The range included a background section of the sidewalk beyond Booth’s boundary, and it was a bit creepy at first to see their neighbors passing by—Sara Boulter, sweeping past the mess with a look of horror discernible even in miniature; Tess out with her kids—and often Naomi’s younger one too.
Ant hadn’t realized quite how much Tess did for Naomi, though Em had said Naomi liked to make little digs about her sister-in-law not working. Tess moved languidly, with a kindly, dreamy air, an earth mother figure never without a child or animal by her side, unlike Naomi, who was a force of nature, often seen striding—alone—from house to house. In the aforementioned court battle, he knew whom he’d send into the witness box.
Also picked up in the footage were Sissy’s occasional evening strolls, which sometimes involved her stalling on the sidewalk to stare, arms hugged across her chest, feet locked in place, as if to take a step over Booth’s boundary was to run the risk of detonating a land mine.
There was little to see once darkness fell, for the app had a limited night-vision function and there was no security light on either side of the drive. Sometimes, the outline of a figure against car headlights revealed Ralph or Finn walking Daisy home after babysitting.
“We have to agree this is purely to get Booth,” Ant told Em. “If we happen to catch one of the Morgans snogging that babysitter, we don’t tell anyone.”
Em scowled. “Daisy is seventeen. I think we would be morally obliged to report it to her parents.”
“I was only joking,” Ant said, groaning.
He didn’t have to wait long for success. Within ten days, there was clear footage of a visitor handing Jodie an envelope in return for a set of car keys and a package of what Ant presumed were vehicle registration documents. As Darren and Jodie watched, the man then got into a polished-up Renault on the drive and slid from range. He did not return.
“That’ll be cash in that envelope,” Ant crowed, replaying Em the segment. But she wasn’t nearly as thrilled as he was; she was paying more attention to Sam, who’d been grizzling all day. It was Saturday lunchtime and next door the TV played an extended stand-up comedy routine, complete with roaring audience. “Isn’t it great? You all right, Em?”
She flashed him a disbelieving look. “In case you haven’t noticed, Sam’s teething and in agony and I’m trying to comfort him while you play with your toys.”
“It’s not a toy,” Ant protested. “It’s equipment to capture the documentary proof we’ve been waiting for. What’s the problem? Anyone would think you didn’t want to catch them in the act!”
“Anyone would think you’re getting some stupid macho satisfaction out of buddying up with Ralph over this. Like this is anything to him but a pissing contest.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, he lives two doors down in a detached house with state-of-the-art double glazing! His children aren’t a thousandth as badly affected as your own son.”
“Sam’s the reason I’m helping Ralph,” Ant protested, his patience thinning.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m fucking sure.”
Em’s shoulders went rigid, her jaw jutting as she spoke: “Please don’t swear at me.”
“I’m sorry.” He regained his composure. “I’m just disappointed you’re not more excited about this breakthrough.”
“‘Breakthrough’?” Her scorn had an awful ferocity to it. “Proof of something that was already obvious to anyone with a pair of eyes?”
“Yes. Because what’s obvious to anyone with a pair of eyes doesn’t count, believe it or not! So can you please stop being so obstructive?” He could feel himself flushing, his blood surging.
“Why are you having a go at me?” Em cried. “I’m not the one wrecking people’s lives!” As Sam began wailing, she handed him to Ant and dropped into the nearest chair, face in hands.
Ant squatted next to her, cuddling Sam while trying to comfort both mother and child. He was frustrated to feel his own tears rising as laughter detonated on the other side of the wall.
“We have to work as a team, Em. There’s literally no other way. We can’t beat them alone.”
“We can’t beat them at all,” Em said, her voice thick with misery.
“Don’t say that,” Ant said.
The exchange left him feeling wounded—and confused. Even as the four walls closed in, he didn’t know where he was with Em anymore.
* * *
—
At least Ralph was thrilled. His head appeared on the other side of the garden wall when Ant was in the garden later that afternoon. “That footage you sent me is fantastic, mate—well done! If that’s not proof he’s running a business from the premises, then I don’t know what is.” He spoke in a low, intense voice, like an editor briefing his star reporter.
“Can you believe they’re so brazen?” Ant agreed.
“I know. Shame it’s not coke or E or something. Then he’d be banged up all right.” Though, technically, it had been Jodie caught committing the misdemeanor, Ralph spoke exclusively in terms of Darren.
“Fancy a beer? Hop on over. Hey, maybe we should think about pulling down this wall as well? The bigger the better.” Ralph passed over the stepladder and Ant climbed into the Morgans’ garden as if he’d been doing it all his life. Whatever the cause of Em’s skepticism, he considered the Morgans a godsend. They knew the street inside out. They would correct this dire momentum toward anarchy before the Kendall marriage imploded.
A flicker in his upper peripheral vision told him they were being watched, he presumed by a needlessly disapproving Em. He tried to recall when it had begun, her tendency to deride his efforts. The slide on his part into the kind of man who might swear at his wife. Was it with Booth’s arrival, as cut-and-dried as that? Or had it been earlier? Exacerbated by neighborhood unrest, not born of it.
But when he looked again, he saw that the figure was not in his own window but in the one beyond. Booth.
“Freak,” Ralph said, following Ant’s gaze. “Wouldn’t be surprised if on top of everything else he was a pedo, would you?”
CHAPTER
7
TESS
Yes, we’ve complained. We all have, some of us repeatedly. But none of it has had any effect. He either ignores you completely or smirks and walks away. She’s a bit more willing to engage, but then, she is front of house, isn’t she? Running the business side of things while he does the labor. Quite the dream team, eh?
The most difficult issue for us? I suppose what I hate the most is how it alters your relationships with your neighbors. You get caught up in other people’s dramas as well as your own. Basically, this one couple has destroyed the whole atmosphere of the neighborhood. Even before this awful tragedy, they’d destroyed it.
MRS. TESSA MORGAN, 5 LOWLAND WAY, HOUSE-TO-HOUSE INQUIRIES BY THE METROPOLITAN POLICE, AUGUST 11, 2018
Two weeks earlier
“Do Ralph and Naomi really care what’s going on?” Em asked her, oversize sunglasses masking the now habitual blaze of indignation in her eyes. “They can’t be that bothered by it, with their amazing double glazing. Is this campaign just some vanity project?”
They were in the Morgans’ garden with Dex and Sam. Thanks to Finn’s sprinkler system, the lawn had survived the July heat wave to resemble a vivid, shimmering paradise in a blanched and thirsty land. A shuttlecock lay savaged on the terrace, Kit’s handiwork, if Tess had to guess (or maybe Charlie’s). Ralph and Naomi had paid for the deep natural stone terrace they shared, chosen to suit their own extension and laid in place of the existing redbrick herringbone design Tess had been fond of. Two hundred and fifty thousand pounds that extension had cost, Ralph had told Finn, and sometimes, when Tess caught a glimpse of Naomi at her central island, white marble gleaming in the midmorning sun like a source of light in its own right, she thought of a s
paceship—and of how pleased Naomi was to be the earthling entrusted with its controls.
She took a moment to consider Em’s question. “They do care, yes, but for different reasons. Ralph’s on a mission about the cars, but Naomi’s real concern is Play Out Sunday. I said to her the other day, should we cancel it, you know, because he won’t clear his cars? And she said”—here, Tess mimicked Naomi’s gravelly, well-spoken tones—“‘Over my dead body, my friend.’”
Em laughed. Tess noticed she laughed in that way people under stress did, as if their signaling might at any time malfunction and turn laughter into sobbing.
“When will he wake up?” Dex asked, prodding baby Sam in his buggy. “He’s always asleep.”
Poor, poor little Sam, Tess thought. They’d just been to the park to see the cygnets, but he’d slept through the whole outing. Em had shown Tess the special noise-canceling earmuffs they had bought for him to wear at night, but he sometimes pushed them off in his sleep and woke up. Like his parents, he’d had no choice but to turn seminocturnal.
“Soon,” she promised Dex, “but we need to leave now to pick up your sister from school.”
“You’ll be off to school in September, won’t you?” Em said to Dex. “It’ll be nice to escape, won’t it?”
An odd verb to choose, Tess thought. Dex said nothing, just nodded, solemn-eyed. It was almost as if he sensed Em’s fragility, the need to handle her with care.
But when the mothers and sons, plus Tuppy, emerged into the street together, he was more typically boyish. “Another truck!” he yelled excitedly.
Sure enough, at the bottom of Em’s drive there idled a lorry laden with scaffolding. Whatever cheer Em had gained from the hour in Tess’s garden now drained, her whole countenance slumping. She removed her sunglasses. “Oh God, what’s going on now?”
“He must be starting on the roof repairs,” Tess said. “Finn said he mentioned those when they first met.”
“Great.” Em began pushing the buggy, her stride brisk, and Tess had to scurry to keep pace. “He hasn’t finished the inside yet. Why can’t he do one thing at a time?”
Reaching Em’s drive, they had to navigate with care as scaffolding boards were carried to Booth’s house by two builders. Booth and another man were already assembling the poles for the lower level.
“Is that a proper scaffolding company?” Em said. “Those boards look a hundred years old.”
“Off the back of a lorry in both senses of the phrase,” Tess murmured.
“And the workers don’t look like professionals, do they? Shouldn’t they be wearing hard hats and those fluorescent jackets? Wait a minute!” Em stiffened. “Those poles are sticking out over my window!”
It was true: the horizontal poles poked a good foot across the obvious dividing line between the two houses and slightly over the Kendalls’ living room window.
Em checked the brake on Sam’s buggy and strode forward. “Excuse me? Hello! Don’t pretend you don’t know who I am! You need to take this down—it’s extending right across my property!”
Though the scaffolders paused to look at her, Booth barely glanced up, absorbed in his task. He was bare-chested, as he often was in the hot weather, and it made Tess uncomfortable to see his skin greasy with sweat. She had a horrible image of him being impaled on one of his rusting poles.
“Did you hear me? I said you’re extending across our property and you haven’t asked my permission!” Em stepped under the poles and rapped Booth on the shoulder.
Tess caught her breath: it was the first time she’d seen any of the neighbors make physical contact with him.
“What’s the big deal?” He grimaced, impatient of the interruption.
“The big deal is you should have asked! Like everything else you do, you do it without any warning or explanation, nothing. It’s completely unacceptable. We live here too!”
It was unfortunate that she sounded so emotional, almost wild, and Booth exchanged a look with one of the workers, who failed to suppress his laughter.
“Don’t make fun of me!” Em screamed, but they ignored her and carried on with what they were doing.
Hearing her distress, Sam woke and began whimpering, and Tess knelt to comfort him. Both Dex and Tuppy were riveted by the argument, Tuppy rigid with attention.
“Just you wait,” Em continued, shouting now. “We’re onto you, you know. We’ve got proof!”
“Proof of what, love?” Booth was unruffled. “D’you want to get out of the way? You might lose an eye.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s safety advice.” He shouldered past her, not violently, but with enough momentum to cause her to overbalance slightly and stagger toward the near side of the scrap heap.
Tess checked that the brake was engaged on Sam’s buggy. She wouldn’t have handled this as Em was but she was damned if she was going to watch him ride roughshod over another woman like this. Assigning Dex Tuppy’s lead, she marched up to Darren. “Can’t you stop for half a minute and have a civilized conversation about this? You’ve hardly started putting the scaffolding up. It won’t cost you anything to start again and move the poles along a few inches.” Then, when he disregarded her plea as easily as he had Em’s: “Is your wife in?” Dodging the passing workers, she beat on the open front door with her palms. “Jodie!”
Jodie emerged, phone in hand, midcall and harried. “What’s going on? I’m trying to talk on the phone here.”
“Would it be possible to ask your husband to restart this scaffolding?” Tess said. “He’s got it right over Em and Ant’s window.”
Jodie sighed before speaking sharply to Darren. “Move it along a bit, all right? Makes no difference to you.”
“Thank you.”
For two or three seconds, it felt like a significant compromise in relations, until Dex shrieked from the sidewalk, “Mummy, Tuppy’s run away!” and suddenly Tuppy was at Tess’s feet, barking and rearing up, and Booth was snarling at him, “Get that fucking mutt off my drive!” and he raised the tool in his hand as if to hurl it at the dog.
“You need to leave,” Jodie told Tess, putting herself between her husband and Tuppy. “We can’t have kids and dogs running wild on a building site.”
As if she were the rational one, not Tess! As if her husband were not the one putting up dodgy scaffolding half-naked!
Capturing Tuppy’s lead, Tess retreated. “I’ll be ringing the council about this,” she called. “And Health and Safety. Then I’ll come and watch you take it down again, piece by piece. Are you OK?” she asked Em, who was now with Sam, her face and neck streaked with high color. Sam was bawling at full volume.
“I’m fine.” Em fumbled with the brake, not meeting Tess’s eye. “Thanks for helping, but I need to go in and feed Sam. Oh God, he’s really upset.”
“She’s deranged, that one,” Tess heard Booth say to the scaffolders in his odd, mild voice, as Em thumped the door shut behind her. “Am I meant to be moving this or what?” he asked his wife.
“Don’t bother,” Jodie said, puffing her cheeks as she sighed.
Hurrying away, Dex trailing, Tess Googled the council’s website and found the relevant page:
You do not need a permit to put up scaffolding on your own property. You must, however, use a builder or scaffolding contractor who is trained and competent.
Trained and competent according to whom?
“Mummy, no!”
“Sorry, Dex.” Tess put away her phone before she committed the very sin she warned her son daily was the deadliest: crossing the road without waiting for the green light.
* * *
—
It was easy to blame Booth categorically for what happened on that week’s Play Out Sunday, but in Tess’s opinion it was partly the parents’ fault. All of the parents, herself included. After all, they’d known they couldn�
�t continue to trust the safety of the arrangement the way they always had, not until they secured his cooperation and stopped him from moving his cars in and out. Plus there was now the RV outside Ralph and Naomi’s, an obstruction by anyone’s standards, as well as four other vehicles left in the street.
The heat was brutal. Even the shade, cast by the paper-dry canopy of elms, felt exposing.
A group of kids, led by the Boulter twins, who, at thirteen, rarely partook these days and whose presence was something of a draw, were skateboarding on the stretch outside their house. Dex and Charlie were attracted by the energy of it, though they didn’t have boards of their own, and Charlie clamored nonstop to be allowed a turn until eventually Naomi went out and tasked the older boys with giving him a few tips. It was after Naomi had returned indoors to fetch sunscreen and Tess had redirected Dex’s attention to Isla and her friends’ skipping game that the incident occurred.
The first thing was a yell from Ethan Boulter, followed by an eruption of younger voices screaming. Charlie was lying motionless on the ground by the rear bumper of Darren Booth’s white van. Booth had evidently reversed out of his drive into the street, turning downstream into the boarders’ path and hitting the first moving target he’d met. He remained in the vehicle, with the engine still running.
“Where was he hit?” Tess cried, dashing over, Dex in her wake, and was assaulted by a cacophony of panicked children’s voices:
“Is he dead?”
“His eyes are open!”
“He needs the kiss of life!”
“Turn the engine off!” she screamed to Booth, who, for once, complied without a word. Kneeling next to Charlie, she could tell he was breathing, but it was still the most ghastly sight, a little boy—her nephew—inert and open-eyed, as if hovering between one state of being and another. He was conscious but unbending, perhaps from the shock. She called over her shoulder to the thickening crowd: “Someone get Naomi! Number 7. Isla, you go! Charlie, Charlie, darling, can you hear me? You’re going to be OK. . . .”
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