The Stepson: A psychological thriller with a twist you won't see coming
Jane Renshaw
Prologue
Carol - November 1997
Later, in her statement to the police, Carol Jardine would say she had no inkling, as she swung her car off the little country road and onto the drive, that anything was wrong.
Then Nick leaned forward from the back seat and said, ‘That’s weird – why aren’t there any lights on?’
Sunnyside was in darkness, the only illumination provided by the car headlights as they swept the short avenue of trees that led up the slope to the house. It was November, so the trees were pale grey and skeletal. Carol hated this time of year, when you turned round and suddenly all the trees had lost their leaves and the fields had been ploughed and autumn was tipping fast into winter, short dank days and long dark nights.
There was nothing necessarily sinister about the lack of lights.
‘Maybe they’ve had to pop out,’ she suggested as she pressed her foot to the accelerator.
‘Could have been a power cut,’ her son Andy, Nick’s best friend, contributed from the back seat.
But the houses they’d just passed on the road had been cheerily aglow.
And if Duncan and Maggie had just popped out, why hadn’t they left lights on for Nick, knowing that, by the time Carol brought him back from their day out in Edinburgh, the sun would long have left the sky?
Sunnyside – such a ridiculous name for this hulking mass of a Victorian monstrosity that turned not its grand frontage but its higgledy-piggledy rear end to the world, the jutting one-storey wings that housed the old kitchen and the pantry and the warren of little rooms that would once have been the dairy and the laundry room and the scullery. Usually the three kitchen windows would have been lit up, casting a warm yellow glow out into the night. And not just the kitchen windows. Maggie never bothered to turn off the lights when she left a room, so there were usually bright windows all over the place, as if poor Duncan were made of money – which from Maggie’s point of view, of course, he was.
But tonight, nothing.
No lights at all.
‘Were they planning on going out?’ she asked Nick as she edged the car round the side of the house to the huge front door. ‘Maybe they’ve been delayed?’
‘No.’ She could hear the tension, now, in his voice. ‘They weren’t going anywhere, as far as I know. And there’s the car. If they’ve gone out, they must have gone on foot. And they wouldn’t, would they, in the dark? Not with Isla?’
Almost before she’d brought the car to a halt on the sweep of gravel at the front of the house, Nick was out and running to the door.
Something made her say, ‘Stay here’ to Andy as she fumbled with her seat belt. ‘I’m going to lock you in. I mean it, Andy. Stay right here and don’t move.’
The hall sprang into being as Nick flicked the switches and all the wall lights came on, illuminating the cavernous square space with all those doors and the elegant staircase twisting up to . . . No, Carol wasn’t going to think about that, about Kathleen falling from up there.
‘Dad?’ Nick suddenly shouted, the word bouncing back at them from the far recesses of the hall. ‘Dad?’
The boy’s handsome face was drained of colour in the sudden brightness, the adolescent softness transfigured into sharp angles and hollows under the wing of dark hair that flopped across his forehead. He pushed it back absently.
‘Where are they?’ he half-whispered.
And then he was running again, snapping on lights, throwing open doors, drafts hitting Carol from all sides as she trailed him – Carol wasn’t built for speed – through the high-ceilinged rooms. It was still Kathleen’s house. She was still everywhere here, in the restored fireplaces, the carefully chosen muted, authentic colours, the tasteful antiques and the chintzy armchairs and sofas.
She followed him along the panelled corridor to the kitchen.
Country house style, as Kathleen had called it.
Maggie wouldn’t know country house style if she met it in her soup.
But at least the woman hadn’t tried to put her own stamp on the place. It was all just as it had been in Kathleen’s time, except for things like the David Bowie tea towel draped over the rail of the pale-blue Belling cooker and the orangey-pine rocking chair in which Maggie fed Isla. Clustered around the huge steriliser on the worktop were bottles of various sizes, the bottle warmer, the milk powder dispenser, and even the brush for cleaning them and the teat tongs, clutter Kathleen would have consigned to a drawer.
And there was Bunny, the mad-eyed grey rabbit Isla was always sucking on. He was lying on the floor by the fridge. Carol bent and picked him up and thought of little Isla, just two months old. Despite being Maggie’s, she was a sweet baby, like a little doll with that round face and big blue eyes.
Carol’s back was prickling with shivers, although the room wasn’t cold.
In fact, the kitchen was hot.
Very hot.
And then she saw the glowing red circle on the top of the Belling.
‘The hob’s on,’ she said aloud, although Nick wasn’t in the room. She could hear him moving about in the warren behind the kitchen. ‘Nick! The hob’s on!’
He appeared at a run, skidding to a halt next to her, staring, as she was, at that red circle. She put her hand over it, feeling the heat radiating out. And sitting on the worktop next to it was a pan filled with water and an open bag of oatmeal.
‘Why were they making porridge?’ said Nick. He turned and crossed the room to the table. ‘And look. Three mugs, with half-drunk tea in them. And three bowls.’ He picked one up and turned it over. ‘Three empty bowls, for the porridge, I guess. Three spoons.’