“With a friend. I wanted to speak to you without being distracted. Can I come in?”
She advanced so determinedly over the threshold that Sissy had no choice but to comply. They came to a halt at the kitchen table, the agent’s half-drunk mug of coffee still sitting where it had been left mid-negotiation, and before Sissy could offer her new guest a seat, Em took one, murmuring to herself as she did.
Sissy lowered herself into the seat opposite. “What’s this about, Em? You’re worrying me.”
Em held up an iPhone, the screen lighting up as she lifted it to show a paused video, monochrome and murky, nighttime footage of some sort, a dark figure visible in the top left-hand corner. The white arrow of the play function sat dead center, awaiting Em’s command. Sissy understood then the ambivalence of that doorstep “sorry”: it was a “sorry” for what was to come, not what had been.
It was not really a “sorry” at all.
As Em’s fingertip made contact with the arrow and the video began to play, it was immediately obvious that the figure was Sissy.
The time stamp read: Aug 11, 2018 02:10.
CHAPTER
26
ANT
The situation was getting way too intense; not only had the police taken it upon themselves to speak to his colleagues, but they were challenging him about the “reports” they’d collected even as he sat on a crowded train into work. OK, so most of the other passengers were plugged into their private universes, but he still felt hounded; he still felt humiliated.
He still felt scared.
“In a meeting with your team on the twenty-third of July, you were heard to say that you were conspiring with the neighbors about Mr. Booth?” DC Shah asked.
“Well, yes, but I meant in terms of our complaints to the council about his car business and the noise problem. If one of my colleagues was worried I meant something more serious, well, that’s their interpretation, but I can assure you there’s been nothing criminal.”
A couple of sets of eyes glanced up at this and Ant turned his face to the window, to the rolling spectacle of new apartment blocks along the tracks, shiny balconies decorated with already-dying plants and abandoned bikes. How he wished he lived in one of them, instead of the “idyllic” suburb of Lowland Gardens.
“And on the twenty-seventh, you sent a text to your wife that said, ‘Still at Ralph’s, discussing Booth strategy’?”
“What? How’ve you got hold of my texts? I don’t remember that one at all, but you need to read the whole thread of messages.”
“Your wife responded, ‘I want no part of this.’”
“Yes, she thought we were wasting our time with the council.”
“But you can see why messages like these catch our eye,” DC Shah said.
Ant fell silent. It felt as if everything he said could be misconstrued. When the train pulled up at the platform in Victoria Station, his stop and the end of the line, he remained in his seat as everyone else scrambled to disembark.
In his ear, DC Shah began again: “Perhaps if you were to help us on what you were doing outside late at night on the tenth? Why you needed to step under the scaffolding.”
For the first time in his interactions with the detective, there was a mood of negotiation. Alone in the carriage, Ant made his decision. “Fine. I wasn’t completely honest when we spoke before: when I went out that night, there was a reason.” He breathed in, aware that the facts could hardly sound more fantastical if he was making them up on the spot. “I’ve got this thing—it’s called a death whistle. I bought it online. It makes the most horrendous sound, really eerie, makes your skin crawl. I was thinking I would blow it through their letter slot, give them a bit of a fright, but then I saw their window had been left open a bit and I blew it through that instead. It was crazy. They were playing music—I knew they probably couldn’t hear it. I remember thinking, I’ll come back when the music’s stopped. Then they’ll hear it.”
There was a pause. No detective could have expected that. “Do you still have this whistle in your possession? And proof of purchase?”
“Yes, both. I’ll forward the receipt when I get to work.”
As passengers entered the carriage for the outbound service, Ant stood to leave. He already knew he would not confront any of his colleagues. It wasn’t as if they’d lied, and they might even have thought they were helping.
“Did you go back when the music stopped, Mr. Kendall?”
“No, I fell asleep.”
“Sure about that?”
“Yes,” Ant said. “Absolutely.”
* * *
—
If someone had told him it would be him, of all of them, who retaliated against Booth with horrible violence, he would have thought they’d lost their mind. Especially as, for the first time, there was progress with their official procedures. According to Ralph, Booth had finally heeded the council’s warning and applied for a license to trade from a residential address, and the trading standards department had flagged the application for special debate, owing to the number of complaints lodged against him. At Ralph’s request, Ant was among those to e-mail the committee pleading against granting the license. He did not consult Em, who was currently relatively upbeat, a state of affairs unexpected enough for him to choose to leave well alone. Her friendship with Tess seemed to have cooled, but she was spending more time with Sissy and, though he knew better than to share the view, Ant hoped exposure to Sissy’s grief would help put Em’s own predicament into perspective.
“We can’t count on the council. Someone needs to scare the bastard good and proper,” Ralph told Ant. “Me and Finn are putting our heads together, if you know what I mean.” His adoption of this sort of talk contained a certain swagger; their troubles with Booth had released something in him that came very naturally, and far from being warned off by Amy Pope’s death, he seemed galvanized by it.
“Should we have another meeting?” Ant suggested.
“Nah,” Ralph said. “Too many killjoys in the group.”
A text message from Em was what triggered his savagery. It was Sunday and she’d taken Sam to visit her old school friend Gwen, who lived in Oxfordshire in bucolic tranquility (aka a normal house on a normal street with normal neighbors), leaving Ant to finish a work presentation. Earplugs only half smothered Metallica headlining next door. The message read:
Gwen says we need to get a referral to a pediatric hearing specialist ASAP. Sam should be making a lot more sounds by now, must not be hearing properly.
He felt immediate and painful drumming in his chest. Had this opinion come from anyone else, he would have disregarded it, but Gwen was a GP and mother of three. This whole time, he’d clung to the belief that Sam would be all right, that the noise pollution wasn’t quite bad enough to do permanent physical damage, and yet it might actually be that it was bad enough, that time had run out.
Filled with a transformative rage he had never before experienced, he snapped shut his laptop, tore out the earplugs and went to fetch a long-handled rake from the garden shed. Back out front, he sidestepped along the wall toward Booth’s front door, not caring if Booth was standing in front of him or not—in fact, he was not, which was fortunate, though his front door was open, music throbbing. Ant took a single step outward and swung the rake over his head to strike the camera. After two cracks, part of it fell to the ground and he kicked this angrily aside. Without hesitating, he then smashed the implement through Booth’s living room window. As glass shattered, showering the room beyond, a violent whirring started up in his ears, preventing him from processing the full impact of what he’d done. It was as he was attacking the nearest car that Booth came out of the house, a human bullet suspending itself just out of range of the rake’s teeth. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
The rake still raised, Ant held firm, his demeanor defiant, even proud. “Wha
t the fuck does it look like?”
As Booth examined the window, his face flushed with confusion and outrage. Breathing hard, he dislodged a shard of glass from the window frame with his fingers and studied it with exaggerated interest. When he raised his gaze to Ant and spoke again, his tone was low and threatening: “So, you’re a hard man all of a sudden, are you? Yeah, right. We all know you’re pussy-whipped, mate. But that’s your problem. Don’t take it out on me.”
Ant stared back, unblinking, high on the empowering energy of pure rage.
“Consider yourself warned,” Booth said, and he stepped very slowly back inside.
A minute later, he heard Booth in his back garden starting up an electric tool of some sort, and for a brief, disorientating time Ant anticipated him hacking down his door, hacking him to death. But, checking from the upstairs window at the back, he saw that his neighbor was cutting plywood with a circular saw. Tracking him to the front, Ant watched him measure up the window, presumably to board it up with the ply.
Standing at their gates, Sara Boulter and Sissy gazed across in open despair at the destroyed glass, the fragments that covered their neighbors’ drive. Ant supposed they must have seen his little spree—like something out of A Clockwork Orange. In the street between them, the cars were parked bumper to bumper, the road and sidewalks empty of children.
He imagined them thinking, Is this what’s become of Play Out Sunday?
CHAPTER
27
RALPH
No sooner had he wound up an unusually fractious call from a long-standing customer about a product he seriously struggled to care about—the prong of a belt buckle had decided to detach; several people had returned the item—than DC Forrester was on the phone again. Jesus, it was ten o’clock on a Monday morning—she couldn’t keep away from him!
“I’m interested in a text you sent to Jodie on the subject of moving the RV parked outside your house. ‘Or else you’ll regret it’?”
“You’ve read my texts?” Ralph said, aggrieved. “On what grounds?”
“It sounds a lot like a threat, Mr. Morgan.”
“What, asking you on what grounds you’re reading my texts?”
“No, the text itself.”
He sighed. “Of course it wasn’t a threat. It was banter.” Unlike this. “And I thought it was his number, not hers. She didn’t identify herself when she replied. She let me think it was him. I’d call that entrapment.”
Naturally, DC Forrester did not. “You were also heard to say that you wanted to burn their house down?”
“Well, ideally someone else would’ve done it.” Ralph laughed at his own joke, but in the reproachful silence that followed he fancied he could hear it: the idea, the consideration, that he might now be asked to come into the station for a more formal discussion. An interview. He’d looked up police procedure online and that was definitely what came next. A recorded interview. Please state your full name and address, or however they started it. Usually before or after the subject had been charged.
“Would you say your wife became unusually angry with Mr. Booth when her children’s play program was suspended?”
“Play Out Sunday?” Ralph was struggling to get his bearings in this conversation. “She was upset, yes. She’s invested a lot personally in making this a great place to live. But ‘unusually angry’? No.”
As it happened, “angry” was a fairly accurate description of Naomi at the breakfast table three hours earlier, when she’d stumbled upon the latest media dispatch regarding the siege suffered by the residents of Lowland Way:
AWARD-WINNING KIDS PLAY PROGRAM BITES THE DUST
The community initiative that won an Urban Spaces Award from City Hall has spectacularly failed following a breakdown in cooperation among the street’s residents. “I’d say we’re more famous now for the death of Amy Pope,” confided one disappointed resident who asked not to be named.
Ms. Pope died in August in a gruesome scaffolding crush on the street, and police, who are treating the investigation as a murder inquiry, have cleared the owner of the scaffolding of any wrongdoing.
“It’s very hard to keep street play sessions going week after week, year after year,” said a spokesman for the National Free Play Group, which campaigns nationwide to restore old-style free play on children’s own doorsteps. “Without the complete dedication of parents and residents, they can easily bite the dust.”
SOUTH OF THE RIVER ONLINE
“Bloody cheek,” Naomi raged. “It’s nothing to do with our ‘dedication.’ It’s to do with a complete madman endangering our children’s lives.”
“You’re preaching to the converted, babe,” Ralph agreed grimly.
“Mr. Morgan?”
“Sorry, yes?” He’d forgotten Eithne Forrester in his ear.
“I said, I understand there was conflict between your wife and your sister-in-law on the night of the tenth?”
“Did Tess tell you that?” Whatever Finn insisted to the contrary, she was a liability, that wife of his. Ralph wouldn’t be surprised if she was the one “confiding” in the press. Then he remembered Daisy. The kid wouldn’t have had a clue they were suspects here; she might well have mentioned the row. “There was an exchange of words that night, yes, but nothing important. Jesus, he must be loving this, knowing you’re investigating us instead of him. Paid for with our taxes, I might add, because I don’t suppose he pays any. Let’s see someone investigate that, eh, rather than insinuating some nonsense about my wife, who’s never done anything but good for this community!”
He was getting emotional, and when the detective let him go, he stood by the window for some minutes, recovering himself. His eye was caught by a camper van in the street below, the same filthy orange as the rust-bucket monstrosity outside his house, which triggered a fantasy about a hydraulic car crusher flattening each of Booth’s vehicles in turn as neighbors applauded rapturously from the curb. For the thousandth time he asked himself how it was that some jumped-up arriviste had had the audacity to move into their street and start treating it as his personal car park. To kill a woman and yet get “cleared of any wrongdoing.”
You couldn’t make it up.
The camper van was blocking access to the warehouse, which made him remember the protesters Ben had had to wrangle when Ralph was on holiday. Hundreds of Lesbians Against Bankers, or whatever, assembling right here.
And it was then, when he wasn’t even trying, in a moment that felt faintly magical, that he finally had his idea.
* * *
—
He rang Naomi to tell her straightaway, or rather he tried to persuade her to let him tell her.
“I don’t want to hear it, Ralph,” she said, and he could sense her mouth tightening around the words, “especially if it’s anything like Ant’s solution yesterday. He could have injured a passing child or animal, even blinded them. He was extremely lucky not to be arrested.”
“No, this is properly good,” Ralph insisted. Personally, he had been both thrilled and amazed by Ant’s response to his call to arms. “Someone needs to scare the bastard good and proper,” he’d said, but he’d never imagined Ant would be the one to step up. Nice work re Booth, he’d texted him, when he’d heard (no doubt that would come back to haunt him). Of course, the problem was that Booth had not been scared off. When Ralph had left that morning, Booth was already up and out in his filthy old overalls. Still working on his house, still openly selling his cars, still blaring out his music.
“This is something we should have done in the beginning,” he added.
There was a pause and he knew Naomi was considering whether to allow herself to be curious. Not indulging him and his Booth obsession had become a matter of discipline to her. And yet, that news item about Play Out Sunday had deeply offended her, and timing was everything.
“I could always tell you tonight,” h
e said reasonably, “but I’d rather get it under way right now. Are you sure you don’t want to hear it?”
He waited. One beat. Two. Three.
“Get what under way?” she said.
CHAPTER
28
SISSY
The Daredevils’ Soft Play Center, with its climbing frames and slides and giant ball pool, provoked an instant headache in Sissy. The psychedelia of primary colors under prison-camp searchlights, the ceaseless screech of infants. And the heat! It made her want to tear her skin off. Hard to see how Em found it preferable to her own home, even with Booth’s renewed program of drilling and revving and pounding.
A weekend had passed since Sissy had watched herself on Em’s phone screen, captured at ten past two in the early hours of August the eleventh. Her movements were miniaturized and grainy, but it was indisputably her as she hurried toward the camera—positioned, she had learned, in the Kendalls’ upstairs window, Sam’s bedroom, and right at the end of its battery life. Then off she veered to the right of the screen, toward Booth’s door.
The time stamp showed that she was out of range—under the scaffolding—for one minute and fifty-three seconds, before reappearing. Fast, but not so fast that it could be demonstrated to a jury of her peers to be impossible.
Soon after, the camera had caught up with her again as she crouched by Booth’s white van; it recorded the backhand flick of her arm as she disposed of something under its wheels. She’d thought it safer to leave the wrench and wire cutters in the chaos of his premises than to take them with her and attempt to conceal them in her own house. The footage showed her to be wearing gloves, since thrown out with the rubbish.
“Why are we meeting here?” she asked. She was perched on the edge of a huge pit of colored balls in which Em had immersed herself, Sam wedged between her legs. His little bare arms smacked at the balls, eyes drunk with joy.
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