The Downstairs Neighbor

by Helen Cooper

  A heaviness dragged at his body as he recalled how she’d looked at him after the police had left. He’d once believed she loved him unconditionally, that they were fundamentally the same person. Now that naïve theory was being put to the test in ways he’d never imagined.

  His phone started to ring. Di’s name appeared on the hands-free display. Alarm spiked through him—did speak soon have to mean this soon? He fumbled with the controls.

  “Hi, Chris.” Di’s voice sounded different coming through the speakers.

  “Di,” Chris said. “Everything all right?”

  There was a pause. He kept one eye on the passing streets, his fingers beating a nervous tempo on the wheel.

  “Well . . .” Di said. “Actually, I was going to ask you the same question.”

  He swallowed. “What?”

  “I mean . . . is everything okay with you and Vic?”

  His shoulders tensed. “I don’t—”

  “Money-wise.”

  After the initial surprise of her question, he didn’t know whether to be relieved or worried. If Di had asked him about their finances a few months back, he would have gone straight on the defensive. Even now, he answered abruptly: “Why would you ask that?”

  “Well . . . I saw you in your office today. Going through your accounts. You looked very . . . anxious.”

  Of course she couldn’t just not mention it. Always had to stick her nose in. “I was looking for something,” he said. “Something I needed for my tax return.”

  “You can tell me if there’s a problem. Gav and I would like to help.”

  “You’ve told Gavin about this?”

  “Erm . . .”

  “Did you mention it to Vicky?”

  “No, no, I wanted to speak to you first.”

  Chris gritted his teeth. “Di, Vicky and I are doing fine. I do take care of her, you know, despite what you and Jane might think.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply—”

  “I have to go. I’m in the car . . .” He talked over her as she tried to cut in once more. “I’ll see you at lunch next week. Or, no doubt, before.” The last part came out more nastily than he’d intended.

  As he disconnected the call, his wipers let out a particularly high-pitched squeal. Chris realized he was lathered in sweat. Who the hell did Di think she was? He was furious with himself, too, for not being more discreet, for letting his panic overwhelm him.

  His heart was galloping now. Alarmingly fast. His whole body was alive with the feeling that somebody else was in the car. Freya was in the passenger seat, watching him drive, her gaze drawing goose bumps to the surface of his skin. She was in the back, leering over his shoulder, her breath in his ear, then on the wet hood staring into his eyes through the windshield. She had things in her hands, sparkly trinkets that seemed to swell in size, and she was wearing Vicky’s bracelet, Vicky’s new blood-crimson lipstick . . .

  He could hear her voice crystal clear. He saw her laughing, tossing her hair, making him laugh, too, with her surprisingly sharp humor. But then cold, as if a switch had been flicked, or angry, gesturing with both long-fingered hands off the wheel. Chris pulled over and curled in on himself, gasping for breath as the wipers continued to scream.

  I can’t stand this.

  Reaching for his phone, he went to the number he should have deleted, and jabbed at the call button.

  It rang and rang.

  Pick up, pick up, pick up.

  Of course there’d be no answer. It was reckless to try, but he needed . . . He didn’t even know what. He just knew he was almost at his limit. Flinging his phone onto the passenger seat, he twisted his rearview mirror toward him and stared into his own red-rimmed eyes.

  Pull. Yourself. Together.

  His phone beeped with a message and he leaned over to read it. My parents won’t let me have lessons with you anymore. I’m sorry. Jess.

  Chris sat back and closed his eyes. His chest rose and fell heavily. A feeling of numbness began to steamroller over him.

  He jumped alert when he heard, then spotted, a group of police officers emerging from the park entrance across the road. They all wore gloves and held clipboards, German shepherds trotting beside them, sniffing the damp air. Was this one of the search teams who were combing the area for Freya? Not wanting to provoke any questions, Chris started his car and moved quickly on.

  He looped back toward the street he wished they’d never moved into, back toward his wife, who’d started to eye him with as much suspicion as all the others.

  He couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  27.

  EMMA

  After her Skype call with Zeb, Emma wandered around her flat with an unsettled cloud in her stomach, eventually ending up back in her son’s empty room. She lay on his bed, looking at the framed Deadpool poster on the wall, trying to unpack everything he’d said to her.

  Why couldn’t she stop thinking how strange Zeb and Freya’s encounter in the park seemed? Or fight the feeling that there was more to it than Zeb had revealed? Even though he’d been so angry with her for looking through his drawings—among all the other things he was angry about—she got up and retrieved his sketchbook from the drawer. She studied the picture of Freya until the girl seemed to come to life on the page, crying and confiding as to why she was upset.

  It was this “why” that Emma now had to pass on to Freya’s parents, despite its sensitivity, despite the many questions it would spark. So do it, she chided herself. Stop procrastinating.

  She closed the sketchbook and then guiltily, without quite knowing why, opened Zeb’s other drawer to peek inside. With a twinge of sorrow she noted its bareness: just a few folded T-shirts, a Sherlock Holmes book (since when was Zeb a fan?), and his keys to this house, which he’d obviously decided he didn’t need. She moved on to his wardrobe, in denial about the fact that she was now actively snooping, and half smiled at the skateboard propped up in a corner, a summer-long fad from a few years ago. In his bedside cabinet, the box of artists’ charcoal she’d bought him last Christmas also made her pause. Emma touched the slim pencils, the thicker charcoal sticks, the solid blocks. Then she noticed something down the side of the box: a long, glossy rectangle of white.

  As she plucked it out and turned it over, she already knew what it would be. Zeb and Freya grinned up at her from a strip of photos just like the one Steph had brought round that morning. Four times over, laughing with heads together. In one picture Freya was tipping a vodka bottle into her mouth, looking more like a hard-core socialite than a blossoming sports star.

  So Zeb had a memento of their meeting too.

  Emma tried to convince herself it wasn’t hidden. It was just in his bedside cabinet. There was nothing wrong with that. Her pulse was rapid as she put it back and left the room.

  * * *

  —

  Her nerves only grew as she rapped on the Harlows’ door. She’d rarely ventured up these stairs in the past and she wished now that she’d done so more often, for pleasant neighborly reasons. Maybe then this wouldn’t feel so daunting. Their door was painted a smart, clean ivory.

  Her heart sank when Paul answered. She’d really hoped to talk to Steph alone. He looked exhausted, but still so unreadable, even as Emma blurted, “I’ve spoken to Zeb about Freya.”

  He led her wordlessly inside. She’d been right in thinking their flat was much bigger than hers. They went through to a large living room and Emma was diverted by the feeling of space and light, the expanse of varnished floorboards, the lampshades hovering above, like satellites.

  The brightness seemed to fade, however, as she took in the people sitting around the room. Steph was hunched in a chair beside the window, almost a mirror image of the one Emma had pulled close to her own window a floor below. The family liaison officer, George, was distributing cups of tea while the woman she presu
med to be Paul’s mum fussed with coasters on the coffee table. The gray-haired version of Paul sat clutching a wad of paper and a pen, staring into space. The atmosphere was hushed but expectant, like the morning of a funeral.

  “Emma’s here,” Paul announced, and all the heads pivoted, their anxious anticipation suddenly centered on her.

  Steph stood up. “Have you spoken to your son?”

  Emma nodded. Her heart was hammering again. She wasn’t sure she could say the thing she needed to in front of all these people. George looked as though he was going to speak, but the woman with the round glasses cut across him. “What does he know about our Freya?”

  Emma had mentally rehearsed how she was going to summarize her conversation with Zeb, but now her thoughts scrambled. She didn’t know who to look at, so she focused on a print on the wall: the swirls of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. Her gaze was compelled toward the photo of Freya beside it. She looked sunlit and happy, her smile unguarded. It was hard to imagine her necking vodka, hard to comprehend secrets or problems that might have led her away from this clean, comfortable home. Especially not the one she’d shared with Zeb, now trapped in Emma’s throat.

  “He . . . he and Freya bumped into each other one night in the park. They got talking, had a drink together, nothing—” She stopped herself from saying nothing untoward, not wanting to plant ideas. “Nothing major.”

  “When was this?” Steph asked.

  “About two months ago, a Friday night. Freya was supposed to be staying at a friend’s but apparently she hadn’t felt like going. Zeb said she was . . . upset.”

  “Upset? Why?”

  Emma shuffled her feet. “Well, Zeb said that it . . . it was related to something she’d found out”—she motioned toward Steph, then broadened the gesture to encompass Paul as well—“about her parents.”

  There was a shocked silence. Steph stared toward Paul but he was looking down, pressing his temples, seeming to sway back onto his heels.

  “What do you mean?” Steph’s tone was sharp but breathy.

  Paul stepped toward Emma. “Freya found out something about one of us?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “I . . . don’t know.” As the lie came out, Emma pinched the edges of her cord dress. She just wanted to get out of there now. Compose herself, come back later. She could listen for when Steph seemed to be by herself, and tell her privately, let her absorb it first. “Maybe I should talk to him again.”

  “He’ll need to make a statement,” George said.

  “Okay.” Emma edged toward the door. She felt as if they were all crowding in on her but in fact they were stationary in their positions, watching her inch away.

  When she was almost there, Steph’s voice stalled her. “Both parents?” She was fiddling with the zip below her chin, moving it a centimeter up, a centimeter down, small scratchy noises. “Which parent did Freya mean?”

  Emma tried to signal to her that she’d return. “I don’t know,” she said again. Her stomach tipped as she wondered if this counted as withholding information. The awkwardness of the situation rolled itself in with her unease about Zeb, about glimpsing Robin, about coming across another strip of photos in her son’s drawer.

  How could she stand in front of this audience and reveal something that might pull the Harlows apart?

  28.

  STEPH

  Once Emma had left, silence cloaked the room. Steph noticed distantly that their ceiling light had two bulbs out, making one half of the living room darker. Everybody else seemed to be on the illuminated portion of a stage whereas she was in the wings, the shadows. She shut her eyes to complete the darkness, trying to grasp what Emma had said, feeling that it was what she hadn’t said that was vital.

  “Have you any idea what Miss Brighton’s son might be referring to?” George asked them.

  Nobody answered. Steph turned to Paul. “We need to talk.”

  Paul nodded. His skin was gray and there were half-moons of exhaustion beneath his eyes. Steph’s glimmer of sympathy was overridden by a quick wave of fear.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Paul said.

  “I’d like to discuss this with you both,” George said.

  “We need a moment.” Steph left the apartment before George or her in-laws could protest further. Paul caught up with her outside. He’d brought her coat and he slipped it around her shoulders. They walked briskly, without speaking at first. There was a charge in the air as if another downpour was imminent, and the buzz of a police helicopter in the bruised sky. Steph stared at each car and pedestrian that passed them, and noticed Paul doing the same. She had the fleeting, terrible thought that this could be their life from now on: looking for their daughter in every turned-away face or shadowy window.

  “I promise you,” Paul said, “whatever Freya found out about me, wherever it took her, I’ll bring her home.”

  The words dead or alive knifed through Steph’s head and she pushed them violently away. She glanced at Paul, his clenched arms, the intensity in his face. What was he carrying that made him so sure he was to blame?

  “What is there to find out?” she asked as spots of rain landed cold and soft on her forehead.

  She watched for his reaction. Did he know what his dad had let slip? Would he be honest with her now?

  The rain gathered urgency. Streams ran beneath her collar, drops sticking to her eyelashes.

  “Let’s duck in here,” Paul said, pointing toward the church.

  They darted up the path. The door clanged shut behind them and the silence inside was chilly but peaceful, Sunday-morning service long finished. Rain dripped from their clothes as they walked down the aisle in a parody of a wedding.

  Sitting in the front pew, with blue light slanting through the stained-glass window in front of her, Steph felt The Question rising from her core. The one she’d stopped herself asking him all these years. It seemed even more pertinent now that she knew the true nature of his police work.

  Yet still she swallowed it, and instead said: “You were undercover. For three years.”

  His head swung toward her. “How do you know that?”

  “Your dad told me.”

  Paul pressed a hand against his face and she heard him exhale.

  “I wish you’d told me,” Steph said.

  He stared at the floor. “I couldn’t.”

  “I know the details must be classified but you could’ve at least—”

  “I couldn’t talk about it, Steph!” His voice surged. “And I don’t just mean because it was classified.”

  She felt tears behind her eyes. Paul moved his hand as if he was going to touch hers, but he didn’t: He ran his fingertips along the worn edge of the pew.

  “What was your name?” she asked quietly. “Can you at least tell me that?”

  There was a pause before he said, “Paul Darren Jacobs.”

  “Paul?”

  “It’s better to use your real first name if possible. Less scope for slipups.”

  “Oh.” Even this small insight made her feel overwhelmed. Clueless.

  “Things went wrong,” he said, “when I was undercover. I thought it was all in the past, but now . . .”

  Dread shivered through her. “Wrong how?”

  “I . . . deceived people. Made bad choices. Lost control . . .” He seemed to coil in on himself on the pew, long legs bent, his spine a question mark. “And there were consequences.”

  Steph felt her pulse in every part of her. “Was it to do with drugs?”

  He shook his head. “In a way I wish it had been. Drug dealers, straightforward villains—perhaps I would’ve dealt with those better. But it was more complicated than that. It was more . . .” He seemed to grapple for the right word, then choked out, “It was hard.”

  “Did you have a relationship?�
� Steph asked, replacing The Question with one that had troubled her almost as often over the years—for different reasons, perhaps, and without realizing then that Paul might have been with someone who didn’t even know his real identity.

  She felt the pew move and creak. “What makes you ask that?”

  “I’ve always had this feeling . . .” She gazed toward the stained-glass window. In it, three people were lying side by side. Steph couldn’t tell if they were praying or sleeping or dying. “. . . that you loved someone before me. Someone you didn’t want to tell me about.”

  He seized her hand. “I love you. And Freya. You’re my world.”

  Sadness exploded through her. The man who’d learned her favorite passage from Jane Eyre for their wedding, who could still make her tingle by kissing her neck, who’d had damp eyes on Freya’s first day of school, he was receding from her again. Or maybe it was her who was retreating. Shutting down because it was all too much.

  Paul stood up and paced back and forth, like an impassioned minister delivering a sermon, except that he was murmuring, “Fuck,” over and over. His curses echoed in the crest of the ceiling, as if they were collecting up high.

  “Did you kill someone?”

  The Question had broken free.

  Paul stopped abruptly. “What?”

  Steph didn’t want to repeat it. She was already regretting asking, but she was also breathless to hear his answer, as though she was detaching herself from the conversation, watching two unknown people and wondering, What is he going to say now? And what will she say?