen at the back of the house, and a downstairs loo that ought to have been left as an under-stairs cupboard. Apart from that, the whole ground floor is the lounge. I go upstairs and find what I expected: three bedrooms – a double and two singles – and a bathroom.

  This isn’t right. If I didn’t know better, I would assume a normal family lived in this house. Fleur’s bedroom is spotlessly tidy. All over the walls, there are posters of what must be some kind of girl band: The Saturdays. George’s room is mainly tidy, but not immaculate like his sister’s. There are a few heaps of clothes on the floor. He has a bookcase in his room that’s stuffed full of novels: Dickens, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Robert Graves, Tolstoy.

  Interesting. It looks as if Anne has no objection to her son reading novels, as long as he doesn’t have access to the internet. It’s other real people that she fears. She’s not worried about the influence of Jane Eyre or Oliver Twist.

  Clever people can be the stupidest of all.

  Anne and Stephen’s bedroom is the messiest room in the house. The bed is unmade. There’s a large pile of clean, ironed laundry balanced on one corner and spilling over onto the floor, where there are nearly as many crumpled, dirty clothes and discarded bath towels. An ironing board is pushed against the wall under the window. There’s a dressing table in a corner with two laptops on it, as well as make-up, deodorant, perfume, balled-up socks.

  The Donbavands need a bigger house. Incarceration doesn’t have to be this cramped.

  The phone begins to ring, startling me. I stare at the old-fashioned handset on the bedside table nearest to the window. It’s covered in dust. I don’t want to touch it. It might stink of liar breath. My stomach heaves at the thought.

  It could be Anne, ringing to speak to George. When he doesn’t answer, won’t she panic and drive straight home? I need to get out of here as soon as I can. There’s nothing to stop me leaving now. I’ve done what I wanted to do: invaded Anne’s home the way she invaded mine.

  Randomly, I pull open the dressing table drawers and find nothing interesting. One contains between ten and twenty plug adaptors. Furious, I slam it shut, thinking about Anne jetting around the world, sharing her ideas with other academics while her son’s not allowed to make one friend without getting removed from school.

  In the next drawer down there’s a heap of hair accessories on top of a brown envelope file, which I pull out and open. My breath catches in my throat.

  At the top of the first typed page, in a large font, are the letters ‘A.I.’, underlined. Allisande Ingrey. Beneath the heading, there’s a numbered list of what look like gravestone inscriptions. It goes on for pages and pages, starting with the short and basic – ‘In Loving Memory of’, ‘In Remembrance of’ – and moving on to longer, more elaborate suggestions: ‘A tiny flower, lent not given/to bud on earth and bloom in heaven’. There’s a blue-ink tick next to number forty-six on the list: ‘Our family chain is broken./Nothing seems the same./But as God calls us one by one/The links shall join again’.

  That’s a reference to Perrine Ingrey having been murdered, no doubt.

  The phone has stopped ringing. In the ensuing silence, I tell myself what I know is true, though I wish I could pretend otherwise: Anne Donbavand has chosen the inscription for my gravestone.

  In the same file, there are three coffin catalogues, showing pictures of every conceivable kind of model: dark, shiny and expensive; plain, light and cheap. There’s a blue tick next to one of the priciest. An odd choice if you’re planning to murder a person, some might say, but I understand. Allisande might be hated and feared by Lisette, but she matters to her. When someone is that important to you, you don’t choose cheap.

  There’s a black eyeliner pencil on the dressing table. I remove its lid and draw an ‘X’ next to Anne’s tick. I start to write, ‘Good quality, but too baroque. I’d prefer a plainer style – okay, sis?’ Halfway through writing ‘quality’, I give up. I don’t want to make a joke, even one that will make Anne angry. I don’t want to call her ‘sis’ because she’s not, has never been and will never be my sister.

  This isn’t funny. I can’t quip my way out of it. A delusional, dangerous woman is fantasising about killing and burying me and I have the brochures to prove it. She’s been thorough: as well as coffins, there are hundreds of pictures of urns in the file: another two catalogues’ worth. Anne mustn’t have been able to decide at first between burial and cremation.

  I take several deep breaths. She might not go any further than she has already. Maybe the contents of this file and the hole in my lawn will be enough for her.

  And Figgy’s nametag, and climbing into your house when you told her she wasn’t welcome, and the anonymous calls, and the dead creature in her handbag …

  I pull out all the drawers, one by one. There’s nothing else in the dressing table, nothing in the wardrobes.

  I find two more files – one red and one green – in the drawer of Anne’s bedside table. I flip open the first and see something that belongs to me. I catch my breath. When did Anne have the chance to …?

  No. She didn’t. She didn’t steal it. This is her own copy of the estate agent’s brochure. She must have seen that Speedwell House was for sale, as we did; sent off for the details, as we did.

  Here’s the beautiful picture of the staircase, Ellen’s bedroom with the little mint-green door in the wall …

  Why am I wasting time staring at something I know by heart? I close the brochure and pull out the other papers in the file: information about Speedwell House, printed off a website … I gasp when I see what’s at the bottom of the pile: another set of estate agent’s details, but this time much older – fifteen or twenty years older, perhaps. The colours in the photographs are faded. Again, there’s the little door from Ellen’s room … Perrine’s room … I vow to myself here and now that I’ll paint that door a different colour as soon as I can, whether Ellen agrees or not. I am coming to loathe that mint green. Why has nobody ever changed it?

  Over the years, Anne has been collecting all the information she can about Speedwell House, the Ingreys’ family home. Except the Ingreys never lived there, and Anne Donbavand is not Lisette Ingrey.

  I stuff everything back into the green file, shuddering.

  The red file is worse. In it, there’s a list of names, email addresses, Twitter handles, workplace details and phone numbers. Bile fills my throat. I swallow it, wincing at the foul taste, then sit down on the edge of the bed so as not to lose my balance. Once the dizziness recedes, I look again.

  Everyone I know or used to know is on this list. Ben Lourenco, Donna Lodge, Freddii Bausor, Dad and Julia, childhood friends, neighbours, casting directors, make-up artists, agents. Everybody who was part of my life, even a tiny part; people I followed on Twitter and who followed me, and the same for LinkedIn and Facebook.

  Everyone.

  Why didn’t I set my Facebook privacy settings to maximum? Why, all those years ago, didn’t I make my Twitter account private? Anne’s presence in my digital life has more than made up for my absence from it.

  I could so easily have avoided this invasion. Alex gave me a little speech about digital privacy a few years ago, and I laughed at him, told him he sounded like a mad conspiracy theorist. ‘I’m not hiding from anyone,’ I said. ‘I hate this obsession with privacy. It’s so much effort apart from anything else.’

  Anne must have spent hours researching all my contacts. There’s a thick wad of paper here. A quick flick-through tells me that she’s thoroughly investigated each and every name on the list. Somehow, she’s found the addresses and phone numbers of more than twenty people, details I didn’t know myself, in some cases. Matthew Read from
the BBC, Peter Fincham from ITV, Will Peterson from Independent Talent, my friend Cassie from primary school who tracked me down and made contact a few years ago, much to my annoyance … Anne has found and listed their addresses, along with assorted other details.

  Obsessed with me, obsessed with my house. Which came first? It had to be the house, surely. Or perhaps a combination of that and Ellen’s friendship with George. I dared to move into Speedwell House, and then my daughter stole Anne’s son’s loyalty …

  Here’s my dad’s mobile phone number, and here, directly beneath it, she’s written mine. Thanks, Dad. Cheers for giving my number to a maniac. I didn’t think you’d ever go one better than the family tree business, but it seems you have.

  What do I do? Do I take these files straight to DC Luce? What do they prove? My name isn’t anywhere in these pages. It looks like a harmless list of names and addresses. And the other file, the coffin and urn catalogues and the inscriptions … there, too, my name is absent. Anne knows, and I know, that A.I. stands for Allisande Ingrey and that, in Anne’s twisted mind, Allisande Ingrey is me, but there’s nothing here that proves any of that to someone who doubts it. The abbreviation ‘A.I.’ has other common meanings: artificial intelligence, advance information. In London, publishers constantly used to send me Advance Information sheets for books they were about to publish, in case I wanted to snap up the TV rights. Anne could plausibly tell DC Luce that she’d headed the inscriptions list ‘A.I.’ because it contained useful information to have in advance of dying. She could – and I’ve no doubt she would – pretend that the blue ticks were things she’d chosen for her own funeral, not mine.

  I press my eyes shut. For a few moments, I am filled with such intense fury that I can’t speak, think or move. Then I breathe it all out, all the heat and anger. With it goes my last hope of getting any help from the police. I no longer resent Euan Luce’s inability or unwillingness to help me, whichever it is. That’s just how things are.

  I open my eyes and stare out of the window. There’s no sign of any cars heading towards the house. From here I’d see anything driving up from the main road, which is useful. The view from the Donbavands’ cottage isn’t as beautiful as the view from Speedwell House. It’s partly because both the ceilings and the windows are so much smaller and lower …