by Rob Parker
Grace saw in that very honest moment that he was a very attractive man—not just physically, which he undeniably was, with his six-foot frame, broad shoulders, trendily styled hair and thick designer glasses, but also in his mannerisms. His character. Caring and honest. She liked him, immediately. Embarrassingly.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Although I’m afraid from my end there’s not much to tell. The disturbance was over at the Fenchurch place.’
‘Oh,’ David said, genuinely surprised. ‘Well, that actually makes more sense given that we live next door to them.’
‘What happened, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘My husband—sorry, we—heard something on the baby monitor in the middle of the night that was a bit strange.’
‘Well, if it helps, it might have been linked. Someone defaced their property—their front windows specifically. It’s just that Mr Fenchurch is convinced it’s me.’
‘Oh. And it’s not you?’ David asked with a playful smile. Grace couldn’t help but smile back.
‘No, it wasn’t I’m afraid. But any more early wake up calls from the police and it might be.’ They both laughed.
‘Well, Olivia’s room is on the front of the house, and the monitor could very well have picked up something from outside if it was loud enough. I think we have our answer.’
‘Yes, but it doesn’t answer my question. If it wasn’t me, who threw that crap up the windows—’
‘It was crap?’
‘Yes. If it wasn’t me, or you or your husband… who was it?’
‘The plot thickens,’ David said, his eyes glazing over slightly, his thoughts gunning elsewhere before he looked straight at Grace. ‘If you ever need anything, give us a call, okay? We are only there, and we’ll be over in seconds. Although with this fellow I don’t think you’d need much help.’ He gestured to Dewey, who was sat at the foot of the oven.
Grace laughed, but still felt the tang of bittersweet. ‘Dewey, despite his looks, is less of a menace and more of a loveable oaf.’
‘Well, then give us a call if ever you feel Dewey isn’t up to it. Please.’
It was an earnest remark, and Grace felt warm all over. The best ones are always gay, she reminded herself, before chastising herself for the very thought.
30
Joyce checked her watch, which was also her pedometer, GPS unit and heart rate tracker. Four and a half miles done, heart rate at a hundred and ten beats per minute, and only half a mile from home. It even told her that it was about to turn seven o’clock. All in all? Perfection.
She’d just about got her route right and was happy. A small thing, but important to her. It came out of nowhere tonight, and, looking back, was so easy to follow. On leaving the estate, turning left outside the entrance gates, she followed an old fence on her left that must have been left there from the building days when the site was fenced off. Keeping the fence visible through the trees on her left, she circled the entire estate property, before returning back to the entrance—which was just ahead.
The air had dropped in temperature with the onset of evening, and there was the softest sprinkle of rain in the air. The sky above was pockmarked with briskly-speeding clouds, buffered by high wind overhead. Whatever this rain was going to become, it would be short lived.
The gateway to the Blackstoke estate was ornate and imposing—a twelve-foot-high arch of wrought iron, predictably in black, with metal lettering over the crest of the arch reading BLACKSTOKE. It reminded her uncomfortably of the gates outside Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp in the forests of Northern Poland—only the phrase ‘Arbeit macht frei’ was gone. If it was a homage, it was a bizarre one—humanity’s atrocities reinvented as kitschy architecture. She turned left under the archway and picked up pace.
On the left-hand side as she passed through, was a small cabin, presumably where the gate attendant sat. The brochures promised a gated settlement with round the clock security, which had to be here somewhere. They were paying for it, after all. Or maybe it hadn’t started yet? There were only five houses occupied here, after all.
She felt the burn in her thighs, as the road gradually inclined uphill. She pushed harder, trying to think of other things.
It must have been a large plot of land, all told, if the fence around it spanned five miles, yet she’d only spent any time in that one corner which was theirs. She reached a roundabout, which had four exits if you included the one she was approaching from. Left was down through the hastily planted sycamores to Broadoak and their cul-de-sac. Straight on and right led to the next stages of the development, due for building and completion in the coming years. Their corner was the only one inhabited, and it gave her a sense of pride.
We were the first. The originals.
She turned left, as the young sycamores stood in neat rows, accompanied by evenly sequenced streetlights. She saw the glow in the sky over the trees where their cul-de-sac was, and tried to up the pace further. She always aimed to hit sprint by the end of her runs, and at their old house she had thrown up through exhaustion in the bushes on the drive more times than she could remember.
The trees parted, she saw the houses, and she began her charge. Head down, long leggy athlete strides. Freedom. the sense of being all you can be. Giving it your all.
Approaching the Fenchurch place. Their own house on the corner beyond, opposite Pam’s. Go. GO! Passing the Lyon’s place. Last fifty yards. The burn howling all over. It was great.
Something caught Joyce’s eye, a white object in the bushes outside the Fenchurch’s house. She slowed, as the object seemed to glow a little, but it was only a trick of the light as her eyes had been getting used to the darkness. The bushes outside the Lyons’ house were a box hedge about three feet tall and two feet across, right the way around the front lawn, and the object was poking right out of the top. It was so out of place in the clean, freshly prepared neighbourhood. Snared by curiosity, she went to it.
It was made of light-coloured fabric, which even in this light, was quite visibly dirty. Mud and assorted dark streaks marked the fabric. She touched it. It was some kind of starchy cotton. When she pulled it out she saw, amid the mud and dirt, it was emblazoned with little, pale blue anchors all over. She stretched it out. It was a babygrow. Filthy, and foul-smelling, but still a babygrow.
Joyce looked around the street. It was empty and quiet. Lights were on in the surrounding homes. She looked at the Lyon’s house. They must have dropped it, or it must have fallen out of the window, she thought. She looked at it again, trying to envisage the size of the garment in comparison to the Lyons’ baby. It looked about right—maybe? It was a long time since she’d had a one-year-old of her own.
She took it with her, and walked round to their front door, giving it a couple of knocks and thumbing the bell once. There was no answer, so, in a fit of neighbourly pique, she decided she would wash it for them and return it later. Having a young baby was hard enough without things going missing, and this thing stunk to high heaven.
31
The feeling of guilt had assaulted Pam so fiercely all day, that she was bursting for a glass of wine to smooth the edge off. However, such was her occupation of the doghouse, she was determined not to touch a drop. Peter was still in a funk, marching about quietly, trying to mask his blame for Pam (she was sure of it) with silence.
What he had done was nice, replacing the guinea pig like that, but they had barely had a chance to even discuss what had gone wrong in the first place. And now, she was too scared to. It would only eventually lead to another pointless rerun, another spat with no true purpose other than to properly dole out the blame for the damn guinea pig’s death.
But, for Pam, that didn’t come near the question of what they should be talking about—namely how the animal got in the washing machine in the first place. Peter had handled it, pulling it out, and all the clothes that had to go with it (nobody wanted to wear anything that had been saturated in LeBron’s blood, no matter how many
times it was going to be put back through the machine).
She was on the kitchen floor messing with a small remote control, trying to work out the LED strip lights that ran around the base of the island, which, when illuminated, gave the central unit a strange Blade Runner illusion that would have worked perfectly if they hadn’t have opted for the traditional country kitchen look. Now, it just looked ridiculous, but at least they gave off a nice glow.
The doorbell chimed again, as it seemed to do all too often, and Pam worried if the constant stream of visitors was going to be a feature of living there. It had never happened in their old life—but then she thought of how remote they were in the grand scheme of neighbours. There was them, some half-built houses and dirt tracks mapped out where roads would eventually lay, and that was it. No wonder they all kept checking in on each other.
Before Pam could get to the door, Peter had marched across from the living room, where she assumed he had been working, watching television or just fuming quietly, and opened it.
‘Hi Joyce,’ she heard him say, with a hint of exasperation in his voice. He must have been thinking her partner in crime had returned, and to save him saying anything embarrassing, she was up, dropping the remote on the counter.
‘Hi Joyce!’ she shouted as she got there. Joyce was sweat-sheened and lycra-clad, her cheeks rosy and her breath puffing around her head, mingling with the steam rising from her scalp. She smiled.
‘I’ve just knocked on the Lyons’ place,’ she said. ‘But they’re out and considering this place has got quite the neighbourhood clubhouse vibe at the minute, I thought they might have stopped by.’ She held up her hand, and in it was a dirty babygrow.
Pam looked at the thing. It was a mess, and something about it was off. It was a baby’s vest alright, short-sleeved, but the cut was kind of weird. Olden. Not super old, but not something you’d see these days. And the patterning, those anchors…
‘They’re not here, I’m afraid.’ Pam said. ‘It is very vintagey, and they are quite cool, so it could well be theirs.’
‘Hmm. It’s just weird. I found it in the hedge outside their place. You know, their place.’ Joyce bent her knees and pulled a sarcastic face as she said it.
‘I can’t picture the Fenchurches having a baby over, even if one was jammed through their letterbox. How weird.’
‘Yeah, I saw it while running, and was going to take it in to wash it, but I saw your door opposite and thought I’d just check. Things… alright?’
Pam suddenly felt acutely aware of just how ‘not alright’ things were, but just as quickly realised that Peter had gone.
‘Yeah fine,’ she said hurriedly. ‘New guinea pig, so big news.’
‘Oh lovely. I heard from Fletcher—’
Pam smiled as she interrupted. ‘Don’t ask.’ She liked her new friend. Joyce was a nice buffer zone to the upheaval and strife, and she smiled back conspiratorially.
‘Shouldn’t smile,’ Joyce said. ‘Should definitely shower though.’ She turned to go, but someone else was walking up the drive past the parked cars behind them. Both women turned to see Christian, looking somewhat tired and more than a little haggard. The usual precision of his appearance seemed off, but Pam couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was that gave her this impression. Maybe it was just his posture, which was both stooped and wrought jagged at the same time.
‘Hello there, wanderer,’ Pam shouted, and he waved a pursed smile in response. Definitely something up, Pam thought.
‘Aha,’ said Joyce. ‘The very man.’
‘Evening all,’ he said.
‘You’ve saved me a visit,’ said Joyce, thrusting the babygrow at him with an outstretched arm, which Christian looked at with an immediate frown.
‘Ugh, where did you find that?’ he asked. The closer he came to them, the more Pam was shocked by his appearance. Gone was that crisp poise and confident contentedness. This man was exhausted and had the air of deep unsettlement. ‘Looks distinctly unhygienic.’
Confusion passed across Joyce’s face, as she lowered the item. ‘So it’s not yours?’
Christian smiled softly. ‘No, thank God.’
‘It’s so strange then,’ Joyce said.
‘Where did you find it again?’ asked Pam, touching the material again. Now unclaimed and thereby certified at least temporarily mysterious, it felt like a foreign artefact.
‘In the hedge outside the Fenchurch place. The far corner of the garden, the bit that looks out into the street. Only one little one in our midst, so how the hell did it wind up there?’
Christian eased it from her and held it up to the overhead porch light. ‘That is strange. Maybe there’s a label, or a name written on it?’ He turned it over and checked the inside collar.
‘Have we had any high winds or anything? Anything that would send it blowing over here from somewhere local?’ asked Pam.
‘Not that I can recall,’ said Joyce.
‘Maryland Fabrics,’ announced Christian, as he showed the women the garment. Through the neck hole, he poked the back panel of the vest through to show a small stitched-on label which read the name he had just mentioned in pale blue thread.
‘Never heard of them,’ said Joyce.
‘Sounds posh,’ said Pam, but she suddenly felt aware that she may have just exposed her less than aristocratic roots. ‘In a boutiquey kind of way.’
‘It’s filthy though—and smells awful,’ Joyce said.
Pam hadn’t actually caught that, but now Joyce mentioned it, it did. She’d thought it was just an extension of that low-level pong the area seemed to carry, but no, now she thought about it, it was definitely stronger and coming from the garment.
‘Doesn’t look new,’ said Christian. ‘Could have been there ages.’
‘No—he’d have noticed. The old geezer, I mean,’ said Pam. ‘He spends all day tending to that bloody garden, I’d be amazed if he hadn’t seen it.’
They spent a moment of quiet silence as they wondered how this item of baby’s clothing had just dropped into their midst, before Christian seemed to remember why he’d come over in the first place.
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘You’ve saved me a job too, Joyce, I was coming over to see you as well. Did anyone in either of your houses hear anything out of the ordinary last night?’
Joyce stuck out her bottom lip. ‘Aside from Fletcher’s night-time routine which has been out of the ordinary for so long it has become ordinary, no.’
‘Pam, anyone here?’ Christian looked at her and she could detect a hint of pleading in his gaze.
‘Nobody’s said anything,’ she said. ‘Why?’
‘We may have had a bit of a disturbance last night,’ he said, then blinked slowly. ‘But we aren’t sure.’
‘The police car? But it was over at that girl’s house wasn’t it?’ She didn’t like the way she had said that girl, but it was out of her mouth now.
‘Yes, but that’s the thing—’
‘She’s a lawyer isn’t she? I just assumed it was something to do with her work,’ Joyce said as she folded her arms. She was no longer steaming now, and just looked damp and cold.
‘Right,’ said Christian, ‘but it wasn’t her that called it. It was that old geezer.’ He nodded at Pam. ‘He’s been finding… shit on his property, and he thinks it’s her dog going about marking its territory in very uncompromising terms. He confronted her about it yesterday, next night, his house is covered in shit. Sorry.’ He glanced over Pam’s shoulder into the house. ‘Poo.’
‘She threw poo at his house?!’ Pam’s voice rose with incredulity. ‘You’re kidding.’
‘No, no. Well, I don’t really know. David went to see her, and she denied it, of course.’
‘Well, I never,’ Joyce said, almost to herself.
‘So, nothing weird happened over here then?’ Christian asked.
Something ticked in Pam’s head. ‘Actually, now we’re on this track, we had a guinea pig end up in a washing machine yesterday.
I’ve no idea how that happened.’
‘It ended up where?’ Joyce said, with her and Christian’s eyes widening in unison.
Pam just nodded with a resigned, regretful smile.
‘Well, that’s a bit weird isn’t it?’ said Christian.
‘Yes, but it was only during the afternoon. Late afternoon I think. Not overnight like the other stuff.’
‘Hmmm.’
‘Maybe,’ Joyce said, ‘a neighbourhood watch group isn’t such a bad idea after all.’
‘If Fletcher has the paperwork, I’ll sign,’ said Christian.
‘Peter already has,’ said Pam, finally feeling like she could support his decision to get involved.
32
Boyd turned over, and noticed that when his cheek brushed the pillow, he felt a little friction. Growth, perhaps. Maybe he’d have to start shaving soon. He’d noticed his voice unreliably wavering, occasionally deeper, so much so that he felt a humorous uncertainty whenever he opened his mouth.
‘Do you feel that?’ he asked out loud. He knew his brother wasn’t asleep, even though he had been still for ages.
‘What?’ answered Burnett, on the other side of the room, himself having been waiting for his brother to speak, aware he was on the edge of breaking the silence.
‘You got any facial hair yet?’
‘What do you think?’
‘What are you going to do about it?’
‘What are you going to do about it?’
‘Ask dad?’
‘Well, we could get some hair removal cream. I saw that on TV. Like a wax.’
‘Do men wax their faces?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Let’s ask dad.’
They fell back into silence. They never meant to mirror each other in the way that everyone assumed they did, but it was just convenient to copy each other—although they did love playing up to it to freak people out. Their behaviour and confidence in their own skin had emboldened over the years because of their innate strength in numbers, mimicking each other in solidarity, so they had become their very own pair quite naturally, despite the obviousness of their shared womb.