With her eyes, she pleaded for her life.
35
Monday, 30 July 2018
The Avenue – 9.06 p.m.
‘What do you think?’
DS Wildeve Stanton was standing in the middle of the street, the night shading in around her. A few late crows flew overhead and their silhouettes were slashes in the sky.
The houses watched her. Inside those brick boxes, the unfolding of lives. Baths and televisions, music and dinner, glasses of wine and cups of tea. So ordinary. And heart- breaking.
She turned away from French, that tilt of grief again.
‘It’s getting late,’ he said. ‘We’d better come back in the morning. Can’t knock on doors at this time of night.’
He was right. The older inhabitants of The Avenue might find late visitors unsettling, especially in the current climate. But she didn’t want to go home.
She stared down the street towards number thirty-two, replaying Cooper Clifton’s words. ‘He said he was on his way to talk to Trefor Lovell.’ With his doll business and easy access to the woods, Lovell had been an early suspect, but he’d had an alibi for the second murder – an old friend had vouched for him – and they had ruled him out, taking him in for questioning and dismissing him as a harmless oddity. But she wondered how thorough her colleague’s investigations had been. There had been talk of a wife, but no one had seen or spoken to her. She wracked her brains, trying to remember what information they had on file for him. Perhaps he was worth a closer look. But it would have to wait until tomorrow now.
‘How long do you think Mac’s going to last? I reckon he’ll be out within the week.’ French was jangling his keys, gleeful at the prospect.
‘Don’t, Bernie. He’s doing the best he can.’
‘Not good enough, though, is it? Sorry to bring it up and all that, but you, of all people, must be thinking if we’d caught the killer by now, Adam would still be here.’
His words slapped her. Because even though they were crass, carelessly tossed at her without compassion, there was truth in them. She did think it. Chest tightening, she took two or three shallow breaths and followed the progress of the birds.
‘Five murders is fucking ridiculous. My mother could do a better job.’
‘Well, get your mother here sharpish.’ The air snapped with her anger. ‘And you shouldn’t slag off Mac in front of me or anyone else. It’s unprofessional.’ She waited for him to apologize, but he shrugged. An urge for solitude tugged at her. ‘Come on, let’s go home.’
Wildeve had always hated coming back to an empty house. She loved the flicker of candles against the window, lit squares of warmth inviting her in. A paper-wrapped bouquet of mismatched roses that Adam had picked up from the flower seller by the station as she was closing her stall. The smell of dinner cooking. But now there was no one to welcome her.
The pain in her head had confined itself to an occasional stretch of its claws. Sometimes an attack could last for days and days, and she would lie in bed in the mornings, still half asleep, braced for the first strike, but there was silence, and for that she was grateful.
She slid her key into the lock. French had invited her for a pint, but the idea of listening to him drone on about Mac’s failings was even less appetizing than the prospect of an evening alone.
That’s not to say she hadn’t been briefly tempted. Time to think was the opposite of what she wanted. And she had clocked the sideways glances from some of her colleagues, could read their unspoken questions. Why is she at work? Why isn’t she crying? Do you think they were splitting up before he died? It’s only been a day. She can’t possibly have loved him that much.
But she had loved him. All of him. The part of him that forgot her birthday, and left his trousers on the floor, and had to have the last word, just as much as the part of him that made sure she ate, and laughed at her jokes, and listened, and always, always smiled when he saw her.
She wasn’t one for crying, that was all.
Emotion did not fill her up, it drained her until she was as empty and dry as the mud-cracked streams and gullies struggling in this unending heat.
Upstairs, she rummaged through the washing bin until she found one of his old T-shirts. It was crumpled and sweat-stained and beautiful.
She climbed into bed on his side. His pillow smelled of the aftershave he had worn for as long as she had known him. She buried her face in it, breathing him in.
Loneliness, the heaviest weight of them all, pressed down on her. Wildeve closed her eyes, imagined herself walking through the dark universe of her grief, looking for a pinprick of light in the distance. Her body was shaking, dozens of tiny tremors that she could not control.
Five minutes passed. Ten minutes. Half an hour.
Dry-eyed, she eventually propped herself up, leaning into his pillow. A glass of stale water was on his nightstand. A photograph of their summer holiday in Sardinia. A well-thumbed thriller by his favourite writer.
He was never coming home.
Another stone settled on the pile in her stomach.
Where were you, Adam? Who did this to you? I wish you were with me now. I wish you could talk to me.
The ceiling light flickered in her bedroom and was followed by the thud of something heavy falling.
Wildeve jumped and knocked over the glass, water spilling onto the carpet. A power surge, that was all, and an attack of clumsiness. When the thrumming in her veins had calmed, she leaned over the side of the bed. The hardback had slid onto the floor, its spine cracked, its pages fanning out like the feathers of a bird. But it wasn’t that which caught her attention.
Lying on the carpet was a folded sheaf of paperwork.
She gathered up the documents. Surprised, she began to read. The first was a handwritten statement about the disappearance of Bridget Sawyer, owner of a toy emporium. Dated September 1966 and covered in rows and rows of spidery writing, it was clear it had been sitting in a police file for several years. It had been photocopied three times.
There were also two photocopies of a yellowing newspaper picture caption dated nineteen years later, a row of five children clustered around a striped puppet booth in what appeared to be a reopening of the same toy shop.
She wondered how these had ended up in Adam’s possession. It was a loosely guarded secret that some police officers ‘lost’ evidence that didn’t support their theories. When they’d knocked down the old police station at Greenham Lane, twenty-seven case files had been found at the bottom of the lift shaft, the mother of all hiding places. But it looked like this case had simply been forgotten.
The light bulb flickered again, making it difficult to read. Wildeve scanned the text, and two words jumped out at her.
The Avenue.
She stared at the writing, trying to make sense of it. Could this have been what Adam was investigating? But how were the two events linked? And what did it mean?
She looked skywards. Is this what you’re trying to tell me?
The light flickered a final time and went out.
36
Now
The phenomenon of collective hysteria has always intrigued me.
What prompted a convent of French nuns to assume the behaviour of cats until their mewls were whipped from them by soldiers? How was it possible for eighty-five schoolgirls to faint, one after the other, like a run of dominoes?
I did not believe in the truth of it until the events in the shop on that day.
The crow puppet had not proved as successful as I’d hoped.
When it swooped down and attacked the ballerina, one or two of the children started to cry. In my haste to hide it away, to pack all the puppets back into their boxes and recapture some of the earlier joy, I didn’t notice that one of the girls had become so distressed that she had left the shop floor and found her way into the old storeroom.
The door was supposed to be locked. And you were supposed to have locked it. But it was too late to do anything about that.
/> Her screams fractured the peace of the shop, one after the other, layers of fear and disgust.
All of us ran towards the source of the cry. The young blonde girl. She was standing at the back of the storeroom. Thumb in her mouth. Tears streaking her face. A mangy peacock feather boa twisted around her neck.
But I wasn’t looking at her.
She was standing next to a hand-carved toy chest that had been tucked away for as long as I could remember, hidden under piles of mouldering fancy dress costumes and surrounded by boxes. Those costumes were now pooled on the floor, as if she had swept them off in her fervour to reach the feather boa. The lid was an open mouth.
No.
I longed to pluck the key from a clockwork mouse and turn back the hours and minutes, to before this moment, this day.
But it was too late.
A ball of dusty candyfloss hair, the shape of a body carved from bone and wood, the remote stink of an emptied rubbish bin.
Knees pulled into its ribcage, body folded in half to fit the space. Teeth bared where the skin had retracted over nineteen years, pulling tight across the bones of the cheeks.
A leathered stick wearing a wristwatch with the sharp-edged face I knew so well.
The child took one look at my expression, unplugged her thumb and screamed again. That sharp, high sound infected the child next to her, who also began to scream. The sound passed to each child, a contagion. Within eight or nine seconds, all of them were screaming, crying, clutching at each other, pulling at their neighbour’s clothes. Their screams filled all of the empty space inside the shop. Inside me. Filling my ears and my head and fuelling my anger. I wanted to shake the silence into them, to hear the snap of their necks. Self-control.
You did not know what to do. You ran amongst them, trying to calm them, to muffle the cries. But I knew it even then. Each intake of breath, each scream punctured another hole in the life I had built.
‘It’s not real.’ I forced myself to laugh. ‘It’s another of my puppets.’ I touched the grey hair to show I wasn’t afraid and slammed shut the lid. ‘It’s just pretend, children.’ I said it over and over again until the screams had subsided into gulping sobs and blotchy cheeks, and they had been ushered from the storeroom. I repeated the words until I believed them myself.
There was nothing else for it. I doled out more lollipops and invited every child to choose a toy to keep. As I handed over the beribboned bags, I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood and whispered to each of them that the puppet with the grey wispy hair was cursed and would come for them and their families if they dared to breathe a word.
‘Sorry,’ you said, flicking anxious glances in my direction, but I was too angry to answer you.
By the time the parents arrived to collect them, the children were docile enough to go home, more than a little subdued.
I sold one paltry toy that day.
37
Tuesday, 31 July 2018
27 The Avenue – 12.01 a.m.
A boy’s laugh was playing on repeat.
Audrina sat up in bed, placed her hands over her ears and began to sing loudly to herself.
‘Who would true valour see, let him come hither; one here will constant be, come wind, come weather . . .’
She stopped singing. The laughter was gone. The lamp in her bedroom was throwing down shadows, but the echo of his childish joy filled her heart. Oh, Joby. The arrival of the boy next door had unsettled her, that was all. Filled her head with memories best forgotten.
She switched off the light and lay in darkness. A rhythmic buzzing filled her up, like the march of a hundred-strong army of tin soldiers.
She curled herself into a ball and drew the pillow over her face. But when Cooper joined her half an hour later, she was still awake. He drew her shaking body to him, and it calmed her.
The night rolled into early morning, passing into yesterday.
But her sleep was restless, the voices of the past crowding her dreams. Joby. Mavis. The dead who haunted the woods across the street.
When she awoke, sweat gathered in the small of her back, nightie stuck to her skin, the room was in darkness save for a patch of moonlight, the air so warm it seemed to breathe.
Too overheated to do more than lie still, Audrina listened for the voices, but they had quietened for now, disappearing through the cracks in the walls.
The clock on her bedside table ticked away the minutes. 2.57 a.m. 2.58 a.m. 2.59 a.m. She stared at the hands as they continued their inexorable progress, unable to relax, to even shift herself into a more comfortable position. She was wide awake, her body tensed and waiting, biting the skin around her nails. She listened for a while longer, trying to catch the sound of the en suite toilet flushing, but there was no doubt about it. The room was too quiet, the absence of his heavy breathing louder than he was.
Audrina lay motionless under the rose-patterned bedspread, and she knew what all this silence meant: Cooper’s side of the bed was empty and she didn’t know where he had gone.
38
Tuesday, 31 July 2018
25 The Avenue – 3.01 a.m.
On the other side of the wall, Olivia Lockwood was also awake.
Garrick’s snoring had dragged her from sleep and now it was eluding her. She was worrying about money and whether the children would settle into their new schools and if this house was a millstone they would regret for the rest of their lives. She blinked into the darkness, fully alert now. A distraction was needed. She felt on her bedside table for her Kindle, but found only tissues and a packet of throat lozenges. And then she remembered: the journey from Cheshire. She had left it in the car.
And, Lord, the heat. The energy-sucking heat. Even though she was only wearing a T-shirt, she wanted to tear off her skin. The back of her neck, where skin met hair, was damp. The sheets were damp. A motorbike revved its engine somewhere in the distance. This place was not home. It was strange, full of unfriendly noises. She licked her dry lips. Imagined a tall glass of juice. Her mouth watered. She slipped on her dressing gown, decorated with the urgent red of poppies and their deep black eyes, grabbed her mobile and walked softly across the bedroom.
It was thirty-one hours since he had texted her. In that time, she had checked her mobile fifteen, twenty times for every hour that passed, but there had been no more messages.
She should delete his number. Block him. She had promised Garrick it was over. It was over.
Except she missed him. And she wanted him to miss her too. To fight for her. Which was pretty shitty when one thought about it.
The kitchen floor was cool underfoot, the grapefruit juice tart and cold. The hit of sugar did not encourage her back to bed.
Instead, she refilled her glass, rummaged in the drawer for the car keys and quietly opened the back door, heading for the patio outside. She sat on the edge of a wooden chair, her phone on her lap. Play it cool. Let him contact her.
The dazzling white of a security light flooded next door’s garden. She looked up sharply, a wash of anxiety dampening her top lip. Fox. Or badger. The estate agent had mentioned this area was a haven for wildlife, and there were occasional sightings of muntjac deer. A moth bumped repeatedly against the ancient outdoor light above her head. So much wasted energy. Her fingers played across the cool metal casing of her phone.
Don’t do it.
Her thumb brushed the screen, bringing it to life. She knew he’d be awake or dozing. He was a night owl like she was.
Next door, a noise shattered the silence, the sound of a terracotta plant pot being knocked over and breaking. Olivia jumped, her heart knocking in her chest. She held herself still, listening to the sounds of the night, for the footsteps of an intruder. She rose from her seat, prepared to investigate.
A dark shape crossed the garden and she inhaled sharply, then laughed at herself. The badger was making its presence known.
She collapsed back into the chair, sipped her juice and typed a single word.
Hey
.
Within a minute, he had replied.
Hey. How’s it going?
OK, I guess.
Only OK?
She drew in a breath, held it. What could she say? A tiny message icon appeared on her screen, sparking another powerful adrenaline rush.
Liv, I thought we weren’t going to do this. But for what it’s worth, I miss you.
A surge of elation. And then another message from him.
I’m down south for work. Do you want to meet?
Ten words that might just change her future. Did she want to meet him? She was hooked on the excitement of illicit texting, she was honest enough with herself to admit that. But they had drawn a line under their affair, knowing how much it had hurt others. If she were to meet him, it would mean that her family’s move – which had come at great financial and psychological cost to all of them – would have been for nothing.
She gazed across her new garden and then up to the window above, where Evan was sleeping. He was still so young. Aster would be all right, she was tough as nails. But her son was much more sensitive. Another five years, that was all. Then she would be free.
Her phone was almost out of battery, but the charger was upstairs and she wasn’t ready to go up yet. In a couple of minutes, when she had replied to him, she would wander down the driveway to retrieve her Kindle from the car. Then she would return to the garden and sit a while longer until her eyes grew heavy enough for sleep.
A fierce expression crossed her face. She tapped out her reply. Deleted it. Tapped another.
Can’t. I’m sorry.
It was the last message she ever sent him.
39
Tuesday, 31 July 2018
26 The Avenue – 3.12 a.m.
A mass of noctilucents.
Fletcher Parnell pressed his face against the window and breathed out his admiration, misting the glass. Imagine if he had missed out on this.
He often had trouble sleeping. Sign of a guilty conscience, his mother used to joke. Back when she was alive. Back when everything was different. But not tonight. Tonight he was awake because it was the start of one of his favourite events in the celestial calendar: the Perseid meteor shower.
The Neighbour Page 11