The Downstairs Neighbor

by Helen Cooper

  “Will you make an effort to be nice?” she asks. “For me?”

  “I am making an effort.”

  “More of one? I really need you to get along.” She smiles into the mirror, the crack bisecting her face, but something in her eyes sends a shiver through my body. For a split second she doesn’t look like herself. The light skating off the mirror carves hollows into her pale cheeks.

  She forces her smile a little wider. “You’re my two favorite people after all.”

  My hand jerks and the ponytail collapses. So he’s level with me now in her heart. I feel like she’s thrown back her elbow into my stomach.

  * * *

  —

  After she’s gone I drift around the flat, watching dark-winged birds gather on our tiny balcony, then flap away over the city. Becca phones and gives me the latest from that side of our small family, the Derby clan. She asks how things are with us, and I can’t even bring myself to tell her what Mum said about Nick. It’s lodged in my chest, like a pain I can’t quite shake, can’t quite understand.

  When Mum gets home, easing off her shoes and massaging her blisters, she announces that Nick’s coming up and we’re going to have Chinese. Takeaway would normally be a highlight of the month, but I find myself acting all negative, asking if we can afford it and claiming to be on a diet. She says Nick’s treating us, and that I need to go on a diet about as much as Mrs. Chalmers from 307 needs more cats. I try to laugh, try to show some enthusiasm for the menu that Nick arrives brandishing.

  “Have whatever you want, girls,” he keeps saying. “Spring rolls? Chips?” He’s got his wallet out, waving it around in his huge hand, though we haven’t actually phoned in the order yet. And even when he’s talking to me he stands close to Mum, like they’re invisibly handcuffed together. She looks small beside him. He makes suggestions about what she could order and she shrugs along with every one, as if making her own decisions is too much effort.

  When the food arrives, I have to admit it smells incredible. Shiny red sauces and sticky battered chicken and fluffy egg-fried rice. Mum seems pleased to see me shoveling it down, as though enjoying the meal Nick’s paid for is the same as liking him. With the glow of food in my belly, and the drop of cider Mum lets me have, I begin to soften. A couple of times I accidentally laugh at his jokes.

  My smile dies when I notice that Mum’s hardly eaten. Nick keeps looking at her plate too: “Not hungry, babe?” I wonder if he’s annoyed she’s hardly touching the banquet. Mum says she’s got a stomachache and he suggests she just have some plain rice, so she chews slowly while Nick watches every mouthful. I feel my own appetite nosedive.

  After tea I offer to do the dishes because I always do them on a Saturday; Mum usually dries. Tonight, though, Nick grabs a towel and orders Mum to put her feet up. She glances uncertainly between us. “Well . . . I am a bit knackered . . .” Still she’s hesitating. I wonder if she thinks I’m going to drop the friendliness as soon as she’s out of the way. I long to do the dishes with her instead, hip to hip at the sink, slipping into a familiar washing-drying rhythm.

  Nick makes a shooing gesture, and she relents. “If you insist, then . . .” She leaves the room and I hear the TV crackle on as I plunge our plates into the lemony suds.

  For a while the only sounds are the clink of crockery and the slosh of water, Nick humming something repetitive and tuneless. We’re rarely alone together. The itchiness creeps over me, same as when I watch him cup his palm around the back of Mum’s neck. I try to relax, try to recall the funny thing he said that almost made me choke on my black bean pork.

  “You don’t need to worry about your mum, you know.”

  A cup slithers out of my grip and splashes back into the water.

  “She’s still not quite recovered from that bug she had,” he adds. “That’s all.”

  I frown over at him. “What bug?”

  “She was under the weather last week.”

  “I . . . I didn’t know anything about it.”

  “Well, she knows you worry about her. She probably didn’t want to make a big deal of it. But that’s why she seems a bit tired.”

  I squeak my cloth around the inside of the glass, trying to cast my mind back.

  “I’m just saying,” Nick continues, leaning on the edge of the draining board, “you shouldn’t worry. Because I’m around now. I’m here to make sure you’re both okay.”

  Sourness floods my mouth, like a reflux from all the rich food. I yank the plug out of the sink, watching the murky water slip away.

  * * *

  —

  Once all our mismatched dishes are dry, Nick goes through to the living room and I stay in the kitchen, staring out of the small window. The view makes me feel suspended in the black sky. Only if I move forward and lean over the sink can I see the twinkle of the city below.

  Mum and Nick talk in low voices in the living room. I shuffle closer to the wall but can’t hear what they’re saying, so I slip out of the kitchen and sneak up on them. They’re standing now, though, sliding open the door to the tiny balcony. I hang back to watch them step through and light cigarettes, the glowing ends floating like fireflies. And I feel a twinge of satisfaction when I realize Nick’s leaning on the spot where the birds always splatter their white goo.

  Then I see him grab my mum’s arm. See her step back, shaking her head. He moves closer, gesticulating, while she turns her face away. I stand watching the shadow-puppet theater of their argument, a screen of stars behind them, and I feel that reflux again, that acid searing up into my throat.

  * * *

  —

  Two days later I’m whirling about getting ready for school and Mum’s racing around getting ready for work. The flat feels extra tight in the mornings. We’re both disorganized, in a hurry. We keep colliding.

  I know it’s not the right moment to bring it up, but Nick’s been here all weekend, so this is the first time I’ve managed to get Mum on her own. As she’s flinging things into her handbag, I ask, “Were you ill last week?”

  “What?” She’s checking she’s got her cigarettes and the shabby umbrella she carries everywhere.

  “Nick said you had a bug, but I didn’t know.”

  “Nothing to know, really. Got your PE kit?”

  “Yeah, I can’t find my new shorts, though. The blue ones are too small . . .” I bend over to riffle through the washing machine, discovering the newer shorts scrunched up inside, still damp.

  Mum’s face falls. “I’m sorry, love, I completely forgot to empty it yesterday.”

  I stuff them into my bag anyway, hoping they’ll dry before second lesson. Then I glance sidelong at Mum, who’s shaking her head, cross with herself. “Nick said you’re out of sorts because of being ill,” I venture.

  She snaps alert, turning back to her own handbag, which has fallen onto its side and is spitting out loose change. “I’m not out of sorts. I’m fine.”

  She reaches to get her tea flask down from the shelf, and that’s when I see it. I’m frozen as her post office shirt rides up, exposing her lower back. There’s a shiny, plum-colored bruise rippling across its width.

  11.

  CHRIS

  On Saturday morning Chris opened his door to two police officers, fluorescent against the rain-soaked steps leading down to his flat.

  He’d been sure it would be them as soon as he’d heard the brisk trill of his doorbell while he’d been failing to eat a slice of toast. He’d just sat there at first, swirling patterns in the cremated crumbs, until he’d heard Vicky moving around in their bedroom and had leaped up to beat her to the door.

  “Mr. Watson?”

  “Last time I checked.” He found himself speaking in the jovial tone he used for plumbers and electricians, which disguised his discomfort at being a homeowner, a bona fide member of suburbia. Somehow he always felt as though he was faki
ng.

  He tensed when Vicky’s voice sailed from the rear of the flat: “Who is it?”

  “One moment . . .” he said to the police, abandoning them on his doorstep and hurrying back down their hall. “Just a student!” he called to Vicky, once he was out of the officers’ earshot.

  He hoped that would appease her, but she appeared in the doorway of their bedroom. Chris put a hand on her shoulder to stop her getting any further. She looked startled—he’d grabbed her too hard. He loosened his hold and tried to smile. “What shift are you on today?”

  “You never remember.” At one time she would have said this affectionately, but now it came out toneless. “I’m just doing eight till one to cover a gap. Should be back for lunch at Di’s. I’ll meet you there.”

  She checked the watch clipped to the front of her tunic, and Chris remembered how it used to amuse him, for some reason, even though he knew it was part of a standard nurse’s uniform. A fob watch seemed so stuffy and old-fashioned, so un-Vicky. Lots of things about her nurse’s kit used to strike him as funny. The Bristol Stool Chart she often carried around with her, not least.

  Glancing past her, he saw three new glossy magazines heaped up on their bed. Vicky wasn’t a celebrity-gossip kind of woman, but she had a thing about snipping pictures out of magazines, keeping them in the drawer of her dressing table, like tokens. He’d asked her about it once and she’d got defensive, saying he wouldn’t understand.

  Maybe he would, though, if she gave him a chance. When had they stopped acknowledging the things that had first drawn them together? The confidences they’d whispered as they’d squashed into her single bed in her grotty student dorm, giggling and clinging to one another as they’d wriggled around trying to get comfy.

  Fifteen years later they owned a flat with a Surrey postcode (admittedly one in need of a lot of work), Vicky had made senior nurse, and he had his own (not exactly thriving) business. Yet it felt like they had so much less. Sometimes he grew nostalgic for that lumpy single bed, for the stains on the ceiling that they would discuss as if they were constellations.

  “Isn’t your student waiting?”

  Vicky was already walking back toward her dressing table. He watched her squirt a blob of eczema lotion into her palms and wind her hands around and around each other, the ritual absorbing all of her attention. She was so introspective these days that she hadn’t yet realized their teenage neighbor was missing. Thirty-six hours now. And Chris hadn’t brought it up, hadn’t wanted to make a thing of the fact that he’d taken her for a lesson on the day she’d vanished. With luck he could keep the police on their doorstep, keep the visit brief.

  He steeled himself to go back out. The sick feeling that had kept him awake most of the night squirmed again. The police were murmuring to one another, peering at the upper flats, but when he returned to the door their focus snapped back to him.

  “Would you come down to the station, Mr. Watson? We need to ask you a few questions about your neighbor and student, Freya Harlow.”

  The station. Chris hadn’t been expecting that. They gestured up toward their car, which shimmered with drizzle behind the Harlows’ his-and-hers BMWs. Chris silently fetched his coat. Outside, the street was quiet but the woman with the twins emerged from the large house opposite, gawping at him as she threw nappies into her wheelie-bin, and a wooden blind twitched in a bay window further down. He hoped Steph and Paul weren’t staring down from their flat—he didn’t dare lift his chin to see.

  As he walked past his own car, he glanced inside. His eyes rested briefly on the glove box before he followed the police onward.

  * * *

  —

  They insisted he wasn’t being interrogated. But the marooned desk in the stark white interview room didn’t exactly say “cozy chat.” The woman and the man sitting opposite were not the two officers who’d come to collect him. They wore black suits and introduced themselves as Detective Ford and Detective Johnson. Ford had quick feline eyes and a prominent collarbone, like something trapped beneath her skin. Johnson was fresh-faced, handsome, but there was a petulant downturn to his mouth.

  “How well do you know Freya Harlow?” Ford began.

  Chris could feel himself slipping into a familiar mode. Censoring his words before he said them. He did it with Vicky these days, he realized unhappily. Skirted around certain topics, no longer told her everything that was on his mind.

  “I’ve been her instructor for six months,” he said. “And her neighbor for a year and a bit.”

  “Are you friendly? The two of you?”

  Chris shifted in his chair. “How d’you mean?”

  “What do you talk about during your lessons?”

  “Mainly her driving. As you’d expect.”

  “Your last lesson with her was the day before yesterday.” Ford looked directly at him. “The day Freya disappeared.”

  She left a pause as if for his response. But she hadn’t phrased it as a question. Chris was aware of breathing a little too heavily. He nodded, and she wrote something down even though he hadn’t said a word.

  “Did anything unusual happen?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “Where did you drop her off?”

  “Back at school. It was her lunch hour.”

  “Did you see her walk in?”

  Chris paused, picturing Freya’s long stride, buoyant even when she was walking slowly, as though she was consciously charging each step with pent-up energy. “Maybe not right in. But I saw her go up the drive.”

  “Toward the main school? Or the separate sixth-form drive?”

  All his saliva seemed to have deserted him. “Um, the sixth form, I think. Could I get a glass of water?”

  Johnson left the room. Alone with the woman detective, Chris felt her stare drilling into him. He shifted again in the narrow plastic seat. When Johnson returned, Chris gulped the water too fast and felt nauseous.

  “How well do you know Freya’s parents?” Ford resumed.

  Chris thought of well-groomed Steph, with her polished smile, and sandy-haired Paul, who shouldered a huge leather gym bag at all times. He thought of how Steph would wave from the window if he and Freya were leaving for an evening lesson, how she’d often be watching from the same position when they returned, as if she hadn’t moved in an hour.

  Would the Harlows have told the detectives about the argument there’d been over Freya’s lessons? Would it look bad if Chris didn’t mention it? Would he even be able to talk about it without becoming hot with indignation?

  He cleared his throat. “Of course, I see them around. Wouldn’t say I know them well.”

  He didn’t add, My wife and I used to call them the Wholesome Harlows when we first moved in. Or the Blond Brigade. Chris didn’t really see them like that anymore, not since he’d started teaching Freya and everything had got so much more complicated.

  Ford turned a page of her notebook. “Who was your next student after Freya?”

  He had tried to prepare himself for this one. Had thought about it on the way over, how important it was to answer nonchalantly. The reality was difficult, though, especially when his mouth was a vacuum.

  “She was my last student of the day.”

  Ford stalled, pen in hand. A change in atmosphere fell across the room like a shadow. “Do you normally finish so early?”

  “Depends who I’ve got booked in.”

  “What did you do in the afternoon?”

  “I went home, did some jobs.”

  “Was anybody there with you?”

  “No, my wife was at work.”

  There was a loaded pause. Chris was sure he could smell himself now, smell his own anxiety.

  “So you didn’t see anybody else all afternoon?”

  “Not until Vicky came home.”

  “What time would that have been?”


  “Around eleven p.m.”

  Ford exchanged a flickering glance with Johnson, then made a note. She waited, scribbled something else, pursed her lips as if in thought.

  Abruptly she leaned forward. “Mr. Watson.” Her tone was cool but something strummed his unease. “Do you realize you were the last known person to see Freya?”

  His face turned to rubber. “Wasn’t she at school in the afternoon?”

  “We thought she was,” Johnson said, forcing Chris to shift his attention onto him. Was this how they were going to do it now? Turn-taking so Chris’s head would swing from side to side? “Freya had a free period after lunch and then psychology. The attendance records said she was there for psychology, but the teacher has since admitted he didn’t take the register at the start of the class as he’s supposed to. He filled it out from memory while the students were off doing research. He’s not convinced Freya was actually there. It seems he wasn’t exactly keeping tabs on his students while they did this ‘independent work.’ A lot of them have admitted the class is”—Johnson carved quote marks in the air—“‘a total doss.’”

  “Sounds like you should be questioning this teacher,” Chris blasted back.

  “We have done.” This was Ford again now. “But since nobody can confirm Freya made it back from her lesson with you . . .” She let the sentence dangle.

  Sweat gathered around Chris’s neckline. For a disorienting second he felt a presence in the empty seat to his right. His feet pressed the floor as though he were braking.

  “I dropped her off.” He peeled his collar from his skin. “She walked up the drive. Maybe she doubled back, I don’t know . . .”

  “We’ll need you to submit the exact route you drove with her that day. And your movements after you parted ways.”