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

by S. E. Lynes

  ‘So, we have a new timeline.’ Farnham scribbles more notes, bites her lip, taps the end of her pen against her teeth. A long moment passes. She leans back, reads it out at arm’s length. ‘You both left at seven forty-five.’ She glances at me. ‘Ava, you return just after ten to eight, patch up your daughter’s knees and head upstairs at around five to, around the same time Matt returns for his jacket. But you don’t hear him because you go into the loo – either the door slams or you flush the chain or whatever. When you come out of the loo, Abi isn’t making any noise so you assume she’s all settled – does that sound right?’

  I nod.

  She looks briefly at Matt before continuing. ‘You ride away, Abi follows you but you’ve gone. She then sees either your friend Neil or a member of the Lovegood family, but whoever she sees, she’s got the sloth toy with her. By the time you come downstairs, Ava, at quarter past, Abi is gone.’

  Neither of us says a word.

  ‘Did you ask Neil where the old tool bag was?’ she asks Matt eventually.

  He shakes his head. ‘I didn’t think of it till later. But it was definitely in the work site that day. And I’ve never seen it since. And as we’ve said, so many things don’t add up.’

  I feel like I need a shower. I need to clean my damn teeth. Regret and betrayal have made a sour mix in my mouth. I wonder if Matt can taste it too.

  ‘For me it’s about the toy,’ I add pointlessly. ‘Mr Sloth and Jasmine. It’s possible Abi could have explained who Mr Sloth was to the Lovegoods, but she didn’t know them at all; I don’t think she’d have chatted to them like that. But she knew Neil was working in their house, and there’s only us and Neil and Bella who call the toy Mr Sloth.’ I make myself shut up, push my foot flat to the floor to stop my leg from jackhammering.

  By contrast, Farnham stays quite still, one hand across her mouth. After what seems like an age, she swipes her hand away and leans forward.

  ‘All we can do is bring them in for questioning,’ she says, with the air that she was going to say more but has decided against it.

  Matt glances at me. I return his gaze and realise I can’t find the hate I have for him. I know it’s there, but all I can see is my companion in this immense loss, someone who believes me absolutely, someone who has admitted fully to his fault in all this. Without him, I am utterly alone. My husband, who has let me down so badly, but who is here now.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

  I take his hand and squeeze it. ‘I know.’

  He wipes his eyes, turns towards the detective and nods.

  ‘If there’s any way of keeping us out of it,’ he says, ‘that would be better. But if you need to name us, then I’ll take full responsibility.’

  I drive us home in silence. Park up. Unclip the seat belt and lift Fred out in his car seat. It is after 5 p.m. The street is quiet, so quiet. I wonder if we will have to move away. Regardless of what happens now, I can’t imagine living here anymore.

  We walk up the short pathway. At our door, Matt glances down the road, towards Neil and Bella’s house.

  ‘Do you think they’ve taken them in?’ he asks.

  I shrug. ‘No idea. Do you think they’d do that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ His face is stretched. Grim. ‘I’ve never turned in my best mate before. I’m not sure how it works.’

  I touch him on the arm. ‘Try not to think about it.’

  ‘Oh, OK then.’

  I turn away from his sarcasm and open the front door. Together we go inside. I have no idea what happens next. I am in a different kind of limbo. We both are. In this together but separate; floating but tethered to the same hook. We make tea. We make sandwiches. We pour fruit juice, which we leave. We open a bottle of red wine, which we drink. Just like the day our daughter went missing, all we have is this: waiting, waiting and the small domestic rituals of our life.

  At around 8.30 p.m., the phone rings. I hear it from upstairs. I leave Fred in his crib and run downstairs. Matt is in the living room, on the phone.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Yes, thank you.’

  He rings off. A long moment passes. I open my mouth to say his name but he crouches, bends over his knees and moans. His hands come up, cradle the back of his head. His knuckles are white knots.

  ‘Matt?’ My body fills with the familiar heat of dread.

  ‘Oh God.’ He begins to cry. ‘Oh God oh God oh God.’

  ‘What?’ I say, heart banging. ‘Was it Farnham?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’ My chest is tight. ‘Matt? Can you tell me? Matt, hon?’

  ‘Oh God oh God oh God.’ Slowly he straightens up, paces to the window, back to me. His face is red, glazed with tears, his eyes small. His arms are still cradling his head.

  ‘What? It’s not him, is it? It’s not Neil?’

  ‘It is.’ He meets my eyes, a sob breaking from him. ‘He’s confessed. Neil killed our little girl.’

  Thirty-Nine

  Neil

  His street slides past the windows of the police car; the place where he built his life flickers like a crude cartoon made from the corner of a notepad: houses become one sole house, overlaid and overlaid again – different-colour doors, different shrubs, different curtains.

  This is my home, he thinks. This is my town.

  And as the town too slips by in the same flicking of a thumb, he knows that it is not his, not any longer – it is the place he was born and raised, the place where he laid the foundations and built his castle brick by brick, only to send a wrecking ball through it and bring the whole thing crashing down. That day. That terrible, terrible morning. Thirty-five years living as a good bloke, minding his own business, meeting Bel, proposing to her on holiday in the Seychelles, marrying her, working hard, never asking anything of anyone, only ever wanting as much as the next man without doing anybody over, trying to be a good mate to Matt, to encourage him, get him to believe in himself…

  It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t matter. He is nothing. By doing what he has done, he has obliterated not only his castle but himself and anything he might have stood for, any good he might have done.

  He tries to pinpoint when exactly he became nothing. The first seconds he can attribute to panic. The conscious part, he thinks, was the moment he pulled the zip over her pale and sleeping face. But maybe not. Maybe he was still senseless then. Blind. Deaf. Numb. Yes, maybe he was. Maybe it was later, when he emerged in fresh overalls from his home and began the great pretence.

  It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t matter. Who the hell cares what he thinks?

  He closes his eyes to the buzzing of the police radio, the rising hum of the gears, the bleeping of the pedestrian crossing, and sees himself standing over the bag in the cavernous shell of a half-built kitchen extension. It is out of his control now. There is nothing he can do to make this right. There is no going back; there never was. It is almost a relief. It was killing him, one day at a time, stripping him out from the inside. Better to have it out in the open, and some hours from now, it will be, once and for all. Matt and Ava will know what he’s done. Everyone will know what he’s done.

  He wonders what Bella knew. If she suspected. Last night, she came in all upset, and when he went up to bed, she was propped up against the headboard waiting for him.

  ‘Why are Matt and Ava suspicious of you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ava said you and Matt got back at midnight the night little Abi went missing. You didn’t get back at midnight. Where were you?’

  ‘I went back out.’ He pulled off his clothes and climbed into bed. ‘I thought I could find her. I told her that.’

  ‘Why did you do a wash load that morning?’

  ‘Wash load? What? What are you going on about?’

  ‘I had to lie for you,’ she said. ‘It was horrible.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything though. They’re just paranoid. Something about that party set them off. Ava especially. I told you. She’s gone mental, needs some pr
oper help, that’s all. Come here. Come on. What you need is a cuddle.’

  ‘You always defend her.’

  ‘Come here.’

  He talked her round like he always did. She liked to be persuaded out of a bad mood like that, used to pretend she was angry about something or other – he was pretty sure she did it on purpose – so they could end up like they did last night, one thing leading to another. It was the best sex they’d had in ages – spontaneous instead of thermometers and ovulation kits and all that crap. It was, he thinks, the last sex they’ll ever have. Wonders now if she knew that, if she was saying goodbye.

  The police car pulls up outside the station. He waits for the cop to open the door. He believed he could move past it. He thought, with time, it would become no more than a bad feeling. But he knows – has always known – that if it comes out, it will define him. And now that day has come. He is about to become Neil Johnson, the guy who killed his best friend’s child.

  Forty

  Ava

  ‘He had a plausible story,’ Farnham is saying, sitting at one end of the sofa while Lorraine Stephens sits pushed up against the opposite arm. ‘It matched what he said at the time, and there was nothing to put him in the frame. When we spoke to Mrs Lovegood, she told us he wasn’t at their home when they left for work and that he texted to say he’d be in later, that he had to go to the builders’ merchants for equipment. Mr Johnson’s wife confirmed that he wasn’t in the house when she left for work but that didn’t put him at the Lovegoods necessarily. His phone data had him at home the whole time.’

  Matt’s leg presses against mine, our hands a knot between us.

  Farnham leans forward and folds her hands together.

  ‘But he couldn’t explain the toy,’ she says. ‘I asked Mrs Lovegood whether Jasmine would recognise a sloth and be able to name it as such if she hadn’t seen the toy before, or whether she had a sloth toy herself. She said most definitely not, to both, that the nearest she’d get would be a monkey. There was no record on Mr Johnson’s bank statement of buying equipment earlier that morning, to which he initially replied that they were out of stock. We pushed him on the toy and in the end he admitted that he was at the Lovegoods’ property at 7 a.m. He’d left his mobile at home. He was working in the utility room while the family were getting ready to leave. The Lovegoods didn’t know he was there.’

  ‘He was in their downstairs loo?’ I cut in.

  ‘Yes. But he couldn’t give us any explanation why he’d lied about that. Then of course we have a missing large tool bag and a missing… person.’

  A small mass, I think. A large bag.

  Farnham continues. We listen to the second-by-second, beat-by-beat rhythm of a different melody all together. Except this one will not end in taunting and tantalising but in one terrible closing note.

  ‘We put it to him that, according to Mrs Lovegood, the only way Jasmine could have known that toy by name is if she’d had it named for her. Ava, you said that Jasmine had called the toy not sloth but Mr Sloth, the name you and your husband had given it. This name would most likely only have been used by yourselves and your friends the Johnsons. We put this to Mr Johnson.’

  ‘And he couldn’t explain it,’ I say.

  ‘No, he couldn’t. The change in timelines was significant. If Abi left your home nearer 8 a.m., and Neil arrived at the Lovegoods’ house a little after seven, it was possible for Abi to have seen him inside the property and for Jasmine to have not only seen Abi’s toy but had it named for her by Neil. It was possible that Jasmine was the only member of the Lovegood family who saw Neil. And later that morning he handed the toy to you, Ava. He found it on the road, which of course means he could have planted it there earlier.’

  ‘So he confessed?’ Matt interrupts.

  Farnham performs her now familiar mannerism of brushing her hand across her chin. ‘Sometimes you get the impression that, no matter how much a suspect is resisting, actually they want to confess. There’s a kind of inevitability to it, as if you and they know that’s where you’re all headed. An innocent person will tend to be very insistent. They can get physical. But throughout, Mr Johnson seemed like he was going through the motions, like he’d lost the will or couldn’t or didn’t want to lie anymore. And once we had him against the wall, as it were, he admitted that, yes, Jasmine had seen him and he’d shown her the toy… and that’s when he broke down.’ She looks up, first at Matt, then at me.

  ‘So he definitely killed her?’ Matt’s disbelief is palpable. ‘I mean, he said it with his own mouth, not under duress or anything?’

  Farnham nods. ‘I’m afraid so. I’m so sorry, I know this must be terribly hard to hear. There are two detective constables with your neighbours just now, explaining the situation. And tomorrow morning we’ll be excavating the site.’

  ‘The site? I thought she was in the river?’

  ‘That was the working theory, yes, and I’ll give you a full account of the sequence of events as we understand them in a moment, but tomorrow we’re going to have to excavate your next-door neighbours’ kitchen floor with a view to accessing the trench immediately to the rear of the kitchen entrance.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘No, no, no, no, no.’

  She sighs heavily, glances up at us both. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Forty-One

  Neil

  He gets in early, as usual. The Lovegoods are upstairs: the clank of crockery in the makeshift kitchen they’ve set up on the landing, the flush of water from the upstairs bathroom, the screech and sing-song of the girls. He’s fitting the boiler himself because Rick, his plumber, has let him down at the last minute. Adam is due later on, at which point they’ll concrete in the beams. He’s in the utility, minding his own business, concentrating. Strictly speaking, he’s not qualified to fit a boiler, but Rick will check it later in the week before signing it off. It’s silent in the little room. He works steadily, but after a while, he notices the silence. It starts to bug him; he could do with some tunes. He pats his overalls, realises he’s left his phone in the work site. Or at home – yeah, he can see it charging on the kitchen table. Not to worry. There’s a radio; he can use that – he’ll pop back for the phone once the boiler’s in.

  He puts the screwdriver on the cistern and opens the door of the utility space.

  Straight away, straight away, he sees it: he’s left the bloody kitchen door open.

  A soft whistle leaves him, eyes rolling, checking the stairwell.

  But they’re still upstairs. He can hear the buzz of an electric toothbrush.

  Jennifer made him fit a lock to the kitchen door the day the building work started. Wouldn’t let work commence until that was done. Told him in the smiling, certain terms he’s used to from his clients that if she ever found that door open while the kids were in the house, she would fire him on the spot. Did he understand? Too right he did. He does.

  But now, in the hallway, he can hear Jennifer and the kids upstairs, so at this point he’s only annoyed with himself. He’s been distracted. Bella got so upset last night and again this morning, and now he’s all over the place. He’s told her they’ll get there, that they’ll keep trying as many times as it takes, but it breaks his heart to see her like that, it really does.

  The throaty purr of Johnnie’s Porsche reaches him from the drive. Sometimes he honks the horn to hurry Jennifer and the kids along, but Neil knows it’s not about that – it’s about wanting to show off to the neighbours, make sure they’ve seen him and know what a big cheese he is. Idiot.

  He hurries into the site and kicks the door shut behind him. Danger over. No more sloppiness from here on in. This job is worth a fortune. It’ll pay for another round of IVF, and if Johnnie is pleased, he said he’ll recommend Neil to all his clients going forward. This job will be the making of him.

  The radio is on top of the washing machine.

  He takes a step, glancing down to judge where his feet are. Last thing he needs is to go falling into the trenc
h.

  Time slows.

  Abi’s cuddly toy is on the ground. The one he and Bella bought and took into the hospital the day she was born. What the hell is it doing in here?

  He swallows, takes one more step, and peers into the trench.

  He tastes vomit, swallows it down. Falls. The shock of the fall sends pain shooting into his knees.

  ‘No,’ he whispers. ‘No, no, no, no, no.’

  Abi. Little Abi. His darling little girl. The set of her limbs, the slackness of her mouth, her skin. A cellophane bag lies by her head, just beyond her tiny fist – in it, two slices of bread. Two enormous plasters cover her little knees.

  She’s dead; he knows it in his bones before he jumps in, before he jumps in and presses his fingers to her soft and tiny neck, to her impossibly thin white wrists, moaning, crying at her to be alive.

  ‘No, Abi. No, no, no, no. Come on, baby girl. Breathe. Breathe for your Uncle Nee. Come on, babe, come on.’

  There is no pulse. No beat of her little heart. Head thumping, skin burning, he lifts her. Presses his face to her little blue coat, holds her in his arms.

  ‘Abi, darling. Darling, no.’

  He can barely see. But he casts about, sees his tool bag against the wall and knows with a terrible clarity that will return to him over and over for the rest of his days that it is big enough. It will hide her.

  Here in this cell, staring at the grey ceiling in his depthless misery, he knows that his panic was blind – morally blind, unthinking, a kind of deafening, reverberating buzz drowning out all but action. He knows that this is what happened. He wishes he could play it out again and do it differently, but he can’t. He can’t; he couldn’t then, even ten minutes later, and he can’t now and that’s that.