The Downstairs Neighbor

by Helen Cooper

  “I think I know where she is.”

  Paul clenched the receiver. “Seriously?”

  “And I . . . I think you need to get to her before the police do.”

  His heartbeat ramped up. He listened for a moment to check George was still occupied in another room, then pressed the phone close to his lips. “Where is she?”

  Emma recited an address. Paul grabbed a scrap of paper and wrote it down. He’d never heard of the place, knew nobody who lived in that area. “Why would Steph be there?”

  “I don’t know. She gave me the address yesterday. Asked me to nudge the police toward it in their search for Freya—”

  “Freya?” He couldn’t stop the soar of his voice, and feared he’d alerted George, but he could hear that he was still deep in his own conversation. “Is she connected to this place too?”

  “I’m not sure how. Steph didn’t seem to want anyone to know about it. But then Freya’s coat was found and things changed and I . . .”

  Emma’s words were fragmenting, but it wasn’t the line: It was the thundering that had started in Paul’s skull.

  “Freya’s coat was found?” he interrupted her.

  There was a moment of silence. “You didn’t know?”

  Paul gripped the back of a kitchen chair. “When? Where?”

  “Yesterday. In the countryside, somewhere near Slough, I think. It was . . . buried.”

  Paul’s breath left him. Why hadn’t anybody told him this? Presumably George and the other officers had assumed he knew. Paul began pacing with the phone, short distances back and forth. “Buried?” he echoed, and suddenly his cheeks were wet, his gut was hollow.

  “I’m sorry,” Emma said. “It—it had blood on it. But that doesn’t mean . . . There was no . . .” He could almost feel her scrabbling for the right things to say. “God, I’m just so sorry.”

  She sounded like she was crying too. Paul closed his eyes. Why did his neighbor seem so invested in his daughter’s fate all of a sudden? Everything was confused. He could hear George wrapping up his call. There was barely any time, but all he could think about now was a grave with his daughter’s jacket in it.

  The only concrete thing was the address on the paper. It was a new focal point. A shred of hope. Paul shook his head forcefully, dislodging the despair that was trying to overpower it. He hung up on Emma and tiptoed out of the flat.

  Outside the house, just as he was debating how best to reach the address without his car, he ran into his parents.

  “Paul!” His mum threw her arms around his neck, her feet almost leaving the ground with the force of her hug and their difference in height. “Where have you been? Are you hurt? What’s happened?”

  He disentangled himself. Her questions accelerated and he had to cut her off. “Mum, Dad, I’m sorry but I have to go.”

  “Don’t disappear again, Paul,” his mum said, with fervor, almost anger. “Stay here with us. We need each other, and Freya needs us all.”

  “I’m sorry. Can I take your car? I’ll explain later. Just please stall George for now. Make something up . . .”

  “Paul!” His mum looked anguished, but she relinquished her car keys into his shaking hands.

  59.

  KATE

  Twenty-five years earlier

  I’m wearing the same dress I wore to Nick’s funeral. It’s the smartest thing I own—it was either that or my school uniform. The dress is looser than when I last wore it: I drown inside the dark fabric.

  We sit in a room with a rust-red carpet and paneled walls: me, Mum, and a man who works for the court. The man has already talked us through what will happen, and let us read our original witness statements as a reminder of what we said all those weeks ago. Now the air snaps with the tension of waiting, a feeling that seems to have held me hostage for so long.

  The door whines and another man appears, a mustached clone of the one sitting with us. “Kate Thomas, we’re ready for you.”

  I shoot a glance at Mum, who gives me a small nervous smile, then follow the man down an echoey corridor, my school lace-ups slapping the floor.

  He opens another heavy door and we’re in the high-ceilinged courtroom. Heads turn from all sides to watch me come in. My eyes sweep without focusing, and I catch sight of Becca in the dock with a glass screen around her. The whole place smells of furniture polish; it gives me a head rush like I’ve inhaled a vat of it.

  “I do solemnly, sincerely, and truly declare and affirm that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

  Details emerge now from the blurred crowd: a woman in the jury with a purple cardigan; a man scribbling in a notebook toward the back of the room. Auntie Rach’s curly mop and wide shoulders, Uncle Jack’s graying beard. And Nick, Nick . . . except it isn’t him, of course, it’s his brother, Richard, sitting bolt upright, like he’s on strings. The one who pushed for the case to go to trial.

  I let myself glance again at Becca. Just long enough to see that her hair has grown and is scraped into a ponytail, that she’s gripping her elbows as she hunches behind the glass. How must she feel being the one on trial while I’m on the witness stand, called by the prosecution? She has stuck to her tactic of denying everything, meaning she’s never mentioned my involvement. There’s nothing I can do but keep to the same story, and hope. And surely, surely, they can’t prove that Nick didn’t just take those pills himself?

  Except now that I’m here, a tiny dot in the eye of this massive courtroom, I’m gripped by the same powerlessness as when I feared Nick would kill my mum. It feels like anything can be proven in a place like this, with clever people steering the ship, people who know far more about cases and evidence than Becca or I.

  The prosecutor stands. She’s wearing a swishy black gown that makes her look like a giant crow. She pats her wig and my questions begin.

  * * *

  —

  Afterward, it’s like looking back on an exam and trying to work out whether I might have passed. I can’t remember exactly what my answers were. Can’t judge if they were the right ones.

  The prosecutor was clearly trying to demonstrate that Becca was alone with Nick for a while during that Friday night, around the time “the pills were most likely ingested.” She probed for other things, too, asked whether there had been any “bad feeling” between Becca and Nick while she’d been staying with us. Becca’s lawyer yelled, “Objection,” and said the question was leading. The judge agreed, so the prosecutor rephrased it, asking what the relationship between Becca and Nick was like. But the idea of “bad feeling” was out there, and I wonder if the jury saw the heat in my cheeks.

  * * *

  —

  Mum had told me earlier that I should go home after my bit was over. She wants me to stay away from the trial as much as possible, thinks it’ll be too stressful for me. But she’s not allowed into the courtroom until she’s given her evidence, so she isn’t there to stop me slipping into a corner of the public gallery and watching.

  This is the second day of the trial. I don’t know what happened yesterday, and I don’t really understand how the legal system works, but I can see the prosecutor slowly spinning her case, seeding her ideas. And I can see the defense trying to dissolve the suspicions as they form, like popping bubbles before they land. Becca’s lawyer has a round, scrubbed-looking face and is at least a foot shorter than the tall, striking prosecutor woman. His voice is quieter and less confident too. I wonder if that matters. And I wonder how Auntie Rach and Uncle Jack have managed to afford a lawyer at all.

  The next witness is Becca’s GP. My stomach twirls as he confirms that Becca did take carbamazepine, and that she came to him asking for a change of prescription. A murmur ripples through the courtroom as he’s asked when this happened.

  Eight days after Nick died.

  She must have pan
icked. Must have gone back to Derby and decided she had to switch her pills, hoping it would somehow disguise the connection.

  “Did she say why she was suddenly so desperate to alter her prescription?” the prosecutor asks.

  “She said she was getting side effects. Nausea and dizziness. She was very keen to try something else, so I agreed we could.”

  “The defendant’s original statement claimed she was not taking any medication for her epilepsy at the time of the victim’s death,” the prosecutor says. “Were you aware of her stopping drug therapy, Dr. Holmes?”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “You didn’t advise her to stop taking carbamazepine?”

  “I wouldn’t have advised that.”

  “Why not?” The prosecutor has this way of sounding intrigued and almost surprised, even when the examination’s clearly going the way she means it to.

  “It’s dangerous to stop taking it. It can bring on a rebound seizure. The dose needs to be lowered incrementally, and alternative medication introduced.”

  The prosecutor asks the jury to turn to Document F in their evidence packs. There’s a sound of shuffling paper followed by a moment of quiet.

  “This is a copy of the defendant’s medical records,” she tells them. “You can see she was given a repeat prescription of carbamazepine only four days before she went to stay with her aunt and cousin.” The prosecutor turns back to Dr. Holmes. “Did she mention that she wanted to stop taking the drug then?”

  “No,” he says. “It was my belief she would continue.”

  “Do you know whether she took her carbamazepine pills with her to her aunt’s flat?”

  “I don’t know that,” Dr. Holmes says.

  The prosecutor nudges the jury back to their evidence packs, pointing out the record for the later change from carbamazepine to sodium valproate. She draws their attention to the date again, and the phrase that Dr. Holmes has apparently written in his notes: Medication reviewed at the patient’s request.

  * * *

  —

  After Dr. Holmes, a few witnesses are brought in to testify about “the defendant’s character.” Somehow these shock me more than anything. One of Becca’s old teachers says Becca was suspended from school in year nine for fighting, and in year ten for bullying. I didn’t know about any of this. I glance at Becca: Her head is down, warped reflections dancing in the glass that screens her. Her defense lawyer cross-examines the teacher to show that, both times, Becca claimed to be defending a friend who’d been threatened by the other people involved.

  “We never managed to establish whether that was true,” the teacher says, “so Becca was suspended.”

  A girl around Becca’s age is up next. Becca stares at her as she takes the stand. They were at school together, apparently. The prosecutor asks about the “incidents” in years nine and ten.

  The girl addresses the jury directly; she seems self-assured, her earrings tinkling. Or perhaps she’s just avoiding looking toward Becca. “Bec always liked to think she was defending people but she took it to extremes sometimes,” she says. “She’d get it into her head that people needed to be taught a lesson. Think she saw herself as a bit of a crusader.”

  I glance around, sensing people absorbing those words, needed to be taught a lesson.

  It feels like the truth of what happened that Friday, and the weeks before, is just a toy to be bounced around and bent out of shape. The way the prosecutor presents the evidence is so clever, it plants doubts even in my mind. Is Becca the strong, protective cousin I’ve always looked up to, or the deluded “crusader” they’re making her out to be?

  I screw my eyes shut and think about jabbing my fingers into my ears. Then I hear them announce my mum’s name and my eyes spring open.

  Seeing her from a distance, in these unfamiliar surroundings, makes me jolt. She looks so poorly. She’s wearing a navy headscarf, knotted at the back, her skin paper-white in contrast. Her fingers are thin where she clutches the edges of the witness box, her face gaunt under the lights.

  She’s fading away. And this was all for her. I want to stand up and shout it: We did it but we did it for a reason. We were wrong but we thought we were right.

  Something makes me glance to the left and, through a gap in the rows of people, I catch Richard’s eye. It’s almost as if he’s read my thoughts and turned toward me at that exact moment. I burn with shame, wrenching my gaze away.

  “Ms. Thomas,” the prosecutor says to Mum, “could you confirm your association with the victim and the defendant?”

  “I was Nick’s partner,” Mum says, “and Becca, the defendant, is my niece.”

  “Did you have a good relationship with Mr. Wood—Nick?”

  “Yes.” Mum’s voice is shaky but formal. Her focus never drifts toward Becca or Auntie Rach, and I’m not sure whether she’s spotted me. “We’d only been together for eight, maybe nine months, but we cared deeply about each other.”

  “What would you say Mr. Wood’s state of mind was like in the weeks preceding his death?”

  “It was a difficult time. I’d been diagnosed with a form of cancer and he was the only one who knew.”

  “Did you ever suspect he was suicidal?”

  Mum considers. “No. I honestly don’t think he was. Distressed, yes. Worried about me. But . . . he wouldn’t have left me to deal with everything on my own. We were both trying to stay positive.”

  The prosecutor leaves a tiny lull, then her voice rises: “How would you describe the relationship between Mr. Wood and Miss Fielding?”

  It’s the same question I was asked. My heart canters as I wait to hear how Mum will answer.

  “Becca spoke to me about Nick after she’d been staying with us a few days,” Mum says. “She said he gave her bad vibes. She even hinted that he’d behaved inappropriately toward her.”

  “Did you believe that?”

  “Not at all. Nick wasn’t . . . He wouldn’t. Becca was quite flirtatious toward him when she first arrived, but then she seemed to sour.”

  It hits me properly then: Mum wants to see Becca convicted. She believes she did it. Or maybe she’s just grasping at the explanation, desperate for that closure.

  Her niece, though. Her sister’s daughter.

  The thought flickers at the edge of my mind: Better than her own daughter. She hasn’t once mentioned that I had “bad vibes” about Nick too.

  Over the last few weeks, waiting for the trial, I’ve been obsessing over the many wrong conclusions I jumped to. It’s frightening how everything can be seen in a different light: the hidden arguments, the secrecy, Mum’s altered personality, and Nick’s mood swings. The way he was always watching her, hovering close to her. And her reluctance to leave me alone with him . . . her anxiety that Becca and I shouldn’t throw any accusations his way. She was scared, I think, that he might snap and blurt out the truth.

  There was fear and threat under our roof—I felt it and I was right. It was just the cause I was hideously wrong about.

  Sometimes I feel so angry that she didn’t just tell me she was sick. I’ve since found out that even Nick’s dad knew—that must have been what he and Mum went off to talk about at Nick’s funeral. But, of course, it’s myself I’m really furious with. For not realizing. For being so catastrophically stupid.

  After Mum leaves the witness box, the prosecutor nods toward the judge.

  “The Crown rests.”

  60.

  STEPH

  The Chertsey maisonette had never really looked or felt lived-in. No pictures on the wall; no plants to bring color and life. Yet despite the scarcity of furniture or accessories (and Steph had made tentative offers to “brighten up the place”), it had always felt claustrophobic, as if congested with something other than the normal stuff of a home.

  Though the place was small, its rent and upkeep had cut
harshly into Steph’s salary over the last four years. The rent was particularly high, in return for a no-questions-asked landlord, an agreement that she could pay in cash, and no official paperwork or real names involved. Occasionally, and ashamedly, she’d had to borrow from the account where Paul’s “severance package” from the police sat barely touched, saved for Freya’s university fees, wedding, house deposit. He’d asked her about a withdrawal once and she’d made an excuse about emergency car repairs. Paul had accepted her explanation, just as his original “Did you take seven hundred pounds out of the savings?” had been more curious than interrogatory.

  He’d trusted her. Even though he’d once been trained to be suspicious, observant. It seemed their daughter was the one with those attributes now.

  Steph felt sick as she glanced up at the curtains of the maisonette. She’d done the same thing countless times before, flicking her eyes toward the upper floor as she approached, always with mixed emotions. Sometimes she’d looked forward to the visits, in a strange way, but there’d also been apprehension, guilt, the suffocating feeling of a responsibility she’d never be free from. Now it was all heightened by fury, and fear . . . and hope. Dizzying hope that Freya might somehow be there.

  A bloodied coat doesn’t mean the end, she told herself yet again.

  She just couldn’t waste any more time.

  It was this thought, and the memory of the note she and Emma had found, that made her take the knife from the pocket of Paul’s jacket and slip it up her sleeve. She shivered at the metal against her skin, shed the heavy coat, and got out of the car. Fleetingly, she remembered she’d left the shoebox and its contents in the hallway of their house. The exhibits of her past, which she’d guarded so carefully. She dismissed the thought before it could divert her. It didn’t matter anymore.

  Opening the door of the maisonette was such a familiar action, pulling up the handle and wriggling the key, but tonight she had no idea what she’d find. The hallway smelled, as always, of old cardboard and dust balls. The lower floor was a steep staircase with a boarded-up shop to the right. Above was the place Steph visited regularly, the place nobody knew about. Except maybe Freya. Clearly she’d seen her mum heading this way when she should have been at work. And clearly she’d already noticed those lies about money and errands and working late. She’d known dishonesty when she’d seen it, though she’d been mistaken about the reason. According to Zeb, Freya had even wanted to buy a car so she could do her own detective work. Was that what the money in her jacket pocket had been for? Had she managed to follow Steph all the way here, and become tangled in something much bigger than she’d anticipated?