Finders, Keepers: The mesmerising new thriller from the author of LIE WITH ME

by Sabine Durrant

  ‘Tom would like us to tackle out here,’ she said.

  I perched on the edge of the chair and took a sip from my mug. It was white inside; the tide lines had gone. But the coffee tasted chemical; there’s always a quid pro quo. I wanted to mention it, I longed to complain, but I managed not to.

  In my pocket I felt for the small shoe.

  ‘You all right?’ she said. ‘Not too traumatised?’

  ‘I’m sorry I was difficult,’ I said. ‘Really I would have found it very hard to get going on my own. I’m grateful. I’m sure you’ve got so many things you’d rather be doing.’

  She looked at my face carefully and then, the tone of her voice tailored to mine, said: ‘Not at all. I’m grateful for the distraction.’

  We sat for a few moments in silence. I tried to remember what we usually talked about. I wanted to be her friend, Verity Baxter: supportive, wise, witty neighbour. But the role was no longer mine to play and I was acutely aware of the loss of it, of my standing as someone whose judgements and opinions still had value.

  I longed to resume our usual idle chatter; who had had Botox and who hadn’t. When I spoke, though, I sounded peevish. ‘I don’t feel I’ve seen you properly for ages.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. I’ve been rushing around here and there. Quite a few job interviews. Been doing a lot of Pilates. Book club.’

  ‘Oh really?’

  Nothing in her expression suggested she was lying.

  ‘Yes – busy bee.’

  ‘I’ve been worried about you. You didn’t seem yourself in the pub that day. And since then I’ve had the impression you and Tom aren’t getting on as well as you should.’

  She looked quizzical. ‘What do you mean? How’ve you gained that impression?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘You been spying on us, Verity?’ She sounded light-hearted, but I wasn’t sure.

  ‘No. Of course not.’ I felt horribly self-conscious. ‘It’s just . . . well, you know . . . sound travels.’

  She nodded. ‘Oh, I see. OK.’ She slunk her shoulders lower in the chair, stretching her legs to rest them on the bar beneath the table. Lightly, as if it were insignificant, she said: ‘It’s a bit stressed at ours at the moment. Tom’s having a difficult time at work. Tempers have flared more than usual.’

  ‘I’ve heard the odd fight.’

  She began to run the pads of her right fingers in circles over her left palm, not quite scratching. ‘Yeah, like all couples.’

  I plucked up my nerve. ‘Is he ever violent towards you?’ I said.

  ‘No! Verity! What do you think? No!’ She laughed quickly. ‘He’s a complicated man. When it’s going well, it’s fantastic. You know, he has so much energy. He can be very funny, you know, life and soul. But he’s working long hours, desperate for new business. Money is – well – we’re in way over our heads. God knows how we’re going to dig ourselves out of this one. As a result, I’ve hardly seen him recently and when I do – when he’s as tense as he is now – all sorts of other things come into play. He can be such an arsehole. But, Verity, I’m no angel.’

  ‘You are to me.’

  She half smiled, considered me. ‘You have no idea. I don’t know whether it’s because I was so seriously ill as a child – faced my own mortality.’ I noticed that little expression settle again on her face: self-pity and valour. ‘I get overwhelmed by life, swept up in things, make mistakes.’

  ‘I’m sure you don’t.’

  I wonder now if she decided to tell me what she did for one reason only: to prove she was still my friend, to make me feel better about myself.

  She angled her face so she could look into mine. ‘I don’t tell many people this because it’s not important. It doesn’t change anything except that it makes me feel . . .’ She pressed her breast above her heart and screwed up her face; a gesture that conveyed an intensity of emotion if not the emotion itself. ‘As I say, I don’t want to make a big thing of it, but . . .’

  ‘What?’ I whispered.

  A flush rose on her neck. ‘It’s nothing. It’s just, my mum had just died, and I was leading a bit of a rackety life when I met Tom. The thing is, I was already pregnant.’

  I began to murmur a response, something stupid like Oh, I didn’t know but she spoke over me. ‘Many men would have run a mile when they found out. He didn’t have to stay. And I’m grateful to him for that.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, trying to sound several things at once: concerned and yet unconcerned, aware of the consequence of his actions while equally conscious of the insignificance of hers. ‘So who is Melissa’s real father?’

  Of course that was the worst thing to say. Her brow creased. ‘Tom’s her real father. It was a one-night stand. It’s not important. Well – not to her it isn’t. From the moment she was born, it was irrelevant. It’s just . . . what am I trying to say?’ She took a breath, started again. ‘It’s irrelevant to Melissa and Tom, but to me . . . every tiny detail in a relationship has an impact, any shift in the balance, and in this case something as simple as gratitude, it can make things uneven and that causes problems. I’ve been feeling very trapped. He hasn’t wanted sex for months . . .’

  Remembering this moment, I feel almost repelled by my inability to behave naturally. I tried to make my expression concerned and knowing, but my face felt tight and wrong.

  She lowered her head further. I could see tiny brown flecks in her eyes. Her lip twisted. ‘Listen, I’m going to tell you something else. I’ve got to tell someone. But if I do you’ve got to promise to keep it to yourself.’

  ‘What?’ (What next?) I moved my face closer to hers. A cobweb had caught in her hair and my fingers twitched to take it out. I think she was about to speak but there was a noise then – a scrape and rattle; the sound of a back door opening. Bea’s voice in the garden: ‘Wait. What?’ Tom’s, distant but echoing, in the kitchen. ‘Where’s your mother gone now?’ Ailsa let out a sharp breath. ‘They’re back,’ she said.

  For a minute, though, she didn’t move. She stared out at the vegetation, at the thigh-high brambles and bindweed, the giant heads of grasses and wildflowers, the vigorous acid green plant with its pointy, sticky leaves that crept into every gap. I followed her gaze; it was focused on the back corner, where the apple tree bows down to kiss the rising undergrowth; the brambles reaching up into the branches to pull it into its embrace. In the warm air, with tiny shifts and rustles, the whole garden seemed to expand, to move as one, like netting or a web.

  Ailsa was still staring. ‘Tom says you could hide anything out there,’ she said. ‘And no one would know.’

  Chapter Twelve

  My grandmother’s inlaid writing slope, poss Regency?

  Codependency, noun. Excessive emotional or

  psychological reliance on another person, typically a

  partner or close relative . . . reciprocal dependence

  on another’s neediness.

  The problem, looking back, is that, like a patient on the operating table, their organs balanced in the surgeon’s gloved hands, I was weakened by her entry into my house. I lost perspective; grip. It triggered obsessional thoughts in me; I ruminated on things all night, pushed them endlessly round and round in my head. Ailsa was right, Tom was Melissa’s father; the existence of a biological father (who?) made no difference to that. And yet – it did add a layer of complication. Hadn’t he recently said something bitter about one-night stands? She’d talked about her postnatal depression and the problems they’d had conceiving. Had both facts fuelled in him a sense of unfairness? Her revelation about their non-existent sex life; linked or unlinked: was his bullying the frustration of a man who couldn’t get it up? And what was the secret she’d been going to tell? I thought I’d got close to her and yet I didn’t trust her. What were her motives in telling me this now?

  When I sat at the kitchen table in the morning, I tried to feel calm. I remarked out loud on the space available for my feet. But the emptiness unnerved me; I was a
ware of the filth along the top of the window, of the smell: disinfectant and dog food and something baser that got into your nostrils and clung and bloated. People think loneliness is like boredom, but for me it’s more like agitation. After a while, I began to think there wasn’t much point to a table if it was somewhere one would sit alone.

  At 11 a.m., I took Maudie for a walk, comforted to see out the front the reassuring heap of black bin bags that would stay, she had said, until I was ‘ready’. I scooted round the common. Though smartly dressed, I was wearing my usual trainers, so for some of the distance, I took it at a half-run. Maudie, poor old girl, struggled to keep up. This is relevant because it shows a) how anxious I was, if Ailsa did come, not to keep her waiting, and b) what a short time I was absent from the house.

  When I saw the open gate and the bare front path, the stepping stones, the grass between them, my first instinct was to throw myself to the ground and scream. Don’t worry, I didn’t. I know how that sounds. I put both hands on the fence and bent forwards, lowering my head over it, so the top bar was pressed into my abdomen. I let out a long low groan, a bellow, like a cow that’s lost her calf. She had promised me, promised. It was the betrayal that got me, the knowledge they’d watched and waited, that I’d been played. A bus hummed. The church bells rang. I didn’t hear Ailsa until she was right on top of me. ‘So Tom took the stuff,’ she said breathlessly. ‘I couldn’t stop him. I know we said we’d wait. I’m really sorry. Verity. Please. It’ll be OK. Look at me.’

  My eyes, I’m afraid to say, were full of tears – anger at being misunderstood and panic, as well as an overwhelming sense of loss.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again, her voice urgent, her hand an insistent pressure on my shoulder. ‘Listen. Please. Dear old V. Let’s go in before he gets back.’ She was so close to my face I could smell the tea on her breath. ‘I’m on your side.’

  Perhaps I should never have let her in, that could have been the end of it, but I did let her in, and we sat together at the little table. Now she had cleaned the windows, the light in the kitchen was harsh; she looked tired, shadows under her eyes. A tiny cut on her lower lip. I should have asked how she was – found a way to ask those questions that piled up in my head. Instead, I was weakened. I let her take control. It stopped being about me and Ailsa or Ailsa and Tom and became about Tom and me. This room: the war office. My house: the campaign. Armed conflict underpinned her language. She referred to him ‘bringing in the heavy artillery’; how we should ‘put up a defence’. It weakened me, won me over. It’s only now, looking back, I realise I should have thought more about who was the vanquisher and who was being vanquished; who was abusing whom.

  She stood up and placed her hands firmly down on the melamine. She was ‘mine’ again for the day. Tom was taking the kids for lunch at his parents in Berkshire. Where did I want her? Don’t worry, she wouldn’t go upstairs. She knew Faith’s room was out of bounds. (I’d locked it now and hidden the key.) Father’s study was beyond her, which left the hall, the stairs and the sitting room. The party wall was a matter of concern. Also: finding the source of the smell. But yes, for now, all good. ‘Right. Let’s get at it,’ she said.

  Her mood was very different that day. No more confidences. She worked with a sort of happy frenzy; almost manic. She sang, scraps of old pop songs, and told me I was brilliant. It was even warmer than the day before, the air mushy like rotting pears, and yet she wore a long-sleeved shirt, I remember that, and now and again I saw her wince and rub her shoulder. I went in search of Nurofen, and in a box of sewing kits, found half a packet of Valium, left over from Mother. She declined – ‘I’m off my own pills,’ she said, craning to look out of the front window, ‘I’m not taking someone else’s’ – though she urged me to take a couple. She said it would help me to relax. The rest is a bit of a blur. I know I sat on the chair at my desk and that she talked to me about various things – for some reason the words egodystonic and egosyntonic float into my head – and occasionally she would bring me an object she had unearthed: my grandmother’s writing slope, for example. ‘It’s rather lovely. Is it rosewood and ivory? Regency, maybe. If you don’t mind, I’ll get it valued.’

  I dozed off and when I opened my eyes, her face was peering into mine. ‘Something’s come up,’ she said. I struggled to sit, but she was already at the front door. It slammed, the gate jangled, and a few seconds later, I heard her door slam too. It was only early afternoon, I think; not much later.

  The stillness of the house pressed in. My head was befuddled. I should have been working and yet I felt edgy, unstable. I wandered to the kitchen and drank deeply from the cold tap. I stood in the garden and, above the mildewy dank fetor of rotting veg or, yes, maybe drains, I wondered if I smelt toast. I went back into the house and into the hallway, hovering. She had stacked some cardboard boxes by the door and I found myself unpacking the top one, finding Brillo pads, some serviceable towels, a pair of Faith’s slippers. I hid these under the sofa, and then I went upstairs and sat on Mother’s bed.

  It was comfortingly full in here. I felt the touch of my mother’s knick-knacks, the photos and old birthday cards; the soft toys on the bed, the shelves of china animals. Whimsies. I picked up a squirrel. Its tail had broken and been stuck back on and I picked at yellow flakes of old glue. Tiny taps and squeaks came through the brickwork: Ailsa was just the other side. The floorboards creaked. I could hear music – what was it; Mozart’s Requiem? – and the gush of water in the pipes. With my ear pressed to the wall, I felt the vibration a distant hum; the tumble dryer on its endless hot rotation. I picked up her voice too: urgent and slightly panicked, ‘Yes, I know,’ a nervous laugh abruptly cut off. Her steps across her floor, the groan of a cupboard opening, small clatters. And then louder thumps as she took the stairs, the rattle of the front door. I got to the window just in time. Hair shiny, a shoulder bag slung across a summer dress, she turned left onto the pavement, and set off in the direction of Tooting Bec.

  For the next week or two I was absorbed by the question of whether she would come or not. I thought and worried about her constantly – a distress only temporarily eased when she was in my sight. But her visits were erratic. I was like the dog, or Max, waiting for the validation of an irregular reward. Sometimes she left shortly after she arrived, saying she had to see someone, she’d come back – occasionally she did, often she didn’t. Unable to work, I’d sit by the window, peering out. It didn’t occur to me to wonder, or to ask, where she went. I knew she was busy. Three children, and a party to plan. Again, in that, I was passive, like a faithful dog. Not that I liked what she did in the house. I hated it really. But her visits, the kindness they imbued, gave a new shape to my days, and in that sense I longed for them as much as I longed for them to be over.

  The heatwave had begun properly. Bluebottles droned at the windows; a wasp crept in through a crack, and buzzed angrily, knocking its head against the glass as if it could bore its way out. The rooms were hot and airless, the sun filtering in only drew attention to the grime that furred the walls. One day Ailsa washed them, but to my eye they looked worse afterwards, not better; uglier and more ashamed. I felt the same, constantly on edge with a sour combination of humiliation and rancour. I would follow her around, helping or obstructing; she kept telling me to go out, to leave her to it. She was brisk, distracted; I think she regretted the confidences of the first day. We never again returned to them. Once she said, ‘I’m a terrible mother. No, I am,’ when I demurred. ‘You have no idea.’ If I began to ask anything further, she’d skate the subject away. I begin to wonder now, what complications in her own life she was guarding; at the time I was numb to such sensitivity, my empathy blunted, my interpretation of her behaviour guided purely by self-disgust. It seeped in, poisoned the atmosphere. I assumed she was repulsed by me, that her underlying emotion was embarrassment, and I didn’t try to get through to her as a result. I regret it hugely now.

  On the rare occasion that we did talk with any intim
acy, I was the focus. Two conversations in particular, both distressing, stick in my mind.

  It was a Tuesday afternoon, and I had been talking about Jackie magazine; how Faith used to read it in secret. (It wasn’t the sort of thing our mother approved of.) Her favourite part, I told Ailsa, was the before-and-after makeover spread where some hapless female in a baggy dress and ill-fitting glasses was given an A-line skirt and a new pair of specs, discarding the severe oblongs for something that brought out the ‘heart shape’ of her face. Sometimes, she’d test the theories out, using me as a model. It would make her laugh.

  ‘I’d like to say you were conducting as dramatic a transformation here,’ I said. ‘But I know I’m making it hard for you.’

  I was fishing. Earlier that morning, she’d discovered the towels and slippers, etc, under the sofa, and given me a lecture about my tendency to ‘churn’. She hadn’t spoken since.

  We were in the front room, sorting through miscellaneous piles of papers, and stationery, and she opened and tried to close a lever-arch file, before laying it on the chuck pile. Then she sat back on her heels and wiped her wrist across her forehead, stretching up the lines, making a quick, hard flicking movement from the temple.

  ‘Does she look like you?’ she said.

  I thought she meant Mother. She’d found some old photos of her, 1970s sepia prints of Mother holding one of our cats to her cheek. ‘Who?’

  ‘Faith. There’re no pictures here of Faith.’

  After a long moment, I said, ‘We both had very long hair as girls.’

  ‘Was she already keen on hairdressing? Did you plait each other’s hair and things like that?’

  I hesitated. I remembered the silkiness of Faith’s locks through my fingers, the slip of it; the fiddle of securing the elastic, her face twisting, gurning when I pulled it too tight; her widow’s peak, so similar in fact to Ailsa’s; the funny wonkiness of her teeth. ‘I used to do hers,’ I said, shutting the image down. ‘She didn’t like touching my hair. She said it was too crinkly.’