18
Monday, 30 July 2018
32 The Avenue – 11.37 a.m.
They were outside his house.
Trefor Lovell could hear them, catcalling and whispering. Experience warned him that soon they would be at his door, ringing the bell and running off. Laughing. Loud. High on the adrenaline of a dare.
If only they would leave him alone. What exactly had he done to them? Nothing, except mind his own damn business.
He imagined a rubbish truck rolling up the road, tipping over on its side and crushing them to death, their arms and legs as mangled as the spokes of their bicycle wheels. Or looping rope around their scrawny little necks and letting them swing from the branches of the hornbeam. Death by long drop or suspension? A severed spinal column or slow strangulation? Slow would be better, he decided. More time for regrets.
He finished making the bed and hovered at the top of the landing. Someone laughed again, boyish with a hint of cruelty. He was looking straight down the valley of the stairwell when the letterbox opened.
‘Hey Ol’ Man Lovell. You killed your wife yet? Did you bury her in the garden?’
The flap shut, and he trapped and held his next breath. There would be more. And so there was.
‘It’s you, isn’t it? You’re the Doll Maker. Are you going to give us some ickle-wickle dolly-wollies, you fucking sicko? Or are you going to murder us?’ It was a teenage boy’s voice. He laughed again, and Lovell recognized in it a kind of shocked delight.
Trefor freed the air from his lungs, and contemplated his next move. He needed to leave for work. He had orders to fulfil, and he was behind. Perhaps he should chase them up The Avenue. Give them a scare. But the last time he’d done that, they’d stuck soiled sanitary towels to his windows. After a day in the sun, the odour had made him gag as he’d cleaned up the mess.
The tips of the boy’s fingers appeared in the mouth of his front door. Trefor frowned. What were they up to? Muffled conversation, and an exclamation of disgust. A giggle, but stifled, as if Trefor would hear, open up and demand to be in on the joke.
He took a step down the stairs, intending to confront them.
Bunches of dried lavender that hung from the bannister brushed against him, sending tiny, fragrant flowers tumbling over his shoulders. His wife Annie had loved these vibrant blooms before she’d left him, and so he’d placed them in every room.
A small envelope – the padded type, thick with bubble wrap and about the size of a birthday card – dropped through the letterbox, the sound breaking open the silence of the house.
‘WIFE KILLER’ was scrawled across the front.
Fire burned in him. He had never done anything to hurt his wife. It wasn’t his fault she’d gone, he’d begged her not to leave him. It wasn’t his fault that he could not bring himself to talk about it, could not face the onslaught of his neighbours, raking over the memories of his marriage, sticking their noses in. It wasn’t his fault that because the gossips hadn’t seen her for a few months, conveniently forgetting she’d been housebound and rarely went out, and because he was a closed and private man, they’d drawn their own conclusions, laced with a cruelty borne of ignorance.
It wasn’t his fault that in the end he’d been forced to lie, to pretend she was staying with her goddaughter to satisfy the busybodies who might feel inclined to voice their suspicions to the police.
The sensible course of action would be to ignore the envelope and dump it in the bin. But a part of him was wounded by these accusations. It fed his masochistic need to pick at the scab of this injustice.
It was as light as a feather.
He shook it, but could feel nothing inside, no shift of weight, no displacement of contents. He frowned. Perhaps it was a note. Well, damn them all. He could handle that. He ran a finger along the seal and peeled back the flap.
In that split second, when he first looked inside, he believed it full of grains of rice. And that puzzled him because why would those shit-for-brains kids send him rice? There were hundreds and hundreds of these pale brownish grains, filling the envelope right to the brim, and when he looked again they were moving. They were moving.
Maggots.
He gagged. Dropped the envelope. And then they were everywhere, squirming across the carpet and moving over his slippers in their seemingly directionless quest for dying flesh.
Retching, Trefor lunged for the envelope while trying to sweep up a handful of the tiny, wriggling larvae, but he fumbled with it and lost his grip, tipping it over on its side. Now there were many more of them, spilling out of the bubble wrap, corkscrewing across each other, burrowing into the polyester fibres, seeking out dark places. Disappearing.
Sweet Jesus, those fucking kids. Did they have any idea what they had done?
Trefor kicked his feet, his movements wild and uncontrolled, trying to dislodge the maggots. He ran to the cupboard underneath the stairs and pulled out a vacuum cleaner, ancient and bulky. Hands shaking, he plugged it in and shoved it across the floor, hitting the skirting boards and the radiator pipes in his panic to contain the infestation defiling his home. He needed them gone. Every last one.
But it was impossible to be certain.
When he had finished cleaning up, he opened his front door and scanned the street. It was empty. But he knew who they were. He recognized their voices.
And those little fuckers were going to pay.
19
Monday, 30 July 2018
The Avenue – 12.01 p.m.
The kids on their bikes almost knocked into him as they flew up the street, their whooping laughter as cruel as the midday sun.
The postman shielded his eyes with his hand and watched them go. He thought about checking on the old guy – he’d seen them congregating outside his house earlier that morning – but decided it was none of his business.
Instead he walked up the path to number twenty-seven, more certain of his welcome there. He was thirsty, a fresh sheen of sweat coating his forehead. A couple of dried leaves clung to the cotton fibres of his shirt. Needing to kill some time, he had driven his van around to the north-west entrance of Blatches Woods, where he had sat on a bench amongst the quiet company of the trees and contemplated his next move. But now he was back in The Avenue, magnetized to this place.
As he bent to post the letter he had deliberately withheld, Audrina Clifton opened the door, floral pinny tied around her waist, lambswool slippers on her feet. ‘You again?’ There was a teasing note to her voice. ‘I thought you’d be long gone by now.’
‘Missed this one.’ He waggled it. ‘Looks like a bill, I’m afraid, Mrs C,’ he said, straightening up and handing it to her.
She tutted good-naturedly. ‘The dreaded brown envelope.’
‘Bane of my life.’ As she shifted on the doorstep, transferring her weight from one leg to the other, he noticed her wince. ‘How’s your arthritis?’
A rueful shrug. ‘Comes and goes. Not too bad today.’
‘And what’s Mr Clifton doing on this fine afternoon? Still suffering with his back?’
Her smile disappeared, the sun behind a cloud. ‘In the garden, as usual. Fretting about his plants.’ She peered skywards. ‘I hope the weather breaks soon. We’re in need of some rain.’ Her eyes met his, and she said, surprised, as if seeing him properly for the first time, ‘Goodness, you look hot.’
‘I’m slowly roasting to death out here. Still, it could be worse. I could be stuck in an office.’ He grinned at her, his teeth bright against his sun-tanned skin.
‘I expect you’d like a glass of something cold.’
‘I hate to put you out.’
‘It’s no bother. Iced water? Or I’ve got some orange juice.’
‘Juice would be lovely.’
He loitered on the step. She didn’t invite him in. She never did. But it didn’t matter. He was happy to stand and chat in the sunshine. Inside or out, it made no difference.
They stood side by side, surveying the street, watching
a cat on a wall stretch in the heat. He lifted his glass. ‘Never had this as a kid. But my niece loves it.’
A chuckle laced with sympathy. ‘Too expensive, I expect. We used to buy those little cartons for my son. He liked them in his lunchbox.’
‘And now you do the same for the grandkids, I expect?’ He nudged her gently to show that he was teasing.
Her face crumpled, reminding him of a used tissue. ‘We don’t have grandchildren.’
The postman flushed. He patted her arm, a gesture clunky with embarrassment. ‘Forgive me. Me and my big mouth.’
‘Please, don’t worry.’ She took another sip of her drink and watched a butterfly land on the buddleia. ‘Perhaps I should have worded it more carefully. We don’t know if we have grandchildren. We haven’t seen our son for a very long time.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ The postman was used to hearing confidences. And opening up to a stranger was easier for some. ‘That must be difficult.’ He pulled at a loose thread on the strap of his postbag, careful to avoid eye contact in case she clammed up. ‘If you don’t mind – I mean, feel free to tell me to shut up – but what happened?’
A sigh so filled with regret it almost hurt to listen.
‘He ran away a long time ago. A family argument and that was it. Last time we saw him.’
The postman whistled. ‘Sounds tough. Have you tried to find him?’
She didn’t answer straight away and he suspected she wasn’t going to. But then she took his empty glass, sadness threading its way through her words. ‘We’re still here. We haven’t gone anywhere.’
A shadow crossed the sun, and the postman remembered his own secret. ‘Do you want to see him?’
She turned to him, and he was floored by the bleakness in her eyes.
‘Wanting something won’t make it happen,’ she said.
Then she went inside and shut the door.
20
Now
Love has many guises.
The electrical arc of physical attraction. The comfortable slippers of a long marriage. Flip a coin, though, and it becomes the burn of unrequited desire, the tunnel-vision darkness of an obsessive. Love is the balancing act of friendship and the willing handcuffs of parenthood. The secrets we keep to protect those we should trust.
But nothing prepared me for you.
I had loved before, of course. Not often. But enough. This was different, though. Deeper. Unexpected. You taught me things I hadn’t realized I needed to learn. The way your eyes looked into my hidden self. The feel of your hand against mine. Your breath on my cheek.
But as I grew older, I discovered what Birdie had known all along.
Love does not always stay the same. It congeals into something unpleasant and ugly.
For a long time, you mended something inside me I believed to be broken. But, as we both discovered to our cost, that repair was only temporary.
21
Monday, 30 July 2018
4 Hillside Crescent – 12.04 p.m.
The back of the house was cool in the heat. Wildeve Stanton had been resistant to buying it, bemoaning the shadows that lay across the garden and the sun-baked driveway with its cracked paving stones. But now, in the cave of their kitchen, she was grateful to escape the eye-screwing light.
‘Here, drink this.’ DC Jim Sheridan, who had driven her car home and steered her through the pack of journalists waiting on the pavement for a statement about her husband’s death, handed her a glass.
She swallowed down her tablets with lukewarm tap water, ignoring the taste of chlorine. The pain in her head was like the turn of a screwdriver.
She mumbled her thanks, but the only way back was to try and sleep it off. With her eyes closed, she pointed to the ceiling, trying to convey to Jim Sheridan that she needed to go to bed.
He gave her arm a squeeze. ‘I’ll see myself out,’ he said.
She dragged herself upstairs, aware in the vaguest of senses that Sheridan was lingering in the hallway.
When she reached the third stair from the top, she heard the familiar click of the front door opening.
‘We’re all with you, Wild,’ he called softly. ‘I hope you know that.’
And then he was gone.
The shape of the shadows in her bedroom was enough to tell her that a significant part of the day had passed while she was lost in sleep.
Wildeve stayed still, braced for a drill-burst of pain. When it came, she let out a low groan, but the drugs had begun to do their job. She rolled onto her side, stretching out an arm to draw Adam towards her, but the place where he should have been was empty.
The tragedy of sleep was waking up. Turning a new page of sorrow and awareness. A second, perhaps two, of forgetting before the memory of his murder sliced through her with its rusty and serrated blade, designed to cause maximum damage.
She lay still, eyes closed, residual sparks of pain in her head, replaying the sequence of events that had led her to this dark hollow.
Less than twenty-four hours ago, Detective Sergeant Wildeve Stanton had been in the Major Incident Room at Rayleigh Police Station in Essex, rereading the case files of Esther Farnworth, the second victim of the Doll Maker. Esther was a single mother, forty years old, white, working at the local school. In an investigation as large-scale as this, there were thousands of leads to explore. Most led to dead ends. But a handful, those hidden pathways, marked out a map to follow. She just had to find them.
Wildeve had written notes on a pad she kept in her pocket.
Motive? Opportunistic? No link established to previous or subsequent victims except locality. Why choose EF? WHY?
Every minute of what had followed was time-stamped into the neurons of her brain, and they fired together again and again, replaying the memory until her eyes burned and her throat was dry and sore.
A ribbon of steam had been curling its way upwards from her coffee cup. In the well between her breasts, sweat was clinging to her skin. The office was too hot, even with the fans on. The sound of heavy footsteps and the weight of a hand on her shoulder.
She had turned around, mouth kinked by a smile, expecting to see Adam, but it was his friend, PC Simon Quick. Despite the heat, his face was the colour of a winter sky. Wildeve had half risen from her chair.
‘God, Si, are you OK?’
A hush had settled over the room, a collective intake of breath. On the periphery of her vision, she was aware of her colleagues huddling in twos and threes by their desks, and then the whispering had begun, like the muttering of leaves on the trees. A thought, as clear as the pealing of the bell from the church near her childhood home, popped into her head.
Something has happened.
She became aware of the knock of her heart in her chest, the flecks of grey in Simon’s beard, the grass stains on his knees, the pinch of her new suede boots. And in that slowing down of time, her subconscious, making connections for her at dizzying speed, offered up her next question.
‘It’s not Adam, is it?’
The words broke open the silence. Even if she lived for a hundred years, she would never forget the way that Simon’s mask cracked and fell away.
‘Wild, it’s bad,’ he said.
‘How bad?’
Simon pressed his palms together in prayer, cupped them around his mouth and nose, and blew into the dark space.
‘Si?’ Her voice lifted in panic, that last vowel stretching into a plea, although she would not have been able to say whether she was desperate for information or the bliss of ignorance, to never know the truth of what he was about to tell her.
‘There’s been a . . .’ Simon pushed a hand through his hair, and she was struck by how much he looked like a boy and not a man, and how strange it was that the mind filled up with random thoughts, as if they might cushion the blow of his words. ‘Someone called in a . . .’ His lip trembled. ‘I got there first. Well, me and Theo did.’
His eyes would not meet hers, and so she watched his mouth move, trying
to catch each of the words as they tumbled out. She wondered where his police dog was, but mostly she wanted him to get to the point. This preamble frightened her, as if the delay meant it was already too late.
‘Adam had taken himself on a job, but none of us knew where he’d gone, and –’ it was curious, the shapes that lips formed during speech – ‘he was late for the briefing but no one had heard from him and then a member of the public found him, and he wasn’t breathing.’
Her head had snapped up then, and she stopped watching Simon’s mouth and searched again for his eyes, and when her husband’s friend found the courage to look at her, the landscape was so bleak that she had to turn away.
‘I’ll drive you to the hospital,’ he had said.
She had known then that Adam was dead. Because Simon would have told her if he was alive, however badly injured. Because she had used those words herself when she had knocked at the home of a teenage boy who had borrowed the family car, or a sister who had slipped out to meet a stranger off the internet, or an uncle who had got into a fight outside the pub.
She could not bring herself to burden their families with the truth, not all at once. The car journey to the hospital was to prepare them for what they would find there.
Wildeve had staggered against the desk, bruising the back of her thighs, a dark smudge of pain. Simon had caught her wrist and kept her upright, but the shock, the grief, was not how she expected it at all.
Her heart was not collapsing in on itself or breaking into pieces. She was not a reduced husk of herself. Instead, she walked the wide, empty spaces of pain. She felt herself opening up, like a house with a dozen empty rooms. So much nothingness to fill.
One day ago, she had been a wife. Now she was a widow.
Wildeve touched her temples. The pain was still sparking, like an ignition that would not catch, but it was dulled for now. She forced herself to get up. She needed water. Something to eat.
As she stumbled down the stairs, gripping the bannister to anchor herself against her blurred vision, she became aware of a shadow behind the front door.
The Neighbour Page 6
