The Downstairs Neighbor

by Helen Cooper

  There was something to grasp onto now, though. A sign that she had to join those dots, face the unthinkable. She seized her phone and scrolled to a number she’d called “Work 2” in her contacts. Her finger froze on the screen as she was hit by the same doubts she’d had while driving along the motorway just now. Attacking this head-on seemed too risky. There were risks to every plan she thought of: risks to Freya and Paul, to herself, her whole existence.

  Risks if she was wrong, risks if she was right.

  * * *

  —

  Minutes later, she was pounding on Emma’s door. She knew she was knocking too loudly, that it was getting late, but they were far beyond neighborly etiquette. And Steph was beyond worrying what Emma thought of her, even beyond worrying whether she was completely trustworthy. She had nowhere else to turn.

  Her neighbor peered out into the hall. “Steph?”

  “I need you to do something for me.”

  Emma blinked and beckoned her in.

  Steph didn’t waste any time. Adrenaline was flying around her body. She thrust forward a piece of paper. “Take this to the police.”

  Emma looked startled. “What?”

  Steph swallowed. “It—it’s an address. Urge them to watch the place, keep their eyes on it. But don’t mention any connection with me.”

  Emma blinked several more times. “I don’t know if I—”

  “Please!” Steph interrupted before she could restrain herself. She’d hoped to keep her emotions in check, but now she sensed her desperation was striking a chord. Her neighbor stared at her for a long moment. Steph could hear that creaking sound again, the turning wheel, this time a haunting soundtrack.

  “Can’t you give it to them yourself?” Emma said in a low voice.

  “No . . . no.”

  “They’ll ask me a load of questions.”

  “Call the tip-line anonymously,” Steph said. “Just be sure they take it seriously. Say you saw a teenage girl in a navy Puffa jacket going into that house. I can’t risk them recognizing my voice.”

  There was another pause. The wheel continued to rattle. Steph couldn’t tell which direction it was coming from and it was starting to get to her now, like it might actually be cogs inside her head. She rubbed the ends of Freya’s scarf, her comfort blanket. “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t have to,” she said.

  “What are you afraid of, Steph? Is it Paul?”

  “What?”

  “Are you scared of him?”

  “No, of course not! I love him, that’s why I . . . why I can’t . . .”

  “I want to help, but you have to tell me the whole story.”

  “I’m not having an affair. It’s not that.” Steph felt another volley of fear. She stepped closer to grab her neighbor’s hand. Emma tensed but didn’t pull away. Her fingers felt as small-boned as Freya’s used to, in the days when Steph would grip her hand to cross the road or walk through the park. Even as a little girl, Freya had resisted Steph’s overprotectiveness. Perhaps she’d always sensed her mum’s subconscious fears, running deeper than regular parental anxiety.

  Steph tried one last appeal, pushing the address into Emma’s palm. “Please. I know you understand what I’m going through. This could save my daughter.”

  35.

  EMMA

  Emma closed the door behind Steph and leaned against it, expelling a long breath.

  She unfurled the address in her clammy hand, and a crush of responsibility bore down on her. Should she carry out Steph’s request in the secretive way she wanted? Or go to the police and tell them everything, hand over the burden? Why did the thought of the latter make her hug the address protectively to her chest?

  Maybe Steph wouldn’t have put so much faith in Emma if she knew she was hiding a mess of secrets and troubles too. Or maybe she’d chosen her for that very reason. A strange affinity seemed to be developing between them, impossible to walk away from.

  Taking out her phone, she searched on Google Maps and Street View, zooming in on an ordinary terrace near Chertsey, only twelve miles away. She couldn’t think of a way to find out anything more. Couldn’t forget Steph’s wide, desperate eyes, her hands fretting at the fabric of that green scarf . . .

  Something made her pause. What had just tapped at the back of her brain? The scarf . . . Steph had been wearing it ever since Freya had gone missing, but Emma had seen it somewhere else recently too.

  She followed her train of thought into Zeb’s room, grabbing his photo-booth strip from the bedside cabinet. Freya was wearing the green scarf in those pictures. It made sense that it was hers, that Steph was clinging to it in her absence . . . and now that she thought about it, Emma had seen Freya with it before. But that wasn’t what was nagging at her.

  She was sure Freya hadn’t been wearing it in the photo strip Steph had shown her only that morning. As Emma cast her mind back, other differences began to bother her. Hadn’t Zeb been wearing his brown winter coat in Freya’s version but his leather jacket in the pictures she was now studying? And wasn’t Freya’s hair slightly different too? Emma wished she could trust her memory, wished she could put the strips side by side to compare. Each time she swung toward thinking she was imagining things, something else would swing her back. Freya was drinking vodka here; Zeb had mentioned gin in his story. Were they, in fact, separate occasions? Had Zeb lied about the number of times he and Freya had met? If so, why?

  Emma left the room and paced around her cluttered flat, something she seemed to have done too many times lately. She went to the window, inching it open to feel the cool night air on her face. The rain from earlier made the dark pavements look varnished, the puddles under the streetlamps like pools of golden oil. When the home phone began to ring, she jumped even more violently than usual, then felt a rush of combustible anger. She’d had enough of these intrusive calls. Enough of everything.

  She stomped to the kitchen and snatched the receiver. This time she didn’t even say hello, meeting the other person’s breathy silence with her own. A long, intense moment pulled tight between them.

  “Robin?” she demanded.

  She expected the click of a hang-up. Instead the caller’s breathing quickened. Perhaps Emma would have hung up herself if her emotions hadn’t been swirling, climbing. What was Robin trying to do to her, even after all this time? She wasn’t fifteen anymore. And in messing with her—the parenting book, the eggs, the calls—he was also messing with a couple who were going through the worst possible ordeal.

  She didn’t even want to follow her fears to their very end. To the connection between what she knew of Robin’s character and what she was starting to worry she didn’t know about Zeb.

  “This has got to stop,” she said into the phone, heat flooding her cheeks. “Stop fucking with my head. Stop sending things to this house. And”—her voice was rising, uncontrollable—“and give me back my son.”

  She shouted the last part much louder than she’d intended. Threw the phone against the wall with a crack. She stood panting, and cringing, but filled with a sense of release. Then she heard footsteps down the stairs again. She gulped air as a knock came on the door, and Steph’s voice: “Emma?”

  Emma slumped into her window chair. She couldn’t face Steph now.

  “I’m okay,” she shouted. “Sorry.”

  She heard Steph lingering at the door. Her head felt as if it was going to explode. She laid her brow against the cold windowpane, letting it freeze away all sensation until her neighbor retreated.

  36.

  PAUL

  Paul was flattened against Daniel’s attic wall, listening hard, his heart thrashing. Someone, presumably Daniel, was wandering around downstairs, doors creaking and closing. His movements seemed unhurried, as if he was as yet oblivious to the intruder.

  Paul eyed the rear attic window. It was still open a crack where he’d gasped for
air, and would probably open further, but how would he get down the back of the house? He peered out and glimpsed the woods again, the furthest trees now silhouetted in a spiky curve along the horizon. Creeping back across the attic, he stared instead down the narrow staircase, his brain fritzing with options.

  His muscles tightened when the footsteps grew louder. Daniel was directly below now, on the first floor. Paul held his breath and pressed himself into the wall again. A toilet flushed and a vibration of pipes enveloped the attic. Then the swing of a door, a brief pause, the sound of receding footsteps.

  Paul edged his way down the stairs to the first-floor landing. There was a burning in his chest. He could hear the hum of a television, and when he risked a peek over the banister he saw the living-room door was closed. Could he make it out of the front door while Daniel was in there? He snuck down the final flight of stairs, two groaning beneath his feet, but froze when he heard the squeak of sofa springs and a cough.

  He was three or four paces from the front door now. His eyes did a speedy assessment of its latches and locks. It looked a simple case of twisting the top latch upward and pushing the handle down.

  So why wasn’t he diving toward it?

  He knew from past experience that wavering over a decision could mean the difference between escape and discovery. You had to keep your head, make rational choices, then act on them swiftly and confidently. It wasn’t fear of failure holding him back this time. It was a much greater force, Freya’s voice again in his ringing ears. Why had he broken into Daniel Sanderson’s house if only to slink out?

  Then a shout came from the living room, leapfrogging across decades: “Who’s there?”

  For a second, the years seemed to concertina. Paul almost called back as Paul Jacobs, as if strolling into Daniel and Nathalie’s flat: Only me! Picked up some beers for us all.

  As time bounced back, his fists balled tight. A cold draft emanated from the front door as if to remind him how close it was.

  “Who’s there?”

  Paul threw up his hands as Daniel crashed into the hall brandishing a cricket bat. He stopped dead when he saw Paul. A bubble of shock seemed to form around him, fixing him in place, like a bronze batsman on a trophy.

  “What the . . .” For a moment his defenses seemed weakened. That would have been the time to rush at him, disarm him, but Paul’s composure was blown too. He took in the face he used to study endlessly for signs of untruth. The face he used to catch staring at Nathalie sometimes, with a look that was somehow both tender and cold, intimate and calculating. Now Daniel must have been fifty-three but the shadows beneath his eyes had a look of permanence, as if he was tired of being himself. He was still broad, though, and strong-looking, dressed in gray overalls with some kind of logo on the breast pocket.

  Daniel’s face twisted with prolonged shock, then settled into an expression of dark loathing. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  Paul kept his hands up. “Drop the bat.”

  Daniel stepped forward, holding it over Paul’s head. Paul tried to gauge whether he could grab it, block it, but it didn’t swing down, only hovered. “I should knock you out. I should kill you.”

  “But you won’t.”

  You won’t if you’ve got my daughter, because you won’t want a scene. Equally, maybe you won’t if you haven’t touched Freya, because you must wonder why I’m here, after all this time, after everything.

  “We’ve an agreement,” Daniel said. “I’m not under investigation anymore. You spying bastards admitted you were in the wrong.”

  “I’m not here for that.”

  “What, then? Not done enough damage?”

  “My daughter.” Paul watched for a reaction, but there was only a flicker: possibly surprise, possibly knowledge, possibly imagined. He was long out of practice at reading what Daniel was thinking.

  “We could talk calmly,” he ventured as Daniel stayed silent, “or you could hit me and see what happens. Either way, I’m not leaving till you’ve answered my questions.”

  Daniel lunged forward and pushed the bat against Paul’s throat. Their bodies lined up squarely as he pinned him to the wall. There had been a competitive edge to their past “friendship,” which had seemed to come from their similar builds, and perhaps from the fact that Paul had made an effort to mirror Daniel’s body language and way of speaking. It was something they taught you in training, how to make someone take to you, but it could work the other way, too, could set you up as a rival.

  Their gazes met, almost exactly level. The wood bit into Paul’s neck.

  “Where’s my daughter?” he wheezed. “What have you done?”

  Daniel slammed his weight behind the bat. “You’re the bad guy here. I can’t believe you’ve shown your face.”

  Paul’s vision slipped in and out of blackness. He closed his eyes, sucked in shallow breaths.

  “You don’t even feel bad about my sister,” Daniel said, “do you?”

  Paul blinked open his eyes. “Every day,” he choked. “I loved her.”

  The fist took him by surprise, punching him in the stomach before he’d registered that the bat had lifted from his Adam’s apple. Air shot into his throat just as it was thumped out of his abdomen, a mix of heady relief and deep, low pain.

  “Don’t disrespect her even further by lying,” Daniel said.

  “I’m not lying. I loved Nathalie.”

  “I loved her.”

  By controlling her. By using her grief to your advantage. But hadn’t Paul done the same? Hadn’t he thought he was so smart, using her as his way in? Nathalie hadn’t shared Daniel’s guardedness, that was the thing. You could tell just by observing her that she’d suffered a loss and was desperate to plug the void. So, when Paul had been dropped into his new life on the Chainwell Estate, trained and prepped, ambitious and naïve, he’d set out to befriend her first. To keep “bumping into her” when her brother wasn’t around, and patiently to gain her trust. He’d been the odd-job man who’d turned up to fix the fridge in the café where she’d worked; the fellow smoker ready with a light outside the tower block; the cheeky chappie making her laugh even when her eyes were still so sad. Then Paul had used everything in his skill set to overcome Daniel’s wariness of his little sister’s new boyfriend. Painstakingly, he’d established himself in their lives, their flat, their family, watching and listening for any clue as to what had really happened to Billie. He hadn’t noticed the growth of his feelings for Nathalie until it was too late. He’d been blinkered, fixated on his task . . . and he’d never been in love before. Didn’t know how it could coil itself around you while you were looking the other way.

  Paul saw the next punch coming but didn’t duck. Let it smash him full in the face. This was the kind of punishment he could take: an attack on himself, not Freya, not Nathalie. He stood firm as Daniel hit again and pain splintered across his cheekbones.

  “She was my sister,” Daniel roared. “And you were nothing. Nobody. A pig. A liar. A murderer.”

  The final word made a fist around Paul’s heart. There was another second of dizzy reprieve, before the cricket bat struck his knees and he folded to the floor. Daniel kicked him in the ribs and Paul let himself go limp. His head spun with voices, mingling with Daniel’s stream of accusations.

  Nathalie saying, Who the hell are you?

  Steph saying, Did you kill someone?

  Freya saying, Dad, you’re not giving up?

  And he was so close to giving up. Closing his eyes and accepting what he deserved. But what about what Freya and Steph deserved? What about everything Yvette had tried to do for him, to help him see that he had made mistakes but he wasn’t evil?

  The next time Daniel came at him, Paul hauled his torso up and head-butted him in the face. The agony of the movement brought bile into his mouth. He’d managed to unbalance Daniel, though, so he jerked his leg
into his shin, making him stagger against the wall. Paul swayed to his feet. His ribs felt shattered. He lurched toward the door, but Daniel was back upright, blocking the way. Paul flailed toward the kitchen instead. Daniel followed, his face purple, brandishing the cricket bat streaked with Paul’s blood.

  Paul felt as if he was moving through water as he strained for the back door. The bat thudded between his shoulder blades, doubling him over. He grasped a kitchen worktop, twisting around to find himself once again cornered, Daniel’s face blurrily close, further accusations forming beads of saliva at the corners of his mouth. Liar. Traitor. Failure. Killer.

  Something inside Paul gave way. He couldn’t take one more blow, one more shouted declaration of his crimes versus Daniel’s self-proclaimed innocence. Old instincts had already caused him to do a lightning-quick check as he’d stumbled through to the kitchen. He knew where his exits were, but he’d also clocked the set of knives clinging to a magnetic holder on the wall. As Daniel swung the bat again, Paul reached sideways and his fingertips brushed metal.

  37.

  KATE

  Twenty-five years earlier

  The neighborhood fuzzes past as I trace the familiar route to the local shops to meet Mum. My instinct is to rush, but at the same time I want to slow things right down, return home only once the pills have worked. I imagine Nick bent over the toilet bowl, clutching his stomach and groaning that he’s not well enough to go on holiday.

  Mum’s waiting for me outside Costcutter, the sea of carrier bags at her feet wrinkling in the slight breeze. I’m too nervous to make conversation as we wander back. Mum seems quiet, too, trudging along, tired from work, she says. The bag handles cut grooves into my palms and the evening feels humid and sticky.