The Turn of The Key

Rachel follows Rhiannon upstairs, encouraging her to go to bed. She thinks her conversation with Sandra will not go well and that she’ll be fired. She reassures herself that Bill probably won’t want to sue her, since he abandoned her and barely paid anything in child support. She watches Rhiannon enter her room, then opens the door to the bedroom. She realizes it’s cold because the window is open—but she had never opened it. She runs back downstairs past a confused Rhiannon and goes to check on the children. To her relief, Petra is asleep in her bed. However, when she goes to check on the girls, she finds a pillow under the duvet where Maddie should be. She begins to quietly call out for Maddie, not wanting to wake Ellie. Her calls become louder as she fails to find her anywhere upstairs. She begins to panic, worried that Maddie may have followed her out of the house when she went to Jack’s. Rachel runs outside and starts calling out for Maddie. As she starts to head to the poison garden, she sees Maddie on the cobblestones beneath Rachel’s bedroom window, surrounded by blood. Rachel grabs her and begins cradling her, telling her it will be ok. But she knows it won’t be since Maddie is dead.

Rachel tried to retell the events of the next few hours over and over to the police, but her memory of it is hazy. She remembers screaming until Jack came, then Rhiannon holding Petra. She remembers the police asking her repeatedly what happened, but she didn’t know and still doesn’t. She knows the police think she did it. They speculated that Maddie had found something incriminating about Rachel in the bedroom, and when Rachel saw her in the room, she opened the window and threw her out. The way her body was found made it difficult for them to believe she fell. Rachel wonders if she jumped.

The fact that Rachel covered the camera in her room also made the police suspect her guilt. No other camera in the house caught anything that happened that night regarding Maddie. Rachel insists to Mr. Wrexham she didn’t kill Maddie, but the fact that the camera was covered makes it impossible for them to know what happened. However, she still feels responsible for the death since she went to Jack’s flat. Jack’s story didn’t help her either. It came out that he had found the purple flower in the kitchen, taken it to the poison garden to compare it, and discovered it was the same. He then removed the string from the gate and put a padlock and chain in its place. It also turned out that he is married with a two-year-old son in Edinburgh.

Although Rachel does not care about Jack’s secrets, she does find herself wondering why he hid his life from her. She may never know because she hasn’t seen him since the night Maddie died. As she got into the police car, he told her everything would be alright, but it has been anything but. She returns to Maddie’s warning not to come to the house—that the ghosts wouldn’t like it—and to the doll’s head, and the pacing in the attic. She knows it wasn’t imagination—it was real. And telling that to the police the first night, insisting the house was evil, cemented her guilt in their eyes as did her fingerprints on the cell phone, which turned out to be Maddie’s. They saw her as a “crazy woman” with a motive to exact revenge.

Rachel closes the letter by reaffirming her innocence to Mr. Wrexham and telling him he has a reputation as a person who can get people who have lost all hope, she says, “off the hook” (330). She insists she loved Maddie and didn’t kill her. She believes the truth will be her savior.

This chapter is a letter dated July 2019—nearly two years after Rachel’s first letter to Mr. Wrexham. It is addressed to Ashdown Construction Services by a man named Phil and explains that a pile of papers was recently found in a wall of Charnsworth prison. The wall, which was being ripped out as part of the prison’s redevelopment, held, he said, “a bunch of letters from an inmate to her solicitor before her trial” (331) but had never been posted. There were also some other letters addressing family matters hidden in the pile, which Phil explains he did not want to throw away in case they were important or legally privileged. He leaves it to the construction company to decide what to do with them.

This chapter is a letter from Jean McKenzie to Rachel dated November 1, 2017—approximately two months after Rachel started her first letter to Mr. Wrexham. In the letter, Jean expresses her sympathies to Rachel regarding everything that happened. She confesses that she knew about Bill and Holly, which caused her to worry about the effect on the children when new nannies came into the house. She admits to judging Rachel because she was, she says, “another pretty young girl” for Bill to prey on (332). However, she knows Rachel would never hurt the children, and she wants to make sure Rachel knows that. She explains to Rachel she told the police the same thing. She then adds that she’s enclosed a letter from Ellie that she didn’t read, but she asks that if there’s anything in the letter of importance, or that anyone else should know, Rachel should tell her. She closes the letter by telling Rachel not to write to the house because the Elincourts shuttered it after Sandra left Bill—who is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with an intern at his company.

The last chapter consists of the letter from Ellie to Rachel that Jean enclosed with her letter, and it was dictated through the app, like Ellie’s previous note that she wrote to Rachel. In the undated letter, addressed to “Dave Owen,” Ellie professes to miss Rachel and then admits to pushing Maddie off the roof outside Rachel’s window. She says she didn’t mean to do it, but Maddie was threatening to chase Rachel away like she did the previous nannies. Maddie was worried Bill would leave again, she says, “like he tried to before” (335). Ellie reveals that Maddie scared the nannies off by playing tricks with Sandra’s old phone and climbing out of Rachel’s window and into the attic. She would play a video through the speakers, so it seemed like someone was walking around in the attic, and she was the one who took the doll’s head. Ellie also confesses that Maddie tried to poison Rachel’s wine with berries, but Ellie caught her and poured the wine out. The night Rachel went to Jack’s, Maddie told Ellie she was going to set off all the alarms so Sandra would find out Rachel wasn’t there. She insisted to Ellie that Rachel would “take Daddy away” (336). Ellie ran after her to stop her and ended up pushing her. She closes the letter by begging Rachel not to tell the police because she doesn’t want to go to jail. She encourages Rachel to say she knows who did it so she can get out of prison. She closes the note by telling Rachel she loves her and wants her to “come back soon” (336).