Think outside the box, Mathilda. Dig a little deeper and instead of stones, you might uncover diamonds.
She shone her torch onto the roof of his mouth, across the upper and lower jaw. At the back of his mouth, buried in his left molar, was a brownish speck. Using a pair of tweezers, she removed it from his tooth and placed it in a sterile plastic bag.
In the morning, she would order checks on the remaining bodies and their teeth, and closer analysis of the stomach contents.
She pushed the metal tray holding Adam Stanton back into place. Her sharp ears caught a tiny sound, almost like an escaping sigh, and if she had been a fanciful woman, she might have said that Adam was breathing out his relief that at last she was on the right path.
But she wasn’t a fanciful woman, she was a rational one. Her only concern was whether she could find the answer before the killer claimed another life.
80
Wednesday, 1 August 2018
The Avenue – 2.25 a.m.
The postman had stopped going home.
She was there when he lay in the darkness of his bedroom, and when he sat at the kitchen table, his meal turning to cardboard in his mouth. And once, when he had gone upstairs to run a bath, she was lying in the tub with a scalpel sticking out of her eye.
He had taken to sleeping in the back of his van. A camping mattress and a pillow, and he could snatch a few hours’ rest. But the truth was he couldn’t escape her, even there. She haunted him. And so did his mistakes.
The postman had been dozing for a couple of hours when he sat up abruptly, his hair stuck to his forehead in the moist heat of the night. For a minute, he forgot where he was, and he was back in the basement of the club, the woman lying dead on the bloodstained concrete, the thump of the bass and the smell of sweat and testosterone. He lay back on the mattress, his hands behind his head.
Wide-eyed, alone, in the darkness.
81
Wednesday, 1 August 2018
25 The Avenue – 2.26 a.m.
Evan stood outside the back door, cloaked in the shadows of the night-time garden.
He had almost changed his mind when he’d crept past the lamplit sitting room and seen the top of his father’s head rising above the armchair. He had paused, uncertain, and then his ears had picked out the steady rhythm of his father’s breathing. The boy guessed he’d been waiting up all night for their mother to come home and had succumbed, briefly, to sleep. Another pang of sorrow lit his heart.
The heat was beginning to break up, and a freshening breeze shook the leaves until they danced. Evan didn’t like it. The muttering of the dry leaves represented all the things he had come to fear; the whisper of ghosts, and the unseen. He smelled rain. The bushes rustled and his heart jumped.
The treehouse loomed at the distant end of the garden. For a boy of nine, it seemed a long way away. The copse behind it was a smudge on the horizon, a portal into the dark world of his imagination. Through the gloom, Evan was certain he saw shapes with stick arms marching onwards, an army of tree men. He almost turned back then. But he pressed on, his stubborn heart set on finding the answers to the mystery of the cassette.
82
Now
You did not believe me.
The children in the shop on the day of the Grand Reopening – that date, Saturday, 20 July 1985, is scored into me even now – had allowed themselves to be fooled, but you were different. You pulled away from me when I reached for your hand, shrank into yourself as we walked home. Took yourself off to bed as soon as the door closed behind us.
You had taken one look at the watch on her wrist and known exactly who was in that forgotten chest in the storeroom. You refused to speak to me. You could read the guilt on my face.
Now, when I look back on that last day, I wish I might have told you the things I tell you now.
That I love you. That regrets are a waste of energy. That the past may not be undone. It simply is. That life is a series of complex events, shaping us into the selves we are. For all its glorious colours, we are shades of grey. That we are driven to act the way we do by instincts we do not understand. That as some are drawn to the light, some of us are compelled by darkness, our strength coming from the hidden places within. That we can never truly know what lies beneath the flash of a smile, a kindly word. We all wear masks.
But what happened that night was because of my careless tongue.
‘We need to get rid of it,’ I said, my mouth pressed to the telephone receiver. Seven words that set the wheels in motion.
You must have been listening. You flew down the stairs.
‘No,’ you said. ‘You have to call the police.’
You snatched up the handset from me, pressed down and cut the call. It was one of those old-style rotary telephones. I caught the dialling tone, the rotation of the finger wheel, the sound of the spring as the dial returned to its resting position.
Why did you do that? I wonder that, even now. Why did you not accept my half-truths and go to bed? In the morning it would have been an uncertain memory and in a year’s time, a forgotten one. I loved you so much. But not as much as I loved my own life.
You were quick. You had already dialled the second nine by the time I reacted. I pulled the wire from the wall. I wanted to talk to you, to explain everything, but you would not listen.
You ran from me, through the back door and into the garden. The heat of that summer as hot as this one, hotter perhaps, and burned into my memory.
I followed you, but you were scrambling over the fence and into the garden of the house next door. I watched you, climbing up the ladder – not rotten then – and into the treehouse you had been given permission to use whenever you liked.
Shadows had fallen across the garden. The neighbours – a young childless couple whose names I’ve long since forgotten – were on a round-the-world trip.
I took my time, enjoying the scent of the jasmine. My love wasn’t home. It was just you and me.
You were muttering, talking to someone who wasn’t there. But you stopped when you heard me coming. You were lying on your stomach on the treehouse floor, your hair sticking up in tufts. As I stood over you, I considered giving you the benefit of the doubt. But you were always one to keep your word, even at the age of ten.
You started to scream.
I only wanted you to be quiet.
83
Wednesday, 1 August 2018
25 The Avenue – 2.31 a.m.
Up high, in the heart of the tree, the wind in the leaves was as loud as rushing water. Evan was cold and wished he’d worn his dressing gown. A twig caught his cheek, tearing the skin. His fingers touched blood. The branches grasped at his hair and his pyjamas, and he struggled to free himself, his arms flailing, panic on his lips.
He was crying by the time he collapsed onto the hard boards of the treehouse floor, his torch casting shadows, startling him at every turn.
A plum fell onto the metal roof and the thump made him cry out, and he wanted nothing more than to be back in the safety of his bed, his mother and father bickering downstairs, the music blaring from his sister’s room, and the security of his family unit, everything as it should be.
He took several deep breaths, fighting to calm himself. In his head, he kept hearing the sound of the scream, and he didn’t want to think about it, but there it was, right at the front of his brain, and it made him think about all the dead people in the woods across the road, and he was scared, properly scared.
The wind was rising, the clouds scudding across the sky, speeded-up like when Aster fast-forwarded the television, and the moon was flashing on and off, like his torch, and he stood up, ready to leave, ready to forget everything he had come here to do, a powerful urge to crawl onto his daddy’s lap. Across the gardens, all he could see was the glint of silver light against the glass of the greenhouse next door.
The first faint spots of rain began to drum against the corrugated iron, and the wind was moaning and moaning, and the ladder was sh
aking as he began to climb down. A splinter of wood buried itself in the bulb of his thumb, and it made him think of the children’s collection of Shakespeare stories his mother had bought him.
By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.
Evan’s face was a pale daub in the darkness, one slipper resting on the third-from-top rung, his hand gripping the one above, torch stuffed down the band of his pyjama bottoms.
The wind was still moaning.
Except it didn’t sound like the wind anymore.
It sounded human.
Evan squeezed his eyes shut, and the speed of his heart was the echo of his childhood; the beat of a wooden spoon against a tub, the pound of a toy drum, the banging of his fists against a saucepan.
He wondered if the killer was coming for him and a sob rose in him. The police lady had said she was going to wait one more day until she started looking for his mother. He wondered if they always took that long. If the killer was in his garden, it would be too late for him. He would be dead by then.
But then he remembered that his mother had taught him to stand up to bullies, to find his courage and to use it, and he made himself open his eyes.
Evan peered over the edge of the ladder, in the direction of the sound. It was coming from the copse, but all he could see was a bank of trees, and the fence that ran across the length of the bottom of his garden.
He reached for his torch and switched it on, sweeping it across the copse, illuminating the claws of the trees, and they were reaching for him, and so he swung the torch lower until it ran across the inside of a deep drainage ditch that he had barely even noticed before.
His torch spotlit pockets of toadstools and dried mud, fallen leaves and ferns and weeds. He saw a flicker of movement, a mouse scrambling out of the way of the beam, and a sandal.
His mother’s sandal.
And lying in that ditch was a familiar shape in a poppy-red dressing gown.
84
Wednesday, 1 August 2018
The copse – 2.33 a.m.
Despite her family’s fears, Olivia Lockwood was not missing, nor was she dead. She was lying face down, dirt in her mouth and nose, leaves tangled in her hair, disoriented and dizzy, but very much alive.
Twisted beneath her was the leg that had broken in three places when she had stumbled into the ditch during the darkness of the previous night. Her wrist had snapped when she had thrust it outwards to break her fall. A large bruise was beginning to form near the top of her forehead. Although she did not know it yet, Olivia had suffered a linear fracture of her skull when she had smacked it against the corner of a wooden crate that had, in the extreme heat, worked its way to the surface of the dried-out and shrunken soil.
She had been unconscious for three or four hours after the fall, although she couldn’t remember the precise details of waking up, apart from an overwhelming sense of nausea. All she knew was the pain in her broken limbs had been so extreme that she had spent much of the last day in a semi-conscious state, drifting in and out of a patchy sort of greyness, unable even to muster the energy to call out.
The fence, trees, plant detritus and the deep sides of the ditch that had hidden her from the house had also largely shielded her from the fierce gaze of the sun, although one of her legs had been exposed and sunburn blistered her calf.
Her tongue was swollen and rough, and had stuck to the roof of her mouth. Her breath came in rapid gasps. She was badly dehydrated. As the rain fell onto her face, she tried to lift her head and wet her lips, but even that felt like too much effort, triggering another bout of dizziness.
She shifted in the dirt, trying to clear her vision, and experienced another landslip of pain. Olivia moaned, and in her half-there state, she thought she heard one of her children calling to her. She knew, with certainty, that she had a son, although she couldn’t remember his name, couldn’t form a memory of him.
Nor could she remember returning from the car and catching the flicker of a torch at the bottom of the garden or stumbling into the ditch as she had gone to investigate.
Her mobile phone was lying amongst the leaves and insects a couple of metres beyond where she lay, its battery long dead. The sound of rustling leaves filled up the spaces in her head, and she thought that she might like to sleep for a very long time.
‘Mummy.’ Hands stroked her hair from her face, and she tried to smile, but the muscles of her cheeks could not seem to move. ‘Mummy, wake up.’
The boy was shaking her, and it was making her head hurt and shooting pain down her shoulder, towards her broken wrist. She couldn’t form the words to ask him to stop, but he must have guessed because he said, ‘Don’t move, Mum. I’m going to get Dad.’ And she heard that rustle of leaves again, the sound of small hands and feet scrambling through brambles, trying to clamber up the sides of the ditch, and her eyes did not want to open, but she became aware again of the absence of light and the dark mouth of the night.
She could not say how many minutes had passed, only that she was drifting and floating, and then she heard loud voices and lights, and strangers were speaking to her in calm voices, and sliding her onto a spinal board and she could not remember how she had got there or what had happened.
‘Thank God,’ said a man’s voice, and his lips were warm against her cheek. He said things like ‘I love you’ and ‘I’m sorry for being such a dick’ and ‘Things are going to be much better from now on, I promise.’
Her eyes flickered open and closed, and the skeletons of the trees above bowed to her, and the moon was cold and she saw snapshots of black and silver, and felt the rain on her face, and she thought, Is this what it is to die?
She wanted to scream at them to leave her where she was because the moving of her body had triggered a wave of agony, but the monochrome landscape blurred until all the colours were washed out, and her world collapsed in on itself.
85
Wednesday, 1 August 2018
27 The Avenue – 2.41 a.m.
The walls were talking to her.
Audrina could hear the cry of a child, like the slash of a knife across the peace, disembowelling it. Unexplained noises. A thump. Footsteps running across carpet. The register of a boy’s voice, high and clear. For the briefest of moments, she mistook him for another boy from another time.
She floated up through sleep, throwing it off, eyes wide open, heart buzzing, hands reaching for a ghost.
The blue wash of sirens lit her bedroom. A man’s voice, low and serious, was talking beneath her window. At the slamming of a van door, she pulled herself up in bed, fear in her eyes, fingers plucking at the cotton tie of her nightie.
‘Surely not another one?’ When he didn’t answer, she felt the first stirrings of panic, as if something important had changed. ‘Cooper? Cooper?’
Cooper was at the window, peering down on the street below. His white hair looked yellowish. He shook his head. ‘No. But it’s something.’
‘Come back to bed,’ she said.
But he didn’t move.
Audrina could feel the foundations beneath her start to tip. She looked at the man she had married all those years ago, could hear the echoes of everything she had lost, and the knowledge that had weighed upon her. Upon them both.
‘Cooper,’ she said again, and her voice cracked. He turned towards her then, as he had always done. As he always would do. He crossed the room, and the heft of his body on the edge of the mattress tipped her towards him.
His fingers were tender as he stroked her face. She rested her cheek against his hand, closed her own fingers around his.
‘I love you,’ he said. ‘Fifty-two years, and that has never changed. That will never change.’
‘I’m scared.’
‘You have nothing to be scared of.’ He sounded warm, reassuring. Kindly. ‘I will look after you. Like I’ve always done. Like I always will do.’
‘Cooper, I—’
‘Hush now, don’t say anything,’ he said, and press
ed a finger to her lips to silence her. ‘Do you understand?’
He was smiling at her, and there was so much love in his eyes, and she wanted to tell him that everything would pass. That they would ride this storm, as they had ridden countless others. But instead, she nodded and he said, ‘Good girl.’
And then he pulled on his clothes and went downstairs.
86
Wednesday, 1 August 2018
25 The Avenue – 2.42 a.m.
Evan watched the rescue unfold from the edge of the ditch. The paramedics had administered pain relief and he saw his mother’s face relax into unconsciousness.
His father pulled him into a hug, picked him up and swung him around. ‘Well done, Evan,’ he said. ‘Well done.’ The paramedics were about to carry her up the garden to the waiting ambulance. They were moving with extreme caution. ‘You might just have saved your mother’s life.’
His father did not ask why Evan had been out of bed. The boy guessed that question was for another time. Or perhaps not at all. When he thought about what might have happened if he hadn’t gone down to the treehouse, he felt odd and shaky.
‘Go and wake Aster. I’m going to follow the ambulance in my car. I’ll call your aunt, and she can drive down and mind you.’ The relief in his father’s face pushed Evan to the edge of tears.
Aster was not in her bedroom. She was not anywhere in the house at all.
Evan was trying to think of a way to share this worrying development with his father when a commotion by the front door stalled him. The boy sat on the staircase, his face pressed against the spindles.
His father was dangling his car keys in his hand, talking on his mobile phone. In another hour, the sky would begin to lighten, darkness diluting into a full-blown blue. Garrick shut down his call, opened the door, and there stood Aster with a crying boy who was dripping with red paint.
The Neighbour Page 22