The Downstairs Neighbor

by Helen Cooper

  She’d had to escape the house, the street. But she couldn’t simply run away. She was tangled in this tragedy and she had to know what she was dealing with.

  Now something made her stare more attentively toward the maisonette. Was it just the shifting light? She waited, her breath shortening, then glimpsed it again: a shadow behind the tatty upper-floor curtains. It seemed formless at first, striping across the window, until it stilled and took on the outline of a person. Emma lifted her phone and snatched a photo. The shadow moved and became fluid, melting into the general darkness of the interior.

  She waited. The shadow didn’t reappear and the house became lifeless again. Should she go and knock? Her nerves revved at the thought, and the longer she sat without seeing anything further, the more she wondered if she’d been duped by an optical illusion. Go home, tell the police, back away. But she was here now. She needed to understand what this place was that had wound Steph into such a frenzy.

  Her palms were clammy as she crossed the road and stood before the house. She counted herself down like she used to at school when she was working up the courage to step into a homeroom. Different scenarios motored through her head, options for what to do if somebody answered. But nobody did. Not at the second knock, or the third.

  And the photo on her phone was hopelessly blurry. The shape she’d captured could have been a woman or a man, could have been a stain, could have been a ghost.

  * * *

  —

  When she returned home, she found a crowd of journalists on the street, drinking coffee and talking into mobiles, a much larger group than the one or two who’d been hanging around earlier.

  “Miss Brighton,” one hollered as she approached. It unsettled her that they knew her name. She tried to push past but a microphone was thrust into her face.

  “Do you know where Paul Harlow is?” the journalist asked.

  Emma couldn’t help pausing. “What?”

  “He doesn’t appear to be at home. We’re wondering why that is.”

  “Is he being held in custody?” another reporter butted in.

  She checked the space where Paul’s car would usually be. It was true, she realized. He’d been gone since the previous afternoon.

  “I don’t know.” Pressure was escalating in her head. Even in her state of confusion about whom to trust, a defense of the Harlows erupted out of her: “Just leave them in peace, won’t you?”

  “What about Chris Watson? Has he been arrested?”

  “I said I don’t know! Why would I?”

  She shoved through the throng, made it into the house, and slammed the exterior door. At the same moment, a smell hit her nostrils. It was the pungent scent of a certain area of the local park, the whiff of something nasty dragged home on the bottom of a shoe. She checked the soles of her boots, but they were clean. Her eyes watered and she stoppered her nose as she looked around the hallway.

  A package was half wedged through the letterbox. She could tell instantly that the envelope was soft and moist, little flecks of brown seeping at the corners. When she tugged at the very edge she felt its horrible squelch, and as it came free of the jaws of the letterbox she yelped and dropped it to the floor.

  Dog shit now? Really, Robin?

  Disgusting. Childish. Pathetic.

  Except she couldn’t even use these words to diminish her own horror. This package was the thing that finally made her tears erupt.

  42.

  STEPH

  Steph knew she had to listen to what George was asking her as he leaned forward from her sofa while she hunched in her window seat. But there was chaos in her head, white noise in her ears, grief in the pit of her stomach, and anger at the grief because a bloodied jacket did not mean the end. It wasn’t helpful to Freya to think the worst, to howl with loss, to stop breathing every few seconds because some irrational part of her feared she was stealing breaths that should have been her daughter’s . . .

  “Steph, I’m sorry, I know this is hard . . . but do you recognize this?”

  George was holding his iPad toward her, with a picture on its screen. Steph didn’t want to look. The last thing he’d shown her, early that morning, had been the photo of Freya’s jacket for her to identify. Crudely buried, bloodstained, folded over, like somebody lying on their side. Steph had been convinced that the next words out of his mouth were going to be about body parts or bones. She understood now what people meant when they talked about time stopping. It had been the worst moment of her life.

  Now George expected her to contemplate another image on that screen.

  Intervening thoughts scissored across her mind. She had to get to the maisonette, should have gone days ago. She’d been so cowardly leaving it to Emma. Each time she opened her mouth to tell George to send his colleagues there, fear froze her stiff as she thought of everything it would unleash. If only she could slip away from all the people who seemed to be constantly around her . . .

  And Paul was still gone. Unreachable, oblivious. She kept thinking she saw him in the street, her heart contracting with hope, but it was just a journalist who looked a little like him, fooling her every few seconds.

  “Steph?”

  Finally, she looked at what she was being shown. At first she thought it was just a photo of a twenty-pound note, until she spotted the doodle in the top-right corner and all her fractured attention rocketed toward it.

  “That’s . . . Freya’s driving-lesson money.” She lurched forward and grabbed the iPad from George. “I always draw a car in the corner of the notes I give her for her lessons. It’s just a”—she stared at her own silly sketch of a Mini Cooper—“a thing I do. It’s an ongoing joke that Freya loves Minis.”

  George nodded. “There were several banknotes folded up in her jacket pocket, with this same drawing on each. Amounting to almost three hundred pounds.”

  “Three hundred?”

  “Do you tend to give Freya the money in advance?”

  “No, on the day,” Steph said. “I don’t understand . . . Why did she have so much on her?”

  “We were hoping you might be able to tell us.”

  Steph had to look away from her doodle, her eyes raw. Chris Watson’s face now leered into her mind. Hadn’t Freya been paying for her lessons? Or hadn’t the lessons been taking place at all?

  George moved closer and swiped at the tablet still in her hands. Colors skidded across her vision. “What about this?”

  It was a photo of a round silver box, a cluster of jewels decorating its hinged lid.

  “What is it?” Steph asked.

  “You don’t recognize it?”

  “Should I?”

  “It’s a solid silver pillbox. It was also in Freya’s coat pocket.”

  Steph planted two fingers on the screen and zoomed in until the image was as pixelated as her thoughts. She shook her head, feeling faint.

  “Did Freya take any regular medication?”

  “No.”

  “Could this have been a present?”

  “Not that I know of . . .”

  She imagined George looking up sharply and saying, Well, perhaps you wouldn’t know. Because perhaps you didn’t know her as well as you thought. And maybe she learned her deceptiveness from you.

  43.

  KATE

  Twenty-five years earlier

  When Auntie Rach arrives to stay with us, the flat becomes instantly cramped. She’s almost as wide as she’s tall, with a shelf-like chest and a frizz of hairsprayed curls. She hands out sorrowful hugs and I let myself lean into the doughy comfort of her body. Becca does the same, but only for a second: clings to her mum, then pulls away as if remembering they fell out before all of this happened. I sometimes wonder how Becca copes with the constant roller coaster of war and peace between her and Auntie Rach. Not to be speaking to my mum, to have her ringing up her sister
to moan about what a “nightmare” I am, I wouldn’t be able to stand it like Becca does.

  Auntie Rach insists on sharing Mum’s bed with her, saying she shouldn’t be alone. Imagining Mum teetering on the edge while her sister takes all the room would normally make me laugh, but I doubt I’m ever going to find anything funny again. I wonder whether Mum sleeps in pajamas, hides her skin, whether Auntie Rach will spot the bruises. I wonder who has the side of the bed that used to be his.

  As far as I can see, Mum still hasn’t cried for Nick. She stares at his things lying around the flat, picks them up and examines them, like pieces of moon rock that have somehow found their way in.

  The cause of his death hasn’t been confirmed. The first stages of the postmortem were inconclusive, so now there’ll be a toxicology report. Auntie Rach tells us this one morning, after a phone call from the coroner’s office or maybe the police: I’m losing track of all the people involved. I’ve never heard of a toxicology report but I can guess what one is. I shoot my eyes toward Becca: She’s staring into space, unblinking.

  I want to ask exactly what they’ll test for. Exactly how it works. But I press my lips shut, my pulse hopping.

  Auntie Rach lays a palm on Mum’s shoulder. “It could take four to six weeks.”

  Mum sinks her head into her hands. “What about the funeral?”

  “Once they’ve collected all the samples they need, they’ll release his body back to the family. Apparently it’s the analysis that takes the time. We should be able to have a funeral.”

  The family. Since Nick’s death I’ve realized he didn’t exist in a vacuum, didn’t appear out of nowhere just to make our lives a misery. He has a dad and a brother who live somewhere down south. Mum murmurs on the phone to them, awkward and unsure because she doesn’t even know them; they’re having contact only because they were all connected to someone who’s dead. I try to listen in, try to guess whether his dad’s crying, whether his family loved him. Once I hear a raised voice at the other end, and afterward I catch Mum whispering to Auntie Rach, “They want answers.”

  At the moment I get most of my information from eavesdropping. I hoover up overheard fragments, one-sided phone calls. Neighbors pop round with steamed-up Tupperware boxes of food, and I lurk in the background, wondering what they’d think if they knew even half the truth. The police ask us questions about the weeks leading up to Nick’s death: Had he been ill or acting oddly? To my relief, Mum mostly keeps me out of it. My legs go soft each time I see the flash of a uniform through the peephole in our door.

  About a week after his death, the word antidepressants starts cropping up in the hushed conversations Mum and Auntie Rach have when they think Becca and I are asleep. At first I wonder if Mum’s started taking them: I check the bathroom cabinet but there’s only a gnawed red toothbrush and a bar of dusty white soap. The next night, I hear them discussing it again and I manage to grasp the thread this time. I scurry over to Becca and shake her.

  Her eyes fly open. We’re both on a knife edge at the moment. Always waiting. Some days I can convince myself no one will ever know what we did. Other days a confession prickles like ground-up glass on my tongue.

  Becca snaps into a sitting position. “What is it?”

  “Nick was taking antidepressants. The police found them in his house.”

  She frowns. “What?”

  “Maybe it was a reaction to them,” I whisper, “not to . . . to what we . . .”

  Becca is silent. I can hear her breath coming in little bursts.

  “Don’t you think?” I ask.

  “Maybe.” She draws up her knees, hooks her arms around them. “It’s possible.”

  I shuffle back to bed but can’t escape my thoughts. I wish there was somebody I could talk to, somebody who knows about medicine and postmortems and inquests. Who would answer my questions and never tell a soul that I asked.

  * * *

  —

  Soon Auntie Rach has to go back to work, so she and Becca prepare to head back to Derby.

  Tears fill my eyes as I press my face against my aunt’s big shoulder and smell the mousse in her crispy perm. Without Becca I’ll feel totally alone, but perhaps I’ll be able to think for myself. Maybe things will be clearer. We hug loosely, her body skinny and cool compared to her mum’s, and she squeezes my wrist, like a signal of solidarity.

  Then it’s just Mum and me, like it always used to be. Except I still feel echoes of Nick. I still jump at tall shadows, hear the jangle of his keys, catch phantom drifts of frying bacon in the air.

  We rarely mention his name, which is weird in itself. But he’s still around.

  One Friday evening, Mum comes into my room. It’s stripped of Becca’s things now: I can pad right across my carpet without having to stretch over her sleeping bag, and my books have resurfaced from beneath her heaps of fashion magazines. Her meds no longer sit on the bedside table; they haven’t been there since the day after Nick died, when Becca whisked them away as if getting them out of sight would solve everything.

  Mum stands on the spot where Becca slept for almost three weeks. Spreads her arms as if suddenly noticing all the extra space.

  Releasing a breath, she says, “I’ve arranged for you to have Monday off school.”

  “Monday?”

  “Nick’s funeral.”

  An uncomfortable silence falls. I think she’s going to walk away, but she lingers near the door. “I’m nervous,” she says eventually.

  “About the funeral?”

  “I don’t know why. Maybe the thought of all those people. And I still feel so . . . I mean, funerals are supposed to give closure, aren’t they? But we won’t really have that. Not until we know why it happened.”

  I blurt: “What’s the toxicology report for?”

  “To test for anything he might’ve had in his system. The doctors think he had some kind of reaction.”

  “Like an allergic reaction?”

  She plucks at her cardigan. “Possibly.”

  “Could it be . . .” I know I should stop but I can’t. “. . . his antidepressants?”

  “How do you know about those?”

  “I heard you and Auntie Rach.”

  There’s a pinched look to her face. The blue disks under her eyes resemble bruises, making me wonder if the real ones on her body are still there, whether they’re fading now, faster than the memories.

  “They’re not sure,” she says quietly. “The analysis takes a while when they don’t really know what they’re testing for.”

  It’s one of the longest conversations we’ve had since he died. Part of me wants to keep it going—I’ve missed her and I don’t want her to leave. Another part fears that if we keep talking, I’ll tell her everything.

  She moves to go.

  “Was he in pain?”

  I didn’t mean to say it.

  Mum stalls. “What?”

  “When he got sick.” My voice is almost a whisper. “Did he seem like he was in a lot of pain?” I don’t even know what answer I want to hear.

  Mum lifts a chunk of her hair and studies it. Thin threads come away in her fingers. “Oh, love . . . it’s all a blur.”

  44.

  PAUL

  A jacket of pain seemed to have replaced Paul’s rib cage. When he tried to peel open his eyes, his face threatened to crack. There was an expanse of white above him, a searing pain in his skull. He shifted his legs. He was in a bed beneath cool white sheets. A voice was saying his name, but the heaviness of his eyes became irresistible and he let them settle closed again.

  The next time he woke, he must have cried out. Concerned faces were peering down at him, coaxing him to lie back against the pillow. He was still mouthing something. Perhaps an echo of whatever he’d shouted that had brought people running.

  Freya, Freya, Freya.

  “I
t’s okay.” This was a nurse with a soft smile. “Do you remember where you are?”

  Paul glanced around and slowly nodded. He was on a ward now, rather than the chaos of the emergency room. It was daytime. How long had he slept?

  “What time is it?” he asked, his swollen tongue mashing his words.

  “Two thirty p.m.,” the nurse said as she took his temperature. “Just another manic Monday! You’ll still be drowsy from the painkillers. You need to get some rest.”

  “No . . .” He was groggy, and in pain, but the last thing he could afford to do was rest. “Freya . . . Steph . . . Daniel . . .” He wasn’t even sure he was saying the names out loud, but the nurse was nodding dutifully.

  “We’ll get in touch with your family, don’t worry.”

  “No, you don’t understand. My daughter, she’s . . . and my wife . . .” The frustration of not being able to articulate it made the pain in his head intensify. “I have to call . . .” He twisted toward the bedside table, amazed to find his mobile there. His relief was short-lived as he saw that its screen was shattered.

  “I can call someone for you,” the nurse said.

  “My wife. Steph.”

  “Do you know her number?”

  Paul scrunched up his face, then croaked out the digits that were more familiar than his own. The nurse poured him some water but he gesticulated at the number she’d written down.