His legs ache from crouching on the cellar steps behind the kitchen door. He backs down into the cellar and accidently kicks a child’s bag on the stairs. He stamps on it to stop it rolling and holds his breath. Nothing; no one’s heard him.
He doesn’t dare switch on the cellar light in case it shines through to upstairs. Winter gloom from the street comes through the grilled windows at the top of the wall so that he can make out the decor. Dark wall tiles and flat-screen TV: it looks like a porno cinema. Damian Howard drooling over images of underage girls. Sascha kicks out at a popcorn dispenser and cracks the plastic casing. He freezes and listens hard. Scheiße.
60
“I was letting in some fresh air,” Helen says. “It’s warm in here.”
“Why are you shivering then?” Mel asks.
Helen closes the front door. She doesn’t see how she’s going to get out now without offending her.
She rests one hand on Mel’s arm. “I think we should leave. Damian’s obviously not coming. I don’t like it here.”
Mel’s eyes are on her. Helen can’t read them. “Let’s watch the rest of the DVD first,” she says.
“Can’t we just …?”
“Please, watch with me.”
She follows Mel back into the lounge. She’ll give her ten minutes, make herself stomach that much more of Chris’s poison. Then let Mel down gently and leave.
Mel presses play. Chris reappears on the screen with the “Shatter Reality” card. “I was the only person that Fiona had spoken to for four months. I became not only her protection officer but also her lover.”
She rolls her eyes but Mel, chin in hands, is totally absorbed. Helen gives a loud sigh to distract her but she doesn’t react. How can she be sucked into this tripe?
“When she became pregnant she was happy – for the first time since I convinced her she was mixed up with the drugs syndicate.”
Helen wants to stick her fingers in her ears but Mel doesn’t stir, not a flicker of movement. She sits on Louisa’s sofa in Louisa’s shirt, watching her dead husband say he got a girl pregnant.
“Fiona’s delight gave me an unexpected opportunity to achieve the final stage. I told her how thrilled I was and attended every hospital appointment – which wasn’t easy as I was working overseas by then.”
Still Mel doesn’t move. How much more can she listen to without reacting? How much sicker can Chris’s fantasy get?
“Twelve weeks into the pregnancy, I told her devastating news. The drugs gang had tracked her down. Intelligence reports suggested that they intended to kidnap the baby and force Fiona to testify in their favour.” Chris turns as if addressing an invisible Fiona beside him. “Sobbing, I said, ‘My bosses are arranging your new identity but while the Syndicate is after you, no baby of ours can ever be safe.’” He looks into the camera and sighs. It’s a ham actor’s attempt at regret.
Helen shakes her head. Not that. No way could he have made a girl do that.
“The clinic gave Fiona every chance to change her mind. But she stuck to the script: we were too poor to provide for a child; the time wasn’t right; there would be other chances.” The camera refocuses on a close-up of his face, pink and puffy like undercooked chicken. “You must decide for yourself whether she showed great strength of character or utter stupidity.”
Helen hisses at the screen. “You disgusting, little—”
“Listen,” Mel snaps.
“A week later I told her about her new identity. She was a former telesales worker who would become my wife, and live with me in Germany.”
Helen’s blood is hot then cold. She stares at Mel. “You?”
Mel’s expression is blank.
“You? You’re Fiona. He did this to you?”
“That was Chris for you.” Mel sighs, as if she’s complaining that he never did the washing-up.
Helen catches her breath. “You lost your baby? He made you do that?”
“Watch this bit,” Mel says, pointing at the screen.
Helen wants to switch it off and talk to Mel, listen to her, give her comfort, but like a rubbernecker driving past a traffic accident, she’s drawn back to the screen. It’s another view of Dickensweg filmed from an upstairs room. Mel crosses between two parked cars and emerges on the far side, with a pushchair. Her pace is trudging. Helen has forgotten how big she used to be. When Chris’s voiceover starts, Helen can’t stop herself from trembling.
“To prove to the ‘Security Services’ that she had put the loss of the baby behind her, and that she could handle our assignments, she had to walk around the neighbourhood with an empty buggy.”
Helen wants to puke. Chris was a total psycho. What kind of sadist forced a woman to get rid of her baby and made her relive the agony? “I’m so sorry,” she says. She knows she sounds pathetic.
Mel’s mouth twists. Helen thinks her triteness has made her angry, but she’s glaring at the screen.
There’s a camera close-up of Chris’s manicured fingers. He has a €10 note in each hand. “Düsseldorf Airport was another test. I left her there with hardly any cash and a suitcase full of shoes. I told her it was a vital training exercise in case she ever had to go on the run without me.” The camera moves to his face. “Do you know how hard it is to stay at an airport without a flight ticket and not get arrested?”
Mel pushes her thumb in her mouth. Helen thinks she’s seeking comfort. But, no, she bites it, drawing blood. It mingles with her saliva and blobs onto Louisa’s shirt. Helen looks back at the TV to stop herself remembering the last time she saw blood on Louisa’s clothes.
It’s Damian on-screen now, filmed from above, a glint of red scalp through faded boyblond hair. He’s staggering up a garden path with a suitcase. Mel appears in shot behind him. Filthy T-shirt, sweat patches at her throat. She takes the case from Damian and drags it forward out of view. Helen’s seen this before, live and from ground level. She was watering her garden. Damian, red wine in hand, on his doorstep. Mel shuffling towards them. She’d been to Lanzarote. Except the poor woman never went on holiday.
“When I went back to get her, I was her saviour. It didn’t matter that I’d put her there in the first place. I told her that my bosses had one more test. I dropped her at a service station on the A61. She had to walk 10 kilometres along the side of the motorway without a police patrol spotting her.”
“Oh, Mel, I don’t know what to say.” Helen puts her head in her hands, ashamed of how wooden she sounds. But it’s the truth, she hasn’t a clue how to speak to this abused woman.
“Be quiet. It’s not finished yet.” Mel licks the blood from her knuckle as she keeps looking at the film.
“My bosses told me my operation was costing too much.” He doesn’t bother with inverted commas this time. Perhaps he was deluding himself by now that the bosses were real. “They would decommission me unless I raised €3,000 in three days. Fiona had to contribute 10 per cent.”
More street footage. Mel is staggering across the road with a pile of clothing to the Stephens’s doorstep. The door opens and the pile is passed to the figure in the obscured doorway, presumably Polly. Then the film speeds up and shows Mel whizzing across to other houses with more piles. Her fleshy backside quivers in blue striped leggings. With a Benny Hill soundtrack it would be comical but there’s no music and Chris’s words are chilling.
“Fiona washed those clothes as if her life depended on them.”
“Didn’t he know he’d get arrested if anyone ever saw this? This stuff could have put him in prison for years,” Helen says.
“He would have edited it. He was good at editing.” There’s a tear on her cheek. She lets it reach her chin and fall away.
Helen kneels in front of her, ignoring the pain in her leg. The coldness of Mel’s skin seeps into her own when she touches her hand. “I … Mel. I don’t know what to say, I …”
Mel faces her. “How old do you think I am?”
“I …”
“I’m 26. Five years
ago I was a student studying French. Now I can’t remember a single word.”
What can she say? Even after the weight loss, Mel looks late thirties. The skin, the mouth, the face – washed out and knackered.
Mel leans forward, shaking off Helen’s hand and presses the eject button on the player. “That’s the end.”
Helen moves back to the sofa. Five years. It’s been going on for five years. “I didn’t know any of this. I …”
Mel’s back is ramrod straight. The short sleeves of Louisa’s top dig into the sleeves of her jumper below, so tight her arms must hurt.
“He taught me to trust no one. I had to report to him any unidentified cars outside our house and sweep every room I entered for listening devices. You caught me once, looking in the drawers in your hall. Didn’t you guess?”
“I had no idea,” Helen whispered. She’d thought Louisa had put her up to being nosy. If only that was all.
“I had to practise surviving interrogation. You must have heard splashing through the wall.” She’s staring at Helen now, it’s the same empty stare she gave the TV screen.
“I … don’t … didn’t know what it was.” The gasping and coughing, Helen on the toilet trying to pee quietly so the bather next door wouldn’t hear her. She should have known.
“When you came to my door last night I thought for a moment it was Chris. He’d go off for days, leaving me with no money and not much to eat. If I didn’t hear him tap on the door when he came back, he’d leave again. If I didn’t listen, I didn’t get fed.”
“Didn’t you ever think of leaving him?”
Mel narrows her eyes, focusing on Helen. “How could I? He was shielding me from a drugs syndicate. He was the shepherd, protecting his flock. I couldn’t walk away; it would be a death sentence on my parents. Then I saw the DVDs. I realized the sentence was lifted because I’d already died.”
Helen wants to embrace her, tell her she has a chance at a life now, but she glances over the parquet to the door, to the windows. She has one more question and sits on the edge of the sofa, in case she has to run. “When did you find them?”
“In July, after the burglary. We all went out looking for Murdo. Everyone thought I’d just flown back from Lanzarote but I’d walked miles. I couldn’t keep up with the search so Chris sent me home. Our house had been ransacked. The burglar had smashed open Chris’s locked cabinet in the spare room. The DVDs were on the floor. I watched a bit of one and then hid them in the shed,” Mel says.
She pulls a piece of paper from her waistband. “I found this too. At the time I couldn’t understand why he kept it. I get it now.” She throws it to Helen but it flutters to the floor between them. “Go on, read it.”
Helen reaches for it. It is a newspaper cutting. Missing Girl Phones Home.
Mel says: “Do you know how it feels to make a call like that? Hearing your parents’ voices after so long is like having your innards ripped out. And every day afterwards, when you wake up, you feel eviscerated all over again.” Her shoulders sink and she chuckles. “Good word: eviscerated. It’s a Fiona word, not one of Mel’s.” She stiffens again.
Helen holds the piece of paper out to her. She can’t stop her hand from trembling. “The DVDs, this cutting. They’re evidence. We could go to the police. Get help for you. Why didn’t you go when you found them?”
Mel takes the paper, folds it and tucks it up her sleeve. “I had to work out my exit strategy.”
Helen shivers. Should she work out hers? “We ought to go now.”
Mel turns back to the blank TV screen and continues her monologue. “I pretended to have a nervous breakdown after the burglary. God knows I’d earned one after what I’d discovered, but I was only faking it. Whenever he went out, I left my bed and exercised. By December I was ready. Chris might have called it Stage Two. But I’m not as good a planner as Chris. I got something wrong.”
“What? What did you get wrong?” she asks but dreads the answer.
“I overheard Chris and Louisa arguing at the Christmas market and thought Louisa was in on it. I started thinking it was real again.” She pauses to suck more blood off her thumb. “I went back to bed. You see, I hadn’t watched the part where Chris introduced Louisa as a victim. If I’d seen that, things might have been different, but I wasn’t to know, was I?”
She looks at Helen, twisting her head to one side like a manipulative child who’s done something bad and thinks peering through her fringe will make it all right again.
Get the hell out of here. It doesn’t matter how. Just get away. Helen snatches at an idea. “Let’s talk about this somewhere else. Do you remember what I told you last night about Damian? We’re not safe here. Phone him and say you can’t face clearing Louisa’s stuff. Then I think we should go to the police.”
Mel glares at her.
Helen flinches and tries to qualify her mention of the police. “They’ll be able to reunite you with your parents.”
Mel stands up, and Helen cowers. Oh God, she’s made it worse: Mel’s parents. Pandora’s Box.
But Mel walks to the colouring book. “I suppose it’s because we use the other colours so much that there’s a need for one more.”
“Mel, shall we …?”
“I phoned my parents this morning. God knows how I remembered their number after so long. My father wasn’t there. He died two years ago.”
“Oh God, I’m so sorry …”
“You think I should call Damian? Let me show you something.” She walks over to the sliding doors into the dining room, pushes them open and points at the music room door beyond. “In there. Go and look.”
Helen hesitates behind Mel. The last time she saw Gary, he was slumped over the Howards’ dining table. And she found Chris in the music room. Dead Chris. Headless Chris.
“Go on.” There’s fury in Mel’s voice.
Helen pushes the music room door ajar and sees a pair of legs on the floor. One brown loafer is unhooked from the heel. There’s a Christmas tree pattern on the sock.
61
Helen ducks out and grips the dining table to stay on her feet. She can’t see whether Damian’s bleeding, but blood from Chris and Louisa and Gary cascades through her mind.
She clings to her wreck of an escape idea. “We have to get out of here,” she gasps. “It’s not safe.”
Mel saunters back to the lounge. She selects a felt-tip, goes to the wall and scrawls on it. Helen feels dizzy. The pen is red, it had to be red.
“I always hated this wallpaper,” Mel says. She presses so hard that she splits the nib.
Helen still clutches the table edge. How easy is it to open the patio door? How fast can she move with her injured knee? How will she get out? How? How?
“Come and sit down,” Mel says. She goes back to the rug for another pen. “I said sit down.”
Her heart in her throat, Helen moves into the lounge again and sits on a sofa, the one nearest to the hall door.
As she tests other pens on the colouring book, Mel says: “Louisa was fine playing spies, but as soon as Chris asked her for money, he lost her. He misjudged how important her marriage was. Damian promised to stay with her if she economized; there was no cash for spy games.”
She goes back to the wallpaper and stabs it with purple dots. Her arm moves with rhythmic precision. She returns to the rug when the pen has bled out.
“The argument I overheard was Louisa telling Chris she’d had enough. It panicked him into thinking she might expose him.” She selects a black pen from the pile and scrawls a wavy line on the colouring book. “Chris told me his bosses were preparing to move us again.”
She wraps her arms around her body and rocks back and forth. “Another bedsit, alone, no food, only tap water. Crying for my baby. Phone going, no sleep. A knock at the door, hide, hold my breath.” She stops rocking and shakes her head. “Not again. He wouldn’t do it to me again.” She selects a different pen. Her expression remains hollow.
“Mel, I think it’s time to
—”
“White could be the missing colour. I don’t use white when I’m colouring.” She turns the page and begins filling in Marge Simpson’s hair. Her pen strokes are quick and neat. “There were a few snow flurries when I went over but, half an hour after I left, my footprints were buried under a good six inches of white.”
“Mel, I think I heard something.”
“I had Chris to thank; he taught me stealth. He said it was on his bosses’ orders but he never did say why. I had to practise creeping up on him. If he heard me, he would spin round fist first. I learnt to be stealthy.”
“But it’s over now. No one will hurt you if we go somewhere safe,” Helen pleads.
“Louisa was leaning over a pudding, piping on whipped cream. Stealthy. Stealthy. Stealthy.” Her pen moves back and forth to the same rhythm as her words.
Helen stands up, feeling giddy. Her knee is throbbing but she continues the pretence of hearing someone else nearby. “There’s that noise again. We should …”
“I’ve always thought cheesecake was upside down fruit crumble. Louisa’s was a bit of a mess afterwards to be honest.” She continues colouring as she speaks. Her voice is monotone, matter-of-fact. “When Chris played stealth, I learnt to be quick. Into the dining room, quick. Knife into Gary, quick. But Chris was quicker. The big-I-am special agent ran like a frightened girl into the music room and shut the door. So I came over hysterical: ‘Help me, Chris, please. I didn’t mean to’.”
Helen squirms as Mel’s voice goes up in pitch. She sounds like the ineffectual Mel she’s always known – the one Chris created. She can imagine how it would have convinced Chris he still had a hold over her.
“He opened the door; he thought he’d won again. But the knife was in his neck before he knew it.” She grips the pen in her fist and gouges into the paper. “All the dread and humiliation of the last five years fell away. Fiona came back. I saw the kids’ musical instruments and smashed them up. I’d switched off to everything for so long. It felt good to have a normal temper tantrum.”
The Perfect Neighbours Page 25