Huge unfairness overcame me, filling my throat with the hot, dry lump of incipient tears—they pricked my eyes, and I blinked them away fiercely. ‘I didn’t tell you at the time, because…well, I didn’t think it was all that important, not then. But a couple of weeks later, I was hoovering our room and saw him standing outside. His car was parked by the side of the road, and he was looking at the house. And not long after that, I came down here one morning, and found Socks dead on the garden path—’
I broke off for a second, lighting a cigarette, inhaling deeply. ‘It was just like Rebecca’s dog, what had happened to it. And Mr Wheeler had been so close to her. I thought it might be his idea of revenge. He’d been so furious with me—an eye for an eye, you know—doing to me what someone had done to her—’
I’d been addressing most of my words to the table-top, afraid to see the effect they might be having on him, and as I finished speaking, I dragged my gaze back to his face. I’d expected any combination of mounting anger and deep anxiety, but didn’t see either—he looked bemused more than anything, forehead corrugated, eyes uncomprehending. ‘Is that what’s been getting to you so badly for the past few weeks?’ he asked. ‘What you’ve been so worried about, and wouldn’t tell me?’
I nodded, and saw the creases in his forehead deepen; his scrutiny had become troubled and oddly distant, as if he was looking at me through a microscope. ‘Annie,’ he said carefully, ‘I don’t know why you let it bother you. It’s just a few coincidences—not even striking ones, come to think of it. Just…things that happened.’
I stared at him, wrong-footed, disbelieving. I could have been talking to the policeman again, hearing him dismiss my fears with patronising gentleness, the way a psychiatric nurse might react to a harmless schizophrenic gibbering about vampires under the bed. ‘Look,’ he went on. ‘That vet got the wrong end of the stick and got angry. He happened to be passing one day, and thought maybe he’d call in on Liz—he saw her car wasn’t here and drove off. And then her cat died…it was an old cat, you’ve said as much yourself. There’s nothing out of the ordinary in any of it…you must be able to see that.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Carl,’ I said urgently, ‘look what’s happened. What do you make of all this?’
I gestured at the blinds that formed a curtain in front of infinite night, as they rattled again in the wind. ‘This happened to Rebecca as well, I told you about that months ago. Her windows were smashed; it’s exactly the same. That vet’s behind it all, that Mr Wheeler—it’s some kind of revenge, I’m quite sure of it—’
His expression was incredulous but also deeply disturbed. He looked like a man confronting something that he’d read about in passing, but had never expected to encounter in the flesh, a man who had no idea what to do in this situation. We both knew it was his turn to speak, but he didn’t say anything for endless seconds. It was as if he’d forgotten his lines.
‘That’s just ridiculous,’ he said at last. ‘Come on, think about it rationally. It was a burglary, and that’s the end of it. What’s our DVD player and stereo got to do with your bloody research?’
‘They took my book. My book on Rebecca Fisher.’ He shrugged evasively, and sudden frustration rose inside me, exploding into rage. I gestured towards the fruit bowl, slightly too wildly. ‘It was there this morning, right there. You’ve seen it there, I know you have—you’ve seen it there dozens of times—’
‘I have, but so what? They took all kinds of things, in case you didn’t notice. What about the camera and clock radio? They weren’t worth anything either. It looks like they helped themselves to whatever caught their eye…maybe one of them was a true-crime fan, wanted something to read on the drive home.’
His humour was a knee-jerk reaction, no more or less—he showed no sign of smiling, or even wanting to. Still, it seemed to imply a flippant indifference to my fears, and infuriated me. ‘They took my folder, as well. I didn’t tell you before, but they did. I kept it in the spare room, and it had all my research notes in it. Why would that have gone, if it was just a burglary?’ I stubbed out my cigarette viciously, lighting another at once. ‘Burglars wouldn’t even have noticed it, they’d have just—’
‘This is insane,’ he interrupted abruptly. ‘Literally insane—I mean, Jesus, Annie, it’s like something from the X Files. Some world conspiracy about your research? An evil vet avenging Rebecca Fisher?’ His voice was straight from a management meeting, but he looked as stunned as I’d felt coming into the house that evening. ‘Maybe the burglars just liked the look of your precious folder. Why would anyone want to steal your notes?’
Suddenly, nothing was too damning to keep to myself—I’d have told him any secret in the world, just to make him believe me. ‘There’s something else,’ I said quietly. ‘Something I haven’t told you. I got a silent phone call here, the week before last. There was just breathing down the line for a few seconds, then someone hung up.’
I paused, trying to gauge the impact my words were having, but he’d become poker-faced, inscrutable. ‘Then, a couple of nights later, the same thing happened to you. Only there wasn’t any breathing when you answered. They just hung up…’
I watched his blank look giving way to something else, like a Polaroid photograph developing itself before my eyes. As the picture grew clearer, I froze up inside. His expression had become more aghast than ever and, instead of horror, his voice was full of incredulity.
‘Annie,’ he said, ‘you’re just not making sense. The one I picked up wasn’t a silent call, it was just a wrong number. And I’m sure the one you picked up was just the same.’
I was starkly reminded of Petra’s attitude towards my fears, over the phone—only I hadn’t told her everything, had been convinced that, if desperation ever forced me to, her complacency would instantly snap into vicarious terror. And I had nothing left to tell Carl, I realised. I’d slammed all the cards down at once, confident of an awed gasp that hadn’t come. ‘It wasn’t just a wrong number,’ I said furiously. ‘I could hear someone breathing.’
‘Yes, Annie. People do that.’
‘Not that kind of breathing, not normal breathing. It sounded deliberate.’ Even to my own ears, I sounded neurotic, hysterical; the world’s worst hypochondriac, interpreting banal flu symptoms as the onset of scarlet fever. Only I knew how serious it really was, and pressed on desperately, trying to make him understand. ‘Rebecca got silent calls here herself—the policeman told me earlier. When I got back from London this evening—’
It was as if I’d been running for my life, and had stumbled straight into a man-trap while glancing fearfully over my shoulder—my sentence tripped over itself and went sprawling. Carl’s nonspecific concern suddenly sharpened, focused. ‘London?’
I’d have to explain, I knew; the truth had jumped out too obviously to deny, or even to mitigate with a half-lie. ‘I went there earlier,’ I said unwillingly, ‘to interview someone about Rebecca. I’d have told you, but I didn’t think it mattered. I was going to—’
‘Look.’ His interruption came unexpectedly, blunt and utterly decisive, as if he’d been grappling with a huge and intricate problem for weeks, and had finally decided on the only possible course of action. ‘I want you to stop this research, Annie. I’ve said it before, but this time, I mean it. You’re making yourself ill. You know what I mean. I don’t like to think that, never mind say it, but it looks like you’re sliding back all over again…what you told me about your fresher term at university…’
His voice tailed off, suddenly awkward. I stared at him. ‘You don’t believe me about the threat here, do you? You don’t believe me at all.’
He didn’t quite look at me. ‘I don’t think you’re lying, Annie. I just think you’re…imagining things. We were burgled today. That’s all there is to it. Everything’s perfectly safe.’
The suffocating terror of not being believed on a crucial issue by someone who knew and loved you better than anyone in the world—it was helplessness and
betrayal and utter isolation all at once. I wanted to scream, to rage at him for not understanding, but could only bite down on that impulse as hard as possible; a hysterical outburst would only strengthen his conviction that he was right, I was wrong, my research had begun to unbalance me.
I nodded without speaking or looking at him. Suddenly, I couldn’t bear to see him, and didn’t trust myself with words. There was a tense silence before the sound of an approaching van cut through it, gradually becoming deafening through the shattered windows as it turned into our driveway.
‘Thank God for that,’ Carl said, rising from his seat. ‘It’s the glaziers.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
THE FOLLOWING MORNING I opened my eyes to the half-lit familiarity of our bedroom, and felt Carl stirring drowsily beside me as the alarm went. For a fraction of a second, I couldn’t understand why I felt so unsettled, then it all came back to me; the emergency glaziers working late into the night, Carl going next door to apologise about the noise shortly after they’d arrived. I remembered hammering and sawing and loud male strangers’ voices filling the kitchen and living room, as if a small invading army had been setting up camp on our ground floor.
They’d finally finished, packed up and driven off at around half past midnight. We’d gone to bed immediately after that. We hadn’t said another word about the things that really mattered—they had been abandoned on the glaziers’ arrival, and felt like something indefinitely postponed.
‘Well,’ he said, reaching out to switch the alarm off, ‘suppose I’d better make a move.’
‘You don’t have to go into work today, do you?’
‘It’s a Wednesday morning, Annie.’ He smiled. ‘There’s no reason not to—it was a burglary yesterday, not a bereavement.’
I could see him trying his best to pretend last night’s conversation had never taken place—or, if it had done, the issues had all been resolved for good. I found myself trying to do the same.
‘I’ll find out about getting a burglar alarm today,’ he said, getting out of bed. ‘I’ll track down a decent security firm this afternoon. The sooner we get one installed, the better—for our own peace of mind, if nothing else.’
He went into the bathroom, and I heard him showering. Even here, in this bedroom that hadn’t been touched at all, everything around me felt terribly wrong; the whole feel of the place had changed, and something new and alien and threatening had crept in to invade it. I realised that I didn’t want Carl to go to work at all, that I suddenly feared being left alone here. And at the same time, I knew that I could never say so without feeding his awful suspicions. It looks like you’re sliding back all over again, he’d said last night, what you told me about your fresher term at university…
Coming back in, he started getting dressed for work, and talked to me as he did so. ‘I’ll get in touch with the insurance people, as well—they should pay up for the missing stuff. I’m not too sure what they’ll say about your computer. It might be fixable, God knows I’m no IT expert, but it looked pretty much of a write-off to me.’
‘Me too,’ I said. ‘Same as the microwave.’
‘Well, like I said last night, it’s a bloody nuisance, but we can always replace them. We might as well get the new DVD player and stereo first, though. Why don’t we go into Bournemouth on Saturday, pick them up together?’
Everything between us had become deliberately, carefully superficial—we’d glued our normal relationship together like a vase, it could come apart again at any second if we put it straight back to its intended use. Behind the too-fragile surface existed things that couldn’t be discussed at all easily. ‘That’ll be fine,’ I said, ‘and we can take the computer for a check-up somewhere. PC World should be able to tell us the damage.’
He left for work soon afterwards. As the front door closed behind him, silence exploded throughout the house; I went to the window as I had done yesterday, looked out, watched him drive away. This time, I dreaded seeing the black car vanish over the horizon, and it was gone far too soon. Around me, I felt the world become as alien and sinister as it had seemed when we’d first moved here, but it was worse now, a thousand times worse.
Washing and dressing quickly, I came downstairs as though something was dragging me—I didn’t want to see the ground-floor rooms at all, not this morning. In the living room, I forced myself to draw the curtains. Perfect sunlight showed thorough repairs hastily tidied-up after—specks of plaster dust spotted the carpet by the windows, and one of the workmen had left his half-empty coffee cup by the skirting board. There was a faint, unplaceable smell like glue and wood shavings. Everything around me looked stripped, abandoned, desolate.
I went into the kitchen to wash up the workman’s cup, and it was exactly the same in there: the air seemed too still, and noises far louder than they had any right to be. I turned the tap on, and the sound of running water filled my ears. I could feel the tension around me thickening, coalescing to become a presence in its own right, summoning voices, memories, and ghosts of the past.
I couldn’t stay here, I realised. The empty rooms terrified me. I had to get out.
Getting my handbag and keys, I went out to the car and started driving into Bournemouth. I had nothing to do there, but it called to me as a temporary place of safety—somewhere that wasn’t all that different from Reading, where there’d be people and places to distract me from this new fear. Even Rebecca had diminished in my mind; there was nothing inside me but panic, and an animal impulse to escape.
Once in Bournemouth, the time passed slowly and far too quickly. I wandered aimlessly round shops I didn’t want to buy anything from, and tried to warm myself with strangers’ voices. They came from all sides, in the height of summer and the school holidays, families and couples and groups of friends. I seemed to be the only person in the whole city who was there on my own. In the heat and the cheerful crowds, my mind kept returning to the empty house full of silence, the coffee cup where I’d left it by the sink. And I thought about Carl, frowning in an office I’d never seen, remembering the events of last night. Wondering what the hell was happening to me, and whether I was losing my mind…
But I wasn’t, I told myself urgently, I wasn’t. I’d call Petra soon, and tell her all about it. I’d do it that weekend, while Carl was gardening. She’d understand when she knew the full story. There was a crucial difference between her and Carl, created by circumstances alone: he hadn’t known me during that terrible fresher term, but she had done. She’d be able to see that it wasn’t the same at all, that the dangers surrounding me were only too real.
Outside Starbucks, I sat with a paper I couldn’t concentrate on, and a coffee I couldn’t enjoy, and a huge clock ticking slowly in my head. Each second brought me a little closer to the inevitability of going home. I got another coffee to delay it, and another, smoking too many cigarettes and trying not to think about the time. But the world seemed sadistically determined to remind me—the clear line where the sunlight ended inching across my table, other tables emptying as the last hour or so of shopping beckoned. Finally, I had no option but to check my watch. It was almost half past five in the evening.
I longed to stay here, but knew I couldn’t. I’d have to hoover up the plaster dust round the windows before Carl came home from work, and I’d have to make a start on dinner. I couldn’t bear the thought that my having been out all day could confirm his worst suspicions, that they could rapidly set into cast-iron certainty. He’d see my actions today as bizarre and irrational—scared to return to a comfortable home, running away from it like a child playing truant…
All the way back to Abbots Newton, I tried my utmost to see the situation through his eyes—there wasn’t any danger, we’d just been burgled—but it didn’t work at all. I knew he was wrong. The closer Ploughman’s Lane got, the colder I felt inside. The inexorable drive up the hill dragged out for minutes.
No police cars, this time. Liz’s car wasn’t there, either. Just the white house i
n the distance, empty and waiting. And the things that would greet me inside it: the coffee cup, the plaster dust, the silence.
I’d never known Carl to put anything important off, and getting the burglar alarm fitted was no exception. On Friday afternoon, two men arrived to install it. They accepted occasional cups of tea with thanks and asked about the burglary with exactly the right combination of briskness and sympathy. I found it oddly reassuring to submerge my fears in the normality of the situation—a down-to-earth young wife taking positive measures to prevent a second break-in, untroubled by anything but the loss of an expensive stereo and DVD player.
‘Well, it certainly won’t happen again now, Mrs Howell,’ one of the men said. ‘When this alarm’s set and triggered, it’ll alert the local police straight away. You’d best be careful you don’t set it off yourself, by accident—if that happens, you should call the station in Wareham, let them know ASAP before they send a car round. Be a bit embarrassing, I’d imagine.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘I’ll remember that.’
It was easy to smile when they were there. But they were gone only too soon. As the front door closed behind them, the burglar alarm didn’t reassure me in the slightest, not in any way that mattered. It had been designed as protection against impersonal greed, not hatred, and loyalty, and vengeance.
We hadn’t just been burgled. I was as sure of that as I’d ever been of anything. If we had, I thought, our TV would have been the first item to go—it had been far and away the most expensive thing in the living room, and hadn’t even been touched. While A Mind to Murder and my research notes were gone without a trace. I thought a lot about those notes, with a sense of loss almost like bereavement—the school photograph, the faxed-through psychologist’s report, the photocopies of old newspaper pages I’d made in the London library—I knew them all virtually off by heart, but that didn’t seem to matter. In an odd sort of way, they’d acquired sentimental value; souvenirs of discovery and fascination, tangible mementoes of the real Rebecca.
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