Snegurochka by Judith Heneghan (best ebook reader for laptop .TXT) 📕

from an old man by the entrance, or the flapping of wings in the domed roof overhead. Rachel looks up and sees white dust drifting down from the skylight. It isn’t feathers, though, or snow. It is tiny flakes of paint.

‘Hey,’ says Lucas, stepping up beside her. ‘Shall we get some fruit?’ He’s still fiddling with his bulky audio recorder. The microphone is sticking out of his pocket.

Rachel looks over his shoulder. The tall woman in brown overalls he was talking to is now loading jars of yellowish soured cream into a box. She bangs the box down on the back of a hand-cart and wipes her hands across her chest.

‘I’m all done,’ says Lucas. ‘The women weren’t very talkative. Vee got in first, it seems. I should have known she wasn’t just shopping. Nice of her to remember about that Scottish woman though – great for you to start to make your own friends here.’ He taps out a cigarette from the pack in his hand. ‘At least I’ve got some audio ambience for my sound library. Background chatter. The domed roof makes for some interesting accoustics.’

The apple man is leaning across his display, offering Lucas a slice of green apple on the end of his knife. Lucas takes it.

‘Spaseebo. You never know when you’ll need stuff like that. When you’re up against a deadline.’

Something swoops suddenly, almost skimming Lucas’s shoulder. Rachel ducks her head, but it is only a bird.

‘Where’s my book?’ she asks, her voice harsher than she intends.

‘What book?’

‘The book I was reading. The book in the kitchen this morning. You took it. Jurassic Park.’

Now Lucas remembers. His face is a picture of dissembling.

‘Oh – you weren’t still reading it, were you?’

‘Where is it?’

The apple man extends a piece of fruit to Rachel. His arm is perilously close to one of his pyramids.

‘Lady, Lady? You like? Poprobye yablochko, moya khoroshaya . . .’

Lucas waves the man away. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t got it. One of the press officers asked if he could read it. The one who gave me the idea for my film feature, actually. Sorin, or Sarin . . . He’s a fan of Spielberg. I could hardly say no.’

Rachel can taste something sour at the back of her throat; her palms prickle with sweat. She needs to stay calm, conceal the danger, yet all she can think about are the pages she hasn’t read, the ten pages she must read before night comes.

She pushes her thumbnail into the tip of her ring finger. Hard. Harder.

‘You – you gave it to him?’

‘Well, yes. I thought you’d finished it. Come on, Rach, it’s just some crappy airport novel!’

Lucas has no inkling. He doesn’t know what he’s done. Rachel needs to make good the ritual, a ritual that has been nudging, soundlessly, at the edge of her consciousness but which now snaps into focus.

The balcony is waiting. Ivan is not safe. She is going to have to compensate.

* * *

When Rachel was fourteen she answered an ad in the local paper. Babysitter wanted, it said. For a girl and a boy aged six and three. One pound an hour.

The house was an old rectory and Rachel thought it beautiful, despite the spiders. The garden was rambling, the wallpaper on the stairs was sprigged with yellow roses, the bathroom had actual beams in it. When the parents went out for the evening, for drinks or ‘supper with friends’, she moved through the rooms touching the comfortable furnishings and stroking the family’s chocolate Labrador and all the while thinking how, one day, she would have a home like this one. The children had dark hair and blue eyes and she was bewitched by their fierce stares and quick fingers and high, mercurial voices.

‘You’re not the leader,’ said Alice, the six-year-old, on Rachel’s first visit. ‘I am.’

Then one afternoon she was asked if she’d mind staying overnight. The parents were driving up to London and wouldn’t return until two or three in the morning, too late really to run her back home. They’d pay her for her time, they said. They’d leave a telephone number. She jumped at the chance to sleep in the cosy little guest room. Her own mother didn’t object.

That evening Rachel chased the children round the garden to tire them out. She fed them fish fingers, though they didn’t put salad cream on theirs. She bathed them in the sloping bathroom, dried and dressed them in their brushed cotton pyjamas and gave the little boy, William, a piggyback to the bedroom their parents called ‘the nursery’.

Then something bewildering happened. Rachel had left her watch in the bathroom and as she went back to fetch it, she heard the nursery door close behind her. When she returned, the door had been locked from within.

‘Alice,’ she called, her hand on the door knob. Now she could hear whispering and the sound of bed springs from the other side. ‘Let me in.’

Alice didn’t answer. Rachel knelt down and put her eye to the keyhole. She couldn’t see anything – the key was still in the lock.

‘Alice, please come to the door and turn the key. You’ve locked me out! You told me you wanted a story!’

‘You’re not my mummy or my daddy,’ said Alice, as if from far away. That was all Rachel could get out of her.

For the first hour or so she tried to reason with the siblings, bribing them with biscuits they weren’t supposed to eat, but Alice wouldn’t let William approach the door. Then, when William started crying and his wails of distress increased, Rachel banged on the old pine panels and pushed against them with her shoulder.

‘Please, Alice. William is frightened. You’re being mean. Please, Alice. You can both sleep in my bed. Please . . .’

Eventually William’s cries faded to dry shudders. By about eleven, the sounds had stopped altogether and Rachel tried to block out images of him lying on the floor, slowly strangled by a sheet or stabbed through the eye with one of Alice’s carefully sharpened colouring