She throws a jumper over the top half of her body but it only gets halfway down her belly so she takes it off. The snow still hasn’t come yet but they’re promising an Arctic storm and the news is getting suitably histrionic about travel chaos, even at the end of March, so Naomi needs to decide what she’s going to wear for the biennale.
She had hoped she wouldn’t have to be on-site but it seems clear that Matilda would have an aneurism if she has to deal with everything on her own. Naomi will be there at the opening, which the forecast says is going to be zero degrees but bright and sunny, and then is planning to pop in every day for an hour or two and have an ‘office hour’ to deal with various issues as they crop up. Charlie’s bringing Prue to the opening. Naomi’s looking forward to it. Looking forward to seeing people enjoying the fruits of her labour in a way that she never could in her old job where she only saw numbers, projections and old men slapping each other on the back. She was always adamant that Prue see her working, it’s a chance for her to understand what her mummy has been doing and, hopefully, she’ll be impressed.
She goes to the wardrobe and pulls a long cardigan down when she hears beeping. Three beeps. She wraps the yellow cardigan over her bare body and goes to look out of the French window. She thought it might be the sound of a car being unlocked but there’s no movement in the street outside. She looks up and down the road for the yellow van. She’s found herself doing this four or five times a day since she discovered who he is.
She wants to text Lex Palmstrom, to tell him that she knows, but she has no idea how he’d react. In a bizarre way she feels claustrophobic with the secret of him. The detective is a dead end for now. She hasn’t called back to chase up their meeting and Naomi imagines she’s written her off as a bored housewife.
Three beeps again. It’s coming from behind her. It sounded like it was coming from the floor. Naomi bends down and listens.
Three beeps. From under the floorboards. She gets her phone from her bedside table and turns on the torch. She shines it down between the cracks in the floorboards, which are still black though most of the debris has been removed. She sees clumps of hair under the floor, big bushes of dust, half pencils and old hairbands. Then she sees white plastic reflecting the torchlight back to her. She makes out a red light. Three beeps again, the light blinks with each beep.
‘Lenny,’ she shouts. She heaves herself up from the floor and goes down the two flights of stairs to where the carpenter is building some shelves in the basement. ‘Have you got a crowbar?’ The big man glances up from the piece of wood he was sanding with a look of puzzlement.
‘What is it you want crowing open?’ he asks, a big smile spreading across his face.
‘There’s something under the floorboards in our bedroom.’
He goes over to a large stand-up toolbox and rummages around until he pulls out a long iron bar. He moves over to her, she holds her hand out and he laughs and gives her bump a pointed look. ‘You better show me whereabouts.’
She lets him go first up the stairs, aware that the view under her jumper might be a little racy for a man of his age, and follows him up to the bedroom.
‘This one here.’ She points out the floorboard.
‘These boards are a hundred years old, I might not be able to keep it in tact using this.’
‘I can do it if you want?’ she says, reaching again for the tool but he sweeps it away from her grasp. He kneels down and is about to insert the blade of the crowbar into the floor when he stops and runs his hands over the staples that secure the floorboards.
He looks up at her. ‘These are new.’ He ushers her down to look. ‘Colour matches all the older ones pretty well but you can just see where splinters of wood have come up around them. Very professional job.’
‘Can we just look underneath?’ The big man notes her impatience and goes back to his crowbar, still sticking up out of the floor. A very professional job, Naomi thinks, at least there’s no doubt as to who’s responsible for putting whatever it is under the floor of their bedroom. Lenny levers gently, wincing as he hears the wood coming away from the staples. Naomi comes closer, trying to peer around the big man into the hole. Lenny holds up the piece of wood to show her he’s managed to get it off in one piece but she waves it away, looking past his arm at the object nestled under her floorboards.
It’s a baby monitor. Large, rounded white plastic. A large ‘On’ button but nothing else on it. The receiver, the part you leave in the baby’s room. She picks it up and turns away from Lenny, not wanting him to see. The thing beeps its three beeps and Naomi presses the button to turn it off. She blinks her eyes, sees herself staring back in the mirror above the sink, each thought parrying into her eyelids like flashes of a strobe light. The buzzing, the static she heard that day, was the device she’s holding now. He’s been listening to them since at least then and probably a long time before. He knows everything. Where’s the receiver, she thinks. The range on monitors is very limited, their old one is in the loft because it wouldn’t even reach from Prue’s room to the kitchen. Is that why she’s seen his van close to the house? But no, that doesn’t make sense. He’d only get snippets of their conversation on the rare occasions his van’s been parked nearby. The receiver has to be somewhere in the house but for what purpose if there’s no one to hear it? Unless, her breath catches at the thought, he’s been listening to it the whole time. Hidden somewhere in the house when they’ve been there, spying on their conversations, listening to them sleep, catching Prue’s every screech and giggle as she jumps up and down on their bed.
‘You want me to put this board back in?’ Lenny asks, still on his hands and knees.
‘Er, yeah,’ Naomi says, although she doesn’t sound remotely certain.
FIVE
The Whitstable Golf Club clubhouse is a large fifties pre-fab, on paper a pretty grim venue to use as the headquarters of the arts festival, but the set-designer/artist couple that Naomi commissioned to decorate the inside of the building and the marquee attached to the back have done an incredible job.
The theme for this year’s festival is ‘Van Gogh’s Seaside Hideaway’, Victoria’s idea. The artist spent a couple of years in his youth on the Kent coast in Ramsgate, so in his honour the walls have been daubed with impressionistic dots, blues and greens and whites. The weather is still wintry, but inside the festival it feels like spring. The large grassy area just beyond the eighteenth tee has been co-opted for the event and there are various stands and stalls with artists selling their wares. A gourmet hot-dog stand billows the caramel smell of cooking onions, which makes Naomi’s mouth water for the umpteenth time. She’s already had two of their jumbo hot-dogs since she got here at eight o’clock this morning. There was a problem with an author of historical fiction not turning up to a reading of their new book at the independent bookstore in town – Naomi found a local young spoken-word artist who stepped in much to the bemusement of the old dears who’d come to hear a talk about a Huguenot detective – but that aside, everything is going smoothly.
Naomi walks out on to the terrace and listens to the buzz of well-spoken satisfaction. She cranes her head over the throng to try to find Prue and Charlie. Prue’s loving the crowds and keeps grabbing artisanal knick-knacks from stalls and trying to walk off with them. The artists and regular patrons who she’s dealt with are all a bit in awe of the hotshot from London who’s running their little festival, so she moves amongst them like royalty; it’s silly but feels nice, nonetheless. She looks round a stall selling hand-painted pottery at the vast blanket of green beyond their small encampment. There’s no sign of them.
Charlie’s bought her candyfloss, she thinks. That’s the only reason they’d be hiding from her. Matilda insisted on a candyfloss stall and he’s caved and bought Prue one in full knowledge that Naomi wouldn’t have allowed it. The number of times that she’s talked to him about presenting a united front on sugary treats.
‘There you are.’ Matilda grabs her shoulders, giv
ing her a shock. She looks concerned, but then she always does.
‘All OK?’ Naomi tries to keep the weariness out of her voice.
‘Charlie’s looking for you.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘He’s inside.’ Matilda won’t tell her any more so Naomi pushes past her and slices through the crowd towards the clubhouse. She sees Charlie on the decking, he’s looking frantically over the crowd and as he lights on her, she knows what’s wrong.
‘Where’s Prue?’ she asks, four pensioners shifting out of her way, and she breaks into a jog.
‘Shit, I thought she might be with you.’
‘She was with you. She’s been with you since you got here; why would she be with me?’ Naomi marches away from him and round the side of the building. Her first and only thought is that that man has taken her daughter. She looks at the golf club car park. There’s no sign of the yellow van, but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong. She couldn’t find him hiding anywhere in the house. She looked in the attic, the basement, everywhere someone of his size could have been, but there was no sign. She almost wishes she’d found him there now. She runs as fast as her bump will allow back towards Charlie. He looks shell-shocked, blinking, stunned into inactivity as he always is in stressful situations. She grabs him by both shoulders and looks into his eyes; if he knew what she knew perhaps he’d be able to shake himself out of it and find Prue.
‘Where did you last see her?’
‘We were, er, we were in the gents’ toilet. I was at the urinal, I was trying to keep her next to me, but she ran out. I chased after her, thought she’d be waiting by the door, but when I came out I couldn’t see her. It’s rammed in there. I was hoping she’d run off and found you.’
‘Well she hasn’t.’
‘She’s probably just hiding under one of the stalls.’
Naomi looks at the floor and shakes her head; if she looks at him she’ll get angry and she hasn’t got time for that. She walks to the edge of the decking and scans the crowd for Prue’s pink puffa coat. There are so many people. She could be anywhere. She sends Charlie one way round the stalls and she goes the other. As she goes she asks all of the traders if they’ve seen Prue until most of them have joined the search.
Fifteen minutes later, there’s still no sign of her. Matilda brings Naomi a cup of tea and ushers her into one of the stallholders’ camping chairs. She’s already sent a crew of people to go and look over the rest of the golf course.
‘She might have gone into the woods. I remember when my Liddy went missing in a garden centre. I was this close to calling the police and then I found her, sitting behind a display fountain, throwing stones into it.’ Naomi wants to ask Matilda if she can shut the fuck up and go and find her child but she lets her drone on so she can think. Has this been it all along? Is this what he always planned to do? Eliza said he was obsessed with his sister, she was all he had, all the family he had in the world, and she was taken from him. So that’s what he’s doing to Charlie, to her. He’s ripping the heart out of their family. If he has Prue, if he does anything to her little girl, it will be Naomi’s fault because she could have stopped him. She could have told Charlie, told the police, she could have kept them safe. Perhaps this is what Karin felt: unfiltered despair. If something has happened to Prue, Naomi won’t be able to carry on. When she was conceived something changed in Naomi, something in her biology changed. She wasn’t just herself any more, thoughts of Prue’s well-being now occupied almost all of her brain. Prue became the shining figure in her consciousness. If he took her away, Naomi wouldn’t be able to heal. Naomi has never focused on her mortality before. She has always worked towards crafting the best life that she can. But if Prue lost her life, like this, when she could have stopped it, she would have to end her own.
Naomi hears shouting coming from beyond the tents. She stands up, trying to decipher what the voices are saying.
‘Found her.’ Charlie’s bellow rings out around the golf course. The arms of the camping chair squeeze her as she slumps back into it. She wandered off. It wasn’t him. Matilda puts a hand on Naomi’s shoulder.
‘They always turn up all right,’ she says. Naomi gives her a half-shrug that tells Matilda that she’s right, that she was silly to get so worried. Charlie saunters into the main corridor between the various stalls, he hugs their daughter tightly to his chest.
Naomi’s so delighted to see Prue’s round cheeks, rosy from the cold, bouncing towards her, that she barely registers the huge hot-pink candyfloss she’s clutching. As they get closer, Prue almost jumps into her mother’s arms. Naomi clutches her tightly, her little feet padding against the top of her baby bump. The cooked sugar smell of the candyfloss is overwhelming but her chest flutters and Naomi feels her eyes moisten with relief. She nuzzles into her daughter’s neck, breathing in her warmth.
‘Please, darling, please, don’t scare Mummy. Please don’t run off like that,’ she whispers to her.
‘Daddy friend. Not worry.’ Naomi pulls her head away sharply and eyes her daughter, what does she mean?
‘Yes, Daddy’s your friend,’ Charlie says, flicking his eyebrows at Naomi, blowing his lips out in relief.
‘Mummy friend.’
‘Yes, Mummy’s your friend too, chiclet.’ Charlie pinches his daughter’s nose and pretends to have stolen it. Why is she saying that? She’s never called them her friend. Charlie’s got it wrong. She’s trying to tell them where she’s been.
‘Where did she get the candyfloss?’ she asks Charlie, direct, angry.
‘Not from me. She must have found it.’
‘Oh God.’
‘She’s fine.’ Charlie puts an arm around her waist. ‘She’s all right.’ Prue sees the fear etched on her mother’s face and Naomi see her little girl have an idea. She licks her hand, like she’s a bear licking honey off it.
‘Oh, I think we need to return this. Our little kleptomaniac was holding it when we found her. Thought you’d recognise which stall it was from.’ Charlie hands her a beer mat. It’s one of the ones from the bookshop’s stall. Naomi turns it over and reads the text. She walks quickly out of the market and looks at the car park again, no sign of the van, then she scans the road away from the golf club, nothing. But she has no doubt it was him. It’s a warning. He’s letting her know that no matter what she’s discovered about him, he is still in control. She reads the words on the beer mat again, a quote attributed to Alexander Pope.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing
SIX
[email protected] 23 March 2018 at 08:21
To: [email protected]
Re: LEX PALMSTROM
Dear Naomi,
Snakes. He sent me pictures of cut-open snakes. Pictures of their stomachs and the half-digested animals inside.
He turned up at my house four years after Karin’s death. I was still living at my parents’ house. He must have only been seventeen, eighteen, but he was a man, tall, broad shoulders, nothing like the little boy who’d stayed on my parents’ sofa.
I invited him in for a cup of tea. It was nice to see him at first. I still thought about Karin all the time. He was very interested in everything I’d been doing. I’d been to uni and dropped out. I asked him how he was and he said he had been trying to move on from Karin’s death. I asked him where he’d been living, what he was up to, and he was evasive, but very friendly, smiley. I should have known something was going on, it was like he was too pleased to see me. We ended up sitting together on the living-room sofa having a cup of tea when he gets up, says he has to go to the toilet and leaves the room.
Then I hear the sound of a door locking. He’s locked the big double glass doors that lead into the kitchen. Then he leaves the house through the back door. Our dog, Misty, she was a little Yorkshire Terrier. She was in the kitchen. She walks up to the double doors and looks at me, trapped in our front room. Then the back door to the kitchen opens and this thing slides into the room and I can see it’s a sn
ake. A huge snake. I’d never seen a snake in real life before. I know now it was a reticulated python. One of the white and yellow ones.
I probably don’t need to tell you what happened after that. But I want you to know that he made me watch the whole thing. He’d pocketed my phone so I couldn’t call anyone and he cut the power so I couldn’t turn the TV up to drown out the sound. It took two hours from the moment the snake bit Misty and squeezed the life out of her until I saw the shape of her moving along the inside its body. Then he came back in the kitchen and took the snake away. I assume it was him. He was in full protective clothing, face covered.
I reported it to the police but they couldn’t find him. They managed to get a restraining order but he never came back.
I had a couple of years of counselling after, to make sense of it, to try and work out why he did it to me. We worked out that perhaps it was because he had to watch someone he loved die slowly in front of him and he thought I deserved to have the same happen to me. He wanted me to feel as helpless as he did. Or maybe it was because I sat by and did nothing. I’ll never know why, which I’m sure was all part of it.
Happy Ever After Page 26