Girl A: an astonishing new crime thriller debut novel from the biggest literary fiction voice of 2021

by Abigail Dean

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You need to add another string to your bow,’ Oliver said, and when Gabriel continued to look at him, blank and anxious, he set down his glass and sighed. ‘Let’s put it this way,’ he said. ‘It’s December. Nobody wants a survivor of child abuse for their Christmas party.’

  Oliver proposed that Gabriel should accept what he described as more ‘standard’ work. Many of his clients, he said, needed to be flexible in order to get through the year. Oliver would accept an additional down payment to make this happen.

  ‘I had thought that I could be, like – motivational,’ Gabriel said, and Oliver snorted.

  ‘You’re a great kid, Gabe,’ he said, ‘but you’re not motivating anybody.’

  There seemed to be an infinite number of courses, served with stern deliberation. When they were finally outside the restaurant, Gabriel explained that he would need to leave. The last train home would depart in half an hour, and he wasn’t sure how to get back to Euston. He had spent most of the meal trying not to cry, and was longing for the moment – the humiliating, private moment which must, finally, be near – when he could do so.

  ‘You don’t need to do that,’ Oliver said. Cautiously, as if he was asking for permission, Oliver took Gabriel’s index finger, then his middle finger and his thumb, and finally his whole hand, their fingers entwined. Oliver stumbled to face him – he was two bottles of wine down – and tipped his head upwards, until he was too close for Gabriel to see.

  Gabriel had only ever kissed uninterested schoolgirls in the bedrooms of his friends, and Oliver’s force amazed him. There was a dogged determination in his hands, on Gabriel’s cheeks, and in his tongue, parting Gabriel’s lips, and – later, in Oliver’s bedroom, which looked south onto Tower Bridge, and which was precisely as Gabriel would have imagined it, right down to the black bedsheets and the touchpad lighting – in the rhythm of his mouth against Gabriel’s penis. When Oliver was asleep, Gabriel stood at the window – he couldn’t work the automated blinds, and had to prise them apart to see out – and surveyed the city, and thought pityingly of Jimmy Delaney, asleep in his university hall, with essays to write.

  Gabriel returned to the Coulson-Brownes only once after that. There, he collected the belongings which he had salvaged from Moor Woods Road and took what he liked from his room. He left the tepee behind. The Coulson-Brownes provided him with a few months of rent on a flat in Camden, in exchange, he suspected, for never having him live with them again. ‘This is it,’ said Mr Coulson-Browne, ‘this really is it, Gabriel’, and Gabriel thought, triumphantly: Yes, it is.

  Now he was tired, slack on the bench, without the energy to get back to the hospital. I jogged to the reception desk, collected a wheelchair, and helped him into it. The shadows of the forest fell closer across the lawn.

  He didn’t speak again until we were in his room. He manoeuvred from the chair, and I wheeled it out to the corridor, so that he wouldn’t have to look at it in the night. ‘Will you come again?’ he asked.

  ‘I can stay nearby,’ I said. ‘I can come tomorrow.’

  I didn’t know how to talk about the house on Moor Woods Road. It seemed impossible to ask anything of him when he was sitting on the bed, trying to take off his shoes.

  ‘Has Delilah told you about the inheritance?’ I asked.

  ‘She mentioned it. She said that there’s the house, and a little money.’

  He lay down, and groped for his blankets.

  ‘She told me about your idea,’ he said. ‘About the community centre.’

  ‘And what do you think?’

  ‘I need some time,’ he said. ‘Some time to consider my options.’

  I paused, caught between the bed and the door. Gabriel, who had always been compliant.

  ‘The visitor,’ I said, ‘earlier today. Is this something to do with him?’

  At the bed, I took his hand. I wanted to comfort him, I decided, but I also wanted him to stay awake.

  ‘Was that Oliver?’ I said. And: ‘Gabe – what did he do to you?’

  He lay on his back, with his hands twitching on the blankets. Asleep, or ignoring me.

  I sat on the lawn and rearranged the weekend. There were bed and breakfasts across the county: all of them were named after vegetation, and occupied. I found a spare room in a hamlet with nothing but a church and a pub, and drove there across the hot afternoon. Mum and Dad had intended to visit London on Sunday; they would have to wait. Harder than I expected, I said, by text. Another day at the asylum.

  My host led me to a room attached to her family house, and presented a plate of biscuits and a handwritten Wi-Fi code. I was to use it responsibly. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘This is perfect.’ I thought of the Romilly Townhouse. The comfort that was to be found in its clean, vast spaces, and doormen appointed for discretion. ‘I’ll be outside with the little ones,’ she said, ‘and you’re welcome to join us.’ We each smiled, politely, quite sure that I wouldn’t.

  I opened my laptop. The desk looked onto a bright, brilliant garden. Sunlight darted through oak trees and flitted across the grass. I ate the biscuits and worked, and watched my host playing with her children. She was an actress: a dinosaur and then a princess, and now a bridge, under which they scrambled. The garden was strewn with discarded props. Delilah had been right, in one respect. I was such a serious child. Even my games had required absolute commitment. I tried to imagine joining the children around the flower beds, accepting the roles I was assigned. It seemed inconceivable. They would see through me and cut me from the cast.

  Some things were for the best.

  I watched for a little longer, then I closed my laptop, and walked to the pub.

  That night, muddled from an afternoon of wine and in the strange, warm room, I dreamt of one of Robert Wyndham’s parties. Long white tables adorned the lawn. Everybody was there: Delilah, Gabriel, Evie, Ethan and Ana. Everybody was well. I sat next to JP, who was telling some great anecdote, and I leaned into him. The party was raucous; I was struggling to follow his narrative. Glasses chinked, and the table behind us shrieked with laughter. I hushed them, wanting to hear the story, but it was impossible to concentrate on it, and after a time I stopped trying. Opposite me, Evie was grinning and bored. She slipped from the table and across the garden, to where the lawn met the forest. I stood, too. By the time I had left the table, she was already turning to the woods. I called to her, but she didn’t hear me, and in time she dimmed between the trees.

  We moved to Hollowfield and to Moor Woods Road when I was ten, and in Miss Glade’s class. Gabriel needed a bed; Ethan had started to lobby for his own room; Father had lost interest in the Gatehouse and had found a site to establish his own congregation. He would call it the Lifehouse. Whenever he talked about it, he built the pulpit with his fists, and etched the aisle with his fingers.

  Delilah and I were the only ones to protest. ‘I have friends,’ Delilah said. ‘Don’t make me leave my friends, Papa.’

  ‘Can’t we at least wait until summer?’ I asked. ‘When school’s over?’

  Of all of the teachers at Jasper Street, I liked Miss Glade the most. She didn’t encourage me to read in class, and she didn’t praise me in public. Early on in the year, in October, she asked me to pop to the staffroom at lunch, and said that she had been impressed with my weekly book reports. Would I like to be assigned some extra reading – under the radar, no pressure, et cetera – just in case I was getting bored? On Friday lunchtimes, we sat in the windowless meeting room next to the school office and discussed whatever she had recommended. Miss Glade usually produced some kind of snack and asked that I helped her to eat it as we talked: a whole platter of fruit, for example, or a tray of flapjacks which she had baked. It always looked like far too much for one person, and I wondered how she had ever expected to finish it on her own.

  The trouble came when Miss Glade spoke to Mother. Mother was collecting Delilah and Evie, standing in the playground with Gabriel and book bags and her jaundic
ed white dress, and Miss Glade asked if she could spare a moment. The others came in, too, and Gabriel roamed between the chairs and tables. He lifted crayons from their pots and took books from the shelves, giggling. He had a sharp, puckish face and a gappy smile. He would take items from strangers’ supermarket trolleys and they would laugh, and forgive him.

  ‘Isn’t he lovely,’ Miss Glade said. Mother nodded, shifting from foot to foot.

  ‘It really does need to be a minute,’ she said. ‘We have to get back.’

  ‘It’s good news,’ Miss Glade said, ‘so it won’t take long. I just wanted to comment on how well Alexandra’s doing this year. Really top work, across the board. English, maths, science – the first tasters of some of the other subjects, too. It’s been an excellent year, so far.’

  Delilah rolled her eyes. Evie shot me a smile. Mother nodded away the praise, expectant, waiting for the great reveal.

  ‘My recommendation,’ Miss Glade said, ‘is that you and Mr Gracie explore the idea of scholarships to some of the better secondary schools in the area. It’s still a year and a half off, I know, but it never hurts to start thinking. A lot of these scholarships are dependent on family finances – and obviously I can’t comment on that – but I can put together a prospective list, or talk you and your husband through some of the options. Whatever works.’

  ‘Right,’ Mother said. She looked at me, as though there was something I knew and was refusing to disclose. ‘You’re talking about Alexandra?’ she said, to Miss Glade.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘OK. Well. Thank you.’

  ‘Should we put in an appointment,’ Miss Glade asked, ‘at a more convenient time?’

  ‘I don’t know if that’s going to be possible,’ Mother said. ‘We’re relocating in the next few months. Up to Hollowfield.’

  ‘Oh,’ Miss Glade said. ‘I wasn’t aware of that.’

  She, too, looked at me.

  ‘If it helps,’ she said, ‘some of the options would still be—’

  Gabriel had spun the globe on Miss Glade’s desk so fast that the Earth crashed onto the classroom floor. He froze, a cartoon culprit, and when the adults approached him, he cowered.

  ‘It’s no bother,’ Miss Glade said, but Mother had already crossed the room. She rapped Gabriel on the hand and gathered him in her arms.

  ‘See,’ she said. ‘It really isn’t a good time.’

  We walked home together. It was early December, but some of the houses had decorations up. Delilah and Evie ran ahead, pointing out their favourite Christmas trees. My breath muddled with Mother’s in the air. ‘As you know,’ she said, ‘I didn’t go to the grammar school. And things worked out fine in the end.’ I looked at the brown tape on the pram, and Mother’s hair beneath the streetlamps, a brittle white and wrenched back from her face. Less of the light landing in it, now.

  ‘I wouldn’t mention this to your father, if I were you,’ Mother said. ‘He has other plans. Much grander plans, Alexandra.’

  ‘But it wouldn’t cost anything,’ I said. ‘To try.’

  Delilah and Evie had stopped outside the biggest home on the street. In the window, there was an ornate doll’s house, and in that house it was Christmas Day. Miniature children raced to the presents beneath the tree. The father reclined in his armchair. I looked for the mother in the bedrooms and in the kitchen, but that miniature was missing.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Evie said. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Come on,’ Mother said. She was beyond us, drumming her fist on the handle of the pram. I caught up with her before she could move on, so that she had no choice but to look at me.

  ‘At least let me try,’ I said.

  She glanced away, as if she was embarrassed for me. She was smiling, just a little, and I suspected then that this had nothing to do with Father.

  ‘I said no,’ she said. ‘Didn’t I.’

  Miss Glade didn’t give up, although she abandoned the idea of enlisting Mother for support. Our Friday meetings became more fervent. You have to consider how other people may interpret this, she said. Don’t just say that you like it – that isn’t enough – tell me why. Her recommendations became more diverse: she brought in books about history; religions; the Romans and the ancient Greeks. In an hour we could unravel the string through the Labyrinth; slide through the hippocampus; scour coral for a male seahorse with eggs in its pouch. ‘How long do we have?’ she would ask me, when we came back to the little cupboard room. I narrated the time from the clock above her head, although she never seemed particularly interested in my response. I don’t think that’s what she was asking me at all.

  ‘Alexandra,’ Father said. ‘You have a guest.’

  He was standing at the bottom of the stairs. I had crossed the landing to clean my teeth, with Fantastic Mr Fox in my hand. My ritual was to stick the brush in my mouth and read three pages, whatever the book.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘Who?’

  ‘Why don’t you come and see?’

  He swept an arm towards the living room, like a showman presenting a new, exotic act. I left my book on the side of the sink and padded down to him, into the downstairs lights and the smell of just-eaten casserole.

  Miss Glade stood in the centre of the room, wearing a bobble hat and a duffle coat, impossibly clean. It was the first time I realized that she must exist outside of school. She had evenings, and a bed, and things that she thought about when she got into it. She was shorter than she was in the classroom, but Father did that: he shrank people. I folded my arms over my pyjama top, which was threadbare, thin enough that you could see my nipples through the material.

  ‘Lex doesn’t need to be here,’ Miss Glade said. ‘I came to talk with you.’

  ‘Oh, we’re a very open family.’

  She was trying to look between us, but her eyes drifted to the corners of the room and the garbage bags there, the spill of old clothes and shoes and a few exhausted soft toys. Mother’s blankets were piled on the sofa, stiff with dirt.

  ‘Hello, Lex,’ she said.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. And then, not trusting this version of her, the night-time version which didn’t want to talk to me: ‘What are you doing here?’

  She looked at Father, who was already smiling.

  ‘You remember the scholarship,’ Miss Glade said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wanted to talk to your dad about that – and a few other bits and pieces. Nothing very important. Certainly nothing for you to worry about.’

  Father spread down on the sofa, and gestured to the spare cushion. Miss Glade sat right at the edge of it, as if she didn’t want our house against her skin. When she was there, she wrung her hands, still purple-white from the cold.

  ‘If you don’t want her to hear,’ Father said, ‘that’s fine with me.’

  Miss Glade looked at me with something sad and resigned in her face. Something like a message, with the knowledge that I wouldn’t be able to read it. ‘I’m sorry, Lex,’ she said. ‘But I need to talk to your father in private.’

  ‘OK, then.’

  ‘OK. I’ll see you tomorrow, Lex.’

  Evie was already asleep. I lay on top of the covers with the light on, keeping guard, trying not to fall asleep. Miss Glade was one of the cleverest people I knew, I thought, but also one of the stupidest. She looked at me as if she was frightened for me, while she sat down there with Father, and wasn’t even frightened for herself.

  I never did find out what Miss Glade and Father discussed, but we left for Hollowfield a week later. I arrived home from school to find the family in the kitchen, Father standing with his palms flat on the table and Mother at his side. ‘We’ve got a house,’ he said. ‘A house of our own.’

  A little earthquake passed across Delilah’s face. It started with tremors at her lips and at the corners of her eyes. ‘I hate you,’ she said, and her features crumpled.

  ‘Already?’ I said.

  ‘It’s become necessary,’ Father said. ‘All hands on
deck.’

  There were times when the exercise of packing seemed to be an autopsy of the house and the childhood we had spent there. Here, beneath my parents’ bed, were the blankets on which Mother had given birth to Ethan. Here was a book about the American Frontier, never returned to the library. Here were unwashed liquor bottles, housing families of thin black flies. When we lifted the furniture from its cavities, we uncovered the house’s worst ailments. The carpet beneath my bed was soft and matted, and tumours of mould had grown up to the mattress. There were putrid sleepsuits underneath the cot, each worn by any one of us, and never washed. The walls in Mother and Father’s room were punctured, and when we held our fingers to the wounds we could feel the air outside, leaking into the house.

  At the bottom of Mother’s wardrobe, I found a notebook, sun-crinkled and close to disintegrating. I opened it in the middle. The handwriting was cumbersome – the writing of a child – but I didn’t recognize it. Dispatch 17, it said. I visit Mrs Brompton’s cottage on a Saturday afternoon. She is in her garden, and in the mood for talking. I smiled. Dispatches from Deborah. Mother’s contacts from the world of journalism were recorded on the back page. They would be retired by now, I thought. Some of them would probably be dead. Had she ever called them? It seemed unlikely. The book had been forgotten, rather than hidden. I added it to the rubbish pile.

  On my final day at Jasper Street, I embraced Amy and Jessica and Caroline. ‘We’ll miss you so much,’ they said, and scrubbed at dry eyes. (I provided them with an excellent anecdote for future therapy – a tale of guilt, naivety, and horror – and when each new source close to the family stepped forward, years later, I would wonder if it was one of them.) Miss Glade produced a cake for the class to share – iced with an open book and Good Luck, Lex! – and when I cut into it, each of the layers was a different colour. I thought of Miss Glade in the kitchen of a small, warm house, wearing oven gloves and pyjamas, and I allowed myself a moment to reside there, with the smell of baking and a lifetime of Friday lunches. I hadn’t quite forgiven her for the surprise visit to my house, but after the cake, I decided that I should try.