The Perfect Neighbours

by Rachel Sargeant

  Manfred turned to her. “The policeman said the alibi is falsch.”

  Acid came up to her throat. “So now we know,” she whispered.

  “I’ve always known,” Damian said.

  Manfred drank his schnapps.

  40

  Saturday, 11 December

  “You’ll share a bottle of red, won’t you?” Damian said after he’d placed his order for bolognaise with the waiter. “The house wine is drinkable. Have you been here before?”

  “Once.” The dreadful time with Gary to make up for a silly row. The Howards had been there and the Mowars, making her sulk behind the fake ivy. She should have made more effort. Time was finite; it ended like everything else. Gary and Helen. Helen and Gary. Gone.

  A bark of laughter at the next table; the school admin staff’s Christmas party. From the open, trellis-free side of her booth, Helen had a clear view. One was Geoff Barton. No, too fat, and badly dressed. And the woman next to him looked nothing like Karola. An inked salamander crawled on her shoulder.

  The waiter was hovering, biting his lip, pen over his notebook. Helen didn’t want anything but chose the Parma ham starter as a main and a mineral water. He walked away, not bothering to write it down.

  “You have to eat, Helen. After what we’ve been through, God knows we deserve a decent meal. Besides, with Jakobsen behind bars, we have something to celebrate.” Damian finger-combed his hair over the large yellowing bruise on his forehead. Freshly shaved and wearing a silk shirt, he was making her skin prickle.

  “You said we were taking the boys to McDonald’s. I wasn’t planning on dinner. I can’t stay long.” She’d driven behind him all the way, not realizing the kids weren’t in the BMW until he’d got out in the restaurant car park. Tinted rear windows had a lot to answer for.

  “The foster family is giving them more burgers than one of Chris Mowar’s film-makers managed in Supersize Me. Louisa will be turning on her mortuary slab.” He puffed out a breath. “Don’t pull that face, Helen. Lighten up.”

  A belch, some squeals, a roar – a man in a flashing bow tie and a reindeer jumper had tucked a bloom of the fake bougainvillea in his hair. Damian talked louder: “I’m not going to avoid mentioning the fact that she’s dead any more than I’m going to avoid saying that our marriage wasn’t perfect.”

  When the waiter put down their drinks, Damian took a swig. “I don’t see Louisa through rose-tinted spectacles. I know what she was and what I was. Her death doesn’t suddenly make us saints. Am I boring you?”

  Had he caught her glancing at her watch? “It’s just that it’s noisy,” she said.

  “Would you rather go somewhere else? Back to my hotel?”

  Her armpits leaked. “Here’s fine,” she said, but made a point of looking at her watch again. He needed to know she intended to leave soon.

  Damian refilled his glass. The wine smelled tinny. “I meant to the hotel bar. We don’t have to go to my room.” He grinned. Red-stained incisors. Her skin crawled.

  The fat man in the big party was telling a joke. “So the inspector said to the teaching assistant, ‘Now that’s brave’.” Laughter. People applauding like seals. The claret-haired woman opposite him caught Helen’s eye and smiled. But then her expression froze. She must have recognized Helen from the gossip grapevine, or from the old graduation photo that the online media had lifted from her Facebook page and used in their so-called news stories.

  Helen’s cheeks burned. Salamander and Claret gave her inquisitive glances. The heat spread: into her hair, around her neck, across her shoulders. Take her jacket off? No way; Damian’s eyes would seek out her nipples through her top.

  “This wasn’t a good idea. People are staring at us,” she said.

  He laughed, raised his glass towards the big group and shouted: “Cheers”. One or two of the men lifted their glasses in response.

  Had he no shame? What must people think, seeing him – them – out drinking while Gary and Louisa lie in a police mortuary? She was about to tell him how disgusting she felt when his tone changed.

  “Have you gone through Gary’s things yet?” Deep furrows appeared in his forehead.

  Helen’s mouth went bone dry.

  Damian went on: “I don’t know where the hell to start with Louisa’s. I can’t chuck it all out; the boys might like some of it when they’re older. Sabine’s going to sort out the clothes. She says she’ll sell the good stuff on eBay and take the rest to the school shop. Louisa only had good stuff so I reckon the shop’s catch will be pretty small.” He gulped down more wine and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His palm was red and deeply etched. Helen looked away; it seemed indecent.

  “I’ll keep all the photo albums. She never left photos on the memory card. Every picture was either labelled or deleted if it didn’t come up to scratch. Every certificate the boys ever got – from Tumble Tots to music exams – are in the albums too. I must put Toby’s new one in there when it arrives, assuming he’s passed, but I know he has. It would take more than his mother’s murder to put him off his scales.” He swallowed more drink. “I keep asking why I wasn’t killed instead of Louisa, or Napoleon. God knows I have less integrity than the dog.”

  The food was taking an age to arrive. She thought about inventing a text message that required her immediate return home, but Damian looked desolate, talking about his failure as a husband and punctuating his sentences with gulps of wine. She decided he needed her to listen. It must be hard keeping it together in front of the boys.

  But when the waiter brought their meals, Damian asked for another bottle of wine. Helen thought he’d had enough.

  He must have read her face. His own expression changed from desolation to defiance. “We have to carry on. It’s no good hiding. We can’t go back. I’m not skulking around, trying to avoid being seen where I shouldn’t be. I’m not lying to Louisa or buying Aldi sweets for the boys and pretending they’re from the airport. Marriage should be banned. Who wants an institution based on hypocrisy?”

  Helen shrugged. Why argue? She and Damian were poles apart in their views on marriage. He’d even been with someone else on the day his wife was murdered. Was it the babysitter or some other woman? Was he duplicitous enough to have let Louisa invite her to her dinner parties? Helen had seen the way his eyes lingered on Polly Stephens’s neat ass and Audrey Garcia’s cleavage, but neither gaze seemed reciprocated. Polly only ever had eyes for her baby monitor. Who else? There was another woman who’d visited the Howard house but that had been in an official capacity, hadn’t it?

  “Have you been seeing Sabine?”

  Damian choked on his wine. “The school nurse? She’s older than Louisa; why would I go there?”

  Helen’s mouth opened, about to condemn his ageism, but why bother. Wasn’t cheating on his wife the bigger crime? The age of his sleeping partner was irrelevant.

  “Don’t look so shocked, Helen. A woman in her thirties makes demands, wants commitment. I’d never leave my kids; younger women know the score.”

  “What about your wife?” Helen snapped. “Didn’t she deserve commitment? How could you lie?”

  Damian waved his spoon. “Can you honestly say you never kept anything from Gary?”

  Sascha Jakobsen: palm to palm. “Nothing important,” she replied, examining her fork. The prongs were tarnished.

  Damian sucked up strands of spaghetti and washed them down with another drink. He had tracks of red wine imprinted on the corners of his mouth. Dracula after a good meal. Her stomach squirmed.

  “And you believe that Gary never kept anything from you?” he said.

  She sliced off a corner of ham and pushed it under the rocket salad, ignoring the question. But her head filled with memories of Gary’s endless gaming. The sleepless nights, the denial that anything was troubling him.

  Damian didn’t notice she hadn’t answered and fired off another question. “What about Chris and Mel Mowar? I always thought there was something wrong in that marriag
e.”

  The second bottle of wine arrived. He refilled his glass, slopping wine over the top. It flowed down the outside of the glass and bled into the tablecloth. Something caught in Helen’s throat. Red growing into white. Leaking. Spreading. Swamping. She shook off the flashback to Louisa’s bloodied collar and made herself listen to Damian.

  “She turns into slimmer of the year and two weeks later her husband is dead. If we didn’t know for sure that lunatic did it, I’d be wondering about her.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “She’s hardly wailing with grief, is she?”

  “Considering she’s only just out of hospital, I’d say she’s showing quiet determination to get through this.”

  “It’s always the quiet ones. Who knows what goes on behind the façade?” He shovelled more spaghetti into his mouth.

  Helen put down her cutlery. “Why are you attacking Mel all of a sudden?”

  He looked at her with unfocused eyes. “It’s not just Mel. We all have a veneer. Do you know who the biggest phoney was? Louisa, that’s who. The Spider Queen spinning her web around us, afraid to drop a thread. What did you think of her?”

  Helen trawled her mind for the least damning thing to say, but Damian was off again before she found it. She suppressed a sigh. When would he shut up?

  “Let me guess, you thought she was a middle-class, privately educated graduate with transatlantic friends. Isn’t that how you saw her?”

  Remembering Louisa’s outburst when Murdo was missing, how her true accent had leaked through, she suspected her background wasn’t privileged, but she nodded. She hoped he would drop it. Instead he raised his voice to compete with the noise on the other table.

  “She went to private school – that bit of the image is true – but for all her airs and graces she wasn’t middle class. Her parents scrimped and saved to give their only child the finest education they could afford. ‘Nothing but the best for our girl.’ Louisa died every time her dad said that.” He swallowed his gaff, colour surging up his throat. He carried on. “They have no idea how she acquired her upmarket accent or why she called herself Louisa instead of the name they gave her.”

  “I …” What the hell could she say to that?

  Nothing – no need – Damian surged on. “And those girlfriends in New York she kept visiting? They didn’t exist. She was in Glasgow with her parents. No matter how ashamed she was of her roots, she was loyal to them, I’ll give her that. She went to see them at least six times a year, sometimes with the boys, but always with a different made-up explanation for her absence – shopping in New York, hen weekend at Champneys, school friend’s wedding. The old dears are desperate to come out here and look after the grandchildren, but I’ve convinced them to concentrate on planning the funeral. Let’s hope it’s not too tacky.”

  Helen cut off more ham, sliced it and sliced it again, thinner and thinner, imagining it was his tongue and she could silence him. It explained Damian’s dig about Louisa’s childhood that Helen had overheard months ago, but he repulsed her. His wife wasn’t buried yet and he was already betraying her and her family.

  Damian went on speaking. “She was a bright girl but she cut her degree short to move out here with me. She lived her career through mine. I’m the head teacher, providing us with a comfortable existence.” He counted on his fingers. “But she was the chair of one committee, director of another, trained counsellor, accomplished pianist, charity worker, budding business woman, community campaigner.”

  He slapped his hands on the table. “The Nobel Peace Prize couldn’t have been far behind.” He slugged down more wine. “God, I can’t tell you how liberating it is to let go of that fiction. It’s hard work living with a persona. Marriage wrecks a couple. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I …” She sliced more ham. The knife scraped against the plate.

  “We’re compromised into cardboard cut-outs of ourselves. Don’t you agree?”

  She pushed her plate away. “I loved my husband. He was my best friend.”

  Damian dropped his fork. “Come on, Helen. You don’t have to pretend you weren’t stifled. We all saw how you loathed it here. Your undying love for Gary didn’t quite make you a willing consort.”

  Helen slapped her napkin on the table and stood up to leave.

  Damian caught hold of her wrist. “I’m sorry. I have no right to comment on your marriage or Mel’s. Just because mine was fake …” Tears rolled down his face.

  The claret-haired woman was watching. Her smile was gone now that her mouth was hanging open.

  Helen sat down and spoke in a quiet voice. “I don’t think anyone’s marriage is faultless. We all rub along as best we can. When you’ve got through this, you’ll have the boys to remind you of the good times.”

  Damian looked at her quizzically, no longer listening. “So you and Gary had problems?”

  “Not problems, no,” she said. She found herself adding: “Something was troubling Gary. Something long-term, I think. Did he ever say anything to you?”

  “Never,” he said and drank deeply from his glass.

  It wasn’t what she expected. She thought she’d shown a weakness that he could exploit but he seemed indifferent.

  “I wonder how long Jakobsen will get. I know we’re supposed to be terribly British and let the man have a fair trial – innocent until proven guilty – but I don’t need a court to tell me he’s guilty as the devil,” he said.

  His face was red with anger and alcohol. Behind the clean-shaven face was chronic tiredness. Probably the only thing keeping him going was his intense hatred of Sascha Jakobsen.

  “What did Sascha mean when he said he wanted justice?” she said.

  Damian looked away. “Did he say that? I don’t remember.”

  “When you were fighting, he said he wanted justice. He said it to me too, when we were in Austria. I wonder what he meant.”

  “No idea.” He drained the wine bottle and called out for the bill.

  ***

  In the car park she hung back, not wanting to walk with him, fearing a wine-soaked goodnight kiss. But when he slipped on an ice patch and veered towards a departing car, she grabbed his arm and told him he mustn’t drive. He blinked at her, lolling from side to side. She wasn’t sure he’d heard and she doubted he’d manage to phone a taxi. She found herself offering him a lift back and dreading that he’d mistake the suggestion for a come-on. But he climbed into the passenger seat and fell asleep.

  Keen to get rid of him and his booze-breath, she drove fast over the gritted roads. His disclosures about Louisa were at best disloyal and at worst vile. Okay, she took some delight in hearing that Louisa – or whatever her real name might be – was not who she pretended she was. But she sort of admired her too. To reinvent herself and yet to remain loyal to her parents must have taken guts. Had she been too quick to judge her? The woman had made her welcome, in her own way, but Helen had rejected her.

  She remembered the argument between Louisa and Chris Mowar at the Christmas market. If they were having an affair, Damian could have known about it. He’d talked about being in a hotel when they died. A moment of doubt pricked her: what if he never left the area that day? The cruel way he ripped apart Louisa’s background tonight made it sound like he hated her. Enough to kill? And what should she make of his behaviour tonight: manic, oscillating between fury and despair? Someone that unstable could be capable of anything.

  But the snoring drunk beside her was harmless, wasn’t he? No more a killer than she was. She gripped the steering wheel. Than she was. She’d read about people who’d blotted the most appalling traumas out of their mind. Was her memory fast-forwarding the time between digging her way through the snow into Number Ten and finding Louisa’s body? Several minutes could have elapsed between the two events. Then she ran out of the house and into Manfred Scholz. Covered in blood and sweat.

  Fiona

  A policewoman leant against her patrol car.

  “Stay calm,
” he whispered.

  We kept on walking, right past her. Shep even smiled and nodded. So confident.

  “How can you …?” I asked.

  “Remember what I said.”

  No questions. That was Shep’s instruction. The bedsit had been arranged in a hurry so there hadn’t been time to do a sweep. It was the same in his car; the Syndicate could be listening. But now in the street, in this new town we’d fled to?

  Two men came out of McDonald’s, eating burgers. Young and stocky. Nice faces, but they were wearing epaulettes and had badges on the top of their sleeves.

  I looked ahead of me, not at them.

  “Stop pinching me,” Shep whispered.

  I loosened my grip on his arm. Their uniforms were green so maybe paramedics, not police. But it could be a trap; trust no one.

  We turned the corner into the pedestrian precinct.

  “I’ll be away tonight. I need you to take down codes,” he said.

  There was an Asian couple with a child in a buggy behind us. Three texting teenage girls approached in front. He must know these people were safe otherwise he wouldn’t have mentioned the codes.

  “When will you come back?” I said.

  “It depends on the terrain.”

  “And you don’t know when you’ll call?” I got tired staying awake, and some nights he didn’t ring at all.

  “Undercover, you know how it is. Codes are vital.”

  Sometimes lack of sleep made me so dizzy I couldn’t feel my limbs.

  He put his arm across my shoulders and pulled me close to him. “It’ll be worth it in the end.”

  I smiled at him, my shepherd.

  41

  Tuesday, 14 December

  Should she ring Mel’s doorbell? Helen had scarcely seen her since she came out of hospital. They’d shared a shivering doorstep chat when Helen called to invite her for coffee. Mel declined, saying that she wanted to clear Chris’s wardrobe. Helen felt as if she’d forced herself on Mel just as Louisa used to force herself on both of them. She set off for the shop without asking Mel whether she needed anything.