‘Hey, what’s up, Cassie. Is everything all right?’

‘Yeah, sure. I thought there was somebody outside the door. You didn’t see anything when you came in? Nothing suspicious?’

‘No, nothing,’ said Ron, removing his shades. ‘You look really freaked out. Do you want me to call anybody?’

‘No, no, I’m fine. I just got carried away, that’s all. Over-active imagination. But there wasn’t a problem with the door down to the –‘

As she shifted position she felt something by her right foot.

‘What -?’ she said, her head automatically dropping down, her sightless eyes moving in the direction of the object.

‘Oh, here’s a package for you,’ said Ron, bending down to pick it up. ‘Looks like there was a courier for you. I guess he must have got someone else to sign for it. Here you go.’

Cassie opened her hands to receive the package, a rectangular cardboard box. Gee, she had worked herself up into such a state. All because of a stupid delivery. It would be the latest batch of audio books she had ordered a couple of days back. A couple of classic English novels – she couldn’t believe she had never read Jane Eyre – as well as an American writer’s account of buying and renovating an old villa in Tuscany and a new CD of Emily Dickenson poetry. She turned the package over in her hands, relief and anticipation running through her in equal measure.

‘Sorry to be such a weirdo, Ron,’ she said. ‘You must think I’m too much.’

‘No worries,’ he said, turning back to open his door. ‘See you around.’

‘Thanks – bye,’ she said, retreating back into her apartment.

She could feel her face stinging with embarrassment. It was occasions like this, she thought to herself as she threw the package onto the sofa, that she was pleased she could not see. At least she was spared the sight of her stupid face in the mirror. She laughed to herself as she opened the icebox and took out the already open bottle of white wine, enjoying the sensation of the chilled glass against her skin. She heard Moisie meow as she entered the kitchen. A moment later he was snaking her way between her bare legs.

‘Your dumb mummy has just made a fool of herself,’ she said, bending down to stroke its head. ‘Nothing new there, I suppose.’

She poured herself a glass of wine and picked up a pair of scissors from the work top. Sometimes these packages were a nightmare to try and open. Last time she had been sent a package she had broken one of her nails on the damn thing. Before she sat down on the sofa she arranged her glass of wine and the scissors on the low-lying wooden table in front of her. She picked up the cardboard package and felt along its outer edge for a tag to pull. Nothing. Gee, that was a surprise.

She reached out for the scissors with her right hand, taking hold of her glass with her left and enjoyed a mouthful of wine. She pushed the glass further into the centre of the table, just so she wouldn’t knock it over and settled back into the comfort of the sofa.

As she started to open the package she realised just how light it was. Perhaps it only contained one of the audio books she had ordered, maybe the other ones would come later in the week. She hoped, if that was the case, that she had been sent Jane Eyre. She was fascinated by what happened to Mr Rochester in the course of the book, intrigued by the idea of a blind romantic hero.

She cut along the top edge of the cardboard, her hands prising open the envelope as she did so. She ripped it open quickly, searching out the square, plastic CD case. This is odd, she thought, as she came across something quite different. It was a long, sausage-shaped object, made of felt, with a zipper running down its middle. What was it? Her hands turned it over, her fingers running down the length of the zipper, feeling its ridges down its spine. At its top end was a toggle which she pulled towards her. It was a pencil case, she realised, the kind she used to have when she was a child.

With one hand she held the case open, while with the other she searched inside its soft folds. For a moment she hesitated as fear threatened to surge up inside her again. It was only a kid’s pencil case, for god’s sake, obviously delivered to the wrong address. Perhaps it had been found by a passer-by who assumed it had been lost by one of the children inside the apartment block. Who had kids? There was Nadia and Jim, on the fifth floor, they had a couple. Then there was that gay couple – Janine and Debbie – and she thought there was another guy, a weekend dad, who had a six- and an eight-year old. She’d probably find a clue inside if she kept looking.

Just then she felt something – a small, nugget shaped object - at the bottom of the case. What was it? An eraser? But one of its outer edges seemed wet, sticky even. She picked it up between her thumb and forefinger and brought it out of the pencil case. As she examined it she felt the slight, almost indistinguishable, contours that seemed to run around one of its surfaces. Then there was something sharp, an edge that formed itself into a half-moon shape and another surface that was flat, harder. She turned it around in her hands, feeling the stickiness begin to spread across her palms. As she brought it up to her face she smelt the unmistakable stench of blood. She felt fear begin to stifle her. She threw what was in her hands onto the floor, steadying herself on the sofa as she tried to stop herself from retching.

She ran to the door, wrenched it open and finally screamed.

‘Ron! Help. Ron!’

‘What the fuck –‘ he said, as he opened his door and saw Cassie, her bathrobe open, her sightless eyes wide with terror.

‘In – there,’ she said, her arm pointing not to her apartment, but to a bare wall. In her panic she had lost her sense of direction. ‘That package. The package.’

‘What?’

‘It contained a couple of – of –‘ She couldn’t spit out the word. ‘The ends of – two or three – ‘

‘Cassie?’

‘F-fingertips.’

7

Wherever she went in the house Kate saw something to remind her of her father. On the walls of the dining room were a number of his watercolours, sketches of Hope at different stages in her life, charcoal drawings of Kate as a girl, quick portraits of some of his showbiz friends and the occasional landscape: the view of the sea from the beach house, a colourful gouache of the Beverly Hills home he had bought way back in the fifties, vistas from various hotel rooms in Europe. There were a number of impossibly glamorous black and white photographs of the couple – her mother with a smile as dazzling as the diamonds that circled her neck, her father in a dinner suit, looking serious, his dark eyes brooding, troubled.