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

by Abigail Dean

  ‘You were wonderful,’ Bill said. ‘Truly. I didn’t have to say a word.’

  ‘Were you expecting to?’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that. Just – you were very impressive. That’s all.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  An intimidation of men passed, bare-chested, and looked at me curiously. Not Girl A; just a stranger in a suit, on one of the hottest days of the year. I took my sunglasses from my bag. I didn’t belong here now, any more than we had done then.

  ‘They shouldn’t make us wait more than a few days,’ Bill said. ‘A week, maybe. Ready to roll?’

  When he had pulled out, and he no longer had to look at me, he said: ‘Your mother would be very proud of you.’

  I didn’t respond. His words sat with us in the car, a sour passenger.

  The house had made its own strange headlines. When Mother was imprisoned, she asked for it to be sold. Kyley Estates, based in one of the other -field towns, presented the listing: 11 Moor Woods Road was a detached, four-bedroom family home with exceptional views and easy access to Hollowfield’s high street. It had a modest garden, ripe for landscaping. It might benefit from some updating. For weeks, there was no reference to the events which had taken place there, and very few enquiries. The slideshow pictured grubby carpets; chipped paint; the moor encroaching the garden. A local journalist eventually exposed the story. House of Horrors to be sold as family home. After that, Kyley Estates was inundated with interest. People requested tours at dusk; they brought cameras; they were found trying to detach sections of the wallpaper to take home with them. The listing was removed, and the house started to rot.

  We turned onto Moor Woods Road, and Bill dropped gears.

  ‘Did you know the neighbours?’

  ‘No. There were horses, though. In that field. We’d stop and talk to them, on our way home from school. They didn’t think much of us.’

  ‘You’d – what? Feed them?’

  ‘Feed them? No.’

  I laughed. I could see the house coming silently beyond the car windows.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘That wasn’t really an option.’

  Bill pulled onto the driveway and cut the engine.

  ‘Do you want to get out?’ he asked.

  The husk of the house against the white sky. Every window was shattered or absent. A few rags of curtain hanging in the upstairs bedrooms. The roof drooped in on itself, like the face of a person after a stroke.

  ‘Sure.’

  It was cooler here. A wind was blowing from the moor, telling of the end of summer. I walked to the side of the house and surveyed the garden. There were waist-high weeds and clusters of rubbish. The grass was tangled with outdated wrappers and strips of material, unidentifiable as clothes. Scorched rings in the earth, where teenagers had lit fires. Bill was at the front door, talking, his voice muddled by the wind. There were a few lank flowers left at the threshold, still shrouded in plastic. I touched them with my shoe. I didn’t read the card.

  ‘I guess people still leave flowers,’ Bill said. ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘I thought so.’

  It had happened at the hospital, too. My room was populated with new toys and second-hand clothes. With white bouquets, as if I was dead. Dr K appointed nurses to sort through the accompanying labels, which could be divided into three categories: acceptable, well-meaning but misguided, insane.

  ‘Do you think they know what they’re letting themselves in for?’ I asked. ‘The council?’

  ‘They’ve got the figures.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose so.’

  ‘Is it like you imagined?’ Bill said. He knocked briskly on the front door, once, and I had the desire then to frighten him, to say: Don’t you want to see what’s inside?

  ‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘Imagine it, I mean.’

  He had imagined it, I thought. He had been imagining it for a while.

  I crossed back to the car, and held the handle, waiting for him to unlock it.

  ‘The next time you come here,’ Bill said, ‘the whole thing’ll be gutted.’

  ‘The next time?’ I said.

  In the car, at the bottom of Moor Woods Road, I pointed to a spot beyond the junction.

  ‘That’s where the woman found me,’ I said. ‘The day we escaped.’

  ‘Just there?’

  ‘Thereabouts. Do you know what the driver said, when she was interviewed? She thought that I was a ghoul. Those were her exact words. She thought that I was already dead.’

  I prepared my smile. It was the face which I presented at interviews, or at the check-in desk at the airport. When there was something I wanted.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ I said.

  He glanced across at me, then away.

  ‘Why did Mother appoint me,’ I said, ‘as executor?’

  ‘I don’t know the answer to that.’

  ‘Come on, Bill. All of the things that you’ve done. Helping me. Arranging the meeting. Speaking to the probate lawyer. You must have known her pretty well, to bother doing all of that.’

  ‘It’s my job. Isn’t it?’

  ‘Is it?’

  He sighed, and his cheeks deflated. I liked the advantage of him driving, so that I could scrutinize him as I wished.

  ‘Fine,’ Bill said. ‘We got on. I wanted to help her. You have no idea how vulnerable she was. The vitriol that woman faced, by virtue of making it out alive. But I don’t imagine you want to hear about that. About the size of the cells, or the abuse, or the mothers in the mess hall—’

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘No.’

  ‘It is my job, by the way. I always thought that I’d work in human rights. Help people that way. Be a barrister. I wasn’t clever enough, I suppose. I went to all of the interviews in London, just after university. No – I wasn’t nearly clever enough.’

  There was JP, ascending some great stone staircase, with papers clutched in his fist. Precisely clever enough.

  ‘This job,’ Bill said, ‘I still get to do that. You help people nobody else thinks are worth helping.’

  His hands left sweat prints on the steering wheel.

  ‘Anyway,’ Bill said. ‘If you ask me, I think that she respected you the most.’

  ‘Respect,’ I said. ‘Really? That is unexpected. I mean, that really is a surprise.’

  I made myself laugh, although it wasn’t funny. More than anything, I wanted to injure him.

  ‘I think that she tried,’ he said. ‘I actually think that she tried. She mentioned this scholarship. A scholarship you could have applied for when you were at school. She said that she spent weeks talking to your father about it. Nagging away at him – that’s what she called it. She said that she had to be subtle – you always had to be subtle.’

  We were past the mill and turning back towards the town.

  ‘She was certainly subtle,’ I said. ‘I’ll give her that.’

  ‘Do you know what she said,’ Bill said, ‘when I’d ask if I should contact you? When she was dying, I mean. I’d ask if you might visit, if I got in touch. And she just said, oh, no. Lex is much too clever for that.’

  A dull red blush advanced to his ears, and he was no longer interested in looking at me. I tried to think of something pleasant to say, to fill the rest of the drive. I thought of him arriving home, hours late, to a plate warming in the oven. He clawed off his shirt and trousers, and calmed himself – sensibly, alone – in a quiet bedroom. That ungrateful fucking bitch. He would, I admitted, probably never think something like that.

  He didn’t get out of the car to say goodbye. I clambered out and stood on the pavement, watching him through the open window. I had sweated through my shirt and suit, and I tucked my hands beneath my arms, afraid of what he might gather from the patches.

  ‘I appreciate your help, Bill,’ I said. ‘But I can take it from here.’

  He didn’t look at me. His eyes were fixed on the dull road home.

  ‘Your father,’ Bill sai
d. ‘Did you ever think about what he did to her?’

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘there was always so much else to think about.’

  Evie was waiting for me in the room above the pub, tiny amidst the two beds. She was pale and slouched, but still she smiled when I walked through the door.

  ‘Tell me. Tell me everything.’

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘I’ll be fine. Come on, Lex!’

  While I showered, she sat in the corner of the bathroom, the knobs of her spine against the radiator. I narrated the day from the cubicle, gesturing through the stream of water, ducking out to catch the expressions on her face. ‘You nailed it,’ she said. ‘Absolutely.’

  When I spoke about Bill: ‘How the hell did Mother manage that?’

  In response to the house, she was quieter. ‘I need to go back there,’ she said. ‘What did you feel?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  She smiled. ‘That’s such a Lex answer. “Nothing”.’

  ‘I don’t know what else to say. It was just an ordinary house. Are you going to tell me how you’re doing, now?’

  ‘Not so good.’

  ‘Allergic to Hollowfield?’

  I had been joking, but she considered it. ‘I don’t know. It started when we arrived. A kind of – fear, I suppose. Like – dread.’

  ‘We can leave now. Stay somewhere in Manchester, or back in London. You should see the hotel—’

  ‘I’m too tired, Lex. Tomorrow.’

  ‘First thing tomorrow.’

  I bought a bottle of wine from the bar and we finished it in a chair beneath our window, waiting for the storm. The wind blew down from the moors, already damp from where it had come. Sky the colour of sand. I wrapped a blanket around Evie and set my feet on the window ledge. Down on the high street, people scurried beneath shopfronts and back to their cars. It was good to be here, inside and together, and close to the end of the day.

  ‘I’m worried about you,’ I said.

  ‘I’m just tired.’

  ‘You’re tiny. You need to eat.’

  ‘Sh. Tell me a story. Like you used to do.’

  ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’

  She laughed. ‘A good story.’

  ‘A good story? OK. At the beginning of the story, there are seven brothers and sisters. Four boys; three girls.’

  ‘I’m not sure about this story,’ she said. She glanced at me, one eyebrow raised. ‘I feel like I know how it ends.’

  ‘What about if they live by the seaside? In a great wooden house over the beach.’

  ‘Better.’

  ‘Their parents work hard. Their dad runs a little IT business. Their mum’s the editor of the town paper.’

  ‘She survived the journalism cuts?’

  ‘They had an exceptional website. Her husband designed it.’

  ‘Touché.’

  ‘Sometimes the kids like each other and sometimes they don’t. They spend their whole childhood on the beach. They read a lot. They’re each good enough at something. The eldest one – he’s the cleverest—’

  ‘That isn’t true.’

  ‘—He’s the cleverest. He has ideas about how the world should be. He has all of these convictions—’

  ‘The girls. Tell me about them.’

  ‘Well, one of them’s unspeakably beautiful. She takes after her mother. She works in television. She can make anybody tell her anything. She knows what she wants, and precisely how to get it.’

  ‘The other two, though.’

  ‘Oh, they’re all over the place. One of them wants to be an artist. The other one doesn’t know what she wants to do. She might be an academic. She might be an escort. She might be a lawyer, even. There’s plenty of time for them to think about it.’

  ‘They can be anything they want to be.’

  ‘Exactly. Before they decide, they set off from the wooden house, and they travel the world. They have a bucket list from the books they’ve read. They’re away for many months – for years.’

  ‘Living the dream.’

  ‘Then they’re close to home. They come to a small, strange town. More like a village.’

  ‘Is it called Hollowfield?’ Evie asked. ‘By any chance?’

  ‘It’s called Hollowfield.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘It’s a day’s travel back to their house by the beach, but they’re tired. They need to stop. They check into a room. They have a bad feeling about the place, as if they shouldn’t be there. As if they’re not welcome. Or – perhaps – as if they’ve been there before.’

  ‘And what then?’

  ‘Nothing. They sit at the window, uneasy. Trying to put their fingers on it. The next day, they pack up and go on their way.’

  ‘Do they know how lucky they are?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  ‘I wish I could tell them.’

  ‘No. Let them be.’

  ‘I’m so tired, Lex.’

  ‘That’s OK. We don’t have to talk any more.’

  When I looked at her, she seemed to have regressed; she looked twelve, or thirteen.

  The sound of the storm came first, the edge of the rainfall advancing along the high street. I closed the window and lifted Evie to the bed, and sat vigilant against the headboard, watching the room become dark.

  In the night, Mother. She sat hunched at the end of my bed. She held her head in her hands, the fingers swollen apart and encased with old dirt.

  Before I spoke, I listened for Evie’s breath. The room cold enough to see it. The white of emaciated arms stretched above her head.

  ‘Mum,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, Lex.’

  ‘Mum,’ I said. ‘We need to do something.’

  I had started to cry. I prided myself on how little I cried, just like all of my favourite characters. But it was harder than they made out. You couldn’t even indulge the thought of tears, and this time, I had left it too late.

  ‘Please,’ I said.

  ‘Temporary,’ she said. ‘Just a temporary thing.’

  ‘Evie’s starving,’ I said. ‘She has this cough—’

  ‘I don’t know if there’s anything – anything that I—’

  ‘There are things that you could do,’ I said. ‘There are.’

  ‘What? What could I do?’

  ‘You’re out shopping,’ I said. ‘Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the day after. You can build up to it. You go up to someone – to anyone. Just start talking. You can tell them about Father. You can just – you can explain. You can explain that it got out of hand. How he started to change. You can tell them that you’re frightened. You can tell them – about Daniel.’

  A sob shredded from my throat. I swallowed it.

  ‘Please,’ I said.

  She was shaking her head.

  ‘But how could they understand?’ she said.

  ‘It just got out of hand. That’s all.’

  ‘Yes. It wasn’t meant to end up like this, Lex. You understand that. We were trying to protect you. That was all that we wanted. There was no other way—’

  ‘Yes. I understand that. Father had his ideas – his dreams. And when they didn’t go right—’

  ‘It was longer ago, Lex. It was so much longer ago than that.’

  ‘You can tell them everything,’ I said. ‘But soon. It has to be soon.’

  She touched my shoulder and then my face, left the chill of her handprint in the space between my chin and jaw.

  ‘Maybe I could,’ she said. ‘Maybe I could.’

  She didn’t, of course.

  Ethan in our room, unchained, with pink material in his arms.

  ‘You’re to wear these,’ he said. ‘And clean yourselves up.’

  He had the key to the cuffs, and when he leant over me, I clutched at his hand. He shook his head. ‘If you try anything,’ he said, ‘he’s going to kill us both. Not today, Lex.’

  ‘When, then?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I sat on the
bed and stretched out my body. Muscles shifted and grumbled. As soon as Evie was free, she dashed across the Territory and onto my lap, and locked her arms around my neck, like a sloth on a limb.

  ‘It’s a temporary thing,’ Ethan said. ‘I wouldn’t get too excited.’

  He was wearing old, odd clothes. A double-breasted black suit with dusty shoulders, and a clip-on bow tie. It was the kind of outfit you would find during an exhumation.

  ‘One of you should get in the bathroom,’ he said. ‘One at a time.’

  After locking Evie in the room behind us, he held my elbow along the landing. I assumed that he was supporting me, but when my legs started to work, I felt the pinch of his grip and understood that wasn’t the case. At the bathroom, he wedged a brogue against the door, and waited.

  ‘I can’t just leave you,’ he said. ‘You know that.’

  I stepped onto the tiles, and peered into the bath. Tepid water, long-run, and grey with the dirt of other bodies. I turned back to him, and before he could look away, I pulled my T-shirt over my head.

  ‘Can’t you?’ I said.

  I sat in the bath with my knees to my chest, and rolled a wizened bar of soap along my limbs. I was whiter than the tub. When my teeth started to chatter, I climbed out, and dried myself with a vile towel left in the sink. Ethan handed me the pink material, his back still turned, and I held up a dress, high at the neck and long to the shins.

  ‘What is this?’ I said. ‘Ethan. What is it?’

  He half turned to me, so that he could whisper. ‘He’s calling it a ceremony,’ he said.

  ‘It’s OK. You can turn around.’

  ‘You look ridiculous.’

  ‘Well, you look like you’re dead.’

  I waited on my bed for Evie, trying to formulate a plan. I could hear her coughing from the bathroom. The panic of the opportunity. I lifted the corner of the cardboard at the window. Beyond it there was only the black-blue of the closing dusk, and rain on the panes.

  The door swung back open, to fuchsia.

  ‘Do you like it?’ I asked Evie, and she cocked an eyebrow. It was something we had been practising through our listless days: the raised eyebrow.

  ‘No. Me neither.’