The Cliftons had been friends once, but that Cooper was a cold fish. Slippery, too. It had taken Trefor weeks and weeks to notice the dolls’ eyes had gone missing, because he preferred to paint them on his creations. But a few days ago, when one of his regular clients had requested a bespoke doll with glass eyes and hair, he had checked his accessories box and been puzzled to discover his supplies were so low. As for the paint, for a long time he assumed he’d been careless, blaming himself for misplacing the specialist pots of Peach Lip, Rosey Blush and Soft Lash. But now he knew.
That bastard Cooper Clifton had set him up.
Lovell shifted on the hard bench of the cell in the custody suite. Their ridiculous game of cat and mouse had finally come to an end.
The old man had found himself in an impossible situation. Eight months ago: that’s when he should have gone to the police. The night he’d asked his new neighbour Fletcher Parnell to take some photographs of his dolls for his website.
Fletch had come one evening after work, armed with two cameras and their fancy bits and pieces.
‘Look,’ he’d said proudly, showing it to Trefor. ‘It can do all sorts.’
Trefor hadn’t been listening. A basic website was the height of his technological know-how. But Fletch had snapped away happily, occasionally showing Trefor, painting at his workbench, what he had done.
When he had finished, he’d pulled out what looked to Trefor like a lens cap. Fletch had grinned. ‘It’s an external infrared filter.’
‘What does that mean in plain English?’
‘It means I can see things invisible to the human eye.’
‘Aye. We’d learn a lot about folk if we all had one of those.’
Fletcher had begun to take pictures in Trefor’s workroom. The dolls on their shelves. The paint pots, the real hair and eyes.
He had wandered off down the corridor, towards the front of the shop. Trefor hadn’t paid him much heed. Fletcher was a friendly enough chap, but nervy and twitchy, as if his body was charged with electricity. He’d let him get on with it.
After a while, Trefor had washed his paintbrushes, wiped over his workbench. The usual end-of-the-day routines.
He was just about to turn out the light when Fletch came barrelling in.
‘You have to see this,’ he’d said, jerking his head in the direction he’d just come. ‘This is seriously weird.’
Trefor had lumbered after him with low expectations.
A dim light was on. Fancy dress costumes lay in haphazard piles. One clothing rail was pressed against the wall. When he’d agreed to rent the place all those years ago, Cooper Clifton had offered to redecorate. The smell of fresh paint had stayed with Trefor for days.
‘Look,’ Fletch had said, pointing towards the far wall. ‘Can you see it?’
Trefor had looked at him as if he was mad.
‘It’s a wall.’
‘Yes,’ said Fletch, fumbling with his camera. ‘Now, look at this.’
At first, Trefor could only see the magenta hue of the infrared images on the digital screen. Specks of dirt and lint and smudges that weren’t apparent to the naked eye. But as he became accustomed to the peculiarities of the picture, he saw what Fletch was talking about.
Spatter.
He blinked several times. The spots were clustered to-gether, as if something had sprayed against the wall. Beneath it were smears, but they were patchy, like negatives, as if someone had tried to wipe them clean with limited success.
Fletcher was explaining the science behind his discovery, how infrared has longer wavelengths than visible light. But Trefor was not interested. The facts were simple. The camera had cut through multiple layers of paint to reveal this secret.
‘What do you think it is?’ said Trefor. But he had known.
During the early years, when he’d been young and hungry for action, when he had left the Royal Marines and taken a job abroad in security for an oil company, before he had realized the cost of killing, he had stabbed a thief. The blood had sprayed the wall in exactly the same way.
Someone had died here.
And then he remembered the jokes amongst the other shopkeepers on the parade when he’d taken it over, the mysterious disappearance of Bridget Sawyer and her relationship to Cooper Clifton. And what about Joby Clifton? Losing one family member was careless, but two was surely more than coincidence.
His first instinct had been to call the police. But Fletch was resistant. No, no, it’s none of our business. What if they decide to close you down? Let’s not get involved. Whatever happened here, it was a long time ago. And then Annie had become so ill he had allowed it to slip from his memory.
Until she died and everything had spiralled from his control.
One winter’s evening, gone midnight, he’d brought her body in from the garage, but in a rare lapse of judgement, had forgotten to draw the curtains.
A shadow at his window. The white hair of Cooper Clifton.
Trefor had never breathed a word about the disappearance of Cooper’s son, Joby. He’d maintained the Cliftons’ pretence to protect their feelings. Because of this, he assumed they’d have an understanding, a gentleman’s agreement. Each to their own. Live and let live.
A few days later he had bumped into Cooper. His old friend hadn’t said it outright, but he had hinted that he knew. That he’d seen Trefor moving his dead wife’s body. That he could make life uncomfortable. Perhaps raise the rent.
Incensed, Trefor had got his own back.
Anonymous calls to the Cliftons, hinting at his own suspicions about Birdie Sawyer and Joby.
Tit for tat.
But when things began to disappear from his shop, and the bodies appeared in Blatches Woods, Trefor started to panic. If he contacted the police, he would have to tell them about Annie, and he wasn’t ready to do that. If he said nothing, others might die.
What Trefor had not yet been able to puzzle out was how Cooper had known it was him on the end of the phone.
Trefor conjured up the image of a ten-pence piece.
Heads.
Tails.
If he did nothing, he would never speak to Cooper Clifton again. But he wanted that murdering bastard to know exactly who had led the police to him.
He banged on the door of his cell. Minutes passed. He banged again, loud and urgent.
Eventually, an officer appeared. ‘I’d like to make a phone call,’ said Lovell.
The request was relayed to the duty inspector. Luck was on Trefor’s side. The duty inspector wanted to eat his sausage and egg sandwich while it was still hot and grunted his assent.
There were six rings before he heard the click of a receiver being picked up.
‘Hello?’
‘I want to speak to Cooper.’
She sounded wary. ‘Who is this?’
‘Just put him on the phone.’
‘He’s busy, I’m afraid.’
‘It’s Trefor Lovell.’ He paused, trying to find a way to frame the words, to let her know that Cooper’s attempts to set him up were nothing but dust now.
‘I’ve told the police everything. Your husband is going to die in prison for what he has done.’
99
Now
The police are almost here. The neighbours will gather in tangles on the corner or peer from behind their curtains, ashamed of their prurience but too hungry to deny it.
They will shout at the journalists with their cameras and intrusive questions. They will shake their heads and tut at the spectacle of their street on national television again. They will breathe out their shock at the discovery of a killer in their midst.
Tomorrow morning, these hypocrites will hurry up the street with a newspaper tucked under their arm.
It fascinates me, the way we pretend to be something we’re not. The face we show to the world hides a darkness.
Mother. You. Natalie Tiernan, Esther Farnworth, Will Proudfoot, Elijah Outhwaite, Adam Stanton.
A roll call of the dead.
&nb
sp; My dead.
But not quite all of them.
Time is almost up. I must say goodbye to my garden in case I do not see it again. I must walk the corridors of this house.
It’s the end of the road.
I am ready.
I will submit.
100
Wednesday, 1 August 2018
27 The Avenue – 6.27 a.m.
Audrina poured granola into Evan’s bowl and sprinkled on an extra handful of raisins from a tub in the cupboard.
‘Honey?’ she said, already drizzling a spoonful, thick and sweet, across his cereal.
Evan stared at his breakfast, shoulders hunched, head bent. He did not look at either of the adults.
‘Eat up,’ she said. Kind. Full of encouragement.
Cooper stood by the back door. He was wearing his gardening clothes, and he was holding a small and neatly labelled envelope of seeds he had harvested himself, ready for planting. An ordinary scene in the life of an ordinary family. Except Evan didn’t belong to this family and there was a plywood box containing a child’s skull under the kitchen table, although Audrina didn’t know that.
Audrina’s heart broke for herself. For her husband. Fresh lines marked his face. He was old now. Defeated by circumstance. But they would get through this. As they had done before. As they would do now.
‘Who was on the phone?’ Cooper sounded steady but she had known him for enough years to detect the break in his voice.
She flicked a look at Evan and back again to her husband. Cleared her throat. Started towards him, to soften the blow of her words with touch. ‘That Trefor Lovell. He says the pol—’
The sound of sirens filled the kitchen. Their family home. The place where love had found its way through the weeds that might have choked weaker marriages. Cooper’s head snapped up. Their eyes met. He held open his arms and she stepped into them. The comfort of the familiar was an undervalued gift.
Through the wall of his chest, Audrina could hear his heartbeat. Constant. Steady. Unwavering. She closed her eyes, breathing in the smell of him. Soap and the earthy scent of geraniums.
‘Remember what I told you?’ He chucked her lightly under the chin. In some marriages, this might have seemed dismissive or patronising. But not here. This was a gesture of affection. A tender goodbye.
‘I love you, Audrina.’
She shook her head, a violent denial. ‘No, Cooper. I—’
He placed his finger on her lips. ‘Hush now, my love. You’ve been a good wife. I’ve been happy. Haven’t you?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘No buts, my love. Promise me you’ll do as I ask.’
‘Cooper . . .’
‘Promise me.’
‘I promise.’
He kissed her. To a casual observer, it may have seemed chaste. His lips grazed hers, barely touching. But every ounce of love he felt for her was in that kiss, his desire to protect and cherish and honour as undiminished as the day he met her.
The back door slammed. The sound of running footsteps.
Cooper and Audrina spun around in unison. A spoon lay on the floor, two or three droplets of milk marking the linoleum. The boy had gone.
And so had the crate.
Cooper’s lips pressed together until they went white around the edges. His shoulders slumped, the balloon of his hope pricked. Audrina brought her handkerchief to her mouth. Their hands sought and found each other, fingers entwined like vines.
Time slowed and stilled. Blue lights moved against the walls in a hypnotic dance. The clock in the hallway counted down. Neither moved, savouring this pause in breath before their lives were split apart.
The sound of loud voices and heavy hammering at the door.
‘“Those who have courage and faith shall never perish in misery.”’ Cooper was trying to smile, and Audrina had a pain inside her, flavoured with regret and a quiet sort of anger that was filling her up, setting her alight.
‘I can’t live without you,’ she said, and there was so much truth in those words that she did not know where to put it, how to shape it.
‘You can,’ he said, and his anger had teeth. ‘You must.’
And she nodded at him, slow and sad. Resigned to this hand of cards.
Cooper discarded Evan’s uneaten cereal in the dustbin and put the packet of seeds on the table. The envelope was open and a handful spilled across the cloth. He moved towards her, and they lost themselves in one last kiss, a slow-falling stepping off a cliff. Fifty-two years of shared history. A promise, then, to protect their past, to steady their present and light their future.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
And then Cooper Clifton opened the door to meet his fate.
101
Wednesday, 1 August 2018
27 The Avenue – 6.28 a.m.
In the beginning, it was never about the killings. That came much later, when too much water had passed under the bridge and going back would be like rubbing himself out.
There had been no intent, not at first. But falling in love had triggered a rare kind of alchemy, and by the time Cooper had recognized the threat of it all, he was in too deep to find his way home.
Not that he had wanted to.
The sense of power had been unexpected. It had started with the old woman, years and years ago. Bridget. Always going on, she was. Do this. Do that. She had made Audrina scrub the shop floor, even though she was eighteen and star-bright, sharper at accounting than most women twice her age. When he had protested, the bitch with the permed hair and crepe-paper hands had stared at him with scorn, eyeing the dirt beneath his nails, the stains on the knees of his trousers, his lack of everything.
His anger had ignited, white-hot, blinding him to common sense and decency. His hands had been trembling when he turned the sign from OPEN to CLOSED. Drew the bolts across and pulled down the blind.
Credit where credit’s due, mind. When he’d smacked her on the back of her skull with a wooden mallet, she had staggered, but she hadn’t fallen over. She’d been stunned, though, and fracturing bone makes such a distinctive sound.
He’d hit her again and again, the powder flying from her made-up face like dust from a beaten rug, blood spattering the wall. But the child’s hammer he’d snatched up from the miniature version of a carpenter’s workbench lacked the heft to finish what he had begun. Weakened, yes, but she still had the strength to drag herself away from him, crawling like a baby amongst the teddy bears and building blocks.
He’d cast around, looking for a more effective weapon. The puppets watched him, unblinking. The wooden trains with their tiny passengers paused on their journeys to see what he would do next.
In the end, he’d settled on a spinning top. He’d smashed the metal casing against the wall until it dented and split, and a corkscrew-shaped spike lay in his hand.
He punctured her temple, burying it in her brain.
The blood flowed dark, the thinnest of trickles against the smudge of her face. Rat poison in her mouth to finish the job. Even then, the disorder of death made him uncomfortable.
Bridget Sawyer’s body was slight enough to hide in one of the hand-carved chests decorated with the alphabet, all pastel flourishes and curls.
His wedding gift to Audrina, the woman he loved.
102
Wednesday, 1 August 2018
27 The Avenue – 6.28 a.m.
Cooper Clifton let go of his wife’s hand and held out his wrists in submission, his fingers loosely curled into his palms.
‘I know why you’ve come,’ he said.
In all her years of policing, Detective Sergeant Wildeve Stanton had never heard a suspect say that.
As the police cars had pulled up outside 27 The Avenue, with its flower-filled garden and freshly painted brickwork, she had thought how it was always the same: that seam of darkness hemming the lives of ordinary folk. That so much of the ugliness of her job was found not in city alleyways or late-night street stabbings, but behind the mown lawns
and washed cars and laundry on the line, the mundane and everyday.
Inside lives quietly lived.
She stared at his face. The white softness of his hair. The smile lines that fanned out from his eyes. The inoffensiveness of his ironed polo shirt.
The limp effort of his body.
This man had killed Adam.
The urge to fly at him surprised her. She dreamed of plucking out his eyes and dragging her nails down his face, of holding his wrist over the flame of the cooker’s gas ring until the skin blistered.
She felt all these things, but she believed in the process of law. Instead she spat out his rights – arrested on suspicion of murder – and handcuffed him.
‘What on earth’s going on?’ The older woman had stumbled into the hallway and collapsed into her wheelchair. She wore a look of perplexed mystery.
‘Try not to worry, my love.’ Mr Clifton attempted to pat his wife’s hand, but the bite of the metal forbade it. ‘Things will be as right as rain. I’ll be home before you know it.’
Mrs Clifton’s face crumpled and Wildeve felt a tug of sympathy for her.
‘Someone will stay with you,’ she said kindly. ‘They’ll explain what’s happening.’
Officers were spreading out across the house, a thorough search already underway. In a minute, Wildeve and Mac would escort Cooper Clifton to the car parked outside. But both of them were distracted by Mrs Clifton, who was clutching at them, plucking at their clothes.
‘Please, my husband wouldn’t hurt a fly. There’s been a terrible mistake. He’s not capable of something like that.’
More officers were entering the house, the front door wide open. Noise and chaos. A sense of relief.
And Wildeve and Mac, delighted with their early morning’s work, were lulled into a false sense of security by Cooper Clifton’s lack of resistance, his willingness to cooperate.
But Cooper’s years of gardening had lent him a wiry strength and he had the element of surprise on his side. He shoulder-barged his way past the female officer coming through the door and found himself on the street outside. Empty.
The Neighbour Page 25