Those People

by Louise Candlish

  “Or maybe they just asked her how the babysitter got home? What the fuck is wrong with you? Aren’t holidays supposed to put you in a better mood, not worse? Jesus, no wonder Tess feels suffocated by you two. You’re not back five minutes and you’re already on her case.”

  Ralph felt mist rise. “Pretty easily suffocated, isn’t she? And bloody ungrateful.”

  There it was, the thing he knew Finn disliked hearing more than anything else: that he and his family should be grateful, that he owed Ralph for his cushy setup.

  “Why should she be grateful, exactly?” Finn glared, his forehead glossy with sweat. “Because you noticed the house next door to yours was for sale? Because you lent us the deposit, which has now been paid back? You have to have people in your debt, don’t you? You have to be the one pulling the strings. That’s why you don’t like Booth: he doesn’t fall into line the way you’d like him to.”

  Ralph turned on his brother with the snarl of boyhood fights. “I don’t like Booth because he put my son in hospital. He killed an innocent woman. He’s breaking into our houses and gunning down wildlife and he’s walked away from all of it scot-free.”

  Finn balked; clearly, he’d forgotten momentarily about Charlie’s near miss, if not Amy’s death. “Before all that. You know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t know what you mean and I think you should shut the fuck up.”

  Aware of the curious looks their raised voices were attracting from other drinkers, Ralph reminded himself—no, tormented himself—that this wasn’t how people in the Fox behaved. It was how people in the Star behaved, maybe, but not the Fox. He was overcome with shame and rage; he’d been so sure he belonged—he’d taken belonging to an art form—and yet here he was not belonging, after all.

  Maybe it was a throwback to their sixteen years of sharing a bedroom, but neither brother was in the habit of storming out of rows. They would wait it out in bitter silence if necessary (especially if they had drinks to finish).

  “Sorry,” Ralph said finally. “I’m just shattered from the drive. This thing with Daisy won’t come to anything.”

  “Of course it won’t,” Finn agreed readily. “Shows you’re a good citizen, that’s all. And they are detectives. It’s well within their capabilities to discover a babysitter’s name and address. And maybe she noticed something? Have you thought of that? Something that could help us.”

  “Yeah, it’s possible.”

  At last spying a free table, he ordered new drinks and they sat for several minutes checking e-mails and messages. Then Ralph felt a crawling sensation on his skin, an early-warning impulse that he at first put down to their latest nerve-jangling discussion of Booth. But when he glanced around the bar, he saw he was mistaken. “I don’t fucking believe this.”

  “What?”

  “At the bar.”

  They must have been to the Fox a dozen times since Booth had moved to Lowland Way and they’d never seen him here before. The Star was his patch. But it was him all right. With two mates, both men, younger than him and visibly wound up with Friday night expectation. Of the three, Booth looked the most unkempt and yet also the most at ease. His gaze drifted from Finn to Ralph and settled there.

  “You don’t think he followed us?” Finn muttered.

  “No. He’s just come in. Saw us walk past his house, I bet. Mobilized his troops. Not hard to guess where we were going.”

  “Why would he want to do that?”

  “It’s a taunt,” Ralph said. “A challenge. He wants to show us he can infiltrate our domain. Maybe he’s seen us in the Star and doesn’t like it.” As Booth turned his back on them to order drinks, Ralph willed the girl behind the bar to register his unsuitability and snub him, but she served him faster than Ralph himself had been served. She smiled at him as she pulled his pint.

  “You know if you get into anything now, there’ll be a hundred witnesses,” Finn said, by way of a warning. “Plus, there’s three of them.”

  “True.” Ralph turned his chair so he didn’t have Booth in his eyeline, but still he couldn’t relax. “What’s he doing now?”

  “He’s waiting for their drinks. Here they are.” Finn looked confused. “Wait . . . I think he’s offering us a drink.”

  Ralph swung around, his willpower shot, in time for Booth to call across to them, just audibly over the Friday night clamor: “Hey, Kray boys! I said, can I get you a pint?”

  The barmaid looked over, grinning at the reference, awaiting the brothers’ requests. What was he going to do, Ralph thought, spike their drinks? Come over and throw them in their faces?

  He called back: “I wouldn’t take a pint from you if I was crawling on my hands and knees in the Sahara.” The remark was loud enough, aggressive enough, to draw a range of responses: hostility from Booth’s sidekicks, fearful looks from two women at the next table, bewilderment from the barmaid.

  “I think that’s a no,” Darren told her. “Just these, then, love. Thanks.”

  She took his money, sending a disapproving glance Ralph’s way.

  What the hell was going on? Ralph seethed, as Booth and his party took their drinks outside, presumably to smoke. Not only was he brazenly invading the Morgans’ turf, but he’d marked out lanes and was running rings around them. The feeling of impotence threatened to overwhelm him, as if he might overheat and combust.

  “Unbelievable how he’s been able to hoodwink everyone into thinking he’s the good guy,” he fumed. “There must be something we can pin on him, something that no one can deny is criminal. How about we bring some pedophilia accusation against him? Or just spread the word in the Star? With any luck, some vigilantes’ll come and lynch him.”

  Though Finn had an approving gleam in his eye, his response might have been scripted by Naomi: “The police aren’t stupid. They’d see straightway there’s nothing like that going on. Plus we’d be opening ourselves up to charges of harassment, or even perverting the course of justice.”

  Ralph nodded. “You’re right. We shouldn’t have to fabricate crimes. He’s committed enough real ones.” He held his brother’s eye. “I think it’s time for a whole new game plan.”

  Finn didn’t flinch. “With you all the way, mate,” he said.

  CHAPTER

  24

  TESS

  “Hello. This is Tessa Morgan from Lowland Way. My husband said you wanted to double-check something from our chat?”

  There was a short wait while DC Forrester gathered her notes. It couldn’t be that serious, then, Tess thought, if she needed to remind herself of the query. No summons to the station quite yet.

  “Yes, I’m just looking at statements from the night of the tenth and I see we’ve had a report that you were seen in the street with your dog about twelve thirty.”

  “Oh!” Tess was taken aback. “I think I did take Tuppy out. I completely forgot that.”

  “You forgot?”

  “Yes, I did. Because it wasn’t important. When you have a dog, you take him out constantly. You don’t remember every individual trip.”

  “You have a very large garden, Mrs. Morgan, if I’m remembering correctly?”

  Tess suppressed a sigh. “I could have just let him out the back, yes, but that would have got the dogs next door all excited and then there’d be three of them barking and waking everyone up. So I just took him out the front and walked up to the patch of green on the other side of Portsmouth Avenue.”

  “Did you approach number 1 on this late-night expedition?”

  “No.”

  “Your husband didn’t tell you how to go about loosening the bolts that would compromise the stability of a scaffolding structure?”

  “Er, no.” Tess felt her heartrate quicken. “But how hard can it be, anyway? Anyone can pick up a wrench and turn a screw or nut or whatever it was.”

  “But not everyone has experience
working on a building site, as your husband does.”

  “How do you know that?” Was this really a working hypothesis? Husband and wife coconspirators. “That was over twenty years ago!”

  “The scaffolding fixtures were older than that. I think you said yourself the materials showed considerable wear and tear.”

  Tess paused. She needed to start keeping better track of what she’d said and what she’d left unsaid. “I did, yes. They looked ancient.”

  “Are you in the habit of picking up after your dog, Mrs. Morgan?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Tess sighed. “I am, yes. While you’re on the phone, can I ask if your colleagues in the drugs squad have followed up on my complaint after a party at number 1 on Saturday? There were definitely illegal substances being used. Surely that’s more serious than a malicious complaint of dogs’ toileting habits? No offense, but I think you need to have a little reappraisal of what’s worth investigating here.”

  She’d sounded more strident than she’d intended and there was a beat of surprised silence.

  “None taken,” DC Forrester said smoothly.

  * * *

  —

  Naomi had posted on the residents’ Facebook page:

  Has everyone seen this? This is exactly what we want to avoid, for all our sakes! Please DO NOT SPEAK TO THE PRESS!

  The link was to a nasty little piece on the property pages of one of the tabloids:

  BARGAIN BASEMENT

  Pick up a bargain in posh Lowland Gardens in South London—if you have the stomach for it!

  Lowland Way, one of the suburb’s smartest roads, is in meltdown following the recent death of a young woman in a building accident. With the police in and out of residents’ houses and its famous Play Out Sunday plan abandoned, sellers have been forced to slash their prices. This three-bedroomed period cottage has been reduced from £1.2 million to £900,000. It has no basement—but you could always dig one out (planning allowing) to maximize your bargain! With Lowland Estates www.lowlandestates.co.uk.

  Bloody gutter press, Sara Boulter commented. How are they getting this stuff?

  Ant Kendall: Very callous and upsetting. How awful for Sissy and the family to read this sort of thing.

  Though Tess had avoided the group of late, too distressed to follow the multiple queries and comments on the various “Missing Cygnet” posts, she had been aware of an insistent and unwarranted desire to redeem herself with Naomi. Her phone call from the detective had changed that, and the next time she saw Naomi in the garden, playing with Charlie and the dogs, she went straight out and asked to have a word.

  Naomi set Charlie up with a game involving bouncing a tennis ball perilously close to Tess’s kitchen window, then said, “If it’s about this latest article, Ralph’s going to ring Lowland Estates and have a word. It’s not in their interests for the street to be known as some sort of property Costco.”

  “It’s not that, no,” Tess said, determined to stay on message. “Naomi, did you or Ralph say anything to the police about Finn having experience on building sites?”

  Naomi eyed her with interest. “Of course not. But you can understand why they might find that relevant. He is the only one who knows how to work those couplings, or whatever they’re called.”

  “Yes, him and any of the billion other active users of YouTube who fancied watching a tutorial on the subject. Come on, anyone can learn anything in five minutes these days. It’s completely unfair to implicate Finn.”

  Naomi sighed. “That’s true.”

  The concession was rare enough for Tess to soften her tone. “So, I hear Ralph is worried he’s a suspect as well?”

  “Yes. He thinks the police are trying to play us off against each other.”

  “People are definitely starting to point fingers,” Tess agreed. “The police know I was out with Tuppy that night and I have no idea who told them.”

  Naomi glanced up. “You were out with Tuppy?”

  Her surprise sounded real enough, but Tess wasn’t quite ready to trust her. After their row, mightn’t she also have stayed awake stewing? Gone to the window to breathe in some fresh night air? “I couldn’t sleep, so I got up again. He was getting agitated, he needed the loo and I didn’t want to let him in the garden in case he got Cleo and Kit excited and woke you all up.”

  Naomi looked doubtful.

  “We had just argued,” Tess reminded her. “I didn’t want to start another row and it was just easier to take him out. I put my jacket on over my pajamas.”

  Looking momentarily askance at the thought of such slovenliness, Naomi recovered herself. “Hmm, highly suspicious,” she said sarcastically. “A woman in her pajamas taking a dog for a pee.”

  This was better; she was on Tess’s side again.

  “Ant said they’re on his case as well, so that’s at least three of us,” Tess said.

  “And it sounds as if they were a bit skeptical about Sissy’s report about the break-in too. You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if they think this is one of those Murder on the Orient Express things.”

  “What, we all did it?”

  “It’s a theory—don’t you think? First we give each other alibis and then we drop little hints, each directed at someone different, just a few innocuous details, nothing really incriminating. It has the same effect: no clear suspect.”

  Tess looked at her. “Four sets of clips were loosened, the police told Finn. How many people could that possibly involve?”

  “Well, a maximum of four, I suppose.”

  They laughed together, not old-style laughing, but darker, more guarded. As if in direct response, there came the loud, unpleasant wail of a power tool from Booth’s garden.

  “How can he operate machinery when he’s injured?” Tess said. “We can’t fault his work ethic, can we?”

  “You know what we should do? Build up the wall between us and number 3,” Naomi said, only half joking, and Tess followed her to the wall to assess its height. “There’s this special fencing apparently, designed to minimize noise from busy roads. We could do the same at the front. Let’s build it as high as the council will allow. Or higher—we’ll apply for permission retrospectively.”

  “Wall them off?” Tess said. “Like they’re Mexico or West Berlin? That’s a bit unfair on Ant and Em.”

  Still, it wasn’t the craziest idea she’d heard to date.

  “Was it you who sabotaged the scaffolding?” Naomi asked, with a sudden pounce, and Tess felt the same vicious heart pounding she had when questioned by DC Forrester.

  “Are you for real?”

  “I think I am, yes.” Naomi moved a step closer. “And I’d take it to the grave if it was you, just so you know. Whatever the intention that night—if there ever was one—it wasn’t to hurt Amy.”

  “No.” As their eyes locked, there was a new flare of tension. “Was it you?” Tess countered, with a note of daring.

  Naomi stepped back again. “Of course it wasn’t. I’m one of the few who isn’t a suspect.”

  “Not yet,” Tess said.

  * * *

  —

  Since that unwelcome visit from Jodie, she was wary of the doorbell ringing. Now, if she wasn’t expecting someone, she would go upstairs and check who it was from the bedroom window before returning in a great hurry to take receipt of a parcel or let the British Gas guy in to read the meter.

  When the bell went that Tuesday morning she approached the door with smile, expecting it to be Em Kendall for coffee. Tess hadn’t seen her friend since before the cygnet incident and she wanted to show Em the memorial headstone she’d planted in the corner of the garden.

  She drew back the door, smiling.

  “Hello!” Standing on the doorstep was a woman in her early thirties with bright eyes and a persuasive smile. “I’m Savannah McKenzie. I write for the Evening Standard a
nd I’m working on a feature on the investigation into Amy Pope’s death. I’ve spoken to the police and I’m really keen to give the neighbors’ side of the story as well. I wondered if you had a minute.”

  Clever opening gambit, Tess thought. Giving the impression that there was a side to challenge, a case to defend. This woman probably hadn’t been given the time of day by the police, let alone any details of a working hypothesis.

  “Did you know the victim at all?”

  “I didn’t, no. Sorry, I can’t help you.”

  “What about this neighbor whose scaffolding collapsed? I gather he’s not the most popular guy on the street?”

  Ms. McKenzie’s tone, impeccably judged to suggest affinity with the cause, gave Tess pause. Might the residents have misjudged the situation with the press? Mistaken an opportunity for a threat? Seeing Em approach the gate, she called out in greeting and the reporter turned to see who it was.

  “We’ve already met,” Em said, preempting her. “Remember? I have nothing to say to you.”

  Her bad-natured tone shocked Tess, though evidently not the journalist, who pressed her card on Tess “just in case.”

  “Good riddance,” Em said to the closed door. “Press, police, the local council . . . they’re all just out for themselves. We’re nothing but collateral.” She was evidently in a bitter mood.

  After putting the coffee on and finding a rice cake for Sam, Tess led her guest into the garden to show Em the headstone for the cygnet. Tuppy sniffed the recently turned soil with interest.

  “The body’s actually under there?” Em asked.

  “No, the police took the corpse as evidence, poor thing. This is a memorial. I couldn’t bear the thought of that beautiful creature just being forgotten.”

  “So it was shot?”

  “Yes, with an air pellet. Have they got an air rifle, do you know? Booth and Jodie.”