Kitty took an involuntary step backwards. 'Matt, you can't stay in here. I'm about to have a bath.'
'I've got to put it right. That room was beautiful. It can't stay like this.'
Her heart was thumping loudly enough to drown the sound of rushing water. She saw her swimming costume on the floor and wished she was wearing something under her towel.
'Please go away, Matt.'
'I won't be long.' He crouched, ran his fingers round the edge of the hole. 'I just have to fill this in. I wouldn't be much of a builder if I left a great hole here, would I?'
Kitty moved towards the door.
He stood up suddenly. 'Don't worry, Kitty. I won't get in your way,' he said. And smiled.
Kitty's bottom lip was trembling. She willed her mother to come up, or Anthony - anyone. Someone must have seen him come in. The walls of the room seemed to close round her, the faint echo of the voices outside a million miles away.
'Matt,' she said quietly, trying to stop the quaver in her voice, 'I'd really like you to go now.'
He seemed not to hear her.
'Matt,' she said again, 'please go.'
'You know,' he said, 'you're so like your mother.'
It was as his hand stretched out to touch her face that Kitty bolted for the door. She pushed past him, wrestled with the lock, and then, with a muffled squeak, she was tumbling down the stairs to the hallway, not knowing if he was behind her. She fumbled with the front-door catch, and then she was outside, sprinting across the lawn, a sob still caught in her throat.
'There's no point asking me,' Henry was saying. 'I'm a musical Philistine. If it doesn't have some tear-jerker as a finale, it's lost on me.'
'He is only the shortest genetic step from Judy Garland,' said Asad, removing clingfilm from another bowl. Some of Kitty's friends had got out of the water, and were towelling themselves dry or hovering hopefully by the food table.
'I don't think I know any Judy Garland songs,' Isabel said. 'There are more towels over there, if anyone needs them.'
'Do you play only classical music?' Asad arranged the serving spoons in the centre of the table, then popped an olive into his mouth.
'Yes. But it doesn't have to be gloomy.'
'I don't think classical music has quite the emotional drama you get with a show tune, though,' Henry said. 'I mean, I don't think it would make me shed a tear.'
'Emotional drama? Mr Ross, you have been ill-informed.'
'What? You think you could make me cry? With your violin?'
Isabel laughed. 'Harder men than you have been known to fall,' she said.
'Go on, then.' Henry picked up a tea-towel. 'I throw down my gauntlet. Do your finest, Mrs D. Wring me out.'
'Oh, I'm out of practice. I haven't played properly for months.'
'We don't care.'
'But my violin's in the kitchen.'
Henry bent down and pulled out the case from under the table.
'Not any more.'
'I get the feeling I've been played,' she said.
The two men chuckled.
'We had to ensure we got our own private performance,' Henry said. 'It's not like you've been selling tickets or anything. Go on. A quick burst. Rude not to, given it's your daughter's birthday and all.'
Isabel adjusted the violin under her chin. Then she drew her bow across the strings, and let the first bars of Elgar's Violin Concerto in B Minor sing out in the midday sunshine.
She glimpsed Asad and Henry's rapt expressions, and then she closed her eyes, trying to concentrate, to remember the music. She played, and suddenly her violin didn't seem so inferior. It sang of her sadness to be leaving the house, of the absence of her husband, the man she had thought he was. It sang of the pain of missing someone you hadn't known you might miss.
She opened her eyes, and found that Kitty's guests had begun to climb out of the water and sit on the grass. They were quiet, listening, apparently mesmerised. She shifted position, and as she ended the first movement she saw him among the trees and wondered if she had imagined it. He lifted a hand, and she was smiling, a huge, unguarded beam.
Henry and Asad turned to see what she was smiling at and nudged each other surreptitiously.
He smiled back at her. He wasn't her husband, but that was okay.
'You came,' she said, lowering the violin. He looked tired, she thought, but at peace. His job had restored something to him.
'Brought Kitty a present,' he said. 'My sister chose it. I can't say I know much about what girls like.'
'She'll love it,' said Isabel. She couldn't stop staring at him. 'I'm so glad you made it. Really.'
All the old awkwardness had disappeared. He stood tall again. 'So am I,' he said. Out of Matt's shadow, he had become, she realised, imposing.
They stood there, facing each other, oblivious to curious glances.
'All right, all right,' said Henry, flapping a hand at Isabel. 'Sit down, Byron. You don't have to make her stop. I was feeling enjoyably mournful.'
Byron grinned. 'Sorry,' he said. 'Where's Thierry?' His eyes had not left Isabel's, and she realised she had flushed.
She lifted her violin to her shoulder. 'The kitchen or the boiler room or somewhere. He's been setting up a . . . den.' He raised an eyebrow. It was a shared joke now, she thought. Not a source of tension.
He lowered himself on to the grass, his long legs stretched out in front of him, and she fixed her eyes on the Cousins and resumed playing, trying to focus on the music, trying not to think about what his return might mean. I don't care who he is, what he did when he was someone else, she thought. I'm just glad he's here. She closed her eyes, immersing herself, afraid that without the notes to hide behind what she felt would be nakedly apparent, all too visible to her audience.
She loved the second movement, its rich ebb and flow, its reflective, songful tone, but it was now, sliding down the heart-wrenching notes of the descent, that she grasped why she had unconsciously picked this piece. That phrase, the impassioned bittersweet notes before the end of the movement, suggested new knowledge, that there was no returning to the past. Elgar himself had said it was 'too emotional', but also that he loved it.
She opened her eyes. And there was Asad, his head tipped back in contemplation, and Henry, beside him, wiping his eyes surreptitiously. She let the last notes linger, wanting to milk the moment.
'There,' she said, as she let her violin fall to her side. 'I told you I--'
She was almost winded by her daughter hurling herself at her, one hand pulling Isabel towards her, the other clutching her towel. She was sobbing so hard she could hardly speak.
'Kitty!' Isabel backed away a little and peered into her face. 'What's the matter?'
'It's him.' Kitty struggled to speak through her sobs. 'It's Matt McCarthy. He's in the house.'
'What?' Byron was on his feet.
Isabel looked at the house. Then, realising her daughter was naked under the towel: 'Did he touch you?'
'No . . .' said Kitty. 'He just . . . He was in the master bedroom . . . He came through that hole . . . He frightened me.'
Isabel's mind raced. Her eyes met Byron's.
'He was acting really weird. I couldn't get him to go . . .' Kitty was still hanging on to her.
'What shall we do?' Asad had stepped up beside her.
'I don't know,' she said.
'What's he playing at?' Something had hardened in Byron's face and his body tensed. Suddenly Isabel was filled with fear, not of his history but of what he might do in her name.
'He said he wanted to fix the house,' said Kitty. 'The hole. But he wasn't normal, Mum. He was--'
'Thierry,' said Byron, and was sprinting across the grass towards the house.
Upstairs in the bathroom, Matt wiped the glass with a finger and peered down at the gathering below. He saw Isabel look up and, for a moment, could have sworn she had caught his eye. Now she would come.
Perhaps now they could talk.
He did not notice the water le
vel in the cast-iron bath, which had continued to climb after Kitty had fled. He did not hear the creaking of the depleted floor joists, subjected to unexpected pressure from the weight of the water.
Matt McCarthy climbed back through the hole, walked slowly into the master bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed and--
Byron walked slowly up the stairs, glancing into every room he passed in case the boy was there. Years of tracking had made his movements near-silent, and few of the stairs creaked now that the wooden boards had been relaid.
He reached the landing, and heard taps running. The bathroom door was ajar, the room apparently empty. He pushed on the door of the master bedroom, and there was Matt, sitting on the bed. He was staring straight in front of him at the hole. Matt looked up and blinked.
He had been expecting someone else, Byron realised. He stood in the doorway. He was no longer frightened of anything Matt McCarthy could do.
'Where's Isabel?' Matt asked. His skin was grey beneath the tan, apart from two spots of colour in his cheeks.
'You need to leave,' said Byron, his voice low and steady. But the thumping of his blood as it pumped through his body was so loud he was sure it must be audible.
'Where's Isabel?' Matt repeated. 'She's meant to come up and talk to me.'
'You've just scared Kitty half to death,' Byron said. 'Get out. Now.'
'Leave this house? Who are you to tell me to leave it?'
'You bully everyone, don't you?' Byron could feel an old anger now, an anger he had spent years keeping under wraps. 'You'd bully a young girl if it meant you got this house. Well, I'm telling you, it's over, Matt.'
As Byron spoke, Matt had returned to staring through the hole, watching the water as it gushed to the rim of the bath and then brimmed over the edges. It was as if he hadn't heard him.
'Get out,' said Byron, shoulders braced for the force he would require to eject Matt. 'I'm telling you--'
Matt looked at him. 'Or what? You'll make me? One word, Byron.' Matt laughed, as if at some private joke. 'One word. If you can spell it. P-A-R-O-L-E . . .'
The thumping in Byron's ears became unbearable. He saw Matt's mocking smile, the deadness behind his eyes, and discovered he no longer cared about the consequences. All that mattered was stopping this man, showing him he could no longer frighten and cheat people, exploit Isabel. He lifted his fist, drew it back--
And his breath was sucked from him as, with a terrible cracking, wrenching sound, the bathroom floor began to give way--
Byron, thought Isabel, picking up her violin and trying to think of something cheerful and diverting to play. Everything would be okay because he was here. He would make sure nothing happened-- At a splintering, tearing noise she dropped the instrument and spun round--
The noise broke into the still air like a gunshot, a terrible noise, filled with dread; it sucked the atmosphere into a vacuum, and then came a low rumble, a groan, a deafening crash of timbers and tiles all undercut by a terrifying timpani of breaking glass. The Spanish House was collapsing from its centre, as if some great crack had opened in the earth between the two wings. The earth trembled, ducks rose shrieking from the reeds, as the two sides crumbled. As Isabel, Kitty and the guests stared, their gasps of shock stalled in their lungs, the whole thing was gone, folded in on itself, a great plume of dust rising to fill the space where a house had once been. And then it cleared, and there, against the sky, were two half-standing ends of a house, its splintered joists rising like broken bones, its floors, its walls so many piles of rubble, a thin stream of water trickling from a broken pipe, like a celebratory fountain, in the centre.
No one said anything. Sound and time had been sucked away. Isabel let out a little 'uh' of shock, her hands clapped to her mouth, and after a brief pause, Kitty began to wail, a high-pitched, unearthly sound. Her body shook violently and her eyes were fixed on the place where her home had been. Then, when she could finally form the words: 'Where is Thierry?'
Laura stared through the windscreen, unable to believe what she had just witnessed. The sheer magnitude, the unlikeliness, had pinned her to the passenger seat. There was no house where, moments earlier, a house had been, just this terrible skeleton, two sides rising up, the innards of the rooms exposed - wallpaper, a picture still hanging, knocked to a jaunty angle. Half a bedroom, posters still pinned to the wall.
Behind her, in the back seat, her old dog whined.
Fingers fumbling, she managed to open the door, and got out. From there, on the drive, teenagers huddled together in shock, still clutching towels. Isabel was staring at the house, her hands pressed to her mouth. Then the Cousins were behind her, Henry's mobile phone pressed to his ear as he shouted instructions. Pottisworth, she thought absently, feeling his malevolent presence in this, hearing his unpleasant wheezy cackle in the splintering of wood, the delayed smash of a pane.
And then Nicholas was striding towards her, his face ashen, his folder still clasped to his chest.
'What the hell?' he was saying. 'I was in the garage. What the hell?'
And all she could do was shake her head. They began to make their way to the garden.
'Thierry!'
They rounded the corner and Laura's heart leaped into her mouth.
'Thierry!' Isabel stood on the grass a few yards away. Her hair was wild and when she tried to move forward her legs gave way and she sank to the ground.
'Oh . . . oh, no,' Laura breathed. 'Not the child . . .'
Nicholas reached for her hand but, suffused with dread, she could not take it.
'It's Matt,' Nicholas was saying. 'He must have weakened the structure. I'd swear it was sound the first time I saw it.'
Laura could not take her eyes off the Delancey woman. She was white with fear, her eyes blank with catastrophe.
Behind her, her daughter was sobbing.
'Mum?' someone called. And again: 'Mum?' Isabel turned, and Laura thought she would never forget the look on her face. The boy was coming through the trees, his puppy at his heels. 'Mum?'
She was on her feet and running barefoot as fast as she could across the grass, past them all, and then she had him in her arms, and she was sobbing so hard that Laura found she too had begun to cry. Laura watched her, heard her sobs. Saw grief and pain, brought about in part by her own desire.
She felt suddenly like a voyeur and turned to the house, a great splintered hole in the middle of the woods. The frontage was now a red-brick mask, two blank windows for eyes, its doorway an open mouth of despair.
It was through this that she saw her husband stumble out, his head bloodied, one arm hanging awkwardly at his side. He seemed no more troubled than if he had been sizing up a job.
'Jesus Christ,' Nicholas muttered.
She saw suddenly the depth of Matt's insanity.
'Laura?' Matt said, tramping over the bricks, and she realised that, only a few hundred feet from his home, Matt McCarthy was completely lost.
'Thank you,' Isabel was saying, to some unknown deity, unable to let go of her son. 'Oh, thank you. Oh, God, I thought . . . I couldn't bear it. I couldn't bear it.' She breathed in Thierry's scent, refused to let him pull away from her, her tears on his skin.
'We've counted everyone, all the kids,' Henry said. 'They're okay.'
'Keep them back,' Asad said. He broke off to use his inhaler. 'We should make them stand by the lake.'
There was another low rumble. 'What's that?' said Kitty.
As they stared in horror, the back wall of the west wing, the remaining half of the master bedroom, teetered and then, as if in slow motion, collapsed in a shower of bricks and glass, prompting a shout from the young people on the lawn, some of whom were running towards the lake. Isabel clamped her arms round her two children, trying to shield their faces with her hands. 'It's okay,' she was murmuring. 'It's okay. You're safe.'
'But where's Byron?' Kitty asked.
'Byron?' Thierry said blankly.
'He went to find Thierry,' Kitty said dully, and turned toward
s where the boiler room had been.
'Oh, sweet Lord,' said Henry.
Isabel was across the grass, then on her knees hurling pieces of brick behind her. 'Not again,' she was murmuring, her voice thick with fear. 'Not again. Not you too.' And then, as word spread, they were all beside her, pulling at timbers, the teenagers' slim limbs red with brick dust, Isabel's hands raw and scraped. 'Byron!' she was yelling. 'Byron!'
The Cousins had Kitty and Thierry, wrapping them in towels despite the warmth of the sun. Thierry was shaking, his face bleached with shock. Henry poured him a sweet drink. 'Is it my fault?' Isabel heard her son ask, and felt her own face crumple in response.
Six of them were hauling at a roof timber and gasped as it finally came free. Kitty's friends were shouting at each other, warning of glass or protruding nails. Two girls were weeping, and one stood a short distance away, talking on a mobile phone.
'They'll be here soon,' Henry was saying, as if to reassure himself. 'The fire brigade and the ambulance. They'll find him.'
Isabel ploughed on, her movements settling into a rhythm. She chucked bricks behind her, one, two, three, try to see if there's a gap below, one, two, three, shout again. Her breath was uneven, heart pounding against her ribcage.
'Don't let them walk over anything,' Asad called. 'If he's underneath it might cause something else to fall on him.' As if to confirm what he had said, two teenagers squealed as a piece of wood gave way beneath them, and they were pulled to safety by their friends.
'Get them away,' Asad shouted. 'Everyone, move away. The other side might still come down.'
It was hopeless, Isabel thought, sitting back. She glanced at her watch and saw it had been almost twenty minutes now but they still had no idea where he was. A sense of chaos had begun to build, of delayed hysteria. Behind her, two people were arguing about the best way to lift a joist. Henry and Asad were telling the teenagers to stop what they were doing and move away. Underlying everything, she could hear her daughter's attempts to reassure Thierry that it would be okay.
But it was not okay. Byron was somewhere in the remains of the house. And every minute that passed might count. Help me, she told him silently, sweat pooling between her shoulder-blades as she dragged at another piece of rubble. Help me find you. I can't bear to lose you too. Then she sat back on her heels, the balls of her hands pressed to her eyes.