The Intruder at Number 40

by Louise Candlish

  There was no reply at the door.

  ‘She’s not answering,’ said the neighbour at number 42. Ryan recognized her as the woman Amber had been in the café with, together with the good-looking guy who Ryan had since seen on the high street a few times with a posh blonde. ‘I’m not sure she’s even in. I think she might have gone to join her husband on his business trip. She hasn’t been well recently.’

  ‘I know,’ Ryan was about to say, but stopped himself. At least he knew now that the couple had not split up. Knowledge equalled self-preservation for a man in his position.

  The courtesy call became a courtesy email. She did not reply.

  The next time the camera registered any activity was the following Saturday, when Amber spent half an hour or so at the window watching the street below. She seemed calmer now, content again. In the mirror she cupped her breasts with her hands through her sweater and kept them like that for some time. He wondered if she’d had enlargement surgery, which would explain her previous absence; perhaps that hysteria had been pre-op nerves. But he didn’t think so. Her figure, with which he was as minutely familiar as any husband, looked just the same.

  Though he didn’t realize it then, this was the last time he would see her. Jeremy returned from his work trip and was in and out of the room, showering, dressing, and finally packing again. The leather holdall was the same one he’d used for his work travel but this time he took items for both his wife and himself.

  There was nothing for several days and then, at one otherwise unremarkable morning briefing in early February, Deborah made an incredible announcement. The owner of 40 Lime Park Road had just phoned and the house was going back on the market.

  ‘You mean Jeremy and Amber Fraser?’ Ryan exclaimed. ‘But they’ve only been there ten months.’

  ‘You’ve got a good memory,’ Deborah said.

  She handled the sale personally, allowing several parties to proceed in a race to exchange, an unethical practice that the agency discouraged as a rule. Though it was standard for each client to be assigned a negotiator as a point of contact, it was a small team and the properties themselves were shared. Not this time. Only Deborah and her most senior negotiator, Mark, were allowed to know the burglar alarm code for 40 Lime Park Road and when Ryan made requests to take his own candidates for a viewing, he was told they must be referred to Mark.

  The old woman next door was selling up as well, apparently, though she was using a different agent.

  Someone had seen a police car on the street, Cheryl whispered.

  Well, once he heard that, he couldn’t sleep. What if the police searched the Frasers’ house and found the smoke alarm? Objects that might fool ordinary civilians would surely not fool a forensic investigator. The website from which he’d bought the device had promised no hidden serial numbers, but what good was that if they only sold a handful of the things a month? They could be traced individually in no time at all.

  On the other hand, there was a tamper alarm on the device and this had not yet been triggered. Plus Cheryl had eavesdropped on Deborah and Mark and understood that it was the next-door flat that was of police interest, not the Frasers’. ‘Wonder if they’ll tell people that when they’re showing them around,’ she said, disgruntled for more obvious reasons than Ryan’s to have been cut out of the deal.

  There was nothing for it but to bide his time and stay calm. Now, when he checked in with the Frasers’ master bedroom, it was to watch his colleagues conduct viewings.

  Even though, in time, he was aware of the house selling to a young couple from New Cross, it came as a supreme shock when a new figure appeared on video. She was a dowdy woman in her thirties – and possibly quite mad, he soon decided, judging by the frantic way she cleaned the room, going over and over the spotless carpet with her Hoover. One minute she was ill in bed and the next she was up and removing all the furniture. Watching her manhandle the double bed on to its side and edge it through the door, Ryan almost lost the will to live.

  No sooner had the mad woman moved herself and her husband (a fretful-looking thing) out of the bedroom than she was back, spending hours a day in a chair by the window. It was like she was convalescing from some debilitating disease and yet she appeared perfectly able-bodied. She must be, he realized with an unexpected pinch of compassion, depressed.

  Then, the tamper alarm did issue an alert and the connection between 40 Lime Park Road and his secret phone was broken. Sleepless, he berated himself for not having got into the house before somehow (it wasn’t as if he hadn’t tried to think of a way, but Deborah’s defences had been impenetrable and the new owner struck him as the type to escalate it if he were to visit unannounced; after all she’d never met him). Dozens of theories occurred as to what might have deactivated the device, his favourite being that she’d removed it with the intention of fitting it somewhere else in the house, somewhere a fire was more likely to start.

  However, two days passed and it had not been reinstalled.

  Rubbish collection day in Lime Park was Friday. Late Thursday night, Ryan drove his mother’s Micra to Lime Park and located the bin for number 40. At least there were only two sackfuls; these he transferred to the boot of the car, watched only by a fox.

  It took over an hour the next evening to sift twice through the disgusting tangle of dust and human hair and God knew what (it was compulsory to recycle food waste in a separate bin, thank the Lord). He hadn’t actually expected to find it, the exercise being more in the spirit of elimination than discovery, but, to his great joy, there is was! It had slipped into an empty Tampax box, to all appearances a discarded smoke alarm.

  ‘What are you doing, Ryan?’ his mother called through the locked garage door. ‘Ros is here with her daughter …’

  ‘Coming!’

  Since he and Julie had split up, his mother had been hinting about the neighbour’s divorced daughter, who was Ryan’s age. She’d been going to the gym, apparently, and was ‘back in the game’. Meeting her, he saw immediately that she was revolted by the idea of a middle-aged man living with his mother and needing to be persuaded from some unnamed activity in a sealed garage. It probably didn’t help that he clutched a crushed Tampax box under his arm as he reached to accept a beer. She was OK-looking, he supposed, soft-bodied and a bit wrinkled, especially around the eyes and mouth. Like him, like Julie, like the new couple in the Frasers’ house, she was nothing special.

  He couldn’t wait to go up to his bedroom and review the Amber highlights. Not that he intended storing them for long, he understood that that was too risky. This would be the last time.

  The next day, having stuffed the Lime Park rubbish into his own bin, he walked down to the boating lake in Danson Park. ‘Goodbye, Amber,’ he mouthed, before hurling the alarm and the phone into the water.

  And he imagined her at that exact moment, wherever she was, whoever she was with, reacting as if by extrasensory perception to the sound of his thoughts.

  ‘Oh, Ryan,’ she’d say, her voice sticky with sorrow. ‘I’m really going to miss you.’

  ‘I’ll miss you, too,’ he said aloud. His heart hammered dreadfully, his skin was afire, and it took him a minute or two to regain his composure.

  And then, chin up, he walked to the station to catch his usual train to work.

  The end

  Prologue

  I am running naked through the streets of Elm Hill.

  It is late evening, summer’s end, and the streetlamps burn synthetic holes in the darkening sky. Deep in the rack of streets on the east side of the park, the mild air feels hostile, the near-silence thunderous.

  I am trembling badly. The arm covering my breasts has begun to spasm and both knees are buckling. Blood leaks from my right foot where gravel has sliced the sole. But none of that distresses me as much as my face, the grim­ acing, primitive feel of it, as if I’ve been robbed of all that makes me civilized.

  He has done this to me.

  A sign for Wilson Road slides into
view and I feel a sudden ache of hope: where I started is farther from me now than my front door. Just a left turn here, a quiet stretch of residential road, and the high street will be ahead. This will end.

  A woman approaches, lifts her eyes, and I see the same startled expression and flash of high colour as in every other face I’ve encountered, all mobility arrested by the shock of seeing a nude woman loose in leafy Elm Hill. They suspect I’m insane – there is a secure mental health facility at Trinity Hospital a mile or two away – and are afraid to help in case I turn savage.

  But there’s a flicker in this face that prompts me to speak for the first time since this nightmare began: ‘Please, can you lend me something?’

  ‘What?’ She’s stunned by my addressing her – and by my accent. It’s worse to know that I am educated.

  ‘To cover myself. Please.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve got anything …’ She looks down at her cotton dress and gestures helplessness. It’s balmy; no one is carrying a scarf or a jacket.

  It strikes me that I’m thinking normal thoughts. I’m still rational.

  ‘Oh,’ she says, and suddenly she does have something, screwed up in her handbag, a light cardigan of some sort.

  ‘Can I borrow it? I’ll return it if you–’

  ‘Keep it.’

  With shaking hands, I tie the garment around my lower half, then tighten my arms over my chest.

  ‘Look, hang on.’ The woman takes a purposeful step towards me, her gaze lingering on the bruises that bloom on my arms. His fingerprints. ‘My name’s Beverley. You don’t have to tell me yours, but something has obviously happened, hasn’t it? Come home with me and–’

  I interrupt: ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘Broadwood Road.’

  I know it: no closer than home. ‘No thank you, I’m fine.’ I sound polite, as if declining the offer of a drink.

  The awful thing is she’s relieved. She did the right thing and now she can scurry away with a clear conscience and a story to tell.

  On the move once more, I slam my left toes into the raised edge of a paving stone and cry out from the pain. Raising my free hand to my face to wipe away tears, I catch a scent beneath the sweat, a scent that only makes me sob harder: chlorine and sunshine, scrubbed stone and suburban grass. Swimming pool.

  I’ll never go back.

  At last the high street blazes in greeting, the Vineyard bar directly opposite the junction at which I’ve emerged. I falter. I’d forgotten about the pavement terrace, its crush of smokers; I’ll need to pass right by it to reach Kingsley Drive. From a standing start, I sprint across the traffic lanes and meet the shockwave, the universal bewilderment that erupts into laughter.

  ‘Who booked the stripper?’ a man’s voice calls out and a second round of laughter volleys into my back. ‘Bit long in the tooth for that, aren’t you, love?’

  I sense rather than see the phones in their palms. There will soon be pictures circulating, if not already, attracting likes and shares and retweets, comments that make this man’s sound tender.

  I’m on my street. The pain in my damaged toes is ferocious, consuming the foot and calf, making me limp. My building is in sight: four featureless storeys, the night sky above. It’s nearly over, nearly over.

  And then I see him. He stands by the building doors watching, waiting. My knees roll and at last I sink to the ground, powerless. Because I know he’ll watch forever, he’ll wait forever.

  It will never be over.

  Chapter 1

  31st August 2015, 12.15am

  She coughs in her sleep.

  I spring to her bedside to check that her chest is rising and falling as it should, that her pulse is steady and her skin warm. In the dimmed light, I can see the vestiges of stickers glued on the headboard in younger years, pictures of kittens and ponies and love hearts: all things nice.

  Children grow and it strikes the parent as both miracle and loss.

  The coughing subsides, but I remain on my knees, vigilant. I haven’t watched over her like this since the night she was born, when I stayed awake, enchanted and petrified, ready for her cry. At least Ed is with me this time. Thirteen and a half years ago, he wasn’t allowed in the maternity ward after visiting hours but was sent home with the other fathers, ready or not.

  I don’t suppose Lara Channing had to stand for that. She would have been in some posh clinic for the births of Georgia and Everett, installed in a private room with Miles by her side, the recipient of privileges she’d assume came as standard. ‘You are an angel,’ she would tell the staff in her smoky, intimate way, ‘I mean it: an angel.’ And she would say it like she really meant it.

  But I mustn’t think ill of Lara. Not now.

  ‘Here, this should sober you up.’ Ed comes into the room with mugs of black coffee – as if adrenaline has not annihilated the alcohol hours ago, pinned open our eyes and cleansed our ears.

  I return to my seat on the little pink sofa by the door, take the coffee in both hands. The smell is instantly comforting. Though there is space next to me, Ed chooses not to take it, perching instead on Molly’s desk chair under the window. ‘Is she sleeping a bit better, d’you think?’

  ‘Yes. I’m glad we brought her home.’

  We speak in whispers. Until the last half hour she’d fought sleep like an infant, her distress slow to fade, and since then we’ve hardly dared exchange more than a syllable.

  ‘She needed to be in her own bed,’ I add.

  ‘You’re probably right. It’s good you insisted.’

  You insisted, this should sober you up: it destroys me, the way he speaks. If never again, surely tonight we should be united. ‘She was completely hysterical, Ed. We know how to deal with that better than anyone. And it’s not like we’ve snatched her from intensive care and absconded, is it?’

  He lifts his glasses from the bridge of his nose, replaces them a second later. He is not quite looking at me. ‘No, but the paramedics were pretty clear about wanting to take her in for observation.’

  ‘We’ll observe her here,’ I say.

  He nods, lets it go. To the right of where he sits, Molly’s school uniform hangs on the wardrobe door, a scholarly silhouette with regulation tights dangling low. New shoes sit on the carpet below. All ready for the first day of term on Wednesday. I wonder if she’ll be well enough to go back or if we should keep her home for the week to recuperate fully. To think how we used to dither over arrangements when she had a day off sick, debate whose turn it was to cover, like it actually mattered!

  All three of us were different people then.

  ‘Ed?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘I wish I’d never …’ I pause, struggling to subdue the ‘what if’s, to keep them from massing and charging.

  ‘Wish you’d never what, Nat?’ Now he looks at me, direct and eager, almost with a sense of daring.

  I lose my nerve. ‘Nothing.’

  And I think how wrong people are when they say you should never regret, I think how unrealistic that is – dangerous, frankly. Personally, I regret almost everything, including and especially these last months. Even the parts when I was so happy I thought I might levitate, when it felt as if I’d never before known what summer was, what pleasure was, what it meant to live life to the full.

  Mostly, I regret ever laying eyes on Lara Channing.

  THE BEGINNING

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  Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  Published in ebook format 2016

  Copyright © Louise Candlish, 2016

  Cover: Door © David Papazian / Shutterstock; Ivy © Slavko Sereda / Shutterstock

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  ISBN: 978-1-405-92783-3