The detectives rose obediently. “Of course. That’s fine. Perhaps we can phone you if we have anything further.”
Anything further: the phrasing of the courtroom. Having a sudden desire to be useful, she said, “Amy did bring something else: those.” She indicated the sunflowers, laid out on newspaper on the work top, as Naomi had instructed. To be preserved in Amy’s memory.
The visitors did not comment. Only as they left did the man remind her, “The website details for your B and B bookings? Only when you have a moment.”
* * *
—
In a very kind e-mail, Amy’s mother, Faye, had told Sissy that her bereavement counselor had recommended a daily local errand, no matter how painful it was, to keep her connected to the outside world, and Sissy had adopted the advice herself.
Today, Thursday, the day after the police came, it had been a walk to the high street to buy fruit. Returning to Lowland Way, she felt the sucking sensation of loss as she watched Em Kendall backing out of her drive, little Sam in his car seat in the rear. That should have been Amy, in a year’s time, driving her baby around, singing to him, eager for his first words, his first steps.
Instead, no baby. No Amy.
As Sissy put her key in her lock and pushed the door, she was startled to feel resistance—complete resistance, which ricocheted into her wrist and arm as momentum carried her body forward. It took a moment to understand that the security chain was engaged, and she froze, her body incapacitated with shock. It could be engaged only from the inside.
At exactly the same moment, there was a sense of another movement halted—above her head. Someone was in her house. Upstairs.
Overcoming the paralysis, she took a few steps back and gazed up at the bay windows of the master bedroom. There was nothing visible through the glass beyond the top of the drawers and the edges of the curtains.
Think. She had no B and B guest today and no cleaner or other worker (she couldn’t afford the luxury of outside help anymore); she knew better than to leave spare keys under flowerpots. Who had a key? Pete. Also, Tess Morgan. But it definitely wasn’t Pete and she could think of no good reason why Tess would enter her home without permission, much less bar the front door once inside. Someone had broken in—presumably at the back, where they were less likely to be seen—and Sissy had caught them in the act. The safety chain had bought them time to escape.
She fumbled for her phone, thinking briefly of the business card the detectives had left, before dialing 999.
“Go and wait somewhere safe,” she was advised. “With a neighbor or in a nearby public place. Do not try to gain access and confront this person.”
“I won’t.” By now she knew it was him. Booth. She had developed an animal sense for him and that sense was flaring, stirring the hairs on her arms. Disobeying orders, she approached the side gate, which opened without her needing the key. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d used it—before Amy’s death, certainly—and there was no evidence of the lock having been forced, so it was possible it had beenleft unlocked this whole time. The kitchen door was closed, as she’d left it, but also unlatched. She was only half-sure she’d locked it; her mind was fractured these days, sequences lost to blind spots, like pigment spots on the retina. Had Booth arrived prepared to force locks and smash glass and found he had no need?
She stepped into her kitchen and edged through the hallway. Nothing looked different. Upstairs, she toed open each door in turn, scanning the rooms from their thresholds. She knew he could be in any hiding place, in a wardrobe, under a bed, even behind the door— he could be mere feet from her at any time, their breath mingling. If he kills me, I don’t care. I’ll sacrifice myself to guarantee his conviction, his imprisonment.
Then came the sound of a car braking in the street. Rushing down to the door, she saw dark silhouettes through the glass. The police. So fast! He’d be trapped and rooted out, arrested, once and for all!
But, as she went to open the door, she found the chain was no longer on. It made no sense. Unless . . . unless he’d left as she was creeping around the side—or even when she was inside herself, sliding silently past her as she moved from room to room. Could he really have been so brazen? What would he have done, what would he have said, if they’d come face-to-face on the landing? She imagined her hands on his throat, pressing until they felt something snap.
The police introduced themselves as safer-neighborhood officers, different from those who’d been there on the morning of Amy’s accident. They dutifully checked the house, confirmed the absence of an intruder and listened to her account of the event.
“So, you don’t remember locking the gate or kitchen door?”
“No, but I definitely didn’t leave the chain on the front door. I only use that at night.”
It wasn’t hard to tell what they were thinking: if she’d left the house by the side gate, her first outing of the day, then the chain could easily have remained untouched from the previous night.
“So, you reentered through the kitchen and the intruder left through the front door? Did you see or hear them exit?”
“No. I know how it sounds.” Like a choreographed farce. Two people missing each other by a whisker. Revolving doors.
Addressing his colleague, not Sissy, one of the officers asked, “Why would they put the chain on if they knew the occupier could reenter through an unlocked side gate?”
“Maybe to make me doubt myself, like you are?” Sissy cried. “To make me feel like I’m going mad?” Her rising emotion was not helping correct this illusion. “He might have been watching me, worked out how long I’d be out. He only lives across the road.”
That got their interest. “So you did see the intruder?”
“No, but I know it was him. Darren Booth. He was recently involved in an accident at his house. My son’s girlfriend was killed.”
Though this prompted kind words, there was a sense that she’d just confirmed herself as unreliable. She remembered now, on the leaflet about loss she’d been given by the police liaison lady, a line about becoming forgetful, mislaying your keys and so on.
“Can’t you bring Forensics in? He hasn’t been here ever before, so you’ll be able to find out straightaway if it was him. There’d be fibers from his clothes, wouldn’t there?”
The officers did a good job of concealing their disbelief, it seemed to her. Deploy an expensive forensics operation on the basis of a hunch by a woman in the throes of grief?
She tried again. “He’s just put up a security camera, so why don’t you at least check that?” But of course he’d remember his own camera. He’d probably watched her leave, turned it off, and strolled over.
“OK, Ms. Watkins, while we’re here, do you want to double-check nothing’s been stolen?”
They were humoring her now. Showing due respect. It was as much as she could expect, evidently.
Nothing was missing, of course, not even in the master bedroom, where she spent some minutes searching. Where in the large space would a bloodhound find his strongest scent? she thought helplessly. Why had he come in here and what had he looked at? What had he touched?
In the absence of a single sign of disturbance, the officers suggested she get her locks changed “to be on the safe side,” and she listened with resignation to tips about window locks and extra door bolts. At least they went over to Booth’s afterward. She watched them stand at his door, talking with him for five minutes or so. When they returned to their car, she intercepted them.
“What did he say? Did you check his camera footage?”
“The camera isn’t operational yet.”
As she’d thought. He wasn’t stupid.
“We’re satisfied Mr. Booth was not involved in your break-in.”
They as good as put “break-in” in quotation marks. They thought she was a confused old bird who’d imagined—or
at best misconstrued— this whole episode. They probably had a code for callouts to old dears.
“Sixty is not old,” she told them, a non sequitur that as a parting shot only attracted further kind looks.
When they’d left, their car no longer visible from her window, she wept, as she had every day and every night since Amy died.
CHAPTER
22
ANT
Ant took a long breath as he approached his house on Friday evening. Booth, working on the RV outside Ralph’s place, was mercifully out of range and therefore unable to treat Ant to one of his new death stares. In any case, Ant had learned to fix his gaze on his own door, to avoid looking directly at the spot where Amy had died. It seemed to him there lingered a sense not only of tragedy but of betrayal as well, a soundless scream of protest.
Em was in the garden with Sam, a rare sight in recent months. They had the sandpit out, which made Ant think of the huge sacks of sand loaded onto Booth’s scaffolding, their lethal weight splitting the weave when they fell to the ground.
“The police just called me about the phone,” he told her, keeping his voice low in case of eavesdroppers over the wall. “They said you hadn’t dropped it off yet?”
“Oh,” said Em, and her gaze turned opaque.
“I said I’d drive down with it now. They’re there till late.”
Her hands over Sam’s, Em helped him put spadefuls of sand into his plastic pot. “You can’t do that, I’m afraid. I’ve deleted the app and the rest of the footage.”
“What?” Ant was taken aback. “Why did you do that?”
“I didn’t think we needed it.”
Her tone did not convince, and unease began to creep through Ant. “OK, well, it wasn’t backed up to the cloud, but maybe they can retrieve it from the hard drive or whatever. Where did you put the phone?”
Em’s jaw muscles tensed. “It’s in the bin.”
“The main bin?”
“Yes.”
The weekly rubbish collection had been that morning.
“Why?” he repeated. “I don’t understand.”
“To be honest, Ant, I think it was a big mistake for you to have told them you used this app at all.”
He frowned, exasperated. “What are you talking about? You knew I was sending them the clip—you were the one who suggested it!”
“The clip, yes,” she repeated, like a prosecution barrister seizing on a slip by an unconvincing witness. “Not the whole thing. You don’t think it might look a bit voyeuristic, you having a camera trained permanently on our neighbors?”
“You,” not “us,” he couldn’t help noticing.
“No more so than Booth’s camera now.”
“His is in plain sight for everyone to see. Yours was concealed.” She tipped the pot of sand upside down and smacked its base with the spade, which Sam enjoyed. “I’ve been doing some reading, and just being in possession of that film could have got us in deep shit.”
Ant listened in disbelief as she detailed her research into the law on domestic surveillance usage. Evidently, data protection issues meant they should have notified Booth that his property was within range of their camera; additionally, he had a right to demand to see any material they had recorded involving him and his property.
“OK, so then we could have shown him. We could have shown everyone who happened to be on it. They all knew we were watching Booth.”
“You were,” Em corrected him.
Here she went again, separating them in language, in spirit. He gazed at her in vexation. He could see her reaction was not normal, and yet he could hardly blame her. The last few days had been truly frightening: Tess’s dead cygnet, Sissy’s break-in. . . . She had to be wondering what was in store for her.
He left them to their sandcastles and phoned the police with his unwelcome news. DC Forrester took the call.
“Thank you for letting us know,” she said, and that she didn’t probe felt far more sinister than any telling off might have. “While I’ve got you on the phone, Mr. Kendall . . .”
“Yes?”
“You said you didn’t leave the house on the night of Friday the tenth?”
“That’s right.”
“And yet we’ve had a report that you were outside that night at about midnight. Is there a possibility you stepped out and forgot to tell us? This person is absolutely certain it was you.”
Ant paused, his vision darkening slightly at the edges. “Oh, OK. Well, if they’re a hundred percent sure they saw me, then I suppose I must have.”
“Can you tell me what you were doing?”
“Do I need a reason to go into the front garden of my own home? To put something in the bin, maybe? To check I locked the car? I honestly don’t remember.”
Forgetfulness was no excuse in the witness box, though, was it?
“Do you remember if you went near next door’s scaffolding?”
“Definitely not. I mean, it was right on the center point, slightly overhanging our side, actually, so I might have taken a few steps under it. But I didn’t touch it. I was only outside for a minute or two.”
“So after you did what you can’t remember doing for a minute or two, you went back inside?”
“Yes.” Ant swallowed. Was she recording this exchange? No, that wasn’t legal, was it? “Can I ask who it was who said they saw me?”
“I’m not able to give you that information.”
Of course she wasn’t. But it had to have been a neighbor.
As his brain made a sudden connection, he felt his stomach collapse. The edit tool on the app: It had been activated, hadn’t it? What if Em had seen the footage of him and deleted it? Never mentioned it to him, never mentioned it to the police. The tearing sensation inside his rib cage took a moment to characterize: relief. Relief that she still cared enough to protect him.
When the call ended, Ant pictured DC Forrester circling his name in red, if not on an actual list pinned to a real board, then mentally. Moving his metaphorical mug shot to the top of the pile.
“What was that all about?” Em asked when he rejoined them in the garden.
Ant knelt on the lawn next to her, his voice almost a whisper: “You cut some video before you came to show me, didn’t you?”
Her face gave nothing away. “I didn’t cut anything.”
“You knew it wasn’t backed up to the cloud because I told you, but you chucked the phone away because you were worried it might be stored on the phone itself?”
She said nothing, just shook her head, eyes averted.
“I did go outside that Friday night, but I didn’t touch his bloody scaffolding. I swear.”
Em bit her bottom lip. “I don’t want to know what you did or didn’t do.”
“I didn’t do anything. That’s—”
“No, stop!” She raised a palm, which caught the attention of Sam, who opened his mouth as if to contribute. No sound came out. “Seriously, Ant, don’t. Then if the police do ask me, I won’t have anything to tell them.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” Ant said fiercely.
“Good. Then let’s just get through the weekend, shall we? Without anything bad happening.”
* * *
—
Well, he could have told her that was tempting fate. Unencumbered, evidently, by the police inquiries causing anxiety among their neighbors, Darren and Jodie were in the mood to celebrate. On Saturday afternoon, several disposable barbecues were brought out and lit, and a full-size paint-spattered bin crammed with ice and beers. The music—for once, not metal but techno—began early. Both hosts had dressed for the occasion, Booth in clean jeans and an actual shirt, Jodie in an exposing red dress, her thin blond hair fanned over narrow shoulders.
“What kind of a person holds a party two weeks after someone’s been killed on their prope
rty?” Em said as they watched from the rear bedroom window.
“I think we know what kind,” Ant said. “Who are all these people? What’s the occasion? I’ve never known them to invite anyone over before.”
“They probably advertised it on Facebook. And I don’t think there is an occasion—I think this is a message. Like the dead cygnet.” Em sucked her teeth, her expression darkening. “They want to show us what noise really is. You know, ‘you ain’t heard nothing yet.’”
For all her overreaction regarding the camera, Ant sensed she was totally on the money about this. If Darren and Jodie had learned anything about their next-door neighbors’ disgruntlement, it was that their focus was on noise.
Well, now they really knew what noise was. It was a sound system that made the air shudder and the human brain bounce. It made the pictures on the walls shake. It was sixty or seventy people heckling and singing and laughing all at the same time.
It was something the police had limited powers to manage in a domestic environment, it being a council responsibility, as they explained to Ant over the phone once again—and he couldn’t have been the only one to appeal to them this time. They promised to attend, however, if a lull in higher-priority callouts allowed. (“Attend”? As if they planned to grab a drink and join the fun!)
“You must be aware that this couple have had multiple complaints made against them?” he cried over the hellish, brutal pulse of the music. “We think they’ve just killed a swan as well!”
But it sounded crazy, like a prank call.
Was it any wonder he did what any other desperate person would do? Gather all the alcohol he could find in the house and drink every last drop of it.
* * *
—
When he woke, all he knew for sure for the first two minutes was that he was alive. Pain had claimed his entire body, circulating in his bloodstream and pooling in his head. His first theory was that he’d been beaten up and dumped in a ditch—by whom? Booth?—but once he’d pried open dry, scratchy eyes and seen his earphones tangled on the pillow, still attached to his iPad, he was confident he was in his own home. He hadn’t been assaulted; he’d simply given himself a diabolical hangover.
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