The Perfect Neighbours

by Rachel Sargeant

  Normal? Helen can see the stairs through the open lounge door, and the edge of the telephone stand. The potpourri is out of sight.

  “Sit down,” Mel says.

  It’s a few steps to the front door, but Mel is quick. Knife quick. Helen sits down.

  “Napoleon came in wagging his tail. I watched him for a while, licking up Chris’s blood. I hate dogs. One of Chris’s loyalty tests was to enter a disused classroom block at the back of the school. He said there were guard dogs patrolling. There weren’t but I believed him. I was so scared I soiled myself. He wouldn’t let me bathe. The sores took weeks to heal.”

  She finds a clean page and decorates Homer in olive green. “Napoleon followed me into the hall. He let me tickle his tummy. I overcame a lot to do that, you know.” She glares at Helen, demanding some kind of acknowledgement.

  “It must have been hard. I know you don’t like dogs,” she says, playing along.

  “He made the most bizarre noise when I slit him.”

  Sweat pools in Helen’s armpits. Mel can’t talk forever. What next? She points at Louisa’s fireplace. “The police said they found traces of men’s clothes in this grate. I thought it could be Sascha Jakobsen.”

  “No, you didn’t. You never thought that. Don’t bother saying it now. I arrived in some of Chris’s clothes. They got bloody so I burnt them. I put on Louisa’s coat from the hallstand when I left. I can wear it now I’ve lost weight.” She smooths out the hem of the Lycra top.

  She puts down her pen and lifts up the rug. There’s a knife. Damian’s blood has seeped from the blade into the parquet, Napoleon red.

  She moves forward, the knife held upwards, the point glinting.

  62

  Helen leaps into the hall but the blade catches her, metal slashing through her jacket, ripping into flesh. Pain screams down her arm. Her palm throbs and her arm won’t move. She cups her elbow and blood percolates through her thumb and fingers.

  Helen’s good hand forms a fist and drives up into Mel’s belly. That hand hurts now too, differently, a snap, a bruise. Mel staggers backwards, blocking the front door, giving Helen time to run upstairs, blood from her wound spotting the treads. Which door? Her lungs lag behind and she pauses for too long, giving Mel time to lock the front door and come after her. She is halfway up before Helen lunges into the bathroom. The bruised hand, clammy with the other arm’s blood, bolts the door.

  She must find a weapon. Razor blades? There’s a vast wood-panelled cabinet, polished as a coffin. But there’s nothing on the bottom shelf except deodorant-can-shaped rings of talcum powder. She feels her bloodied fingertips along the top shelf. They come away white. Red and white. Like Louisa’s cheesecake. She gags. Acid up to her nostrils.

  Thud. Mel hits the door.

  Helen’s in a cage of white enamel. How to hide? How to run? She’ll lower herself out of the window with the shower curtain. But there’s no curtain to degrade this deluxe suite. And her bad arm is a dead fish, slippery and oozing blood down her elbow, forming rivulets in the lines on her palm.

  Thud.

  She goes to the bathtub, dirties its sleek surface with a rusty handprint. She catches her reflection hovering in the polished chrome tap and looks down before she can focus. Is there a plug on a chain? Flick it into Mel’s face. Distract her long enough to get past her. But there’s no chain, it’s lever release.

  Mel slams against the door again. The lock won’t survive the onslaught. She must slow it down.

  “Why didn’t you tell someone?”

  No reply. The door judders against another attack.

  How will she fight her off? There isn’t even a loo brush, and the top of the cistern is tiled into the wall.

  “Why didn’t you tell?” she asks again.

  Mel shouts: “Tell who what? How would a neighbour know any better than me about the intelligence services? The only person who knew was Chris.”

  There’s a shower spray attachment with a massive showerhead. Swing it fast and hard?

  “You could have told me. You must have known I never trusted Chris.”

  “I didn’t care what you thought. I believed him. He wasn’t after my money. He took that in the early days.” The door handle rattles and then there’s another thump. “If he’d wanted to con me, he wouldn’t have come back, would he?”

  The wood behind the lock splinters. The first screw drops. Helen yanks at the shower attachment with a desperate scream. Adrenaline triumphs, the attachment pulls free of the wall bringing tile and plaster with it.

  If she’s going to die, she’ll die with answers. “I get why you killed Chris and even Louisa. But why Gary?”

  “He knew. You all knew that monster made me kill my baby, made me miss the last years of my dad’s life.”

  Thud.

  “You’re wrong, Mel. No one knew. We couldn’t have—”

  “Liar! I saw them. The whispering in corners, the sudden silences when I walked in.”

  Helen speaks faster. “That wasn’t about you. It was about what Damian did to that poor girl; I told you.”

  More wood splinters. The second screw falls and skitters across the stone-tiled floor. Helen’s defence is a coil of shower tubing. “And you never doubted Chris? Not once?”

  “Sometimes when he nearly drowned me, I’d think I’d be better off dead. But he’d turn on the charm and I accepted everything all over again. He was my shepherd … What? Who’s there?”

  The thudding stops.

  “Wait there. I’m coming down,” Mel shouts.

  Helen tries not to breathe. The stairs are creaking. Mel’s heard something in the house, but one more assault on the door and she’s in.

  No thud. No sound. Helen trembles and waits, freezing and pouring sweat. She loosens her grip on the showerhead. Two minutes? Five? She gets down on the floor. It smells of jasmine. There’s a new pain as she kneels on one of the fallen screws. She peers at the narrow strip of light under the door. No movement, no shadow.

  If she opens it, there’ll be an ambush. For the first time, Helen thinks about getting help. She could open the window and scream to passers-by. But the neighbours have joined the Christmas exodus; no one would hear her. Even Manfred has shuffled off somewhere. The police then. The number is 112. The only thing she got out of Sabine’s welcome briefing in April. Damn. Her phone’s at home. She pictures Number Ten’s layout – there’s a phone in the hall – but even if it hasn’t been disconnected, Mel will get to her before she reaches the handset.

  Helen winds the shower tubing around her goodish arm. She reaches up to pull what’s left of the bolt. Her clammy fingers struggle to grip it.

  She’s out on the landing.

  Nothing. All the doors are shut. She tries to remember if they were like that when she ran upstairs. She holds her stance, expecting one of them to fly open. Nothing. She creeps to the stairs. The staircase has grown to be the longest in the world and every step creaks louder than the previous one. An eternity later she reaches the front door. She pulls and yanks and fights it but knows Mel locked it.

  Where next: patio or back door? The patio means going through the lounge, and Mel might have gone there to annihilate more wallpaper. The back door was unlocked the last time Helen was here. She’ll have to hope the police – and Mel – have overlooked it. She darts past the lounge. Out of the corner of her eye she sees the colouring paraphernalia but no sign of Mel. Mercifully, Damian isn’t visible when she passes the dining room.

  She pushes open the kitchen door and stops dead. Instinct detects something – a sound or a movement. She winds the shower coil tighter but Mel doesn’t leap out. She holds her breath, straining to hear. But she can’t bear the limbo state any longer. She dashes through the kitchen and utility room to the back door. She yanks the handle up and down. Up and down. Up and Up. It makes no difference: it won’t open. She senses the shadow approaching. She prepares to swing the showerhead but finds her arms pinned to her sides. She bucks and rears and kicks bu
t the grip is too strong. She waits for the blade.

  “Relax,” Sascha says, “I’ve locked her in the cellar.”

  He lets go of her arms as she stops struggling. She takes hold of him and hugs his sinewy, boyish body into hers. He must feel her trembling.

  “You’re safe now,” he whispers into her hair. “But I think she may have tripped on the steps.”

  63

  Saturday, 25 December

  Helen lays a coat on the thin layer of snow and sits down by the pool. The cold seeps through to her thighs. She pulls another coat tighter across her shoulders. Gary’s ski jacket.

  One last Christmas with Gary, or with his jacket at least. It’s their wedding anniversary in three days’ time. She’ll be alone with him for that too. Their second anniversary and their last. It might take months or years to get through her mourning but she knows leaving this place will start the process.

  She draws up her knees and cups her arms around her legs. One leg still feels sore. At least the climb over the fence was better executed than last time and she hasn’t made her injuries worse. She rubs her knee and then her hand travels to her arm. The coat is too thick to feel the bandage. Fourteen stitches where Mel’s knife caught her. A cheerful, overweight doctor at the police station patched her up. She witnessed mental cruelty, violence, and murder, but her body will leave this place with fourteen stitches in her arm and a stab of anti-tetanus in her thigh.

  The winter sun comes out and she shields her eyes. Unbidden, an image of Toby’s bloodied, broken cello drifts into view. She fixes her gaze on the iced-up water. Her mind skips back to May. That first tingling dip, balmy on her naked limbs, after the hit of cool spring air. And the more she trained, pumped, kicked, the hotter her body became. Gary used to love it when she came home pink-faced. He had to kiss her, touch her, and whisper cool breaths on her neck.

  Tears sting her face but she doesn’t wipe them away.

  A car door slams and the perimeter fence creaks and sways. There’s a thud onto the ground.

  When Sascha sits down beside her, she looks away so he won’t see her tears.

  Neither of them speaks for a while.

  Eventually he says: “I didn’t push her.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “She heard me come out of the cellar. I saw her eyes before I saw the knife. She went for me but stumbled through the open cellar door. There was a child’s bag on the steps. I’m sorry she fell.”

  Helen says: “I’m glad it ended then. She’d suffered enough.”

  “I swear on Mareike’s grave I didn’t push her.”

  She scrutinizes his face. He looks older, more her age. The all-out, hell-bent fury in his eyes has dimmed to something else. Sorrow, acceptance, maturity? There are lines etched at the side of his mouth and visible through the stubble. He’s a man now, and he used her, but all she wants to do is mother him.

  “Don’t you think it’s time to let Mareike rest in peace?” she says.

  Sascha nods. “Mareike was the first tragedy. I will always remember but I think I must not look only backwards.”

  “Will you tell me why you robbed us in the summer?” she asks. “I just want to know.”

  He glares at her, some of the fiery youth comes back. “You still think it was me?”

  She shrugs. She doesn’t care if she’s offended him. Too many people have watched their words. Too many secrets. Too many lies. “Wasn’t it you?”

  His expression relaxes, the fire dies even quicker than it ignited. Perhaps he doesn’t care anymore either. “On that day I was in the wood by the Howard house. The street was deserted and I found out later you were looking for a missing child. Manfred Scholz came out of your garden. After he’d gone, I went round the back of your house and saw the broken glass in your door. I cut myself. That’s why the police thought I was the burglar but they dropped the charges when there was no evidence I went inside. Your earring was on the path. I meant to drop it into your bag when we met for swimming but I didn’t get the chance. It stayed in my pocket until I left it here in the snow as an alibi to get you out of jail.”

  Helen rubs her face; her head is starting to hurt. Can there be more revelations? After everything else? “Why would Manfred Scholz burgle my house and three of my neighbours?”

  “I had reason to hate the British so I figured he did too. I said nothing and silently wished him good luck. Then it went too far. Murder. I had to confront him. You saw me coming out of his house when Damian Howard attacked me.”

  Helen shakes her head. “Did you suspect dear old Manfred of a killing frenzy? I can barely believe he ransacked my house.”

  He glares again, his eyes flashing with the annoyance she remembers from their first meeting months ago, when he’d just seemed grumpy, before she knew his temper.

  “What do you know about Manfred Scholz?” he asks.

  She shrugs again. “After what’s happened, isn’t it obvious that I didn’t know much about any of my neighbours?”

  “The Niers School demolished his cottage to make way for a sports centre.”

  “Somebody – Louisa, I think – told me that months ago. Apparently, the cottage was in a poor condition. The school re-housed him and his wife in Dickensweg.”

  Sascha shakes his head. “Moving onto an international estate broke Christa’s heart. In Manfred’s eyes, the foreigners were no better than the Russians who expelled his parents from their homeland in Silesia. When Christa died of cancer, he knew who to blame.

  “All his life he had been a man of honour. But now he didn’t care. He hated the international teachers with their stupid cocktail parties and noisy dogs. He attacked with – how do you call it – paint on walls and signs?”

  “Graffiti? Manfred Scholz was responsible for all the ‘Auslӓnder Raus’ spray paint?”

  Sascha nods. “He told me that wasn’t all he did. He broke play furniture in children’s playgrounds.”

  “We thought it was kids.”

  “I think he was drinking too much. He wanted to do more than smash playgrounds; he wanted to smash houses and shops. He had a tactic. He told me he set a toy bomb and trashed your houses. He also took the boy. He knew what the residents would do.”

  Helen kneels up and faces him. “You’re telling me Manfred Scholz kidnapped Murdo Howard to create a diversion and ransack our houses? I can understand a bit of vandalism but Murdo is five years old. Scholz should be arrested.”

  Sascha raises his hand to calm her. “Manfred said they played marbles and listened to his Kelly Family records. He left the boy watching Raumschiff Enterprise when he broke into the houses. He took him home to his mother afterwards. The child was not harmed.”

  “I’m truly sorry he lost his cottage and then his wife, but that doesn’t excuse what he did. What’s to stop him doing it again?”

  “He won’t. When I went to see him, I told him I knew about the burglaries. I made him look me in the eye and tell me he’d done nothing else. I was talking about the murders but he confessed to the bomb scare and to taking Murdo. He said his campaign stopped the moment he ran into you outside the Howards’ house. He saw your terror. It made him realize where his own vengeance might have led if someone else hadn’t got there first. His rage is spent. He’ll harm no one, except himself with alcohol.” Sascha looks away and seems distracted by another thought.

  “So you blackmailed him? He got you out of jail with a false alibi and in return you said nothing about him kidnapping Murdo?” She scoops up some snow and hurls it at the pool railing. “Is everyone I’ve met here a criminal?”

  “Not me. Not really. I was at the Freibad that night even though Manfred Scholz didn’t see me. I’m glad I made him lie for me. But I regret I destroyed the Howards’ garden. I was trying to get at Damian but I only hurt Louisa. I thought she was a bad person too but I was wrong.”

  Helen sighs. “Louisa wasn’t a bad person. I see that now. She was manipulated like everyone else.” She glares at him. �
�Manipulated like me.”

  “I’m sorry that I lied to you. I would have done anything to get to the truth, but I shouldn’t have involved you.”

  She throws more snow. It misses the railing and spatters on the frozen water. No, he shouldn’t have lied, but then so did everyone else, including her own husband. The only one who didn’t lie, except maybe about her childhood, was Louisa.

  “Are you going to stay in Dortmannhausen?” she asks.

  “My mother has promised to get counselling. Bereavement help at first but I hope one day for alcohol too. I will stay with her. I’ve decided to go back to the Hochschule. To study English. What will you do?”

  “You’ll do well; you have a flair. I’ll get a teaching job in England, but first I have to find Mel’s mother.”

  “Shouldn’t you leave that to the police?”

  “They’ll tell her that her daughter murdered four people. I have to explain why it happened and that there was a far crueller person than Fiona behind it.” She pulls the ski jacket tighter.

  They are silent for some time. She looks at the water again. Will the pool open in May next year now that Louisa isn’t around to wave her petition at the town hall? Louisa deserves that legacy at least.

  She thinks of the elderly woman swimmer in the flowery cap. What’s she doing now? Cooking Christmas Day goose while her husband reads the newspaper? Or do they have the grandchildren round? Normal life. Louisa would have adored that role one day. They’d have been Leo’s children. Toby, on the international classical concert circuit, wouldn’t have had time to marry. And Murdo … Leo’s kids would have loved their funny uncle whom Granny Louisa fussed over.

  Sascha says: “I think we must try to live our lives. For Mareike and for Gary.”

  “Yes” she replies, “for Mareike, for Gary … and for Louisa.”

  They both hold up a hand, and their palms press together.

  Acknowledgements