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

by S. E. Lynes

  Matt made himself look up.

  ‘Listen.’ Neil’s eyes were bright and clear. Focused. ‘You’ve told me now, and that’s it. It ends here. No police, no Ava, no one else. It ends here. Our secret. I’ve got your back. Do you get me?’

  Justification. Absolution. The plastic origami light dissolves into the white ceiling. Whatever pact they made that night hasn’t worked. It was wrong and now it has come out anyway and his daughter is still missing, presumed drowned, and on top of that, his marriage is over, and while he doesn’t blame Neil, understands completely why he ended up telling Ava, still an old sense of injustice burns at the core of him. Just admit it, lad. Lying will only make it worse. It’s not, it was never, fair. How, at six, could he have admitted to anything, anything at all, knowing that the punishment would be so great, that it was already upon him? Yes, yes, his father was right – if he had only confessed to… whatever it was, if he had taken responsibility and apologised, promised never to do it again, he would have been out of trouble so much quicker – yes, yes, yes. But he was a child. And, crucially, he was afraid. He panicked, always panicked; the panic rooted itself in habit, became a pattern as instinctive as running from danger. A reflex.

  No matter how well Ava has helped him to understand it, he has failed to stop this pattern repeating itself. And finally, at the most crucial moment of his adult life, instinct kicked in; he failed to take responsibility; he repeated the pattern, lying by omission, letting his wife take the blame and keep taking it every day, even when he could see her unravelling. By lying he hoped to avoid Ava’s fury and, ultimately, her rejection of him. By lying he hoped to maintain the life he had worked so hard to build – his castle, as Neil would say. But here, in the dark, he knows that beneath all of that is the lowest possible truth, the real truth, the what-it-all-comes-down-to truth: in the face of punishment, the reflex was to protect, above all others, himself.

  Thirty

  Matt

  He leaves for work early, exchanging a perfunctory goodbye with Ava, who is changing Fred in the nursery. In the afternoon, he calls her on the landline and three times on her mobile, but she doesn’t pick up. He tries again, on the hour, but nothing. Her silence is horrible. The waiting it invokes is horrible, a horrible, anxious limbo state.

  At half past four, he has done no work despite no lunch break, no idle chat by the coffee machine. Knowing that Ava must be home, he texts: Hey. Can we talk? Xx

  Nothing.

  He feels himself fall forward, at the last moment stops his head from crashing into his desk. Supporting himself with his hands, he lowers his forehead onto the hard glass surface. He is glad of his private office. He should stay and finish the sketches for the shop frontage in Aldgate to give to the team first thing tomorrow, but there is little use in him even trying. His brain is squirming like maggots, his heart a mass of crunching shards. Ava has lost her mind and that is on him – he has done this to her. He knows that her heart too will be as shattered as his and that he is responsible for this on top of everything else. It has occurred to him in these long hours that he betrayed her not only that night but every day since. Every time she has struggled, he could have held out his hand. He could have pulled her up from her hill of sand. And he didn’t. He did not act. It is not what he has done but what he has not done that is unforgivable. If he’d thought about it, he would have known this. Neil should never have agreed to it, let alone offered to back him up. Neil, in whose home he will have to sleep tonight.

  A buzz. She has replied after all, but the words hit him in the chest.

  There is nothing to say. Please don’t make this worse. I’ll be contacting a solicitor. The sooner you accept it, the less painful it will be for both of us.

  How quickly they have gone from what they were – two people who loved each other – to whatever this is.

  I’m so sorry, he replies. Can I at least come and grab some things? X

  Of course. We should maintain a civil relationship for Fred’s sake. We have to think of him going forward.

  His throat closes. God, the formality. He reads the message over and over, a stone sinking in his gut. It is as if she’s someone he’d like to get to know but who is closed off to him, unattainable. He remembers thinking that about her the first time he saw her, at a client’s house party in Islington. She was going out with someone else then. She was a little tipsy and was playing the piano, and when he spoke to her, he was surprised that she, like him, hailed from near Manchester.

  ‘You’re amazing at the piano,’ he said to her once she’d left the keys to rumbles of drunken cries for just one more and they’d found themselves wedged in the smoky kitchen. ‘You could be a concert pianist.’

  She shook her head. ‘Stage fright. I’m a primary school teacher. Try not to be disappointed.’

  ‘There’s nothing disappointing about that. Do you play for the kids? I bet they love you.’

  ‘Could you talk to my mother?’ She rolled her eyes, her head lolling a little, but she was blushing. ‘A waste. A waste of talent.’

  ‘Sharing your talent without any expectation of glory is not a waste.’

  A week later, the client gave him her number. A week after that, he called her, with little hope of success, was amazed when she said yes, yes, sure, she’d come out to dinner.

  He took her to a small dark restaurant in Soho. She seemed so sophisticated and he wanted to seem sophisticated too, but over dinner he admitted he didn’t know anything about classical music.

  ‘My parents are quite working class,’ he said, by way of explanation.

  ‘Is classical music the preserve of the middle classes?’ she asked, eyes flashing. ‘According to whom?’

  He felt the heat in his cheeks, was glad of the dimly lit space. ‘Oh, I, no, I mean…’

  She laughed. ‘My grandad was blue collar, as they say, but he drew the notes on a strip of cardboard and taught himself to play on an upright handed down from his father. He grew apples and rhubarb in the garden of his bungalow and made furniture for my dolls out of wood. On my father’s side, they all played the piano, all of them. They used to sing round it at Christmas – one of my great-uncles had a heart attack and collapsed on the keys. Everyone laughed because they thought he was joking; it was family folklore.’ She grinned, an expression that told him she wasn’t done yet. ‘My mum plays beautifully, used to play the Moonlight Sonata to lull me to sleep. My dad likes to cook, makes his own pesto, bakes his own bread. Both of them left school at sixteen, had nothing but a tiny flat when they first married, used to eat off the top of a washing machine. But classical music was all around me growing up. Honestly, people have such a weird view of what working-class people are actually like. Look at you. You went to a state school, didn’t you? And now you’re an architect, for goodness’ sake. Hardly a geezer, are you?’

  ‘No, but my best friend is.’ He laughed, poured more wine while he worked out what to say. ‘I’m sorry,’ was all that came to him. ‘I made an assumption. I guess I was scared we wouldn’t have enough in common.’

  ‘We don’t need to have a lot in common. We just need to have what’s important. Values. What’s right, what’s wrong. And we’re both scared, so that’s something else.’

  ‘Scared?’

  ‘I’m scared of the stage and you’re scared of… well, of me, at the moment.’ She laughed. ‘I’m teasing. Anyway, I listen to other kinds of music. I love Bruce Springsteen.’

  ‘So do I.’ He sat back in his chair. Knew already he was in trouble. Falling.

  I don’t deserve her, he thought, as early as then.

  He didn’t. Doesn’t. And he has proved it.

  Now he studies her cold text, scraping through his hair with bitten fingers. She was right: he was always scared. Scared of his father, scared of the school bully, scared of success. He’s a coward. But she knew it and she married him anyway. She hoped he’d change is effectively what she told him during that horrible argument after the party. What
is it they say? Men marry women hoping they’ll never change, but they do. Women marry men hoping they will change, but they don’t. And he hasn’t.

  Of course, he replies. I’ll pick up some stuff after work. I’m so sorry, Ave. Really.

  She doesn’t reply.

  He waits.

  Nothing. There is nothing to say. Sorry doesn’t cover it.

  Thirty-One

  Matt

  Ava is in the living room watching television, Fred asleep in the crib at her feet. These last few months, he has hated finding her like this, like just anyone, slouched watching TV instead of being dynamic, being Ava, being the woman he married, the woman he would find playing Scott Joplin on the piano while Abi danced around the living room dressed in one of her pink tutus, her fairy wings strapped to her back.

  ‘Look, Daddy.’ Round and round, arms waving about, believing herself absolutely to be a ballerina. Up and down the length of the front room, around the piano, floating back to the front of the living-room area where DI Farnham sat them down and told them they’d found Abi’s coat, where now Fred sleeps at his mother’s feet. And Ava, his darling Ava…

  ‘Hi,’ he says, drumming the door jamb with his hands.

  ‘Hi.’ A perfunctory glance and she returns her gaze to the television.

  He waits for as long as it takes him to realise there is nothing more.

  ‘I’ll go and grab a few shirts then,’ he says eventually. Please don’t make me do this. Please.

  ‘Fine.’

  How long does he stay at the door, staring at the back of her head, praying she will turn around, properly this time, and, with tears in her eyes, tell him that she can, after all, forgive him? He wants so badly to throw himself at her feet, promise her that they can get over this, but instinct tells him, she has told him, that the moment is not now, and that it might be never. To ask for forgiveness now would be an insult.

  And so he leaves her. Upstairs he packs some shirts, pants, socks and a spare pair of trousers, some toiletries – the banality of these items bringing an acrid taste to his mouth as he places them into a sports holdall – a holdall, for Christ’s sake. He returns downstairs to the still life that is his wife: transfixed or, more likely, determinedly fixing, her eyes on the screen so as not to have to look at her snivelling excuse of a husband.

  ‘I’m off then,’ he says brightly.

  And then, at last, she turns. But what she has to say shocks him to the core.

  ‘Did you know Bella and Neil were trying for a baby?’

  ‘What?’ Matt drops his bag to the floor. ‘When did you find that out?’

  ‘Last night.’

  ‘Last night how?’

  Her chin tips up. Her eyelids lower a fraction. ‘You were in bed. I couldn’t sleep. I texted Neil around midnight.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I needed to ask him about Jasmine recognising Mr Sloth.’

  ‘Oh, Ava.’ Sadness fills him.

  ‘Don’t oh, Ava me.’

  He hears the steel in her voice.

  ‘Neil said he was waiting until the business got up and running,’ he says, trying to keep her off the topic of bloody Mr Sloth, the toy he wishes to God he’d thrown away.

  ‘Well, they’ve been having IVF.’

  ‘What?’ Matt reels. ‘Since when? Hang on, rewind, midnight? You were texting Neil at midnight?’

  ‘Actually, we met up. We walked up to the lock.’

  He stares at her. Her chin is still tipped up, her eyelids still low. She is his wife; he has no idea who she is.

  ‘You were asleep,’ she says, a lacing of defiance in her tone.

  He shakes his head, wills himself to stay calm, above all not to shout. ‘Neil didn’t have anything to do with Abi, you know that. You know it, Ava.’

  ‘I thought I knew you, but I didn’t, did I?’

  Touché. He closes his eyes, holds them closed a second, two.

  ‘The day before Abi disappeared,’ she continues, her face tight with tension, ‘do you remember, that Sunday, we told them I was pregnant? Well, the night before, they’d lost a baby. A pregnancy, you know? They’d been having IVF. And it happened again a few months later.’

  ‘Oh my God.’ Matt’s hand flies to his forehead. For a moment he cannot speak. Neil. His best friend. Whom he has known since he was eleven. ‘Why didn’t they tell us? I can’t understand why they wouldn’t tell us.’

  She shrugs. ‘I don’t know. I’ve been thinking today that Bella did look rough that Sunday, you know, for her. I thought she was hung-over. I thought we’d offended them, maybe by not telling them, maybe they felt they’d been left to guess like strangers. And obviously, afterwards, they couldn’t have told us, not on the back of our happy news – it would have been awful. And I suppose after Abi, they felt we had enough on our plate. I mean, it’s not like I would have been much support, I suppose.’

  ‘But he could’ve told me.’

  ‘Maybe he feels like if he starts telling you his problems, it’d… I don’t know… unbalance things.’

  The subtext drifts down, settles. He is weak, that’s what his wife is saying. Neil is the strong one, the one who listens and fixes and builds. That’s the dynamic his far-too-perceptive wife is pointing out to him. Matt gets himself into messes he can’t handle but that Neil can put right. To a certain extent Ava does this too: straightens him out. And hasn’t Neil done the same with Johnnie? Sorted out his mistakes? Now he, Matt, has to walk down this road he’s lived in most of his life to the man who has been his friend for all that time and pretend he doesn’t know what’s destroying him bit by bit because that, that, would reverse their roles so dramatically neither of them would know how to play their part. Instead, he will go there to be listened to and fixed and built back up after making a mess of things yet again.

  ‘… and then when I talked to Neil after the party, he was crying,’ Ava is saying, and he wonders how much he’s missed.

  ‘Poor guy.’ Matt sees Neil, there in the pouring rain the night of Abi’s disappearance. All that going on and there he was, solid as a rock. ‘I wish he’d told me.’

  Ava turns away. ‘I still think there are a lot of other things he’s not telling us.’

  His guts flip. Surely she isn’t going to keep going on about Neil. He walks slowly into the living room and sits on the sofa opposite.

  She doesn’t object. But nor does she speak.

  ‘What things?’ he asks after a moment, feeling suddenly incredibly tired.

  She shakes her head. ‘Things from the party. But what’s the point? You think I’m a lunatic.’

  ‘I don’t! I… I don’t. Please. I’m listening.’

  She shakes her head, her bottom lip pushing petulantly against the top. But after a moment, she exhales.

  ‘Last night at the lock, I spoke to him. And it got very intense. We sort of ended up in the river.’

  ‘What? How the hell—’

  She holds up her hand. ‘I’m not getting into that now.’

  He exhales, his breath shaky. It is worse than he thought. She is ill, so ill. He wants to cry, to shake her, to hold her to him, but he must not, and he must not interrupt; he has to play this carefully, very carefully indeed.

  ‘OK,’ he says.

  ‘I believed him,’ she goes on. ‘Last night. But today I’ve been going over everything, and the thing is, I don’t know if I believe him anymore. Neil’s such an easy talker. But I realised, thinking about it, that when I asked him about Mr Sloth, he didn’t answer me, not really. He just got defensive and started asking what the hell I thought I was accusing him of.’

  ‘Of course he did, he—’ Consciously, Matt places his left hand over his right, to remind himself to stay quiet.

  She closes her eyes, that familiar tic of irritation, and opens them again.

  ‘You don’t know the whole story,’ she says. ‘When I saw Jen and the girls yesterday, Jasmine recognised Mr Sloth by name. By name, Matt. Think about it.
The only way she could know that toy by name is through Neil. I’ve never even met Jasmine and neither have you. And then, and I know you don’t want to hear this, she started going on about pockets, pockets, pockets, which is exactly what she called Neil at the party. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, don’t you see? Pockets is Jasmine’s name for Neil.’ She glares at him, as if to say: there.

  He holds up his hand. ‘Can I speak?’

  She nods.

  ‘I can explain that. At the party, Jennifer told me Neil had a game going with her. He used to hide her toys in his pocket and then pull them out – it made her laugh. That’s literally it. She probably calls all her toys Mr or Mrs.’

  ‘So why didn’t he say that?’

  ‘Because he had you in his face accusing him of having something to do with Abi’s death, in the middle of the night, right by where she’s supposed to have drowned. How the hell did you end up in the water anyway?’

  Her eyelids flicker with irritation. He returns his hand to his wrist, squeezes it.

  ‘Whatever,’ she says. ‘There are other things, things I’ve thought through properly. Like Neil being so upset at Jasmine recognising him. I know you’re going to say it wasn’t that, that it was Johnnie, and that’s what Neil said too, but I saw you with him under the willow tree at the party and it looked like he was freaking out. His reaction was way over the top, don’t you think?’ She looks up. Her eyes are bloodshot. ‘Don’t you think?’

  ‘Ave,’ he tries. ‘Listen to what you’re saying. You’re clutching at straws. There’s no connection, none whatsoever. What you’re saying is that even when Neil gives you a good reason, you don’t believe him. He’s our best friend, hon. Come on.’