The Suspects

by Katharine Johnson

  “This is serious, Emily. You’ll have to tell them where he was.”

  “Rather not,” I mumbled.

  After all, we’d all given false alibis. Would it really help now to tell them that on the night the police were so curious about, Stuart had been tied to my bed with silk scarves and covered in whipped cream, fruit and melted chocolate?

  Chapter Two

  We weren’t bad people, we just made a bad choice. Or at least that’s how it started.

  We often asked ourselves how they’d picked us out of all the students in the country who’d applied for the journalism training scheme. Assuming there were others. We must have had something in common, something they saw in those interviews, something they liked. In one of our training sessions, the Managing Director told us it was “the hunger.”

  “Is that the same as desperation?” Zak asked, and we’d all laughed – a bit too loudly.

  In any case, The Hunger became a catchphrase between us, spoken in a theatrical tone and applied to a host of situations from justifying that second Mars Bar to wanting to ask someone out.

  Perhaps in reality they picked us for our differences, as part of a psychological experiment to see how long we could stand being with each other. If so, they must be at least partly responsible for what happened with Xanthe.

  But my therapist told me that when something that awful happens, it's natural to look around and find someone else to blame. Mostly at the time I blamed Margaret Thatcher. If it wasn't for her government’s toxic laws, the recession, the housing bubble, the soaring interest rates, the loss of society...

  But the truth is, we all made the decision to move in together, although we must have all known it couldn't work. None of the stuff that came after would have happened if each of us hadn’t already made some bad choices.

  ***

  I still cringe now when I think back to that final interview – the Panel one held in the company’s airy Bristol office on the fifth floor with a view over the docks where old warehouses were being turned into swanky apartments, galleries and art centres. I walked down a cobbled quay past people cleaning their boats watched by seagulls perched on masts, on past a line of stalls selling handicrafts, jewellery, handmade cards and espadrilles. All part of a brave new world – so much happening, so much beginning. I wanted to be part of it.

  The interview started well but one of the panel had the nerve to ask me how many other jobs I’d applied for. When I told them they asked whether in that case I was serious about wanting this one.

  “Serious?” I spluttered. “Of course I’m serious. Do you know how much it’s cost me to come down here from Edinburgh three times? Do you know how long it takes?”

  It went on a lot longer than that but it’s too painful to recall. There was more I could have said. I’d been so bruised and battered by the tsunami of rejections over the last few weeks and dreaded having to go back to living at home. I knew my parents would have done their best to treat me as an adult, but we’d have driven each other mad and I couldn’t take the humiliation of having failed to come out of university with anything to show for it. Going back would mean going backwards. A degree meant nothing if I was going to end up working in the bowling alley or the garden centre with the kids who’d said all along that further education was a waste of time.

  When I stopped I found the Panel staring at me and I had a feeling they might be reaching for a panic button. But I suppose they saw it as The Hunger.

  At any rate four weeks later, I was standing in a bedsit in the Redland district that smelled of fresh paint and had floorboards that echoed under my feet.

  “It’s so bright and clean,” I said to the agent. “Much bigger than the other rooms you’ve shown me.”

  He was young, skinny, wore a shiny suit too broad-shouldered for his frame. He stood looking out of the window, shifting his weight from one foot to another, jiggling some coins in his trousers.

  “A short walk to shops and cafes, an excellent bus service, separate bedroom, your own bathroom…”

  He needn’t have tried so hard. I’d have taken it anyway. I don’t know if perhaps he tried to warn me when he said, “It’s one to think about anyway. Let me show you some others.” At the time I thought he was trying to put me off, thought he might be trying to keep it for himself or a friend and it made me all the more determined to have it.

  That first night in the flat I lay awake imagining my new life. It was a good flat for parties. Plenty of space for friends to stay over. I pictured the things I’d put in it when I got that first £500 pay cheque – a kilim, floor standing wrought iron candles, a wacky mirror… I got myself so excited I couldn’t sleep.

  If I hadn’t been young and naive, I might have been suspicious about the fresh paint and the bars on the windows. If I’d been local, I might have recognised the address from news stories.

  ***

  “Where are you living?”

  It was the first thing we asked each other in that stilted conversation, sitting in the beige-walled Training Room that smelled of machine coffee, new carpet tiles and vinyl chairs, and had a view of boats and a cobbled quay. Imogen looked down at the table when I gave her the name of the road. Zak’s arched brows shot up and he looked out of the window.

  Xanthe drew in her breath and said, “You’re joking.”

  “Er – no.”

  Stuart frowned and shifted in his seat. “It isn’t necessarily the same flat.”

  “Same as what?”

  The door opened and Mary, the Editorial Trainer breezed in, shaking the bangles down her arm and bringing with her a waft of Opium that made Stuart close his eyes and inhale. Zak sneezed.

  “Well, hellooo my lovely trainees.”

  As she was setting out the goals, timetable and levels of achievement she expected us to reach, pen squeaking across the whiteboard, I caught Xanthe’s eyes flicker towards me, then away again but I had to wait for the coffee break to ask her more.

  “I don’t know if I should say,” she began.

  “You’ve already started,” said Zak. “You can’t leave it like that now.”

  I put my money into the machine, selected a white coffee and watched the thin brown liquid froth into the cup over the powdered milk but still nobody spoke. I looked round.

  “So, is someone going to put me out of my misery?”

  “Look, it’s just there was a murder in one of those flats a few months ago,” Zak said. “Have you heard of Lily Ambrose? The Missing Bride?”

  Of course I had. It had been all over the news. She never actually got to be a bride. She’d disappeared after going for the final fitting for her wedding dress. I couldn’t remember the details, but I knew the story didn’t end well.

  “He um, he kept her at his flat,” said Xanthe. “Your flat, if you mean the one on the end looking over the park.”

  I nodded, trying to dredge up what I’d read. Neighbours had complained about the smell and then the flies. Police found her emaciated body surrounded by unspeakable instruments of torture.

  “They’ve caught the man now so don’t go giving yourself nightmares,” said Stuart as we walked back into the training room for the last session before lunch.

  I appreciated his kind smile, but I knew it was already too late.

  I’d never sleep properly in that place again. Each time I walked into the flat and smelled the fresh paint, it would remind me of what might lie underneath. I’d find myself staring at the blank wall and imagining streaks and blotches showing through, bloody footprints on the floor. In the middle of the night I’d hear screams, pleading.

  So I arranged to be out as much as possible and invited friends – old friends who knew nothing about the flat’s history – to stay at weekends so I was never on my own.

  ***

  But it turned out I wasn’t the only one who was unhappy with where they were living. Zak hated his room in a council-run B&B with a load of old men who were “almost definitely paedophiles.” Imoge
n was stuck in a suffocating bungalow on a road that looked like Brookside Close, with an elderly woman and nine cats. “And they all hate me. I’ve been scratched to pieces.” She pushed up her sleeves to reveal a network of angry red scars.

  And Stuart’s housemate left notes everywhere. Please wipe the washing-up bottle after use…Please do NOT pull the flush after midnight…PLEASE don’t use my toothpaste. I can tell!!

  If Stuart’s grandfather hadn’t died we’d have probably each found a place on our own, so I feel even he should take a posthumous share of the blame. Stuart put the proposal to us at lunchtime in Coffee Stop. We’d started congregating there to escape the office crowd. It wasn’t a stylish place. It overlooked a car park, the tables were sticky, and you had to watch the owner, or he’d shovel sugar into your coffee without asking, he was so absent-minded, but at least we could talk freely about the course and gossip about other people in the company without fear of being overheard.

  “The thing is,” Stuart said, “my Gramps died.”

  Shrugging off murmurs of “Oh, that’s awful,” and “Sorry, mate,” he carried on. “No, you know, he was old. But he left me a few thousand. I wasn’t expecting anything. It’s enough for a deposit on a flat I suppose.”

  “You’re going to buy?”

  I suppose it hadn’t occurred to us. It seemed such a grown-up thing to do.

  “Why not? Prices are going up all the time. Someone on The Architect bought a place six months ago and it’s doubled in price. You know what they’re saying – if you don’t get on the property ladder now, you’ll never be able to. And if I live with Helena any longer, I might just kill her.”

  Sympathetic nods all round.

  “I’m sick of handing over all my hard-earned cash to that jumped-up little landlord who’s younger than I am so he can swan around in his flash car. At least with a mortgage you end up with a house at the end of it.”

  He gulped his tea. “I can’t afford to buy a whole house on my own. But if I could find enough people to share, we’d each pay less in mortgage than we’re paying in rent.”

  I noticed he’d slipped from “I” to “we”. The pause that followed was slightly too long to be comfortable.

  “You mean, the five of us?” asked Zak pushing his hair back with both hands.

  “Why not? We’ve all shared student digs. We know how to behave.”

  There was another silence as we thought about this. Yes, we’d shared flats before but not with each other. I was picturing my student friends coming down from Edinburgh, wondering what they’d make of this lot. No doubt they were thinking something similar.

  “I can’t stand pettiness,” said Imogen at last. “People who whinge about paying their share of the bills because they’re away at weekends.”

  “And I’m not having a chores rota,” said Zak.

  That led to an all-out housemates-from-hell discussion until Stuart called us to order. Xanthe was spooning her cappuccino into peaks and slicing the tops off, frowning in concentration while humming along to Perfect by Fairground Attraction that was playing on the radio. “What if one of us wants to sell after a few months and the others don’t?” she said, looking up.

  “Hmm, we’d have to agree to a certain time limit – say two years, until the training scheme ends,” said Stuart. “We can get a contract drawn up, make it official.”

  “No need for that,” said Imogen, her cool blue eyes resting on each of us in turn. “We trust each other, don’t we?”

  Chapter Three

  In the beginning the house-hunting brought us together, gave us a common goal. The more time we spent with each other poring over property details, viewing houses and talking to agents, the more it started to make sense, us being a unit. The fact we had so little in common was a good thing – it meant we’d respect each other’s space, stay out of each other’s way. And we had no problem agreeing to Stuart’s stipulation that none of us should date each other which would upset the balance in the house.

  But the more time you spend with people the more things you find you have to talk about. Perhaps we weren’t so different after all. Other people in the company had already started talking to us collectively as “you lot” and seemed amused and interested by our plan to move in together. They’d see us hanging around the photocopier or the coffee machine locked in discussion over damp courses or rewiring or how to paper a wall and seemed to enjoy giving us the benefit of their experience.

  Most of the men were jealous of Stuart and Zak getting to share a house with Imogen. She was one of those women everyone falls in love with – and others just had to accept they only had a chance with anyone after Imogen had rejected them.

  She was clever too. At press conferences she was the one to extract the details from the interviewee. She had a way of sitting back while we all dived in and then asking the killer question so directly and with such charm, fixing the person with her steady blue-eyed gaze and barely raising her voice, it made evasion seem impossibly rude.

  She told us once the serenity thing was an act, that really she was like a swan paddling desperately under the surface, but I think in those days Imogen just wanted to fit in with the rest of us. Perhaps in some way she already anticipated the divide that was to come.

  ***

  It took several weeks to find the right house. The market was going crazy and most of the properties had already been snapped up by the time we saw them in the estate agents’ windows. A quick glance through the property papers during our lunch hours in Coffee Stop showed we’d be hard pushed now to find enough money for the five per cent deposit we needed.

  “I could ask my dad to lend me some,” said Imogen.

  I doubted my parents would be able to help. Both academics, they’d never been good with money and were still paying off their own mortgage on the grey flint bungalow in which I was born.

  “I don’t have parents to ask,” said Xanthe. “Tenerife airport collision – two Boeing 747s collided on the runway? We were coming back from holiday.”

  Something about the note of pride in her voice when she told us it was “the deadliest air accident in history” broke my heart.

  “God, how awful,” said Imogen but Xanthe just shrugged and went quiet and picked at her cauliflowered sleeve. Then she looked round and managed a brave grin. “Sorry – didn’t mean to put a downer on everything.”

  Somehow Stuart managed to steer the conversation back to the housing thing, but I thought Xanthe’s story explained a lot about her. She was a lost soul looking for a family. I thought about how buying the house with us could make her feel she belonged somewhere again.

  But I felt a sweep of panic when Stuart said, “Don’t worry, we’ll find the money between us to pay for your share.”

  I had no idea how I was going to pay for mine let alone sub Xanthe but it didn’t seem right to claim I was penniless. Zak once told me he’d been earning money since he was fifteen, making stuff and trading it in the playground. It made me feel ashamed. I’d taken jobs in the summer holidays to pay off my overdraft each year at uni but I was sacked from the waitress job after I dropped a pudding in someone’s handbag.

  I was clutched by a sudden fear that I was going to be left behind, the one who didn’t make it onto the housing ladder before it was whisked away. I saw a future in which I was eternally paying rent for rooms that were more and more decrepit while the others moved on to bigger and better places.

  In the end Imogen told the agent she wasn’t leaving his office until he’d shown us what was in his bottom drawer. He laughed and tried to deny there was anything.

  “There always is,” she said. “We want to see what you’re keeping back for selected clients.”

  Just as we thought he was about to throw us out he sighed and said, “I’ve shown you everything in your price range – except this one because it needs so much work.”

  Zak seized it. “We don’t mind work.”

  Admittedly, it was clear as soon as we arrive
d that the photographs had flattered the place. Taken from a distance on a bright day, the cracks and dark stains on the plasterwork were bleached out and a tree masked the broken iron canopied balcony with its peeling paintwork. But the fact remained it was a handsome, terraced house on four floors a short walk away from bars, clubs and boutique shops in Clifton, the most desirable area in Bristol.

  Georgian, the agent informed us. Regency, Zak muttered scornfully. I didn’t care. I was in love.

  Inside, it more than matched the description of “in need of total refurbishment.” It had been run as a B&B for council tenants. The carpets had every stain imaginable and the high ceilings were yellow with what I assumed was damp.

  “Nope,” said Zak, clambering up on a cupboard and peering. “Just nicotine.”

  The real damp was in the basement, which stank of mushrooms and had huge growths in one corner that looked like giant sea sponges.

  “Easily fixed,” the agent assured us. “Nothing like as bad as it looks. The tenants caused it by blocking up these air vents. All you have to do is open them up again to let the house breathe and it will rectify itself.”

  “We’ll just keep the door shut,” said Xanthe.

  After all, we wouldn’t be using the basement as living space anyway. It would just be somewhere to stash bikes and booze before a party. The woodchip paper throughout the house was covered in thick layers of gloss paint. More paint hid what could be a gorgeous staircase. I had to pull Imogen off before she clambered aboard the rickety banister and slid down with a whoop.

  The rooms were a good size, there was a large stained-glass window at the back over the stairs and the upper floors had a terrific view over rooftops, chimneypots and towers of the city below.