The Sixth Window

by Rachel Abbott

  *

  Scarlett couldn’t bring herself to speak, but it had nothing to do with a bottle of wine or unwanted revelations about her dad. She knew perfectly well that it was her fault the police had interviewed Alison. She had kept her suspicions to herself for more than eighteen months, and she was furious that Alison had now told her mum, especially as Alison seemed confident that she would be able to prove the text message didn’t come from her phone.

  The problem was, it wasn’t just the text that Scarlett had told the police about. She had discovered her dad had lied, and she could still remember every vivid moment of that evening.

  It had happened a few weeks before he died. Scarlett had been round at Gracie’s after school, revising for a test the next day, and had been walking home when Ed had pulled up beside her in his car.

  ‘Hop in, Scarlett. It looks like it’s going to chuck it down any minute. I’ll give you a lift home on my way to work. I’m on nights again.’

  As they had driven through the village, Ed chatting away and asking her all sorts of school-related questions, Scarlett had looked to her left out of the window and seen someone jogging down one of the lanes that ran off the main road. The jogger had then turned into a gateway. There was no doubt at all in her mind that it was her dad because he had just taken up jogging to get rid of some of what he called his spare tyre, and he had bought an absolutely hideous bright green running jacket. She nearly pointed him out to Ed, but he had been teasing her dad about his midlife crisis, so she had kept quiet.

  Scarlett hadn’t thought much about it until she got home. She was walking down the hall to the kitchen, about to ask why Dad was out jogging, when her mum called out to her.

  ‘Tea’s ready. Dump your coat and sit down. We’re not waiting for Dad. He’s gone out for a jog, and then he’s going round to Ed’s for some supper and to watch the match on TV. At least we’ll be spared a night of football.’

  Scarlett had been stunned and almost blurted out that Ed was working and wasn’t going to be in that evening.

  Through the rain-streaked window she couldn’t tell exactly which gate her dad had turned into, but the only person they knew well down that road, as far as she was aware, was Alison. She didn’t want to say anything until she’d had a chance to ask her dad about it. It would be typical of her to expose a secret meeting to plan a surprise present for her mum.

  And then she hadn’t had the opportunity to ask the question. It was nearly Christmas, and although the incident never entirely left her head, there had been such a lot happening, and it didn’t seem the right time to cause any upset. Then two days before he died she saw the text on his phone. It had all slotted into place – or at least, she had thought so. She had been so furious with him that she hadn’t been able to speak to him. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what he had to say.

  That last day – the day he died – she had told him she had read the text message and that strange expression had come over his face. She could see it now as clearly as if it had been yesterday. The muscles in his face relaxed, and he had smiled as if what he had been going to tell her later would have resolved everything in her mind.

  She wished she hadn’t told the police. She hadn’t planned to name anyone, but it just slipped out that she had originally suspected Alison.

  She felt the tears trickle sideways across the bridge of her nose to drop onto the pillow. She had caused this. She was the one who had given the police the evidence to question Alison. And her mum was suffering because of it.

  With so much tension in the room, last night hadn’t been the right time for Scarlett to talk about her suspicion that there was another room in the apartment next door. It now seemed so irrelevant and trivial that Scarlett couldn’t understand why she had been excited about it. She was going to forget it. It was none of her business, and she had more important things to think about.

  47

  Tom was walking out of a conference room at the end of a boring presentation on budgets when he heard his name called.

  ‘DCI Douglas, do you have a minute?’

  It was Philippa of course, and everybody within earshot knew that she normally called him Tom, so why she had resorted to formality he didn’t know. But he would play along.

  ‘Yes, Detective Superintendent Stanley,’ he said with a wide smile. ‘What can I do for you?’

  He was sure he heard a slight snigger from one of his colleagues, but he didn’t take his eyes off Philippa. She was great at her job – a job that Tom wouldn’t do if they paid him ten times his current salary – but sometimes she was unnecessarily pompous.

  Her eyes narrowed slightly. She had got the message and wasn’t best pleased but would let it pass. She never dwelt on anything inconsequential.

  ‘I wondered if there’s been any progress on the investigation into Sergeant Gray’s death?’

  ‘You know that the joyrider claims to have an alibi and says he abandoned the car well before the accident, I suppose? We’re still checking, but we’ve not managed to track down the people he says he was with. If he is the one who killed Bernie Gray his behaviour deviated from his previous pattern, without a doubt.’

  ‘So what else have you got?’

  ‘We’ve been re-interviewing everybody, and interestingly a couple of new things have come to light. Gray’s daughter apparently believed he was having an affair, so we’re looking into it to see if maybe some jealous husband might be involved, although as yet we’re not sure who he was having the affair with.’

  ‘So why didn’t the silly girl tell us this at the time?’ Philippa made no attempt to hide her exasperation.

  Tom paused for a moment as if thinking.

  ‘Well, let me see. Maybe she was so devastated at her father’s death that it never occurred to her? Or perhaps she thought – as we all did and broadly speaking still do – that it was some kids who had stolen a car, so there was nothing to be gained by smearing his name. Or possibly she knew how much her mother would be hurt. I suspect any one of those, or even a combination of them all, could have silenced her.’

  ‘Oh,’ Philippa said, looking slightly sheepish for a moment. ‘Nevertheless, it might be good news.’

  ‘We’re hoping so, but there are a couple of bits of conflicting evidence. The daughter had it fixed in her head that Bernie was having an affair with his wife’s best friend but has recently revised that view, and the friend – Alison Morgan – says she didn’t send the incriminating text message the daughter found. Apparently she can prove it.’

  ‘And what was so damning about the text message?’

  ‘I think the words “I love you” probably did it for the daughter.’

  Philippa didn’t respond, so he continued to fill her in.

  ‘We’ve asked the analysts to interrogate Gray’s telephone records and they should hopefully be able to work out who sent the text message, even though the sender withheld their number. Of course we won’t be able to get the content of the messages without his mobile, which I think was smashed to smithereens in the crash, so we’ll have to whittle it down from there. If he was seeing someone else, I’m confident we can find out who.’

  ‘He was quite a good-looking chap, actually,’ Philippa said, as if that explained the affair, although Tom couldn’t quite see the relevance.

  ‘There are plenty of ugly mugs who have affairs too, you know. Anyway, when did you meet Sergeant Gray?’

  ‘He worked here. It was when you were away. I can’t remember if you were working for the Met at the time or having an easy time of it in Cheshire. He was part of a joint task force. Operation Sphere, it was code-named. He was a detective when he came to us, but I gather that after his time here he decided to revert to uniform.’

  ‘And the case he was working on, did we rule out any links to his death?’

  ‘Oh, he asked to be returned to division at least six months before he died, and he certainly wasn’t a high-profile member of the team. Get Sergeant Sims to look at i
t again, but I can’t see the relevance. What about your suicide case? You should really hand that back, you know, Tom.’

  ‘I know. We’re fairly sure that it was a suicide, but I still want to know what led a young girl like that to jump off a roof, and I think we may be on the track of something a lot bigger than one suicide. So unless you think I’m not giving enough attention to the other crimes on my list, I’d rather stick with it, if you don’t mind. In fact, we’re due to go out and see the girl’s parents again later today.’

  ‘How are they doing?’ Philippa asked in an uncharacteristic show of empathy for the bereaved.

  ‘Badly. The father is devastated, as you might expect. He blames himself for not listening to the girl. The mother is refusing to believe that her daughter would do such a thing, given the impact it will have on the family’s reputation.’

  Even Philippa raised her eyes at that one. ‘Gosh.’

  Philippa had to be the only police officer in the whole of Manchester who used Gosh as an expression of intense surprise without any trace of irony.

  ‘Yes, gosh indeed. There’s a very complex dynamic in that family, but at some point the truth is going to hit Mrs Bale, and I genuinely don’t know how they will all deal with it when it does.’

  Tom didn’t mention the photos that had been found. He wanted to be one hundred per cent sure that they were of Jennifer first, because it would inevitably result in conclusions being drawn and might muddy the waters. He wanted everybody to think clearly. But Tom was going to find the bastard who had taken them.

  48

  It was four o’clock in the afternoon by the time Scarlett switched off the vacuum cleaner. She had spent the morning scouring Internet recipe sites for meals she felt capable of cooking for the two of them, and then she had gone shopping for the ingredients. She needed to do something right for once. It was her fault the police had spoken to Alison, and she wanted to try to make things better.

  When she had walked back into the apartment, it had felt musty and there was still a vague smell of stale wine in the air, so she had thrown the small window open and nipped back out to buy some sweet-smelling freesias, which were now in a tumbler on the coffee table.

  Cleaning wasn’t her forte, or her mum’s either, although a duster had been flashed around very briefly in the seconds before Alison had visited. Scarlett thought briefly of her mum’s friend. She had considered phoning her that morning and telling her how much upset she had caused, but then she had thought better of it. She knew what Alison would say – she would blame Scarlett for telling the police a pack of lies.

  Only they weren’t lies. She knew what she had seen, and it was up to the police to find out the truth.

  With nothing left to clean, Scarlett sat down on the sofa and leaned back, her hands behind her head. She had been keeping herself busy to stop the thoughts from crowding in on her. She kept saying to anyone who would listen that she wasn’t a child, and so maybe she should take responsibility for her actions and tell her mum what she had told the police and why.

  Tears were spilling down her cheeks again, but she quickly raised a hand to wipe them away and sat forward on the sofa, her ears straining. She could hear someone. It was coming from above her, or was it from the other side of the wall? A voice, a young voice, female, she was sure.

  ‘Please,’ the voice said. ‘I promise. I promise.’

  The voice was suddenly cut off. Scarlett thought of the sixth window and her idea that there was a secret room. Was that really possible? Was there someone in there? What if the girl was being held against her will? Was it real, or was she imagining it?

  Whatever was happening, she had to tell someone. If she called Lewis, he would be able to find out if someone was there.

  Scarlett grabbed her phone from the coffee table and searched for Lewis’s number. She pressed Call and waited for it to connect.

  She listened as the call was connected.

  It was ringing.

  A second later there was another sound all around her in the room, the sound of an irritatingly chirpy ringtone. And it was coming through the ventilation duct from the other side of the wall.

  49

  Scarlett realised her mistake almost immediately and hung up, and the ringing on the other side of the wall stopped, as she had known it would. She shouldn’t have done that.

  He was there. In the room. And he would know that she had heard his phone. Why else would she have hung up so quickly?

  Maybe he had seen someone going in and had gone to investigate. But the thought lasted no more than a couple of seconds. That wasn’t it at all.

  She ran into the bedroom and closed the door. How could she stop Lewis from knowing what she had heard? She didn’t even know why it mattered, but if he had known all along that somebody was in that apartment it meant he had lied to her. He was hiding something, and she didn’t know what.

  She shouldn’t have panicked, and somehow she needed to put it right. Lewis couldn’t have known she was in their sitting room; she could have been calling him from somewhere else. But he might guess.

  She had no idea what to do, but the problem was taken out of her hands when her phone started to ring. She looked at the screen. It was him, Lewis. She could barely hold her phone in her damp hand.

  ‘Hello,’ he said when she failed to speak. She couldn’t read his voice and didn’t know what he was thinking. ‘Did you just call me?’

  Scarlett forced herself to smile, knowing he would hear it in her voice.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ she said. ‘Yes, sorry. I called your number by mistake when I was trying to call my friend, but I dropped my phone before you answered and it cut off.’ She was talking too much, and she knew it.

  ‘Where are you?’ he asked.

  ‘In my bedroom, reading.’

  ‘Have you heard any more strange noises?’

  Last time he had laughed at her, but this time there wasn’t a trace of amusement in his voice, and she knew exactly why he was asking. Scarlett swallowed and forced the smile wider.

  ‘No, I guess it must have come from the apartment upstairs or something. Sorry I bothered you about it.’

  ‘You didn’t bother me. I was going to text you later anyway, to check that you’re all right.’

  Scarlett’s heart was thumping. She couldn’t help feeling a slight thrill that he had been thinking about her, but why didn’t he tell her that he was in the room next door? She knew the sound had to be coming from the other apartment. She could practically reach her hand through the wall and touch the girl on the other side. Who was she? And why had Lewis lied about where he was?

  They ended the call with Lewis promising to keep in touch.

  ‘I don’t like the thought of a girl like you being cooped up all day,’ he said. ‘Maybe I could buy you a cup of coffee one morning.’

  Scarlett had stammered a response, not knowing whether the idea of a cup of coffee with Lewis was exciting or terrifying.

  As she put her phone down she suddenly remembered that she had taken a photo of the building. With everything that happened the night before, she had completely forgotten about it.

  She scrolled through the images on her phone and found the final picture. Using her finger and thumb to enlarge the image, she could clearly see which was their window. The lamp was there. She scrolled the picture sideways to show the south wing. There was definitely only one apartment on that side of the building, so the sixth window in the picture had to belong to a room between that apartment and theirs, and there was no sign of a doorway through from their flat – she had checked.

  Every one of the windows in the picture showed as nothing more than a black void, so there were no clues to be had there. Scarlett had gone through the layout of the empty apartment in her head over and over again. There were no more doors and, more to the point, she was sure there were only five windows.

  There had to be another room.

  50

  There was no question in Tom’s mi
nd that he would be seeing Louisa that evening – work permitting – so he called in at the shops on his way home to buy fresh pasta, smoked salmon and a few herbs to make a simple supper, should Louisa be hungry. He didn’t want to spend the whole evening cooking, and these ingredients would take him about five minutes to prepare. He had also selected a Sauvignon Blanc from the Veneto region of Italy, which was now chilling in the fridge.

  While he waited for Louisa to arrive, Tom thought about the plan of action that had been agreed with Becky and the team investigating Jennifer Bale’s death. They hadn’t given up on the images from the swimming pool CCTV, but were focusing on the hunt for the boy or man who had taken the photograph of Jennifer. Someone needed to keep Mr and Mrs Bale up to speed in the unlikely but not impossible event that the source of the photograph came to light, and as Tom and Becky were the only police officers with any relationship – if you could call it that – with the family, it seemed to make sense for them to be the ones to talk to the parents.

  They had visited them that afternoon, and the conversation hadn’t gone well.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Bale, as you know we have of course been continuing to investigate the circumstances of your daughter’s death.’

  ‘And so you should.’ Mrs Bale leaned forward in her chair, her chin jutting out as if Tom was personally to blame for her daughter’s death. ‘Did you find out how she came to fall, then? Was she pushed, or did she slip on something?’

  Tom repeated everything he had told the Bales several days previously. ‘There’s no indication that anyone else was present at the scene, and those findings haven’t changed, I’m afraid.’

  Mrs Bale sat back heavily in her seat with a huge sigh. ‘So what are you here for if you’ve not worked out who killed her yet?’

  Gregory Bale looked at his wife, his bloodshot eyes flashing with irritation.

  ‘Give it a rest, Linda. Listen to the man.’