A blush heats her face and she can’t believe she’s taking a compliment from this sleaze.
More footage of Louisa in her sport kit. A distance shot of her hands pressed against her front door, stretching her calf muscles.
“The victim in this trio is the control freak. Underneath her outward show of dominance, this woman – let’s call her Tracey – is running scared. She’s terrified her husband will leave her and destroy the world she’s fabricated.”
Bastard. All of Louisa’s secrets broadcast. Was Tracey her real name? Helen’s glad Chris is dead. She’s glad Louisa is, too, and spared this humiliation.
“For the purposes of my investigation, I assumed the role of the con man,” Chris announces on the screen.
“You arsehole,” she shouts, not caring what Mel thinks. But Mel sinks back in the sofa, as if settling in for a good David Attenborough.
“I started with the ‘seduction’.” He makes inverted commas with his fingers. “I pressed buttons that made her feel good about herself. I was attentive to her in a way that her womanizing husband was not. When I’d gained her trust, I told her a secret. Disclosing confidences to a woman like Tracey is like feeding best steak to a lioness. She thrives on control and knows that information is power.”
Helen rubs her eyes, tugging at the skin below her sockets. What makes it so bad is that he’s right. Every cruel hole he pokes is a perfect puncture in Louisa’s façade.
“The secret I told her …” There’s a beat and he looks straight into the camera. “was a lie.” There’s another beat as he smoulders with smugness into the lens. Helen relives every dignity-destroying dinner party she attended with Chris at the table. It’s a wonder she didn’t decapitate him herself.
“Every con artist knows that to tell a convincing lie, you should tell the most outrageous one you can. I told Tracey I was an undercover intelligence officer, monitoring security risks to the British community in Germany.”
She doesn’t bother looking at Mel, sure that even this revelation won’t rock her. Maybe it isn’t news to her; maybe she knew her husband was Walter Mitty.
“I confided in Tracey that it was becoming difficult to do my job because of my wife’s mental problems and bouts of paranoia.”
Mel folds her lip over her teeth and scratches her nose. These are tells, but Helen can’t read them. The woman’s eyes stay on her husband.
“I appealed to Tracey’s sense of her own self-importance. It seemed to her entirely apt that a woman such as herself, who ran every committee in her community, should be co-opted onto a forum of national importance. I asked her to keep an eye on my wife while I was out on ‘missions’.”
Another set of inverted comma fingers. Helen’s own hands itch. She wants to grab his fingers and shove them down his throat. Wait until Damian sees this. If Chris wasn’t already dead, he soon would be. Damian would never have let Chris trash Louisa. Helen looks away but not before seeing Chris’s face break into the smug grin she found so repugnant when he was alive.
“To keep her convinced, I arranged what I call a ‘tableaux of authenticity’.” More inverted fingers. “I organized for her to meet me coming out of the police station near where we lived. I told her I was on a liaison assignment with the Germans. In fact, all I’d done was ask the desk officer for directions to the cinema.” His nostrils flare, triumphant in his own ingenuity. A thoroughbred tosspot.
Helen shakes her head; the whole thing must be a crappy spoof. No wonder he was apoplectic when the DVDs went missing. He wouldn’t have wanted anyone seeing this. Mel said it was the first DVD. How much more rubbish is there?
No way would Louisa have fallen for this. She was a snob but not an idiot. Louisa was all for pretence as long as she was the one making it. She’d have seen straight through Quentin Tarantino here.
The screen goes blank.
“That’s the end of the first disk,” Mel says, jumping up. How sprightly she is these days.
“Is that all you can say? Aren’t you shocked?” Helen asks. “Did you know about any of this?”
Mel tilts her head, as if weighing her up. “Yes and no,” she says. She puts another disk in the machine.
57
Sascha sits on the cellar steps. His body aches from straining against the door into the kitchen. He heard voices and now someone has put on a TV or a radio. A man’s voice. A police radio? I’m screwed this time.
He should have held his ground when the front door opened instead of running into the cellar. The visitor could have been Howard himself. It would all be over by now if he’d got him, put his hands around his throat and squeezed. But there’d been shouting, too muffled to make out. A scream? Then silence.
The new voices must mean the police or a witness. Revenge just got complicated.
58
“Now onto the scientific element of my research – a step-by-step guide to selecting and manipulating a victim.”
The camera pans across a bar full of people. It’s The Britannic, the town’s attempt at a British pub. Helen loathes it, but, as Chris’s filming shows, it’s popular with most school families. She picks out two of the gap-year students and what might be the claret-haired woman from the Italian restaurant, although her hair is dyed black in the film.
“So first find your victim. A good place to start your search is a nightclub. Young people out on the town let down their guard. They’ll be happy to pass the time in conversation with a friendly, older man. Gradually some will melt away – no doubt finding the older man rather boring.”
The camera is back on Chris. Helen ignores his stupid mock-modest grin. She waits for the next line. Nightclub. He’s going to do it. He’s going to talk about Club Viva.
“The friendly, older man will be left with two or three. He’ll ask them about their families, their relationships, their aspirations. In no time, he builds up a picture of who is vulnerable and suggestible. He gets their Facebook details and takes it from there.”
Helen leans forward. This is it. Say it, you creep, say it. She unbuttons the top of her jacket. Christ it’s hot. The heating’s still on despite the house being vacant.
“An excellent potential victim is the student. Young people with a naive curiosity for life. The con man installs himself in a university town and seeks out the pubs that students frequent.”
She undoes another button and glares at the screen, willing him to get the hell on with it. The scene changes to views of several cities. She recognizes Oxford and London. Another cityscape wobbles and falls away, leaving a view of the magnolia-painted wall. The faker filmed it in his bedroom. He’s holding up postcards to the camera. What an amateur.
“Sit at the bar and be on the look-out for the straggler in the group: the prissy one who can’t keep up with the drinking games; the nerdy one who talks about finishing essays; the unattractive one who gets left out as the others pair off.”
There’s acid in Helen’s throat. This is what Damian said happened at Club Viva. She braces herself for the whole sordid story.
“I found Fiona in a pub in Southampton.”
Images of what Helen presumes is Southampton city centre appear. But why is it Southampton and not Düsseldorf?
“She was the quiet one in a bawdy group but she didn’t have the strength of character to find more suitable friends. Instead she attached herself to me. She told me she was in the final year of her French and Business degree and had spent the previous year as a language assistant in Lyons. Her parents doted on her, and she worried about their health.”
Helen shakes her head again. It’s a fairy story. Mareike was German and still at school.
“With the groundwork in place and a considerable rapport established, I revealed that I was an intelligence officer sent to root out a drugs syndicate at the university. They were believed to be Western European with links to major terrorist groups worldwide.”
Chris steps closer to the camera. His skin is flushed and shiny. A real film-maker would ha
ve dabbed on Max Factor. His eyes still squint to the side.
“Most of you watching this will refuse to believe that anyone would fall for a line like that from a bloke they met in a pub. That’s why choosing the right victim is so crucial to the con man’s plans. Fiona didn’t take what I said at face value. She searched the Internet and asked me questions, but I’d prepared my character well. I had sufficient answers to reassure her.
“It was time to move in for the con.”
A dramatic soundtrack blares as Chris holds up a card with the words “The Con” handwritten on it. Presumably he intended to add graphics to his masterpiece later. He holds up another card: “Create Anxiety”. His expression is primary school teacher doing flash-card phonics.
“Stage one of this con meant making Fiona feel frightened.”
Helen’s skin itches. It isn’t the Club Viva story; it doesn’t feel like a story at all.
The image changes to a ransacked room – sheets ripped off the single bed, desk drawers open, books and papers torn and strewn across the floor.
Helen throws up her hands. It’s a story all right, or a re-enactment. “Mel, that’s … Is that your house?… Mel?”
“It’s our spare room. He used it as a studio,” she replies but her eyes don’t leave the screen.
“I staged a break-in at her halls of residence. I made sure I was with her when she found the mess. I told her that my bosses had discovered that the drugs ring was French and that she had unwittingly made contact with them during her year in France. She was now in danger.”
Helen rolls her eyes when she hears more of the dramatic music. Chris’s film-making skills are amateurish, and sick. It’s like watching a 10-year-old pull the legs off an insect he’s captured.
He laces his hands together across his chest. One finger stands proud of the other digits. It’s his pointing baton to emphasize his words.
“From this moment on, the con gathered speed. I knew she wouldn’t contact the police because she was utterly convinced of my status as an intelligence officer.”
He holds up another handwritten card: “Social Isolation”. “If you’ve laid firm foundations in stage one, the transition to social isolation will be smooth.
“I told her I was putting pressure on my bosses to find her a safe house. I would request permission to become her protection officer but it would take a few days.”
The camera angle changes to a full-length shot. He has adopted the persona of a policeman: feet apart, hands behind back, monotone delivery.
“I stayed away for a week and in that time made silent phone calls to her mobile. By the time she saw me again she was barely venturing out of her room. She was ready to accept anything, so I told her I’d managed to get her a flat in Manchester. I said my bosses had taken some convincing but I’d called in a couple of favours. She was to tell her parents that she’d been headhunted for a trainee journalist job in France.”
Helen tries to remember Chris ever mentioning Southampton, or Manchester. Is it true?
The screen goes blank and then comes back with a close-up of Chris’s face. “Within three months of meeting Fiona, I’d convinced her to give up her degree, lie to her family and go into hiding.”
The screen darkens and Chris reappears further away, holding up another card: “Control Communication”.
“I convinced her to avoid anyone in uniform, warning her it could be a trap. Pretty soon she would hide in the bathroom if there was a knock at the door. I didn’t tell her to; she worked it out for herself.” His face has the punch-pleased expression of a dog owner whose mutt has won an obedience class. If Fiona were beside him on-screen, he’d pat her head.
He waves another card: “Financial Dependence”.
“I convinced Fiona that the drugs syndicate would trace her through her cashpoint withdrawals. All she had to do was give me her bank details and I’d take care of everything. From that point on she had no access to money. If she needed anything, she had to put her plea to me.”
He holds up another card but drops it. He swears and then the screen goes blank as he stops filming.
“This is criminal, Mel. Did he really do this?”
Mel’s eyes stay on the fuzzy image, waiting for her husband to reappear.
“Mel, is this true? Answer me.”
Mel puts her finger to her lips, shakes her head at Helen and snaps her gaze back to the TV.
When the screen comes back on, he’s holding the card in place. “Stage five is Physical Manipulation. The weak victim is a malleable victim. I deprived Fiona of sleep. I would ring her in the night with important codes to write down. She had to stay awake, never knowing when another call might come through.”
Helen puts her head in her hands again. She wants to leave, to unknow his sick fantasy. But her gut says it’s not a fantasy and she’s already complicit. She stays.
“There are two more stages to achieving total dominance over the victim. Stage six is to make the victim abandon their past. I let Fiona ring her parents again. She played her part well: the trainee journalist on a chance-of-a-lifetime internship.”
“You sick bastard,” Helen says. Mel waves her silent.
“I woke her in the early hours in a state of alarm. I told her the call had been traced. The drug barons were closing in.”
Mel’s fidgeting. She folds her arms, unfolds them, bites her nails.
“By 9 a.m. I was driving her away from everything she’d ever known. I told her that in order to protect her parents she couldn’t call them again.”
He has another card but it’s blank. He taps it in his hand. His face beams with joy.
“The final stage – stage seven – came about unexpectedly.” He turns the card round as if he’s an archaeologist revealing a Viking treasure. It reads: “Shatter Reality”.
Helen stands up and presses the player’s off-button. “I’m not watching this. To dream up this kind of fantasy and pass it off as a documentary is vile.”
Mel is still staring at the blank screen. “It’s real,” she says quietly.
“How real? You mean to tell me that Chris went to Southampton to brainwash a girl into leaving university and going into hiding with him?”
Mel looks at her now. Her blank face is the polar opposite of Chris’s animated onscreen features. “You never liked Chris, did you?”
How can she ask? Of all the nosy neighbours, Chris was always the biggest creep and, after what she’s just watched, even his wife must see it. “If you knew about this, why didn’t you tell the police or at least leave him?”
Mel stands up. “I’ll make a start on sorting Louisa’s stuff. Come up and help.” She goes upstairs. Her steps are light and brisk.
Helen rubs her knee. It’s hurting again and she’s too outraged to move. The intrusive questions, the pronouncements he made on her marriage. Chris Mowar preyed on women and saw them as fodder for his pseudo-documentary. Poor Louisa. Helen accused her of pulling the neighbours’ strings when in truth Louisa was the one who was manipulated and humiliated.
Chris Mowar justified his behaviour in the name of a documentary. The charm, the flamboyance, the arrogance, the cruelty, it was all there. And Mel had lived with him. Why the hell did she do nothing?
Helen goes to the front door. If Damian turns up, Mel can take her chances.
She calls out: “Something’s come up. I’ve got to go.”
There’s no reply.
“Pop round for a coffee later if you want.”
Still no reply. Her skin tingles. What if Chris’s film has shocked Mel more than she let on and she’s up there sobbing?
Even though Helen thinks Mel has shown more resilience in the last few weeks than anyone else, she finds herself walking back into the lounge. She’ll stay a bit longer, for Mel’s sake. She sits on a sofa, needing a minute to prepare herself before going upstairs. To Louisa’s stuff. She imagines the chiffon blouses, the tailored trousers, and the designer exercise clothes standing to attention in
Louisa’s wardrobe, like faithful retainers awaiting their mistress’s return.
The DVD player is still lit up, with Chris’s disk inside. No way is she watching any more. She was right about his attitude to women. Didn’t Steve Chadwick say Chris wanted to film Mareike straight after she was attacked at Club Viva?
Damian Howard and Chris Mowar – some double act. It gives Sascha one hell of a motive for wanting them both dead. Her heart races. Now that the DVDs have come to light, it’s only a matter of time before Sascha finds out about Chris’s predilection for snaring girls. The hairs on Helen’s arms stand on end and she has the urge to flee. As soon as she’s warned Mel, she’s getting the hell out of Number Ten and Germany.
When did Mel first see the film? Her reaction – or lack of it – suggests today wasn’t her first viewing. What if she first found the DVDs in early December? How would she have reacted then? Helen snaps a lid on her thoughts, not liking where they’re leading her. She takes a deep breath and wills herself to stop imagining all sorts.
But what if, despite her lack of emotion, she did watch them for the first time just now? Helen lets out a sigh, predicting that Mel might spend the next several hours crying on her shoulder. But Helen needs to leave. The film was disgusting but there’s nothing she can do about it. Mel will have to come to terms with it in her own way. She limps across the hall, trying not to put weight on her injured leg and opens the front door.
Mel appears on the stairs. She’s slipped one of Louisa’s Lycra tops over her clothes. Although she’s lost weight, she hasn’t reached Louisa’s diminutive proportions. The shirt is straining across her breasts. Her pallor is corpse-like against the salmon pink. She stops on the bottom step.
“Where are you going, Helen?”
59
It’s gone quiet. For the thousandth time Sascha tells himself he’s a Vollidiot for not stepping forward as soon as he heard the front door close. But there are at least two people in the house. He doesn’t know their whereabouts and can’t take them by surprise. He isn’t sure whether the man was on a radio or in the house. There was a woman’s voice too and above his head a herd of elephants. Now nothing and he needs to pee.
The Perfect Neighbours Page 24