The Girl Downstairs

by Iain Maitland

  Growing ever more fearful, I hurried home as quickly as I could, taking longer and faster strides through the snow and ice. By Widow Woman’s silent bungalow and the Man in the Suit’s grand-designed house. To my home – my chocolate-box cottage – which I am going to have to leave forever.

  Fluffy was in his basket by the fireplace.

  He lifted his head up and turned to look at me as I came into the hallway. Then dipped his head back down into his sleepy state. Nothing to worry about in Fluffy’s little world.

  I do not know what to do about Fluffy. I cannot take him. Nor bear to leave him to his fate.

  I have packed clothes: rolled-up tee shirts, two changes of trousers, pants and socks, and a sturdy pair of shoes for walking through snow. A shaver, with different attachments, so I can shave my head if I have to. A form of disguise. Hair dye, a packet from one of my wife’s chests of drawers. A radio, to keep up to date with the local news on Felixstowe Radio and Radio Suffolk

  £65 left in cash, in notes, that I had around the cottage in various wallets and drawers. I think she took £20, or maybe £40. A debit card so I can withdraw more cash. £250, £500, I guess. Maybe once this afternoon, if I can find a cash machine, and again after midnight, another day, one last £250 or £500 withdrawal. Perhaps £1,000, to see me on to the streets before the police start contacting banks, shutting down the supply.

  I am looking at the paperback books in the bottom half of my bedside cabinet. Choosing one or two old favourites to read during quiet moments. An Alistair MacLean perhaps. Then it hits me. The stupidity of it all. The idea that I am going to run away with my radio and a paperback book or two to read when I am wherever I am going to be. Sheltering beneath a tree by the river. Rendlesham Forest, if I could somehow get that far. Underneath Southwold Pier. Some sort of fantasy: a Robinson Crusoe life. Some childish adventure. It cannot happen. Especially with snow and sub-zero temperatures.

  There is nowhere for me to go. I would walk off as the police car arrived. Striding as fast as I could across the fields .

  I doubt I would get more than half a mile with young policemen pursuing me on foot. Even if, by some good fortune, I got away, all this snow and ice and the overnight drop in temperature would mean I would not survive out there.

  Even with some sort of shelter until the weather improved – a barn, a bus shelter – I could not live on the streets for long, just hiding until I ran out of cash, became ill, was forced to give myself up. Back to a longer sentence.

  Then there is Fluffy, who is limping his way up the stairs towards me. Clump. Clump. Clump. I hear his careful step and the snuffly breath of his exertions. He is old now and struggles with the stairs. I forget sometimes that he is thirteen years old. An elderly man, in human terms. He gets to the doorway and hesitates before sitting down as if asking to be taken for a walk.

  It is Fluffy that seals my fate. I cannot take him with me, nor leave him behind. And so I must stay here and wait to see what happens. I cross to the doorway and pick him up carefully in my arms. He has some sort of tender spot – a lump, maybe a growth – to the side of his stomach, and he whimpers a little if I pick him up and cradle his stomach with my hand. I have been meaning to take him to the vet for a while, to see what it is. But I have been scared to visit with Fluffy, as he is too old for an operation, so I nurse him along as best I can for as long as I can.

  We sit together, two old men, two old pals – at the edge of my bed, looking out over the lane and the snow and the frost and the ice and this magical world that I will soon be saying farewell to. I put my arm around him as he stares into space with thoughts of chasing rabbits, and I feel suddenly full of sorrow that this life, what I thought was a sad and lonely one, is about to end. Me to prison. Him to the local Blue Cross, where everyone who sees him will love him to bits, but then sigh and say, Sorry, thirteen is just too old.

  I put my head down and cry. It all comes out of me. I cannot stop myself. On and on I go.

  Sobbing now. For this moment and for everything else. My wife. My daughter. What I have become. What I have done. And for her. And Andrew Lumb and everything else. It has all been such a mess of my own making.

  I sit up as I hear the fateful click of the garden gate.

  She stands there in the hallway, looking at me as I come down the stairs.

  She is holding something up towards me in her hands. I cannot see what it is. A dark mass of some kind.

  She half-smiles. I cannot read a meaning into it.

  I get to the bottom of the stairs, Fluffy sitting and watching from the landing. And I see what she is holding. A little black pot with soil filling it to the top. I am bewildered. I do not know what it is. Nor do I understand why she is showing it to me.

  “Did you go up the town?” I ask neutrally, knowing that she did not, could not have done. That she is back far too soon. So soon that I thought the gate clicking open was a sign that the police had arrived by car to arrest me.

  “No,” she answers simply, then adds, “I can manage for a day or two. Until we can go to the big supermarket.” She pauses and goes on: “I went to the garden centre and bought this for Andy. We could place it here for him and plant it in the garden in the spring.”

  With that, she bends over and puts the little pot at the bottom of the stairs, in or very close to the spot where Andrew Lumb landed and his skull cracked open.

  I stand there, not sure what to think, let alone say to her.

  This little pot of soil, this tiny shrine, tucked in at the bottom of the staircase.

  She turns and walks towards the kitchen. I follow her, wondering if we are now going to carry on just as we were. As if nothing has happened. As if the death of Andrew Lumb means nothing. I am not sure we can do that. I would like to try.

  She goes to the fridge, opens it and rummages in the freezer section. She takes out two ice lollies. An orange one and a lemon one. I am puzzled by her behaviour. She offers them both to me; I choose the orange one. She then leads the way to the kitchen table, and we sit down opposite each other.

  I am nonplussed by this sudden return to normality. I do not know what to say. She is licking and sucking the top of her ice lolly, head down, not looking at me. I am distracted, watching her, by my thoughts. I focus on eating my ice lolly, assuming that, as we finish, we will have a conversation that will somehow clear the air. I don’t know how that can be.

  She finishes eating her lolly first, laying the stick out in front of her on the table.

  She waits for me. Head down in thought. She says nothing.

  As I finish my lolly, she takes the stick I lay next to hers on the table.

  She is then up and at the drawer by the kitchen sink. Takes out a ball of string. Scissors from the bottom of the block of knives on the side. A felt-tipped pen from the tub of pens and pencils on the window ledge. Back at the table.

  She fashions, from the lolly sticks and string, a small, slightly lopsided cross. Snips the ends of the string to tidy it up. Takes the felt-tipped pen and, her tongue sticking out in concentration, draws an a on one side of the cross and an l on the other.

  I follow her out of the kitchen and back into the hallway. She bends and puts the cross into the back of the soil in the pot and pushes it down carefully. Straightens it. She stands there, with me a step or two behind her, with her head bowed as if she is saying a few words of prayer.

  Then she is done. The moment has passed. She asks if she can make lunch. On her own. As if everything is just as it was.

  I agree, but say I have to sort next door first. As though I am doing no more than emptying rubbish into the big grey bin and dragging it out onto the driveway.

  I will meet her back in the kitchen in an hour, to start her off. She goes to fetch a change of clothes and heads to the bathroom.

  I stand on the landing and push open my daughter’s bedroom door. Where it all started with Andrew Lumb. In her bed. I strip the bed of its pillowcases, sheet and duvet cover.

  Go
downstairs and push them into the washing machine. I turn it on to the hottest setting. To wash away the evidence of Andrew Lumb.

  After I have put fresh bedding back on the bed and settled Fluffy in his basket, I start my careful checks from my cottage to his house.

  I look at every part of my daughter’s bedroom in turn. There is nothing obvious to see. But I don’t doubt that if police forensics were here, they would discover Andrew Lumb’s DNA and more. No matter how well she has bleached the surfaces and hoovered the floor, there will be something somewhere. I have to hope the police never get this far.

  I move to the landing, walk down and stand at the bottom of the cottage stairs, looking up, scanning to see any signs of Andrew Lumb’s fall. There is nothing so far as I can see. No dent in the wall or bloodstains on the stone floor. There may be invisible-to-the-eye evidence, a telltale sign under a microscope. There is nothing more I can do than to go over it all every day with bleach as thoroughly as I can, just in case.

  Then slowly, step by step, I go through into the kitchen and to the back door, looking for signs of his blood or anything else anywhere. Again, I see nothing at all. Police forensics might well turn something up though. There may be a hair or a flake of dandruff or an invisible pinprick of his blood. She has cleaned thoroughly from the bedroom to the back door, but something will have slipped through.

  If the police come this far, I am done for.

  No point pretending, nor fooling myself. They will uncover something. A microbe.

  I have to make sure they have no reason to ever look here.

  I go out onto my patio and look towards the gate. The snow is inches deep in places, flattened in others. I can see the trail of his dragged body and a haphazard mess of my footsteps. There is a dark thread of something – blood – in the flattest part of the snow where I dragged the body.

  I fetch a shovel from the garage and scoop up the worst of it, dropping the first shovelful of snow into the drain that’s below the kitchen window. It sits there with its zigzag of blood close to the surface. I turn the tap on, but it is stiff; I cannot turn it far enough for water to splutter out and wash the bloody snow away.

  So I am in and out of the kitchen, heating up kettles and pouring the boiling water onto shovelful after shovelful of snow, until all the blood has disappeared down the drain. I then kick and spread and level out the remaining snow so that it looks as even as I can make it across the patio.

  Killing someone is not an easy thing to do, nor live with.

  I am haunted by what I have done.

  And, on a practical level, I have left a trail of evidence waiting to be uncovered.

  I go into the alleyway between the two properties and walk to Andrew Lumb’s gate. As I glance back, I see the imprints of the soles of my boots, here, there and all over, to and from my own gate. Overwhelming evidence that I have been in and out. And, again, more trails of blood. Spatters, really.

  I had hoped, against all forecasts, that there would have been fresh snow overnight, and that this would have covered any evidence between the two properties. There are reports of possible further snowfall tonight, but these are likely to be patchy showers rather than snow falling everywhere. And not this far east.

  I go back and forth again, taking a shovelful of bloody snow across to the kitchen drain and pouring boiling water onto it from a kettle. I do this three, four, five times. Absorbed in what I am doing. Being careful. When I am done, I fetch a broom from my garden shed and sweep the remaining snow and ice across and around, to make it look as natural as possible.

  I stop, satisfied. It does not look too bad. And if we have snowfall soon, it will leave everything just perfect.

  I look back over what I have done in the alleyway. Down towards the fields. Up to the lane.

  And I see a boy, Widow Woman’s grandson, standing there watching me. He has her dog on a lead.

  Looking up and at the boy seems to encourage him. That I am friendly and wish to talk. I am not, and I do not want to.

  He tugs the dog’s lead, and they walk down the alleyway towards me. This boy who does not seem to know he should not talk to strangers.

  I stand up straight and tall and look at him, not sure whether to smile or not. I do not feel like smiling. I am worried about what he has seen. How long he has been standing there.

  “Good morning,” he says politely, this precocious little child.

  “Hello,” I answer, nodding at him. The fat Labrador waits patiently.

  “What were you doing?” he asks, a touch of curiosity in his high-pitched voice.

  I look at the boy, his innocent face, a touch of blond hair sticking out from underneath his woolly hat. Wrapped up nice and warm in his matching clothes. This loved and cared-for child.

  If I am short with him, he will go home and tell his grandmother, and it might become an issue. So I will be polite, and he will go away. He will leave me alone and not think anything more of what he has seen.

  “I was … getting rid of some … dog … my dog …” I gesture towards the path.

  “My granny gives me bags.” The boy takes a handful of black bags from his pockets and shows them to me. As if I would never have heard of such things.

  There is a moment’s pause. Not an awkward one.

  Just that neither of us know what to say.

  I hope he will be on his way. Children are not meant to talk to strangers these days.

  “He’s my granny’s dog,” the boy says. “Barry.” He laughs, a little embarrassed. It is a happy sound. “My grandad was Barry,” he adds, to explain it for me.

  “I’m Conor,” he says. “With one n, not two.”

  I hesitate, about to say I’m Mr Adams, but the world is less formal these days, so I say, “I’m Philip.” I don’t think he is going to go away as quickly as I had hoped.

  He puts out his elbow, this well-taught child. Still mindful of COVID-19.

  I smile and put out my elbow, too.

  We do a clumsy elbow bump.

  “You know my granny,” he says. “She lives –”

  “Yes, I know her,” I interrupt. “She’s nice, your granny.” I’m not sure what else to say.

  “She lets me walk Barry on my own if I walk down here … through the alley. I then go round the fields and come back in a circle.” He draws the route in the air with his finger.

  I smile and nod, wanting him to be on his way, but without wanting to be rude to him. He seems a nice and polite boy.

  “My granny says to say hello to you if I see you. I saw you yesterday with a girl and your dog. I don’t think you saw me. I was playing hide-and-seek with my sister.” He hesitates, then adds quietly, “We were allowed out for some fresh air. We are not supposed to come down this end. Because of Andrew.”

  His voice tails off, as if he realises he shouldn’t have spoken of Andrew Lumb. He pulls the lead, and the dog gets to its feet.

  The revelation that he has seen Rosie with me is a shock. I wonder what that might mean for me. And what else he might have seen without me noticing him.

  And the reference to “Andrew” alarms me. I had assumed Andrew Lumb was alone and unnoticed by the world around him.

  “Andrew …?” I ask.

  The boy glances around, as if his granny might be standing just behind him.

  “My granny says not to talk to him,” the boy answers. “He comes out and says hello when he sees me.”

  The boy now seems a little nervous.

  “What does he talk to you about?” I ask conversationally.

  “Football. We both support Ipswich.”

  I nod and smile. Letting him talk on.

  “He said he has a signed football shirt he’s going to show me when he next sees me. From 1978. When they won the FA Cup. It’s on his wall. Signed by Kevin Beattie. I’m not supposed to go in. But I’d like to see it.”

  He looks pensive and unsure.

  This sudden sharing of information with me, almost in confidence, as if I were
his grandfather. His grandpa.

  “I think he’s away at the moment,” I reply. “Andrew. He’s gone to visit his grandparents … in Colchester.” I nod. Yes, that’s the best thing to say.

  The boy looks confused. I can’t help but think he was expecting to see the football shirt today.

  He ponders that for a moment. Then he says goodbye, and he and the fat Labrador are on their way.

  I hope that’s the last I see of him. But something about the encounter unsettles me and makes me feel uneasy. That I have somehow made a mistake.

  I am not sure what that mistake is.

  16

  Friday, 29 November, 1.01 Pm

  I decide to do Andrew Lumb’s house and patio later. After lunch. I am preoccupied with thoughts of the boy. And I do not want to leave Rosie alone in the cottage for longer than I have to.

  I had assumed she wanted to make sandwiches. Or something equally simple. That these might be ready on the table with glasses of squash on my return.

  But no. She wants to have a go at bolognese again. On her own this time. And she has been waiting for me to return.

  We go through the whole rigmarole. Turning on the computer. Reaching for my notebook. She taps each letter and number of the password into the computer. Oh so slowly. She then clicks Google on the home screen, and I tell her to put Bolognese … B-o-l-o-g-n-e-s-e … space … recipe … r-e-c-i-p-e into the search. She stumbles over some of the letters – stopping, bewildered, when I say space – and by the time we have found a recipe with pictures, I have just about had enough.

  I then have to point to each ingredient in turn and say what it is. Some are obvious. Others less so. Most of the ingredients I have, but not all of them. I tell her where they are and why the ones I don’t have are not that important. She looks uncertain. She then asks if I can print off the recipe. I don’t know why, since she cannot read properly. But I agree to it. My colour ink cartridge is low, and the print-off is rather faint. She looks at it for a moment without speaking as if she is thinking, This isn’t very good. It is all I can do to stay calm and polite.