Forty-five minutes after pretending to leave the country, I was secretly sitting behind a locked door watching hidden cameras inside my own home. I thought I was about to catch my housekeeper doing something terrible to my daughters, but when the footage finally showed me who they were truly afraid of, I went cold.
That morning I kissed my girls goodbye and carried my briefcase to the front door as though I really was flying to Toronto.
“Four days,” I said. “Be good for Rosalba. Daddy’s home Friday.”
Bea, who is nine, put both arms round my waist. Poppy, who is six, held on to my hand and whispered: “Do you have to go again?”
And the way she said again very nearly made me call the whole thing off.
There was no meeting in Toronto. The plane was not leaving the airfield. And forty-five minutes after my car went out through the gates at Calder Heights, it came back in through the service entrance, with Gideon Price, my head of security, at the wheel.
Nobody could know I was in the house.
Especially Vivienne. The woman I was supposed to marry in December.
She had put the idea in my head over dinner the night before.
“You trust Rosalba far too much, Conrad.” Quietly. A hand on my wrist. Diamond earrings gone from her dressing table, she said. Cash. A bottle of perfume.
Rosalba has worked for me for almost five years. After Helena died, she was the one steady thing in my daughters’ lives.
But Vivienne said there was something worse than theft.
“She’s turning them against you. They barely speak when you walk in. They run straight to her. Open your eyes.”
Suspicion does what suspicion does. It gets into ordinary things. A child running to a housekeeper starts to look like a campaign.
We had upgraded the security three months before — more than thirty concealed cameras across the common areas. So I invented Toronto, and I let myself into the monitoring room behind the garage, and I sat down in front of a wall of screens.
For fifteen minutes, nothing happened.
Rosalba wiped down the kitchen. The girls finished breakfast. And I began to feel ashamed of myself, sitting in a dark room spying on a woman who had never once given me a reason.
And then Vivienne walked into the living room.
And her face changed. The softness went out of it like a light going off, the second she thought I was over the county line.
Bea was reading by the fireplace. Poppy was on the rug holding the grey rabbit Helena gave her in the hospital, the week before she died.
And Vivienne crossed that room with her heels going on the floorboards like a starting pistol.
“How many times have I told you two not to sprawl about in my living room?”
Both girls jumped.
And what frightened me was not that they jumped.
It was that they were not surprised.
Bea shut her book at once. Poppy put her head down. And Vivienne took the rabbit out of Poppy’s arms and put it on the top shelf of the bookcase, where a six-year-old cannot reach.
“When your father’s away, I make the rules.”
And my stomach turned over, because Bea got up without a word and stepped in front of her sister.
Automatically. Like something she had done so many times it no longer needed a decision.
And then Rosalba came in.
She walked, very calmly, into the space between Vivienne and my daughters.
“Miss Vivienne. They were only reading until the tutor comes.”
“Did I ask you?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then remember where you are. You’re staff. You’re not their mother. You are nobody in this family.”
My hands closed on the edge of the desk.
And Vivienne told the girls to go upstairs.
And Poppy looked up at the shelf.
“Please. I just want my bunny.”
“Then learn to do as you’re told.”
And Poppy hesitated, and said, very small: “Please don’t be mean to Bea.”
And Vivienne took hold of my six-year-old by the wrist.
And Rosalba put her hand flat on Vivienne’s arm. Not hard. Just there.
“Do not touch her.”
And I was out of that chair.
Twenty seconds.
It is forty metres from the monitoring room to the living room. Through the garage, the boot room, the back hall.
I have timed it since. Twenty seconds at a run.
And I came through the door and Vivienne was standing in the middle of my living room with her hand still up where Rosalba had moved it, and Rosalba was between her and the girls, and Bea had Poppy behind her on the stairs.
And Vivienne saw me. And in about half a second, her face went back.
All the way back. The softness came up into it like a tide.
“Conrad! Thank God. She put her hands on me. You saw — she—”
And she was actually walking towards me with her arms out.
And Gideon came in behind me, and said, completely flatly, the way he says everything:
“Sir. It’s all recorded. Every angle.”
And she stopped walking.
And the ninety seconds after that, which are on camera and which I have watched once.
Vivienne did not argue. That surprised me more than anything.
She looked at Gideon. She looked at the corner of the ceiling above the fireplace, where there is a smoke detector that is not only a smoke detector.
And I watched her understand, in real time, how long it had been there.
Not today. She could see from my face that I had seen today.
She was working out whether there had been a yesterday. And a last week. And a last month.
And then she said the only thing she said to me before she left.
“You were supposed to be watching Rosalba.”
Not sorry. Not you’ve misunderstood. Not even how dare you.
You were supposed to be watching Rosalba.
She had built the whole thing — the dinner, the earrings, the fake trip — so that I would sit in a dark room and watch exactly one person.
And I had watched the wrong screen.
What she had actually planned.
We found the earrings that afternoon. In a zipped inner pocket of Rosalba’s handbag, which lives on a hook in the utility room. With three hundred dollars in fifties folded round them.
Rosalba had not been in the utility room since the Saturday. Vivienne had been in it on the Sunday evening — the utility-room camera was one of the original ones, and it was one she knew about, and she had stood with her back to it for about forty seconds.
And on the monitoring room’s own log, we found that at seven the previous evening, Vivienne had asked Gideon — casually, in passing — which cameras recorded audio. And he had told her. Kitchen, entrances, utility.
She had not asked about the living room. Because she did not know there was one.
Her plan, as far as we can reconstruct it, was this. On the Tuesday, with me in Toronto, she would “discover” her earrings missing, ring me in tears, and suggest we look in the staff areas. Gideon would find them in the handbag on the utility-room camera. I would fire Rosalba over the phone.
And by Friday, when I came home, there would be nobody in that house who knew what happened in the living room when I was not in it.
Which is when Gideon told me the rest.
Why there was a camera in the living room.
Vivienne had suggested the upgrade in the June. Entrances, staff corridors, the kitchen, the utility room. “For Rosalba,” she said. “So we know.”
And the installers came, and did exactly that.
And in the last week of July, Gideon came to my study and said there were blind spots in the common areas that bothered him professionally. The living room. The playroom. The library. The top landing.
And I said fine, sort it out, and did not think about it again.
The cameras went in on a Thursday when Vivienne was in Santa Barbara.
Gideon did not tell her. Because he had been asked not to.
By Rosalba.
Rosalba had come to him in the middle of July. Not to me. To him.
She told him she had seen things in the living room. She told him she had tried, twice, to say something to me, and both times I had said Vivienne was “finding her feet with the girls.” She told him that if she came to me with a story, Vivienne would say the housekeeper was jealous, and I would believe my fiancée, and Rosalba would be out of the house by the weekend, and then there would be nobody.
“He has to see it,” she told Gideon. “Not be told. See.”
So Gideon put in the cameras. And for forty-five days, every evening, he reviewed the living room footage. On his own time. And kept it. And said nothing to me.
Forty-five days.
See more on the next page