The Downstairs Neighbor

by Helen Cooper

  “I don’t know if I can remember the exact route.”

  “You’ll need to try.”

  Ford stared at him for a few more moments. Chris tried not to shrink away from her eye contact as he wondered whether she had more to say. He sensed there was a question she hadn’t asked, an angle she was saving. But she slammed her notebook shut.

  “Thank you, Mr. Watson. I’ll ask somebody to take down those details before you leave. But if you think of anything else, please get in touch. Particularly any . . . irregularities from your lessons with Freya. Anything at all.”

  He didn’t like the way she teased out the syllables of irregularities. It made him think of dodgy football managers or politicians under investigation. One of those euphemisms that meant somebody’s net of secrets was about to unravel.

  12.

  PAUL

  It was two days since he’d last seen his daughter. Since he’d said a hurried, distracted good-bye to her as he’d left for work on Thursday morning. Probably no more hurried or distracted than most weekdays, but still it pained him to think of it. He must’ve dropped a kiss on top of her head as she’d sat on the sofa with a bowl of milky Weetabix in one hand and her phone in the other. Had he wished her a good day at school? Done a subtle “dad-check” of what was on the screen of her phone? He couldn’t remember. Hadn’t known then that he might need to.

  Now he was sitting in her favorite sofa spot, unable to contemplate breakfast, staring at his phone. A reply to the message he’d sent during the sleepless early hours of this morning had just come through, making his heart quicken.

  If Yvette was shocked to hear from him, she didn’t say so. Her response was characteristically calm, and as concise as his original message had been.

  Yes, we can meet, her text said. Where and when?

  Paul glanced over at Steph, perched on the chair she’d drawn up to the living room window sometime in the last twenty-four hours and left in place, like a permanent lookout station. In her leggings, with her hair tied up, she looked painfully like Freya. Steph’s ears stuck out the tiniest bit; normally she brushed her hair down over them, whereas Freya always had that life-of-its-own ponytail. Was that Freya’s green scarf Steph had huddled around her neck too?

  He tilted his body so there was no chance Steph could see his phone. The action flooded him with guilt. He felt it widening even further, the gulf that had opened between them when he’d asked to speak to the police alone. It had grown when he’d left to visit Glover last night, and he’d been unable to close or even address it when he’d returned to find Steph printing endless missing posters with their daughter’s face.

  As soon as possible? he typed. Kingston Bridge?

  To his surprise and relief, Yvette came back instantly: I can be there in half an hour.

  Did she already know about Freya? Or did she just realize that it must be important for him to contact her out of the blue?

  Paul went to the bathroom, splashing cold water onto his face, shaking out his limbs, which had begun to prickle with nervous energy. Just the thought of seeing Yvette again was unscrewing things in his brain. Blocks that had been tightly, essentially, in place.

  Returning to the living room, he said: “I . . . I’m going to pop out.”

  Steph looked up, frowning. “Where?”

  “To look for Frey.”

  “But where?”

  He didn’t answer. He reached for his sneakers but the laces wouldn’t tie: His fingers moved too fast for his brain.

  “I’ll come with you,” she said, standing.

  He raised his head. “No! No, you should stay here for when the family liaison officer comes.”

  Steph gazed back at him through bloodshot eyes, pressing the scarf into her throat. Her cheekbones had already been sharpened by lack of sleep and food. He remembered the first time he’d ever seen her, almost twenty years ago: The curve of those cheekbones had stirred something in him, even though his head had been a dark, angry mess. He’d been going on a holiday that Glover had urged him to take, during the leave he would never return from. To break the exhausting cycle of his thoughts, Paul had struck up a conversation with the industrious woman serving drinks in the first-class lounge. He’d found himself observing her as he’d nursed a beer, watching her move expertly around the room, swerving chairs and tables without having to look. She had let him waylay her from her tasks, chatting to him with a touch of shyness but no obvious impatience. When he’d asked her about working in an airport she’d said it was like being in a bubble. That had appealed to Paul. He’d wanted to stay in the air-conditioned bubble of that lounge, pretending the rest of the world didn’t exist.

  Later, when she’d returned to her work, he’d heard her making an announcement about frequent-flyer cards over the loudspeaker. She’d paused halfway through, and when she’d resumed he’d detected suppressed laughter in her voice. Paul had spotted her through the door to the staff room, holding the microphone to her grinning mouth while shaking her head at the colleague making her laugh. He’d felt he was glimpsing a different side to her and he’d smiled properly for the first time in months. Leaving his number on a napkin had just been part of the escapism. He’d never expected her to call, never expected to see her again, beyond that bubble.

  He still loved it when Steph got the giggles and her usual composure would melt. Freya brought it out in her—they could lose it over something incomprehensible to anyone but the two of them, starting up again every time they caught one another’s eye. His breath trapped in his throat as he thought about it now. When had been the last time?

  “I’m supposed to just sit here?” Steph moved toward him.

  “One of us should.”

  “Tell me where you’re going, Paul. Running away again. What the fuck’s going on in your head?”

  The word stalled him. She rarely swore these days. They’d both tried to kick the habit when Freya was little because she’d been such a sponge, with a cheeky intuition for the naughty words. Paul had the urge to swear now, too, as ferociously as he could.

  He put his hands on Steph’s shoulders, molding his fingers around their familiar shape. You could tell her. As the thought crossed his mind it was chased by dread. Steph seemed to change beneath his hands, her shoulders becoming thinner, her hair darker, those cheekbones warping into somebody else’s. A different suffering mother desperate for answers. Paul reared away with an intake of breath.

  “I’m sorry.” His hands tremored in midair. “I don’t even know what’s in my head myself. I just need to get out, need to be doing something.”

  She opened her mouth but any response seemed to evaporate. Paul walked quickly to the door, guilt tearing at his stomach.

  “Paul,” he heard her say, but he thundered down the stairs.

  Outside, every tree had his daughter’s smile. Some of the neighbors had displayed the poster in their windows—Steph must’ve asked them to—and it was as if they’d imprisoned Freya in their tasteful living rooms. One poster had blown free from wherever it had been nailed and was pirouetting with new freedom down the road.

  Paul battled an urge to chase it, dive on it. He yanked his eyes away as a taxi pulled up on the street and Chris Watson climbed out. Paul’s jaw hardened. In the storm of everything else he’d almost forgotten about Watson, the last person to see Freya. Had he received his grilling from the police? The guy looked ruffled, yet somehow not ruffled enough. He walked to his door without acknowledging the posters of Freya, without seeming to notice her dad watching him all the way.

  Paul thought about Steph’s disagreement with Chris. How he’d seemed unwilling to enter Freya for her test even though she’d taken to driving as instinctively as she’d mastered catching and kicking a ball. How the school had fucked up the register and the CCTV had proven useless and there was a great blank space in the middle of Freya’s afternoon.

&nbs
p; He was so close to stalking Watson to his door: What do you know about my daughter? But still one thought roared louder than the rest, dragging his attention onward.

  Two missing girls, then and now.

  * * *

  —

  As he strode along the Thames path, propelled by that ever-increasing nervous energy, Paul felt Freya bounding beside him. Doing the sidestepping thing she would do when she was in the mood to jog-and-chat, her hands shadowboxing, eyes dancing. He’d long ago accepted that he and Freya didn’t have quite the same brand of closeness as Steph and she had. Maybe it was an entrenched mother-daughter thing, or maybe because he was naturally more reticent, but Steph tended to be the confidante, the tear-drier, and Paul had to admit he left those things to her. But he had always been the one Freya wanted to race, or shoot penalties against, or compete with on the diving board during her swimming phase when they used to call her Flipper. She’d reawakened elements of him that had been diluted since he’d left the police: competitiveness, energy, drive. He needed to revive those qualities again now, and he prayed she was using them, too, that they were fighting their way back to one another.

  He saw Yvette before she saw him. She was on the bridge, staring down at the water, the wind toying with the hem of her long red coat. Her hair was shorter than it used to be, with glimmers of gray. She still emitted an aura of calm—did all psychotherapists have that? Even the stretch of river flowing beneath her gaze seemed more tranquil than the fast-flowing bend further ahead. Paul’s heartbeat settled into a less frenetic rhythm. Surely Yvette would be able to help him. And he certainly wouldn’t resist her help, the way he had when he’d first been ordered to start seeing her as part of the police’s “duty of care.”

  He thought of her therapy room with the beech tree outside and the window always fractionally open. The books about PTSD that filled her shelves; her patience as Paul sat for long, silent stretches, finally beginning to cooperate near the end of each session. Nobody else knew so much about him. Not even Steph and Freya, who’d been like new limbs and a new heart after everything that had happened before.

  Now he felt like one of his limbs had been hacked off as punishment for thinking he deserved to live normally again.

  Yvette turned at the sound of his footsteps, and Paul realized she wasn’t as calm as she’d first appeared. Her lined, worried eyes made his heart fire up again.

  “Paul,” she said. “What’s happened? DI Glover called me yesterday and asked whether I’d heard from you. He wouldn’t say why. Then I got your text. Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”

  The wind whipped at her coat and she held on to its lapels. An old instinct made Paul follow her hands with his eyes. Many times she’d asked him to focus on their rhythmic, deliberate motion while she’d teased out his most troubling thoughts. Eye movement desensitization therapy, they called it.

  Now, as her hands disappeared into her pockets, the fears that had been piling up inside him tumbled out: “You always told me I had to forgive myself. But what if Sanderson never forgave me? What if he’s just been biding his time? Waiting to take everything from me . . . like he thinks I did from him?”

  “Slow down, Paul. What’s been taken?”

  “My daughter. Freya. The one I sent you a picture of when she was a few weeks old.”

  That was the last time he’d contacted Yvette before today. He’d sent her the photo eighteen months after he’d finished therapy, as a way of showing her he was doing okay. She’d sent him a note back—he still had it—saying Freya looked a perfect little live wire, her eyes already wide open, curious, alert.

  Realization appeared to be dawning in Yvette’s face. Perhaps she’d heard something in the news but not made the connection with Paul. Perhaps half noticed a poster on the way here but not looked closely, not expected it to be the girl whose baby photo she’d once smiled over, thinking that one of her patients had found his happy ending.

  13.

  EMMA

  “What do you mean, fallen through?” Emma roamed around her living room with her phone at her ear, banging into the boxes of stock that she still hadn’t got used to having in her way.

  “I’m afraid the buyers have changed their minds,” her real estate agent told her, in a tone that made Emma feel as if he blamed her. Maybe she’d deterred her shop’s buyers by being too openly sad about the sale. Perhaps she should’ve smiled graciously and wished them luck, rather than showing them round with a how-dare-you-buy-my-life sullenness. After all, it wasn’t their fault. It was nobody’s fault, as her mum kept reminding her. So why did she feel so furious?

  “They decided to go another way,” the agent added.

  “What does that even mean?”

  “A different property, I assume.”

  They were taking their secondhand electrics elsewhere. Probably to a place with cheaper overheads and higher footfall. Emma had never liked the idea of her shop being filled with rewired TVs, but she needed the money from the sale. Needed it to pay the rent on her flat and settle invoices while she searched for a job. To keep her afloat, in control, for when Zeb came home and everything would be okay.

  She managed not to swear until she’d hung up. Then she flung her phone across the room, where it landed in a box of 1920s jewelry and sank into its glittery depths. Suddenly Emma felt suffocated, felt heat coming off the leather handbags lined up along every baseboard.

  It took her a moment to realize her phone was ringing again. Its vibration sounded metallic against the brooches and hairpins inside the box. She dug in her hand, praying the buyers had had a drastic change of heart within the last thirty seconds.

  But it wasn’t her real estate agent.

  “Zeb!”

  She tried to tame her enthusiasm as she stabbed at the screen. There was no reply. A rustling came down the line.

  “Zeb? Can you hear me?”

  A buzz of voices now, faint and fragmented, and something like the clink of glass. Emma’s spirits dived again. He’d clearly pocket-called her. Why did it sound like he was in a bar? At eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning?

  “Hello?” Frustration rose through her. “Zeb, are you there?”

  There was a tinny echo on the line. She hung up and tried to call him back—once, twice, no answer—then sent a text: Just want to know you’re okay.

  She watched as the Delivered notification appeared, but not the Read. With a growl she deliberately aimed for the box of jewelry this time, torpedoing her phone to the bottom.

  * * *

  —

  She needed to get out of the house. Pulling on her scruffy running gear (how did the joggers around here always manage to look so glamorous?), Emma stuck earbuds into her ears, turned up her iPod, and escaped into the hallway.

  “Oh!” She almost ran into two uniformed PCs just outside her door. “Sorry.” She pulled out the buds, feeling disrespectful even for thinking of listening to a frivolous post-punk playlist when her neighbors were into their second day of hell.

  “Emma Brighton?” the male PC with the earnest face asked.

  She nodded, dropped her earbuds, fumbled to scoop them up.

  “Could we ask you a few questions?”

  “Of course.” She stepped back inside and held the door for them. “Please . . .”

  They squinted around, as if wondering whether all her boxes were stuffed with knockoff DVDs. She’d spilled Gilbert’s food earlier: Seeds were crumbled on the carpet where the police stood in their regulation black shoes. The woman had auburn hair in a neat bun, the man a slightly gangly way of holding himself that reminded her of Zeb.

  “You may be aware that your neighbor Freya Harlow is unfortunately missing.”

  She swallowed. “Yes. It’s horrible. Have there been any . . . ?”

  “When did you last see her?”

  “Erm, it would’ve been Thursday mo
rning. I saw her out of my window, leaving for school.”

  Her cheeks warmed at this half-confession of her interest in the Harlows. She hated the image of herself as a nosy neighbor or a bored spectator of others’ lives. Was that what she’d become since her shop had closed, since Zeb had left?

  “Did you notice anything out of the ordinary?”

  Emma looked toward her window as if to re-create her last sighting of Freya. There she was in a navy Puffa jacket, ponytail flopping to one side as she paused to read something on her phone. Was Emma’s memory tainted by the knowledge that Freya had vanished, or had the teenager really seemed subdued? Had she hunched her shoulders as she’d studied her phone?

  She recalled now that Steph had come out of the house, calling after her daughter. Freya had looked irritated, shoving her phone into her pocket as she’d spun around. Steph had handed her what looked like a couple of banknotes, and touched Freya’s arm before she’d left. Did Steph remember that casual see-you-later touch? Had she been replaying it endlessly? Perhaps convincing herself, as Emma was now, that Freya hadn’t responded, had maybe even shrugged her off.

  “I guess I’ve seen her happier,” Emma said.

  “Was she upset?”

  “No, no. She just wasn’t as full of beans as she sometimes seems.”

  “Have you noticed other changes in her recently?”

  “I don’t really know her.”

  “But you did notice she was less . . . ‘full of beans’ on Thursday?” The PC said it like Emma had coined the phrase.

  “It was just an observation. I only saw her for a moment. And I . . . I wouldn’t like to say what’s normal behavior for her.”

  But Freya’s demeanor that morning had snagged her attention, even if she was only properly registering it now. Mainly because Freya’s carefree bounciness had been a source of amazement to her for a while. Her own experience of being a teenager had been so different, so bogged down by self-consciousness and insecurity.