Those People

by Louise Candlish

  ALSO BY LOUISE CANDLISH

  OUR HOUSE

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

  Copyright © 2019 by Louise Candlish

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Candlish, Louise, author.

  Title: Those people / Louise Candlish.

  Description: First edition. | New York Berkley, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018059466 | ISBN 9780451489142 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780451489159 (ebook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Suspense. | FICTION / Contemporary Women. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6103.A63 T47 2019 | DDC 823/.92--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059466

  First Edition: June 2019

  Jacket photographs: house by plainpicture/Arcaid/Peter Durant; male silhouette by Michal Sanca/Shutterstock; female silhouette by EyeEm/Getty Images

  Jacket design by Katie Anderson

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  To my editors, Jo and Danielle, with gratitude

  CONTENTS

  Also by Louise Candlish

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Acknowledgments

  Readers Guide

  About the Author

  CHAPTER

  1

  RALPH

  Yes, we’re aware that someone’s been killed; of course we are. What a terrible way to die, absolutely horrific. My wife was one of the first on the scene. She’s over the road right now at number 2, Sissy Watkins’s house—Naomi Morgan, she’s called. You’ve probably spoken to her already?

  I personally wasn’t here, no. I was playing tennis at the club on the other side of the high street. I must’ve left here at about eight.

  Yeah, it all looked normal on the corner when I left. The usual scrap heap. Piles of rubble everywhere, cars wedged in like some crazy 3-D jigsaw. A total disaster zone. Listen, I don’t mean to do your job for you, but you’ll save yourself a whole lot of legwork if you forget the rest of us and go ask him how this happened.

  Darren Booth, of course. Who do you think I mean? The man responsible for this tragedy! And while you’re at it, maybe you should find out from the council where they’ve been while all of this has been going on, eh? If you ask me, they’ve been completely negligent these last few months. These budget cuts have gone way too far and all it takes is one character like him and suddenly we’re living in the Wild West.

  My relationship with him? Mutual hatred, I would say. I recognized his type straightaway. Doesn’t give a shit what anyone else thinks. Uncivilized, basically. I remember the first conversation we had—if you can call it that—the weekend he moved in. He almost came at me with a hammer. . . .

  MR. RALPH MORGAN, 7 LOWLAND WAY, HOUSE-TO-HOUSE INQUIRIES BY THE METROPOLITAN POLICE, AUGUST 11, 2018

  Eight weeks earlier

  The first clue that something was amiss that Friday evening was that the parking space outside his house was occupied by a filthy white Toyota so decrepit it was bordering on scrap. Certainly not the vehicle of choice of anyone he knew on Lowland Way.

  If you entered the street from the park end, as Ralph generally did when he drove home from his warehouse in Bermondsey, you proceeded along a sliding scale of house sizes—and prices—from pretty workmen’s cottages through narrow three-story terraces to the large detached Victorians at the Portsmouth Avenue end. These were indisputably the best properties, their old brick glowing furnace red in spectacular contrast to the green of the elms that lined the road.

  Ralph and his family had occupied number 7 for more than fifteen years, while, right next door at number 5, his brother, Finn, and his family had been in residence for twelve. It was as good as it got, the brothers agreed, and for half the price you’d pay in some parts of London.

  Parking was the big compromise. The front gardens were too shallow for off-street parking and the street bays were unrestricted by the council, which effectively meant a free-for-all. Hence the occasional intruder.

  Nosing past the Toyota, he became aware of his windscreen blurring. It took him a second or two to register that the wall of number 1 was being smashed to smithereens by some barbarian workman, a dust cloud drifting into the road. Nearby, a white panel van hogged the spaces of two cars, which explained the parking disruption.

  “What the hell . . . ?” Ralph pulled over, wound down his window and called to the builder: “Excuse me—what’s going on here?”

  The guy didn’t hear him. Under his gray overalls, his physique was unexpectedly slight given the dirt tornado he’d produced single-handedly.

  Ralph raised his voice: “Hey! Can you please stop!”

  This time, the worker halted, remaining for a second or two with his back to the street, to Ralph’s car, with a stillness that struck Ralph as a little sinister. Then he turned and approached, lump hammer in hand. His face was smeared with dirt, its expression casually defiant.

  “Can I ask who hired you to knock down this wall?” Ralph said.

  “You can ask what you like, mate.” The accent was standard South London, not Eastern European as Ralph had naturally expected, and the mild tone made Ralph’s own sound peremptory, officious.

  “Was it the council? Because they’ve got no right to demolish it. This wall is one hundred percent
the property of number 1. I’ve seen the documents with my own eyes.”

  Occupying a generous plot next to Finn’s house, semidetached numbers 1 and 3 were the only pair of postwar houses on the street and, set back far enough to allow a short shared drive, the only ones with private parking. The high wall on the corner, all that remained of the original Victorian villa that had been flattened in the Blitz, had in recent years been under threat by the council, who wanted to widen the left turn from Portsmouth Avenue, basically turning Lowland Way into a rat run. Supported by the owner of number 1, Old Jean, the Morgans had led the campaign against demolition—and won.

  Since late December, when Jean had passed away, the house had stood empty, the wall forgotten. Ralph had taken his eye off the ball, evidently.

  A new thought struck him. “Unless . . . Wait. Is there a new owner? Is that who hired you?”

  “There is a new owner, yeah.” There was a malevolent swagger to the way this guy gripped his hammer, Ralph’s open window just swinging distance away. How easily he could bludgeon Ralph’s skull if he chose!

  Ralph’s fingers hovered over the window controls. He was experiencing a primitive antipathy toward this person, as if encountering a member of a rival tribe who’d entered his settlement without permission. He jerked his gaze back to the man’s face, tried to size him up. He must be . . . how old? Mid-fifties? He had a large bald patch, pink from sun or exertion, and deep facial lines mortared with dirt—older than Ralph, certainly.

  Ralph coughed, the dust catching in his throat. “Can I have his number? I’ll fill him in on the situation.”

  “Another time, mate,” the builder said. “I’m in the middle of something here.” And returning to the wall, hammer raised, he smashed it with an unrestrained violence that made Ralph brace in his seat.

  Plucking lines from his anger-management tool kit—“Breathe out more than in. . . . Repeat to yourself: you are perceiving a threat that may not be there”—he powered the window shut and reversed down Lowland Way and into the first available space, all the way back at number 19. He was normally very skilled at parallel parking, but this evening it was necessary to make several adjustments before he finally turned off the ignition.

  Checking his phone, he saw, too late, a missed call from Naomi, followed by a text:

  New neighbor at No. 1, looks tricky! Come straight home and let’s discuss.

  Oh, fuck.

  * * *

  —

  Letting himself in, Ralph struggled to reconcile his horror at the wall demolition with the nervous exhilaration of renewed battle.

  “You see what’s going on out there, Nay?”

  “I certainly did.” Naomi was in the kitchen at the back of the house. The cofounder of a website for mums of preschoolers—“curator, not editor,” she would correct Ralph—she was based at her partner’s live-work unit a twenty-minute power walk away and usually had dinner under way by the time he arrived home (Ralph prided himself on taking over the cooking on weekends). Lean in gray activewear and tall even in black ballet pumps, she looked like a wife and mother in a commercial as she stood at the marble-topped island, tossing the glistening leaves of a salad; as usual, she scooped the cherry tomatoes to the top in the hope of hoodwinking the family’s lettuce haters.

  At his approach, she turned, tongs raised. A strand of dark hair—long and smooth, policed regularly for gray—drifted into her eye and she used an elegantly bent wrist to dislodge it. “I’m as appalled as you are, darling—believe me. But it’s too late to save the wall, so there’s no point getting into a row with the new owner tonight. I thought we’d go and introduce ourselves to him in the morning, when the dust’s settled—literally. Find out his plans, stop him from doing anything else crazy.”

  As if by his master’s voice, Ralph was soothed. There was a lifetime of confidence in Naomi’s well-formed vowels, the conviction that she would not just meet your expectations but blow them out of the water. “What makes you think this bloke is the owner? I thought he was just the builder.”

  “I checked the Land Registry website and it’s showing someone called Darren Booth. I Googled him and found a photo. It’s definitely the guy who’s smashing the wall.” Finished with the salad, Naomi opened the fridge and handed Ralph a beer. Friday was one of their four permitted drinking nights, with the declared long-term aim of shrinking it to two. Though the kitchen doors were fully open to the garden, there were enough appliances humming to obscure any building noise three doors down.

  He took his first swallow. OK, so he’d made a mistake; that was not the way he should have handled interaction with a new neighbor. No need to bore Naomi with the details. “There isn’t any preservation order, so I suppose there’s nothing to stop him replacing it if he doesn’t like the style,” he conceded.

  This they knew only too well. As a community, the residents took great pride in their street and had gained modest celebrity with Play Out Sunday, their initiative to clear the street of traffic so the kids could play outdoors the old-fashioned way (Naomi’s brainchild; she’d been given an award by the mayor). Aesthetically, however, each household was free to make its own decisions, thanks to the council’s irritating tolerance on building permissions.

  “Do we know anything about him?” he asked. “Where he’s come from?”

  Naomi began laying out plates and pairing cutlery. “He’s not on Facebook or Twitter, so I don’t know anything personal, but he came up in recommendations for car repairs in Forest Hill—that’s how I identified him. Sissy’s doing some digging. She doesn’t recognize him, but he must be a relative of Jean’s to have inherited the place.”

  “I think you’re right,” said Ralph. The house had not been listed for sale and when the neighbors at number 3, Ant and Em Kendall, had rung the solicitor to inquire, they’d been told probate was proceeding at a standard pace—butt out, in other words. “Even in the state it’s in it must be worth seven hundred thousand. There’s no way someone like him could’ve found the money to buy it.”

  “Someone like him”: this was rich coming from a self-made man such as Ralph, who grew up on a council estate in Kent, but perhaps his background was also the reason he was qualified to generalize. He understood firsthand the limited routes available for success.

  In his case, it was raw talent that had propelled him to his status as sole proprietor of a wholesale business specializing in small leather goods. Manager of a staff of twenty. Owner of a riverside warehouse now worth ten times what he’d paid for it, thanks to the gentrification of Bermondsey in the aughts that made the rise of Lowland Gardens look sluggish.

  He was making short work of the beer. “It’s bad news for the Kendalls. The dust is terrible.”

  “They’re on holiday, so hopefully they’ll miss the worst of it.” Naomi put on oven gloves and transferred a large Le Creuset casserole dish from oven to table, calling for the kids, who were upstairs in their individual chambers, doubtless getting postschool fixes of their chosen digital poisons. Ralph imagined them with their heads tipped back and eyes half-closed, like the junkies in Trainspotting. (There was no Play Out Friday, evidently.)

  “Where’re the dogs?” he asked.

  “Tess is walking them for me. I must remember to return the favor sometime.” Naomi pulled a face. “God knows when.”

  The kids arrived, lethargic at first but soon outbellowing each other with their news; Libby was twelve, Charlie seven, but the age gap did nothing to temper their rivalry. The subject of Darren Booth was dropped. Naomi didn’t agree with slagging people off in front of the kids; it set the wrong tone. Never underestimate based on appearances, her mother had taught her.

  Fuck what anyone else thinks, Ralph’s father had taught him.

  Oh yeah, and also, Defend your turf.

  * * *

  —

  As usual, his wife’s instincts were impeccable, Ralp
h noted with satisfaction. Declaring it tactically smarter to welcome the newcomer as a group, she summoned Sissy and Finn and Tess to join them for the meet and greet.

  Finn arrived while Naomi was out delivering the kids to their Saturday morning activities. He entered through the bespoke steel-framed glass kitchen doors that had cost an arm and a leg (“ROI, babe,” Naomi had argued, quoting house prices; she knew exactly how to sweet-talk him). The brothers’ houses had free access to each other at the rear, the fence between the two gardens having been removed when the kids were very young—the removal was, in case anyone wanted to know, completely different from this new guy’s butchery. They’d returfed the communal garden to create a space wide enough for a game of football or badminton, and now their kids were growing up with the equivalent of a small park, instead of a garden, eight miles from the center of London—who wouldn’t feel like a smug bastard about that?

  “I’ve come to join up,” Finn said, helping himself to coffee with the strong, oversize hands that reminded Ralph of his brother’s spell laboring on a building site one summer in his twenties. Two years younger than Ralph and arguably more handsome (thicker hair, bluer eyes, whatever), Finn was, however, neither as rich, which everyone said was the most important thing, nor as tall either, which everyone knew was the most important thing.

  “Good man,” Ralph said. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this Booth character.”

  “Is that what the invader’s called?”

  “According to Nay. She’ll be here in a minute. Where’s Tess?”

  “Doing the swimming run. She said to go without her.”

  No matter. Tess was no pushover, but she didn’t have her sister-in-law’s talent for first impressions, a fact demonstrated when Naomi sailed in, dynamic in bloodred ribbed top and vintage jean skirt, legs still tanned from their Easter holiday in Dubai. Her hair swung free the way Ralph liked it.

  “Hi, Finn. Ready for the charm offensive? Sissy says she’ll join us over there.” She swept up the tin of biscotti she intended to give the newcomer. “I’m guessing he’ll invite us in for a coffee.”