by Tammy Cohen
She didn’t deny it.
‘I saw a picture of Frances with your daughter. On Facebook. I followed her to your house and came to warn you. I know what she’s capable of.’
Something pulled itself tight inside me then. What exactly was Frances capable of?
‘So why didn’t you?’ I asked her. ‘Warn me, I mean. You had the opportunity. Maybe not in Highgate Woods when I was with Frances, but that time in Alexandra Palace.’
She looked fleetingly guilty.
‘I was afraid,’ she said simply. ‘I’d spent so long running from her, I was afraid of letting her back into our lives.’
Now she started telling me the whole, terrible history of her relationship with Frances Gates.
‘We moved into a garden flat in Muswell Hill about four years ago. My son, Henry, was just a baby. Frances lived upstairs.’
‘With her mum?’
Claudia gave me a funny look.
‘Just Frances. We met the day we were moving in. It was hectic. My husband, Matt, had rented a van and it was packed to the gunnels with all our stuff. I’d driven over with Henry and was helping Matt unload the van while Henry was asleep in the communal hallway, tucked out of the way in his car seat under the table where we piled up the post.
‘All of a sudden, this woman, Frances, appears from the house with Henry on her hip. “Poor little fellow was screaming his head off, so I took him out,” she said. “Hope that’s okay.” I felt awful then. I hadn’t heard a thing.’
I imagined Frances smiling her wholesome, gap-toothed smile, bouncing a stranger’s baby on her hip, and I shivered.
‘After that, Frances was in and out all the time. Matt wasn’t sure about her right from the off, thought she was too intense, but I was grateful to have her around. I was an older mother. None of my friends lived nearby. I was lonely when Matt was at work. Frances was really helpful at first, minding Henry while I did the shopping or even on the odd occasion Matt and I went out in the evening. We thought we’d really landed on our feet.’
‘Until?’ I asked, checking my phone again.
‘Until things started happening.’
‘Things? What things?’
Claudia ran a hand across her forehead and I noticed how smooth it was and realized she was younger than I’d first thought. I’d put her at around my own age, but I thought now she was at least five or even ten years younger.
‘It happened like a dripping tap,’ she said finally, fixing me with her cool eyes so that I couldn’t look away. ‘So gradual I didn’t notice it. Frances appeared subdued around Matt. She moved away when he stood near her. One time she asked me if I trusted him, but when I wanted to know why she backtracked completely and told me to forget she’d said anything. I found things as well. A receipt tucked in between the pages of a novel Matt was reading, for dinner in a fancy restaurant I knew he and I had never been to. Another time a business card for a boutique hotel inside one of his jacket pockets.
‘What you have to understand is I was so tired all the time. Henry was a terrible sleeper. I wasn’t myself. My thoughts were all over the place.’
I nodded in silent recognition. In this, at least, I could empathize.
‘So you confronted him?’
‘Not immediately. But I did change towards him. We started arguing a lot. I was constantly testing him. Like I said, I wasn’t thinking straight. All these little things were clocking up in my subconscious.’ Here she broke off to make a ticking noise while tapping the side of her head. ‘But I wasn’t really aware of them. Except I must have been to an extent, because why else would I have gone snooping on his computer?’
‘Snooping?’ I repeated dully.
‘I think I justified it by telling myself I needed to find something on his laptop – a household bill, maybe. I’m not sure. I remember opening up any files that had unfamiliar names. Frances and I had had a conversation some time before where she’d told me that when people try to hide stuff on their hard disk, they use really generic, deliberately dull-sounding terms like “admin” or else a series of random letters or numbers. You know how she works in computers, so she knows that kind of thing. Most of Matt’s files were completely innocuous, but then there was one which had numbers rather than a name and, when I clicked on it, I saw it contained around five or six jpeg images.
‘I wasn’t really focusing. I was already feeling guilty for having gone into Matt’s laptop. I opened up one of the images, and for a few moments I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing, like my eyes were sending the message to my brain but my brain wasn’t processing it. I opened up another. And another. Waiting for the explanation to come into my head.’
‘So?’ Anxiety – about Frances, my dad, Em going AWOL – made me impatient. ‘What were the images of?’
‘A woman’s naked body. No head, just the anatomical parts. The usual tawdry tale, I’m afraid. Different pornographic poses on the same bed.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘Closed the file. Shut down the computer. I suppose I was in shock. I knew then that Matt was cheating. And that if there had been one, there had probably been others too. The next time I saw Frances, I asked her point blank if Matt had ever tried anything on with her. I’d remembered the way she behaved when he was around. How she never seemed to want to be in the same vicinity as him.’
‘And what did she say?’
‘She refused to answer me. And that was all the answer I needed. I told Matt he had to leave. By this time, we hadn’t been getting on for a while. I showed him the photographs on his computer and he swore blind he had never seen them before. He said someone else must have put them there.’
I was thoughtful then, remembering the email to Nick saying we ought to nip our relationship in the bud and then the message that had gone out to Kath and Mari telling them not to come to my dad’s funeral. An image came into my head of Frances bent over my laptop that morning she came round to check for spyware on my computer. Those competent fingers flying over the keyboard.
‘So Matt moved out and instantly went into a spiral of depression. He’d suffered that way before when he was younger, before I met him. Had a breakdown as a student and ended up on a psych ward for a few weeks. I missed him like an amputated limb, and so did Henry. Frances was around all the time, fussing over me. But I wanted my husband. And I was worried about him, despite everything. I told Frances I was having second thoughts, said everyone made mistakes in their lives. That’s when she took a deep breath in, as if she had something unpleasant to say, and then she told me she’d seen Matt out with another woman, having dinner in a Muswell Hill restaurant he and I used to go to in the early days. She hadn’t wanted to upset me, she said. That’s why she hadn’t mentioned it before.
‘So that was that. I couldn’t take any more. I told Matt I wanted a divorce. He looked so awful I almost caved in, but then I thought about those disgusting photographs, and Frances saying she’d seen him with someone else while I’d been pining after him, and I hardened my heart and walked out.
‘Two days after that conversation, a woman out walking her dog near Tring came across Matt’s car parked in a lay-by with all the doors and windows locked and the remains of a burnt-out portable barbecue in the back seat. Suicide by carbon-monoxide poisoning, the coroner said.’
Had I suspected where the conversation was heading? Looking back, I think I had. There was something hollowed out about Claudia, as if a fundamental part of her had been scooped out and discarded.
Her story made me forget my own for a minute, my worries about Em fading in the face of Claudia’s crushing sadness.
‘How did you find out about Frances?’ I asked her now. It was just a given that this was why she was here – to tell me what she knew about this woman who’d wormed her way into my life – and my daughter’s.
‘It was a few days after Matt died. I wasn’t coping well. I felt so guilty and sad, and every time I looked at Henry it was like tearing a fresh strip of
f my heart. I came up to see Frances and she was in the middle of a work call. She’d taken time off work to be with me, even though I hadn’t asked her to.
‘So as not to disturb her, I waited in the hallway for her to finish. The door to her bedroom was open. I’d never been in there before. She usually came down to me, because of Henry, I suppose. Anyway, that’s when I saw it.’
‘Saw what?’
‘The bedspread from the photographs in that hidden file on Matt’s computer. The naked ones.
‘The woman was Frances.’
44
My thoughts reeled. Frances, with her freshly scrubbed complexion and her childlike desire to please. I couldn’t believe it was true.
And yet, already, the spreading nausea in the pit of my stomach told me it was. I remembered how Frances had more than likely overheard Nita saying, ‘I thought she’d never leave,’ and yet still she’d come back for more. Determined to stake her claim on our lives.
‘When I could finally think joined-up thoughts again, I started doing some digging on Frances,’ Claudia continued. She seemed to be finding some sort of release in this unburdening and I had the impression talking about this was new for her. ‘I tracked down a cousin of hers through social media, a man called Michael, who talked to me reluctantly, only after I told him about Matt.
‘He said Frances had always been “odd”. That was his word. He said her dad had left when she was young and she’d been brought up by a narcissistic mother who never gave Frances the attention she craved.’
‘But that’s not true!’ I exclaimed. ‘She’s always talking about her mum’s kindness.’
Claudia gazed at me levelly.
‘Have you never told yourself that if you repeat a lie often enough you can make it true?’
I thought of the lie I’d told myself about my marriage. That we were happy. That Phil had destroyed something whole and good, rather than something already irredeemably cracked.
‘Only one time did her mother make a fuss of her, her cousin Michael told me,’ Claudia went on. ‘It was after Frances got into the local paper when she was a child for doing some small act of heroism, which of course her mother then managed to turn around so it became about her. So proud of my heroic daughter. That sort of thing. After that, Frances would apparently create dramas deliberately to recapture her mother’s attention and approval. Once, an aged aunt’s handbag went missing at a family party and everyone searched for hours before Frances produced it with a flourish, getting all the thanks and gratitude, even though Michael had seen her hide it herself. Another time she was at one of her mother’s friends’ houses and their dog somehow got out of the front door and it was Frances who triumphantly brought it home.’
I remembered Dotty then, coming home with a gash in her stomach, and a sour taste came into my mouth.
‘Frances told me she lived with her mother,’ I told Claudia now. ‘She said she had MS and she was her carer. She said they were close.’
Claudia frowned at me. ‘Frances’s mother died a few months before Matt and I moved in.’
I felt out of my depth then. Floundering. All those times Frances had talked about her mother, how nurturing she was. It had all been a lie.
‘So why didn’t you cut her off?’ I asked Claudia now. ‘Once you knew what she was like?’
‘I tried, but don’t forget she lived upstairs. She knew when I was at home and would come round, knocking on the door, asking why I wouldn’t see her any more. I challenged her about the photographs, but of course she denied knowing anything about them. And when I tried to find them again on Matt’s computer, they’d vanished.’
I thought about all those evenings Frances had babysat alone in Claudia’s flat. The access she’d had to their computers, their lives. It all made a sickening kind of sense.
‘Then one day I was in the kitchen making tea and Henry was in the garden splashing about in the paddling pool. I had my eye on him the whole time. But all of a sudden there was this hammering at the door and Frances was screaming that Henry was in danger, and I ran out to the garden and saw he was holding a big, jagged piece of glass. Frances said she’d seen him pick it up from the end of the garden, by the bottom fence. But I knew.’
‘You knew what?’
Of course, I already understood what Claudia was saying, only I didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to think it even.
‘I knew she’d dropped it from her kitchen window. Probably aimed it directly at the paddling pool.’
‘That can’t be right. No one would …’
I didn’t finish.
I remembered that shadow passing my parents’ living-room doorway. How Frances had turned up at the funeral, desperate to be involved. And now I remembered something else. How I’d tried to gently push Frances away a couple of days before my dad died, using the excuse that my parents took up so much of my time. Oh God, had I signed my father’s death warrant?
‘Did you tell the police?’ I asked Claudia.
‘Yes, but when they questioned Frances she reminded them how I’d complained a few months before about the student house that backs on to ours. They used to throw butts of joints and those metal capsules of laughing gas over the fence and I’d made an official complaint to the police. “They must have chucked a broken bottle over this time,” Frances told the policeman who came to her door. “Thank God I happened to be looking out.”’
Claudia told me how she’d put the flat up for rent then, and moved out a few days later, to a place near enough that Henry could still go to the same nursery but far enough to put some distance between them and Frances.
‘But then she found us. I went to pick Henry up one afternoon and there she was, with her hand on his shoulder, chatting to the head of the nursery. I can’t explain to you how it felt. This clammy fear that came over me that we’d never be free of her.’
I didn’t tell her that she needn’t explain to me how it felt.
‘That’s when I knew I had to move away completely. Cut all ties. I moved to Surrey to be near my mum. Ever since then I’ve been constantly watching over my shoulder. Questioning Henry about who he’s seen and talked to.’
‘What about the police?’
‘What could I say? That there were photos that don’t exist any more of a woman’s naked body on a similar bedspread to hers? That my boy picked up a piece of glass from the garden? That my husband killed himself because I wouldn’t believe him?
‘You know, some days, I even question myself. Can I really be sure it happened this way? Is she really as dangerous as I think?’
I had a strange feeling then, a clawed hand grasping at the skin of my back as she said that word: ‘dangerous’.
I grabbed hold of my phone again in case Em had called and I hadn’t heard it, but there was nothing. In desperation, I went to our WhatsApp group chat to send her a message telling her to contact me. Which is when I saw she’d sent a message earlier that day.
Belatedly, I remembered that bleeping sound from my bag while I was talking to Dean Baverstock on the pay-as-you-go phone.
Frances asked to come round but I know she’s starting to get on your nerves, Em had written, so in the end I said I’d go to hers instead. Taking one for the team. You can thank me later.
I remembered the text I’d sent that morning telling Frances that I needed to focus on me and my girls. That rush of guilt and relief that came afterwards.
‘Do you know where Frances lives?’ I asked Claudia Epstein urgently.
‘Of course I do. I lived there, remember.’
‘Can you take me?’
Claudia was already shaking her head.
‘Sorry. I can’t go back there. Not to that place. Not to where Matt and I were so happy.’
‘Please,’ I grabbed her hand. Her fingers felt thin and dry. ‘I haven’t got a car. I think my daughter is in danger.’
Claudia held my gaze for a few moments, while the world seemed to stand still, then gave the briefest of no
ds.
We climbed into her ancient Volvo. There was a child seat in the back and a selection of picture books that Claudia gathered up hastily and shoved into the glove compartment, as if trying to protect her son’s privacy.
The drive to Muswell Hill took only ten minutes, but it felt like hours. Every red traffic light we stopped at had me pressing my nails into my palms, wondering where Em was. Why she wasn’t answering her phone.
‘Just up here,’ said Claudia. Then, almost immediately, ‘Oh!’
I followed her gaze to where a knot of people was standing outside a house with a large clematis in the front garden. They were gazing up at the top floor, where black smoke was billowing from an open window.
45
‘The fire brigade is on the way.’
The woman who told us this was in her forties and wearing sweat pants and sheepskin slippers, as if she hadn’t been intending to leave home today. Her voice was fast and flustered and a purple rash of excitement extended over her chest and neck. She was shouting to be heard over the screeching of the smoke alarm.
‘It’s just awful because my neighbour Frances, who lives in that flat, had just nipped out for milk and came home to find it on fire and, before we could stop her, she ran back inside. She said someone was in there. A visitor.’
I looked at the ground, where a half-empty plastic carton of milk lay in a white puddle of its contents. A numbing chill had overtaken me, so it took several seconds for my mind to catch on that visitor meant Emma.
‘Oh my God!’ My hand was over my mouth, my blood rushing in my ears.
The woman, misunderstanding, turned to me. ‘We all tried to stop her,’ she said, as if I was holding her to blame. ‘She insisted on going in.’
I lunged towards the open front door, which was half wreathed in smoke, but Claudia held me back.
‘It’s not safe,’ she said. ‘And if Frances is on her way back with Emma, you’ll only get in their way. The stairs are quite narrow and it’s pitch black in there.’
