The Housemaid: the story so far

Millie Calloway had ten years of prison behind her and could not get anyone to hire her, so a live-in housekeeping job at the Winchester house was more than she could turn down. Her room was in the attic, and the door locked from the outside.

Nina Winchester behaved like a woman coming apart. She wrecked her own house so Millie could clean it, invented rules and punished Millie for breaking them, and screamed over nothing. Her husband Andrew was patient, charming and apologetic about all of it, and he and Millie fell into an affair.

None of it was what it looked like. Andrew had spent seven years locking his wife in that attic for punishments he invented, had her committed for eight months until she doubted her own memory, and held their daughter Cecelia over her to keep her in the house. Nina had hired Millie on purpose, having read exactly what Millie went to prison for, which was killing a man who was raping her friend.

Andrew locked Millie in the attic. Nina had hidden pepper spray in the room for precisely that. Millie put him in there instead, kept him there, gave him back what he had been giving, and he did not come out alive. Enzo, the landscaper who had been quietly helping Nina for months, helped afterwards.

Andrew's mother Evelyn arrived, understood at once what had been done to her son, and approved, because she had raised him in that attic herself.

Nina and Cecelia left. Millie went to interview for another cleaning job, and the woman who opened the door had bruises and a question she never quite finished asking.

Millie was studying social work, dating a lawyer, and still taking cleaning jobs, which is how she ended up in the Garricks' apartment. She was told never to go into the master bedroom. She heard a woman crying behind that door.

Wendy Garrick turned up in time with bruises and a broken wrist and a story about her husband Douglas, and Millie did what Millie does now. She got hold of a gun and waited for him.

The man she shot was not Douglas Garrick. He was Russell Simonds, a furniture salesman who looked enough like him, and Wendy had been sleeping with him for months. The gun Wendy had supplied held blanks, so nobody died in that room. What Wendy wanted was Millie's fingerprints, Millie's record and Millie's panic. Once Millie ran, Wendy shot the real Douglas with real bullets and left the police a trail leading to a housekeeper with a violent past and an affair that had never happened.

It very nearly worked. What Wendy had not counted on was Marybeth Simonds, Russell's wife, who learned about the affair and the killing, followed the pair to a lake house, cut Russell's throat, made Wendy write a confession, and put heart medication in her wine.

Security footage cleared Millie. In the final pages Millie explained where Marybeth had got the idea, and the medication. From her.

Ten years on, Millie was a social worker married to Enzo, with two children, Ada and Nico, and a house on a cul-de-sac with only two neighbours. Suzette Lowell would not leave Enzo alone. Janice Archer photographed the street from her window. Jonathan Lowell had a room in his basement that nobody talked about.

Jonathan was found with his throat cut. The police found his blood at Millie's house, and Enzo confessed to killing him.

He had not. Jonathan had been luring nine-year-old Nico into that basement room. Ada, eleven, worked out what was happening, went over to stop it, and when he would not let her leave she stabbed him with the pocket knife her father had given her for protection. Enzo confessed because he had worked out that his daughter had done it.

Jonathan was still alive when Ada ran. Martha, the Lowells' housemaid, came back to steal from the house, found him bleeding on the floor, and finished him with a knife across the throat.

Then the police searched the basement room properly and found the remains of a boy who had gone missing years earlier, with Suzette's DNA alongside them. Millie and a detective she trusted put that in front of Suzette and let her choose. Suzette confessed to killing her husband rather than answer for the child.

Enzo walked free, Ada was never named, and Martha was never found.