by S. E. Lynes
Only the next day does he understand. He is printing posters with Neil’s rather attractive wife in his office when Jen texts to tell him they’ve found the little girl’s jacket in the river.
The river. Of course.
I owe you, Neil Johnson, he thinks, still staring at Jen’s message. I owe you big time.
Forty-Seven
Ava
‘He didn’t kill her with his car?’ I say, impatience rising. ‘What do you mean, he didn’t kill her with the car?’
Farnham drinks the rest of her tea and puts the mug carefully on the coaster.
‘The results of the post-mortem showed that Abi died of the head injury sustained in the trench,’ she says. ‘She was knocked unconscious by Johnnie Lovegood’s car but the car didn’t kill her.’ She glances up, her face soft and pained and sorry. ‘She won’t have suffered; she won’t have known anything about it.’ Another pause, as if it hurts her physically to carry on. ‘But you see, she was still alive at that point. If Mr Lovegood had reported it when he knocked her over, it’s entirely possible she would have lived. But he didn’t do that.’ She shakes her head. ‘He didn’t do that.’
‘She was still alive,’ I say.
‘I’m so sorry. In the end, the whole thing came down to seconds. Literally.’
Matt, whose arm is around my shoulders, pulls me close.
‘But don’t those cars have sensors?’ he asks.
‘They do,’ Farnham replies, ‘but if you’re listening to loud music or distracted… He wasn’t paying attention, that’s the bottom line. He wasn’t driving with due care. Many accidents aren’t caused by speeding as such but by manoeuvring the vehicle too fast in smaller operations such as three-point turns, reverse parking and, as in this case, pulling out of a garage. It really doesn’t matter what car you drive, to be honest. If you’re not careful.’
I close my eyes. Imagine Johnnie Lovegood, in his stylish clothes, sitting hunched in the back of a patrol car. I open my eyes to the man who is still legally my husband and the detective who has finally got her man. I wonder if she feels satisfied. Wonder how far removed you have to be from another’s pain to feel something as uncomplicated as satisfaction.
‘Protecting what’s ours,’ I say.
‘What?’ Matt is frowning at me.
‘That’s what this is all about.’ I look back at him, at the man who is still, for now, my other half, letting tears drop from my chin. ‘You lied because you were worried about losing me and Fred. Neil lied to save himself and Bella, and Johnnie lied to protect what was his. It’s just a question of degree, really.’ I look across to Sharon, who is listening, out of solemn respect or sympathetic indulgence it’s hard to tell. ‘Our daughter was murdered and her death kept secret because we stopped looking after each other. And if we don’t look after each other, we’re just hiding in castles, shooting arrows at our neighbours, aren’t we? If you see a hat on the ground, you put it on the wall because that’s what you’d like someone to do if they found your hat. If you hit a little girl, you call an ambulance because that’s what you’d like someone to do if they hit your little girl, do you see? That day, no one stopped to think she was everyone’s little girl… We’re all connected, that’s all, that’s all I…’ I am weeping into my hands, the sobs getting louder.
‘Hey now,’ Matt says, rubbing my back. ‘Don’t upset yourself.’
‘I’m not upsetting myself. This is upsetting. Somewhere along the line, we’ve been so busy getting and having and getting more and more and more again until we have so much we have to guard it at all costs. We’ve forgotten – we’ve completely forgotten – to look after each other.’
Matt’s arms fold around me. I feel his lips press on the top of my head.
‘What are we going to do?’ I sob into his chest.
‘We’ll be all right,’ he says. ‘We’ll be all right.’
Forty-Eight
Four months later
Two days ago, in diagonal sleet, we moved to a cottage in a village not far from my parents’ home. Unable to bear staying in our street, Fred and I have been living with them since a little after Abi was found, and now we are happy to be back under one roof with Matt. Matt has taken a lower-paid job with a firm in Manchester but intends to work his way back up. The houses are cheaper here, so I can have a separate room for my piano. I am quietly hopeful for this new start. I can live here safe in the knowledge that I won’t be bumping into people who know what happened every five minutes, not to mention Bella or Jen, and this has brought me a great deal of relief.
After the trial, Bella texted to say how sorry she was and to reiterate that she knew nothing until after the party. I replied that I believed her, and that I thought she was a brave and special person. I wished her well. And I did, I do. She is the one who understood where the line is drawn between self-preservation and the right thing to do, and I will always admire her for that. What I didn’t say, but what I suspect both she and Neil understand, is that we never want to see either of them again. The same goes for Jen, who posted a long and tenderly worded handwritten letter in her trademark purple ink, which Matt brought up on one of his visits. She and Johnnie are getting divorced. She was mortified by what happened and hoped I could find it in my heart to believe that she knew nothing whatsoever about her ‘ex-husband’s heinous actions’. I wrote back – the paper correspondence old-fashioned but somehow apt – that of course I believed her. I left out that this was only once I’d read her letter, because up until that point, I was unsure. But there the contact between us must end. I was fond of her, and I miss her, but I need this new start. We all do.
Neil was charged and convicted of prevention of lawful burial and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. He was sentenced to two years but will most likely serve one, we are told. Apparently he and Bella are still together and are planning on moving to Guildford, according to an old school friend of Matt’s.
Johnnie Lovegood was charged and convicted of manslaughter and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. He is currently serving the maximum sentence at Her Majesty’s pleasure in Wormwood Scrubs. I wonder how he finds the grey sweat suits, whether the cuisine is to his taste. He will, I know, find his punishment outrageous, a travesty.
‘Have you seen the bedside lamps?’ Matt asks, drumming on the living-room door jamb.
‘In the kitchen. In one of the boxes on the table. It’s marked “Bedroom Stuff”, I think. Shall we have a cuppa though?’
‘OK,’ he says. ‘I’ll make it.’
‘There are some biscuits in the cupboard by the kettle,’ I call after him. ‘Mugs are around there somewhere.’
From the box on the floor I pull out the framed picture of Abi, push the palm of my hand across it before placing it on the mantelpiece. We had a private family funeral for her a month after she was found. And whilst her life’s end sounded the saddest possible note, it was a note less maddening than the hanging devil’s chord, and I am able at last to sit with it and to hear it. My heart belongs to Matt and to my son, but it is still my daughter’s too, still enmeshed with hers as hers is with mine. She is still part of me: my body, my tissue, my bones. She will always be part of me. Her death cannot change that. Nothing can change that.
‘You can watch us from there, little monkey,’ I say to her now, not minding the tears that fall.
Once we settle in, I plan to teach piano lessons. Eventually, I might return to the classroom; we’ll see how it goes. I have played my mum’s piano daily for months now, and together with my beautiful son, music has the power to bring me moments of joy. I still haven’t mastered Chopin’s Ballade No. 1, but that is a torture I have chosen for myself.
I no longer check the door four or five times every time I come home; my aim is to stop altogether in this new place. My sessions with Barbara ended when I moved north, but if I think I need help, I will make sure I get it. I know I must look after myself, in all respects, so that I can look after little Fred. Our so
n is seven months old now, sitting up – at this very moment, actually, napping in his new buggy in the hall. He is becoming himself, shouts ‘Oi!’ sometimes when he wants our attention, and this makes us laugh. I still have nightmares regarding him and Abi, but they are less frequent now.
So yes, here we are, Matt and I. We have survived. We are together. What he did was unforgivable, but love does not switch itself off so easily. A terrible act can define us or change us fundamentally; that is what I have come to believe – existentialism with a caveat, if you like. I believe Johnnie Lovegood’s actions did define him. He was able to absorb what he had done and carry on. I believe that Neil’s actions are not fundamentally who he is and that is why he was not able to exist as an authentic version of himself afterwards. I believe that Matt understands the consequences of what he did, that he understood them the night I told him there was no future for us. I believe the shock broke a pattern within him, and that night, he became a man strong enough and brave enough to finally take responsibility. I don’t know exactly how I can be so sure, only that he seems, he feels, changed to me.
We all lie to one another, all the time. That day, that beat-by-beat morning, when seconds turned out to be the difference between life and death, the lies were flying around like bees. I too am to blame, and I know it more than anyone. If I hadn’t gone upstairs for my phone, I would have seen Matt come back and stopped Abi from unclipping herself from her buggy. If I hadn’t been on my phone, she might still have unclipped herself to follow her daddy outside, but I could perhaps have saved her from Johnnie Lovegood’s car. If I hadn’t been so glad of her silence, if I hadn’t taken the break I thought I needed, she might still have been hit by Johnnie’s car but I could have – perhaps, perhaps I could have – saved her from his callous and fatal disposal of her, his inability to see that she could so easily have been his own daughter, that in a sense, she was. But as Barbara would tell me, none of these things means I didn’t love my daughter.
When they found her coat, I smashed my iPhone into little pieces with the hammer. But lately I’ve come around to thinking that my daughter’s death is not really the fault of the material trappings of our lives: expensive phones, big cars, kitchen extensions, status symbols. To blame these things is too easy. For me, it is down only to how we act towards one another. So many people helped us that day, and showed such kindness in the weeks that followed; I can truly see that now, with distance. As for us, Matt and I plan to look after each other and those around us as best we can. It is all we have – this, and the seconds and minutes and hours of our lives.
It is all any of us has really.
If The Housewarming kept you gripped from start to finish, you’ll love the chilling suspense of Mother.
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Mother
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Christopher would never hurt anyone. Not intentionally. Even after everything that’s happened I still believe that…
Christopher Harris is a lonely boy. A boy who has never fitted in to his family. Who has always felt something was missing from his life.
Until one day, when he discovers a suitcase in his family’s attic. Inside the suitcase is a letter. Inside the letter is a secret about his mother that changes everything.
What price would you pay for the perfect family?
Christopher finally has a chance at happiness. A happiness that he will do anything to protect…
An unputdownable thriller about the lies we tell and the secrets we keep, Mother will hold you breathless until the very last page and leave you reeling. Perfect for fans of The Girl on the Train, The Sister and Apple Tree Yard.
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Books by S.E. Lynes
The Housewarming
Can You See Her?
The Lies We Hide
The Women
Valentina
The Proposal
The Pact
Mother
Available in audio
Can You See Her? (Available in the UK and the US)
The Lies We Hide (Available in the UK and the US)
The Women (Available in the UK and the US)
The Proposal (Available in the UK and the US)
The Pact (Available in the UK and the US)
Mother (Available in the UK and the US)
A Letter from S.E. Lynes
Dear Reader,
Thank you so much for reading The Housewarming. I really am so delighted that you did. If this is your first book by me, thank you for giving me a try and I hope you liked it enough to check out my others! If you’ve been with me since the beginning or have read me before, thank you for coming back, thank you for sticking with me – I really appreciate it!
My next book is well under way, and I hope you will want to read that one too. If you’d like to be the first to hear about my new releases, you can sign up using the link below:
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This story began its gestation in the summer of 2016. I was a very new debut author at the time and had gone along to the TBC party in Leeds (TBC is the not-so-secret secret Facebook’s The Book Club, run by the famous and formidable book lover Tracy Fenton). I was researching my second novel, Mother, and had timed my trip to coincide with the party so that I could meet some of the readers I’d got to know online. There, I met Lorraine Tipene and her daughter, Rachel, who has Angelman Syndrome. I didn’t really know anyone at that time, since my debut had only just come out, so I was a little nervous, but Lorraine was so friendly to me, as was everyone, to be honest, and at the end of our conversation I told her that one day I’d put Rachel in a book and make her the key to a mystery.
Lorraine has been a keen supporter of my work ever since, along with many other lovely people, and I never forgot our conversation. The problem was coming up with a plot. Then, at the beginning of this year, I got the niggling, nudging nugget of a new idea. I worked up some notes, a synopsis, a few chapters, then chatted to Lorraine over the phone – firstly to ask if she was on board and secondly to find out more about Rachel. The result is The Housewarming, a mystery whose resolution hangs on the words of a young girl with Angelman syndrome. If it weren’t for Jasmine Lovegood, I’m not sure Abi would ever have been found and laid finally to rest. If it weren’t for Lorraine and Rachel Tipene, I’m not sure this idea would ever have occurred to me.
I try really hard to write thrillers that linger in the mind long after the final page, so I hope The Housewarming gave you food for thought as well as providing an emotional and gripping reading experience. I began this book in January 2020 and finished it during lockdown, so I was quite far along with the process when it became apparent that Covid-19 was set to become an unprecedented and deeply traumatic moment in our global history. Matt and Ava’s story was originally set in the late summer of 2020, but including coronavirus in the narrative felt too raw – both for me, the author, and for my readers. Also, given the scale of the virus, it would have been impossible to factor it into the plot without it taking over completely – such has been its impact. I therefore made the decision to move the story to a year earlier and to have the narrative finish before the impact of coronavirus made itself known.
However, the themes in my work usually come from all that I am feeling subconsciously, and The Housewarming is no exception. Very much informed by the time of writing was Ava’s isolation, her anxiety, and her feeling of being contagious in her unresolved grief. The story is also underpinned by ideas surrounding individual and community responsibility – quite simply, the importance of looking after others, even when you yourself are not at risk. Even before official lockdown measures were put into place, it became apparent that protecting the vulnerable in society was a responsibility that belonged to all of us. This idea fed into the book: Abi was ever
yone’s little girl, in the sense that we are all interconnected – the global pandemic has shown us that, no matter who we are, we all rely on each other to an extent.
Although the book centres around people looking after number one in a moment of extreme stress, I was keen to balance that with the wider sense of community, and with the kindness of others. The book is set in a fictionalised version of Teddington, where I live (I would ask anyone who lives there to forgive my artistic licence in terms of the local geography), and one of my abiding memories of my early years here is receiving a phone call from a woman I knew to say that she was in the local hospital with my daughter, then eleven, who had fallen in the park and broken her hand. This woman didn’t call from the park but from the hospital, where she had driven my daughter directly. I was knocked out by this act of kindness, so I wanted to convey that people mostly do the right thing… but, hey, it wouldn’t have been much of a psych thriller had my characters all done the right thing, would it?
I do need to acknowledge the inspiration of the most famous disappearance story of our time, that of Madeleine McCann. Like many people, I was very affected by that story, having two young daughters at the time, and, as with other cases of missing children, I have always felt very keenly how awful it must be to have your child taken and to never find out what happened to them. I wanted to explore that not knowing, the difficulty of not being able to grieve yet grieving every day. I didn’t go too far into what it must be like to have suspicion fall upon you as a parent, because I was more interested in the existentialist idea of our actions defining us – at what point we cross the line and, because of one action, become someone else entirely; whether it is even possible to preserve one’s sense of self afterwards. I took the narrative viewpoint of a year after Abi’s disappearance because I knew I was working towards closure and resolution for Matt and Ava rather than a strictly happy ending. I hope Matt and Ava are now fixing up their house together and are forging their new life in love, honesty and relative peace.