The Housewarming: A completely unputdownable psychological thriller with a shocking twist

by S. E. Lynes

  I grab my key and close the front door. If she’s inside, she can’t now get out.

  And I’m running, calling, calling, calling her name. Flailing around, caught in the white heat of my own burgeoning panic.

  At the same time, here I am, watching myself from the present, watching myself over and over, screaming at that woman, myself: Run to the river, Ava; run to the damn river, I am begging you.

  But I don’t hear my own voice. I don’t hear it shouting at me from my desolate, devastated future. I don’t hear it.

  ‘Abi!’ is all I hear: my own blind and desperate cry.

  I run. The metallic taste of blood fills the dry cave of my mouth. Past the Parkers and the Smiths. The chap with the camper van has left. Outside my own house yet again, I stand with my hands on my hips, panting, trying to think. Next door’s Mercedes has gone. She works in Surbiton, leaves early; he works in town, takes the train. The other-side neighbours’ Porsche has gone; they leave together, kids in the back. Lovegood, I think their name is. I think of our own rusty Volkswagen and Neil’s big white van: Johnson’s Quality Builds written in green on the side, and I think of how Neil, Bella and Matt are more a part of this town than anyone here, though they seem like the outsiders now – their cars, their voices don’t match, and I think: why am I thinking about that now?

  And here, in this tortured present, what I’m thinking is: why aren’t you running to the river, Ava? Why, when you were going to feed the ducks? Why haven’t you thought of that?

  But I do not run to the river. I am for the moment rooted to the spot. Abi will be somewhere, is what I’m thinking. She’ll be in the front garden or in the house. Playing a trick. Boo! she will say. You didn’t see me, did you, Mummy?

  ‘Abi!’

  Too many minutes have evaporated now into the steam of my boiling panic. Too long, too long. She should have appeared by now. I am running again. Up to the end, back again, the sense that I have done this too many times now, that I’m repeating the same action with the hope of a different outcome. Past number 76, 78, 80. Second by second. Beat by beat. The beats get louder, a pounding, drumming rhythm. My heart. My little girl’s heart. Hearts beating. Clocks ticking. A metronome keeping time, a melody accelerating. Sand slipping, slipping away.

  Sweat pricks on my forehead. She must be around here somewhere. She couldn’t have walked as far as the main road. There’s no way she’d have made it, no way she would have dared to go as far as the river.

  No way.

  I’m outside our house again. When did I go upstairs? Let’s be logical. Let’s slow this down. Eight? Five to? I clipped her into her buggy and I went upstairs. She won’t have made a bolt for it immediately. If she became bored and unfastened that clasp, it would have been ten, fifteen minutes later. So she’s probably been missing for maybe twenty-five minutes, maybe longer…

  Crying fat rolling tears, I call Matt. Second by second, beat by beat. The long discordant ringtone. The silence. The ringtone. The silence. My own sobs bang against my ribs. The ringtone. He won’t hear it. He’ll be at work by now. He had a meeting at 9.30. A new project, a factory conversion somewhere in the East End. He won’t hear his—

  ‘Ava?’

  ‘Matt!’ My voice is high and shaky, my breath short. I am gasping for air, marching through the house, pulling open the kitchen cupboard doors.

  ‘Ava? Are you OK?’

  The broom cupboard is empty, the store cupboard empty.

  ‘Matt! I can’t find Abi!’

  She’s not under the kitchen bar. She’s not under one of the stools pretending to be a lion in a cage.

  ‘What d’you mean, you can’t find her?’

  ‘She’s not under the couch!’

  ‘Not under the couch? What?’

  ‘She undid her buggy clasp.’

  ‘What? OK. Ava? Ava, can you just—’

  ‘I left the front door open. I left the door open, Matt, and she’s… Oh God, the oven is empty, oh thank God.’

  ‘Ava, slow down. Just tell me what’s going on.’

  ‘Abi’s gone. She’s just… disappeared. She must’ve wandered out. I only popped upstairs. Literally. I just went to get my phone. There’s no sign of her. There’s no sign of her, Matt.’ I try the back door. Locked. I unlock it. I am in the garden.

  ‘Abi?’ I press my nose to the window of the shed. ‘Abi?’

  This is mad. There’s no way she can access the back. But still I scrutinise the border plants, the chaotic mass of ivy that foams over the entire left-hand fence. Rain speckles the sliding patio doors.

  ‘She’s probably hiding.’ Matt’s voice is calm, the voice of reason. ‘You know what she’s like. Have you tried upstairs?’

  ‘Not yet.’ I’m back inside. My trainers pound up the stairs. ‘I don’t know where to look first, Matt. I don’t know where to look for the best. Should I be outside? Do you think she’d walk as far as the main road?’

  ‘Have you been outside?’

  ‘Yes. She was nowhere. She’s not in our bedroom.’

  ‘Have you looked by the bins?’

  ‘Not yet. I’m in the house. Abi! Love? She’s not in our room… she’s not in her room. She’s not under the bed. Oh God, oh my God, it’s been ages. Do you think I should call the police?’

  ‘God, no, she’ll be somewhere. Have you checked the garden?’

  ‘Yes, but the back door was locked. She’s not in the bathroom. Abi, love? She’s not in the washing basket. She’s not here. She’s nowhere, just nowhere, like she’s vanished.’

  ‘She won’t be far.’

  The phone is hot at my ear. I run back downstairs, back out of the front door. Sweat trickles down my forehead, down the sides of my body. No sign. There is no sign of her. There is no one on the street.

  ‘Oh God, Matt. I feel sick. I’m going to be sick.’

  ‘Ava?’

  ‘I’m outside.’ I can barely get the words out. ‘I can’t see her. I can’t see her.’ A pain in my sternum like the end of a broom. The rain is falling more heavily now. I shield my eyes with my hand. ‘There’s no sign of her. She’s vanished. She’s disappeared into thin air. I think I should call the police.’

  ‘She’ll be somewhere. Has she gone to Neil and Bella’s, do you think?’

  ‘She wouldn’t do that. Well, she might, but I knocked and there was no one in. And if she was there, one of them would’ve rung me by now or brought her back. I just don’t think she’d wander off like this, not for this long.’

  ‘What about that time she wandered out of toddler group? She went miles.’

  ‘I know, but she wouldn’t do that again, would she? I was so cross with her. I shouted at her. She was really upset. I think… I mean, I don’t think—’

  ‘Look, I’m coming home,’ Matt says. ‘I’m not far. I got a puncture on the towpath so I’m this side of Richmond. Just keep looking, yeah? I’m turning round, OK? I’m heading back.’

  Two

  Ava

  Second by second. Beat by beat. A metronome keeps time for the frantic melody of my life’s unravelling. I watch myself from above. I shout out the things I should have done, places I should have looked, the order in which I should have done it all. Really, I can be very abusive towards myself, that stupid cow there, that idiot woman who can’t hear me, who is blind, blind, blind to logic, deaf to reason, numb with fear. That morning. Look at her. Look at me. Rain soaks my hair, my clothes. My dumb feet thudding on the paving stones, running to nowhere, on a wheel. I have been getting my fitness up, leaving the house with Matt when he goes to work so that I can go for long walks with Abi. Stale bread in a bag, feed the ducks, across the lock to Ham, to the little park. The German bakery, pretzels as big as her head. Fresh air makes you feel better, no matter what.

  ‘Why don’t you tell Mr Sloth what we’re going to do today?’ I say, clipping her into her buggy. Yes, I clip her in. I know I do because I can see us, there in the hall. I am crouched in front of her. I’m smil
ing at her. I’m putting Mr Sloth in her lap and I’m thinking that the silver name bracelet Neil and Bella bought her is getting a little snug around her wrist.

  ‘Tell him we’ll feed the ducks. Don’t let Mr Sloth eat the bread, OK?’

  She giggles. That’s the last thing she does.

  I only pop upstairs.

  Things I would do differently. The door I would have checked before going upstairs. The two and two I would have put together. The ducks. The river. The obviousness of it all. I would have run in the right direction immediately. I would have found her hurrying towards the river, chin out, full of her own mischief, the little minx. I would have closed the damn door. I would not have scrolled through Facebook. Had I known, I would not even have looked at my phone – of course I wouldn’t. God knows, I have to look at myself every day and see in my haunted reflection the ghost of my ignorant self. That morning. Almost a year ago. I see so plainly that I didn’t know what was about to happen, what was happening, what had already happened. I didn’t have the smallest clue and yet a prescient dread flooded my every vein. I watch myself, from here. I watch that woman sit on the loo and scroll through her phone and I shout at her, at me: ‘Do not do that! Run, Ava! Run to the river! You were going to feed the ducks – why can’t you think of that?’

  ‘You need to stop shouting at yourself, Ava.’ That’s what my counsellor, Barbara, says. ‘Try not to punish yourself. Try to forgive yourself as you would someone you love.’

  Barbara is helping me limit how many times I check the front door when I get in. She tells me I didn’t do what I should have done that morning because I am not psychic.

  ‘But I should have checked the door,’ I tell her.

  ‘Sod should.’

  Sod should, that’s what Barbara says. There is no should. I went on my phone because since Abi was born and I cut my hours to part-time, my phone is my lifeline. My phone made me feel like I still belonged to the world. My friends were on it. My social life. My clients – the parents of the kids I teach piano to. I didn’t, I don’t, spend my days interacting with other professionals in a funky office space; I am no longer in a staffroom with other teachers, exchanging stories about kids in our classes or arranging to go for a drink on Friday. I don’t kick off my shoes at night and sigh with the relief of not having to talk to anyone for the rest of the evening. I am often stuck at home. And yes, there are times when I have felt trapped.

  So yes, I would go on Facebook or Instagram and guarantee myself a few laughs, a bit of banter, God forbid, an interesting news article, a well-articulated opinion piece.

  I got lonely. I got bored. There – there’s the dirty truth. I get – used to get – bored, sometimes, while I was with Abi. I would crave adult contact. While Abi was having a snack or her dinner, instead of talking to her, I would chat to my mum, too far away to pop over for a cup of tea. At the park, I got bored. I got bored with baby talk and endless domesticity and children’s programmes. I got bored with nursery rhyme CDs blaring out of the car stereo. There were times when I longed to put on Chopin or Springsteen or Björk and turn the music up, up, up to drown out Abi’s whingeing.

  ‘Yes. All of that,’ Barbara tells me. ‘But that doesn’t mean you didn’t, or don’t, love your little girl. It doesn’t mean you couldn’t, or can’t, look after her.’ She includes both tenses. She knows that if she talks about Abi in the past tense, I lose it. She knows I’m not ready for the past tense.

  ‘The problem is,’ I reply, ‘I didn’t shut the door, did I? It all comes back to that and that feels pretty insurmountable.’

  ‘Leaving the door open or not checking it was shut is a commonplace human error that ninety-nine times out of a hundred would have no negative consequence,’ Barbara says.

  I don’t believe her.

  And so I watch myself on this endless loop. Second by second. Beat by beat. A ticking clock. A metronome. A heartbeat. A clock stopped. A melody played out. A heart broken.

  That morning.

  Matt is on his way home. The thought calms me. At the near end of our road, a couple of mothers are wandering past, heading down towards the primary school. They are chatting, their children a few metres in front of them, sailing along on bright plastic scooters.

  ‘Excuse me!’ I call out, but the mothers don’t hear. Lost in their own conversation, they carry on walking, hoods up against the thickening rain.

  I quicken my pace, scanning front gardens, peering over the tops of dwarf walls and hedges, through side gates. If she’d been knocked over there would be a scene. Sirens would be wailing. There’d be an ambulance, cars chequered blue and yellow, police waving people on. If someone saw her on her own, they would stop and ask her where her mummy was. And anyway, I wasn’t upstairs that long.

  ‘Hello!’ I call again, no more than a metre away now. They turn and look at me, eyes questioning in fleeting bemusement.

  ‘Hi. Sorry.’ I’m short of breath, sweating, trying to appear rational. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve seen a little girl, have you? Did you see a little girl heading up as you were coming down?’ I level my hand above my knee, try not to sound hysterical. ‘About this big. She’s two. She’s wearing a light blue coat and a cream woolly hat? Red ankle boots?’

  They look at each other, back at me.

  ‘No, sorry.’ One of them shakes her head, digs a portable umbrella from her bag and flicks it open.

  ‘What’s her name?’ asks the other. Her eyebrows rise in encouragement.

  ‘Abi. It’s Abi. Listen, if you see her, I live just there, Riverside Drive. Number eighty-eight – the first semi after that big detached one on the end there.’

  They nod and smile – we’ve all been there, is what they say without words. Yes. We’ve all been there, but that doesn’t make it any less frightening.

  ‘Hate it when they run off like that,’ the umbrella one says. ‘Hope you find her soon.’

  ‘I’m sure I will.’ I smile. A conditioned response, but I’m off, changing direction, running now, up towards the river. Thameside Lane is wider than our suburban street. Faster, but not fast fast. But still. Cars grind up and down, pulling into spaces between other cars parked on the right. The school run is warming up. There will be more cars soon, last-minute arrivals. The cars are bigger than they were even five years ago. Newer. Even the small ones are built like bumper cars. Matt’s lived here since he was eleven. He says the drivers don’t give way like they used to when this was just a place, not a ‘village’. These cars are too big, I think. They are bigger than they need to be. We are all protecting what is ours, enlarging what is ours, our houses, our chariots. You can’t see past them – bumpers for rogue wildlife, the odd stray lion. Often they park right on the end of streets so that they are as near as possible to where they want to be, but we, we, meanwhile, can’t see around the corner when we’re trying to pull out, or cross over on foot. We have to step right into the road to see. If you’re tiny, no chance. You’d have no chance.

  I hope they’re not driving too fast. I hope they’re paying attention.

  Stop it. If she’d been run over, there’d be an ambulance. Paramedics. You’d feel it in the air. That stillness that follows shock.

  It’s quarter to nine. I am yesterday and today all at once forever. I am there and I am here, shouting at the memory of myself, shouting at her, the woman that was me: ‘Call the police, Ava. Call 999. Call now. Call half an hour ago. Let’s go back, let’s go back to when you had Abi with you. There. You have her. She is yours. She is enough. You don’t need to scroll through your phone, you don’t need your life. Do not answer that comment. Do not clean the bathroom. Do not strip the beds.’

  There is no way on earth Abi would have got this far is what thumps in my mind to the beat of my trainers on the wet black tarmac. But she would know how is the counter-argument that slows me in my tracks. And boy, she can move fast when she has a mind to.

  There are two pubs: one on the river, the Fisherman’s Arms, and one a
little further back, the Thames View, as if to say, we might not be on the river but we can still see it – that’s what Matt said when he first took me there for a drink on our fourth or fifth date, when he was still living in a room in a shared house in Twickenham. God, that seems so long ago now.

  I hear the river before I see it. I round the corner. Ducks bob on the water where the lane slopes down. The water is high after all the rain in the last few days, halfway to the blue barrier. To the right, on the other side of the footpath, the fence surrounding the Fisherman’s Arms garden. Beyond, the kids’ fort, endless tables and benches, all empty at this time of the morning. The rain has thinned a little, though I am wet through now anyway and don’t care. I jog up the path and peer through the fence, through the pub garden to the railings on the far side, to the river, the distant white foam of the weir. Just the sight of that furious churning water makes me feel sick, but there is nothing, no sign.

  I jog up to the mouth of the footbridge. Here, the river splits, becoming tidal after the lock, heading then towards Richmond, to Westminster, out to the Thames Estuary. On the far side, dog walkers disappear up the steps to the next bridge; a cyclist coming my way lifts his bike onto his shoulder. It isn’t Matt.

  Avoiding the white rush of the weir, I turn towards the luxury riverside flats, the boats bobbing on their moorings. Brown geese glide upriver towards Richmond. The lock-keeper’s cottage stands on its little green island. The sky is bulky and grey. There is no sign of my daughter. But she could have got this far, I know that. She could be over in Ham by now. We walk this way every day and she’s a bright little thing. Just because she’s never done it on her own doesn’t mean she can’t. Like Matt said: she escaped from toddler group and got all the way down a busy high street before anyone thought to ask where her mummy was.

  At the time, it frightened me out of my wits.