Only the Crows Know

by Ese McGowan

  Quite a few people looked peaky but with all the cocaine and alcohol, they partied on regardless. It terrified me. I wasn’t drunk. I was so paranoid about Adam and Alicia that I determined to stay sober enough to keep an eye on them. I wanted to intervene before she cornered him in a dark niche somewhere. There was definitely something odd about Joel and still then I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. As I said. I block things out, I block people out. Always have done. I swear he was encouraging her to seduce Adam. He was the one who told her to sit on his lap and Adam had his hands all over her and I mean all over her. She was caressing his legs with her hands and looking at me as she did so. I have no idea whether she was inviting me to join in or if it was one big power play.

  At some point or other, and I don’t know exactly what time it was, someone somewhere in the street had had enough and called the police.

  They kicked everyone out. I climbed over the stile in the garden and sneaked back inside my house as the voices of the intoxicated clashed with the police. You would like to think Alicia and Joel were arrested for organising such a stupid thing but by the sounds of her raucous laughter, it would seem not.

  I went to bed, in the spare room. I felt terrible. I thought, I haven’t caught it, I can’t have. I’ve been careful and I certainly couldn’t have caught it tonight as it doesn’t display that quickly. It was more likely, I decided, that I had been drugged.

  At 5am Alicia and Adam were in the kitchen. I didn’t hear Joel’s voice but as he doesn’t speak much anyway, preferring to ogle instead, he may very well have been there too.

  After all the irritating giggling and banging around, falling over and hysterical remarks at how funny they both were, they had sex, loudly, blatantly and she, Alicia, let the whole world know how good it felt.

  I wanted to blow my brains out. This was torture and I had no courage to stop it, to kick her out or him. I was defunct of power. I was scared that even if I went downstairs and made myself known, that I could hear them, that they wouldn’t stop even then. They had become so involved, so intense and I didn’t want the image of them in my head. The sounds were bad enough.

  And you know, all of them went out on the Thursday night and clapped for the carers of the COVID patients they had infected and put in hospital.

  I took three codeine and I passed out.

  When I woke up it was daylight and I felt horrendous, gasping for water, feverish, coughing some, yet I had smoked forty odd cigarettes with the stress of it all. I didn’t know what time it was. I couldn’t find my phone. I needed water. I needed to take action. Whether they liked it or not, Alicia was about to get kicked out of my house and Adam was going to be packing his bags. That was my decision. I was determined.

  I pulled myself out of bed and pulled on my jumper. My body was a bizarre mix of shivering limbs and searing hot marshy skin.

  I turned the door handle and smacked my head straight against the panel.

  Someone had locked me in and from that point I was in there for days. Until the last party, when Joel died. Ask them why they let me out for that?

  At first I couldn’t understand what was happening. I thought I was in a dream. It felt terribly real. I could sense the cool air flowing over my arms. The room was so cold. I was coughing but the dry yet mist filled air can do that. It didn’t mean I had the virus. I was feverish but I can get like that when I’m stressed and sleep deprived because a drugged sleep is not a real one.

  I banged on the door and tried calling out to Adam. I could hear muffled voices, not in the house. The back door must have been open. He couldn’t hear me calling. I told myself that. He was outside with someone, Alicia probably and Joel and it sounded like there were children but I couldn’t work out if I was stuck in a dream or if this was real.

  I shook the door handle. Kicked the panels. Nothing. I could hear a metal rattling when I punched the door and I did so badly. The pain ricocheted up my arm from my knuckle through my elbow and into my shoulder. I was exhausted. Coughing still and trembling. I walked over to the window. Someone must go by, I thought. Someone will hear me calling for help but then, I didn’t want anyone to know what he had done to me, locking me in here. We had created the myth that we were happy and most of me refused to court the humiliation. He was my fiancé, my lover, the man who adored me, my best friend. And when this was all over people would talk and wonder why I had stayed with him because of course I would do, we were still going to get married. This was a glitch. A terrible one but he had gone mad, clearly. Something he had taken last night at Alicia’s party had sent him over the edge. He was ill. She had done this to him, to us. It was all her fault and not his at all because he just simply wasn’t like this, he wasn’t this person. He was one of the good ones.

  Or so he told me.

  But I didn’t even know if it was him who had locked me in here. How could it have been him? He would never do this to me. She probably joked that they should do it and he laughed, running off into the garden waiting for me to wake up while she crept upstairs and bolted the door, stole my phone and, I can’t believe this, locked the windows. She must have locked the windows. She was drugging him and I would know this for sure, if in the next hour or two he doesn’t come looking for me to see why I’m not yet up and downstairs making toast.

  How many days have I been in here? Like this?

  She’ll have drugged him downstairs. I convinced myself. He’ll be in a coma while she sifts through our property, our bank loans, mortgage anything she can get her hands on because she is a bad person. She is sinister. She has an evil intention about her. Either she wants something or she’s a Svengali type who preys on people and manipulates their lives for fun. And Joel — who is he?

  He is someone to me.

  I bet they weren’t even having sex last night, I thought, Adam and Alicia, if it was last night. They were mucking about, drunk, drugged up, thinking what fun it would be to make me think they were having sex in the kitchen while I was upstairs because she must have heard me on the landing, the floor creaks so.

  I heard a sound outside on the street. It was Dana, in a face mask, climbing into her car. I banged on the window, shouted her name hoarsely. Nothing. She didn’t flicker her movement. She couldn’t have heard me but no one else was outside making a sound. How could she not hear me? I banged and banged. Flapping against the window frame like a trapped bird flown into a fan light in error and incapable of escaping.

  She drove away. She’ll come back and I’ll try again, I thought.

  But I didn’t see her. I had collapsed on the floor. Passed out. When I pulled myself up to the window, sometime later whenever that was, I saw her car sat on the street, parked in the exact place she had earlier, as if she had never been anywhere at all. The street was dead of noise, movement. Only the birds and their chorus, so loud without the suburban din, the hum of engines, the rattle of tongues. The sun had moved from the front of the house. I had to have been asleep for hours or was it days? It was mid-afternoon and the room had barely warmed up. And no sooner had I opened my eyes all around me fell into black.

  Until Adam woke me and asked me why I wasn’t getting ready for the party as if nothing I remembered had ever happened, as if there had been no other party, as if I had gone completely mad. I had no idea even what day it was. And I’m telling you, this is not the truth because I don’t know what the truth is. I was supposed to fall off that roof. I was supposed to die. They will tell you that all of this never happened. They will tell you things even I have no idea about but none of it will be true. Don’t believe a word they say. They have poisoned everyone against me. Will they poison you?

  But there is something I know now. When you find out, you will ignore it because you could have stopped all of this from ever happening.

  12

  Interview with Dana Begum who lives opposite Erin Green and Adam Konstantas, three doors down.

  ‘She said she was banging on the windows for someone to help her?’ answers Dan
a to Detective Miriam Sykes’ question.

  ‘I don’t know anything about that. The only thing I know about is the garden deal they had going. And that was a very strange idea. I don’t remember seeing Joel at the party much but yeah there were two parties; she’s not lying about that or maybe more. But I know there were definitely two. Both were completely out of control like all parties tended to be when Adam was involved.’

  ‘Explain to me what you mean about the garden deal,’ requests Miriam in a rather tiresome tone.

  I, me, Erin, would also love to hear what everyone else thought about it. Wonder if she’ll mention the enormous shed and the cannabis farm Joel erected, or perhaps she’ll leave this out in case nothing is done and it will backfire on her. After all, who wants to have a target on their back like I do? Answer: no-one.

  ‘The garden deal? Has no-one told you about that? Well, it was all a bit weird. It sounded weird. Alicia had two kids and I think Joel was the father but hell, she’s flighty so I wouldn’t be surprised if they had different fathers and he’d allowed that. No one actually said he was the father and I didn’t hear any of them call him ‘Dad’ or anything normal for a kid. In fact, they were a bit strange around him, like they barely knew him or something. But then Joel seemed strange so it might have just been his way. Anyway, her kids were living with her parents, she said, who were over seventy and you know, not allowed to be near kids, the Government said so because of the NHS, and so she had to have them back. They were young, two, three, four probably, something like that. They certainly sounded that age but I didn’t see them up close or anything. Just peering out of the window, catching a glimpse, as you do.’

  ‘Ok,’ says Miriam, and I would imagine with flattened expression.

  ‘Yeah I live three doors down. I said that already didn’t I?’

  I can see Miriam nodding. People do that on the telephone even when the person they are talking to cannot hear them. Never understood that.

  ‘Alicia dumped them on me that night,’ continues Dana, ‘and I agreed to look after them, which was ridiculous—’

  ‘Hang on, you just told me that you had only seen them from out of your window and now you’re telling me that you were looking after them?’ interrupts Miriam.

  ‘Yes. Then. But I was a stranger to them and then I was carrying them across the road. I’m just saying that it’s all very weird that a mother would do that with her children, in the middle of the night, when they are half asleep. I mean, like I said, I didn’t know them, I’d never met them before. No one had. You still there?

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘So it must have been around 11pm but I’m not certain of that. It’s not like I was paying any attention to the time. I was more surprised that she had even asked me. We barely knew each other. I don’t think I would have off loaded my kids with a neighbour I’d known for only a week or so. I mean I knew Adam and Erin. Perhaps they suggested it. I was fairly close with Adam. I mean I used to be. We’d hang out sometimes when Erin was away but that hadn’t happened for a while. I know Erin wasn’t aware we’d spend time together. Not that she notices much. She pretty self-absorbed. If it’s not about her, it’s not interesting—’

  ‘Dana. Is any of this relevant to the death of Joel Mason?’

  Yes, I was wondering the same thing. I knew I had heard children’s voices when they locked me in the spare room.

  ‘Well I think so because none of their behaviour makes sense. The kids all came back, a couple of days before the party. Why would you do that and why weren’t they with her before? Doesn’t she like her own children, if they really are her children?’

  Miriam sighs heavily. Dana exhales, an awkward near embarrassed grunt, but it doesn’t stop her.

  ‘After the first party, before the second but don’t ask me when exactly. I don’t keep a diary on them. They turned up in a taxi, made a right racket. Alicia used a lot of taxis. She must be loaded to travel like that all the time. Anyway, and then Alicia had said to Adam she had a good deal for him according to what I heard—’

  ‘You heard it literally or from someone else?’

  ‘Someone else but I can’t remember who. Everyone was talking about it but afterwards, later, then I did I hear her say that to him, at the party or something. She was laughing about it. Anyway he hadn’t worked for a couple of weeks, because no one had booked him and then the lockdown started to creep in, so when he couldn’t be furloughed, because he was a freelancer in film and of course no one was filming anything, he was screwed. He was a “live in the moment” kind of person. He spent as he earned so he had nothing to fall back on. I couldn’t live like that. I’d never sleep.

  ‘The kids wanted a pool in the garden, one of those massive blow-up tank type things. Loads of kids in the street had one, which was a goddamn nightmare by the way because in the summer, from dawn until way past dusk all you can hear are screaming kids. And what with this warm Spring weather, you can imagine the noise. I couldn’t sit out in the garden despite how warm it had become. It was some kind of hell. Not that any of those people were adhering to the advice, staying in, only going out for essentials. What a joke. It was like a street party half the time, from day one and all those graphs shown in the Government press conference about the decrease in car traffic was hilarious when you looked at our neighbourhood. They were all back and forth, picking up friends, getting pot, shopping for ice cream, then paddling pools, beers, you name it. It was awful. Half of me wanted them to get the virus to teach them a lesson because they sure as hell didn’t care if they were spreading it. I didn’t really want that, though, obviously. I told myself that was an awful thing to think and felt ashamed when those thoughts sneaked in.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, the garden deal. One morning one of the kids asked Joel if they could have a big swimming pool and he said yeah, like he had room, because with all the sheds they’d put in there after Pearl had moved out, there was barely room for a rotary line. But he said yeah, why not?

  ‘Next thing you know, Alicia is over the wall, like she did about a million times a day, into Adam’s garden and apparently she offered him money to buy half of his garden so that the kids could have a pool there. I heard her say they could knock down the wall. I can just imagine how apoplectic Erin must have been when he said yes. Not that anyone had seen her for days, weeks even. I mean this guy was desperate. Desperate for money to pay the mortgage or bills or for whatever, his coke, who the hell knows? That’s what everyone says anyway. I doubt he’s ever had to apply for benefit before in his life. He was a cushioned type of guy, if you know what I mean. Erin earned more than him. We all thought that. This had to have been the first time in his life that he experienced anxiety, not that I saw any sign of it for sure. He knew Alicia because she was a make-up artist and they had worked together. She was freelance too but her parents were loaded. Well, I didn’t know that then but we all do now. Her parents have an enormous house in Keston, South London and one in Surrey and she made a big thing of that at the party apparently. Showing off. Looking down on all of us in this shitty seaside town. Don’t ask me what the hell she was doing even living here. No one made her come here and we’re all here to give our kids a better life and all that and because it was cheap. She moves here and her father drives a frigging Lexus. I don’t know what Joel did. I don’t think he did anything. I didn’t like Joel, if I’m honest.

  ‘I don’t know how much money Alicia gave Adam for the land grab, if it even happened. I’m still not sure it wasn’t all one big joke to see how we all reacted. Or to see what Erin would do wherever the hell she’d gone off to. Someone joked that Adam had killed her.’

  ‘Funny.’

  There is an awkward pause before Dana continues.

  ‘You see, they were always whispering and laughing together. Winding Erin up. We laughed that money probably wasn’t part of the deal, some of us in the street. He was clearly infatuated with her. She had this hold over him. Alicia I mean, not Erin.
She couldn’t have a hold over anyone if she tried, not that she thought like that. I’m talking about Erin. She’s big headed. I don’t like her much. Anyhow, we joked that Alicia had offered Adam a night with her and because he was so possessed by her, he would have agreed to anything just to have that one night.

  ‘So, no, if Erin says she was banging on the window — has she said that yet?’

  ‘I’m not getting into who has said what Dana. I’m here to take down the facts and create the picture of what happened to Joel Mason,’ states Miriam in her business-like manner.

  ‘OK, well, I didn’t hear her and no one else has mentioned it but there weren’t many people walking along the pavement, that’s fairly true. A lot of comings and goings in cars, but walking, no. Most of us on the street would go through the alley to the cemetery to take walk, down at the back of Erin’s house. All of those houses really, Alicia’s too if you think about it. Probably where they put Erin when she disappeared. No, I don’t mean that, I shouldn’t have said that. Can you not put that down that I said that please?’

  ‘I’m taking notes, Dana, of what you tell me.’

  ‘Put it this way, the only banging I heard, everyone heard, was Adam knocking down the garden wall, part of it anyhow and I didn’t see that because I have no view from my house — of their gardens but the point is, that I heard them do that so therefore if Erin had been banging on the window to get my attention out front, then I would have definitely heard her.