Page 1 of Oleander

Prologue

The house rose above the trees like a great mythical beast. A neo-gothic nightmare that lived in memories and dreams. Time withered and aged everything, but this place would live forever. I never thought I’d set foot inside this place again.

But he was dying.

I know you hate me. I know I do not deserve your forgiveness, Jude. But please, if you ever loved him – come. Let me say to you what I must, before it’s too late.

It’s been close to eight years, and I’m still dancing to his tune. But I’m not the boy I was then, weak and innocent as a newborn lamb. Together, they’d made me over into something crueller and less trusting. Whether that means I’m prepared for what lies in wait inside, I don’t know.

But I’d never been able to stay away, not then and not now. This house, like its inhabitants, called to me; it always had.

Something he knows only too well.

The rain falls in sheets, heavy and relentless as it pounds the windows and roof of the car. The flight from Gatwick had been delayed because of the storm, and it seems to have followed me over the channel. It makes dark, deep rivers of the gulleys at the side of the road and drowns out the radio station pumping outdisco music from the hired car. I hadn’t bothered working out how to fix it.

I almost drive around to the back of the mansion to the private resident car park, but instead, I pull the rental car up past the front entrance and into the paved area reserved for visitors and turn off the engine.

There are a few lights on inside and around the front entrance, which should make it seem less imposing and threatening, but it doesn’t.

I’m not sure how long I sit there before there’s a knocking on the passenger-side window. I don’t hear it immediately because of the rain, but I startle at the sight of a hooded figure gesturing for me to roll down the window. I have to turn the engine on to do that, but then it’s down, and I think he’s trying to decide whether I might be insane or not by the way he’s looking at me.

“You Jude?” he asks.

“Um, yeah?”

He smiles a kind white smile that goes all the way to his eyes. He looks to be about my age, maybe a couple of years older, early thirties perhaps.

“He’s been expecting you for a month. And since no one else comes, I figured.”

“Right.”

It’s still raining pretty hard, but the guy doesn’t seem to notice or care.

“I’m Jasper. The nurse.”

“Right,” I say again. Of course, he has a pretty male nurse.

Jasper laughs a little and glances up at the sky.

“You coming in? I like the rain, but not this much.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m coming in.”

He doesn’t hang around as I take my time getting out of the car; instead, he bolts on long legs back into the shelter of the house.

With a deep breath, I grab my overnight bag and jacket and step out into the downpour.

Jasper’s waiting just inside the vestibule, and he closes and locks the huge door behind me as I step inside Deveraux house for the first time in almost a decade. I’d been back a couple of times since Oxford, but that seemed like a lifetime ago now, and nothing appeared to have changed in the years since. I knew he’d started some renovations to the upper floors, but that hadn’t carried on down here. Not a single thing is different to how it was then. There’s some comfort in that, I find. Some sort of morbid nostalgia that I assumed had died in me a long time ago. It unsettles me. Makes me feel like a stranger in a place I know almost intimately, a place that felt as much a part of me as the heart in my chest.

It occurs to me suddenly that I’d never once come in through this door. I’d always come in through the back entrance, the service entrance, every time.

Jasper, still smiling, takes my jacket and hangs it inside the boot room off the entrance foyer.

“Can I get you some tea or coffee…?” he asks, coming back. “Something to heat you up?”

I look at him. Tall, pretty, dark-haired. Just his type.

“You his nurse or his butler?” I ask. It comes out ruder than I mean it to.