Page 52 of The Elements

Sometimes, I would observe other families on holidays, fathers, mothers, and their children splashing around in the waves, building sandcastles, eating picnic lunches, and wished that I could be among them.

I would have liked a brother or sister, someone for me to take care of, or someone who might take care of me, but when I asked Beth whether she would ever give me one, she said that she’d sorted that problem out years ago because being a mother was the hardest job in the world and she didn’t intend doing it twice, even though, to my mind, she had barely done it once.

It was only a few days after Eli let me see inside the Teague mansion that I encountered the twins for the first time.

I was walking down the path that led from the cottage to the beach, and they were making their way simultaneously from the other side along a carefully constructed set of steps toward the end of their garden.

I watched them carefully. Two boys. I would have preferred a boy and a girl, but I’d take what I could get.

“You’re the Petrus girl, aren’t you?” they said when our paths crossed, and their voices were like nothing I’d ever heard before.

Posh, refined, condescending. Their family roots, I knew, were here in Cornwall, but they’d been brought up in Kensington, in West London, which Beth said was where the swanks lived.

“Them Teagues,” she told me, “have more money than they know what to do with. He’s a big shot in some bank. Probably nicks it all from the vault.”

They stood tall, both of them, although they were still growing into their looks and needed haircuts.

Almost in unison, they would blow air up from their lower lips to brush their fringes from their eyes, which was when I would see the scatter of pimples dotted across their fore-heads.

When they declared me “the Petrus girl,” it made me feel like they were talking to a member of staff, and although I didn’t like their tone I longed for their company, anything to ease the isolation, so I said yes and told them they could call me Freya.

“He’s Arthur,” said Pascoe, pointing toward his brother.

And, “He’s Pascoe,” replied Arthur, pointing back. “Don’t mix us up or we’ll kill you.”

There was no chance of my doing that. They weren’t identical and Arthur had a pronounced birthmark on his neck, just beneath the jawline, that looked a little like the map of the Thames that I saw at the start of EastEnders .

I stared at it, wondering whether it was in fact a birthmark or he had been badly burned when he was younger.

As I studied it his face reddened slightly, which only emphasized the deformity.

“How old are you?” I asked, and they told me. Fourteen.

“And you?”

“Twelve.”

“Just a kid,” said Arthur, laughing and shaking his head, and Pascoe joined in. I got the impression they were trying to mock me, but I was just a kid so I couldn’t quite see how this could be considered an insult. What was wrong with being twelve? They’d been twelve themselves not so long before.

“Your house,” said Pascoe, nodding in the direction of Beth’s cottage, “belongs to us.”

“It’s not mine,” I told him. “I just stay with Beth for a couple of months every summer, that’s all. I live in Norfolk.”

They rolled their eyes, as if this cast me even further down the proletarian ladder than they’d imagined.

They asked about my father, and I told them, verbatim, everything that Hannah had told me, even using her terminology.

Wrong ’un. Tinkers. No better than they ought to be.

Up the spout. I said that I’d seen their father come and go over the last week but not their mother, and when I asked whether she would be coming down to Cornwall soon, their smiles faded.

Arthur looked away, his glance directed toward the water.

Pascoe watched him for a moment, appearing equally troubled.

“Mother died,” he said at last. “Just after Christmas. That’s why we’re here now, doing the bolt-hole up. Dad says he needs a project.”

“What’s a bolt-hole?” I asked, and Arthur pointed back toward the house.

“That’s a bolt-hole,” he told me.

I felt bad for them over the loss of their mum.

The mother of a girl in my class at school had died a few months earlier in a car crash, along with the father of another.

Everyone had felt sorry for them at first, but then it turned out they’d been having an affair, and, with the casual malevolence of children, our sympathy dried up instantly and the two grieving daughters, half sisters in adultery and tragedy, became sworn enemies.

“How did she die?” I asked, and, to my astonishment, Pascoe told me that his father had murdered her, but that the police hadn’t found out because he was very clever and they weren’t supposed to tell anyone.

Arthur remained silent throughout this exchange but didn’t seem surprised by it.

I didn’t know whether Pascoe was having me on, but I rather liked the idea of the story, so encouraged him to tell me more. “How did he kill her?” I asked.

“Well, he didn’t do it himself,” he told me. “That would be asking for trouble. No, he hired someone. A trained assassin. Used to work for MI5 or MI6 or one of those places. Someone who knew exactly what he was doing.”

“But why?” I asked. “Didn’t he love her anymore?”

“That’s the thing,” he said. “He loved her too much. So, when he found out that she was sleeping with someone else, he had to act. You do know what that means, don’t you? Sleeping with someone else? Or are you too young yet?”

“I know what it means,” I declared haughtily, holding his gaze until he turned away.

We’d started studying biology in school that year, and bodily parts, both male and female, their functions, what went where, and what happened when they did, had become the most common topic of conversation in the schoolyard as we offered both accurate and absurd explanations to each other.

“You can’t tell anyone though,” said Arthur, squeezing my arm so tight that his fingermarks remained there for some time.

“If you do,” added Pascoe, “then Father will murder you too.”

“And us.”

“All right,” I said, uncertain whether to believe them or not but unwilling to take the chance.

“You should be grateful we even told you,” he said, folding his arms and looking me up and down as if he was considering the price he might get for me on the open market. “The only thing better than knowing a secret is having one of your own.”