by cass green
The girl probably lives with her boyfriend in this small market town. They have a dog – some, small yappy thing, which they love as much as a child. One day they’ll marry and their mates will come along dressed in jeans and T-shirts. They’ll go to the pub and all get pissed.
Neve realizes the girl’s smile has slipped a little and she is regarding her curiously now.
‘Yes! No,’ says Neve and blushes at her own stupidity. ‘You’re mending a, er, my laptop?’
‘Got your ticket?’
Neve hunts for a while in her purse but she knows it is a fruitless search. She has never been able to hang onto things like this, which make the admin of life run smoother. She’s had to recover passwords for virtually every website she’s ever been signed up to, and once had to wait until a nightclub cloakroom had handed over every single item to other guests until her coat finally emerged.
‘Don’t worry,’ says the girl. ‘Just give me the name.’
A few minutes later the black laptop is placed on the desk.
‘Now, we had some problems,’ Neve is told, ‘and I don’t know whether we have recovered everything or only the most recent data on the computer. We’ve managed to find a fair number of photos, but some drives seem to have been overwritten so many times, we could only get a partial recovery. Everything we managed to salvage is on this.’
She slides a CD across the table towards Neve.
‘Okay, that’s better than nothing, thanks.’ Neve gets out her bank card with an uneasy feeling that it might be declined. Thankfully, the payment goes through.
Now that she has the computer in her hands, she feels a strange reluctance to turn it on and look at what is contained within. Instead she mooches around the shops for a while, trying to work up the will to find the first bus she will need to take her back to the cottage. She buys a small amount of groceries, tops up her electricity key, and finally makes her way to the bus stop, just as a light rain begins to fall.
It takes an hour and a half to get back to Stubbington Lane. Her bottom is stiff from the bus seats and, having been caught by the rain in the wrong sort of coat, smells like a wet dog.
The estate agent had phoned as she settled onto the first bus to say, tersely, that she had missed yet another appointment. Apologizing profusely, Neve says she needs more time before firming up another. Georgia McColl tries to press her to a time but she can’t think about this now. The other woman is a little frosty when the call ends.
She will do it; sort out this valuation. She will. But her head is crowded with all this stuff right now and she must understand what is going on first.
The laptop in her handbag seems to have become a kilo heavier since this morning. By the time she is dragging herself up the lane and through the gate to the cottage, her shoulder aches and she wishes she had never bothered paying to have it recovered. She could, she thinks belatedly, have waited until she next went to London. Steve would probably have done it for her. He’d have moaned. But he would have done it. But what Matty said was so strange. She has to know.
When she comes into the quiet hallway, with its dim, jaundiced light and smell of potpourri, she feels an overwhelming desire, once again, to get away from here. She listens for a moment, alert to any sound of an intruder. She should get the locks changed. But she has no money for that.
The first thing she does is top up the meter.
She misses Jarvis, acutely.
After making herself a cup of coffee and a peanut butter sandwich, she sits down at the kitchen table and switches on the laptop.
As she is about to slip the disk into the slot at the side there is a rap at the front door.
‘Oh, bloody hell,’ she slaps the table with both palms. Now that the moment has arrived, she wants to get this over with, to truly know that there are no pictures of her. That Matty was just being weird.
Yet as she gets up and goes to the front door, there is a small part of her that is grateful for this hiatus.
The shape behind the glass looks vaguely familiar and when she opens the door, she is unable to hide her feelings.
‘Oh,’ she says flatly. ‘Hi.’
Finn smiles tentatively. ‘I’ve come to sort out the window, as promised,’ he says. His nose is red around the nostrils and his eyes look puffy. He does an explosive sneeze into his bent elbow and apologizes, sniffing.
‘As you can see,’ he says, ‘I’ve been a bit under the weather. It’s why I didn’t come sooner. And also …’ He shuffles, awkwardly. ‘I think I may have been a bit of an arse the other evening.’
‘Okay,’ says Neve again, wrong-footed. But she isn’t quite ready to let him in.
‘It was the first night out I’d had since … well, you know,’ he says. ‘And I’d been feeling crap all day. I didn’t want you to think I didn’t, well, I didn’t …’
‘It’s fine,’ says Neve crisply, pushing the door to let him in. ‘Don’t give it a second thought. But if you can get the window done quickly that would be great. I’m in the middle of something.’
‘Sure, sure!’ he says. ‘You won’t even know I’m here.’ He grins at her, and she is irritated that her body seems to respond happily, despite what her brain is telling it to do. He tells her he will be working from the outside and goes to his van to get what he needs.
A few minutes later she sees his face at the back window. He is wearing safety goggles and doesn’t meet her eye as he begins to scrape and bang at the broken pane.
Neve sits at the table and stares at the laptop.
She should just get it over with. Having Finn here might be a good thing.
But this feels like something she needs to do alone.
She waits.
It doesn’t take him long, anyway, and when she hears the polite knock on the back door, she gets up, hoping this won’t cost too much.
‘The putty will take a while to dry,’ he says. ‘But it should do the trick.’
‘Thanks,’ she says.
‘Did you want those bars off?’ says Finn. ‘Think you mentioned that before?’
‘No,’ says Neve, too quickly. ‘I mean, not for now.’ He regards her with a puzzled expression.
‘Look, are you alright?’ he says gently. Neve feels something shiver in her abdomen.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I might have to get back to you on that.’
They smile tentatively at each other.
‘I really am sorry about the other night,’ says Finn. ‘I think maybe it’s just too soon.’
‘It’s fine,’ says Neve wearily. And then, ‘Anyway, the last thing I need is a reason to stay in this shithole.’
Finn grins widely at this.
‘Well,’ he says. ‘If you do decide to stay, maybe we could have a drink? As friends? We can moan about the smell of cow shit and reminisce about traffic noise.’
‘Okay,’ she says with a smile. ‘If I stay, you’re on. Now how much do I owe you?’
He holds up his palms and shakes his head.
‘Not a penny,’ he says. ‘Consider it my apology for turning down a beautiful woman and being a fucking eejit.’
Neve swoops her eyes. ‘Cheesy bastard.’
Finn laughs. ‘That’s me.’
Neve is still smiling as she walks back into the kitchen. It’s a relief to have such a normal exchange. She is suddenly overwhelmed with a passionate desire to get away from here.
But not yet.
She sits down in front of the computer.
There is no password. The screen comes to life with a discordant electronic tune.
The desktop is a blank screen. Neve starts with the documents file first.
Nothing very exciting here. Letters to a GP requesting a repeat prescription of a drug Neve has never heard of; some documents relating to tax.
There are several folders of photos. One is called ‘Sadie and Matteo’ and contains a bunch of images of two beautiful dark-haired children, who beam with gap-toothed smiles at the camera. Some o
f the pictures are of the children as babies.
Neve moves on and there are more pictures, apparently taken during Isabelle’s time in Australia. Most seem to be of an intense-looking man in his forties, who looks at the camera with a slightly arrogant air. Neve decides this is an ex-boyfriend and, sure enough, she finds one where Isabelle is tucked into his shoulder, smiling. He is kissing the top of her head and looking off to the side. She zooms in on the picture to look more closely at Isabelle and her heart contracts. Although tanned and smiling, there is something in her eyes, even here, that seems deadened somehow. As though she isn’t really there. And she is thin; much thinner than when Neve saw her that night. Her cheekbones look too sharp and her collarbones jut above the neck of the blue dress she is wearing.
Other folders contain either landscape shots or the occasional group of people holding up beer bottles under bar canopies. A couple make her peer more closely. There is a woman with the same coarse, dirty blonde hair as Neve. But she has huge eyes that look pale in colouring and a much thinner face. Could this be the person Matty saw? Could he just have really crap eyesight, she wonders?
Neve sits back in her seat. This is no good. This is making her feel like a ghoul.
She decides to look at one more folder before giving up.
It’s called ‘Hannes’. A person’s name, or a place, perhaps. Geography has never been her strong suit.
Neve lifts the coffee to sip and clicks open the file.
Seconds later, she slams the cup back onto the table and is on her feet, both hands crossed over her mouth.
Because every single image in this file is of Neve.
41
Neve goes to the sink and tries to hold a glass under the tap with a hand that shakes so hard that water slops out the top. Her brain is jangling like a struck bell. She can’t think, she can’t make sense of it, so she forces cold liquid into her mouth and gasps and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand as it runs down her chin and onto her clothes.
She stands for a few moments then, staring at the window pane.
Why? Why, why, why …?
Neve walks back to the kitchen table and reaches for the laptop. She makes herself flick through the images. There are so many:
– Neve, sitting next to Miri on the tube, laughing with her mouth open, hands unconsciously mirroring her friend and resting on her own belly.
– Neve, in a queue for coffee, staring down at her phone and frowning deeply at what she sees. Her hair is scraped into a rough ponytail and she looks hungover.
– Neve, dancing, arms above her head in a sensuous curl. Her face shines with heat and alcohol and happiness.
– Neve, walking along the road to Lou’s, carrying a bag of shopping.
There are more but she can’t bear to look and she slams down the lid of the laptop.
Someone – Isabelle? – had been stalking her for ages. She tries to place some of the pictures but the only one she can mark for sure is the one in the nightclub. That was the night her phone was stolen, wasn’t it? She and Daniel had gone to a new nightclub in Hoxton, London, to celebrate the thirtieth birthday of someone in their pub group.
Neve’s heart starts to throb almost painfully in her chest now because something is taking shape in her mind. Something dark and strange.
Everyone had said how lucky she was, to have found the stolen phone that very same night …
She thinks about the press of bodies on the dancefloor, almost moving as one. A hand slipping into her bag and removing the phone.
And then leaving it handily where staff would find it.
Why?
Why?
Neve runs across the room to her bag to get the phone now. Once, she would never have been more than two feet away from it, but the signal is so poor here she has become less reliant.
She quickly starts flicking through pages of the screen. Searching.
And then she finds what she is looking for.
E-spy. The app she had noticed for the first time in the vet’s waiting room but been too preoccupied to look at properly.
Nothing happens when she taps on the icon.
She can’t bear to lift the lid of the laptop again so hurries to the bedroom to get her iPad, where it has been charging.
She taps, ‘What does the app E-spy do?’ into Google while she is still walking and gets many, many hits.
‘E-spy is the perfect way to keep track of your kids, or even your cheating spouse!’ reads one.
‘Buy the best GPS spying software,’ says another.
Neve drops the phone on the table, as though it is burning her fingers.
The phone feels dirty, poisoned. But she makes herself pick it up and quickly dials Sally Gardner’s number. It goes straight to voicemail.
She leaves the phone where it is and doesn’t even stop to get a coat before she is picking up her keys and running out of the front door.
Someone knows what has been going on. Someone needs to give her answers.
Neve is sweating when she arrives at the Gardners’ cottage, even though there is a mean, bitter wind and threatening black rain clouds bunching together in the sky. Her insides sag when she sees that there are no cars at the front of the property. But she rings the bell anyway and then bangs on the front door.
Stepping back dejectedly, she looks up and sees a movement at a window upstairs.
Matty? Lurking there and watching her, no doubt. She goes back to the letterbox and snaps it open.
‘Matty!’ she hisses. ‘Please … I need to talk about Isabelle. There’s something … terrible.’
She’s gabbling but can’t pull herself together. Nothing seems to stir inside the house so Matty clearly has no intention of coming down to talk.
Cursing him, she hesitates for just a moment longer then begins to run further up the lane, towards Briarfields.
When she gets to the large, wrought iron gate, she sees the green Land Rover parked in front of the house. Richard said the security buzzer didn’t work and she is about to kick the gate in frustration when she sees that it isn’t locked.
She pushes it open, and, trying to get her breath back, stomps around the side of the house to the kitchen. Cold rain begins to patter on her head but she barely registers it. She is still blasted by shock, unable to process what is happening.
Not bothering to knock, Neve wrenches open the kitchen door and steps inside. Jarvis gets to his feet and comes over in a blur of hair and tongue and tail. His silly, soft presence makes her want to dissolve into helpless tears so she only murmurs a few words to him before opening the kitchen door and entering a passageway.
It is panelled with dark wood and is poorly lit. Neve walks until she comes to a wide hallway with a cracked parquet floor and a large staircase curling upwards. Dour pictures of hunting scenes line the walls, while a couple of grim-faced Victorians glower down from the staircase.
Neve gathers her courage and yells, ‘Richard?’ at the top of her voice. ‘Richard, are you here? It’s Neve. I need to talk to you.’
She hears movement above then, as though the entire house is breathing out. Richard appears at the top of the stairs, looking tousled and startled, dressed in a tatty blue dressing gown.
‘What are you doing here?’ he says. ‘I was having a nap and then I heard—’
‘I need to talk to you. It’s important,’ Neve interrupts.
He stares at her for a moment and then mutters that he will get dressed and meet her in the kitchen.
Neve doesn’t move. She feels that if she lets him out of her sight, he will simply melt away.
Sensing this somehow, he says wearily, ‘I’ll be there in a minute. Just let me throw some clothes on.’ He seems oddly unsurprised to see her here.
Neve mutters agreement and turns back to the kitchen. She sits at the table, straight-backed, not touching anything. Warmth against her leg makes her start and she sees that Jarvis is lying by her feet. She can’t stop her fingers from seeking his comfo
rting heat and she rubs his soft head and tries to breathe slowly.
If Richard patronizes her, or makes her feel as though she is overreacting, she thinks she might actually kill him. She is winding herself up so much about this that when he comes into the kitchen a few moments later, she almost starts shouting before he has even begun.
He doesn’t look at her as he goes to a cupboard and produces a bottle of whisky, then two glasses from the side of the sink.
‘Drink?’ he says.
‘No,’ says Neve. ‘Yes. I don’t know. Yes. Fuck it, yes.’
He smiles weakly then pours two generous measures into the glasses, which are cloudy from over-use.
Neve takes a sip and then immediately coughs. She hates the peaty burn of whisky but it does help a little, so she takes another.
‘Tell me what you know,’ says Richard.
Neve takes a breath in and out, forcing herself to be calm.
‘I thought she was a total stranger,’ she says crisply. ‘And she was. To me. But she had been following me. Stalking me. She’d put an app on my phone. There are all these pictures of me …’
Neve takes an angry sip of whisky. Must not cry. But pressure is building in her throat and her eyes are prickling. She blinks hard. Picks up the whisky glass. Puts it down again.
‘Why was she doing that?’ she says, voice skidding. ‘You know something. I can tell.’
Richard bends his big head and looks down at his own glass. His face is hidden for several moments until Neve says, ‘Richard!’ sharply.
He looks up. His eyes are brimming, his mouth twisted. A terrible sound, half-gulp and half-groan, comes from his mouth and then he is covering his face and sobbing. His shoulders shake and he says, ‘Oh God,’ over and over again.
Neve sits, rigidly. Her lips feel numb, her face frozen. Terror swells inside her.
There is no prospect, not now, that she will learn anything good. Nothing coming now will make her feel better. She is staring into an abyss. In these few moments, she still has a fingertip hold on the edge. But Richard is speaking again and her grip is slipping.
