The Turn of the Key

by Ruth Ware

That’s exactly what the police did. All those little throwaway remarks—all those unedifying facts. I could see the triumph on their faces every time I dropped one, and I watched them picking them up like bread crumbs, adding them to the weight of arguments against me.

“Is he?” The words were meaningless as a response, but somehow . . . just the knowledge of this small thing was a little nugget, a connection to this faceless man.

The first reference to the odd fact that had been at the back of my mind all the way up here: four women had already walked out of this post.

Having the bad luck to engage one nervous, superstitious employee seemed quite likely. Getting four in a row seemed . . . less so. Which meant that there was a strong chance that something else was going on,

Maddie is eight, Ellie is five, and the baby, Petra, is just eighteen months, so they’re all in bed.”

“Rhiannon is fourteen going on twenty-four. She’s at boarding school—not

I honestly hadn’t even thought about actually getting the job.

Now . . . now I wanted it. Not just the fifty-five thousand a year, but everything. I wanted this beautiful house and this gorgeous room, right down to the sumptuous, marble-tiled shower, with its sparkling limescale-free glass and polished chrome fittings. More than that, I wanted to be part of this family.

I picked up the phone again, angling the torch at the page, looking more closely at the picture. It was hardly a work of art, just stick figures and thick crayoned lines. It showed a house with four windows and a shiny black front door, not unlike Heatherbrae. The windows were colored in black, all except for one, which showed a tiny pale face peeping out of the darkness. It was oddly disconcerting, but there was no name signed to it, and no way of knowing

To the new nanny, it read in neat, regular italics. My name is Katya. I am writing you this note because I wanted to tell you to please be

I know that on the surface, at least, it seems as if this is nothing to do with my case. And yet . . . it’s everything. I need you to see Heatherbrae House, to feel the warmth from the heating striking up through the floor, the sun on your face. I need to you to be able to reach out and stroke the soft cat’s-tongue roughness of the velvet sofas and the silky smoothness of the polished concrete surfaces.

“Don’t come here,” she whispered, still refusing to look at me. “It’s not safe.” “It’s not safe?” I gave a little laugh. “Maddie, what do you mean?”

“It’s not safe,” she repeated, with a little angry sob, shaking her head harder so that her words were almost lost. “They wouldn’t like it.”

The ghosts, she had sobbed. The ghosts wouldn’t like it.

The ghosts wouldn’t like it. The phrase floated through my head, spoken in Maddie’s reedy little voice, its childlike quaver lending the words an eeriness I would normally have shrugged off. But that was bollocks. Utter bollocks. I hadn’t seen a whiff of the supernatural the whole time I was in Carn Bridge.

I was wrong, Mr. Wrexham. I was very, very wrong.

But he was so . . . so comfortable. He was padded—every inch of him. I don’t mean he was fat, but he was cushioned, physically, emotionally, financially, in a way that he just didn’t seem to grasp, and it was his very ignorance of the fact that made it even more infuriating.

Do you understand what it’s like for people who don’t have your money, and your protection, and your privilege?

He was selfish. A selfish, self-centered man who had barely asked me a single personal question—not even

how my journey had been. He just didn’t care.

blackness, I thought I saw the glint of two little eyes, glaring at me.

Okay, so Bill was a creep. He wasn’t the first I’d encountered. Why was I so disappointed to find him here? I knew the answer, of course. But it wasn’t just who he was. It was everything he represented—all the hard work and careful planning that had brought me here, all the hopes and dreams bound up with my decision to apply.

Not a poltergeist. Just your average fiftysomething man who couldn’t keep his dick in his pants. The same old, boring, depressing story. Still, it felt like a kick in the guts.

slow and measured, as though someone was pacing on a wooden floor, which made no sense at all, since all the floors up here were thickly carpeted.

But I can’t—I can’t seem to explain the situation quickly. That was the problem with Mr. Gates. He never let me explain properly—to show how it all built up, all the little things, all the sleepless nights and the loneliness and the isolation, and the craziness of the house and the cameras and everything else.

I had a crystal clear memory of putting the key up there after Jean left, just as Sandra had instructed, to keep it handy in case of an emergency but out of reach of the children.

This, though, was different. I could hear the footsteps start on one side of the ceiling and move slowly and implacably to the other. Then they paused, and reversed. It sounded . . . well . . . as if there was someone pacing in the room above my head.

“Achlys—(pronounced ACK-liss)—Greek goddess of death, misery, and poison,” it read.

I know what you’re thinking, Mr. Wrexham. None of this is helping my case. And that’s what Mr. Gates thought too. Because we know where this leads, you and I, don’t we?

To tell you only the parts that exonerate me would make me slip back into the old, old trap. Because it was the lies that got me here in the first place. And I have to believe that it’s the truth that will get me out.

And then it struck me what a fucked-up dynamic this really was—that my relationship with this damaged little girl was not about caring and caregiving but about winning and dominance and war.

The name sounded in my head with a curious chime. Jack . . . Grant. It wasn’t an uncommon surname, particularly around here, but . . . still. Dr. Kenwick Grant. Could it really be coincidence?

So. Elspeth had been the only person who was ever in danger of eating that jam.

I frowned. There was something a little malicious in her voice, and I wondered what exactly she meant.

The sound was so close to the noise of last night, and yet, there was something different about it too. It was more . . . solid. More real, faster, and mixed with the crunch of plasterboard.

What I was looking at were the walls, the furniture, the feathers. They were everywhere.

The strangest thing was the walls—or rather, what was written on them. Scribbled on all of them, in childish crayon letters, some small, some huge and scrawled, were words. It took me a minute or two to make them out, for the letters were misshapen and the words badly spelled. But the one right in front of me, the one staring me in the face over the small fireplace in the center of the room, was unmistakable. WE HATE YOU.

The goasts donet like you. They hate yu.

We want you too go awa. The gosts are angrie. They haite you. Get out. There angry Wee hate you. We hite u. GO AWAY. We hate you.

“Related?” Jack said. He gave a laugh, and shook his head. “God, no. Grants are ten a penny up here. I mean, I suppose we’d have all been part of the same clan back in the day, but there’s no connection between our families nowadays.

Oh, God, I’ve been scared. But I have never been quite as scared as I was that night in Heatherbrae House.

There was a long moment of silence, Ellie hanging limp and heavy in my arms, my own breath panting in my ears, and then her whole body stiffened and she let out a wail of indignant shock and began to cry, with all the desolate surprise of a child told off for something they had not realized was wrong.

Dave Owen I am very sorry for scratching and waning away from you and saying that I hate you please don’t be angry and don’t go away like the others I am sorry love Ellie p. S. I got dressed by myself

“It was another little girl,” she said. And somehow I knew that was all I would ever get out of her.

It looked very different today. Not full of the potential for a new life, new opportunities, but as gray and forbidding as a Victorian prison—only I knew that was a kind of a lie as well, that the Victorian facade presented to the driveway was only half the story, and that if I walked around to the back, I would see a house that had been ripped apart and patched back together with glass and steel.

Something is wrong, I wanted to write. No, scrap that, everything is wrong. But . . .

But her reaction was neither of those things. Instead, she smiled, rather sweetly, in a way that was totally unnerving, and said, “Oh, I don’t think you’ll do that.”

“I’ll do better than that,” she said. “I’ll give you two. Rachel. Gerhardt.”

Because this is where it gets very, very bad for me, doesn’t it, Mr. Wrexham? This is where the police case on me shifted from being someone in the wrong place at the wrong time, to someone with a motive. Because she was right. I couldn’t ring Sandra and Bill. I couldn’t do that, because Rhiannon knew the truth.

But the basics were all there. The name thing was just a . . . technicality.