The Downstairs Neighbor

by Helen Cooper

  “I thought you had lessons all morning?” she said.

  There was a silence in which they both seemed to register that neither had expected to bump into the other.

  “Just grabbing a coffee.” He nodded at the orange wool dangling like a dead creature in her hands: “What are you knitting?”

  He didn’t catch her answer because his eye was drawn to something sparkly on her wrist. A silver bracelet with white gems and tiny pearls. Not her usual style. Not the kind of thing she’d ever buy for herself.

  He was still staring at it after she’d finished speaking. She tugged down her sleeve and walked away into the kitchen.

  Chris followed. He knew he had to be careful with his words, his tone, but it was hard not to grab her arm and yell.

  “New bracelet?” he said casually.

  She had opened a cupboard and was gazing at rows of jars and tins. She swiveled a couple so their labels faced her and Chris heard the bracelet slide along her arm.

  “Di gave it to me.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “I should take it off before I go back on shift.” He saw how she couldn’t help touching it, couldn’t resist a quick look before she smoothed her sleeve back down.

  “Real diamonds?”

  She snorted. “Di’s not made of money. More so than we are, for sure, but not diamond level.”

  With a small dissatisfied noise, she closed the cupboard she’d been peering into and opened the next one along, contemplating a pack of biscuits. Chris didn’t know what she was searching for, what she wanted but apparently hadn’t found.

  As he turned to leave, she said, “Did you know the girl from upstairs is missing?”

  Chris wheeled back to face her. She was looking at him, her posture and eyes suddenly alert, like a different person. He nodded.

  “I feel awful now,” she said. “For calling them those names when we first moved in.”

  “We didn’t mean anything by it.”

  We were just developing our in-jokes, he wanted to add, back when we still had them. Back when we used them to cling together if we felt like fishes out of water.

  * * *

  —

  He did have lessons booked for the rest of the morning—Saturday was always busy—and there was nothing to do but forge on with his routine. The sense of a street made of eyes was more oppressive than ever as he left the house for the second time. Still he couldn’t look up at the Harlows’ even for an instant. He ducked his head into his car like a celebrity—or a criminal—avoiding the press.

  Something made him flip open the glove box and check it yet again, reaching his hand to the back and patting his way around the carpeted emptiness. He sat back and fastened his seat belt but the jitters wouldn’t settle. This car used to feel like a haven. His domain, where he was in charge, the expert. He’d liked being alone in it, listening to nostalgic soft rock and swigging coffee from his travel cup, but he’d also liked the ebb and flow of students, the way he could allow them in for prescribed blocks of time. Recently, though, he’d felt trapped if he spent too long sitting there, felt like he was running out of air.

  His mind returned to his conversation with Vicky, the bracelet glinting from her wrist. It was possible her sister had given it to her. Chris knew he shouldn’t ring Di and ask, but the compulsion to do so was taking root. He needed to get to his next appointment, find a distraction. He’d see Di later at the weekly lunch. Maybe he’d—

  He sat bolt upright. A navy Puffa jacket was moving toward him along the street.

  Seconds later his vision adjusted, but his heart still charged. Red hair, not blonde; scurrying steps, not long, athletic strides.

  Jess, not Freya.

  And, in fact, the coat was black rather than navy, different from Freya’s now that he saw it properly.

  Jess spotted him and faltered. Struggling to recover, Chris lowered his window. She stopped but he noticed she didn’t come too close, which made him feel grubby, tainted.

  “You okay?” he asked her.

  She shook her head, her eyes filling.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Stupid question.”

  “I’ve come to talk to Steph.”

  She looked younger than usual and Chris realized she was wearing no makeup. There was a childishness about the way she was standing, too, with toes pointed inward, hands clutching opposite elbows. He felt a sudden sharp twist of sorrow. “Has there been any news?” he asked.

  Her chin thrust out. “I thought you’d know more than me. Judging by what the police have said.”

  Chris flinched as if she’d spat through his window. Not for the first time, he wondered how much Freya had told Jess about him. Her eyes were wide with accusation, but she couldn’t seem to keep them trained on his face. Lines marred her forehead; the overall effect was more confused than confrontational.

  “Jess . . . I don’t know what the police have been implying. Of course they’ll be checking out my story, testing other possibilities—that’s their job. But as far as I knew, she’d gone back to school after our lesson. I really thought she had.”

  There was a silence. Recycled air blew from his dashboard heaters. Jess didn’t seem to know what to think. Her lip had started to tremble.

  “Seriously.” He leaned forward. “I wish I knew more. Wish I could help.”

  She let out a sigh that inflated her bare cheeks. “Fuck, this is all so weird. Sorry for the language.”

  “You don’t have to apologize.”

  He smiled at her and she eventually smiled back through her tears, her body language softening. Chris found himself wanting to keep the conversation going, wanting to secure her as an ally, pathetic as that was. Why should her opinion matter? Yet somehow it did.

  She wound a rope of hair around her fingers and glanced toward Steph and Paul’s flat. Chris finally dared to look, too, squinting at the upstairs sash windows with their heavy taupe-colored drapes. The sun flashed and he thought he saw a pale face between the curtains, the whip of a blonde ponytail, but as he caught his breath it was gone.

  He took in the Harlows’ immaculate paintwork, noticeably brighter than his own, the house seeming to wither as the eye traveled down. Anger swept him, like a flare of heat. It was old resentment rolled in with something new, a kind of outrage with a ball of fear at its center. Steph and Paul had everything and they’d never appeared grateful. And they didn’t know their daughter, any more than she knew them. They’d accused him of milking them for money, when really it had been Freya who’d wanted more sessions . . . It came from her . . .

  “Oh, before I forget.” Jess broke his thoughts, holding a crumple of cash toward him. He had a memory-surge of Freya doing the same: those banknotes with her mum’s little car drawings in the corners.

  “What’s that?” He stared at Jess’s offering, sliding his hands beneath his thighs to flatten their trembling.

  “For yesterday’s lesson. I didn’t pay you.”

  He shook his head. “Don’t be silly. We didn’t really have a lesson in the end.”

  She shrugged and put it away. “Thanks, Chris,” she said, and he felt an unexpected flood of affection. Perhaps a displaced feeling, perhaps a reaction to hearing his name said without hostility.

  Jess leaped back as the house’s main door opened. Chris felt his own body jolt, the seat belt snapping tight around his neck.

  Blue-haired Emma emerged, rather than one of the Harlows. His breath gushed out and the belt slackened. But he could see that Jess was rattled to have been caught talking to him, even by Emma. Was he already the enemy?

  Jess fled without saying good-bye. Emma’s gaze lingered on him as she held the door for Jess, then got into her own car. When Chris caught movement again in the Harlows’ window, he started his engine. Freya’s frozen image watched from every tree as he accelerated away.


  16.

  STEPH

  Freya’s old one-eyed teddy was number eight. Her multicolored psychology revision notes—left halfway through a sentence—were number twelve. A half-full bottle of her favorite Lacoste perfume was seventeen.

  The police had re-examined her attic room, leaving small numbered labels on everything, even the towels in her en suite. Now that she was allowed to touch things again, Steph inhaled the perfume, pressed her face into the teddy, thumbed through the train tickets on the white-painted desk. Maybe there would be something nobody had yet spotted, something whose significance only she would recognize. Or maybe just by touching these things she could pull Freya back into reach.

  She wished she could lay out her thoughts around the room and number them, too, to have any chance of making sense of them. Paul wasn’t back, wasn’t answering her messages. Even when he was here his mind was blatantly elsewhere, his face frighteningly shuttered. In his absence, the police had come to look at the smashed egg and had seized How to Be a Better Parent for testing. But not before Steph had caught glimpses of its advice.

  Be open and honest with your child.

  Give them explicit permission to lay the worst at your door; let them know that nothing they might want to talk about is off-limits.

  Don’t avoid topics just because they’re difficult.

  Every word had felt like a wagging finger. But we used to talk, Steph had wanted to whisper back to the pages. She used to tell me things.

  She’d seen nothing that said parents had to be limitlessly honest with their children in return. Or with each other. But her brain had penciled it between the lines.

  A visit from Jess, just after the police, had only heightened her guilt. Jess had swung from insisting she would’ve known if Freya had been upset or in danger to bursting into tears and suggesting that Freya had been different lately. She’d thrown around words like moody, distracted, hyper, secretive without seeming to realize they were making Steph’s head spin, her heart hurt.

  Now Steph rippled her fingers over the spines of Freya’s books. Freya was known for her sportiness, but there was a bookish side to her, which Steph treasured. She’d given her the Ursula K. Le Guin novels she’d adored when she was a teenager, and hoped her daughter would be captivated by them too—hoped so much, in fact, that she hadn’t yet asked her about them, just in case she wasn’t. The shelves were mainly devoted to Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes: Freya had long had a thing for detective fiction. But it was a dog-eared Harry Potter that currently lay next to her bed, bringing a lump to Steph’s throat. She knew Freya reread Potter whenever she needed comfort, and used the soothing murmur of the audiobooks to lull herself to sleep.

  I keep thinking about the last time I watched her play volleyball, Jess had said. She was amazing as always, but . . . she seemed kind of livid. Every time she punched the ball I actually winced!

  But Steph had been at that match too. She hadn’t seen Freya as angry, only determined, powerful. She and Paul had cheered rather than winced. Were they deluded?

  She hasn’t even seemed that excited about our university applications recently, Jess had also flung into the mix. Steph had bitten back her protest: ’Course she’s excited! Because what if Steph was the one who’d actually been excited, at the idea of Freya doing what she hadn’t? The numerous prospectuses she’d ordered for her daughter were cowering at the back of Freya’s desk drawer, seemingly untouched. Perhaps Steph had requested far too many. Perhaps she’d ignored the fact that Freya had hardly reacted each time she’d presented her with a new one.

  Perhaps she’d ignored a lot of things.

  Her hands moved faster now. Opening drawers, lifting lids off boxes, flipping pillows. She caught sight of herself in Freya’s mirror: bent over, burrowing, desperate. Surrounded by the drooping heads of the daffodils she’d bought Freya last week. Watched by the photos Blu-Tacked to the wardrobe: groups of friends at sleepovers and bowling alleys; Jess’s dog, which Freya doted on; Steph, Freya, and Paul on their American road trip two summers ago, the marbled colors of the Grand Canyon rippling behind them.

  Buried underneath, to Steph’s surprise, was one of her and Paul’s wedding photos. The picture Freya used to giggle at when she was little, when she’d had a fascination with her mum’s long lace veil and her dad’s dated haircut. So this was where it had got to.

  The door buzzer broke her thoughts. Steph dropped the wedding photo into her pocket and rushed to the living-room window to see out. Before even checking who’d buzzed, her eyes snapped to the empty space on the street where Chris Watson’s car was usually parked.

  What do you think of him? she’d asked Jess. Did Freya like him? Do you think he’s telling the truth about her going back to school?

  Jess had seemed to grow even more muddled, her cheeks flushing, eyes widening, then scrunching. I guess I like him . . . I don’t know . . . I think Freya liked him okay . . . She’d crumpled again into tears and Steph had found herself hugging her, trying to pretend she was Freya but she wasn’t, nothing like, and she’d had to pull away before resentment overwhelmed her.

  Her gaze shifted to take in Paul’s parents waiting on the pavement. Heather’s lips moved incessantly; Brian spun his watch around and around his wrist. Steph felt a blast of love, as she always did when she saw them, especially because she had no living parents of her own. But today she wasn’t sure she could cope with their emotions as well as hers.

  She took a breath and went to let them in. The hallway smelled of bleach where the egg had now been cleaned away. Steph’s stomach flipped at the memory of it slithering from the book. She thought again of their egged doorstep a fortnight ago, before she’d had any reason to pay it much notice, before the line between meaningless and sinister had become blurred. Other things had started to niggle at her, too, like those three rotten banana skins impaled on their railings about three weeks before. Was it a pattern, or were these just things that happened all the time?

  As soon as she opened the exterior door, Heather was upon her. She wrapped her solid arms around Steph in such a heartfelt way that she felt something break inside. Please don’t be nice to me, don’t be too motherly. Brian hovered behind, always more restrained. Like Paul, he was an ex-policeman, and often struck Steph as an older, less complex version of his son. But perhaps she was being unfair with the latter part of that judgment. He kissed Steph’s cheek and clasped her hands with such gravity that again Steph almost crumbled.

  A confused thought flashed through her mind: Frey will be disappointed to have missed them. She regressed in age when her grandparents visited, let them ply her with ginger cake and call her by pet names she’d long outgrown.

  “Oh, Steph,” Heather kept saying, tears slipping out of her eyes as if she was no longer aware of them.

  Upstairs, her in-laws gazed bemusedly around them. The flat did feel alien without Freya in it, even though her leggings were still on the radiator and her Ugg boots were in a heap next to the sofa where Steph had repeatedly asked her not to leave them.

  “Where’s Paul?” Brian asked.

  “He’s gone out.”

  Heather looked at her. “Where?”

  “I’m . . . not sure.”

  “Oh . . .” Heather blinked behind her owlish glasses. Steph had never seen her look so lost. She was an ex–social worker, gutsy and levelheaded. She sat down and immediately stood up again, the wire frames sliding along her nose. “What have the police said? What are they doing to find our Freya?”

  It was an ordeal to talk them through everything, to relay facts that felt as if they were about someone else’s daughter, neighbors, family. Steph watched Brian for a reaction when she mentioned the police’s questions about whether she or Paul had enemies. He started twisting his watch around his wrist again, its strap catching on his dark hairs. There was an odd expression on his face, glazed yet intense, reminding her of P
aul when he disappeared into himself.

  You know something, she thought, with sudden conviction. Not about Freya, perhaps, but about your son. Do you know something I don’t?

  * * *

  —

  The three of them sat in the living room and each took up a task. Steph pored through her address book for anyone she hadn’t yet thought of who might have heard from Freya. Heather did the same, with her wider circle of family and friends. Brian had a long phone conversation with their family liaison officer, then reverted to detective mode, making a timeline of the day Freya had last been seen. Another back-to-front thought occurred to Steph: Freya would have loved to help him with this. Writing down clues, following a trail, solving a puzzle. She used to say she wanted to be a detective when she grew up, until she’d got older and had seemed to pick up on her dad’s reluctance to talk about his police career.

  So much for no topic being off-limits, Steph thought again, the parenting book’s words still vivid in her mind.

  As soon as Heather left the room to make some calls, she turned to her father-in-law.

  “Brian, why did Paul leave the police force?”

  He looked startled.

  “I . . . Well, I thought you . . .” His fingers plucked at the knees of his once-smart trousers, his hands just like Paul’s. “Why do you ask?”

  He seemed to mean, Why do you ask now?

  Steph didn’t answer. Let her question float between them. She remembered it had taken months to get to know Paul when they’d first met. To peel back the layers of him. There had been so much he wasn’t allowed to tell her about his job, about why he was on indefinite leave from the force and seeing a therapist once a week. But back then she’d become convinced she’d found the real soft core of him. She hadn’t cared about anything else. Perhaps the idea of a fresh start, no looking back, had appealed to her too.