by Adam Croft
I don’t know which way to turn. It’s an indescribable feeling. To have nowhere to feel safe, no person you can trust. To feel so alone.
I try to tell myself I’m not alone, that there are people I can trust. I can trust Mandy. I can trust my mum and dad. Can’t I? I can even trust Kieran. Good old dependable Kieran. I tell myself this is the case, but I don’t believe it. Even though I know none of these people are responsible — I know it’s Gavin Armitage because I’ve seen him and spent time with him — it still doesn’t help those feelings of suspicion. When the threat is unseen, and could be lurking round every corner, your whole concept of trust goes out the window.
I do the only thing I can do. I pick up the phone and call the police.
The officer seems sympathetic at first, perhaps because he can hear the terror in my voice.
‘Sorry, you’ll have to slow down a bit,’ he says. ‘Did you say someone’s been in your house?’
‘Yes. Gavin. He’s been here,’ I explain between breaths, trying not to hyperventilate.
‘How do you know?’
I take a deep breath and hold it for a second, trying to slow my breathing. ‘The photo. There’s a photo on the mantelpiece. He’s changed it. He’s put the photo from the shoot in there.’
‘And what makes you think it was Gavin?’
‘He’s the only person who has them. Who else would do it? I didn’t do it.’
‘Okay. And does anyone else have access to your house? Does anyone have a key?’
‘No. No-one. I had the locks changed recently as well. I’m the only person who has a key.’
‘Right. Is there any other sign that someone’s been in the house? Anything stolen? Signs of forced entry? Broken windows?’
I think I would have noticed a broken window at this time of year. ‘No. Nothing,’ I say.
There’s a couple of moments of silence as the officer thinks about how to phrase his next question. ‘Have you had any guests round recently? Anyone who might have done it for a practical joke?’
I shake my head, even though he can’t see it. ‘No. No-one has come round. The last people who came over were my parents, but I’ve changed the locks since then. No-one else has been in since.’
‘And the photo wasn’t there earlier today?’
‘No,’ I say, trying to sound certain even though I’m not. I don’t remember specifically looking at the mantelpiece this morning, but I’m sure I still would have noticed it — even if it’s been like that for a day or two. Right now, I don’t care. I just want someone to come out here and make the place safe, to put my mind at rest. Even if they’re investigating something that turns out to be nothing, I don’t give a shit. It’s peace of mind. I need to feel safe. ‘Please. Can someone just come out and have a look? He’s been here. I know he has. There’s no other explanation.’
I hear the officer take a deep breath on the other end of the phone. I imagine him weighing up the odds in his mind, trying to work out whether ignoring a potential breaking-and-entering outweighs the chance of me being some crazy woman.
‘We’ll get someone out this evening,’ he says. ‘In the meantime, is there anyone you can call to be there with you? To make you feel safer and more reassured.’
I think for a moment. I could call Mandy. Or my parents. But there’s nothing they’ll be able to do. The only people who can help me are the police. ‘No,’ I say. ‘There isn’t.’
He pauses for a moment before speaking. ‘Alright. I’ll try and arrange for someone to be there as quickly as possible. I can’t grade it as an emergency situation, you understand, but we’ll do all we can.’
I let out the breath I didn’t realise I was holding. ‘Thanks. Thank you.’
25
The police officer who turns up seems friendly enough. She’s a woman in her forties, I estimate. Probably in the police as a second career. She doesn’t have the world-weary look of someone who’s been in the force for twenty years.
‘Is it just the two external doors you have?’ she asks.
‘Yeah. Front and back.’
‘To be honest, I can’t see any signs of forced entry. No damage from crowbars or jemmies or anything.’ She walks around the house checking the windows as she speaks. ‘What about window locks? Do they all lock from the inside?’
‘I think so, yes. I can’t see how anyone would’ve got through one from outside.’
‘And they were definitely all closed when you left the house?’
‘It’s December,’ I say, deciding she probably doesn’t need an in-depth explanation of the local climate at this time of year.
‘I know. But you’d be surprised. Sometimes people open their bathroom window or whatever, then forget to close it.’
‘I didn’t,’ I tell her. ‘It was closed when I got home, too. So unless he came in through the window, closed it behind him and is hiding under my bed right now, that’s not how he got in.’
Even saying those words frightens the life out of me. I hadn’t even considered the possibility that he might still be in the house. I know deep down that he isn’t. Of course he isn’t. But even thinking about it shoots a deep terror right through me.
The officer looks at me, can sense that I’m still very uncomfortable to say the least.
‘Mind if I take a look around upstairs? Just in case there are any signs of entry there.’
I gesture limply towards the stairs.
After a few moments she calls down. ‘Is the loft space shared?’
‘No,’ I call back up. I have friends who live in terraced houses, in which the loft space is continuous. Mine’s completely bricked up between my house and next door, though. As far as I’m aware it was built like that.
‘Mind if I have a look up there?’ she says quietly, peering around the corner of the living room door, making me jump. I hadn’t even realised she’d come back downstairs.
‘No, go on,’ I say. ‘There’s a chair in my bedroom, in front of my dresser. I use that to reach the hatch.’
I hear her footsteps as she walks into my room, picks up the chair and plonks it down under the loft hatch. A few seconds later I hear the sound of the ladder sliding down before she goes up into the loft, presumably carefully, on the off-chance that someone’s waiting up there for her. I’m not worried, though. She might be a middle-aged woman, but I’ve absolutely no doubt she could kick the shit out of even the biggest burglar.
After a couple of minutes I hear her back on the landing, pushing the ladder up into the loft space and closing the hatch.
‘Can’t see any signs of entry anywhere,’ she says, as she jogs back down the stairs. ‘It’s an odd one.’ She walks over to the mantelpiece and looks at the photo frame. ‘You’ve not touched it, have you?’
I shake my head. ‘Not since I found it like that. That’s the last thing I want to do.’
‘Alright. Might be some fingerprints on it, but I wouldn’t hold out much hope. If someone’s managed to break into your house without any signs of forced entry and without needing a key, I doubt they’d be stupid enough to leave fingerprints. Especially not at this time of year. Wearing gloves in the middle of winter isn’t exactly a marker for suspicion.’
She leaves the room and walks into the kitchen, where she uses her radio to ask for someone to swing by with evidence bags. I take this to mean that they’re not going to send out a forensics team to dust the photo frame and the house for fingerprints in situ. To me, that says they’re not treating this as seriously as they might otherwise do. My heart sinks.
‘Someone will come round to retrieve the photo frame,’ she says. ‘I can’t do it myself as I don’t have the right gear. It all needs to be signed off and everything. Cross-contamination and all that. Needless to say, don’t touch it until they get here.’
I nod. ‘What about other things? I mean, can I touch other stuff? Or will they want to...’
‘I’m sure that’ll be fine,’ she replies, a little too confidently for my l
iking.
‘Won’t they be dusting for fingerprints or anything?’
She averts her eyes from my gaze. Only briefly, but enough for me to notice. ‘I wouldn’t expect so, no.’
I leave it a second or two. ‘Why?’
‘Honestly? Unless there’s been any sign of forced entry, they’re unlikely to treat it as breaking and entering. Entering, maybe, but that’s not illegal. And at the moment we can’t prove it even happened at all.’
There’s a look on her face that says I wish I’d phrased that a bit better. I can tell she doesn’t believe me. And why would she? She doesn’t know me. All she knows is I’ve reported a guy stalking me — a guy who doesn’t exist on any records, whose photographic studio isn’t where I said it was — and now I’m convinced someone’s been in my house, even though there’s no evidence for it whatsoever, other than my deluded, paranoid mind.
‘What’s the medication for, Alice?’ she asks.
My head snaps towards her, perhaps a little too quickly. The question caught me by surprise.
‘Hmmmm?’
‘The tablets. I wasn’t prying, but when I went to get the chair to go into the loft I saw the packets on your dresser. Fluoxetine and sertraline.’ The fluency and familiarity with which she reels off the names tells me she knows exactly what they’re for. There’s no use in lying.
‘I went through a rough patch a little while back. I needed help to keep my head above water. But I’m alright now.’ I hope my face looks convincing. I also hope she didn’t look too closely at the prescription dates on the labels.
She nods. ‘Alright. If you do struggle again, there are lots of places that can help you. I know I’m no doctor, but I know people who’ve been there. Medication isn’t always the answer.’
‘He had a website,’ I say, trying to divert the conversation and desperately prove to her that I’m not going mad. ‘I was on it a few days ago, and when I checked back again it was gone. He was on Google and everything, but now nothing.’
She glances at me in a way which makes me feel uncomfortable.
‘Seriously,’ I say. ‘I can give you the website address. You can check to see who it was registered to, can’t you?’
She raises her eyebrows slightly. ‘I suppose we can, yes. The tech boys will be able to, anyway.’
I give her the website address, and she notes it down. I’m starting to feel very uncomfortable, so I try to speed up the conversation and bring it to an end.
Once she’s gone, I feel slightly relieved. The feeling of being under suspicion in my own home is one I don’t want to repeat. But it’s not her fault. The truth of the matter is I no longer feel safe here. I no longer feel safe anywhere.
26
I watch the police car disappear up the road, the exhaust fumes creating a dirty cloud behind it in the cold winter air. As the fume cloud quickly disappears, I put on my shoes, step outside and lock the front door behind me.
I ring my next-door-neighbour’s doorbell, wait a few seconds, then hammer my fist on the door. It’s no use. They’re clearly not in.
I jog across the road, looking both ways as I do so, and knock on the door of the house directly opposite mine. An old couple lives here. I don’t know their names, but I know it might take them a little longer to get to the door. As it happens, they’re there in seconds, no doubt having been watching the police car outside my house and ruminating on how the neighbourhood’s gone to shit.
‘Hi. I’m Alice, I live over the road,’ I say, gesturing weakly at my house. ‘I was just wondering if you’d seen anything odd recently. Anyone trying to get into houses. A man, maybe?’
The elderly gentleman’s brow furrows, and his wife appears from around the living room doorway and hovers behind his shoulder.
‘I don’t think so. Why, is something wrong?’
‘Has there been a break-in?’ his wife says, before I can answer his question.
I quickly decide that all evidences points to ‘yes’ and that, in any case, having my neighbours on extra high alert isn’t going to do me any harm at the moment.
‘Yeah. Looks like it,’ I say.
‘Oh dear. We’ve never known anything like that around here,’ the woman says, before her husband adds: ‘When was it?’
Good question. ‘Earlier today, we think. It’s not as straightforward as it sounds, unfortunately. It looks like whoever got in managed to do so without breaking anything. They might’ve forced the door or picked the lock. We don’t know yet.’
I amaze myself at how calm I manage to sound. I’ve never been any good at hiding my emotions or putting on an act, but even though all I want to do right now is break down and cry, I’m managing to not only hold it together but to sound steady and completely unruffled.
‘Oh. Well I haven’t seen anything unusual,’ the man says. ‘How about you, dear?’
She shakes her head. ‘No, nothing.’
‘Well thank you anyway,’ I say, forcing a smile and turning away.
The woman calls to me as I’m halfway down their front path. ‘You know where we are if you need anything, alright dear?’
I force another smile and nod, before I continue my walk down their path, tears now starting to run down my cheeks. The kindness of strangers.
I stand for a moment at the side of the street, wishing I knew my neighbours better. I’ve never spoken to any of them before in my life, apart from the occasional wave. How many of them can I seriously expect to be looking out for my safety when I can’t even be bothered to say hello to them, or pop round and introduce myself? I guess we’re all guilty of breeding insularity and at the same time expecting to be able to carry on as normal.
I try the next house along, but again there’s no answer. How can everybody be out? Surely there must be someone still at home. Somewhere.
But as I look around me, the houses all seem to converge into one. Everything’s spinning and I suddenly feel very woozy. I just about manage to put my hands out and brace myself against someone’s front wall, before everything turns black.
27
‘Alice? Alice, can you hear me?’
The first thing I feel is a splitting headache. I instinctively reach up to check, recognising that I’m lying on the cold concrete slabs and trying to work out whether I hit my head. There’s a thick blanket over me, a coarse material like the sort of thing you’d put in the back of an estate car for a muddy dog to sit on.
‘It’s alright, you didn’t bump it,’ another voice says. I recognise them as the man and woman from the house opposite mine.
As my eyes come back into focus, I see a pair of feet entering my field of vision, walking towards me. I look up, following the line of the legs, and just about make out the face of a blonde woman who I don’t recognise, but who looks at me and walks past without affecting her stride.
My first response is anger. I’m clearly lying on the pavement in the middle of December with a rug over me, with two people attending to me. Why the hell would you not stop? What sort of human being would walk on past? How would she feel if it was her?
‘Sorry,’ I say to the elderly couple. ‘I think I fell.’
‘You passed out, dear,’ the woman says.
‘We saw you,’ the man adds. ‘You’ve been out for a few minutes.’
‘Have you had much to eat today, dear?’
I nod and tell them I have, but the truth is I don’t remember. I’m not even entirely sure what day it is.
‘I’ll go inside and phone an ambulance,’ the man says.
‘No, no.’ I try to get up, but the woman pushes down on my shoulders, keeping my backside firmly planted to the paving slabs. They’re cold, and I want to stand. ‘Please. It’s fine. It happens sometimes. I’ve got medication, but I was so tied up with the break-in that I forgot to take it. If I can go back home and take it, I’ll be fine. Honestly.’
The man looks at me, and then at his wife, unsure whether to believe me.
‘Honestly,’ I say
again. ‘If you call an ambulance you’ll be wasting their time. It’s my own silly fault for forgetting to take my tablet. I’ll go back and take it, and I’ll be fine.’
‘What is it, dear? Blood pressure?’ the woman asks.
I grunt and grumble as I try to get to my feet. They try to help me, but their lack of strength isn’t doing much.
‘Yeah, something like that.’
‘You know where we are if you need us, alright?’ she says, the same way she did when I walked away from her front door a few minutes ago — or whenever it was. This time, though, I’m not emotionally affected. I just want to get home. I want to crawl into bed, put the duvet over my head and imagine none of this ever happened.
‘Thanks. I appreciate your help.’
My legs feel light, like feathers. Jellied feathers. I try not to let any of this show as I make a point of confidently crossing the road, ignoring the pounding in my skull and the nausea rising up from the pit of my stomach. As I get to the other side of the road and my front gate, I turn and smile at the couple, who are still standing at the side of the road, the man with his arm around the woman’s waist. She lifts her hand and waves at me.
I fumble with the key in the lock, my hands trembling and shaking, but eventually I get back inside, close the door behind me and let everything out.
28
I do the only thing I can do: I call Mandy. I need someone to speak to, someone I can trust, someone I can depend on. I need to lay it on thick, though. If I try to hide how insecure and anxious I feel, Mandy will be her usual over-the-top aggressive self, which won’t help. I don’t need to know how much she wants to kick his head in or what she’s going to do to his testicles. I need her to be there for me, to comfort me, to tell me everything’s going to be alright.
‘Hey Alice. What’s up?’ she says as she answers the phone. I can hear a lot of noise and commotion in the background. It sounds like she’s in a bar.
