Those People

by Louise Candlish

  A skinny, long-limbed guy in a suit and tie, Shah was disarmingly well prepared, referring to Ant’s doorstep chat with the uniformed officer on the afternoon of the eleventh without once looking at his notes. His pad was large, with a soft blue cover. Did he expect to fill it with details of Ant’s suspicious habits?

  “In light of developments, I’m interested in the period between Friday evening at about six thirty and Saturday morning at about eight thirty,” he explained unsmilingly.

  Between Booth and Jodie leaving for the pub and Amy Pope knocking at the door, Ant thought. So it was just as Booth had threatened and Ralph had warned: they, the victims, were now suspects in Amy’s death. The world had gone mad!

  “I was here, helping my wife get ready for a visit to her parents with our baby son. She postponed it because of what happened and headed off last night, instead. I can give you her number, if you need her to confirm.” He suppressed a shudder at the memory of his public clash with Em the previous evening. “I hate you!” Though she had been the more obviously hostile, he had not been as caring as he might. Chastising her in front of the others the way he had. He’d felt ashamed of her, too conscious of what the Morgans might think of them. In their impotence, they’d been able to turn on each other far more easily than on the true cause. “Yes, so she went to bed first. I was just going up myself when Darren and Jodie came back and I heard the usual booming music.”

  “Did you go round and ask them to turn it down?”

  “No, I didn’t. As I told your colleague, there’s no point. And before you ask, no, I didn’t sneak out and unscrew his scaffolding bolts or whatever you say happened. I wouldn’t have a clue how to do that even if I wanted to. You’re welcome to check my Internet search history.” He regretted the suggestion the moment he made it, rushing to apologize. “I’m sorry. No, no one left the house, until we heard the scaffolding come down the next morning. I’m positive about that, yes, positive.”

  God, he was sounding nervous. It was self-fulfilling, though, wasn’t it? Trained detectives must know that. You imagined them thinking, He’s acting guilty, and that made you act guilty. “Just let me know if I can help you with anything else,” he said, as DC Shah prepared to leave.

  “Thank you. Just your wife’s number,” the detective said gently, as if prompting an elderly relative with early signs of dementia.

  * * *

  —

  Having convinced himself that Em might never return, he almost felt like weeping when he came home from work on the Tuesday evening to find her back. Sam, already bathed and dressed for bed, let out a yelp of delight at the sight of his father, which really did bring tears to Ant’s eyes. He carried his son around the kitchen as he unpacked the shopping he’d picked up on his way home. He named every item (“wine,” “curry,” “crisps”) and tried to get Sam to make sounds of his own. Em passed no comment on his dietary habits in her absence.

  “Feeling rested?” he asked her, immediately regretting the choice of words, since no parent of a small child was ever going to answer yes to that. “I thought you might be away longer.”

  “The police called,” she said. “They want to see me in person. Besides, I do live here.”

  “Sure. I just meant that things haven’t exactly improved with Darren and Jodie.” He’d come face-to-face with them just once while Em was away. They’d been in the front garden inspecting an old Polo that had sustained bad scratches in the scaffolding collapse, and as Ant passed, they stopped what they were doing and stared at him with a forceful sense of menace. Only now did he appreciate the lukewarm glances of old.

  “What?” Jodie challenged. “If you’ve got any complaints, I suggest you talk to the police.”

  “I already have,” Ant said with bravado, but a roll of fear made his hand spasm as he tried to turn his key in the door.

  “To be honest, they’ve just carried on where they left off,” he told Em.

  She shrugged. “Of course they have. But I refuse to be driven out of my own home by bullies.”

  Well, this was welcome news.

  “Plus, you have to admit we’re a lot safer now the scaffolding’s gone. It was far, far more likely to have been one of us than Amy.”

  Ant wrested a block of cheese from Sam’s grip and put it in the fridge. “Let’s not say that in front of Sissy.” But she was right; it was a truth that bore repetition: a terrible tragedy had taken place on their doorstep, and regardless of any misguided theories the police had chosen to pursue, the neighbors were the lucky ones.

  “I notice he’s installed a camera over his front door, so he’s obviously stepping up his security,” Em said. “The police must’ve told him to watch his back, in case one of us sneaks in with our next murder weapon: a vial of cyanide, maybe? I’ll order some online.” Her snigger caused Sam to laugh too, and Ant wondered if his young brain was absorbing any of this dark talk, the vocabulary of death and hate. When they looked at photos from this period when he was older, would they be able to see that he was troubled?

  Easy to forget that Sam—specifically, his education—was the reason they were in Lowland Way in the first place, neighbors and all; the road was safely in the catchment area of the outstanding Lowland Primary. Nothing was guaranteed, of course, but the Morgans had explained the form: get him into the kindergarten attached to the school, which helped in the event of a tie, then pray every night for a low intake of siblings.

  That was before they prayed every night for silence. For their lives.

  “Should we be worried the police are on our case?” Em asked. “Are we suspects?”

  “Top of the list, I would imagine,” Ant said.

  “I assume someone’s reminded them Booth almost ran over Charlie Morgan not long before?”

  Ant paused his task. “What are you saying?”

  “Just that we’re not the only ones with a motive, if they’re thinking in those terms. And it won’t take them long to discover there’s been a group campaign against his business.”

  “No one’s trying to hide that. It’ll all be on file at the council.” But the remark caused his mind to rewind and alight, abruptly, on Em’s observation: “I notice he’s installed a camera. . . .” A significant detail now surfaced that had somehow remained submerged: his camera app on the old iPhone, abandoned since he’d secured evidence of Booth’s trading for Ralph—how much, or little, time had there been between then and August 11? Weeks, certainly. A long time for a phone battery. And yet, hadn’t it been set up to work on standby? It might just have staggered on.

  Thank God he hadn’t mentioned it to the detective. DC Shah would have seen for himself the lack of any exterior camera or alarm system at number 3, but if he’d asked, You don’t happen to have any concealed home security equipment, do you? Ant would probably have said, without thinking, Yes, as a matter of fact I’ve been using a nifty little surveillance app. . . .

  Unbelievable—he’d had all this time to remember the phone and, if needed, dispose of it, including several days in the house alone. He could have checked and double-checked the video to his heart’s content. (And why the hell hadn’t he set it up in the first place so he could access it remotely from his own phone? Fuckwit.)

  “Talking of cameras,” Em said, “if the police are right, then we should have a look at our own visuals, in case we caught the mystery saboteur on film.”

  Ant pretended to focus on Sam, who was straining to be returned to Em. “Oh, I stopped using the app after I got my money shot—literally.”

  She frowned. “I’m sure the phone was still sitting in the window when I left.”

  “Yeah, but I haven’t recharged the battery. It’ll have died ages ago.” He was aware that he was trembling slightly.

  “But it might still have had a few percent left that night. Or there might be old footage of the scaffolding going up?” Em began to look animated. />
  “True. Let’s check it out. I think it’s time for bed,” Ant told his son, then, passing him to Em: “You do that and I’ll go look.”

  “No,” Em said, refusing to take him. “You do bedtime and I’ll go look.”

  “OK.” Next door, the TV was on, the lesser of two evils as far as Sam’s sleeping went. Ant tried to concentrate on lulling him to sleep, all the while imagining his wife downstairs viewing grainy night film of Friday the tenth. Would she see a prowler, just like the one the police were on the hunt for? A killer?

  When he rejoined her, twenty minutes later, she was hunched over the phone screen. “There is something. Right at the end, just before it goes dead.”

  An unfortunate choice of phrase, but neither commented.

  There were six short sequences from the night of the tenth and the morning of the eleventh:

  7:01: Darren and Jodie leaving the house together.

  7:16: Ant arriving home from work.

  8:33: Pizza delivery guy arriving at number 3 and, seconds later, leaving.

  12:20: Darren and Jodie arriving home.

  12:29: Jodie leaving the house again.

  12:48: Jodie returning.

  “I think she went to get cigarettes,” Em said. “Look—when she comes back, she’s got one in her mouth. Must’ve gone to the petrol station on Portsmouth Avenue. That’s the only place open that late.”

  “He’s a real gent, letting her go out on her own so late at night,” Ant said.

  “Maybe that’s why she fiddled with his scaffolding on her way back in,” Em said with heavy emphasis.

  Ant stared at her, amazed. “Are you serious? Where’s that bit? Show me.”

  “Well, it doesn’t show it on here, exactly. She’s under the scaffolding and that’s not within the range of the camera. But, look—there’s also this. It’s the last thing the camera caught before it died.”

  It was a single second of footage: Jodie backing out a few steps from under the scaffolding, before vanishing under it once more.

  “That’s twelve fifty,” Em said. “Two minutes after she comes home. Two minutes is long enough to loosen a few bolts.”

  “I don’t know,” Ant said. “She might have been doing anything: looking for her keys, checking her phone. . . .”

  Em dismissed this, intent on her theory. “The point is, she’s the only person caught on camera outside their house that night, other than you coming home and the delivery guy bringing our pizza. So if the sabotage took place during that period, then this is proof that no one else had the opportunity. We think he’s hateful,” she went on. “Maybe she does as well.”

  Well, it wasn’t the worst idea, Ant thought. Anything to redirect the police from them. “I’ll clip it and send it to the police now. The detective left me his details.”

  Em went to shower and unpack, leaving him to thumb through the footage an additional time. As Em had said, the battery had failed soon after Jodie’s return, the very last motion captured being the dash of a fox at 12:59. What a bizarre—and frustrating—coincidence. How much better it would have been to be able to present the police with the exact timings of Amy’s arrival at the house in the morning, even if it would have felt horribly ghoulish to view the girl in her final moments. But there might have been some clue, perhaps a few words addressed to Booth that could have been lip-read by the experts.

  He dug in his wallet for the card left by DC Shah and attached the clips to an e-mail message. There was a tense moment when he saw that the phone’s edit tool was already activated, but he reminded himself that he’d used it the last time he’d checked the app. That triumphant delivery to Ralph of the clip of Jodie handling cash from a customer.

  Glory days, indeed.

  * * *

  —

  Though it felt like an agonizingly long time before he heard from DC Shah, it was in reality just twenty-four hours. “Is there other security film from the morning of the eleventh?”

  Ant explained that the battery had died at one a.m.

  “That’s inconvenient timing.” Was there doubt in his tone, even disbelief? “Did you have a specific purpose for setting it up?”

  Ant explained the neighbors’ concerns about Booth’s illicit trading activities—no harm in reminding the police who the criminal was here.

  “You didn’t say anything about a home security camera on the weekend of the incident or in our interview last week.”

  Ant didn’t like that phrase, “you didn’t say anything”—it sounded horribly similar to “anything you do say.” Nor did he care for the idea of an “interview,” as if the questioning had been more formal than he’d understood. “We assumed the battery was long dead, but we happened to check and discovered something we thought might be relevant.”

  DC Shah, likely hardened to garrulous accounts of people happening to check and assuming this and that, moved on. “Any particular reason why your neighbor would have taken her shoes off?” he asked.

  Ant was startled. “What? I didn’t notice that.”

  “She arrives with shoes on. Then, when she steps back into view for a moment, her shoes have been removed. Any thoughts?”

  He had not done this when they’d met face-to-face: discussed the case, considered Ant’s theories. It felt like an opportunity, an invitation.

  “Maybe she used them to hammer the scaffolding? To loosen the bolts?”

  “Loosen bolts with a pair of high-heeled shoes?”

  Ant felt foolish. He imagined the detective thinking he shouldn’t give up his day job.

  “I’d appreciate it if you could bring the mobile in,” DC Shah said finally. “Leave it with one of our phone downloaders for a couple of days.”

  “Anything to help,” Ant said.

  CHAPTER

  20

  TESS

  There was something about the detective that reminded Tess of Naomi. A withheld disapproval, perhaps because Tess had not been in on the two previous occasions she’d called; the only person to give the police the runaround and yet the one with the least excuse to do so.

  Imagined criticism or not, she found herself reacting to it by being really quite rude. “This is a complete waste of taxpayers’ money, if you ask me. Booth didn’t have a clue what he was doing with the scaffolding. It’s as simple as that. Did my husband tell you it didn’t have the right number of braces? You know, the diagonal poles?”

  “He knows something about scaffolding construction, does he?” DC Forrester asked. From a distance, Tess had thought her about her own age, but close up she was younger. Oddly, given what she must see in her job, her eyes had an optimistic sparkle.

  “The basics, yes. Enough for us to contact the Health and Safety people about it. I meant to chase it up, but it hadn’t been that long and . . . well, I suppose I never imagined anyone would be injured, other than Booth himself.” Tess flushed. “That sounds bad. I don’t mean I hoped he’d be injured, obviously.”

  As the detective scratched her throat with a fingernail, the sound seemed to amplify. The house was unnaturally silent, Isla and Dex at a sports camp at the local leisure center all week and Tuppy sleeping in the garden. Tess imagined herself roaming the rooms of their huge house when Dex started school. Find a job, earn some money. And yet, she’d done nothing to get the process under way.

  “Shall we talk about what you were doing the night before the collapse?”

  “If you really think it’s relevant.” She supplied her timeline, its events distant now, even unreal, given all that had happened since. “When we got home from the theater, we put the kids to bed, paid the babysitter, then had a quick drink. Can I just ask, if you’re right and someone deliberately unscrewed the bolts that night, then why didn’t the alarm go off? I’m sure he had one rigged up there. I saw the wires.”

  DC Forrester’s examina
tion of her felt suddenly more acute. “Do you own any wire cutters, Mrs. Morgan?”

  “Wire cutters? Why? Not that I’m aware of, but I’d have to ask Finn. Why? Oh!” Tess faltered, understanding. “You mean the alarm wires were cut? Well, that is dodgy.”

  “Yes, we think so.”

  Again, Tess thought she detected a trace of distaste. Who is this woman in her posh house, describing murder as “dodgy”? Was that what the detective was thinking? That’s not me at all, she protested silently. People say I’m earnest, a martyr.

  She was just being paranoid.

  “Have you considered the possibility that he sabotaged his own scaffolding for some sort of insurance scam? Have you investigated his finances?”

  But the inquisition was strictly one-way, just as it had been when she’d gone to the station. She had a shameful memory of her children sitting waiting in a building stuffed with criminals, having expected a trip to the zoo.

  “You mentioned a babysitter,” said DC Forrester. “Could I have a name and contact number, please?”

  * * *

  —

  There was a new report online about the accident, the first Tess had seen with a neighbor quoted directly:

  NEIGHBORS BLAME OWNER FOR SCAFFOLDING DEATH

  A resident living near the site of a fatal scaffolding crush in Lowland Gardens has accused the property owner of causing the death of Amy Pope.

  The neighbor, who preferred not to be named, said the police were “barking up the wrong tree” in their investigation. “I don’t buy this idea that someone sabotaged the scaffolding. Wouldn’t it be too much of a risk that it would fall on them? You’d need technical knowledge, practical experience. Surely it’s the person who built such a dangerous structure on his premises who needs to be held accountable for this death?”

  The same neighbor claimed that the street was in “total agreement” on the issue, adding that residents had noticed heavy building materials being loaded onto the lower platform just days before the tragic collapse. “I don’t know if that contributed to Amy’s death, but I wish now I’d pursued the issue at the time.”