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

by Abigail Dean

  Amen.

  Some time after midnight, headlights swung through the window.

  Father came in the door breathless and pained, like the last survivor of some bloody crusade. He called for Mother, and she went to him. They staggered together to the kitchen, and she served him tea and crisps, tenderly, beneath the bright electric lights. While we were waiting for him to talk, I brushed down the empty pie plate and returned it to the cupboard.

  ‘I’ve been,’ Father said, ‘with the police.’

  They had picked him and Jolly up from Dustin’s, mid-breakfast. The food had just arrived. Full English, with extra black pudding. When the officers approached the table, Jolly set down his knife and fork, and sighed. Father narrated this part of the story with the kind of hushed awe which he usually reserved for the Old Testament God. ‘At least,’ Jolly said, ‘let us finish our fucking breakfast.’

  The inquisition happened at the station. They were charging Jolly with money laundering and fraud. The fraud related to Jolly’s use of religious donations from the residents of Blackpool, and was, of course, a complete fucking fabrication. I thought of his congregation, their faces turned up to catch some of his light. They would have counted out precisely what they could afford, and pressed the notes into his warm, damp hands. The police asked Father how Jolly spent his money; where Jolly kept his records; why Jolly hadn’t shared his proceeds, if they were such close friends. Once Father had prayed for them, he knew exactly how to answer. ‘No comment,’ he said. He no-commented all afternoon.

  They released him in the late evening. When they returned his belongings, the officer flicked a few thin coins onto the floor, so that Father had to stoop to collect them.

  ‘Don’t spend it all at once,’ the officer said.

  Father gathered us to him, then. ‘There’s persecution out there,’ he said, ‘for people who desire to live the life that we do.’ I thought of the laughter in the school corridor, as Mother and I had left it. Father lay a hand on my neck, still cold from the drive home, and I warmed it with my own.

  That night, for the first time in many months, Ethan wanted to talk with me. He called to me from his room as I passed to go to bed, so softly that I thought I had only hoped for it. He called again, and this time I knocked on his door and went in. He was lying on his bed in his school trousers with the Bible held above him. As soon as I was inside the room, he threw it at me, too fast for me to catch it. It hit me in the chest, and stung. ‘So,’ he said, and laughed. ‘Thou shalt not steal.’

  ‘We don’t know anything yet,’ I said, and he laughed again.

  ‘What do you think he spent the money on? I bet it was something really dark. Old Jolly. He was always a complete lunatic, but I wasn’t expecting this.’

  ‘Do you think Father had anything to do with it?’

  ‘I doubt it. I don’t see Jolly as a man who would have shared his proceeds. But – put it this way – I don’t think that this will help with Father’s state of mind.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, and because I couldn’t resist it: ‘Like you’re his great confidant.’

  ‘At least I have a seat at the table.’

  Ethan stood up. He had always been taller than me – even Delilah was taller than me – but in the last year his body had acquired a new power. There were cuts of muscle in his arms and across his chest. I heard him exercising in the evening, the noise of each odd movement repeated again and again, accompanied by his breath. He was beginning to refine himself. He stopped a foot away from me. I held back my shoulders, as Father had told us that we should, and adjusted my face so that I wouldn’t look afraid.

  ‘I think that he’s losing it,’ Ethan said. He spoke so softly that I stepped closer to him still. ‘He already thinks that the world conspires against him. He talks of creating his own kingdom, right here in this house. This thing with the police – it just confirms what he’s always suspected.’

  Ethan still revelled in the transmission of knowledge. Part of the deal was your gratitude, which he looked for to confirm that he was cleverer than anybody else. I nodded, as though the information was taking some time to process, and asked the only question which seemed to have any worth. ‘Then what do we do?’ I said.

  ‘You look after yourself, Lex. I won’t be able to do it for you.’

  I suspected that Ethan had requested my presence with this conclusion in mind. He was resigned to our fate and had no interest in an alliance. As I turned to leave, I recalled the one thing that I knew, and he didn’t.

  ‘Why weren’t you in school today?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘You weren’t. Mother came to collect us, and I couldn’t find you. You haven’t been in all week.’

  ‘Maybe there’s nothing left to learn.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘Fine, then. I spend my time doing things that are a little more worthwhile. Sometimes I go to the library. You don’t get bothered there. And sometimes—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Sometimes I ask people for money.’

  ‘You what?’

  He contorted his face into an anxious smile. ‘You don’t happen to have a spare pound, do you? My mother forgot to pack my sandwiches.’ The smile trembled, and cracked into laughter. After a few seconds, when I didn’t join him, he wiped his eyes and lay back down on his bed.

  ‘I don’t think that school will be much of a concern any more,’ he said. ‘In the parish of Moor Woods Road.’

  I didn’t acknowledge it, but Ethan was right about school: I never did go back to Five Fields Academy. The day after Jolly’s arrest, I heard Father moving through the house in the early morning. It was still dark outside, and I was comfortable and warm. I wasn’t even hungry. I closed my eyes and drew up the covers, and when I next woke it was light. The alarm clock was missing from its place on the floor. ‘Did we sleep in?’ Evie asked, emerging testudinate from the duvet.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Still in bed, I pulled on my school jumper over pyjamas, and braced for the cold. In the kitchen, my parents sat hand in hand, Mother stroking the hair at Father’s temple. There was a collection of clocks on the table in front of them, not just our alarms but the clocks from the hallway and the living room, and the pink plastic watch which Delilah had received for her ninth birthday. Mother and Father shifted as I entered the room, and Father smiled at my choice of dress, the way that you smile at a child’s faux pas. ‘You won’t be needing that,’ he said.

  In place of the kitchen clock, he had hung the cross from the Lifehouse. Suspended embarrassingly above the hobs.

  ‘Why don’t you wake the others?’ Mother said. ‘And we can share the news.’

  When we were assembled in the kitchen, Father began to talk. What had happened to Jolly, he said, was an abomination. He had long been suspicious of the authorities’ attitudes to religious groups, peaceful though those groups may be. He had seen the influence of those attitudes in our despondency and our self-consciousness; in our sins and – he looked at me – in our cynicism. He had decided that we should commence a freer, more focused way of living, outside the shackles of public education. He would teach us himself.

  Only Gabriel rejoiced at the news. ‘So we don’t have to go to school?’ he asked. When Father nodded, he gasped and clutched his fists to his chest.

  Father had ideas about how we would structure our days. Time was an unnecessary distraction, and he would monitor it himself. This was a world without the dictation of the school bell, or going-home time. There were books we had studied which we would need to discard, and which he would collect later that day. It would be up to us to discard the ideas which we had acquired from them.

  ‘There are some things that you’ll need to forget,’ Father said. ‘But there’s so much for you to learn.’

  That morning, Father wrote two letters: one to the headmaster of Five Fields Academy, and the other to the headmistress of the school that Evie, Gabriel and Delilah attended
. The letters were polite and perfunctory. Father wished to exercise his right to educate his children at home. He had reviewed the curriculum (‘curricula,’ Ethan mouthed to me, unable to stop himself), and was confident that he and his wife would be able to deliver them. He would welcome visits from the council.

  ‘Do you know where we are on their to-do list?’ Father asked. Mother gazed up at him, wide-eyed, and shook her head.

  ‘Below the bottom,’ Father said. ‘Last in line.’

  He signed, with a flourish.

  During lunch, I excused myself to use the toilet. In our room, I surveyed the small pile of books on the floor, which I had checked out of the school library the week before. I had already read them all; things had happened too quickly for me to return them. I thought of the disappointment of the school librarian, who had praised me for never incurring a fine, and who had once told me that there were days when she much preferred books to human beings. I knelt down and examined the spines. There were fantasy novels, and an R. L. Stine, and something by Judy Blume. I couldn’t hide them all: they would have to go. I took the book of Greek myths and unwrapped it from my jumper, touching the cover and the golden fore edge. It was, I thought, the nicest thing that I had ever owned. I tucked it beneath my mattress, where Father couldn’t find it, and where we could still reach for it at night. In the bathroom, I stared at my reflection for some time. ‘Think,’ I said. I watched my lips pull back over the word. For the first time, I saw myself assembling a rucksack of belongings, and leaving Moor Woods Road in the middle of the night. I could do what Ethan had done, and ask people for money. I could reach Manchester, or even London. I could find Miss Glade, and beg to live with her. I straightened up. It was a ridiculous idea, and besides, I couldn’t leave Evie. I was overreacting. I lifted the skin at the sides of my mouth, and I returned to the kitchen, smiling.

  The computer shop opened two doors down from the Lifehouse, just before the church closed. It was called Bit by Bit. ‘Fucking imposters,’ Father said, when he first saw the signage, hurrying us behind him.

  Whenever we passed – to the weekend services, or to a prayer session in the evening – the shop was busy. At the till, there was a young woman with a shaved head and a jungle of tattoos. There was a leaflet in the window advertising free computer lessons for the elderly. We had Information Technology classes at school, which mostly involved the boys trying to breach the school’s safeguards to find pornography, but I knew how to send an email and format a document. Father had taught Ethan more than this, but lessons had not been extended to the rest of the family.

  I mentioned Bit by Bit to Dr K in passing. We were talking of Hollowfield, and how little of it I remembered, and she held up her palm and frowned. ‘Let’s talk about this shop,’ she said. ‘And what it meant to your father.’

  ‘He didn’t like it,’ I said. ‘I think that much is clear.’

  ‘And why do you think that was?’

  ‘His own enterprise hadn’t worked out. He was jealous, I suppose.’

  ‘Wasn’t this the ultimate reminder of his failures?’ Dr K said. ‘Which he had just tried – had relocated – to forget?’

  ‘It was just a shop.’

  She rose from her chair, as she did when she was animated, and walked to the window. It wasn’t the long window of Harley Street. This was in our early days, when we met in a hospital in South London. Her office was on the ground floor, and she had to keep the blinds closed; the doctors liked to smoke just beside it.

  ‘Entertain me, Lex. Slip into his head – oh, I know, it’s an unpleasant place to be – and consider the litany of his failures. The coding classes. His employment in IT services. The Lifehouse. The fall of his idol. Failure on top of failure. Men like your Father are odd, delicate things. Easily cracked – just a hairline fracture in the porcelain.’ She turned back to me, smiled. ‘You don’t realize that you’ve broken them until the shit floods out.’

  ‘Lots of people fail,’ I said. ‘Every day. All of the time.’

  ‘And everybody’s brain is wired that little bit differently.’ She shrugged, and returned to her chair. ‘I’ll never ask you to pity him,’ she said. ‘Only to understand him.’

  We sat as we often did, in deadlock, each of us waiting for the other person to speak.

  ‘I ask you,’ she said, ‘because I think that it might help you.’

  It was a weekday evening, in my first year back at school. I still had to attend a physiotherapist appointment and finish my homework. ‘Are we done?’ I asked.

  She gave it a final try. ‘Do you remember when the shop opened,’ she said, ‘in relation to the Binding Days?’ I was already standing, pulling on my coat.

  ‘I need to go,’ I said. ‘Really. Dad’ll be waiting.’

  He wasn’t. I sat in the hospital reception, watching the strange cast pass through the sliding doors, hidden by the water fountain in case Dr K emerged from her office and found me in the lie. When I thought of Father, all I could see was the collection of photographs published by the papers after the escape. Here was Father at the pulpit (The Preacher of Death); here was Father on Central Pier (They Were Once a Normal Family). His real face – the tics of pleasure and disappointment – eluded me. He would have liked that, I thought. The idea that he couldn’t be captured.

  Of course, Dr K was right. Bit by Bit had opened a few months before the Binding Days began. The last time I had walked by, in the days when we were still walking, the shop window was broken. The crack had been taped up with cardboard, and a cheerful note: Still open for business.

  For a fortnight, my world was compressed to the office and the hotel. Black taxis moved me between them, turning on their lights when I approached. I slept little enough that there was no discernible ending or beginning to the days. The numbers at the bottom of my screens blinked from one date to the next.

  I kept the probate documents in the safe in my room, to alleviate the strange fear that I’d return to find them gone. I requested that Bill reschedule our visit to Hollowfield, and he was silent; for a moment, I thought that he would refuse. An article had appeared in a tabloid, under the headline ‘Hollowfield’s House of Horrors: Where Are They Now?’ I imagined the members of the council assembled around it, wondering which of us had been paid for the commission. It was a double-page spread, with the famous garden photograph in the centre. Our forms had been removed, leaving seven black silhouettes and the letters of our pseudonyms. In the margin, the journalist summarized us. Ethan was ‘an inspiration’. Sources close to Gabriel reported that he was ‘troubled’. Girl A was ‘elusive’. Bill sighed. He would give me one more week.

  Jake signed the documents on behalf of ChromoClick at eleven forty-seven, thirteen minutes from our client’s deadline. It was a subdued gathering. Devlin was in New York. ChromoClick’s solicitors dispersed. When I asked the night secretary for a bottle of champagne and two glasses, she sighed, and walked slowly to the firm’s kitchen. When she handed me the bottle, she scowled. ‘Congratulations,’ she said.

  Jake stood at the window of our meeting room. When he turned to me, he was grinning. ‘There aren’t many moments like this in a lifetime,’ he said. ‘Are there?’

  I knew precisely how much richer he had just become. ‘I think you’re doing well if you get one,’ I said. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Do you get your life back now?’

  I laughed. ‘This is my life.’

  ‘And you don’t get tired?’

  ‘Sure. But I don’t mind it. There’s always something to think about. Somewhere else to go. I’ve been bored in the past – really bored, in fact. And – well. This isn’t so bad.’

  ‘Your boss seems like a pretty hard taskmaster.’

  ‘She’s been in this firm for thirty-five years,’ I said. ‘I don’t think she had much of a choice.’

  We looked back to the window. There were a few bodies left in the next office along. There was a certain comfort in that; in the City, somebody was always hav
ing a worse night than I was.

  ‘I used to play this game,’ I said, ‘with my sister. What would you do with a million pounds? Am I allowed to ask you what you have in mind?’

  He laughed. ‘And the rest,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t want to be impolite.’

  ‘I’ll build a house,’ he said. ‘There’s a particular kind of house that I’ve had in mind, since I was a child. Very different from the house where I grew up. Isn’t everybody’s answer some variation on that?’

  ‘Well, we were children. I wanted a library. She wanted a convertible.’

  ‘She’ll have change.’ He was quiet for a moment. ‘I have no doubt,’ he said, ‘that you’ll get your library.’

  We shook hands at the lifts, on his way down. The adrenaline was seeping out of me. I could sense myself becoming smaller and flatter.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘I just thought – did you ever do it? Your ChromoClick results?’

  I laughed. ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Let me tell you a secret,’ he said. His lift was here, and between the closing doors, he said: ‘Me neither.’

  I walked past the empty offices to my desk. There was a message waiting for me from Devlin: ‘Give me a call when you can,’ she said. She had sent an email, too, which said: I left you a voicemail.

  ‘Congratulations,’ she said, as soon as she picked up the phone.

  ‘Thanks. This was a good one.’

  ‘You were excellent. Everyone’s happy. There’ll be a dinner in New York.’

  ‘Just what I wanted to hear.’

  ‘Not for a while. Jake’s flying out. Some of the other partners. I hope that you’ll be back here by then.’

  ‘I’m nearly there. There’s just one last thing to do. And my sister’s flying in to help out over the weekend. It’ll be easier, once she’s here.’