The Child Across the Street: An unputdownable and absolutely gripping psychological thriller

by Kerry Wilkinson

  ‘Hot out here,’ he says.

  ‘It is August.’

  ‘Good point.’

  He reaches onto the van’s lowered tailgate and grabs a bottle of water, from which he downs half, before passing it across to his helper.

  ‘He’s my lad,’ he says, flexing his arm to make his muscles bulge. ‘Needs to get a bit of meat on his bones.’

  Gav’s son offers a sheepish smile and I suspect he’s been told this roughly two dozen times today already.

  Gav nods across to Megan, who is watching us from the front door. I do a double take, unsure why she’s here – especially as I packed her into a taxi earlier. ‘Your, er, daughter was asking about a few things,’ Gav says. ‘I said it was up to you.’

  Megan’s wearing that smile again. ‘I hung around,’ she calls across.

  I turn back to Gav. ‘She’s my sister,’ I say.

  He looks me up and down. ‘Sorry, I thought…’

  ‘Give me a minute.’

  I cross to Megan, who’s still in the doorway.

  ‘Why didn’t you go home?’ I ask. I want to be annoyed but somehow can’t.

  ‘I didn’t want to.’

  ‘You’ll have to at some point.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What did Mum say?’

  ‘Not happy – but she’ll live. She says you’re a bad influence, but I told her I’ll be back tonight.’

  ‘How am I a bad influence?’

  Megan shrugs and breaks into a smile. ‘Leaving me alone here with strange men, I guess.’

  ‘I didn’t leave you! I put you in a taxi. And what happened to the cash I gave the driver?’

  Megan digs into a pocket and holds up some notes. ‘He kept some of it,’ she says.

  I take the money and drop it into my bag. ‘What did you want from the house?’

  ‘The photo albums.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘How about the TV?’

  ‘I don’t know how you’re going to get that on a bus.’

  ‘I was thinking about another taxi…?’

  ‘You paying?’

  She doesn’t say anything, but she bites her lip in a clear indication that this wasn’t in her plans.

  I reach into my bag and then hand her back the cash. There’s so much of me in her that it’s almost overwhelming.

  ‘Thanks,’ she says, still cradling that smirk. ‘There was one other thing, too.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s a bunch of vinyl in one of the boxes upstairs.’

  ‘Dad’s old records,’ I say.

  ‘Can I have them?’

  I sigh and turn between her and the van. ‘I’ll check with Gav because I already told him he could take what he wanted. I’ll ask about your TV too.’

  ‘You’re my favourite sister.’

  I snort at that. The cheeky so-and-so.

  When I cross back to Gav, he’s sharing a sandwich with his son. He nods across to Megan. ‘She’s got some good arms on her, that one. Been lumping all sorts into the van.’

  ‘She asked if she could have the TV and some records. I know I told you that you could keep whatever, but—’

  ‘Fine by me. If you’d said on the phone how much stuff there was, I’d have come yesterday.’ He stops for a mouthful of water and then adds: ‘There’s some personal stuff in the front bedroom up there. Figured you should have a look before we cart it away.’

  Gav nods up to Dad’s bedroom above us and I almost tell him he can take whatever it is. I’m not sure what stops me, but I thank him for the tip and then head inside, away from the sun, and go upstairs.

  There’s a scrabbling from the spare room, where Megan is boxing up the items she wants. I leave her to it and, for the first time since arriving back in Elwood, nudge through the door to my father’s bedroom.

  Gav must’ve opened the windows because, instead of the musty Old Spice I’d have expected, there’s a calm breeze bristling through. The doors are open to the built-in wardrobe at the back of the room, and it’s been cleared of the clothes and shoes that would’ve been inside. Much of the room is empty, although the bed remains. It’s been stripped, though I don’t know if this was done by Gav. The mattress has gone and there’s a box sitting on the bare slats. I sit on the floor and pull it down so that it’s next to me.

  The card on top is my father’s birth certificate and, directly underneath that, is his marriage certificate. The sight of Mum’s maiden name is striking and I almost call through to Megan, wondering if she’ll get a kick from it. I stop myself because I can’t predict how she’ll react. We share a mother, but we don’t. Her life is chopped into two – before and after the day she walked away from this house. I have no idea what last name she was using before she married a second time and had Megan.

  Underneath the certificates are a stack of loose photographs. It’s more time travel. There are pictures of Dad that I’ve never seen before. Perhaps even proof that his tall tales of sporting dominance as a young man weren’t that tall at all. There are black and white pictures of him playing football, in which he looks fit and fast. His hair is slicked back and he’s such a good-looking young man that it’s only the shape of his face that tells me it’s definitely my father.

  There’s a photo of him in hospital, with his leg in a cast, then another of him in a wheelchair next to a row of trees. Then there’s a small, dog-eared picture of his wedding day. It’s sunny and he’s in a horrendous, flared brown suit. Mum’s in white, but her dress looks scratchy and uncomfortable. I don’t recognise either of the two witnesses they’re standing awkwardly alongside outside the register office.

  I’m a squat little blob in the early photos of me. A bloated head on paunchy legs. I suppose it’s good fortune that I wasn’t like that for too long. In the next photo, I’m in a caravan somewhere, climbing on the table. I’m probably five or six and have no memory of this apparent holiday. There’s food around my mouth and a series of mucky fingerprints on the table. I’m also wearing a ballerina dress I don’t ever remember having. The thing that’s most apparent is how blissful I am. I’m beaming with joy at whoever’s taking the photograph.

  I was happy once.

  The final photo leaves me dizzy with déjà vu and melancholy. I’m a little girl in front of the bouncy castle at Elwood Summer Fete. Mum must have taken the picture because Dad’s at my side, resting his elbow on the top of my head as if he’s using me to hold himself up.

  It’s my dream, or part of it, and it definitely happened.

  I consider returning it to the pile, but then drop it into my bag instead.

  Underneath the photos is an envelope crammed with cash. I don’t count it fully, but I do flip through the notes. There’s a mixture of paper and plastic and, if I can trade in the old ones at the bank, there’s around five hundred pounds. It’ll help pay for a hotel somewhere, so that I don’t have to sleep here any longer.

  I take that, too, and then quickly flick through the rest of the stack. There are football programmes, some old receipts, and a few industry certificates Dad earned through his work. I return all of those to the box and use the bed frame to push myself up. I’m about to go and find Megan when there’s a bang from outside. I go to the window and watch as Gav and his son lug one of the armchairs into the back of the van. His lad seems strong enough to me.

  It’s as I turn away that I notice a black, plasticky tube in the very corner of the window. At first I’m not sure what it is but as I pick it up, I realise it’s a camera. A red light blinks at me and I suddenly remember returning here after the funeral. I was drunk and trying to get inside when I saw something flare from above. I’d put it down to my intoxication – but it must have been this flashing red light from Dad’s window.

  I follow the wire at the back of the camera down towards a small, black metal box that’s slotted into a metal bracket which is screwed to the wall. There is a row of seven SD cards inserted into the box.

  One card for each day o
f the week…

  Helena told me that Dad was worried about security and Chris said there’d been a break-in on the street. I didn’t know that Dad had any idea about cameras and security systems – but then I didn’t know him.

  I take the metal box through to my room, which is the only one I told Gav to avoid for now. My suitcase is still open on the floor, with my clothes forming a perfect floordrobe. For the first time since getting here, I open the lid to my laptop. I try the second SD card from the box but, as soon as I start playing the MP4 file, I can see that the date is from Sunday. I watch the footage for a little while anyway. The camera was angled towards the corner, giving a wide view of the road at both the front and the side of the house. I skip through it but almost nothing seems to happen. The odd person walks by, or a car darts past – but that’s about it. Hours and hours of nothing.

  With Saturday apparently counting as day one, I take the fourth card from the box and slot it into my laptop. Linda at the petrol station told me that their CCTV system recorded over the old footage – and I feel a jolt as I spot last Tuesday’s date in the top corner of this material. After midnight tonight, it would have likely started to override what I have in front of me.

  The footage starts at midnight and I scroll forward quickly, watching the night vision grey turn into the brightness of daylight. It jolts ahead in bulky increments, stopping at quarter past four in the afternoon.

  My heart is racing as I click backwards a minute at a time. I found Ethan at ten past four – and I push back five times. Then two more. Then I click go and watch.

  It’s so simple. So ridiculous that, every time I went to sleep in this house, the answer was sitting a few metres from me. Beverly Close is a short road that runs from where I found Ethan to a junction, where it intersects with this house on the corner.

  I watch the video twice as Holly’s car slows for the corner and then jolts away. It happens seconds after Ethan was hit.

  I don’t need to watch it a third time, nor zoom in, because the driver who hit Ethan looks both ways and, in doing so, offers a perfect profile shot for my father’s camera.

  I know who it is.

  Forty-Four

  There’s no need to knock on Holly’s front door. I simply lean against her car and wait. It only takes two or three minutes until she emerges from the house. She’s more curious than angry, looking both ways towards her neighbours, before slowly moving along the path towards me.

  She doesn’t say anything, but I suspect she sees something different in me this time.

  I wait until she’s close enough, and then: ‘I know who was driving.’

  Her eyes narrow. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I know.’

  It might have been twenty years since we were friends, but there’s still that part of us that knows one another as well as anyone.

  Holly nods towards the house and takes a deep breath. ‘Are you coming in?’ She moves onto her path and looks back to where I haven’t moved. ‘Will you give me a chance to explain?’

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘We were friends once, weren’t we?’

  Holly keeps moving and, when she gets to her house, she holds the door open and waits. I think about walking away, but if I do that, there’d have been no point in coming here in the first place. I realise that the reason I came was precisely to hear the reasoning.

  I head up the path and into the house, waiting in the hall as Holly closes the door behind me. She leads the way past the boxes into the kitchen and we sit as if everything is perfectly normal.

  A minute passes, maybe more. Holly glances up to the clock and then down at me.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘My dad had a camera pointing at the street. I think he was worried about being burgled.’

  She takes a breath and then glances towards the window. She must know it’s over. ‘Who’s seen it?’

  ‘Just me.’

  Holly slides down into her chair and lets her head flop backwards, so that she’s staring at the ceiling. She stays there for a short while and then pushes herself up, angling forward with her elbows on her knees.

  ‘He’s got his whole life ahead of him…’

  She could be talking about Ethan, but she isn’t. There’s a quiver to her voice and she sounds heartbroken. No, not just sounds heartbroken. She is.

  I can see why. When he turned side-on in the video, just moments after hitting Ethan with the car, as his knuckles seared white through gripping the steering wheel, there was complete terror in Rob’s face.

  Holly’s son is supposed to be a young adult on his way to university, but, in that moment, he was a terrified child.

  ‘Rob’s always been a nervous driver,’ Holly says. ‘If anything, it might have been a bit worse after he passed his test. He always had someone in the car with him when he was learning, but then he had to make decisions by himself. He’d get home after driving somewhere and he’d be shaking. We were supposed to be sorting him out with his own car this summer, but he didn’t want it. I was trying to encourage him to use mine to get him used to driving. I went out with him a few times, but I can’t be with him all the time.’ She sighs and then adds: ‘He’s not one of those kids who gets a ridiculous car with a bass you can feel thumping through you. He doesn’t drive fast. He’s a quiet kid and he’s smart.’

  ‘But he didn’t stop…’

  The only sound comes from some kids in a back garden nearby. They’re running around, screaming and having fun.

  Holly tugs at her hair and then, from nowhere, aims a kick at the nearest box. It tumbles onto its side, spilling a small mound of vials onto the floor. She doesn’t move to pick it up.

  ‘Ethan was dead,’ she says, not looking at me. ‘That’s what Rob thought. If he stopped and waited for the police, or the ambulance, or whatever, then it wouldn’t make any difference. If you’re dead, you’re dead. None of that would have brought Ethan back. Why would Rob give up his own life for someone he thought was already gone?’

  ‘He wasn’t dead, though.’

  ‘No…’

  Holly stands and crosses to the fridge. She removes a can of supermarket-brand lemonade, crunches the tab, and then drinks. When she’s had a large mouthful, she offers me the can, though I shake my head. She doesn’t sit, instead pacing back and forth until she eventually stops next to the back door. It seems like a lifetime ago that she did this when trying to stop Mark from blustering inside and giving the game away that they were seeing one another.

  ‘Rob can’t go back in time,’ she says. ‘None of us can. This can’t be undone. I know that one life might have been wrecked – but if you tell people, it’ll wreck two.’

  ‘You can’t put that on me.’

  ‘But it is on you. You have the power here.’

  ‘Ethan can’t feel his legs. He might never walk.’

  Holly stops and stares at the ceiling for a moment. ‘They always say that,’ she says. ‘Then there’s a story a couple of years later that some kid’s walking again. It’s on Comic Relief every year. You must’ve seen it.’

  I stare at her, wondering if this is the real person she is.

  ‘What have you done with the video?’ Holly asks.

  ‘Nothing yet.’

  ‘Are you going to tell the police?’

  ‘I should.’

  ‘You don’t have to, though.’

  She looks to me, implores me.

  ‘Can I talk to Rob?’ I say.

  Holly pauses for a moment and there’s a second or two where I think she might say yes.

  ‘He’s gone,’ she says instead. ‘He couldn’t stand being here and was talking about going to the police. I told him to get out of Elwood, so he’s gone to stay with his cousin for a while.’

  ‘You stopped him telling anyone?’

  ‘I saved him from himself.’

  ‘He was going to do the
right thing.’

  ‘The right thing for who? Not him.’

  ‘When’s he coming back?’

  Holly looks up to the clock once more and then, as if on cue, there’s a bump and bang from the back door. It swings open with a creak and then Mark ambles in. He’s sweaty and red-faced, as if he’s been out running or exercising.

  He closes the door behind him and then turns to take in Holly and myself with a confused expression. ‘I thought—’

  ‘She knows.’

  It’s only when she speaks that I realise Holly has shifted so that she’s standing in the doorway to the hall. I turn between her blocking one door and Mark the other. It’s only two words, but there’s such knowing there that I realise she’s been stalling. Not only that – but Mark already knows who left his son for dead.

  Mark exchanges a glance with Holly and a shiver surges through me.

  ‘Who else knows?’ he says.

  I’m about to answer when Holly talks over me: ‘Just her.’

  I look up as his face clouds and his eyes darken. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  Forty-Five

  I turn from Mark to Holly but realise that she’s now frozen. She’s staring at the wall, then the floor. Anywhere but me.

  Staring into the abyss.

  There’s a sharp scurrying sound and then Mark’s suddenly over me. In a flash, he’s pulling me up by the straps of my top. I try to flail or shout, but it’s already too late. He has the crook of his elbow under my chin and is pressing hard enough on my throat that I can hear myself wheezing for breath.

  I have no idea what happens next. It feels like there’s a flash of movement and then, in a blink, I’m on the floor. My head throbs as pink stars swim across the kitchen floor in front of me. I’m staring at a scuffed pair of tennis shoes on the bottom of some tanned, hairy legs. Did he punch me, or…? What?

  I push myself up, using the legs of the kitchen table for support. There’s a clear path to the back door but as soon as I try to move, my legs become jelly. It’s no use anyway, because Mark steps across so that he’s in front of the door once more. I’m left on the ground, on my knees.