‘Jesus,’ he said quietly. ‘I think you’ve really hit on something, Annie. That sounds like it could make a great book.’
A huge wave of relief swept over me. I had been dreading polite, awkward distaste, feared presenting a treasure I thought I could retire on and finding it valued as worthless. ‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘And there’s something else. I want to write it all in the first person, from the point of view of the woman herself. My Rebecca Fisher character. Of course, she won’t be Rebecca Fisher, she’ll just be…’
‘Loosely based on her. I know.’ He smiled. ‘It’ll be tough doing it that way, though, won’t it? I’m no writer, but I’m pretty sure you’ve never hung out with any notorious killers.’
‘Tell me about it. I’m starting to wish I had done—maybe then I’d have some idea of how to bring one to life. I know we met Rebecca Fisher, but it didn’t feel like meeting her at all.’ Inspiration gnawed restlessly and my forehead corrugated in thought. ‘I’ll have to find some way around that; it must be possible. I’ve sent off for a book about her, from the internet. Maybe I’ll ask around the village, too, see what people thought of her, try and get some kind of feel for her personality. What someone who’d do that might really be like, when you got to know them. Someone round here must have known her to talk to, it stands to reason.’
‘Well, best of luck. Looks like you’ve had a pretty productive day. I think it’s great you’ve got a new idea at last. Especially when it’s such a good one.’ Enthusiastic as he sounded, his voice had an edge of finality. ‘Call me a philistine bastard for changing the subject like this, but I’m starving to death now. Want me to put the asparagus on?’
Over dinner, he ate heartily, but I had no appetite whatsoever—I felt like a shaken-up Coke can, thoughts fizzing and bubbling inside me. The conversation moved to his brother’s imminent birthday, whether I had any ideas regarding a suitable present, and various people he worked with. With the novel burning a hole in my mind, every other subject held all the interest of a bowling score, but I tried my best to look and sound as though I was paying full attention. We’d discussed the new idea for ages, and I couldn’t drag the subject back out again tonight; deep down, I knew he didn’t really appreciate how much it meant to me.
That night, I found it impossible to get to sleep for some hours. By midnight, Carl was snoring gently and rhythmically, and I lay beside him, mind teeming. I realised I hadn’t been entirely honest with him regarding my feelings—not because I’d wanted to mislead him, but because I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge the full truth to myself. While I’d described the bright, dizzy joy of inspiration, I could feel something moving behind it: the near-superstitious horror I’d experienced walking back from the shop, slowly blending into fascination.
The thrill of finally having a new idea. The unease of knowing where it came from. As the first flickers of characters and subplots began to move through my mind, these two emotions came together in the dark and fused into something I couldn’t put a name to; squirming, treacherous, troubling.
I woke earlier than usual the following morning—Carl was still fast asleep, and the bedside clock told me it had just gone six. Normally, I’d never have dreamed of getting up at such a time. Now, however, I found I couldn’t stop myself.
I edged out of bed, not disturbing him, and went downstairs. Curtains and blinds were drawn throughout the house, and everything around me had a desolate feel, chilly and grey as cold ash. When I opened the blinds in the kitchen, the sudden flood of sunlight was welcome—tentative and tepid, but sunlight just the same.
For long seconds, I stood there looking out into the slightly overgrown back garden and the dense woods beyond it. There was something hypnotic about all that freshly minted emptiness, and I felt as if I were entirely alone in the house. I wasn’t used to the way the light looked at this hour, and its unfamiliarity lent everything a dreamlike quality. It occurred to me that Rebecca Fisher might have come down here this early herself, after the anonymous threats had begun; that she’d stood in this spot, at once restless and purposeless, unable to linger in bed as I’d been. I remembered the dog collar we’d found in our first week here, the pet we hadn’t seen any sign of when she’d shown us around in March. I had a mental picture of it watching her incuriously from the corner, by the door, as she stood and remembered why she was hated…
I shivered in the early-morning chill, and forced myself to move away from the view. Making strong black coffee, I lit a cigarette and sat down at the table with a pad of A4 and a biro. Deliberately, I turned my attention away from the echoes that lingered on the air, towards the facts alone; the drama, the horror, the things that could easily be translated into fiction.
As it happened, it was easier than I could have hoped—the bare plot outline that had come to me yesterday was developing at an almost frightening speed, and fresh details began to unwind as I scrawled down first-stage notes. A child murderess who’d built a whole new life for herself under an assumed identity, a happy, respectable life as a pillar of village society. And her politely, implacably blackmailing nemesis—a retired female police officer now fallen on hard times, a chance sighting in the local shop sparking sudden recognition…
I don’t think anyone else would have been able to decipher my handwriting. It had degenerated into a tiny, erratic scrawl, as if someone else was dictating at a hundred miles an hour and I was struggling to catch each word without the aid of shorthand. I was still scribbling furiously when Carl’s voice came from behind me.
‘Annie? What the hell are you up to?’
I turned, startled as if caught in some shameful or criminal activity. He was standing in the doorway, touslehaired and dressing gowned.
‘Just thought I’d make a start on the writing,’ I said. ‘Well, on the notes, anyway. The actual writing’s a long way off, yet.’ I struggled to sound casual, as if I’d been driven down by mild peckishness rather than starvation. I was well aware I wasn’t making a very good job of it.
‘I’ve never known you get up this early when you didn’t have to,’ he said cautiously. ‘It’s only just gone ten to seven. How long have you been down here?’
Over three quarters of an hour—the realisation startled me badly. I’d had no idea of how quickly the time had passed. ‘About ten minutes or so,’ I said quickly. ‘I don’t know, I just wanted to get something down on paper.’
‘That’s dedication.’ He smiled. In his eyes, I saw my actions become characteristic of that charmingly foreign country Artistic Temperament, rather than the bleak and alien wastelands of Strange Behaviour. ‘I wondered where you’d got to when I woke up a few minutes ago. Didn’t break the flow too badly, did I?’
‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll be able to pick up where I left off.’ I closed and bolted a heavy door against the clamouring ideas. ‘Want some coffee?’
‘Thanks, but no thanks. Think I’ll go and have a shower. I’ll leave you to it—don’t work too hard.’
As I heard him moving around upstairs, I tried to plunge back into the logistics of the plot, but when he’d finally left for work I was dismayed to feel the high-pressure jet of ideas slow to a trickle, and threaten to dry up completely. It was the house, I realised; in his absence it became somehow oppressive, distracting, reminding me how little I knew about the woman who’d inspired my shadowy central character. A nervous middle-aged woman who’d owned a dog and left its collar behind. A woman with bloodshot pale eyes and greying fair hair tied indifferently back in a ponytail. A woman whose personality and emotions and motivation were entirely hidden from me. A stranger…
My train of thought was derailed by the sound of the back door creaking open. Glancing round, I saw Liz’s cat Socks poised in the doorway with the politely autocratic air of a duke waiting to be seated at the Savoy. The sight obscurely cheered me; I couldn’t help smiling as I rose from my seat. ‘Hello, puss,’ I said, ‘What’s the matter, Liz at work? Come on—I’ll get you some milk.’
I filled a saucer and set it down by the table. It was fine to have him here during the daytime; it was only the immediate presence of cats or dogs that started Carl sneezing. Socks glanced up at me with more acknowledgement than gratitude before lapping the milk up briskly. Then he shook a few drops off his whiskers and padded over to a broad square of sunlight on the underfoot tiles, where he curled up in its absolute centre, his attitude midway between sunbathing and sleeping.
Realising that the new visitor wasn’t going to require a lot more attention, I sat back down to the notes, absently lighting another cigarette. My earlier misgivings deepened as I looked at what I’d written earlier. A crucial absence stared out at me from each page, made the broad outline of this long-awaited new idea two-dimensional, unsatisfactory.
Some time later, I was startled by a second noise from the back door, this time a brisk, playful tippety-tap. Rising to get it, I saw Liz through the window, brown hair escaping from its bun in flyaway wisps. Untidiness normally brought with it a reassuring air of vulnerability, but in her case it seemed to imply the exact opposite, a woman too busy and confident and practical to care about any element of grooming other than cleanliness. Even her face reflected that; an unselfconsciously weather-beaten look said that she’d never worn any makeup beyond the occasional smudge of lipstick, and that she’d never wanted to.
‘Hello, dear,’ she said cheerfully, stepping in. ‘Sorry to be a pest, but I was wondering if you’d seen—oh, there he is. I got back from the library a few minutes ago, and wondered where he’d got to. I do hope he hasn’t been a nuisance.’
‘Oh, not at all,’ I said quickly. ‘It’s been nice having him around.’
‘Really, dear, just shoo him away if he bothers you, there’s no need to be embarrassed about it. He’s only after more food, as if he didn’t get enough at home. He can be a greedy little thing sometimes.’ She smiled, looking affectionately down at Socks, then her gaze moved to the table, the scrawled-on pad of A4 beside the half-full ashtray. ‘Oh dear, I didn’t interrupt you, did I? Were you writing a letter?’
I remembered I hadn’t told her about my writing, and decided that this wouldn’t be a good time to do so. I had absolutely no wish to share my new idea and have it met by blank, rather wary incomprehension—everything I’d seen of her told me she’d consider it in extremely bad taste, if not actively morbid. ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘To an old friend in Reading. I thought it’d be nice to keep in touch.’
‘That is nice. I always think the telephone isn’t quite the same—I don’t care how many people say it’s more convenient these days. My mother always used to say, nobody ever kept a nice telephone call.’
A brief and rather awkward pause. She was the kind of woman who it was decidedly stressful to receive an unexpected visit from; I was aware of her discreet but total alertness to domestic detail, tried not to wonder what she was privately disapproving of behind that polite social smile. The ashtray seemed the most obvious culprit, and I found myself thanking God there wasn’t a half-empty wine glass on the table.
‘Well, I’d better be off then, Anna,’ she said. ‘I’m sure I’ll see you soon.’
She bent down and scooped up Socks with small hands that looked surprisingly unspoiled by cooking and gardening and other placid semi-rural pursuits. Her wedding and engagement rings caught the light, sun glinting off the thin gold band and dancing across the square-cut emerald conventionally set in diamonds. As she carried the big ginger cat over to the front door, something seemed to occur to her, and she turned back.
‘Would you like to pop over in half an hour or so, dear? A couple of my friends are coming round for a cup of tea and a chat. Helen, who you saw when you first moved in, and another lady called Muriel. I’m sure it would be nice for you to meet them properly. I wouldn’t dream of intruding, but you must be getting awfully lonely on your own here.’
Extraordinary, how much could change in less than twenty-four hours. This time yesterday, I’d have agreed joyfully in the hope of meeting new people, making new friends. Today, my enthusiasm was driven by something else entirely. One or more of them must have known Rebecca Fisher, I thought—must, at the very least, have spoken to her more than once.
‘I’d love to,’ I said. ‘Thanks very much. I’ll see you then.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘SO WHERE WERE you living before, Anna?’ asked Muriel.
The four of us were sitting round Liz’s kitchen table over carrot cake and Earl Grey. As the youngest person present by at least fifteen years, I experienced a distinct self-consciousness, an outsider’s feeling I was far too familiar with. There was something dutiful about their interest and my own smiling, polite replies. It was like visiting distant aunts for the first time in years. ‘Reading,’ I said. ‘We were there quite a while.’
‘That must have been very nice. My eldest daughter lives quite near there, you know. In Basingstoke.’ Muriel was almost a caricature of a nervous fiftysomething widow who’d led a quiet and sheltered life: she spoke very fast, in a high fluting voice whose every cadence expressed vague uncertainty and anxiety to please. ‘I went to visit her there once, nearly two years ago—the time does fly, doesn’t it? I was rather worried, to be honest, even with my son-in-law in the house. There seemed to be an awful lot of crime in the area.’
‘It’s the same everywhere, these days,’ said Helen, apparently to Liz and Muriel only. ‘Not the same as when we were young.’
Up until now, she’d hardly spoken. Her voice was quiet and flat and somehow heavy, the opposite of Muriel’s in every way. On our first meeting, it hadn’t even occurred to me that she was attractive; her manner had combined with her clothes to deny any hint of that—the crisply ironed high-necked shirt, the fair hair pulled back in a pin-neat bun, the brusque, unemotional greeting to the new neighbour. Watching her more closely, I was startled to realise how good her bone structure and complexion really were. She was big without being at all fat, just built very slightly above normal scale. Her movements were as devoid of grace as they were of clumsiness—she didn’t seem to have the self-consciousness necessary for either. ‘We never used to hear about crime,’ she went on, ‘not when I was a girl.’
‘Well, there’s always been some, I dare say,’ Liz said amiably. ‘Even in some of the nicest places. It’s an awful shame, when you come to think of it.’
Out of nowhere, I spotted a golden opportunity to take the subject where I most wanted it to go, a casual side-turning off the conversation rather than a brake-squealing change of direction. ‘Even here,’ I said, trying to sound as matter-of-fact as possible. ‘You know, I heard yesterday that Rebecca Fisher lived next door, before we moved in.’
A brief moment’s silence as the three of them glanced at each other quickly, and I was struck again by the almost cartoonish contrast between Muriel and Helen, the former tiny and anxiously animated, the latter the exact opposite. I observed Liz existing at some point between them, as if overseeing proceedings. Perhaps it was simply because she alone was on home ground, but the things that distanced me most from her had never been more in evidence—she was comfortably at the centre of her domestic world, a woman who’d never known what outside meant. ‘Well… I suppose you had to know sooner or later, dear,’ she said reluctantly. ‘I expect you heard from Maureen in the shop. She’s such a dreadful gossip.’
‘I did,’ I said. ‘I must say, it came as a bit of a surprise.’
They all watched me for several seconds, faces betraying varying degrees of uncertainty; Liz spoke again at last. ‘I’m sorry you had to find out like that,’ she said quietly. ‘Perhaps I should have told you myself. The thing is… I didn’t think you’d want to know. I thought it would just upset you for no reason.’
‘I don’t mind. I’m not frightened—why should I be?’ I remembered the way I’d felt walking back from the shop yesterday, the unfolding sense of hypnosis as the front door closed behind me. As if to hold those images at bay, I found my
self speaking with Carl’s earnest-eyed pragmatism. ‘I’m not, you know, superstitious like that. I don’t mind who used to live in the house, or what happened there.’
‘You must have nerves of steel, Anna, you really must.’ Muriel sounded awed. ‘If I found out something like that about my little cottage, I’d move the very next day, I’d simply have to. It was terribly frightening, when all of that was happening—when I found out, I didn’t sleep properly for weeks.’
‘Don’t expect she’d have done you any harm. Not these days.’ At first Helen sounded dismissive, then judgemental. ‘Still, it’s a scandal they let her out at all. Good thing she finally got what was coming to her, or almost—you know about that, I suppose?’
She addressed me abruptly: I couldn’t help but find her manner a little intimidating, casting me in the role of an unreliable witness facing an expert cross-examiner. I relayed in brief what I’d heard from Maureen Evans—the anonymous notes, the broken windows, the abrupt departure. When I’d finished, their expressions said that I’d been told the full story. I could sense both Muriel and Liz wondering what they should say, how they could reassure without actively lying.
‘It was such a terrible thing to happen,’ Muriel said hesitantly, at last. ‘I can’t help thinking she might not even have been who they said she was—whoever it was that did those awful things to her. It could just have been a dreadful mistake of some sort.’
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