I can look back at those years in the house on Cheyne Walk with the Thomsens and see exactly the tipping points, the pivots upon which fate twisted and turned, upon which the storyline warped so hideously. I remember the dinner at the Chelsea Kitchen and seeing my father already losing a power struggle he was too weak to realise had begun. And I remember my mother holding herself back from David, refusing to shine for fear of him desiring her. I remember where it started, but I have no idea how we’d got from that night to the point nine months later when strangers had taken over every corner of our home and my parents had let them.

My father feigned an interest in the various goings-on. He’d potter around the garden with Justin, pretending to be fascinated by his rows of herbs and plants; he’d pour two fingers of whiskey into two big tumblers every night at 7 p.m. and sit with David at the kitchen table and have strained conversations about politics and world affairs, his eyes bulging slightly with the effort of sounding as if he had a clue what he was talking about. (All my father’s opinions were either black or white; things were either right or wrong, good or bad: there was no nuance to his world view. It was embarrassing.) He’d sit in on our classroom lessons in the kitchen sometimes and look terribly impressed by how clever we all were. I could not work out what had happened to my father. It was as though Henry Lamb had vacated the house but left his body behind.

I wanted desperately to talk to him about everything that was happening, the upending up of my world, but I was scared that it would be like pulling a scab off his last remaining hold on his own sense of significance. He seemed so vulnerable, so broken. I saw him one lunchtime in early summer, clutching his mohair cap and his jacket, checking the contents of his wallet at the front door. We’d finished lessons for the day and I was bored.

‘Where are you going?’ I asked.

‘To my club,’ he replied.

Ah, his club. A set of smoky rooms in a side street off Piccadilly. I’d been there once before when my mother was out and our babysitter had failed to materialise. Rather than be stuck at home with two small, dull children to entertain, he’d put us into the back of a black cab and taken us to his club. Lucy and I had sat in a corner with lemonades and peanuts while my father sat smoking cigars and drinking whiskey with men I’d never seen before. I’d been enchanted by it, had wished never to leave, had prayed that our babysitters would fail to turn up for evermore.

‘Can I come?’

He looked at me blankly, as though I’d asked him a hard maths question.

‘Please. I’ll be quiet. I won’t talk.’

He glanced up the staircase as though the solution to his conundrum might be about to appear on the landing. ‘You finished school?’

‘Yes.’

‘Fine.’

He waited while I put on my jacket; then we walked out on to the street together and he hailed a taxi.

In the club he found nobody he knew and while we waited for our drinks to be delivered he looked at me and said, ‘So, how are you?’

‘Confused,’ I began.

‘Confused?’

‘Yes. About how our lives are turning out.’ I held my breath. This was exactly the sort of impudent approach that would have had my father grimacing at me in the past, turning his gaze to my mother and asking her darkly if she thought this sort of behaviour was acceptable, was this the sort of child they were bringing up.

But he looked at me with watery blue eyes and said, simply, ‘Yes.’

His gaze left mine immediately.

‘Are you confused too?’

‘No, son, no. I’m not confused. I know exactly what’s going on.’

I couldn’t tell if he meant that he knew what was going on and was in control of it, or that he knew what was going on but could do nothing to stop it.

‘So – what?’ I said. ‘What is it?’

Our drinks arrived: a lemonade on a white paper coaster for me, a whiskey and water for my dad. He hadn’t answered my question and I thought maybe he wouldn’t. But then he sighed. ‘Son,’ he said, ‘sometimes in life you get to a fork in the road. Your mother and I, we got to a fork in the road. She wanted to go one way, I wanted to go another. She won.’

My brow shot up. ‘You mean Mummy wants all the people in the house? She actually wants them?’

‘Wants them?’ he asked grimly, as though my question was somehow ridiculous when it clearly wasn’t.

‘Does she want to live with all these people?’

‘Christ, I don’t know. I don’t know what your mother wants any more. And here, take my advice. Never marry a woman. They might look good, but they destroy you.’

None of this was making any sense at all. What did marrying women – something I had no earthly intention of ever doing, but also something about which I thought there was no other option; if you didn’t marry a woman then who would you marry? – have to do with the people upstairs?

I stared at him, willing him to say something clear and enlightening. But my father didn’t have the emotional intelligence or, indeed, since his stroke, the vocabulary to be clear or enlightening. He pulled a cigar from the pocket of his jacket and spent some time preparing it to be smoked. ‘Are you not keen on them, then?’ he said eventually.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘I’m not. Will they ever go?’

‘Well, if I had anything to do with it …’

‘But it’s your house. Surely you have everything to do with it.’

I caught my breath, worried I’d pushed him too far.

But he just sighed. ‘You’d have thought so, wouldn’t you?’

His obtuseness was killing me. I wanted to scream. I said, ‘Can’t you just tell them to go? Tell them we want our house back. That we want to go to school again. That we don’t want them here any more?’

‘No,’ said my father. ‘No. I can’t.’

‘But why?’

My voice had risen an octave and I could see my father recoil.

‘I told you,’ he snapped. ‘It’s your mother. She needs them. She needs him.’

‘Him?’ I said. ‘David?’

‘Yes. David. Apparently he makes her feel better about her pointless existence. Apparently he gives her life “meaning”. Now,’ he growled, opening up a newspaper, ‘you said you wouldn’t talk. How about you stick to your word?’

21

Miller Roe stands outside the house on Cheyne Walk, staring at his phone. He looks even more rumpled than he’d looked that morning in the café on West End Lane. He straightens when he sees Libby and Dido approach and he smiles.

‘Miller, this is Dido, my colleague—’ She corrects herself: ‘My friend. Dido, this is Miller Roe.’

They shake hands and then all turn to face the house. Its windows glow golden in the light of the evening sun.

‘Libby Jones,’ says Dido, ‘good grief. You own an actual mansion.’

Libby smiles and turns to open the padlock. She feels no sense of ownership as they cluster together in the hallway, looking around themselves. She still expects the solicitor to appear, striding ahead of them authoritatively.

‘I see what you mean about all the wood,’ says Miller. ‘You know, this house used to be full of stuffed animal heads and hunting knives. Apparently there were actual thrones, just here …’ He indicates the spots on either side of the staircase. ‘His and hers,’ he adds wryly.

‘Who told you about the thrones?’ asks Dido.

‘Old friends of Henry and Martina, who used to come here for raucous dinner parties in the seventies and early eighties. When Henry and Martina were socialites. When their children were tiny. It was all very glamorous, apparently.’

‘So, all those old friends,’ Dido continues, ‘where were they when everything turned dark?’

‘Oh God, they weren’t proper friends. They were parents of the children’s friends at school, transient neighbours, cosmopolitan flotsam and jetsam. Nobody who really cared about them. Just people who remembered them.’

‘And their thrones,’ says Libby.

‘Yes.’ Miller smiles. ‘And their thrones.’

‘And what about extended family?’ Dido asks. ‘Where were they?’

‘Well, Henry had no family. He was an only child, both parents were dead. Martina’s father was estranged, her mother remarried and was living in Germany with a second family. Apparently she kept trying to come over and Martina kept putting her off. She even sent one of her sons over, in 1992; he came and knocked at the door every day for five days and nobody ever replied. He said he heard noises, saw curtains moving. The phone line rang dead. The mother was racked with guilt that she hadn’t tried harder to access her daughter. Never got over it. Can I …?’ He’s veering to the left, towards the kitchen.

Libby and Dido follow him.

‘So, this is where the children were taught,’ he says. ‘The drawers were full of paper and textbooks and exercise books.’

‘Who taught them?’

‘We don’t know. It wouldn’t have been Henry Lamb. He failed all his O levels and didn’t go into higher education. Martina didn’t have English as her first language, so it was unlikely to be her. So, one of the mystery “others”, we imagine. And most likely a woman.’

‘What happened to all the schoolbooks?’ Libby asks.

‘I have no idea,’ says Miller. ‘Maybe they’re still here?’

Libby looks at the big wooden table in the middle of the room with its two sets of drawers on each side. She holds in her breath and pulls them open in turn. The drawers are empty. She sighs.

‘Police evidence,’ says Miller. ‘They may well have destroyed them.’