QUIET NEIGHBOURS an unputdownable psychological thriller with a breathtaking twist

by MCPHERSON, CATRIONA

  “It must be,” said Jude. Then she heard her own sycophantic voice and thought the cop would know she was trying to ingratiate herself. What would Eddy say? “Are you a detective, then?” She was rewarded with a quick frown.

  “Right, Miss Crowther.” The voice was more clipped now. “Address?”

  “Here, now,” Jude said. “Since the cottage isn’t exactly—”

  “Permanent address,” said the sergeant.

  Jude rattled off her parents’ house number and street, the postcode she’d learned as a child. They wouldn’t check. They had no reason to.

  “And you’ve been here how long?”

  “Just over a week,” said Jude. “Working for Lowell. Mr. Glen.”

  “Oh, we know Lowell,” she said. “He’s an old friend of the D&G constabulary, is Lowland Glen. Although he’s been living quietly this last while.”

  Jude said nothing. Was she harking back to the summer of love, 1994, the time Eddy would so dearly like to learn more of?

  “Although …” the cop said. “Maybe he’s starting up again.”

  Jude shook her head. “I’m a librarian and Eddy’s his daughter,” she said. “We’re not exactly setting the rafters ringing. Eddy’s mum was one of the ones who used to hang out here, you know. Back when Lowell had a houseful.”

  “Aye, so I heard,” said the cop. “And she has a look of her.”

  “So, was it really wild?” Jude said. “It’s hard to imagine.”

  “We never got the chance to find out,” said the copper. “They all kept their noses clean, kept it on the premises, and the only neighbour”—she jerked her head—“never complained officially about the noise, so we never got a chance to come in and see what they were up to.”

  “Frustrating for you,” said Jude, but she had gone too far and the woman’s eyes narrowed.

  “Let’s get back to business,” she said. “Any enemies?”

  Jude felt her face freeze. Raminder had an unknown number of brothers and sisters, plenty of them in the only photo Jude had ever seen, although some might have been cousins.

  “Something bothering you?” the cop asked.

  “Just made it seem real, you asking that,” Jude said. “I was feeling guilty, thinking I’d left something on and destroyed Lowell’s lovely little house and then, when the fireman said about the letterbox, I was feeling lucky—understatement! I was feeling sick with relief that I wasn’t in there. I never even thought of it being about me until right there. I—Sorry.” She put her head down between her knees to buy herself time, tense, waiting to see if her story had gone over.

  “Really?” The woman’s voice was dry. “That wasn’t the first thing that occurred to you?”

  “Of course not,” said Jude, sitting up again. “I mean, it’s like something off a film.”

  “Huh.” Jude thought she saw a drop in the woman’s shoulders. “Now that’s interesting. See, I’d have said coming from London you’d be more alert for crime. But I suppose a crime like that—targeted arson—that’s the kind of thing that comes easier in a wee place like Wigtown. Know what I mean?”

  “Not really,” said Jude.

  “Big city—everyone’s a stranger. And if nobody knows your secrets there’s no point trying to get rid of someone to stop them spilling.”

  Jude couldn’t have helped her eyes widening even if she’d tried, and so it was just as well that it fit the bill. “So you really don’t think it was just kids being bad?” she said. “You think someone’s got a grudge against Lowell? And I just got in the way?”

  “Lowell, the church, Todd Jolly …”

  “Todd Jolly?” said Jude. “He’s been dead thirty years.”

  “Ach, it’s not a proper grudge till it gets down a generation or two,” said the woman. “And you’re dead right, by the way. It was thirty years past just in the spring there. You’ve got yourself up to speed nice and quick, eh?” She winked at Jude and grinned at the effect of her wink.

  This was why Max never liked cops, Jude thought. They ran up against each other most days at work, going out to accidents and sudden deaths, and Jude thought they’d be natural allies. But Max changed pubs when the one nearest the ambulance depot turned into a coppers’ haunt thanks to the new offices being built. Their old pub—the Bobbies’ it was called for the years it had done service to police coming off their shift—was too far away.

  “They’re never off their shift,” Max had said. It had taken a while for her to work out the problem, but in the end it came back to drink, like everything. He had told her when they were dancing at Allan’s retirement do. Everyone else was shaking their tail feathers since it was a fast song, but Max could only drape his arms over Jude’s shoulders and shuffle around the floor.

  “Go home after this, eh love?” he’d mumbled into her hair. “Place is crawling with bloody filth.” She hadn’t understood, had looked around at the sparkling black and silver décor of the function room. “That fat one with the pint in his hand. He’s got a lip on him. I can’t be arsed with him. Dunno why Allan invited them all.”

  Jude looked over at the man with the pint, an off-duty cop as clear as if he’d a sign above him. He was standing with his legs spread wide and surveying the room with a smile on his face, switching his gaze from corner to corner like a metronome. When he caught Jude’s eye, he came over.

  “Day off tomorrow, Maximilian?” he said, a rich chuckle bubbling just under his words.

  “No,” said Max.

  “Shame you’ve got leave so early then,” the man said. “Still, you’ve managed to get a whole night’s partying in in half the time, eh?” He threw a look at Jude. “Let us know if you need a hand, love,” he said. “When your taxi gets here.”

  “I’m driving,” Jude said.

  “Are you?” said the fat man, still grinning. He glanced over at the table where her bag and cardigan were sitting. “You just leaving that nice big glass of Chardonnay for someone else, are you? That’s very generous. You’re like your husband. I see him buying drinks that turn out to be for other people all the time.”

  Jude had driven home in burning silence, making up retorts, while Max snored with his face against the window, a line of drool joining his chin to his tie. A silk tie, ruined. She’d thrown it out in the morning.

  She had been quiet too long. This copper was looking more amused than ever.

  “You think someone’s sending a message?” Jude asked. “Like the Wigtown mafia or someone?”

  Annoyance was better than amusement, and the woman was pretty annoyed to have a Londoner laugh at her little town, at the possibility of crime there. She retreated into routine questions. Had Jude seen anyone hanging around? Had she heard any noises at night. Jude kept quiet about the footsteps in the fog and the footprints in the grass, and when five more minutes had passed, it was over.

  “Right-oh,” the cop said. “Phone?”

  Jude gave the number of Lowell’s landline and the woman looked annoyed. She added the shop number and the cop went as far as to lift her pen from her little notebook and look over.

  “Are you deliberately refusing to give me your mobile number, hen?”

  “I haven’t got one,” said Jude. “They’re not compulsory.”

  Again the copper’s eyes narrowed but she said no more, just stood and walked out, leaving Jude sitting there.

  She heard Eddy clattering downstairs as soon as the kitchen door closed.

  “Christ on a bed of rice!” she said. “I was sitting halfway up, like whatsisface. I heard everything. What a prize bitch she is.”

  “Christopher Robin,” said Jude. “You were right about a mobile, by the way. She looked at me like I was a space alien.”

  As if to cement Eddy’s triumph, her phone rang at that very moment and she cackled with glee as she fished it out of her pocket. She had bathed and dressed and was wearing a long cardigan of Lowell’s like a dress, nothing but her wrinkly ribbed tights underneath. She had Birkenstocks on her f
eet and a towel round her shoulders while her hair dried. She looked about fifteen, despite the belly. She glanced down at her phone and then wheeled around, turning her back on Jude so fast that her wet rats’ tails of hair flew out like blue-black sunrays.

  She touches that up, Jude thought, and felt a shift inside her. It was partly something she couldn’t put her finger on and partly, of course (what else?), Raminder. Raminder was more and more in her head; the dream getting to be nightly, the picture there behind her eyelids, whenever she closed them.

  “What is it?” said Eddy, turning back.

  Jude looked up. Maybe it was that blue-black hair and the cold blue light in this room—no wonder Lowell never used it—but Eddy’s face looked whiter than Jude had ever seen it.

  “Never mind me,” she said. “What’s wrong with you? Who was that?”

  “No one,” said Eddy. “Ex-boyfriend. A ghost. Jude, what is it?”

  “Just memories,” said Jude. “I don’t want to talk about it.” But that was a lie and Eddy knew it. Jude tried again. “I don’t trust you not to tell Lowell.”

  “Me?” said Eddy. “I’m like a bank vault. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “It’s your hair,” Jude said. “Your black hair. It reminds me of someone.”

  “I’ve seen the photos,” Eddy said. “In the news. But hers was straightened. Mine comes out my head like this.” She tossed it this way and that again. It was so fine it was drying already.

  “She fell.” Jude blurted the words out. “She was crying. And she was carrying a suitcase. She tripped at the top of the stairs.”

  “Raminder,” said Eddy.

  “I didn’t push her,” Jude said. “I went out onto the landing to … talk to her, I think. Help her. Like, drive her somewhere or help with the baby. The baby was down at the front door in her pram, bawling her eyes out, and Raminder was crying. So I went out onto the landing and she heard me and turned round and then she just tripped. She went down like …” Jude put her head between her knees for the second time in half an hour. The cool blue room had started to darken from each side, turning to grey as her eyes lost focus and all the blood left her head to puddle under her feet.

  “Where was he?” said Eddy. “Cos the news said—”

  “Passed out drunk,” said Jude, into the tent of her skirt. “That’s why Raminder was leaving. That’s why she was crying.”

  “So she didn’t find you together?” said Eddy. “Cos the news said—”

  “She didn’t know I was there until I went out onto the landing,” said Jude and sat up and back, feeling the hard mounds of the button-back chair behind her, feeling at last the stiff end of one of the horse hairs she knew would be there somewhere. It dug into the back of her head and she let it keep pricking at her, drove her head back harder to see if it would break her skin, but instead she felt it buckle. “I was hiding behind the bedroom door,” she said, “like someone from a French farce.”

  “What, starkers?”

  “No! I wasn’t in bed with him!” Jude said. “He didn’t know I was there either. I hid—Jesus, this should be funny! When I heard him coming in, I hid in the wardrobe and then when he passed out, like he always did, I came out and I was standing there looking at him when she came in the front door. I didn’t have time to get back in again.”

  “Thank God for that, eh? If she packed her stuff.”

  “So I was just standing there. Behind the bedroom door.”

  “And then you followed her,” said Eddy. “And you saw her fall.”

  “I never touched her,” Jude said. “She turned and tripped and she went down, slid and tumbled and slid again. Right to the bottom. She was face-down. All that black hair like a sheet, I couldn’t see her face. She was kind of—Sometimes people fall and you know something’s broken from the angles, right? But it wasn’t like that. He legs were straight and her feet were sort of still up on the bottom step and her arms were straight out down by her sides from the way she’d slid, you know? I couldn’t see her face.”

  “Could you hear her breathing?” said Eddy.

  “I couldn’t hear anything,” said Jude, “with the noise of the baby.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Eddy said. “I forgot the baby. Poor wee mite, eh?” She put a hand on the top of her belly and held it there, looking at Jude with not a single twinkle in her eye. “And then you dialled 999,” she said. “Just like anyone would. You did the right thing. Just like any other good person. Didn’t you?”

  TWENTY-SIX

  “Oh my dears!” Lowell had opened the door so quietly that neither one of them had time to compose her face. “Those ruddy police!”

  “Steady on, Dad,” said Eddy, with a shaky laugh. “Mind your language.”

  “They let me off comparatively lightly,” he said, “thanks to the fact that the house was empty and it’s not insured.”

  “It’s not insured?” said Jude. “Oh Lowell. I’m so sorry. If only I hadn’t come and started kicking up dust.”

  He shushed her, flapping his hands as though he were swimming doggy paddle. “Truth will come to light,” he said. “‘Murder cannot be hid long.’”

  “What?” said Eddy. “What murder?”

  “Oh my dears! I should be shot.”

  “It’s just an expression, Eddy,” said Jude. “A quotation. From …”

  “The Merchant of Venice,” said Lowell.

  “Who?”

  “What do we do now?” Jude said.

  “We get back into the cottage and purloin the letter for one thing,” said Lowell.

  “Which, if you’d put it in your bag or your back pocket instead of in some old book where you’d completely forget it was, we’d already have it,” Eddy offered.

  “I just hope, dear me, yes, that the fire investigator doesn’t find it first.”

  “Oh yeah, like the fire investigator’s going to go snooping through a pile of manky old books looking for clues to a fire that started downstairs. Why would he? Why would anyone? Who puts stuff that matters in a book deliberately, instead of like bus tickets or that to keep your place?”

  Jude leapt up from the button-backed chair. “Eddy, you’re a genius,” she said.

  “I try,” Eddy said. “How come this time though?”

  “I knew there was something,” Jude said. “I knew there was some reason I wanted to bring the book club books. I’ve got it. Lowell, where can we spread them out?”

  “Dining room,” Lowell said, striding out and across the hall, into another of the unused parts of Jamaica House. It was dancing with dust motes and sad in the daylight, its dark wood and rich colours much more suited for lamp-lit evenings.

  “Christ Almighty, when’s the funeral?” said Eddy, looking around.

  Jude clicked on the electric light hanging low over the long table. “Perfect,” she said. “Eddy, we’ll run up and down and you unpack them.”

  “Right,” Jude said, twenty minutes later. “Three book clubs, like you said, Lowell.” She picked up the nearest volume. “First, the one he joined himself when his wife was still alive. He didn’t write anything on any of these because he didn’t need to; he had someone to talk to. But then there’s the next one—the one his daughter Angela got him. He wrote wonderful little reviews in them. Witty, pithy, clever little summaries. I think I fell in love with Todd Jolly because he gave Rosemary’s Baby the one-word review: Blimey!”

  Eddy rolled her eyes. Lowell shouted with laughter.

  “But I’m not entirely sure I quite see, my dear,” he added mildly.

  Jude opened Black Narcissus to the endpaper. “Brilliant but I bet the tourist board hates him. See the thing about these is—and this is the lightbulb you turned on, Eddy—it never occurred to him that anyone would ever read them. These were his little jokes with himself, part of the pleasure of reading, along with building his shelves and all the rest of it. He never meant anyone to see these. But then something happens.”

  She took the volume of Lolita,
which had put itself under her hand, and opened it.

  “A third book club. One hundred books to read before you die. He’s thinking about death, you see. And he’s old now; his friends are starting to go and he’s seen it happen that a house is cleared and people go through a person’s belongings. He knows that someone will see his words once he’s gone. He means someone to see his words. In one way it destroys his writing—there’s no playfulness, no little jokes. But what there is … is messages. He’s writing down what someone needs to know. Archie Patterstone is dead. Etta Bell is fading fast. I will tell Dr. Glen enough is enough. This plain man is sick of the world tonight.”

  “What are you on about?”

  “He knew what was happening,” Lowell said.

  “But what was happening?” Eddy said.

  “Frank and Pete Oughton wanted the farm,” said Jude. “What about the rest of them, Lowell?”

  “Elsie’s daughter moved into her house” said Lowell. “As far as I remember. I can’t tell you anything about Etta Bell, though. And Archie Patterstone was a lifelong bachelor.”

  “I don’t suppose you can remember what happened to his estate?” Jude asked.

  “Estate is rather a grand word for it,” Lowell told her. “He lived in the pensioners’ cottages. Can’t have left much beyond his Post Office savings and his—”

  “What?” said Jude.

  “Well, dear me, this might sound silly, but his allotment.”

  “For growing prize leeks?” said Eddy. “Or does allotment mean something else here?”

  “I know, I know, it does sound silly. Good heavens, how could it fail to? But two things. Archie Patterstone worked on that soil for decades. It was like caviar. And I’ve just remembered who inherited it.” He paused. “Bill McLennan.”

  “So what?” said Eddy.

  “Billy McLennan,” Jude said, “whose wife was so angry when I started snooping.”

  “What?” said Eddy.

  “Jackie didn’t want Auntie Lorna in the nursing home. Cared for and looked after and using up all her money.”

  “This is pretty wackadoo, Jude,” said Eddy.