The Watcher

by Kate Medina

  ‘It’s just routine,’ Cara said, picking up on her cue, rising from the table. ‘My boss is a stickler for detail and he’d kill me if he thought I’d left even one tiny stone unturned.’ He smiled. ‘Would you show us, please.’

  They waited, listening to the shriek of cartoon characters having an animated fight in the sitting room, while Denise unlocked the kitchen door, then followed her out into a large garden. It was a hundred foot long and fifty wide, south-facing, Jessie could see from the angle of the sun, flowering borders along three sides, four or five slats missing from the fence in the back right-hand corner, a couple of others hanging crookedly from the horizontal support. The weeping willow was young, a baby still, barely fifteen feet tall, but a dominating presence in the middle of the lawn all the same, its shadow gobbling their feet, their legs, torsos, as they approached it.

  ‘We’re in a conservation area so we weren’t allowed to cut it down,’ Denise said. ‘It’s a pain because of the shade, but we loved the house and the fact that the garden backs onto fields and woods and isn’t overlooked, and everything’s a compromise, isn’t it?’ She stopped a few feet short of the willow and waved her hand vaguely. ‘I didn’t come out myself, so I didn’t see exactly where the footprints were, but I think about here.’

  Cara and Jessie stepped forward, their feet squelching in unison. The grass was sparse, as Denise had said, dejected-looking tufts struggling up from damp red-brown earth.

  ‘It’s damp,’ Denise added unnecessarily. ‘We’re clay here, so it doesn’t drain well.’

  Cara nodded. ‘It rained heavily this morning. I woke early.’

  Didn’t sleep more like, Jessie thought. She hadn’t either. Who could have done after what they’d seen at the Fullers’?

  They circled the area in front of the willow, studying the ground. There was nothing to see beyond a couple of semi-circular indents that could have been made by the heels of shoes. Or the hooves of a pony. Or pretty much anything.

  Jessie looked up, met Denise’s silvery-blue gaze. ‘What did you think?’ she asked.

  ‘Think?’

  ‘About the footprints? You said that your husband, Simon, thought it was a dog walker. Did you agree?’

  Denise shrugged. ‘Well it couldn’t possibly have been a ghostie, could it, as a ghost wouldn’t leave footprints. And as Simon pointed out, who on earth is going to be bothered hanging around in our garden at two a.m. when they could be tucked up in bed? I mean, we’re just … well, we’re just normal. Boring. Nothing to see here!’ Her perfect white teeth flashed, as she made jazz hands. ‘No, it was clearly just a dog walker. As I said before, lots of them use the public footpath. Serves us right for not fixing the fence.’ She dropped her hands. ‘My poor dahlias. I’m not sure that they’ll ever forgive me.’

  26

  ‘Thank you for staying open late for me,’ Jessie said.

  ‘No problem,’ Cherry Goodwin replied. ‘We don’t close until six anyway, so it’s only an extra hour and I’ve got more paperwork than I can begin to get through. I’ve hardly had a free moment all day, what with the press and other ghoulish gloaters trying to get a look at Lupo. That’s what you’re working on, isn’t it? The murder of Lupo’s owners?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jessie said simply. She didn’t want to talk about the case; couldn’t talk about it.

  Though she had enjoyed the hours she’d spent with Darren Cara on the knock today, their efforts had been fruitless: no one they’d talked to, with the possible exception of Denise Lewin and her son’s ‘ghostie’, had seen or heard anything useful in relation to the Fullers’ murders, but everyone had been agog nevertheless, spilling over with questions that she and Cara had politely but firmly declined to answer.

  Late afternoon, she’d found herself back in the incident room, alone and surrounded by images from the Fullers’ crime scene, viewing, thinking, making no concrete progress, but always circling back to the same theories: that the Fullers’ murders were personal and to do with watching. Watching and dogs. The photos on the incident room wall that had snagged her attention time and again were the close-ups of the scratches at the base of the door through which Claudine Fuller had let in death. And the scratches – gouges, more accurately – down Hugo Fuller’s face. Not fingernails. Not a dog’s claws either – not a normal dog at least, or so Dr Ghoshal had said. So, what then? She still had no idea.

  There was an oil on canvas displayed above the Paws for Thought reception desk, a little black and white, Jack-Russell-type dog, drawn with thick strokes of paint. It was beautifully done, the peaks and troughs of oil paint giving the scene – a stony beach and the dog at the centre of it – life. It was the type of painting that Jessie would have itched to pick chunks off with her fingernail when she was a kid. The little dog was hiding underneath an upturned fishing boat, its head resting on its paws, tilted slightly to one side, as if its attention had been caught by something. But its eyes were dull. If dogs could feel sadness, that little dog was deeply sad.

  ‘That’s the first dog that I rescued,’ Cherry said, following Jessie’s gaze. ‘God, twenty-five years ago now, it must have been. I took him home and kept him as my pet. Then, a few months later, one of my friends found two puppies that some moron had dumped in a bin bag in a layby. She couldn’t keep them as she lives in a flat, so I got numbers two and three.’ She grinned. ‘It was a slippery slope after that. I registered for charitable status, started raising money, and hey presto, Paws for Thought was born.’

  ‘Where did you find him?’

  ‘Up in Selsey, cowering under a fishing boat. I’d taken my nephew to the lifeboat station. He was only five or six then. I’m going to his wedding in a fortnight’s time. It was November, bloody freezing, and the poor little dog was soaking wet. He was half-dead when I found him.’

  Now that Cherry had told her the beach was Selsey, Jessie could recognize it from the faint, grey line of the lifeboat pier, stretching out into the water in the top left-hand corner of the painting. She had only been up there once, this summer with Callan, to buy some lobsters from the fishing sheds for a treat dinner one Saturday. They hadn’t walked down the lifeboat pier, but she had thought at the time how spindly it looked, the kind of pier a kid would construct from broken matchsticks, and how she wouldn’t have liked to sprint down it in a howling gale to launch a lifeboat into a raging sea. Jessie turned back to the reception desk. Cherry was jabbing at the computer.

  ‘You never found the dog’s owner?’ she asked.

  Cherry’s gaze remained focused on the screen, her brow creased. ‘No. He didn’t have a collar or any identification. I told the police and put up notices on lamp posts around the beach, but no one ever came forward. It was odd because he seemed pretty well cared for, healthy and well fed, and he was gentle and loving, as if he had been loved, but at the same time he had lots of old injuries.’ She balled her fists. ‘Both his front paws were misshapen, like clubs. They’d clearly been broken at some point. And one of his ears was half-missing, not bitten off by another dog, but a straight cut, as if it had been severed with a knife. He whimpered when I picked him up. I think that someone had given him a few good kicks in the ribs. He was such a sweetie. It makes me sick that people can treat animals like that.’ A whirr and the printer on the reception desk sprung into life. Sitting back, Cherry dragged orange-painted nails through her choppy, hot-orange pixie cut. ‘I’m printing out some instructions. You said that you’d never had a dog before.’

  ‘No, I never have.’

  And why was she now? Because her heart that had already lost two big chunks – one, her brother, years ago, the second, secret, much more recent – had space in it to love. But mainly, she knew, because of those photographs in the Fullers’ house, her knowledge of how Claudine had suffered enough without her beloved Lupo being stuck in a dogs’ home for years or going to a home where he wouldn’t be properly loved and cared for.

  Coming out from behind the desk, Cherry handed Jessie a small
pack of paper. ‘You don’t need to read them now. I’ll tell you everything you need to know, so they’re just for reference, in case you forget. The top sheet also has all the centre’s contact details, in case you have any questions or a problem with Lupo. We’ll take him back, obviously, if you do.’

  Her gaze moved from Jessie’s to the picture above the desk. ‘I called him Selsey, for obvious reasons. I heard rumours that he belonged to a teenage boy. A couple of people said that they’d seen him walking around with the dog. I made some enquiries, found out where he lived and went around there. It was miserable.’ She frowned. ‘God, I remember it so clearly. The mum was nuts. She was wearing a short-sleeved man’s T-shirt and there were needle tracks all down her arms. The front garden was like a junkyard, full of broken bits of shit and empty vodka bottles. She basically told me to fuck off and went back inside. “Fuck off, he’s gone, ain’t he. Dumped us like his shitty fucking dad.” There was a girl, his sister I assume, about twelve or thirteen. She stayed on the doorstep, looking at me. She didn’t seem to be the full package, if you know what I mean, but at least she smiled. I felt desperately sorry for her too, stuck in that dreadful home.’

  Raising a hand, she ran it over the curled-up figure of the little dog. ‘Sorry, that sounded terrible, didn’t it? I’m not judgemental. I just remember leaving that house feeling utterly shit about life. I went back to the police and asked about the boy and they said that his school had registered him as a missing person. They thought that the kid had run away. Run away and dumped his dog.’

  Jessie raised an eyebrow. ‘Just gone?’

  Cherry shrugged. ‘You know, having seen where he lived, I really wouldn’t have blamed the kid.’

  ‘Did the police do anything?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. He was weeks away from being sixteen, the police said. A crazy number of children go missing in the UK every year, though you’re police, so of course you know.’

  ‘Actually, I don’t,’ Jessie said. ‘How many go missing?’

  ‘One hundred and forty thousand and half of those are between the ages of twelve and seventeen. I read it – I can’t remember where now.’

  ‘That’s a huge number. They can’t all stay missing.’

  ‘No, obviously, a lot return at some point, but a lot don’t. And it is a huge number, but that’s the point, isn’t it? We all lead our cosy little lives thinking that nothing bad happens out there but actually that’s rubbish. Fundamentally, the world is a nasty place. Some kids feel the need to run away because their lives are so shit and others get taken, trafficked or whatever. Like all those thousands of girls in those grooming cases throughout the country, that everyone ignored for years and years. Who the hell would have thought that could happen in our so-called civilized society? I thought that the world was cosy too, until I found that little dog and started the rescue charity and now I know better. I’ve seen it all.’

  Not quite all, thought Jessie, an unwelcome, unbidden image of the Fullers rising in her mind.

  ‘I mean, all those children – where do they go?’ Cherry paused.

  Jessie lifted her shoulders, but didn’t answer. Even though she’d had no idea how many children went missing every year, she did know, from the last case she’d worked on, how easy it was for them to disappear – to make others disappear – particularly the marginalized in society.

  ‘We’re not great at looking after the vulnerable in this country. Animals, children, old people, they all get thrown to the wolves,’ Cherry said, her gaze finding the picture. ‘Even though he died years ago now, I still miss him. I really do.’ She put a hand on Jessie’s arm. ‘Anyway, enough of my reminiscing. Shall we go and see Lupo?’

  27

  Denise sighed. She hated it when Simon was away. Hated his absence at any time, particularly when darkness descended, but now, what with that murder on Saturday night only a couple of kilometres through the woods, and the visit from the detective and his psychologist colleague this afternoon, she was even more nervous. She just needed to make sure that her anxiety didn’t transmit itself to Leo. He was a sensitive child at the best of times and another screaming fit in the middle of the night would push her over the edge, send her doolally.

  There’s no harm in being vigilant and obviously lock doors and windows at night, that cute, multi-racial young detective had told her. She had quite fancied him. If the topic they’d been discussing hadn’t been quite so hideous, she would have really enjoyed their chat. And she would, obviously, lock all the doors and windows. She had absolutely no intention of inviting people into her house. If they wanted to get in, they would have to break in. Smash a window. Kick a door down. And she’d hear and be straight on the phone to the police and they’d be around in an instant, sirens blazing.

  Why am I even thinking these ridiculous thoughts?

  Their house, their lives, their whole existence was so different from the Fullers’ as to almost be on another planet. Most people envied those with money, but really, who on earth wanted to live in such isolation? She’d seen that woman – Candice, Clarise, whatever her name was – at the August bank holiday weekend dog show. She’d been there handing out the prizes and Leo had won the prize for the best fancy dress aged ten and under. Denise had spent two whole days making him a Peter Rabbit outfit and he had looked wonderful. He’d deserved to win and she was delighted when he had, as those village fairs could be so unfair. She had warmed to the woman, Candice, Clarise. No – Claudine – that was it.

  Denise thought Claudine Fuller had looked terribly sad when she’d given Leo the prize. She had stopped to chat for a moment, just pleasantries, but Denise had felt a strong sense that Claudine was aching for some normal human contact, warmth, friendship. She’d mentioned to Simon, how sad she thought Claudine Fuller had looked. Sad behind the eyes, despite the dazzling smile that she had fixed to her face as if with quick-dry concrete. A rictus smile, Denise caught herself thinking at the time. But Simon had been annoyed with her, annoyed with her comment, with her having the audacity to comment on Claudine Fuller at all.

  ‘You’re fixated by the woman,’ he had snapped. ‘By her wealth.’

  It had been a ridiculous thing to say. She’d chatted to Claudine for barely five minutes and only because she was trying to be pleasant. She’d bitten down on a nasty retort, because she knew that Simon was going through a tough time at work. Even so, there had been no need to snap at her like that, not on a family day out.

  Poor woman. Claudine had seemed nice. She hadn’t had any children herself, and Denise had felt sorry for her, standing there in her stiff pastel-pink skirt suit and matching low-heeled courts, a silver-tipped pastel-pink leather bow on each toe – a ridiculous outfit really for a village fun day. It had set her apart from everyone else, and perhaps that was what she had intended. Or perhaps that was what her husband had intended for her. He was there too, in his mustard-coloured moleskin trousers, a tweed jacket and matching tweed cap, standing apart from everyone else, including his wife, in a very ‘Lord of the Manor’ kind of way. The only thing missing from his attire a double-barrelled shotgun and cartridge belt. His wife had kept glancing over at him – checking in – Denise had thought at the time, with a strong sense that he was the one in control, pulling the strings, his beautiful wife only a perfect pastel-pink-suited puppet.

  Emptying the dregs of her tea into the sink, Denise glanced at her watch. Six p.m. Still forty-five minutes until Leo’s bedtime. She could hear the Scooby-Doo theme tune echoing from the sitting room, where Leo, post-bath, was watching television.

  Zoinks.

  Creepers.

  You meddling kids.

  And her and Leo’s favourite: Ruh-roh, Raggy. Scooby-Doo’s characteristic signal to Shaggy that the monster was close by.

  She knew all the catchphrases, had watched it so many times, holding Leo’s hand and giggling with him, jamming a cushion playfully over his eyes when he’d been frightened, that she could recite the
m in her sleep.

  There’s no harm in being vigilant and obviously lock doors and windows at night. She’d do that now, with Leo occupied by Scooby.

  The kitchen windows were all fitted with window locks – no need to check those.

  And the double doors to the garden? She was sure they were locked too, but no harm in checking anyway. The garden beyond the glass was pitch-black, only the gibbous moon high in the sky, half-obscured by clouds that appeared, from where she was standing, to whip across its curve, masking, unmasking, masking again. It was windy again and the weeping willow was dancing. It did look ghostly. No wonder poor Leo had been frightened by it.

  The kitchen doors were locked – she shook them just to check – the key nestling in the lock where Simon insisted it stayed so that they could escape in case of fire. She would have preferred to leave it in a drawer, but his family’s house had burnt to the ground when he was eight and he still remembered his father having to fling a chair through one of the kitchen windows so that they could escape, as the key to the back door had been stowed in a drawer, and the front door locked and double locked.

  You have no idea what a fire is like until you’re caught in one. You can’t breathe, you can’t see and you are totally disorientated. The key stays in the lock where we can find it if we need to.

  Fine. She had been fine with that. But now? Claudine Fuller, in her pastel-pink suit, filled her mind’s eye. It had been sadness sitting right behind the poor woman’s eyes. Denise had been right, whatever Simon said. Claudine had been sad and now she was dead, drowned in that splendid swimming pool attached to that splendid, terribly isolated house, a life, a world so different from the one Denise occupied. And right now, standing in her cosy kitchen, Scooby-Doo echoing from the sitting room, of that she was glad.

  Turning away from the garden, she busied herself in the kitchen for a few more minutes, washing up her teacup, wiping the crumbs from the kitchen table into her cupped hand and dropping them into the bin, giving the floor a cursory sweep. She could murder a glass of wine, but wouldn’t allow herself one, not when she was home alone. Well, perhaps a small one, but only later, when Leo was asleep. The fridge, that cold bottle of Chardonnay that she and Simon had cracked open last night, was calling to her. God, if it wasn’t for Leo, I’d be an alcoholic by now.