by Ese McGowan
‘Close? You mean in the last week or two?’
‘Oh, no, they’ve known each other a long time. That’s what she told me anyway. She flirts with him for sure. She has a weird sex appeal. My boyfriend couldn’t stop staring at her at the party and it’s not like she’s a knockout or anything. Quite plain really but there is something about her. I think only men can see it but my boyfriend didn’t hear a word I said when she was around. It was embarrassing. He looked a right fool as she wasn’t remotely interested in him and her boyfriend, Joel, or maybe he’s her husband, not sure about that, anyway, he’s a really weird guy, he lapped it up – what she was doing with Adam. It definitely turned him on and he wasn’t the slightest bit interested in flirting with other women, not even Erin and Erin is definitely beautiful, ugly moods but she’s extremely attractive. Probably why she was so knocked down when Alicia came along because Alicia just isn’t all that. Must have screwed with her head but that’s no excuse for what happened. I think she’d tried to push Alicia off the roof, there was a scuffle and Joel fell by accident but murder is murder, isn’t it?’
Miriam feels a little like she has just stepped into a teenage youth club. Are all of this crowd this weird, this childish? Does Mabel actually have anything pertinent to say about Joel’s death?
Doubtful.
‘It all came to a head at the party and you could feel the whole thing brewing. Erin was so wired with anxiety you half expected her hair to light up, like fairy lights. The tension around her was epic. The looks she fired at Alicia were pure hatred and she clung to Adam, desperately, most of the time and he kept pushing her off. It was painful to watch. She was drunk. Very, very drunk. They all were. But it was before the total lockdown happened, that all the shit started, big time.’
9
Erin Green’s continued written voluntary statement, in room four.
I was in the kitchen when I heard her giggle. The traditional route via the front door had been overridden by Adam’s assembly of a stile between their garden and ours. No, I’m not kidding. The joy of free living. I wanted to puke. He was overjoyed she had brought a six pack of his favourite beer. She had remembered him telling her before. He had planned ahead, apparently, knowing she would bring beers and had some glasses icing in the freezer. It wasn’t bloody hot outside. Sunny, yes, but hardly balmy, not that she’d checked the weather before she stepped out in her shorts. It was Spring for Christ’s sake, not August. She found everything so hilarious and he loved it. He was lounging on one of the deckchairs he had pulled out from the shed, our shed not Joel’s, and placed on the decking alongside a camelia plant, remembering she had loved the one out front so much. How very thoughtful of him. He had never been this considerate with me. He was bewitched by her. He was also a sucker for cannabis and the farm in Joel’s enormous shed would be harvested in roughly two to three months, according to Alicia. So it was a double whammy for him. You have to wonder if that’s how her parents made their money, from drugs.
As he was about to bound into the kitchen to fetch the iced glasses like a salivating puppy she stopped him. She would get them, she said. He should stay where he was because he looked so comfortable that she couldn’t bring herself to move him. What a kindness! He told her she could help him with the crossword when she got back and suggested she plug in her phone and play that song list she had told him about yesterday, the one she had compiled for him.
A lump formed in my throat and I started to shake, involuntarily of course. I could think of nothing to say to her as I saw her in my periphery swaying and swishing her backside over towards the kitchen with Adam coyly admiring her as she did so. And I was watching, not that he cared. She didn’t move quickly. She was slow, suggestive, deliberate. She knew he was watching her and she knew and wanted me to watch. I couldn’t help it, I complied. I didn’t want to. I wanted to pretend that none of this bothered me. She was nothing compared to me, not even slightly. And she was everything because she had devoured me in one bite and no matter how much I told myself I was intact and above it all, her lethal injection culling my plunging self-esteem was a battle I was overwhelmingly losing. You ever meet a woman like that?
‘Hey Erin, lovely day isn’t it?’ she said, moving straight past me and opening the freezer door, removing the glasses and placing them down, then thoughtfully tearing off two pieces of kitchen roll and carefully wrapping each around the individual iced glasses in a perfect triangle. ‘You don’t drink beer do you?’ she said, plugging in her iPhone and setting it to play.
‘Not today I don’t,’ I said referring to her slight. Would have been nice to have been asked instead of told.
‘Why don’t you come and join us outside? I’m sure Adam can find another chair, or you could bring one of these outside,’ she suggested knocking a wooden kitchen chair with her hip. Whose effing house was this?
‘Er, no, they don’t go outside,’ I said about the chairs, as if they were something special. They weren’t. Nothing much was special in this house. A load of second hand junk that was sentimental to me, like those deckchairs he had put out for you Alicia. That Adam and I had bought together, on Sundays, walking back from the flower market, or the riverside, or the pub, together, before you existed. When we were happy or when I was happy to be under his glare. And now I’m not.
‘Yeah, I will when I’ve finished this.’
‘What are you doing? Work?’ she asked me, peering from the bottom of her eyes. You couldn’t pen on much more eyeliner if you tried, Alicia.
‘Something like that,’ I replied as she gathered the glasses. The music starting. Al Green. Let’s Stay Together. I never want to hear that song again in my life. I loved it and now I hate it. I hate her.
The something like that was not work. I was looking for a one bedroom flat. Planning my escape. Capitulating. Suffocating. Because as much as I loved him, if I did love him, (I don’t know what love is) I did not love one second of this. I couldn’t bear it. It delivered a rank taste in my mouth. A churning in my gut. And it was all attention seeking bullshit. I had no intention of moving out. He could move out. She could move away. I would move. They would win. I was spiralling.
I didn’t join them outside. I went upstairs. I punished myself for a good half an hour, crouched, hidden beneath the window upstairs, listening to them, hearing their enjoyment of each other, him, Adam, oblivious to my existence when she was around. Was she his one? I thought I was his one. He had told me that. But it sounded a whole lot like she was. I wasn’t a sound for them much at all.
I crawled away from the window and shut myself in the bedroom. I tried to read a book. I read the same page a thousand times and prayed for her to go home, to leave. I must have fallen asleep at some point.
It was dark when he woke me. He was going to spend the evening at hers. Planning a moving in party. Don’t wait up, he told me.
So why wake me up to tell me?
10
Detective Miriam Sykes has spent the last hour calling numbers that ring out. I gather from the deep sighing that she finds this frustrating. She likes to beat down a front door and peer through a window at the witness to intimidate their response into action. Alas, by the hour, no one is supposed to be going anywhere and thus it has become irksome to say the least that apparently, nobody is now available to take her call. She loathes answerphones. If the IT set up isn’t such an archaic joke in a far from modern Police Station, she would prefer to conduct interviews on Facetime or some video mode, rather than a voice call. Half of her interrogation technique is built on reading the expressions of those who sit before her and without this device she feels tremendously hindered. She has made that crystal clear when ravaging the IT guy for the tremendous fuck up she is experiencing in running the phone lines through the computer for aided recording. Waste of my damn time, she hollers at him and then some other words I am unable to make out. It is mildly entertaining. A pleasant reprieve from my descriptive statement which I am still toiling over.
&n
bsp; At some point, before the day is out she is going interview Erin Green, me, who is still holed up in one of the interview suites writing her biography. Not exactly how I would have described it, but fair enough, everyone has a view.
She doesn’t want some lawyer dishing out the Human Rights Act at her for keeping her at the Police Station, under duress, without charge and as far as charging me with murder, there is no evidence to do so.
Good to know.
‘Make sure someone gets me a signed statement that declares she’s in here of her own free will,’ she screams out at the officers, sitting limply with little else to do.
The accusation from a cold grudge bearer, Alicia Mason is by no means enough to charge me and backed up by a disparate friend, at best an acquaintance, isn’t going to cut it. ‘Alicia is as much of a suspect as Erin right now, if there needs to be a suspect at all, if this isn’t just a pissed-up accident,’ says Miriam.
Whatever all these people spouted out, Joel Mason may have fallen to his death by way of an unfortunate mishap and people who want to cause trouble for Erin Green want to make this something it never was. The jury is out and the forensics, obviously, aren’t in. I hear her say, sort of, as her voice fades in and out as she stomps around the office, akin to a wave rolling in and then away.
Pearl Ritter’s telephone, however, has been manned and she has been expecting and anticipating the call from the detective. Told not to attend the station despite her keenness, she has conceded to detailing her thoughts on the situation forthwith, via telephone.
As is Miriam’s way, she lets Pearl talk. She, Pearl is the type, it seems, that likes to do a lot of talking.
‘It was awful living next door to those two,’ Pearl begins.
Pearl has that kind of vocal tone that immediately gets your back up. It smacks of passive manipulation. I hope Miriam picks up on this and does not let the nebulous cloud mar the slyness she nakedly displays on a clear day.
‘I couldn’t cope with it any longer,’ she continues. ‘I waited for them to go away, I saw them trundle off up the street with their weekend bags or whatever you call them and I moved out.
‘And before you ask, no I didn’t sell the house to Alicia. She’s lying about that. She’s rents it from me. Actually it’s Joel who pays. Whether she pays him anything at all I don’t know. But the agreement was with him. I am considering selling to him, was, sorry, because he’s dead now isn’t he? And it’s a joke that she contributes nothing to the rent because she’s rich. She made a big thing of that. Her parents are extremely wealthy.’
Pearl doesn’t actually allow any room for any conversational interjection. It’s a monologue. A dry one.
‘Both of them made me cringe, Erin and Adam. They thought I really liked them but I absolutely despised them. Actually, correction, I despised her.
‘I had been waiting for them to move for years so that I could finally have a little piece of quiet away from them. I began to think I didn’t actually care who I got in their place as long as it wasn’t them.
‘They did a lot of shouting, screaming at each other and I don’t know if it was a sex thing as always afterwards they would have loud graphic sex, after the shouting and throwing things at each other. I was quite sure they were violent with each other, particularly her, Erin Green. Don’t get sucked in by her. She’s poison, as true as is.’
So glad I made such a good impression on you Pearl!
‘You understand how I couldn’t put up with that anymore? How that can make a person wish bad things would happen to them because, may the Lord forgive me, I wished the most terrible things on them, especially on her, especially now, with the virus.’
‘Ok, I think it’s best you don’t go down that route, Mrs Ritter. Let’s concentrate on what happened last night shall we?’ Interjects Miriam.
‘I will. Oh I will but this is all very important that you know what this person is like. How she ticks. I was sick and tired of them, her, waking me up at five in the morning crashing around, slamming the front door and then coming home at all hours, and mostly drunk. And that Erin – she was a lush, of the highest proportion. She thought herself something special. Can’t say I’m not glad it’s all gone wrong for her; she deserves it, because she killed Joel. It has her hallmark all over this. She’s mentally deranged and if you talk to her— have you been talking to her yet?’
‘Can’t tell you that I’m afraid,’ remarks Miriam.
No, but you’re more than happy for me to hear all of this. Impossible that you don’t know I can.
‘Well, you’ll see when you do,’ thrashes out Pearl, sweet little old lady Pearl, ‘what she’s like and you’ll agree with me. There’s something very wrong with that woman.
‘He was ok, Adam. If you like that sort of man. He was very scruffy but he thought a lot of himself. Very earthy looking. Tall, big nose which somehow it made him enigmatic. I know lots of women said they wouldn’t turn him out of bed. Dana across the road had a big thing for him. It was nauseating the way she threw herself at him but Erin didn’t seem phased. You should make sure you don’t fall for the victim crap from Erin. She’s not bothered by anyone. She has an ego the size of the Titanic and I doubt very much that anyone could knock her from her perch. She is a nasty, venomous spoilt little brat who thinks her good looks can get her whatever she wants.’
I really don’t. I wish I did, sometimes.
‘He wasn’t my type, Adam, even if I were his age. Nothing like my wonderful husband, who was a true gentleman. Adam wasn’t impolite. He was friendly enough. Too friendly maybe. I didn’t mind him really. He could be very funny, not like her. She was miserable. She was awful.
‘When she was away, though, Erin, and she was away a lot, well they both were at times, together sometimes and separately— Anyway, he would have people over, mostly women. I think the one who visited him the most when she wasn’t there was Alicia. Oh yes, her and Adam had history, that’s a fact. One of the reasons I let the place to her and Joel – I thought Erin deserved a lesson in hurt. I wanted her big gob rammed shut once and for all.’
Miriam throws in a question as Pearl sips whatever is keeping her going from the glass that bangs against the telephone receiver. You can hear her struggled gulp racing for free space in her mouth to return to the tirade against me. ‘Is there a reason you feel like that? Did she do something to you?’
‘Yes, actually she did and I will never forgive her for it,’ slams Pearl with virulent contempt in her voice.
‘Go on,’ encourages Miriam, rolling her eyes behind the telephone line. She has to be. I am. Let’s hear this. It’ll be a seismic slight on my person because I will have had to have done something overbearingly damaging to her to have reached this level of hatred in her eyes.
‘She told the council about me.’
Ok, yeah, this is true.
‘I was on disability benefit, on top on my pension because of my knees. I have terrible knees and have been waiting years for the NHS to help me but they stick me on this damn waiting list and bump me down to the bottom year on year, so I need this extra help. Anyway, one day, when I was out painfully walking the dog because I have no one else to do things like that for me and he’s my only company since my husband passed away, the council came round to my house to assess me and Erin stuck her nose in and said I was out. She told them I was on one of my big mammoth walks and that I put her to shame with how fit I was in comparison to her. So of course they took my benefit away from me and threatened me with court action for benefit fraud. When I told Erin what I thought of her nice little chat with the council she laughed it off and said she had no idea who they were or why they were here and at no point did she ever apologise to me. That’s the person you’re dealing with. You still there?’
‘Yes, just listening,’ replies Miriam with an essence of exasperation in her voice.
‘She always seemed a person to have never experienced anything bad happening to her. She’d got away with a lot. It had all
become too easy for her and I had the distinct impression that she wasn’t the easiest person for anyone to deal with. Adam must have been very unhappy with her. In fact I know he was. And she certainly went through friends like I go through chocolate. She was smug. She was always right about everything. She could never see anyone else’s point of view. I have no idea how they met, her and Adam. Must have been when he was high on drugs. I have no idea what on earth he saw in her, other than sex. Maybe she was good at it but I think Alicia must have been better. He was obsessed with Alicia. Well, still is. She isn’t with him but he worships the ground she walks on.
‘Anyway. I saw a lot of what happened round there before and after the lockdown. I moved to a house around the corner. I like the area. I wanted to stay here. I thought if I moved around the corner I could monitor them, wait for them to leave without having to listen to their crap anymore and then move back in.
‘And I’m pretty sure I saw Erin run over that kid, a couple of days ago, in the street. Did you know about that?’
‘Yes Mrs Ritter and that was nothing to do with Erin Green. That was an accident.’
‘Yeah, I bet that’s what she says. That was not accident. She’s a psycho, a killer.’
Lovely.
‘Ok,’ replies Miriam calmly, ‘that’s as maybe but the kid was only bruised and I have spoken to the parents about that and they told me he ran out into the road, in front of your car and that you were driving no faster than five, not ten, miles per hour.’
‘Oh.’
11
Erin Green’s voluntary statement, Part 3.
I knew Alicia didn’t really want me at the party, the first party because they were many. I don’t know how many. It was the ‘Last Hurrah’, she said, before the big lockdown. Only, it was the first of the ‘Last Hurrahs’ whatever they all might say. It was a stupid idea. It was like putting sardines in a sweaty small tin can and spraying the lot of them with the virus. Hand washing, distancing, no one gave a shit. It was an old people’s disease. She said that over and over, Alicia, boosted by a load of moronic followers agreeing how old people deserved it, that they were a drain on resources, that they were a drain on clean air.