Those People

by Louise Candlish

  “Because it’s too dangerous on Lowland Way,” Em said.

  “Dangerous?”

  “Too many people listening. Cameras watching.”

  Sissy had seen the new video entryphone system installed by Ralph and Naomi, listened to Tess’s lament that she couldn’t afford such state-of-the-art security. Perhaps Sissy’s buyers would get one fitted; they were aware of the reasons for the price reduction and would surely wish to secure themselves. “At least not Booth’s,” she pointed out.

  “I know,” Em said. “Ant really impressed me with that, I have to say.”

  Sissy had caught the end of Ant’s offensive, when he’d cracked a car window, and she’d been dumbfounded. “Yes, it didn’t seem like him at all.”

  “Nothing seems like anyone anymore,” Em said.

  Never a truer word, Sissy thought, which made it all the more difficult to concentrate seriously on the declaration Em now made that she had a plan to “put an end” to the mortal threat of Darren Booth “once and for all” and that Jodie’s having left town provided the window of opportunity she’d been waiting for. She intended going a step further than Ant’s senseless violence and breaking into number 1 in the middle of the night. To create an alibi for herself, she needed Sissy to vouch for her by persuading all three Kendalls to sleep at her house. “So just get us over to your place on Thursday night. I’ll help make it happen, obviously, if Ant resists. Then, when everyone’s asleep, I’ll go over.”

  “What exactly are you going to do to him, Em?” Sissy asked. She felt as if she were humoring an overimaginative child.

  “It’s best you don’t know,” Em said.

  It was like making a film in which her character had been told only her own lines, not anyone else’s. Nor even how the plot unfolded, though it was clearly in such a way that made it too much of a risk for the next-door neighbors to sleep in their own beds. Of course, even just guessing made Sissy an accessory to any crime, since she would not be informing the police.

  Not if she wanted Em to keep her mouth shut about the video.

  “Having fun, Sam-Sam?” Em cooed. “Can you hear me, angel?”

  Sam tipped his head back and laughed up at her. He didn’t know there was something wrong with his mum, Sissy judged, but treated her in exactly the way he should: as his star, his center. What was going on in her head to make her plot like this, or even to believe that Lowland Way was too dangerous a place to have a simple conversation? Admittedly, no eavesdropper, witting or otherwise, would be able to pick out their words over the hellish din of Daredevils, but there was more CCTV here than in your average public place. A trained lip-reader could probably help the police decipher this very exchange.

  “Before you do whatever it is you’re going to do, wouldn’t it be best to check in with Ralph and Naomi?” Sissy said.

  “What, like you did?” Em replied. “I’m not interested in checking in with them—or anyone. You’re the only person who knows about this.”

  There was no need to state the reason. Sissy had had many questions when Em had played the video to her, but the first one had been the only one that really mattered:

  “Have you shown this to the police?”

  Em had tipped her head: no.

  “Why didn’t you come to me sooner? Why now?”

  “I didn’t see it myself until last week. I needed some time to think about it.”

  “I,” not “we.”

  “Ant hasn’t seen it?” What sort of a couple hid incendiary material from each other in this way? She’d clearly been wrong to think them close.

  “No. I cut it before he could see it. I sent it to myself in a WhatsApp message. End-to-end encrypted, like Finn said at the meeting. He would’ve wanted to go to the police and I thought you’d suffered enough.” Em paused, eyes grave. “Turns out you’ve suffered more than any of us realized.”

  That was an understatement. What Sissy knew now, what she knew in the rawest way, a way that shocked her several times daily like ice-cold liquid injected into bone, was that the only thing worse than a loved one dying was a loved one dying by your hand.

  “Why are you showing me, then?” she asked Em, a catch of grief in her voice. “Why not destroy it?”

  But she knew the answer; she’d known it immediately: she had not thought to spare Em and now Em would not spare her.

  “You know I only meant him to fall,” Sissy said, “maybe break an arm or leg. I just wanted time off from him, that’s all.”

  “But how could you do that, Sissy, knowing we were next door? Knowing we could have been standing right there when the thing collapsed?” Em’s voice rose to a cry: “Sam could have been under it in his buggy. If Booth’s not there, I often push it slightly underneath it when I come out the door.”

  “If Booth hadn’t been there, it wouldn’t have collapsed. It was his weight that caused it.”

  “You can’t say that for sure. With all those bricks and sacks of sand, it could’ve given way even without him walking on it.”

  “I wasn’t thinking,” Sissy said. “I wasn’t myself.”

  But she had been thinking, hadn’t she? Just one end, she’d been advised, and that would be the direction in which the boards would collapse. She’d chosen the end at Booth’s front door, which would have made it relatively safe for anyone on the Kendalls’ side. And yet, had she chosen the Kendalls’ side, Amy might have survived and the Kendalls would have been unaffected, since they were safely inside.

  She felt a bolt of hatred toward Em. Haven’t I been punished enough for my mistake?

  But Em was nodding as if she’d read Sissy’s mind, was self-consciously reasonable once more. “Well, we can’t change that now. What’s important is what happens next. And this time it needs to be done with no one in the house next door. I’m not taking any chances.”

  Sissy paled. This time. “Are we really having this conversation?”

  “Yes,” Em said. “We really are.”

  * * *

  —

  How had she allowed the criminal spirit to take possession of her? Had it been present in her her whole life, but never invoked? Why had she entered into that exchange on the doorstep with Graham? An exchange that, by the time she’d visited her friend Anthea in Wiltshire and noticed the hardware store near Salisbury train station (the old, unreconstructed kind without cameras), had grown into a set of instructions, a commission.

  “What exactly would you need to do?” she’d asked him as they looked together toward Booth’s scaffolding. “If you wanted it to fall?”

  “You’d need to loosen the bolts that hold the couplings together,” Graham said. “I’d just do the set in the middle and the set at one end. Four altogether.”

  “What are couplings?” Sissy asked.

  “You see where the poles join, under the boards? Those metal bracket things are called bolted couplings. You’d just use a wrench to loosen them and the next time he walked on the boards, it’d come crashing down. It’s just the lower platform, so he’s not going to die.”

  “The very next time?”

  “Yeah, unless he’s Twinkletoes. Hang on—it’s not alarmed, is it? I can see a wire, so I think it might be.”

  “There we go, then,” Sissy said, with exaggerated dismay, but Graham was undeterred.

  “Probably fake, but you’d just cut that before you touched anything,” he said. “To be on the safe side.”

  “Cut it with what?”

  He grinned. “What d’you think, nail scissors? No, wire cutters.”

  “Right.” She paused. “What kind of wrench?”

  “Just a standard one. You’ve probably got one in your garden shed. If not, pick one up at a hardware store. Maybe not a chain, a smaller one, where they probably won’t have cameras. And pay with cash. Seriously, it’s simple. And don’t worry—I won’t
tell a soul.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really. Some people just deserve what they get.”

  Funny, but she trusted him. It was a covenant peculiar to strangers, perhaps, or near strangers, as they were.

  In any case, it was his word against hers, if it ever came to it. What Em had was evidence sufficient to persuade the most ardent Sissy supporter—including Pete—that she’d killed Amy. And he would never understand, never forgive.

  * * *

  —

  Returning, drained and depressed, from her outing with Em, Sissy played voice mails from two missed calls.

  The first was from the police, who, after Pete and Naomi, Sissy now counted as her most dedicated correspondents. She returned the call, hoping to get voice mail, dismayed to have the call picked up on the first ring.

  “It’s just a small thing, Ms. Watkins,” DC Forrester said.

  She’d remembered the “Ms.” A meticulous mind such as hers was a wonderful thing when applied in one’s favor.

  “We’ve read a text message to you from Ralph Morgan? I’ll repeat it to you: ‘I believe we have a common cause.’”

  That was it? They called this fighting crime? “When was this?” Sissy asked politely. “Something to do with Play Out Sunday?”

  “It was sent at eleven twenty-one on Saturday the fourteenth of July.”

  “Oh.” Was it only Ralph’s texts they’d accessed or hers too? But her indignation was born of muscle memory. She no longer cared. “That particular common cause was getting the council to stop Booth destroying our street, but we’ve had many over the years.”

  “You like to work together when you have a problem?”

  “I suppose so, yes.”

  “Would you say Ralph Morgan is well-off?”

  The change of direction took her aback. “He’s comfortably off, yes. He owns his house and a warehouse in Bermondsey. That’s probably worth a few million these days.”

  When the call had ended, Sissy stood for a minute in the garden, regulating her breathing, and the sounds from Portsmouth Avenue made her nostalgic, took her back to a time when all she’d had to grumble about was the screech of traffic braking at the lights on the other side of her wall. The sirens of emergency vehicles racing to the hospital or to the Rushmoor Estate, bypassing Lowland Way, where nothing frightening ever happened.

  The second voice mail required no response from her but was, in its own way, more upsetting than the first.

  “This is a message from Arrowby Legal. We understand that you or a loved one has recently been involved in an accident. If you would like advice on how to claim for personal injury compensation, please phone one of our qualified advisers on this number. . . .”

  “There is no compensation,” Sissy murmured, feeling a crumpling sensation in her legs and managing to keep herself upright by sheer force of will. “There won’t ever be.”

  CHAPTER

  29

  TESS

  She was beginning to think she was being picked on by the police.

  No, that was irrational. She was just feeling fragile because Dex had started school.

  “Yes, that is true,” she said down the phone to DC Shah. “I did scream ‘I hate you’ at him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’d just killed Amy Pope, a lovely young woman with her whole life ahead of her, and he was completely remorseless!”

  “I see. Returning to the walk you took with your dog in the early hours . . .”

  “That again?” She exhaled, worn down. “Fine, yes, I hold my hand up to that one. I put the dog shit on their doorstep the night before the scaffolding collapsed. I’m not proud. It was stupid and petty. Actually, from what I’ve been told since, it must have been when Jodie was out getting cigarettes. I was lucky she didn’t come back and catch me.”

  “And yet she came to your house to remonstrate about it, didn’t she?”

  “Yes. That’s how I know she was the one who killed the cygnet. It was right after that. She knew how much I cared about them. Can I ask you something? If I were to record her confessing to it, would you take me seriously? It wouldn’t be a crime, would it, to record her on my phone?”

  “It could certainly be considered a breach of her privacy,” DC Shah said. “It’s some time since the incident with the bird, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. But some of us aren’t so knee-jerk as others. We wait for the initial anger to subside before making a plan.”

  “Who would you consider knee-jerk?” DC Shah asked.

  Kicking herself, she made no answer.

  “Is it correct that you plan to move, Mrs. Morgan?”

  “Who told you that? OK, well, yes and no. I wanted to, because of schools, you know? But then we had all these problems with Booth and we thought there was no point; we wouldn’t be able to sell. I mean, I know Sissy’s selling—she has no choice—but I heard her house has been seriously undervalued. If I were her, I’d be really disappointed.”

  “So the value of your house is a major concern for you?”

  “Not major, but a concern, yes. Certainly not a motive to do away with a bad neighbor, if that’s what you’re thinking. People don’t kill over house prices, do they?”

  “I’d say it’s a question worth asking,” he responded.

  Well, she’d walked straight into that one.

  * * *

  —

  She was up in Dex’s bedroom, about to ease shut his sash window in anticipation of Booth’s night music, when she heard Finn and Ralph on the terrace below. Quite unbidden, the memory of meeting Ralph for the first time surged to the surface. The brothers had been in their twenties and yet she’d thought right away of the Artful Dodger. Which made Finn Oliver Twist, the one who got caught. This evening, her fingers gripping the window frame as if tethering the house to its moorings, she felt memory transform into premonition.

  “Have you done it?” Finn asked.

  “I certainly have,” Ralph said.

  “I can’t believe it. When will it happen?”

  “Sooner rather than later, I hope.”

  “Nay OK about it?”

  “Took a bit of persuading—I’m not going to lie.”

  Tess stiffened. Whatever this was, Naomi knew about it. Only she, of the four adults, was not included. Incredible. Inexcusable.

  “Amazing to think it could all be over soon,” Finn said.

  “Amazing to think we could have done this right at the start,” Ralph said. “Saved ourselves all this crap.”

  “Let’s go over it tonight,” Finn said. “There’s stuff I need to ask you.”

  Another night at the Fox. It wouldn’t surprise Tess if they asked her to babysit so they could take Naomi with them.

  When Finn came back in, she was waiting for him, resentment burning. “How will it all be over?” she demanded. Then, the thought striking: “Is this about the wall? I thought that was Naomi’s idea, not Ralph’s.”

  Finn rearranged his face from guilt to innocence. “What wall? This is news—tell me!”

  But Tess knew a deflection when she heard one. “What, then? What’s going on?”

  He gave her an infuriatingly secret smile. “Something good. Really good. Don’t look at me like that. I promised Ralph I wouldn’t say anything. It needs to be kept completely confidential or it might not happen.”

  In other words, Ralph thought she was a blabbermouth. He’d spotted another opportunity to subtly downgrade her.

  “But Naomi knows?”

  “She has to.” He paused, a flicker of irritation crossing his eyes. “This isn’t a competition, Tess.”

  Tess bristled. “If you really think it’s competitive for a wife to ask her husband for information about his behavior that someone else’s wife already knows, then I don’t think there’
s any point.”

  “Any point what?” Finn said, and his tone was not fearful or conciliatory, as she might have expected, but challenging. His eyes held hers as if she were the one with something to answer to. “And what ‘behavior’? You make it sound like I’m a child.”

  “Keeping secrets with your brother? Sounds pretty childish to me.” Tess felt a great heaviness then, not so much of defeat as of loss. All of a sudden, her happy, robust marriage felt like an irrevocable tragedy. “I can’t go on, Finn. I can’t go on with you two plotting. How do you think it makes me feel, knowing you’ll help him but you won’t help me?”

  Finn threw up his hands. “Help you do what? You haven’t asked me to do anything!”

  “I’m asking you now. I want to get a confession from Jodie about the cygnet, and you could come with me, intimidate her a bit. It’s something the police will definitely be able to prosecute. I’ve spoken to them about it.” She didn’t mention the breach-of-privacy caution.

  Finn sighed deeply. “Oh, that.”

  “Yes, that. It was just a bird to you, wasn’t it? Its life doesn’t matter. Well, it matters to me and I’m doing it tomorrow, with or without anyone else’s support. I’ll go round in the morning after I’ve dropped the kids at school.”

  Finn’s gaze was stern. “Don’t go into that house, Tess. It’s not safe.”

  “Why? There’s no scaffolding to kill me. Amy Pope already took one for the team, remember?”

  There was a shocked silence. As they stared at each other, each as revolted as the other, it struck Tess that it was a miracle they hadn’t reached this point before now, so immense had been the stress, the grief.

  “Don’t go,” Finn repeated.

  “I’ll go exactly where I please.” Tess turned to leave. “You’ve got your plan; I’ve got mine. Let’s see whose works best.”

  CHAPTER