I disconnected Standling.
‘The gloves,’ I said. ‘You’ve found the gloves.’
The day Tom died, I was highly aware, as I sat at the desk, of the comings and goings next door. Ailsa went out mid-morning for half an hour and came back with a bag of shopping. Bea left with a friend soon after, swinging a tennis racquet.
I sat in the garden to eat my lunch. The rain had done nothing to clear the heaviness of the air. It lay thick on one’s skin, pressed into one’s temples. Screws seemed to be tightening my chest; I took several puffs from my inhaler. The undergrowth looked thick and knitted; a smell of mildew filled my nostrils. It was quiet on their side of the fence. We now know she didn’t plant the Somerset cuttings as she had told me she was going to. She did put on a wash and cook the curry, but I didn’t hear or smell any evidence of that on my side. No wafting scent of garlic, or chilli, or coriander, just rotting grass, festering apples, the usual stench of wet towel.
Mid-afternoon, I left the house and walked to the supermarket for some Nurofen. They were doing a three for two on Pizza Express pizzas so I bought some of those, as well as a packet of special offer Mr Kipling Almond Slices, which Ailsa loves. Outside the shop, a metal crate-like cage was stuffed with deconstructed boxes and packaging, including sheets of soft blue cardboard moulded to fit a line of oranges. Halfway along Wiseton, someone had left a couple of cans of paint; bashed, but not completely empty. I carried them home, my arms full, laden, dragged by the weight, heavy with self-loathing. But, as I crossed the threshold and piled them in the already cluttered hallway, it felt like rebellion.
A little later, I decided what to do. I found a packet of pale-blue notelets that Ailsa had placed in one of the desk drawers. I didn’t practise, or pre-prepare. I wrote straight from the heart. ‘Tom has betrayed you,’ I wrote. ‘He is not worthy of being your husband, or a father to your children. He is having an affair. Keep the house. Get rid of him.’ The last two sentences were an attempt at levity, but I underlined them three times.
I put the letter in the matching envelope, closed but not sealed, as my mother always insisted was etiquette with hand-delivered mail, and I went next door.
Melissa answered. ‘Oh nice,’ she said, when she saw the pizzas and cakes. ‘I’ve got a party tonight, but I’ll have mine tomorrow. Do you want Mum? She’s out.’
‘I know. She’s doing Ricky’s garden.’
‘Really? She was wearing her posh green dress. Are you here to tutor Max?’
I had held out my packages, the envelope on top, but at this I withdrew it. It was Wednesday. I’d forgotten.
Melissa went upstairs to find him and I walked down into the kitchen. I put the pizzas in the fridge and left the cakes on the table, the envelope still on top.
It was stuffy in the room; the doors were closed. A tired bumblebee was humming against the glass close to the floor and I unlocked the doors with the key and folded them back. The bee, still low and heavy, floated off. The cushion covers, big white squares, were hanging from the line. On the terrace, earth seemed to have spilt from Ailsa’s plastic bags, but on closer inspection the scattered piles of black soil were moving and seething, growing wings: ants doing their pre-swarm thing.
‘Ugh.’ Max had come out to look too. ‘It’s horrible when I see loads of tiny insects. It makes me feel all wriggly in my stomach.’
I looked at him. He’d grown over the summer; his limbs had lost their soft roundness. He had freckles on his nose, and his hair, tufted and mussed at the back, was touched with golden streaks. I noticed again how one of his eyes sloped down more than the other, and was overwhelmed by love. He’d crept into my heart, this boy. And now they were moving away. I wasn’t sure I could bear it. I cleared my throat. ‘Excellent sensory description,’ I said.
‘What are they doing? Why are they behaving like that?’
‘They’re fleeing the nest, I think – preparing to set up a new colony elsewhere.’
‘Moving home?’
‘Yup.’
I could hear his child’s breath, quicker and more shallow than an adult’s.
‘She told you we’re going, didn’t she?’ he said.
‘She did.’
He kicked the plastic bag containing plants with his foot. ‘I don’t want to move. I hate moving house all the time. They don’t care, though. Dad says it’s nothing to do with me. He doesn’t like this house, he says.’
‘He doesn’t like living on the main road.’
‘He doesn’t like anything. He doesn’t like me.’
The word came to me unbidden. It’s a word Ailsa had used. ‘Well he’s an arsehole.’
‘He ruins everything. He always does.’
All my unhappiness and anger was focused on Tom. ‘Some people just do,’ I said. ‘If only we could stop them, but we can’t.’
We both stared into the crinkled black plastic – at the muddled green tendrils.
‘They’re dying,’ I said. ‘She should have planted them already.’ I bent down to adjust the bag that he’d knocked, and peered in. One of the fronds, a small but robust thing with delicate fern-like leaves and a thick, circular stalk, looked familiar. I bent to smell it, and Max asked what I was doing. I told him I was seeing if it smelt like mouse. ‘What does mouse smell like?’ he asked, and I laughed and said actually I wasn’t sure; I’d never smelt a mouse. I pulled away. If it was hemlock, I thought, how clever it was to have slipped in alongside these other almost identical plants. Aggressive mimicry. Just like people. Yes – just like the way people pretend to be something they’re not.
The big black winged ants had begun launching themselves into the air and we backed into the kitchen. I shut a couple of the doors, leaving the others open.
‘Do I have to do work?’
‘Not if you don’t want to.’
‘Oh good.’
‘Rude,’ I said.
I could hear him laughing as I inspected the pot on the stove, lifting the lid and getting a waft of garlic and cumin, like underarm sweat.
‘You going to be eating this?’ I said, conveying the answer in my intonation.
‘No way. Not now you’ve bought us pizza.’
I hugged him at the door. ‘Got any plans for the evening?’ I asked.
‘Probably World of Warcraft,’ he said. ‘As Dad’s not here.’
‘Is life easier when he’s away?’
His face darkened. ‘Yes it is.’
It was maybe 4.20 p.m. by then. Ailsa had not yet come home.
The Dog and Fox was busy that night; Maeve and Sue were back from France and Bob had brought his brother along (divorcing and at a loose end). We didn’t do as well as usual, stymied by a nasty sports round; not our collective strong point. Still: an honourable third.
I walked home, cool night air on my skin after the warmth of the pub. Bursts of music and conversation reached me from open windows; the clatter of plates, laughter from a group of people gathered on a balcony. A fire engine screamed up the hill, overtook a waiting car at the lights and branched right down St James’s Drive. The peal of the siren was still ringing in my ears when I drew close enough to see the police car and ambulance ahead of me, the lights on the police car’s roof set to a sliding flicker – a migraine blue-white strobe. I began to run, breathless when I arrived, pulse racing, fear spooling in my head. People on the other side of the road had huddled to stare. The Tilsons’ door was wide open, and a policeman in a high-vis vest was standing at the top of the steps, legs apart, like he was standing guard. It’s the thing I keep thinking about even now, actually: the chilling nature of that open door.
‘What’s happened?’ I shouted. Sue and Andrew Dawson from two doors down were out on the pavement, both in shorts and flip-flops. Another officer was talking to them, I think, though it’s odd: I don’t remember the details, just a sense of the air turning blue-white, electricity in it, lighting the air, turning night to day. ‘Who is it?’ I shouted. Melissa had told me she was going out, Tom was away. S
o – Ailsa, or Bea, or Max. Sue and Andrew ignored me: they always do.
A female police officer must have stopped me going up to the house. I found evidence the following morning of physical force: a fresh blister on the base of my thumb torn open. Now I think of it, she simply took my hand to drag me away. I was crying, I know; maybe I was shouting. But was I a danger? No; an object of pity, an embarrassment.
Was I family? One of them asked.
I nodded, because I was as good as, but Sue was still there, and she told them I wasn’t.
It seems odd, looking back, that they didn’t tell me sooner. I mean you’d think, wouldn’t you, that they’d want to put people’s minds at rest? Or maybe they weren’t fully informed, the policemen outside. Maybe they thought a death wasn’t anything to put anyone’s mind at rest about. Thing is, I didn’t know Tom was home. I thought he was away. Something dreadful had happened – an accident. That’s all I knew.
The police officer took me to my door and put the key in it, I remember that. She offered to come in and make me a cup of tea, but I told her I would be all right. I watched the rest from Mother’s window, piecing together what I could, peering out through the ragged lace. Now, the police and the lawyers have gone over it so many times, I know the lingo: ‘blue light’ and ‘unmarked’ and ‘quick response’, who’s qualified to certify death and who isn’t. I know the Astra contained the inspector; the Ford Transit van the scenes of crime officer – that he brought cameras and tape, and gloves and protective packaging, to locate, record and recover samples. But I was innocent then. It was just arms brushing the fence, the squeak of boots, the rustle of combat trousers, the crackle of voices.
Lots of activity followed by nothing. All those vehicles still there, blocking the road, the lights flashing. My forehead was numb against the cold glass, when two men in green uniform came out of the house. And that’s when I saw, that’s when I knew for sure: they were carrying a stretcher and under a maroon blanket – a body.
I know I let out a shout. I know I banged my head several times against the glass because there were bruises later and I remember the sound of it, and the sensation; I wanted to bleed. I wanted my head to crack.
The ambulance doors closed, and the men got into the front and they drove away.
I went downstairs and opened the front door. For a moment or two I stood in the porch, unable to take a step further. There was just a single police car now. In the distance a motorbike accelerated. For a split second, I almost turned back. How much easier the last few weeks would have been if that had been my decision. But I left the porch and walked down my path and stepped out onto the pavement.
The Tilsons’ front door was closed now, though all the lights were on in the house – I could see through to the far wall of Ailsa’s bedroom, to the shadow along the top of the fitted cupboards. A policeman still stood guard, holding a folder, at the bottom of the steps up to the door. It was hard to see his expression under his hat. He’d half unzipped his yellow jacket and the plastic cover of the walkie-talkie pinned to his shoulder gleamed. I remember thinking how odd it was to see a person standing still like that, apparently idle, without looking at their phone. Everyone looks at their phone now, if they have a minute.
They had strung blue and white tape across the off-street area, attaching it at one end to the old gatepost, and at the other to a shower rail half embedded in the hedge on my side. They must have thought it was easier than trying to tie a knot in privet. Or maybe they were just in a hurry and it was the simplest thing to hand. The tape, which read ‘Police Line Do Not Cross’, had been hung upside down, and it was twisted in places, crinkled in others as if maybe it had been used before. Tom’s car was half wrapped, tape clinging to its rear bumper, like a horrible pastiche of the fantasy birthday present.
The front door opened and an officer came out of the house, walked down the path, ducked under the tape and got into the driving seat of the car. I slunk back into the shadow of the hedge and waited. He was waiting. He flipped down the visor and inspected his chin for a few moments and then something got his attention – he bent his head to look once again in the direction of the house.
I stepped forward again so I could see what had caught his attention.
Ailsa. Ailsa then. Ailsa was unharmed.
She was standing in the doorway, clutching a plastic bag to her chest, the arm of a jumper trailing out of it. The oval of her face looked very white, as if the features had been drawn on porcelain; a Chinese doll painted on the back of a spoon. Behind her was the police officer who had helped me earlier. She said something in Ailsa’s ear and Ailsa nodded and the two of them walked down the steps and on to the path. When they reached the tape, the officer raised it and Ailsa bent her head to duck under it.
She saw me then – looked at me with an expression of complete blankness.
‘Where’s Max?’ I said. ‘Where’s Bea?’
The police woman had taken her arm again and was pulling her towards the car. Ailsa was still looking at me. ‘They’re at . . .’ She paused. ‘Thingy came to get them.’ She squeezed shut her eyes, trying to think. ‘Rose’s.’
‘What’s happened,’ I said.
The police woman had opened the back door of the car and was steering her in, doing that thing with the head, pushing it down to make sure she didn’t bang it.
‘It’s Tom,’ Ailsa called. ‘I’ve poisoned Tom.’
The police search advisor and his team arrived to do their damage the following morning, digging up the flower beds, combing the house. It was to be another few days before they had the result of the post mortem, longer for toxicology, but they quickly began to build a picture to fit the facts. They found the hemlock in the garden, the box of unused gloves, the receipt in the bag for life, the coriander in the fridge. Andrew Dawson had given his statement. They began to hear about the financial difficulties, the problems in the marriage, the life insurance. Nobody mentioned my note: I have wondered since about that.
They interviewed me, as part of routine door-to-door enquiries. Not that I had much to say. They were a lovely couple. And Ailsa? Everyone loved Ailsa. No. I didn’t see them very often. Once a week? I’d seen her the previous day, yes; she’d been looking out for me. I’d been poorly, in hospital. Chest. Sorry, just a cough. I wasn’t contagious. My eccentricity, and the state of my house worked in my favour. Did they want to come in? No?
I visited her at the station as soon as I could, fetching whatever she needed – a bag of clothes, hydrocortisone for her hands, the vial of black onion oil from beside the bed. It was harder when she was moved on; sometimes I caught only a glimpse – her feet climbing the steps of court; that terrible time she banged her head against the doors of the Serco van. I failed to see her completely at Bronzefield, as I’ve explained, though I did manage to speak to her once on the phone. She complained about the food, the noise, the heat.
You’ve got to hand it to Standling and Grainger. It was a stretch to get her bail, but they managed. No proven link, her previous good character. No fear of further offending. The court kept her passport, just in case. Stringent conditions would be met.
When I heard the application had been successful, I got the train to Ashford; walked out of the station and up to the mini-roundabout, right into Woodthorpe Road, and along past the Salvation Army to the Bronzefield entrance. I knew the way because I’d been once before, though, as I think I’ve said, they hadn’t let me in. I waited until she came out, watched her stand, looking around, noticing how lost and small she looked in her oversized jumper, hair flat, grey at the roots, her face pinched. She bent down to fiddle with something at her ankle – the tag already bothering her skin.
It was only when she straightened up that she saw me, standing on the other side of the road, waiting to bring her home.
Chapter Twenty-five
1 pair of Vinoguard essentials vinyl, Medium
Discovery, noun. Law: disclosure of relevant facts
or doc
uments by a party to an action, typically as
compelled by another party.
‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘I knew they were here. You had them. I knew it.’ She was shaking her head; her words were triumphant but her body radiated disbelief. ‘All this time. They were here.’ She took a step towards me. I pressed back against the wall, felt the damp fold of the wallpaper beneath my palms.
She was crushing them together now, moving them from hand to hand. ‘Why have you got them?’
I didn’t want to answer. I took a step down the stairs. But she followed. She was just above me. ‘I just have,’ I stammered.
‘Did you kill Tom?’
‘No? Did you?’
We stared at each other. I was the one who broke first. ‘I found them,’ I said.
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘I did.’
‘Where? In the bin? You took them from the bin?’
I dug my nails into my palm. ‘No. Between the hedge and the planks in my front garden.’
I stared at her and as she stared back the muscles in her face seemed to slacken, a blankness came into her eyes. She was silent for a long time. She started shaking her head, back and forth. ‘What time does Standling want to come?’
‘He said 3 p.m.’
‘OK. Tell him that’s fine.’
She pushed past me and walked slowly down the stairs and into her room, and closed the door.
Standling arrived at 3 p.m. on the dot. It was raining out and he spent a few minutes flapping the water off his mac, folding it up and laying it over the bannister. I’d cleared the hall to make room for Max’s bike and he waited there while I went up to fetch Ailsa. I was anxious she wouldn’t come out, but the door opened. She’d changed into a long-sleeved black T-shirt and black jeans, her hair scraped back into a ponytail. ‘You all right?’ I said. She nodded.
I’d made the kitchen as nice as I could, even picked a bit of greenery and put it in a vase, and we went in there to talk. I stood next to the stove and the two of them faced each other across the small table. Standling kept his briefcase pressed to his trouser leg. He can be pedantic, and when he first sat down he insisted on going through the evidence we knew by heart – point by point. His language worked hard to distract from the weight of it. The circumstantial details – the plants and the not-eating, the coriander in the fridge – he described as ‘a bit annoying’. Andrew Dawson’s statement about ‘a bloodthirsty cry’ he dismissed as ‘unlucky’; Ailsa’s ‘confessional’ 999 call ‘unfortunate but not catastrophic’.
Finders, Keepers: The mesmerising new thriller from the author of LIE WITH ME Page 26
