Adam.
Her heart stuttered, as if he had somehow found his way home, and the past twenty-four hours had been nothing more than a terrible dream.
But the doorbell was ringing and Adam had his own key, and when she looked again, the shadow was taller and broader than her husband had been. She was about to shout, to tell the journalist to leave her alone, when a familiar voice spoke.
‘C’mon, Wild, open up. It’s me.’
She had been avoiding him, but now he had seen her, moving around the hallway. Damn Jim Sheridan for giving her away.
PC Simon Quick was standing in an awkward manner that suggested he was not sure of his welcome. Well, he wasn’t welcome. Wildeve did not want this. She did not have the strength to cope with it. But it seemed she had no choice.
PC Quick made tea and carried it through to the sitting room. Wildeve could not think of anyone less suited to their name. He moved through life as if his batteries were running down, was often late and needed a decent haircut. But in the twelve months he’d been paired with his dog, Theo, they’d made a formidable team, their results earning the attention of the Chief Constable.
Simon perched on the edge of the armchair, his rucksack by his feet. Wildeve’s eyes stung with the salt of unshed tears. So much to say. She had tried to keep it together at work, but here, memories in every corner, she could feel the tiny threads of herself unravel.
‘Do you think you should see a doctor?’
‘I’m fine.’
She wasn’t. What a ludicrous thing to say. Wildeve imagined her words growing smaller, like a fading echo. Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine. She imagined herself growing smaller too, until she no longer existed. Simon glanced across the room at the wedding photograph on the mantelpiece.
‘Bloody brilliant day.’ A rueful smile. ‘Had to iron his shirt for him, didn’t I? Right mess he’d made of it.’ He tried to chuckle, but the sound died in his throat. ‘Didn’t realize my best-man duties would extend to that. Bloody hate ironing.’ His eyes filled with tears. ‘I’m going to miss him.’
She willed him not to fall apart. She could not deal with the onslaught of his pain as well as her own. All she had to offer him was a tight nod.
‘I’m worried about you. Emily, too. She sends you her love. Told me to invite you for dinner.’
‘I’m fine, Simon,’ she said again, the lie falling from her lips as naturally as rain. Her husband had been murdered. She would never be fine again. But she did not want to open up her pain in front of him because she understood the wound would never close. He had loved Adam as much as she had. It would swallow him too.
‘You can come to us anytime you need to,’ he said. ‘I mean it, Wild.’
This time, her tone was softer, genuine. ‘I know that. And thank you.’
Simon leaned back into the cushions, took a sip of his drink, stretched out his long legs. ‘I heard you went into work today.’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you going to the briefing this afternoon?’
She shrugged, even though she knew the answer. She just couldn’t face a lecture.
‘I don’t think you should. It’s not right. I’ll stay with you, if you like.’
‘It’s not up to you.’ A flare of anger ambushed her. ‘And I prefer to be on my own.’ It sounded harsher than she meant.
PC Quick’s face fell. He put down his mug with care, and reached for his bag. Wildeve’s hands began to shake, spilling tea onto her thighs. The stain spread across her pyjama bottoms, darkening the cotton, scalding her skin, but she didn’t move. Couldn’t speak.
He held an envelope in his hand.
Wildeve closed her eyes, the reservoir behind them as dry as sand. She ought to say something, a thank you, if nothing else. But how could she bring herself to do that when she felt no gratitude?
Pain began to rake its nails across her jaw, clawing at the back of her head. The drugs were wearing off. For two or three minutes, she gave herself over to it, allowing the firework bursts of agony to crowd out everything except the clarity of sensation. She screwed up her eyes, dug white-knuckled fingers into the sofa and rode the storm.
When the hurt had retreated and she managed to wrench apart her eyelids, Simon was gone and all that remained was a mug of cold tea and a letter that held the words of a ghost.
22
Now
Step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back.
Birdie disappeared when I was eighteen. It was a relief for both of us.
One day she was there, making bitter coffee and comments, the next she had gone, her cup still on the counter, a ring of scum imprinted on its inside.
She had not made a will, but as her only surviving next of kin, the shop and the house became mine.
No one knew what had happened to her. Not the couple of friends she had failed to alienate. Or the neighbours wrapped up in the cloth of their own lives. Not her new lover who insisted it was ‘completely out of character’ for her to up and leave without saying goodbye. He made a bit of a fuss. But, as I explained to the police, she had threatened to walk out before. That was the God’s honest truth.
On that first night without her – my first night without her – I could breathe again. She had always kept a thick roll of cash in a tin in her wardrobe and I was used to a frugal life.
In any case, I had fallen in love. We lived in Birdie’s house together, pooling our resources, creating our own happy home. I closed the shop as a mark of respect.
And so the waiting began. Seven years until her death became official. But I was in no hurry. What was seven years with a lifetime ahead of me?
The years rolled around and we could not stop them. When Birdie had still not returned, as I knew she would not, I applied for – and was awarded – a Declaration of Presumed Death. At the age of twenty-five, I had my own home and business.
In the beginning, you asked questions about my ‘mother’. I drip-fed you snippets. About the hand-painted watch with the sharp-edged face she was wearing when she vanished. Tick-tock, tick-tock. Her love of violet creams.
But I did not tell you about the scars between my shoulder blades and on the inside of my wrist. I would not lie, but it would have been unfair to clog your feelings with undeserved sorrow for me. I have always despised pity. Those who seek it. And those who confer it upon the shoulders of others.
Even now, with the wail of the sirens, I do not require pity. My decisions have always been clear-headed and I make them with my eyes open. Parental relationships are complex. Imperfect. Filled with love and hate and duty and guilt.
Two people remembered the truth about Birdie, and neither of us was telling.
Until that telephone call eight months ago. It signed the death warrants of us all.
23
Monday, 30 July 2018
25 The Avenue – 2.13 p.m.
As soon as Evan Lockwood had scrambled down the treehouse ladder, his mother had grabbed his arm and hauled him up the garden. As she’d marched him into the kitchen, the boy had stumbled over the lip of the back door and grazed his shin.
He’d cried out, but she’d suspected it was from humiliation rather than pain. She had snapped her standard response. Same as her mother’s. ‘If you’d done as I asked in the first place, you wouldn’t have got hurt.’
Sometimes she despised herself.
Evan was now sitting on the sofa, knees pulled up to his chin, socks down to his ankles, playing his Nintendo Switch. He’d forgotten all about it, his attention focused on his game.
In a concession to ‘spending time’ with her family, Olivia had carried her laptop from the study to the sitting room. She was supposed to be concentrating on a press release she was drafting for a client but she couldn’t stop looking at that graze, the way his skin had broken open in a dozen rubied wounds.
Sometimes her anger scared her.
When she had found Evan in that treehouse, she had wanted to strike him, to make his disobedience stin
g. To reduce him and see him cower. She had never smacked her children, but that didn’t mean the impulse was not there. The red marks on his arm were testament to that.
And she wasn’t naive enough to believe that violence was always physical. Words could bruise. Contempt could crush. Amplifying her voice until it drowned out all others was a type of brutality of its own.
She accepted this did not make her a Good Mother.
She loved him painfully – she loved both of her children – and she tried so hard to be gentle and calm and measured, but her reserves of patience had always been low. She wanted their childhood to be filled with sunshine, but clouds were a constant threat.
Evan could be exhausting, a bouncing puppy, already beginning to challenge her carefully constructed boundaries, but he was not cruel. Aster, on the other hand, was so distant, so contemptuous since Olivia’s affair had come to light, she did not know how to reach her.
The house move and financial difficulties had ramped up the pressure even more. Necessity had brought them here, but she hated this street with its brutal history, its boxy houses and lack of character. When their last home, their forever home – a rambling former vicarage furnished with beautiful things and twelve years of memories – had sold after a week on the market, she had wept for days. And although 25 The Avenue was supposed to represent their fresh start, a treacherous part of her longed for the pulsing beauty of the Peak District and her old life.
Her job at the advertising agency in Manchester. Her expensive car and the cachet of long lunches and lucrative deals. A decent salary. Independence from the drudgery of cooking and cleaning and washing. Status. Respect. Him.
She looked around her new sitting room with its low ceilings, its old-fashioned wallpaper and chipped paintwork, and homesickness engulfed her.
Evan had now discarded his game and was fiddling with his shorts, hands down the front in the way that boys do. Men too. His actions reminded her of Garrick, all pleasure and none of the pain. Her husband was full of grand schemes, but refused to shoulder any of the responsibility. She had recently taken over the family finances and was shocked by his wastefulness, his disregard for money. Stupidly, she had assumed their future was promised, that early retirement beckoned to them both. But a period of un- employment for Garrick, and his hefty investment in the Oakhill flats, had broken them.
Evan was still fiddling with his shorts, and the movement irritated her.
‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘It’s not polite.’
A blush stained his cheeks. He withdrew his hand. ‘Mum,’ he said. ‘Can I show you something? I think it might be important.’
‘Just a minute, Evan. Let me finish this press release.’
He sprawled across the sofa, legs dangling over the armrest, drumming his heels against the leather.
Thump. Thump.
Thump. Thump.
Thump. Thump.
A muscle in Olivia’s cheek twitched, but she did not speak. Her fingers plodded across the keyboard.
Thump. Thump.
Thump. Thump.
Thump. Thump.
She reached for the words, but they teased her, fluttering away. She tried to pin them down, but she was too slow. Flicked a glance at her watch. An hour until she had to deliver. She swore. This was her most important client since turning freelance. But she couldn’t concentrate.
Thump. Thump.
Thump. Thump.
Thump. Thump.
C’mon, Olivia, focus. Now what was she trying to say? The subject matter was boring. As dry as dust. But they were paying her to make it sing, and she needed the money. But still Evan kept kicking . . .
Thump. Thump.
. . . and . . .
Thump. Thump.
. . . she could not . . .
Thump. Thump.
. . . think straight.
‘Stop it!’ Her shout made him jump. ‘Just. Stop. It. I can’t concentrate while you’re making that noise.’ She should have ended it there. Evan had stopped kicking and was struggling to sit up. But frustration with her work, the move and the long summer holidays was spilling over, and she could not prevent the despair from leaking out.
‘It’s always the same, isn’t it? You’re nine now. Old enough to have a bit of consideration for others. But, no. It’s all about you, isn’t it? It’s all about your needs.’
She knew this was terrible, unkind, untrue, even, but there was a freedom in letting her fury fly, even at such a vulnerable target.
‘Do you have any idea how much I do for you? And the rest of this family? I cook. I clean. I wash your clothes. So don’t sit there, thumping your feet against the sofa, while I’m trying to earn enough money to feed us all and pay the bills, to buy birthday presents and ice creams.’
And just as quickly as her anger had submerged her, it was gone, carried away on a receding tide.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, reaching for her son, to draw him to her. To apologize. ‘I didn’t mean it.’
But he backed away, tears swimming in his eyes, his face pale and shocked. ‘Why are you always so mean?’ He was shouting. ‘I wish I had a different mum.’
‘You’re right. I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘I’m tired and worried, and sometimes adults shout at children for one thing when they’re angry about something else.’
But Evan shook his head.
‘You’re always angry. You always shout. I think it’s because you hate me. And I hate you too.’
Then he was gone, door slamming, his feet thumping his anger into every step. Upstairs, the floorboards creaked and she could tell he’d taken refuge in his room.
She meant to go up to him, to comfort him, to glue together the tear. But she had a deadline, a million other thoughts in her head, and soon she was lost in her work.
It was only a few hours later, when she had finished her press release and was thinking about what to cook for dinner, that she realized she had forgotten to ask Evan what he had wanted to show her.
24
Now
The summer that started it all was as tar-stickingly hot as this one. The kind of summer you could taste in hot metal air and drifting spores of pollen.
The shop front had been painted for the occasion, posters stuck about the town. A shrewd idea, that’s what it had seemed like. To attract customers to our toys like butterflies to flowers. The shop had been haemorrhaging money for years, but now it was in intensive care. It seemed I lacked Birdie’s flair for business.
The old fancy dress costumes had been bundled into the back room in loose, careless piles together with old bits of furniture and ancient stock. Everything out of sight.
But the shop itself gleamed with the kind of sheen that can’t be bought: hope.
I can still see the wooden stacks of dominoes, the bold beauty of the jack-in-the-boxes, the perfect porcelain faces of the dolls and the stuffed monkeys with their orange and brown fur. The boxes of miniature cars and the bouncing balls and jacks and a dozen different toys we had spent the last of our money on.
I can still hear the sound the banner made as we unfurled it, the jaunty lettering an invitation to all.
GRAND REOPENING AND PUPPET SHOW TODAY
This glorious day was going to change our fortunes. It was going to change everything.
And it did.
25
Monday, 30 July 2018
4 Hillside Crescent – 3.04 p.m.
The envelope was long and white, and it had her name written across it in a hand she knew as well as her own.
Wildeve lifted it to her nose, hoping for a memory of him, but all she could smell was the chemical tinge of new paper.
She slid her finger beneath the seal and eased it open, pressing the sticky residue of glue and saliva to her lips, knowing his mouth had once been there.
Every serving police officer wrote one.
Every serving police officer hid it at the bottom of their locker and tried to forget it existed.
Every se
rving police officer – religious or not – prayed that it would never find its way into the hands of their family.
Wildeve tensed her jaw and a bolt of electricity streaked across her face. She needed more medication, but it affected her ability to drive, the combination of pain relief and anticonvulsants slurring her voice and her vision.
With a fingertip, she traced the outline of her name. The truth she couldn’t bear to share with Simon nudged at her: she didn’t want to read it. This was a love letter that should remain unsent. A poor substitute for a mouth and hands, the warmth and solidity of a body. Scant comfort for when the worst happened.
Killed in the line of duty.
The paper was shaking so much that all the letters seemed to run into one another, and she tried to compose herself, to steady her heart and her hand.
As she began to read, the first lines took her breath away because there he was again, so utterly Adam-like he could have been standing next to her, murmuring in her ear.
Well, this is the ultimate fucker, isn’t it? Let’s hope I didn’t make some stupid mistake, and instead, right this minute I’m being lauded a hero and the Chief Constable is showering you with medals for my outstanding bravery.
If that’s not the case, if I messed up somehow, I’m so sorry. There’s nothing in this world that makes me want to stay in it more than you.
But we both know if you’re reading this, I’ve already gone.
My love, don’t be torturing yourself about whatever it is that’s happened. I hope it was quick but even if it wasn’t, it’s over now. No more pain. I know that won’t be the same for you and I wish, more than anything, I was there to comfort you. But I know my girl is strong. You can – you will – get through this.
Do you remember that night we met? You were shouting at that guy in the bar with the octopus hands. I was off duty, elbowing my way through the crowds to check you were OK, but you didn’t need me. You flashed your warrant card and all that bravado deflated like a popped balloon. He offered to buy you a drink, and that look of scorn on your face – I think I fell in love with you right in that moment.
The Neighbour Page 7
