Where was Olivia?
He popped his head around the study door and saw her handbag hanging on the chair. She had not mentioned what she was doing today. He searched his memory, sifting out clues. Last night, she’d said something about a briefing from a client, but he’d tuned out after that.
Her mobile phone was still off. After Aster’s panicked call, he’d rung his wife every ten minutes, with no success. But the car was on the drive so she couldn’t have gone far.
For the first time, he appreciated the enormity of moving to a place without friends or family. He’d had no one to call on and ask them to check on the children.
Aster was old enough to look after Evan, but the incident with the grill had made him doubt the wisdom of leaving them alone. He wasn’t convinced his daughter could be trusted.
Back in Cheshire, a few weeks before they had moved, he and Liv had spent the evening at a gallery opening. Aster was supposed to be babysitting. Instead she had met friends at a roller-skating rink and left her sleeping brother on his own. Her irresponsible behaviour had only been discovered because he and Olivia had argued and come home early.
And his daughter had a teenager’s flair for exaggeration. He’d fully expected to find his wife at home, full of apologies. But there was no sign of her. Concern stroked its fingers across his neck.
Evan burst in, face pink, hair damp. He was wearing his goalie gloves. ‘Hi, Dad. I was in the garden. Heard you shouting. I’m hungry. Where’s Mum?’
‘I don’t know, son.’ Garrick glanced at his watch. ‘Where’s Aster?’
Evan flushed. ‘I don’t know.’
His father narrowed his eyes. ‘Has she gone out too?’
Evan scratched his head. ‘I’m hungry, Dad. Can I have something to eat?’
‘For Christ’s sake, I can’t believe she left you by yourself again.’ He sounded angrier than he meant to and knew he was projecting it onto the wrong target. He forced himself to calm down and assess the facts.
He hadn’t seen Olivia since they had both gone to bed at a quarter to twelve the previous night. Her mobile phone was switched off, her handbag discarded. She had not left a note for the children or told anyone she was going out.
Put like that, it didn’t look good.
‘Come on,’ he said to Evan. ‘I’ll make us both a sandwich and we’ll decide what to do.’
‘I’ll be there in a sec, Dad. Just want to get something from my room.’
Evan sat down on the edge of his bed and tipped up his Magic 8 Ball.
‘Is Mum safe?’ he whispered, a twist of worry in his stomach.
The words took a couple of seconds to appear. Reply hazy, try again.
At the same time, his father’s voice drifted up the stairs.
‘Is that Detective Sergeant Stanton? I’m so sorry to trouble you, but I don’t know who else to call. My name is Garrick Lockwood and I think my wife is missing.’
62
Tuesday, 31 July 2018
32 The Avenue – 2.17 p.m.
A flare of adrenaline lit French from inside. Instinct switched itself on. He must read Lovell his rights, handcuff him, call for immediate back-up.
Don’t touch anything. Stop Lovell from leaving. Oh, fuck. Fuck it. I’ve done it. I’ve caught the fucking Doll Maker.
Like electrical sparks, his thoughts jumped and arced, and he turned to Lovell, baton raised, ready to arrest him.
Lovell took a step towards him and French brought his baton down on the old man’s arm with a smacking sound.
‘Hands on your head. Stay where you are.’
A livid red mark was rising on the skin above Lovell’s wrist bone. ‘Now why did you have to do that?’ he said, rubbing it. He took another step towards French.
‘Stay back,’ said the police officer, his voice cracking on the last letter. French hit him again.
But although Lovell was older, he was rangier and stronger, and now he was up close, French could read the writing on the pin – Per Mare, Per Terram. He had half a second to register Royal Marines before Old Man Lovell squeezed his fingers against French’s throat, putting pressure on his vagus nerve.
His vision blurred, and a strange popping sensation in his ears deadened the sound of the birds and the drone of a passing car on the street outside. He could smell Lovell’s breath – sour coffee and plaque – and noticed the old man had blackheads on his nose, and that his mouth was shaping a single word.
Sorry.
In less than eight seconds, French was unconscious.
63
Tuesday, 31 July 2018
25 The Avenue – 2.22 p.m.
DS Wildeve Stanton was the first to arrive.
She parked by the Lockwood family home and considered her position. Technically, she was on leave. She should pass the details of Mr Lockwood’s call to the investigating team and stay out of it.
But empathy was opening her car door and pushing her up the path. A woman had disappeared. A wife and a mother. Wildeve knew what it was to lose someone.
To lose everyone.
In the garden next door, a bank of stargazer lilies was in flower. Their scent was dense and cloying, and it transported Wildeve back to her teenage self. To the feel of the wooden bench beneath her knees. The heavy crematorium curtain. To the sound of crying and the weight of anxious glances and her folded hands, pink with cold.
So excited, she’d been. Alone overnight for the first time. Her parents were visiting family in Glossop, taking her younger sister with them. They’d tried to persuade her to come, but she’d begged off, citing revision. No need to mention her friend Lily’s party.
Fifteen years old. Loosening the strings. Flirting with adulthood. Studying for exams, acquiring a taste for white lies and alcopops. Discovering herself.
When she’d returned home at half past eight that Sunday morning – her mother had arranged to ring the landline at nine – a police car was waiting outside.
She had pulled her coat tighter, last night’s mascara smudged beneath her eyes, hair mussed up from sleeping on the floor, and reached for her door key. A cursory glance, that’s all she had given them. Her mind had been full of the way that Martin Stokes had kept staring at her and their brief kiss in the downstairs toilet, and how he had promised to phone her from the call box on the corner of his street that evening. In that self-absorbed way of teenagers, she had not – for even a beat in time – considered they were there for her.
The WPC – they were called that back then – had droopy eyes and smelled of coal tar soap. She had made Wildeve a glass of lemon squash. Even now, she couldn’t bear the taste of it.
She had been brief and matter-of-fact.
A head-on collision with a lorry crossing Snake Pass.
All three of them killed at the scene.
Instantaneous.
The police officer had tried to comfort her, had offered to make calls on Wildeve’s behalf. Had fussed about who was going to take care of her and where she would live.
‘I’m sixteen tomorrow,’ Wildeve had said, head bowed, staring at her Doc Marten boots. Dull-voiced. In shock. ‘I’ll stay here. I’ll be fine.’
Fine.
And she had been. Not immediately. The loss of her family had almost broken her. She had cried for months for the future no longer promised to her. No mother, warm and sensible, to offer advice on relationships. No proud father at her graduation. No sister to share secrets and clothes with. The loss of unconditional love. But she had survived. Friends and family had rallied round. Shopped. Cooked. Washed her bedding and driven her to school. But the kindnesses had gradually faded, as most kindnesses do. And she had been left on her own. Not yet seventeen and already self-sufficient.
She might have veered off the rails, but her desire to join the police had fuelled her study. She had filled her family’s absence with schoolwork, and she had excelled. As soon as she was old enough, she had applied to join the Force.
But she had never sought promo
tion at work, had actively shied away from it. Not because she was daunted by the responsibility of becoming an inspector, but because she remembered being that teenager, the fear of it all, and wanted to stay at the coalface of policing.
And she was fine. But the abrupt ending of her childhood had left its scars. Youngsters who experience tragedy in their formative years often struggle to cry later in life, even in the eye of fresh trauma, Wildeve had learned during her police training. And so it was for her. Sometimes she wondered if she had cried so much as a teenager there was nothing left but dust and ashes. In the dark hours of the night after Adam’s death, she had longed for release, the relief of tears, but it was denied her. Every now and then, the dam broke, but it was only a temporary respite. It might be years before it happened again. And it didn’t mean she didn’t care. Never that. Adam had shown her that she still had the capacity to love.
But she knew she would survive. She had done it before.
Garrick Lockwood opened the door, the beginnings of a five o’clock shadow on his chin.
‘I hope I’m not wasting your time,’ he said.
Her second visit in less than twenty-four hours. If she hadn’t been on her way to see Lovell, she might have called it in to another officer. But it suited her. She could keep an eye out for French while she was here, and make sure their paths didn’t cross. She followed Mr Lockwood into the kitchen. He was washing a plate and his hair was sticking up, as if he’d been clutching at it.
She had decided on a compromise. Not a lie, exactly. But not the whole truth.
‘I’m not sure I’m the best person to be talking to,’ she said. ‘I can pass on your details to the team, if you’d like.’
He had his back to her, fiddling one-handed with the sponge. ‘I’d rather speak to you. You’ve met her.’
Let it go, Wild. If you think it’s got legs, you can pass it on yourself.
Adam was right. For now, she would listen.
Garrick talked her through his wife’s disappearing act. The empty glass on the patio. The lack of a note. His assumption that she had been asleep in the spare room with the door shut when he’d left for his interview at the crack of dawn.
‘Phone?’ said Wildeve.
‘It’s off. I can’t find it.’
‘You’ve tried friends and family?’
‘Yes, no sign of her.’
‘Purse, house keys?’
‘In her handbag.’
Wildeve inspected her bitten nails before looking up at him. For an adult without ongoing mental health issues, in the absence of a suicide note, without any other indicators of harm, Olivia Lockwood fell under the umbrella of low-risk. She’d only been gone a few hours. Not long enough to panic. But what elevated this case was the nine-year-old boy. Few women willingly walked out on their responsibilities without some kind of explanation. But their father seemed invested, so it wasn’t a social services job. Not yet.
‘Mr Lockwood?’ She met his gaze. His reaction was important. So many husbands were behind the disappearances of their wives. This wasn’t a formal interview. No caution given. No record taken. Technically, she wasn’t on duty. But it would help her decide what to do next.
‘I know this is a difficult question, but do you have any reason to suspect she might be with someone she doesn’t want you to know about?’
A light went off in his eyes. He was drying the plate with a tea towel and kept rubbing the same spot.
‘Mr Lockwood?’
He turned to her and she saw his despair. ‘It’s possible.’
‘Tell me everything,’ she said.
His name was Orson Heller. He was four years younger than Olivia, and they’d worked at the same advertising agency in Manchester.
Late nights working on pitches with tight deadlines had turned into drinks had turned into a sixteen-month affair.
‘How did you find out?’ Wildeve felt the pull of pity.
‘Same old story.’ He placed two mugs of coffee on the table and sat down opposite her. ‘She’d left her phone on the armrest when she went to answer the front door. I picked it up to check the time because I was supposed to be collecting Evan from football.’ He sighed. ‘A message popped up. It was clear they’d fu—’ His son clattered into the kitchen, helped himself to a biscuit, and left again. ‘Slept together.’
‘Is it over?’
‘So she says.’
‘When did it end?’
‘About six months ago.’
To Wildeve, a complex equation of emotion was written across his face. Concern, warmth, a sense of holding oneself at arm’s length.
‘But you’re still together?’
His laugh bulged with bitterness. Then, as a concession to Wildeve’s question, ‘We’re doing our best. That’s one of the reasons we moved here.’
‘And is it working?’
He shrugged, as if he didn’t care. ‘Who knows? But if we’re to make a new start, I – it’s – this state of limbo is damaging to us all.’ His voice cracked. ‘I don’t think she loves me anymore.’
He started to cry and her own eyes pricked. In his loneliness, she saw the reflection of her own. Wildeve got up from the table, stood behind his chair and touched his shoulder to comfort him. He looked up at her and she looked back, and then, from nowhere, the moment stretched into something else, and he was half out of his seat, moving towards her, his hand drifting up her back, and she didn’t move. Didn’t know what to think or what to feel except that she didn’t want to pull away because the touch of someone, anyone, was better than nothing at all.
The front door slammed. Both Wildeve and Garrick jumped. He dropped his hand and started out of the chair.
A mumbled apology. And then, ‘Liv?’ The hope in his voice was convincing.
The kitchen door flew open.
But it wasn’t Olivia Lockwood. Instead it was her daughter, tallow-faced and trembling.
‘Aster?’ He was sharp with disappointment, and shame at his own behaviour. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Is Mum back yet?’
‘No, love.’
Aster burst into tears. ‘There’s a man on the street who’s killed his wife and he’s got a gun and he was shouting and what if he’s got Mum?’
The detective moved so quickly she knocked into a chair and it scraped across the kitchen floor.
‘Who is he?’ she said. Again, more urgently. ‘Who is he?’
Aster could hardly speak because she was crying so much. ‘I think his name is Trefor Lovell.’
Wildeve’s stomach plunged, and she was running down the hall, and all the while these words beat a drum in her brain: French was right, French was right, French was right.
64
Tuesday, 31 July 2018
32 The Avenue – 2.23 p.m.
Trefor Lovell was screwed.
He knew it, and when the police officer lying on his bedroom carpet woke up, he would know it too.
Trefor crouched next to the man and eased a pillow under his head. Tilted his chin in case he was sick. Five minutes or so. If he hadn’t come round by then, he’d call the ambulance himself.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. Muttered an expletive and placed his fingers on the pulse point at the base of the detective’s throat, to make sure he was still breathing. He was. Trefor thanked the heavens for small mercies.
The afternoon sun spilled into the bedroom. Even in the last couple of hours, the heat had intensified the smell. The bunches of lavender he’d hung from the curtain pole and the lamp shade and door handle had helped to mask it, but it hadn’t been enough to smother it completely.
For the last few months he’d been dreading the fall of the guillotine, but now it had happened, he felt strangely calm, as if he had been poised for it all along, neck exposed on the block.
He looked at his wife and he thought he might cry.
He had kept her safe for eight months. Placing her in the chest freezer in the garage a couple of days after she died,
almost breaking his arm as he slipped on the icy path. Bringing her back into their home on the nights his grief threatened to swallow him, a black mouth of sorrow and despair. Laying her on the bed, still wearing her favourite nightdress.
Light as a feather, she’d been when she died. A sparrow. That first time, he’d carried her body by himself. But the freezer had weighted her down. Now he couldn’t manage on his own. He had to use a pallet truck to lift the rigid shape of her, and tie a sheet around her waist to drag her upstairs.
They’d accused him of killing her, those dirty-mouthed kids. The police would think the same. But it wasn’t like that. He could never have hurt Annie. But the disease had eaten her from the inside without either of them knowing.
First symptoms in November. Diagnosed in December. Dead by January.
Her hands had been like paper at the end, dry as dust. She had placed one on his cheek.
‘Let me go,’ she had said.
His sorrow had spilled over, tears streaking the hollows of his face. He had turned away from the bed so she wouldn’t see.
‘I’m sorry,’ he had said, wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his jumper.
‘Don’t be sorry.’ Her voice was soft. ‘Your tears show me that you still feel something for this old, useless body of mine.’ She’d tried to laugh, but it had turned into a cough and she’d squeezed his hand. He’d stroked the back of hers with his thumb. The hand he had held for fifty-nine years, that had guided and steadied him, that had shown him love in a thousand tiny ways.
He’d stayed with her for hours, listening to the rattle in her throat, the rapid breaths and then the long pauses between breathing, reluctant to leave, even to use the bathroom or fetch himself a drink.
He was still holding her hand when her grip slackened and the room flatlined into silence.
It wasn’t planned. Not at first. He’d had every intention of calling the doctor, of registering her death and organizing her funeral. But he was lost in the woods, couldn’t find his way out.
The Neighbour Page 17