The Downstairs Neighbor

by Helen Cooper

  As the years had gone on, Steph had continued to fund Becca’s unofficial existence, sneaking off to visit her in the maisonette whenever she could. They’d fallen into a routine of small-talk and tea, as though Becca was an elderly relative Steph was dutifully checking on. But it had sat there between them. The injustice of Steph’s freedom and happiness versus Becca’s limited life.

  “I wanted to turn Freya against you,” Becca said, “to show her you weren’t everything you claimed. That was all.”

  Steph closed her eyes. Her other big mistake had been ever to utter her daughter’s name to Becca. Her pride in Freya, her inability to shut up about her . . .

  “You told me about the argument with Freya’s driving instructor.”

  Steph’s eyes flew open. “What?”

  More scarlet blotches had broken out on Becca’s neck. “It made me so angry. That the biggest thing you had to worry about was whether your daughter’s driving instructor was milking you. When you wouldn’t even let me have a car until I begged like a child last year! Afraid of giving me too much independence . . .”

  Steph started to protest but the words dissolved. Becca was right. The things that had once made her indignant seemed unbelievably petty now. And she had tried to restrict her cousin’s freedom—not out of overprotectiveness, like with Freya, but out of fear for herself, a need to contain what Becca represented.

  “I sympathized with the instructor,” Becca said. “I imagined this poor guy on the receiving end of your demands and accusations . . . That was how much I’d come to resent you, cooped up here keeping your secrets. I’d reached my limit, I suppose. One day, I got so livid that I looked him up. And . . . and I called him.”

  Steph stared at her. “You called Chris Watson?”

  Becca wouldn’t return her eye contact. The defiance had evaporated. Tears spilled down her cheeks again. “It was a whim. A reckless decision.”

  “What did you say to him?”

  “That I’d heard he was having a disagreement over one of his students. And that I was an interested party . . . with a proposition for him.”

  Steph could hardly breathe. There was a thick, sour taste in her mouth. “A proposition?”

  63.

  CHRIS

  His cell mate had been taken away. It was hard to tell whether it was a good or a bad exit. Home or prison? Afterward, the silence of the holding cell was as cloying as the stench. Despite how lonely he often felt, Chris realized how little silence he actually had in his day-to-day life. In his car there was always the radio. At home there was the click-clack of Vicky’s knitting needles or the chatter of her sisters. Now the silence felt dangerous, allowing his thoughts to roam.

  Would they let him make another phone call? The need to call the number he should have erased, which he’d panic-dialed in his car only two days ago, was prickling over him again. It was an absurd idea to contact her from the police station. She wouldn’t pick up anyway. He had to stop obsessing about her, the woman who’d dragged him into this nightmare, but she and Freya shadowed his every movement.

  He’d let a stranger ruin his life.

  If you’d asked him a few months ago, he’d have said there wasn’t much left to ruin. A marriage that was hemorrhaging love by the day. A business hemorrhaging money at a similar rate. Family who didn’t respect him, routines that made him heavy. But now he longed for all of that. He whispered into the silence that he would never complain about it again if he could just have it back.

  He’d felt brief euphoria after speaking to Vicky. He’d managed to do one thing right: Nobody suspected she’d been the one stealing. She’d seemed so surprised and moved that for a moment he’d let himself believe he could go back to his marriage and be redeemed. But now, in this cold, stinking cell, the bleakness returned.

  He could never go back. He didn’t deserve to. All he wanted now was to purge all the hideousness he’d been carrying around inside.

  It had started with the stolen trinkets, just as he’d told the detectives. When he’d realized Vicky had been stealing again, he’d experienced that sinking feeling, the familiar dread, but also a flame of determination. He had to protect her from her own habit, make sure it didn’t do her any harm this time. And he might have pulled it off if Freya hadn’t stood in his way.

  Their deal had made him uncomfortable, but it had served both of them in the beginning. Freya wouldn’t tell anyone about the stolen goods, in return for him letting her keep the money her parents gave her for driving lessons. But as the weeks had gone on, Freya had seemed to become ruthlessly invested in their arrangement, as if it meant more to her than just a bit of cash or her own car. She’d started booking extra sessions, all at her parents’ expense, until eventually they’d accused Chris of trying to cheat them.

  That had really, really got to him. The one thing he still had was the integrity and satisfaction of his business, even if he was barely making a profit. Now a teenager was stripping him of his money and her well-off parents were accusing him of fraud. The Wholesome Harlows, who literally looked down on him from the wide windows of their immaculate apartment.

  The day he’d got the phone call, he’d been boiling with resentment. Vicky had criticized his loading of the dishwasher that morning and he’d been so close to screaming, Do you know what I’m going through because of you? But she’d walked away before he’d been able to utter a word. And maybe he wouldn’t have said anything anyway, because he never did. He just let the resentment grow while congratulating himself on all his sacrifices.

  He’d stormed out to his car to find that Freya had left him another note. One of her taunting reminders that she still had something over him: not just knowledge but photos, too, and the pillbox. Just to add to his sense of worthlessness, he’d left the house to go to work, then remembered he had no learners booked until the afternoon. He would spend the morning driving the streets, using petrol he couldn’t afford, letting fury expand into every part of him.

  The call had come through on his work phone. If the woman had caught him on a different day, perhaps he would have dismissed her as a crazy person. But that morning she’d spoken directly to his state of mind, whether she’d known it or not.

  “I hear you’ve been having some issues with the Harlow family.”

  “What?” he’d said. “Who are you?”

  “Someone who’d like to teach them a lesson too. I think we could be of use to one another.”

  He’d been intrigued. Excited, even. Like this ally had been sent to him by some weird dark angel. When she’d offered him money it should have aroused his suspicions, but on that day it had just made him more convinced that this stranger could solve all his problems. Reliving that turning point, he was ashamed of how easily persuaded he’d been. How much agony he could have prevented by cutting off the call.

  To begin with, the plan was nothing earth-shattering. The woman, who said she’d known Steph Harlow years ago, wanted to dispel her daughter’s illusions about her mother.

  “She tells lies to her family.” The woman’s voice had been soaked in bitterness. “I just need you to make sure Freya sees that.”

  She’d given him times, locations. All he’d had to do was hit the right spots at the right moments during Freya’s lessons. Sometimes he’d mistimed it of course—it was hard to be precise. But one lesson, they had ended up a few cars behind Steph Harlow’s BMW, and had seen her speeding off down a slip road toward the motorway. Freya had straightened behind the wheel, her foot easing onto the accelerator.

  “I knew it,” she’d said under her breath, but with such passion it was as if she’d shouted.

  Chris had realized then that Freya already suspected her mum of some kind of duplicity. Did that explain her recent personality transformation? The blackmailing, the anger? Suddenly he’d noticed Freya veering toward the slip road, too, and he’d had to slam on his own pedals to s
top her. “The Woman” had told him not to let Freya trail Steph to her destination, only glimpse her somewhere unexplained. Chris would never forget the determination in Freya’s posture, her torso slanting forward, fingers bone-white on the wheel. She’d been desperate to know where her mother was going, and now that desperation seemed crushingly sad. He couldn’t believe he’d colluded with a stranger to prey on it.

  They should have stopped it there. Should have been satisfied that they’d upset the equilibrium of the Harlow family enough. But the woman on the phone never seemed satisfied.

  And him? Was it the offer of more money? Had he wrecked lives for the sake of a few hundred pounds? Or had there been something addictive about the scheme once they’d started? Had it made him feel like he was taking back some power?

  64.

  STEPH

  Steph pressed again with the blade, hard as she dared without splitting the skin over Becca’s collarbone. This was the person who’d shown her how to do a French plait, told her what it was like to kiss a boy, comforted her when she’d been sad. The person whom Steph had looked after during seizures, who had always protected her in return. Now Steph was holding a knife to her throat.

  “Keep going,” she said.

  She had to hear it all, no matter how much it hurt. The guilt felt physical, piling on top of her. And a new horror was seeping in, now that Becca had revealed she’d paid Chris Watson to help her. Becca’s only source of cash was Steph. Had her own money funded this? Her mind raced over all those times Becca had asked her for a little extra to buy chocolate or beers, things to brighten her isolated days and nights.

  Becca could hardly speak through her tears. “A couple of times we were able to fix it so Freya saw you on your way to visit me. We hoped if she kept spotting you in places you shouldn’t be, she’d think you were having an affair or something. And, as it turned out, she’d already got suspicions . . .”

  The guilt hammered down harder. How could Steph have thought that her secrets would have no impact on her family? That she could live a double life without them ever sensing something amiss?

  “That was all it was supposed to be,” Becca said. “That was all I wanted to do, but . . .” A sob jerked her body and caused the knife to break her skin, a tiny cut that sent a trickle of blood down her still-blotchy neck. Steph watched it run over the soft creases. They’d both aged, yet time had healed nothing, it seemed.

  “It wasn’t enough,” Becca said. “I needed you to suffer.”

  “So you made her suffer?” Steph cupped her hand beneath Becca’s chin and thrust her head back against the wall.

  She could see the tension in Becca’s stretched throat, the hyper-awareness of the blade. Her cousin’s voice came out strangled: “Chris was only supposed to take her away for a couple of days. Just long enough to put you through hell.”

  Steph banged Becca’s head against the plasterwork. “He kidnapped her?”

  “He was meant to bring her back, no harm done. It was not planned this way. You have to believe—”

  “Why should I? How could you do this? Freya’s innocent. She was your family—” Her unintentional switch to the past tense made something snap inside. And Becca’s “no harm done” was loaded with the message that the opposite was true. The message that a jacket soaked in blood might represent exactly what it seemed to. A foregone conclusion that strangers watching the news had probably already reached, because assuming the worst wouldn’t bring down their whole world.

  Steph’s left hand pushed into Becca’s face, clawing soft eyelids, the squashy cartilage of a nose. There was white noise in her head and she was dimly aware of her cousin moaning; Steph was hurting her but she didn’t know how badly or whether she’d be able to stop.

  Becca began to fight back. Steph felt her cousin’s hand against her chest, trying to shove her away. Her own hands were around Becca’s neck now, the knife jutting at an angle from her right.

  “Please, Steph,” Becca gasped. “You don’t . . . she . . .” Her left arm flailed, swiping for the knife. Steph jerked the blade away, then grabbed Becca’s hair and pulled: a childish act of violence as if they were teenagers again. Becca cried out, and Steph felt herself splitting in two: one part wanting her cousin to feel all the pain that was gripping her own heart, another horrified at the prospect of harming her. Steph had killed for her mum all those years ago, and now perhaps she would kill for her daughter, destroying what was left of her own life in the process.

  She shifted her palm back over Becca’s nose and mouth. Becca thrashed again with her left hand, shouting something incoherent, and Steph imagined she was driving her into the wall, through the bricks, making her disappear.

  Then Becca became still.

  Steph’s eyes snapped open. She hadn’t even realized she’d screwed them shut. Becca’s head lolled against the wall, her face slack and gray. Steph eased her grip and the knife clattered to the floor. Her mind wouldn’t clear enough to be sure of what she’d done.

  Becca twitched beneath her hands. And as Steph looked again at her face, she realized she hadn’t smothered or strangled Becca. Her cousin was having a seizure. As far as Steph knew, it was her first in over twenty years. She’d shunned her medication while in prison, but had remained seizure-free. Apparently that could happen: Epilepsy could absent itself without any obvious explanation. Becca had told Steph, during one of her more candid moments last year, that it was almost as if she’d dreamed her condition: It’s like I dreamed it all. Mum, Dad, hairdressing, epilepsy . . . life.

  Becca wasn’t convulsing like she’d done during seizures in the past. Her eyes were rolling, though, that left arm still raised as if stuck. Steph lowered her to the floor. The seizure gathered momentum and Steph was back in her old kitchen, or perhaps in Auntie Rach’s garden, anxious to help her cousin. Old habits took over: She slipped her hand beneath Becca’s head and, for a confused time-slip of a moment, she flooded with tenderness.

  It was as if things were on pause for the length of Becca’s seizure, and then reality would be back, choices would have to be made, truths confronted. In her mind’s eye, Steph saw the wingspan of a plane with a rippling backdrop of stars. She felt a breeze on her face, a swooping sensation inside.

  The room suffused with bleached light. It skated across the carpet, turned the walls into bright blank screens. Everything was awash with it: the secondhand furniture that Steph had bought for Becca; the sofa where they’d had so many strained conversations, but also where they’d laughed and reminisced, even in recent times.

  She became aware of her name being shouted. Then somebody else was in the room, running toward her. The white light had gone, and Steph realized it must have been headlights from the street below.

  Turning to her left, she saw Paul.

  Paul is here. Kneeling beside her, staring at Becca stretched out on the floor with her eyes closed. Steph had never thought her husband and cousin would be in the same room. She’d spent the last four years doing everything she could to keep them apart.

  “Steph, are you . . . ? What is this place? Who’s this woman?”

  His questions flowed over her.

  “You’ve got blood on you. Is it yours? Is it hers? Is Freya here?”

  She swayed toward him and he shot out a hand to steady her. Her neck was covered in tears. “This is my cousin.” She pointed at Becca. “She and Chris Watson did this to Freya. Because of me. It was all because of me.”

  65.

  EMMA

  “Are you sure you won’t come and stay with me?” her mum asked, slowing the car as they approached Emma’s street.

  The dark road swarmed with even more police. Lights flashed, officers gesticulated to one another. The windows of Emma’s flat peered out, like scared eyes.

  “It’s not the ideal environment for rest and recovery,” her mum pointed out as she parked, then helped Emma out of
the passenger side. Emma was still getting used to the crutches. She hobbled along the pavement, convinced that a distracted police officer would kick a crutch from under her. Walking beside her, Julie gaped at the chaos that had engulfed the neighborhood.

  Emma kept her ears pricked, listening for information on the crackling police radios. She heard the Harlows’ names. Something about a search. Paul Harlow’s car tracked as far as . . . The rest of the sentence was inaudible.

  “I think we should go back to mine,” her mum said. “I’ve got some leftover gnocchi in the fridge. I could whip up a sauce. You must be starving.”

  “I’ll double my body weight if I stay with you, Mum. And it’s one a.m., not exactly gnocchi hour.”

  “You’re looking too thin. The cookery gene did seem to skip a generation with you, Em.”

  Emma ignored this and looked up at the Harlows’ flat. It had an air of stillness that contrasted with the flashing, simmering energy of its surroundings. She wondered where Steph and Paul were. She hoped they were together, and safe, pulling Freya into a tearful embrace at this very moment. The decisions she’d made sat like indigestible rocks in her gut. Would she ever know if they’d been the right ones?

  Her eyes fell to her own flat.

  “It’ll be good for me to be alone for a bit,” she told her mum. “I need to think about my future.”

  “Well,” Julie said, “I wouldn’t bank on the ‘being alone’ part just yet.”

  “You don’t have to stay with me.” Emma was half alarmed and half comforted at the thought that her mum might move in until her hip had healed.

  “I didn’t mean me.”

  Julie was pointing down the road. One of the parked vehicles wasn’t a police car: It was a small white van.

  Standing beside it was Zeb.

  Emma squeezed her crutches closer to her body as though they might prop up her courage too. She ached when she looked at Zeb, his curly hair falling into his face, his eyes wary. Maybe it was all a misunderstanding. Just because he’d been running away didn’t mean he’d posted the note or done the other things. Just because he’d been evasive about his friendship with Freya didn’t mean he had more to hide.