“My name is Helen Taylor. I’m from the Niers International School, Germany. Please send a message to his classroom. I can wait until break-time.”
The woman opens her mouth to speak. Helen gives her a senior teacher stare. It works.
“Take a seat in the foyer,” the receptionist says.
There is a procession of kids through the corridor. Some stop at the receptionist’s window, and she bats them away. “Cover for 9S? Speak to Mrs Bowers. … Mr Knighton? Have you looked in his office?… Feeling sick? Toilet’s next left. Hurry.”
Has the woman sent the message and will Steve come if she has? The mention of Niers International might whet his curiosity, but if he realizes she’s come about Gary, he won’t want to see her. School holidays tomorrow. If he gives her the slip and leaves without speaking, this whole trip is an expensive failure.
The break-time bell goes and children swarm from all directions. She’s back in Shrewsbury Academy. Happy times. Her chest gapes, this time yearning for her old, old life.
“Mrs Taylor? You wanted to see me.”
A stocky man stands in front of her, holding out his hand. The handshake is moist and firm. There’s a tremor in hers. Does this man, as unremarkable as countless other teachers, have the power to save her? She must be expecting too much of a knight in rolled-up shirt sleeves and beige trousers.
“I’m so sorry for your loss. I saw it on the news.” He sits down beside her, landing heavily on the plastic chair. Friendly eyes full of concern. How they will change when she tells him why she’s here. She can still leave and make up some stupid explanation for her visit. In the area, just passing, Damian Howard sends his regards.
But she thanks him for his condolences and gets to the point. “I have to ask you about Club Viva.”
The friendly eyes snap away. He shuffles in his chair.
She thinks he’s going to bolt but she presses on. “Damian Howard told me what happened but I find the whole thing impossible to believe.”
“He told you? Why the hell would he do that?” His raised voice attracts the attention of two passing pupils. They grin at each other and slow down, growing elephant ears for more. Steve glares at them and they hurry on. “He swore to me it never happened.” His eyes narrow and he seems to be seeing something that isn’t there.
“Mr Chadwick? I have to come to terms with this. Will you help me?”
He scans the corridor. The receptionist is paying them more attention than the queue of pupils in front of her window. “Let’s go outside,” he says.
They go through a different exit into a courtyard full of children. A few boys are chasing around, throwing their sweatshirts at each other. Most of the girls have tied theirs round their waists. Steve finds a bench in the shade. He wraps his arms around himself. Out of the sun, even a Cypriot winter can nip. The children are out of earshot and making their own noise. Helen slips on the coat she’s lugging over her arm and asks what he can tell her.
“It sounds like you know it already. I can’t see why you need to hear it from me.”
“Please. I’d like your version of events.”
“It won’t make it sound any better. A girl still dies.”
So it’s true. Until this moment she’s clung to the hope that Damian made the whole thing up.
“Mrs Taylor, Helen. I didn’t mean … Have I said too much?” The eyes are friendly again. She shouldn’t have come. She can stop it now and not have to see his pity. She’ll head back into the sun and find the waiting taxi. But she can’t make her legs stand up. She has to know.
“Please tell me about the girl.”
“Are you sure that’s a good …?”
“Tell me.”
“If that’s what you want.” Steve sighs and loosens his tie. His throat shines blotchy-red. “She was sixteen years old. It was no defence to say she looked older because she didn’t. He plied her with drink. By the time I noticed how long they’d been gone it was too late. I knew he was a sleaze but that. He made me sick to my stomach.”
An icy hand reaches inside Helen and squeezes. She bends over her knees but can’t clear the din from her head.
Steve’s face comes into focus. Her dizziness clears. “How do you know it was assault?” She knows it’s a mistake before she’s finished the question but it’s out. She grips the side of the bench, preparing for his answer.
He shakes his head. “I couldn’t see much in the dark but I heard her cry. I still hear her.” He kicks at a clump of grass by the bench. His voice becomes bitter. “He refused to accept what he’d done. He was used to charming his conquests into bed and couldn’t comprehend he’d forced one.”
Conquests? Gary had other women? She is trembling. “Could you have misunderstood, do you think? Is that possible?”
He puts the weight of his foot on the grass and twists it. “Even when I confronted him with the news that she’d killed herself, he said it had nothing to do with him. I blame myself. If I’d noticed that he’d taken Gary’s car keys, I might have been able to stop him. If I hadn’t been addled on beer and vodka …”
Helen stops listening. “Didn’t Gary take the keys with him?” she asks.
“Gary must have put them on the table when he got his wallet out to buy a round. Damian picked them up when he went off with the girl. Gary followed afterwards but I’m guessing he was too late.”
Helen feels hope for the first time in weeks. She wants to savour it and let it smother the lies she’s been fed. “Are you saying it was Damian who took the girl outside and attacked her in Gary’s car?”
“Who else did you think it was? That’s why I’m shocked he told you.”
“Damian said it was Gary.”
The colour darkens in Steve’s face and he looks angry. He grips her elbow and turns her towards him. “Believe me, it was Damian.”
Relief dances through her. She can leave now. Go and face Sascha and the rest of them, then back to England and pick up the fragments of her old life. How could she have doubted Gary? All the evidence of Damian’s sleazy ways was there; even his latest conquest is a 19yearold babysitter. Only just legal. But she needs to know it all.
“Why didn’t the three of you report Damian to the police?”
Steve’s hands cover his face. “I wish to God I had.” He looks straight at her. “But I had no proof, only suspicions. When we saw the girl running away, all Chris said was, ‘I wish I brought my camcorder’. He said I had an overactive imagination.”
Low-life scum. She sees his severed head, bile rising in her throat, but she’s glad she kicked it.
“I bought the Tageblatt every day expecting that the girl would report the crime. I told myself that if the police appealed for witnesses, I would come forward. When I saw her photo two weeks later, the eyes were blocked out, but I recognized her. My wife translated the article, and I found out we had her death on our hands.
“I asked Chris and Gary to come with me to confront Damian. But Chris said my conclusions were a complete fantasy. I think he had his own agenda.”
Helen sighs. The conversation she overheard between Chris and Damian about Chateau Petrus wine falls into place. Damian’s dirty secret was Chris’s cash cow. Why back up Steve when there was an opportunity for blackmail?
“You and Gary could have gone to the police without Chris,” she says.
“Gary didn’t know what the hell to do because he saw how the whole thing was destroying my marriage and he was scared for himself. He’d started a relationship with you and he was afraid you’d react pretty much as Beate had. In the end we agreed that we wouldn’t jeopardize your future together for the sake of something we couldn’t prove. It’s a decision that’s haunted me ever since.”
The sleepless nights; it had haunted Gary too. How would she have reacted if he’d told her? Was it her fault that he’d kept silent?
She remembered the call Gary deleted before he “lost” his phone. “Did you ever contact Gary after you moved here?” she asks.<
br />
“I sent him a few texts and phoned him every few months to see if he’d changed his mind. But I never pushed him very hard. I doubt I’d have had the guts to come forward even if he’d agreed. In the end he must have got sick of me phoning; his number became unobtainable a while ago.
A shiver runs through her. So Gary lied to her, changed his phone to make sure she didn’t find out about Steve. Damian had been truthful about one thing: You really didn’t know him, did you? She freezes as another thought occurs to her. Two years on, had Gary’s conscience caught up with him? That was it. He must have warned Damian that he was about to tell her.
Gary. Louisa. Chris. Did Damian silence them? Got his girlfriend to give him an alibi?
“I can see how this is eating at you,” Steve says, studying her face. “Go home and mourn your husband.”
They stand up and shake hands. He pats her arm. She touches his and they embrace. His shirt smells of fabric softener and his arm is plump and undefined. She feels held by a friend or an uncle. Not Sascha. This is guilt-free human contact. Finally someone on her side. She’ll have to go to the police about Damian, before he knows what she’s discovered and comes after her.
The school bell’s gone but Steve walks with her to the taxi. It’s the calmest she’s been since Number Ten.
“It was good to hear the truth. Thank you.”
He holds the car door for her. “You’ve done me good too. I needed to say it out loud. There have been times when I thought I might explode. When I close my eyes I can’t stop seeing that newspaper photograph: Mareike J (16), Dortmannhausen. I’ll never forget her.”
49
Tuesday, 21 December
“Ja?” It’s a woman’s voice on the intercom. Then a click. In the background Helen hears a male “Nein”, but the woman’s already buzzed Helen through to the foyer.
She bangs on the apartment door, thumps it with both hands. “Let me in, you scumbag.” She grabs a wreath off the door and chucks it to the floor. “I know you’re in there. I’ll stay here until you face me.”
The woman opens the door. Small, thin as death, black hair with aged, blanched-out roots. She must be Sascha’s mother. Helen pats her jacket pocket and feels the outline of the vegetable knife. She wishes the woman wasn’t here. Her grudge is with Sascha. This is for Gary. Eye for an eye.
Sascha in a torn housecoat appears behind his mother.
“Why did it have to come to that?” Helen screams. “If you’d told me what happened to Mareike, hell, I would have helped you.”
“Was sagt sie?” the woman says. She must have made out her daughter’s name in the tirade of English words.
“Nichts, Mama,” Sascha says and pulls her away. She goes into a room at the back of the hall but leaves the door ajar.
Helen barges past Sascha and gets into the hallway. “Was it me? Mareike died two years ago. What the hell did I do to trigger you off now?” She knows her skin is red, both face and neck. She let him kiss her neck once. Never again. “Answer me.”
“I didn’t know it for many months.”
“Speak up, Sascha. I want to hear you explain it while I look you in the eye.”
His eyes are pinpricks, burning into hers. “How much do you know?” he asks.
Is it a threat? She doesn’t care. She’ll attack first; she’s got nothing to lose anymore. She puts her hand in her pocket and touches the hilt of the vegetable knife. “I want to hear you say it. All of it. From the beginning.”
He glares at her. His pupils are still tiny but there’s fury there now. “Mama found her body and has to face every day through a schnapps glass.”
The woman’s shadow moves across her door. Helen knows she’ll be out in the hall soon. Mareike and Mama are all the decipherable words she’ll need. Helen must act before that, but she needs the whole truth first. She folds her arms. Her coat’s zipped to her throat. Her unkissable throat.
“Mareike kept our family together. Afterwards, my father left. Mama and I argued. Always the same: I told her to stop drinking; she told me I would drink too if I lost a child. One argument went too far and she showed me Mareike’s suicide letter. I knew then.”
He softens his glare as if searching her face for sympathy. She hardens hers.
“She’d hid the letter to protect my father and me, and she burnt it after she showed me. I couldn’t prove anything.”
“So you decided to avenge Mareike.”
“I found Damian Howard, one of the men from the nightclub. He saw a child in danger and did nothing to help her. I destroyed his garden and told him I knew. He said he didn’t understand but we both knew he did. I thought if I pushed him hard enough, he’d tell me the truth, tell me which man was responsible. By the time I met you at the Freibad, I was ready to try a new tactic.”
Helen steps closer. There’s a tiny mole below his eye. She noticed it when they kissed. He moves back up the hall. She matches his movements, a menacing quickstep. “So I was in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
He nods. His mother comes into the hall, swaying, as if she’s been drinking.
Helen glowers at Sascha. “I thought we were friends. I defended you.”
“It was for Mareike. Any means possible.” His voice is hard.
Even through her raging anger, she feels a twinge of rejection. So she was his means to an end. Her stomach clenches, by God what an end.
“Was Gary in the wrong place too?” she says quietly.
“I don’t …?”
“Why would you hurt him? What did the suicide note say?”
“Mareike said one of four men from the International School attacked her but the only name she remembered was Damian. I discovered Damian Howard was the head teacher. I don’t know if he attacked my sister, but at the least he stood by and let another man do it.”
She leaps at him. His mother screams and sways again.
Helen grabs Sascha’s shoulder, her nails wanting to pierce the nylon material of his housecoat and dig into his collarbone. “You’re telling me you didn’t know that Damian attacked her, or that Gary and Chris were two of the other men? They were just random victims who got in the way when you killed Damian’s wife and dog?”
She feels his body stiffen. He pulls her hand off his shoulder. “Are you saying Damian Howard did it?” He shakes her. “Howard attacked Mareike? Killed her, as good as?”
She yanks herself away, feeling her upper arms bruising up from his grasp. “They could have helped you bring him to justice. Instead, three people died while the real culprit is free.”
She’s crying now, and Sascha’s mother puts an arm around her. The woman’s breath is tinny and smoky, but mostly it smells sad.
Sascha’s not looking at them. He’s pacing the hall, his face twisted in a snarl.
Helen sobs harder. Real tears that won’t stop. Why does she finally have to cry now? It’s all gone wrong. Everything. She slips away from his mother and dashes out of the flat.
50
It is one in the morning when Helen gets to Dickensweg. She’s driven back sweating and crying and shaking. She parks and leans over the wheel. She wants the fire in her to reignite so she can carry on hating. Her eyelids droop and her head lolls against the steering wheel. She forces herself to get out.
The cold air takes the edge off her sleepiness. There’s a light on in the kitchen next door and through the window she can see Mel filling a kettle at the sink. So she doesn’t sleep nights either. Across the road at number 8, Jerome Stephens is in his kitchen with what looks like a glass of whisky in his hand. She walks up her path but at the last minute goes to Mel’s door. She taps lightly and prays Mel will answer. She’s heavy with everything she’s learnt in the last twenty-four hours. Mel can share the burden.
Mel is chalk white when she opens the door. She lets out a breath when she sees Helen.
“Were you expecting someone else?” Helen asks.
“I thought … Chris used to tap the door like that. I thought
for a minute … I expect you think I’m crazy.”
“Of course not. Sometimes I think I can hear Gary playing computer games. It must be part of the grieving process.”
Mel’s expression is blank, not taking the trouble to either agree or disagree. It’s a face that shuts Helen out. United in tragedy, divided in mourning. She’s wearing the mustard kaftan that once strained at the seams, but now gapes at the neck and hangs off her narrow shoulders. Her cropped hair has swapped its ingénue chic from the swim club party for sticky-up and greasy. Three weeks ago they were normal, now they are freaks.
Helen apologizes for her late visit and says she’s just back from Cyprus. “Do you remember a teacher at school called Steve Chadwick?”
“No.”
“He was a friend of Chris’s.”
Mel shakes her head. “I barely knew Chris’s friends, but it doesn’t matter now.” She coughs. Her breath stinks. Like a homeless person.
“Are you eating?” Helen asks.
“Are you? I thought you were in jail,” she replies.
Helen explains she’s been released without charge. “I know now that Sascha Jakobsen had a strong motive,” she says. “Damian attacked Sascha’s sister.”
Mel’s eyes flicker to Helen and she manages a flat “Oh”.
“Doesn’t that shock you?”
Mel gives a hollow laugh. “The shock-wagon has already rolled.”
“But don’t you think that makes Sascha the prime suspect?”
“I told you that.”
“He got Manfred Scholz to lie for him. Could they have been in it together?”
Mel looks at her. “Isn’t that a bit far-fetched?”
Helen feels foolish under Mel’s sceptical gaze. But what if she’s right? Damian authorized the demolition of Manfred’s cottage. Did he seek revenge?
“And Damian has a motive,” she says, her brain racing to the next possibility. “Gary, Chris and maybe Louisa knew about Sascha’s sister. Damian might have wanted their silence.”
The Perfect Neighbours Page 22