by Jo Smedley
It didn’t appear to have anything to do with the house we were looking at, but it wasn’t moving. I wondered if Irene wanted to call things off. I paused a little. Waiting. Irene must have seen me out of the corner of her eye, as her fingers came up level with the side window and beckoned me forwards, even though her head never turned to look at me. She was maintaining her estate agent poise, the only give away that she knew me and that we were in this together, was that quick twitch of the fingers, which the police car ahead would never have seen.
I continued forwards and tried to remember what Lucus and I did the last time we viewed a house. I ignored Irene in the car, looked around as if looking for an estate agent, and then walked up the driveway to the house.
I knocked on the door.
Still, Irene didn’t get out of the car.
I waited.
Still no Irene.
I started back down the drive again feeling somewhat ridiculous. I didn’t know what she had planned. Maybe we should have discussed it.
The moment I reached the pavement again, Irene clicked open her car door and, probably just for appearances sake, finished off a conversation on her mobile phone that went something along the lines of I’ll have to go, the client is here. She was quite the actress! I wasn’t sure if I was going to win any Oscars for my own performance.
I gave the police car a glance. They hadn’t moved. Maybe it really did have nothing to do with the murder. I gave it another look. There was no one inside.
“Hello!” Irene extended one hand, face awash with a plastic smile, while the other clutched the clipboard.
She was wearing a very presentable business suit, her hair carefully coiffed to make her look younger than she really was. She could pass for a pre-retiree, with her business blouse and what had to be a ‘push me up’ bra on underneath. I’d never noticed her chest before today and surely by now anything that size would have sagged. Mine were already drooping. I blamed breast feeding.
“Hello.” Her handshake was as firm as I expected it to be. While it was the first time we’d actually shaken hands, hand shaking just wasn’t something you did when you were friends, she just wasn’t the sort to own a limp one. Everything she did was decisive.
“You’re here to see the house?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Follow me.”
I wondered how long we were going to have to maintain this façade as I followed behind her. As it happened, not long. The moment Irene walked up the driveway and turned away from the main road, she dropped her tones and whispered under her breath.
“It’s been there for a good half an hour.” I knew she meant the police car. “I don’t think it has anything to do with the murder, it’s too far up the road. I’ve not seen anyone get out. It could simply be parked up visiting someone else, or stopped for tea.”
“It’s empty,” I said. I wasn’t sure if my eyesight was better than hers for distance, or if I’d just been able to see through the glare on the windscreen because of the oblique angle I was standing at when I paid the police car another glance.
“There you go then,” she said.
“So you want to go ahead?”
“It would look more suspicious now not to.”
She was right. It would. I just hoped the police hadn’t actually met the estate agents who were responsible for the neighbour’s house already. Otherwise Irene was just about to get us both into extremely hot water. Then again, having a police car at the end of the road might come in useful depending on what we found during the house break. If Irene was right and the husband was inside, having back-up so close to the house might not be such a bad thing.
I fingered the phone in my pocket. How fast could I type in the emergency number… could I do it without him realising? Probably not. I had a smart phone. I needed to see the icons and then the numbers on the keypad in order to type. Maybe I should have put the sim into the older button phone I kept for emergencies. Next time I’d think ahead. If indeed there was a next time.
She glanced behind me to make sure we were shielded a little from the park by the angle of the house and the small Leylandi bush which rose from the corner of the front garden.
“Gloves. Overshoes.” Irene prompted. I’d also taken the liberty of tying my hair back this time, just in case
“Hold this.” She passed me the clipboard and extracted the same slim line lock pick set from her pocket. It was easier to see in the daylight but I couldn’t read any of the writing, it was all in Chinese.
“Shouldn’t take long. This one only has a Yale.”
She threaded two of the aluminium strips into the lock and started to jiggle them about. They weren’t how I expected skeleton keys to look, but then few things in the movies were how they were in real life. After a few seconds where her hands levered the small strips up and down in the key hole, she slipped in a third. The idea was to try and find the latches which the key routinely fit into which would turn the entire lock assembly in one go. She’d explained the art to it yesterday as we walked back from the park, - it sounded simple enough, but it was something which clearly needed skill and a lot of practise.
I glanced behind me. I couldn’t see the police car from the door and I hoped, if they were in another house on the park, they couldn’t see us either. In daylight I felt much more exposed than I had at night, and standing there on the doorstep in swimming pool overshoes and gloves I felt a chill run all the way down me from my head to my feet.
The door clicked open. Irene had worked her magic.
“Coming?”
Like the house we’d visited only the day before, we walked directly into the kitchen and I could see immediately from the position of the doors, the rooms in this house were going to be a mirror image of the other one. The doorway leading off to the hall was directly across the tiles, but there was no furniture. The place was empty; uninhabited, and despite the fact the dead body was next door, this one felt more haunted.
It smelled musty. Unlived in. The central heating clearly hadn’t been turned on for a while and the house was damp and cold, despite the slightly warmer air outside. Being empty, no windows had been opened and it had an unaired feel about it. That empty smell you get from unlived-in houses. Like leaf mould, but with a hint of unwashed carpet and stale cigarette smoke. It was a stark contrast to the home of the murder victim next door, which still carried a slight vanilla scent of life. A small part of me knew it was probably nothing more than an active central heating system, an air freshener and recent cleaning, but the two “empty” houses couldn’t have been more dissimilar.
As before, Irene lost no time.
I followed her. The doors to the rooms were all standing open. Each room empty and devoid of character. Just a shell waiting to receive a new family with new decorative ideas and different furniture, keen to apply their own unique stamp and drive out the cold abandon currently occupying the house like a living presence. Only it wasn’t entirely empty, if Irene was right – Lesley Cooper’s ex was upstairs in the loft space.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “If the house is empty, why is he still in the loft?”
“I suppose it’s safer. Up there he can’t be surprised by any estate agents.”
We reached the top of the stairs, where I had frightened myself with a reflection the night before. There was no mirror here, just a blank wall facing us which had a square of dust framing where a pictured used to hang. We turned and Irene pointed towards two indents in the carpet. She raised her eyebrows. See? I nodded. The depressions were in exactly the same place as the two she’d spotted next door.
“Russ?” She shouted up at the loft hatch. I stood there agog, there was no finesse, no sneaking up, she smiled at me. “Trust me”.
“Russ?” She jumped and made a grab for the short loop of rope hanging down from the loft hatch. She missed by about half an inch. She looked at me.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
She nodded. “Just do it. Everyth
ing will be all right. You’ll see.”
I took her place, and Irene stepped back a little to give me a bit of room. I jumped and, while I’m only an inch and a half taller than Irene, it was enough to give me the edge I needed and I snagged the rope easily. I gave it a pull and the hatch opened towards us, with a familiar loft ladder attached to the door. I gave it a pull to make it unfold and its feet nestled easily into the impressions in the carpet below.
“Russ?” Irene barked again, as if scolding a naughty puppy. We waited. Dust motes caught the light around us as we both stared up into the darkness beyond the hatch. “Russ?!”
“Auntie Rena?” A deep, slightly hoarse voice drifted down from the loft towards us. He sounded surprised, but he was no more surprised than I was.
Auntie Rena? I looked at Irene. Auntie Rena?
“Long story. I’ll tell you later.”
She had never mentioned she knew the ex-husband. I thought back over our conversations. It hadn’t been brought up at all, not even once. I frowned at her. Surely she should have told me of any relationship before we entered the house and started shouting into a loft space. I mean, here was me all a jitter, anxious for our safety, trying to work out how to call the police if we needed to – but she knew him.
“Is that you?” the disembodied voice called down again.
“Yes,” Irene said. “Are you coming down or what?”
I heard footsteps above us as he made his way over to the loft hatch to see for himself. It wasn’t long before a wane, round face appeared at the hatch.
He hadn’t shaven in a number of days and his skin bore smears of soot where he had rubbed at his face. It wasn’t a beard in the true sense of the word; there was no trimming, no shaping. This was more an “old man of the woods” look, only it wasn’t quite long enough even for that. Presumably the stubble had started to grow during his time in his own loft before his wife had been killed, and since then it had morphed into a lichen-like unkempt mess. His hair could have done with a cut too, the fringe drooping into his eyes, the sides tufting out over the tops of his ears. His top was grubby, the collar of his shirt almost browny-yellow with sweat. His face was puckered, pale and sunken, like he hadn’t eaten in a while and had missed out on the sun, which was probably the case. It was doubtful he had been outside since the murder. I wondered idly how long had he intended living in lofts, he couldn’t have a plan when he grabbed the keys and ran next door.
His eyes found mine. “Who’s she?”
He glared at me frostily. I stared back, equally icy.
“Ruth.” Irene didn’t elaborate, and Russ didn’t seem to know how to respond. It wasn’t like we could go through the standard ‘lovely to meet you’ handshake routine. Russ was in a loft, wanted for his wife’s murder, and I was…well, what was I? I had broken into a stranger’s house with Irene, marched up to a loft space that wasn’t mine and demanded to see a man, wanted for murder, who was hiding up there.
“Can you see down the road from the hatch up there?” Irene asked.
“A little. Why?”
“See if that police car has moved off yet.”
The face disappeared and I could hear shuffling above as he shifted position within the loft and walked over to the Velux at the side of the roof. A small smattering of dust dropped from the ceiling in one of the empty bedrooms. The sunlight caught it as it fell, like a small series of sparks dropping in the light.
“I think you owe me an explanation,” I said while Russ was out of earshot. I had walked into this with my eyes open, but Irene had known more. I didn’t like her keeping things from me, at least, not information as significant as this. She knew the suspect the police were after. It meant she wasn’t being objective. She was simply protecting a… a what…a nephew?
“It’s gone,” Russ shouted from the loft, before Irene could reply. “At least, I can’t see one.”
“Come down, then,” Irene told him. “Let’s get you out of here before the police work out the same thing I do. You were stupid to move in here,” she said directly to his face, as he appeared at the hatch. He looked back at her, crestfallen. “What were you thinking?”
“I didn’t,” he admitted. “I just panicked.”
“Panicked because you killed her?” I couldn’t help myself.
“He didn’t kill her,” Irene said. “Tell her.”
“She was dead when I came down that morning.”
“Morning?”
“He would have come down only when he knew she was at work,” Irene said. “Lesley would have been in the house at night so it was safest to move about in the day. Sloppy,” she added, facing him. “Why didn’t you just ask your Auntie Jean for help?”
“I… er… I don’t know.”
“So you snuck down, saw your wife dead and you… what, ran over here?” I wasn’t sure who I was more cross with, Irene or Russ who’d led us into this mess.
“Well I couldn’t report it, could I?” He was petulant. Like a teenager caught smoking behind the school bike sheds. I could see what Irene meant. He was hardly a killer. I could see that myself now, standing face to face with him. “I wasn’t supposed to be living in the house. If they knew I was living in the loft, well… I’d be the obvious suspect.”
“You are the obvious suspect,” I informed him, taking on the role of school caretaker.
He hung his head. “I am?”
I nodded. This was an ill-conceived plan, a cowardly action, and it had led to Irene and me getting into some serious hot water. I wasn’t impressed. In fact, I might have felt better had he looked as if he had some killer potential. I was breaking the law and leaving my child with a friend for…I looked him up and down…someone who would have been a good fit for the part of “expendable numpty” in a Star Trek film. Give him a red uniform and send him off to planet Zog and he’d have been the first to go.
“You’d have been better being honest in the first place,” Irene told him. “Now the whole police force is after you and not the real killer.”
“Do you know who did it?” His tone of voice seemed to indicate he trusted Irene could unravel all the problems he’d made for himself and solve it all in one go. I wondered if he knew something about Irene that I didn’t, or whether he was like this with every intelligent adult with more than half a brain cell.
“Not yet. It’s why we need to move you. I need to find out as much as I can before you hand yourself in.”
“Before I…?”
“You can’t avoid this, Russ. You are innocent, but we need to let due process sort that out.”
“But…?”
“Are you coming?” She took on a bullying tone, “Or do you want the police to find you here?”
Russ slumped, “All right.” His shoulders sagged and sullen teenager was written all over his posture.
I could see why his wife had wanted rid of him. I’d have wanted rid of this drip as well, especially if I was the one holding down a decent job and bringing in a wage while he sat on his flabby back side. I conjured up an image of him slumped on a sofa playing computer games while I went to work each day. Yep. I’d have definitely ditched him. He started to spin himself around to make his way down the ladder, but Irene stopped him.
“Better tidy up after yourself this time,” she told him. “We can’t have you making things too easy for them.”
Russ vanished from the hatch again and I could hear him moving around boxes and shuffling things in the loft, presumably hiding any traces that he had been living rough there for a few days.
We were both staring up at the hatch listening to his movements when she turned to me. “We aren’t related.”
I nodded but stayed quiet. Looking into his eyes I had worked out that much. Irene’s eyes were quick, intelligent. The man she called Russ still had much of the child about him. A boy that had grown up and found himself out of his depth. There was nothing of Irene in him. He called her Auntie though, but I wasn’t about to ask. I was smouldering. I know Iren
e had said he wasn't a killer, but he'd been in hiding for days. I was expecting at least a little more, oh, I don't know, vested Bruce Willis fighting an injustice, not one of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys being taken to task by Wendy.
“I knew his child minder, Jean.” She continued in hushed tones so our conversation wouldn’t carry into the loft. “She’s kept in touch with the family ever since he was a boy. But she’s bed-ridden now. Unable to get out. She called me the moment she heard the police were looking for him. Asked me to help.”
“So you’re…?”
“Not even a family friend. Russ called me Auntie Rena, because the last time I saw him he was 15 and he called every older person Jean introduced him to Auntie, or Uncle. It was polite back then.”
Lillian wasn’t talking yet. When she did, I might start the whole “Auntie thing” if Irene insisted, but it was a little outdated, and as far as I was concerned so long as Lillian was polite, she only had to call her biological aunties, aunties.
"So...the last time you met him, he was 15,” I said. “What is he... 26 now? 30?" She had assured me this man was harmless, but a lot could change in ten to fifteen years.
"Jean's kept in touch with him over the years. He last called in to see her before they split up. He was devastated. He loved Lesley."
"I'm not surprised,” I said. “She kept him in biscuits by all accounts."
She ignored my sarcasm, but I was working up a full head of steam. She could probably tell from my tone. We hadn’t had a row yet. With friends arguments never seem to come as often, or start in the same way as they do between married couples – but I could feel myself working into a martyred-rage. I had been misinformed. I had been kept in the dark. I had been dragged into something she knew more about than she was letting on. I felt used.
"You done yet?" she called up into the loft space.
"How are we going to get him out?” I asked. My tones were frosty; even I could hear the ice. I was angry, but I was a hedgehog, preferring sarcasm and withdrawal to direct confrontation. I wasn’t one of those types who flew into a rage easily, charged about like a rhino, trampling everything and everyone; rather I smouldered and like a hedgehog, I curled in on myself and displayed my spines, passive aggressive, sullen defeatism, sarcasm, cutting remarks, and the worst of it all, was that I could see myself doing it. I wanted to rage at her. I wanted to jump up and down, demand answers, hit something, curse myself for being so easily dragged in without even questioning why, but I didn’t. I hunkered down, I went quiet, gave her the glare, and willed her to read my eyes, and know what I was thinking.