The Downstairs Neighbor

by Helen Cooper

  “I steal things,” he said dispassionately. “I take little tokens from my learners, whenever I can.”

  Johnson was smirking again. Chris had never felt so pathetic. Ford was pushing up her sleeves. “Do you sell them? Is business not exactly booming?”

  It won’t be after this. Perhaps it was crazy to think about his livelihood when he was on the verge of being charged with a crime, but he couldn’t help envisaging the kind of future he’d have even if he did get out of there.

  “It’s not for the money,” he said. “I s’pose it’s a compulsion. Like I want a piece of their lives.”

  They both stared at him. They didn’t get it, and he hadn’t expected them to. Didn’t need them to, really. Only to believe him.

  “So . . . you were stealing from your clients, and Freya found out?”

  He gave a reluctant nod. “She threatened to tell unless I let her off paying for her lessons. It was a small price to pay to keep my business and my reputation.”

  “But soon you got fed up,” Ford said, her voice steely. “Being blackmailed by a teenage girl just galled you a little too much. Maybe Freya started asking for more money, making bigger and bigger threats.”

  “That’s not—”

  “What happened on March the fifteenth?”

  Chris imagined he was looking down a long tunnel, with that afternoon at its end. He had become fed up. And nervous. His lessons with Freya would soon have to end: She couldn’t drag them out indefinitely, and what was to stop her telling people his “little secret” then? It was gossip to everybody else but it could destroy Chris. Worse: It could destroy Vicky, and he couldn’t let that happen, not when she’d struggled so hard to make something of her life.

  Chris set his jaw. “I said I couldn’t keep giving her money. And I needed to know she wouldn’t blab about my . . . habit.”

  “Did you threaten her?”

  “No. But we argued. Anger just seemed to burst out of her and, to be honest, I wasn’t sure it was all aimed at me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “After a while it was like she was just venting. It didn’t seem to be about the money anymore, or my stealing. She seemed furious with life in general. She was driving erratically, not following my directions . . . That was why we ended up heading in the wrong direction when we should’ve been going back to her school. Eventually I persuaded her to let me drive.”

  “Did you try to stop her making a scene?”

  “I tried to calm her down.”

  Ford leaned forward. “How?”

  “Not with any force.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what happened after you swapped places?”

  “She got out of the car.”

  Ford wasn’t blinking. “Where was this?”

  “Portsmouth Road. Out toward the river. I tried to call after her but she ran off. I assumed she’d make her own way back to school. I . . .” His words caught on the lump in his throat. “I never thought that might be the last I saw of her.”

  “Why didn’t you come forward about this before?” Ford’s face had turned thunderous, but Chris couldn’t work out if she believed him and was angry he’d withheld information, or whether she still considered him their prime suspect. Johnson wasn’t bothering to disguise his scorn. Ms. Beaumont had the air of somebody who’d been excluded from a conversation and was silently raging.

  “Because I would’ve had to admit the thefts,” Chris said. “And I knew it would look bad—I was the last person to see Freya, she’d been blackmailing me, we argued . . .”

  Ford trailed her fingertips across the darkened surface of the iPad. “You’re right,” she said. “It does look bad.”

  51.

  PAUL

  “I should get back inside,” Paul told Yvette as a cold wind blew through the hospital car park, and he felt himself swaying under the crush of too many memories. “Get home.”

  Even as he allowed Nathalie back into his head, made her solid again, Steph and Freya gripped hold of him, calling him back to London. He couldn’t even give Nathalie the dubious honor of being the love of his life. She was a wound in the corner of his heart while his wife and daughter had the rest, always would, and what he wanted more than anything was another chance to tell them so.

  If Daniel hadn’t taken Freya, who had? In Paul’s mind, by now, his past mistakes and present crisis were utterly entwined. But he had to face the possibility: Might this journey into his former life have been nothing but a devastating waste of time?

  Yvette slipped her arm through his and risked accompanying him back across the car park. The buzz of evening visiting time was building around the hospital grounds, a smell of mass-cooked food drifting from the upper wards.

  Paul’s eye was drawn by a large black car parked at the entrance to his block. Something about its mirrored windows woke his instincts, just when he thought they’d been killed off again. He was almost unsurprised when the door opened and Tom Glover climbed out.

  “Hello, you two.” He greeted them with a blank face. “Yvette. Fancy seeing you here.” He threw her a stony, meaningful stare. “Mind if I borrow Paul?”

  Yvette looked at Paul. Her eyes flashed concern but he gave a small nod.

  “DS Nicholls can give you a lift back to work,” Glover said pointedly, gesturing at the car.

  “No,” Yvette said. “I’m fine.”

  She glanced once more at Paul before releasing his arm and finally walking away.

  * * *

  —

  Paul didn’t want to get into the car with Glover. Instead they walked in slow laps around the outskirts of the hospital grounds, passing smokers in wheelchairs and patients dragging their drips. His former boss was pretending he’d come to check how Paul was doing, but it was clear there was another agenda.

  “Why don’t you spit it out, Tom?”

  Something complicated crossed Glover’s face. He stared at a pair of doves that had found their way onto the site and were nesting on top of a Hospital Hopper bus stop.

  “I’ve smoothed everything over with Nottinghamshire police. It never happened. You were never there.”

  Paul stared at him. He didn’t know why he was so shocked. Glover had a talent for erasing things from the record. Paul should have been relieved, he knew. But this felt like one more thing he wouldn’t be held accountable for that would catch up with him one day.

  “What the fuck were you playing at?” Glover asked.

  “How did you know I was there?” Paul shot back.

  “You think I don’t keep tabs on Sanderson even now? And you think I didn’t anticipate you’d go off on a fool’s mission? I didn’t think you’d be quite so foolish as to break into his house and stab him . . . If I’d got there an hour sooner I could’ve prevented it all.”

  “You should’ve helped me when I first came to you.”

  “For God’s sake, Paul! You know we can’t draw any attention back to that bloody disaster of a case. We’re going to have to buy Sanderson’s silence yet again—”

  Paul’s head reared up. “He’s alive?”

  “Well, yes. He’s recovering.” Glover jerked his head toward the hospital building. “He’ll stay away from you from now on. And you have to stay away from him. No exceptions.”

  Daniel had survived. Paul blinked slowly, taking it in. His throat loosened as though someone had just removed their hands from around his neck.

  “It’s essential we contain this,” Glover steamed on. “If the public ever finds out we sent in a UC to infiltrate that family, or that Nathalie Sanderson died because she was seduced by that UC, heads will roll. There’ll be a major inquiry. People will be incensed.”

  “I don’t care anymore!” Paul’s shout made a passing porter look their way.

 
Glover stopped walking and turned Paul to face him. His spicy aftershave was still the same scent as years ago, with its bitter aniseed edge. “I’m thinking about the complications for you as well, Paul. I take it Steph still doesn’t know about Nathalie?”

  “No.” Paul was aware of a collapsing sensation inside him, then a spark of defiance. “But maybe it’s time it was all out in the open.”

  Glover’s mask of sympathy dissolved. Paul was reminded of that switch, on the day Glover had told him Nathalie was dead, that transformation from solemn deliverer of bad news to hard-faced guardian of the force’s reputation. Paul had been staying in a safe house at the time. After Nathalie had found out the truth, and gone running with it to her brother, Paul had called Glover and a backup team had rushed to pull him out. He’d been kept in hiding while things were brought under control. He still remembered the house’s plaster-dust scent, hard mattress, and the endlessness of his thoughts, punctuated only by visits from Glover. Daniel had got himself a lawyer and was threatening to sue the police. And there were “concerns” in high places about the way Paul had handled the operation. Concerns about his unethical sexual relationship with the suspect’s sister.

  A few days later, Glover had arrived at the safe house unable to look Paul in the eye. Paul had thought he was going to tell him his career was over, which he’d assumed anyway. Perhaps, even, that Paul would be given another new identity for his own protection, and would have to move somewhere Daniel couldn’t find him.

  But Glover told him that Nathalie had returned to the woods that had last seen her daughter, and added to their infamy by hanging herself deep within the trees. After he’d delivered the news, he’d seemed to lighten with the relief of having got the unpleasantness out of the way. Then he’d launched into his plan for “damage limitation.” He’d said it could easily blow up into a scandal, that Daniel was raging, lashing out, and would no doubt go public about the “misjudgments” that had led to his sister’s death unless they paid him off in a big way.

  Paul had stared at his boss, wondering what kind of man he’d put his trust in. He’d imagined Nathalie thinking the same thing as she’d looked at Paul and realized he was a stranger, a faker, a person with an agenda. The fact of her death would not sink in straightaway. The guilt would come later, would cripple and change him, but in that moment all he’d felt was disgust, aimed at the man in front of him.

  Disgust that was replicated now.

  “I don’t think you mean that, Paul,” Glover said. “I don’t think you want the truth to come out any more than I do.”

  The subtext was as clear as it had been back then: And I have the power to make sure.

  But Paul had a new kind of power himself. The unhappy power of someone with little left to lose.

  Glover adjusted his collar, eyes hard. “It would’ve made things easier if you’d let Sanderson bleed.”

  Paul closed the space between them. “You’d have liked that. Another convenient death on somebody else’s conscience.”

  He strode away, suppressing his limp until the hospital’s automatic doors breezed shut behind him.

  * * *

  —

  The corridors had become crowded. The jostle of other people’s elbows and bags felt deliberate, personal. Paul could barely stop himself throwing out his arms and shoving blameless strangers out of his path. A roar of emotion was in danger of bursting from him, and a confession was crystallizing in his mind, a sort of statement about Daniel and Nathalie and Billie and everything.

  Just as he reached the lifts, a hand grabbed his wrist. He twisted his arm in an instinctive self-defense move, but as he did so, he saw who’d seized him. Yvette kept hold, looking apologetic but determined.

  “Yvette? Are you okay?”

  She pulled him to one side, out of the current of people. “What did Glover say?”

  “He wants me to keep quiet. Not cause any trouble. And he told me Daniel survived.”

  “He did?” Yvette rubbed her lips together. “Jesus.” She seemed twitchy and pale, her eyes glassy.

  “Yvette? What is it?”

  She turned her head and stared into his face. Her fingers grasped his wrists. “I have to tell you something, Paul.”

  52.

  KATE

  Twenty-five years earlier

  I’m in an interview room. The two policemen are opposite, their hands folded around huge white coffee mugs with drippy brown stains down the sides. One has very chunky hairy fingers and the other is rocking back on two legs of his chair—my history teacher would be barking at him to stop it if she were here.

  Next to me is a woman from social services they’re calling an “appropriate adult.” Apparently she has to be present for my questioning because I’m under eighteen. I don’t know what’s so appropriate about her—her gray hair, her flowery blouse?—or what an inappropriate adult might look like in comparison.

  As the questions begin, I see a ghostly twin of myself hovering beside me. The twin is telling the truth. Each part of her confession makes her lighter so she floats into the air, higher and higher like the part in Mary Poppins I used to love, where the old man levitates to the ceiling.

  Except the real me is rooted with terror to her chair. Denying everything, as I’m pretty sure Becca’s round eyes were urging me to do, before we were led to separate rooms. They ask me if I know what pills Becca was taking at the time, and it seems safest to say I’m not sure. They want to know whether Becca liked Nick. “She thought he was okay,” I tell them. “She didn’t really know him that well.”

  Then they want to hear all about that Friday night again.

  “I went to meet Mum at Costcutter.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Um . . . probably about five?”

  “Can anyone confirm you were out of the house at that time? Other than your mum?”

  I’m struggling to grasp the significance of all their questions. I want to stick as close to the truth as possible—apart, of course, from the words my ghost twin is mouthing.

  “Linda. We saw our neighbor Linda Clarke on the way home.”

  The policemen write this down, then without explanation disappear from the room. Mrs. Appropriate offers me a reassuring smile but the pink flowers on her blouse make my eyes ache.

  At last the policemen return. “Thank you, Miss Thomas. You’re free to go.”

  Really? I can go? What does that mean? What will happen next?

  Mrs. Appropriate rises to her feet. “I’ll show you back to Reception, Kate.”

  Mum’s waiting, looking small and slumped in a black plastic chair against a big white wall. She was questioned just before me, by the same two policemen; we weren’t allowed to talk to each other in between. She gives me a searching look as I approach.

  “I’m allowed to go home,” I say.

  “Good . . . that’s good.” She pats my shoulder but her anxious frown sticks in place. “Let’s get out of here.” She stands up, glancing around. I think of my visit here almost two months ago. I’m glad nobody seems to recognize me from that.

  “What about Becca and Auntie Rach?” I ask.

  As if on cue, we hear Auntie Rach’s voice. We turn to see her at the far end of the reception desk, leaning toward the woman behind the screen. Her words carry: “I want to see my daughter.”

  “What’s going on?” I ask Mum.

  “I don’t know, love.” Mum walks forward and I shuffle along beside her.

  Auntie Rach looks up as we get near. Her face is red and shiny, like a glazed cherry.

  “They’re keeping Becca in,” she says. “I think I need to get her a solicitor.”

  Everything smears. All I can see is a blur of light with the negatives of my aunt and Mum emblazoned onto it.

  * * *

  —

  Mum and I come home while Aunti
e Rach stays at the police station. When we get back to the flat I turn freezing cold and can’t stop shaking. Mum puts me to bed, brings me a hot Ribena, lays her hand on my forehead, like I’ve got flu. I think she’s going to speak but she stays quiet, her palm a heavy blanket on my skin. I’m almost asleep by the time I hear my bedroom door hitch on my lumpy carpet as she closes it behind her.

  Sometime during the night I half wake to the hiss of an argument. I swim up through layers of sleep, disentangling myself from a net of bad dreams, and I make out Auntie Rach’s voice, and Mum’s . . . but no Becca.

  Mum saying, Trouble ever since she got here . . .

  And then . . . pills. They were Becca’s pills, and they killed him.

  Sleep drags me back down. When I next open my eyes, the silence feels solid. There’s a clear expanse of carpet where Becca’s sleeping bag should be. I haul myself out of bed to find that Auntie Rach is gone. So are all her things, Becca’s too.

  * * *

  —

  The news comes a few days later. Time has become elastic by then, a rubber band stretching from the point at which I stirred the pills into the beer and eggs, forever in danger of snapping back. Mum and I barely talk. Often I catch her looking at me sideways, a question in her eyes. She’s as pale and tired as she was before he died and the weight’s still peeling off her.

  The phone rings while I’m in the bath. I hear Mum’s footsteps travel toward it but can’t tell what she’s saying once the ringing stops. I get out, pull on some clothes and venture into the living room. Mum’s perched on the arm of a chair, twirling an unlit cigarette.

  Her eyes slide toward me. “Becca’s been charged.”

  “What?”

  “With Nick’s murder.”

  “Murder?” The word burns. I can’t swallow it, must spit it out, but it won’t shift and I’m running out of air. “But . . . no . . . that’s crazy . . .”