The Downstairs Neighbor

by Helen Cooper

  Where did that leave Steph now, though? With nobody to confide in except her downstairs neighbor, a near-stranger, whose son had become inexplicably involved.

  There was one other person she had considered calling in the midst of this crisis, but she’d always stopped herself. That was separate, that was . . . She couldn’t even think about it now.

  “Steph,” Emma said quietly. “I need to talk to you.”

  She moved the towel away and a draft snaked into the gap. Steph nursed her tea, noticing for the first time that the mug had a picture of Frida Kahlo on the side, looking fiery and fierce.

  “My conversation with Zeb . . .” Emma said. “What I told you all, earlier . . . There was more to it, but I wanted to see you alone.”

  Steph’s fingertips met around the mug. “What do you mean?”

  Emma was flushing now, hesitating. Finally she said, “Freya thought you were having an affair.”

  Steph’s lips parted. For a second she couldn’t speak. Then, “What?” she said stupidly, aware of her mouth hanging open.

  Emma twisted the towel around her fingers. “She told Zeb she saw you somewhere when you were supposed to be at work. Maybe more than once. And that she’d noticed you acting strange, being secretive with your phone, telling little lies to her dad. I think she started trying to investigate . . .”

  “Where?” There was a tight vibration inside Steph’s skull. “Where did she see me?”

  “One time was during a driving lesson. She saw your car heading out of town.”

  Steph felt like she was falling.

  When you were supposed to be at work.

  Telling lies to her dad.

  Heading out of town.

  “Zeb said she talked about getting her own car,” Emma went on, “as soon as possible, so she could follow you—”

  “Follow me?”

  “I think so. I don’t know much more, I’m afraid . . .” Emma’s head jerked as if she’d just remembered something else. “Except she mentioned a plan. Apparently she got upset, said there were parts she wasn’t proud of . . .”

  “Was the plan to follow me?” Steph was short of breath and it distorted her voice. “Was that what she meant?”

  “I don’t know. And I’m sorry I didn’t share this earlier. It’s just . . . all those people. I thought you’d want to know first.”

  Steph raked a hand through her hair, pulling at the knots. The sneaking doubts that had chilled her as Paul had left the church were now surfacing as waves of nausea. Everything was shifting, reshaping.

  It was she who Freya had felt let down by, her side of the triangle that had given way.

  Not Paul. You.

  Freya had been trying to follow her. For a moment Steph was sure she was going to be sick. As if she could tell, Emma passed her the towel. Steph held it over her nose and inhaled.

  “She really told Zeb all of this?” she asked. “In that one night?”

  “It seems so.”

  “Where is Zeb?” Some part of Steph was trying to discredit the information, digging for a hint that Zeb was unreliable. Trying to shift the focus to Emma’s relationship with her child instead.

  Because if this was true, it meant she’d failed in ways she couldn’t even comprehend right now. And Paul had absorbed the blame, was out there acting on it, when perhaps this was all on her. She had done this to their family and had refused to face up to the possibility.

  “He’s staying with his dad,” Emma said. “They’re . . . getting to know each other.”

  There was something guarded about the way she said it, but Steph was too dazed to process what it might be. Robin Lyle, she recalled hazily. Was he Zeb’s dad? The man in the hard hat, another stranger Steph had painted her own guilt onto. She stumbled toward the door, reaching for its handle, as though for an escape lever. When she got there, she paused and turned back. “Thank you for telling me,” she said.

  Emma’s blue hair glowed like a gas flame beneath the lights. “I just hope she comes home, Steph.”

  Steph felt tears building deep inside: the kind that might tear her in half if she let them out. “Could I . . . could I ask you not to say anything about this to anyone? I’ll take it from here.”

  Emma nodded, and to Steph’s relief, she didn’t press for any more information. They looked at each other for a few more seconds, a silent contract forming between them.

  Steph fled into the hallway and stood wheezing for breath, the potential scale of her misjudgments starting to take hold. She forced herself upright, walked out of the house, and got into her car. As she accelerated away, she ran through recent conversations with Freya, occasions on which she might have spotted her mum “somewhere she shouldn’t be,” or seen her shielding her phone, hiding a bank statement. Suddenly Freya’s silences at breakfast weren’t just late-onset teenage mood swings. The disappearance of kisses from the end of her texts was not simply a side effect of her growing up, or the petering out of their duvet nights in front of The Apprentice, their chats about books, their chats full stop.

  And Paul was not the only parent with secrets that mattered.

  How could she have been so blinkered as to think he was?

  Steph was under no illusions about what it might have done to Freya, if she’d feared a threat to her parents’ marriage. She thought again of little Freya wearing her wedding veil around their first flat, accessorizing it with a pair of Paul’s shin pads, tripping over the trailing lace every few steps. And how she’d been so upset, so scared when Jess’s parents had split up—the first time it had happened to someone she was close to.

  She still had one of our wedding photos in her room. Had Freya taken it from the album recently, while she’d been stewing over her suspicions? Or had she had it for a while, just because she liked it?

  The deception would have wounded her too. The thought that her mum had been lying to her, to Paul, and at the same time cheerfully buying Freya daffodils, trying to continue with their mother-daughter TV nights, their banter about applying to the same universities . . .

  As cars flashed past her on the motorway, Steph realized she was slowing. Because she was no longer sure this was the right thing to do, the right place to go. She kept imagining Freya behind her, in a Mini Cooper like the ones they used to jokily draw for one another.

  Following her.

  How far, exactly, might she have got?

  At the next junction, Steph turned off. She circled an island and rejoined the M3 to speed back home. All the way, she irrationally scanned the landscape for some kind of sign from her daughter. If she’d been blind before, now Steph had to open her eyes.

  32.

  PAUL

  Paul searched Sanderson’s house, on high alert for sounds of him arriving home. He imagined spotting Freya’s school blazer hanging in a cupboard, a long blonde hair shimmering on the carpet. Breathing hard, he hurried up the stairs. The rooms were soulless, nothing particularly personal or sentimental anywhere. Yet little touches of luxury suggested Sanderson had some money. A flatscreen TV in the bedroom; a super-king-sized bed, which looked slept-in on one side only. Perhaps he still had part of the appallingly huge payoff they’d been forced to award him. But nobody, it seemed, to share it with.

  The attic staircase was steep and narrow, like climbing up a dim, dusty tunnel. Different from the gentle curve of the wooden steps up to Freya’s attic room. When Paul reached the top of Sanderson’s, he hesitated before groping for a light switch.

  Then he staggered backward.

  She was in here. She was everywhere. Photos of Nathalie papered the walls: smiling, biting her lip, hiding from the camera, walking away and toward. The expressions on her face were achingly familiar, yet at one remove in their age-faded colors, like seeing somebody who vividly resembled her. Her wide green eyes, the fall of her hair, the pucker of the skin above h
er nose.

  Paul flinched away as sadness barreled into him. But other images took shape, took on a life of their own, filling in the parts the photos couldn’t show. Nathalie smoking alone outside the tower block; Paul approaching her for the first time, walking another man’s walk, offering a light. The hurt she always seemed to carry in her posture, the dreams that would trouble her eyelids as she slept. Yet her openness, too: always so openhearted and hopeful, despite everything.

  Paul’s eyes went to a photo of her and Sanderson. Sanderson seemed to glare out of the picture, wary and possessive, his arm clamped tight around Nathalie.

  And suddenly Paul couldn’t actually think of him as Sanderson anymore, the way Glover and other colleagues had referred to him as they’d hovered at the edges of the operation. He couldn’t stay detached enough from the feelings of hatred and guilt and confusing nostalgia that were stirred up when he looked into Daniel’s eyes.

  He’s just an overprotective big brother, Nathalie used to insist. Especially after everything we’ve been through.

  There was only one photo of her daughter up here. Daniel’s niece was framed separately from the rest, a miniature Nathalie with long dark lashes and unraveling pigtails. Billie. Her young eyes seemed to plead with Paul, and to reproach him, and to speak in desperate harmony with Freya: Find me.

  Paul fought to control his breathing. White spots blotted the darkness behind his eyelids. If he could just keep them still, stop them swirling . . . He flailed to the rear window and pushed, relieved when it opened and fresh air burst in. Paul held his face to the coolness, but when he opened his eyes he got another shock.

  Because he hadn’t realized. Hadn’t got his bearings, hadn’t remembered the geography of the area well enough.

  You could see the woods from here. A few miles behind the house, they stretched out like a dense carpet, the twilight casting them in a violet glow. The trees seemed to huddle closer together than ever, as though closing ranks, protecting their secrets.

  Nobody goes near the woods anymore, Nathalie had once told Paul.

  And it wasn’t so hard to understand why the locals had steered clear ever since what had happened, or how they could believe, in the absence of any other explanation, that the black spaces between the trees had swallowed the little girl who’d never been found.

  In truth, Paul had no idea what had happened to five-year-old Billie in those woods, almost twenty-five years ago. A day that had changed his own future, though he couldn’t have known that as he’d watched the story unfold on the news. The only witnesses, Nathalie and Daniel, said Billie had strayed too far in while playing. The search of the woodland had lasted months. The wider search for Billie had continued indefinitely—along with the stream of donations to the search fund Daniel had set up in aid of his niece.

  From the moment Billie’s disappearance hit the news, Daniel Sanderson had had everyone in his pocket. The public were all behind him. The press ran campaigns to Find Our Beautiful Billie, always featuring quotes from her distraught uncle. Nathalie had shied from the limelight, would duck her head behind Daniel’s shoulder as the press photographed them leaving their block of flats. Paul still remembered thinking at the time, when he was just an ordinary police officer in south London: There’s something about her, about the two of them. But mostly: There’s something about him.

  And, as he’d later discovered, the Nottinghamshire police had thought so too. Except they’d found it impossible even to question Daniel as a suspect—such was the power of the public’s support, the press’s attention. Daniel had built a narrative around Billie as a working-class child, claiming that people never cared about kids like her, that deep down everybody believed her family must have brought it on themselves. Donations poured in from individuals anxious to show they weren’t like that.

  The donations had soared each time the police had interviewed either Daniel or Nathalie too. The papers went to town on police prejudice, victimization of a suffering family. Daniel had managed to secure a forcefield around himself and his sister, strong enough to make the police back away.

  They never took their eye off Daniel, though. Never stopped attempting to monitor his Find Our Beautiful Billie fund, wondering what all that cash was really being used for, whether Beautiful Billie had suffered something terrible at the hands of her doting uncle. Several years on, when Paul had finished his undercover training, he’d been approached by DI Tom Glover about a job he’d thought Paul would be perfect for.

  Not drugs or gangs or activists, like most UC assignments. This was a missing-child case that couldn’t be solved with traditional methods. It involved getting close to a family, and it was sensitive, needed to be handled just right . . .

  Now a noise broke Paul’s thoughts, making him leap back from the attic window, then freeze in place.

  A car door slamming out front. Footsteps and the jangle of keys.

  33.

  KATE

  Twenty-five years earlier

  I crush two pills in advance, shake the white powder into a little tub that previously held cotton buds, and hide it in my pocket. When I give Becca the nod, she pauses and I think for a moment that she’s going to back out. Leave me alone with this plan after all. But I know she won’t, really, know her instinct to stand by me is too strong. She sucks in a breath and lets out an impressive shriek. There’s a delay, then the sound of Nick’s footsteps.

  He bursts into my room. “What’s going on?”

  Becca hops onto the bed. “Spider!”

  He rolls his eyes. “Thought someone had been killed.”

  “Oh, God, I can’t stand them. Think it crawled under the bed. I won’t be able to relax until I know it’s gone.”

  “Good Lord,” Nick grumbles, but he’s in the right mood to be the hero. He grabs an empty tumbler from the bedside table and drops to his knees.

  He’s soon absorbed in his mission, so I sidle out, catching Becca’s eye as I go. I need to work fast, don’t want to leave them alone for too long. Can’t rely on Nick’s good mood lasting.

  I pull the kitchen door shut behind me. The plan is to slip half the powder into his beer and half into his food. Pouring crumbled pills into the neck of a glass bottle is trickier than I’d anticipated, especially with trembling hands. I do what I can, and use the handle of a long spoon to stir as quietly as possible. Then I glance around again. The bacon’s cooling in the frying pan but I can’t see the scrambled eggs. I yank open the microwave to find a bowl in there, the yellow mixture starting to solidify. Luckily there’s enough liquid to dissolve the remainder of the crushed tablets. Putting back the bowl, though, I’m struck by doubt. What if a normal dose of pills won’t make him sick? He’s much bigger than Becca: They might have nowhere near the same effect. And what if he doesn’t eat all the scrambled eggs, or drink enough beer? He could end up with only a fraction of the powder in his stomach, and I’ll have to watch him take my mum away.

  I jump at the sound of his returning footsteps, leaping away from the microwave as the kitchen door creaks.

  “Couldn’t find it,” he says, strolling back in. “She’ll live.”

  I can’t speak. My cheeks are on fire. Nick looks at me curiously, then his eyes move back to his bacon, cold and fatty on the stove. “Don’t feel that hungry anymore.” He lifts the hem of his T-shirt to wipe some dust from his face.

  “Mum’d be cross if you wasted it.”

  “True! Don’t want to start the weekend on a sour note.” He grabs a plate and sticks a couple of slices of bacon onto it. I think he’s going to stop at that, but to my relief he takes the eggs from the microwave and tips out the whole lot, splattering them in brown sauce before sitting down at the table.

  He pauses as his fork heads for his mouth. “Want some?”

  I shake my head.

  “I’ll leave you some money.” The forkful hovers. “You can have a takea
way on me later.” In it goes. Will there be a strange taste, a gritty texture? He chews slowly, then follows it with another mouthful, washing it down with a swig of beer. I realize I’m watching too intently, and busy myself clearing pots. The sounds of him eating and drinking continue behind me. I mumble something about Becca and flee the kitchen.

  Just as I’m about to go back into my room, the phone in the hall rings. I don’t want Nick to leave his food to answer it, so I grab the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Hi, love.” It’s Mum. My heart judders. What would she say if she knew what I’d just done? Would she be horrified? Grateful?

  “Just picked up some shopping to keep you and Becca going this weekend,” she says. “The bags are heavy. Could you ask Nick to come down to Costcutter and help me? Ask nicely, though, Kate.”

  I glance at the kitchen door. “He . . . er . . . he’s busy. I’ll come.” Before she can object, I hang up. For a few seconds I stand there, too much breath in my mouth, not enough in my lungs.

  I poke my head round my bedroom door and whisper to Becca, “Got to help Mum carry some shopping back. Won’t be long.”

  “Did you do it?” She’s pale, as though she really is afraid of a lurking spider.

  I nod, holding up crossed fingers.

  “Is he eating it?”

  I nod again. “Now we’ll just have to wait and see.”

  As I walk off I’m light-headed, suddenly euphoric, and a blade of evening sun leads me down the corridor.

  34.

  STEPH

  Steph sat in her car outside her house, her windshield slowly steaming up, black skeletons of trees disappearing behind the veil. Back from her aborted mission, she was at a loss as to what to do next.

  She couldn’t stop thinking about that first night, when Freya’s absence could be measured in hours rather than days, and the PCs had asked whether Steph or Paul had any enemies. Paul’s conscience had clearly tortured and driven him ever since. But Steph had refused to join the dots between her own secrets and the protective sphere she’d tried to hold around her family, like a spell. If they did somehow connect, the picture they would form was everything she’d ever feared.