‘We’re all so sorry about Adam.’
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
‘I hate to ask, but did he say anything to you about where he was going? Anything at all?’ A gentler tone. ‘Was anything going on at home that I need to know about?’
Tears filled her eyes, but they did not fall. She had replayed their last conversation countless times. ‘Nothing.’
A sharp, disappointed nod. Then kindly, but direct. ‘Would you – shouldn’t you – why don’t you take some leave?’
Wildeve pictured their home, its lonely rooms filled with memories of her husband. The pain in her head, and her heart.
‘I can’t,’ she said.
Mac studied her. His eyes were grey and red-rimmed, and there was dried egg yolk on his tie. But appearances were deceptive. He was sharper than the blade of a carving knife.
‘The Chief wants to assign you a family liaison officer.’
‘No.’ She was shaking her head. ‘I don’t want one.’
‘You think you can handle this, but you’re in shock, Wildeve.’ His voice was soft with sympathy. ‘And the crash is going to come.’
She couldn’t say it, couldn’t articulate the words. Some would think her unfeeling, uncaring even, but that wasn’t it at all. Not everyone would understand. She didn’t expect them to. But work filled up the hollows of her heart and mind. Stopped her from imagining the horror of his last moments. A distraction from the hole blown into her life. And a way to make his killer pay. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘In which case, I want you to have a poke around. See if you can unravel what Adam was up to. I know it’s a lot to ask but . . .’ He didn’t need to finish. It made sense. She knew her husband better than anyone. ‘The minute – and I mean, the minute – it gets too much, you tell me,’ he said. ‘Promise me.’
‘I promise.’
‘And I know you’re not going to like this, but I want you to take French with you.’
Oh, Christ on a stick. The guy’s a grade-A prick.
Adam’s verdict was so spot-on that she almost turned around to check if he was standing behind her. French was holding court on the other side of the room, his volume control turned so high she could pick out full sentences. ‘He’s a dick.’
‘But he’s a clever dick,’ said Mac with a grin.
A laugh slipped from Wildeve. A couple of officers looked over. She glared back, defiant. Adam would have enjoyed the joke too. Mac’s expression grew serious again.
‘Do your best, Wildeve,’ he said. ‘Get inside his head. Retrace his steps. Find out what he was doing when he died.’ His voice was quiet. ‘Adam was a damn hero every day in this job. Let’s make sure he dies one too.’
27
Now
Human lives are defined by secrets.
All those truths that stay hidden because we’re trying to protect ourselves or others. Because we don’t wish to seem stupid or vulnerable, cruel or weak. Because we’re seeking answers to questions we’re not yet ready to share.
Olivia Lockwood kept secrets. I know this because she told me. She’d had a lover, a younger man, and was considering leaving her husband. Garrick Lockwood kept secrets. He didn’t know if he wanted to stay married to his cheating wife. Detective Inspector Adam Stanton kept secrets too. He loved you, and he had never forgotten you, but he hadn’t told that police officer wife of his – he hadn’t told anyone – that he was trying to find you.
In the last few months, I have learned that our secrets are never as well hidden as we think they are. A freeze-framed expression. A forgotten newspaper photograph. A bloody secret buried beneath layers and layers of paint.
When the police hunt a killer, it is always the secrets they should seek out first.
Because – and remember this, it’s as important as life and death – the camera never lies.
28
Monday, 30 July 2018
26 The Avenue – 7.28 p.m.
The sky was a painting. Streaks of tangerine and gold. An underwash of rose. Yet it wasn’t the colours that interested him, but the clouds.
Fletcher Parnell kept a spiral-bound notebook and fountain pen in the pocket of his jeans for occasions such as this. He’d run up the stairs as soon as he’d heard the low thrum of the plane’s engine, hoping for a distrail, at the very least.
But he had not expected this.
A fallstreak hole.
He turned to a clean page in his book. Dated it. Noted its precise location. Scratched the words onto the lines.
Cavum. Layers of altocumulus. Iridescence.
He took a photograph on his phone and wished he hadn’t left his camera at work. He flipped back through the pages, checking through meticulously kept records.
Fallstreak holes were rare. The last time he’d seen this natural phenomenon was nine years ago. Before all that silliness. A pair of them, an imprint against the sky in the shape of lungs.
Fletcher blinked up at the sunset, mesmerized. A gap punched through cloud droplets which had frozen into ice crystals, as if the sky’s mouth had opened and was trying to speak.
He laughed at himself, not usually given to flights of fancy.
Dessie would be home soon. He should make a start on dinner. She’d be tired after a day of filming, and grouchy. She despised the dismissive way that some actors treated her, viewing her as the hired help. Once, she’d deliberately over-bronzed a Hollywood name because he’d been so rude. Never piss off the make-up artist. She had laughed when she’d said it, but Fletcher knew she’d meant it. They’d only lived together for a few months, but he didn’t like pissing her off either. Made her unpredictable. But if he cooked dinner, she’d soften, and when it came to bedtime she might not push him away.
All these thoughts were crowding his head, and he could almost smell the garlic and the tomatoes he would roast, the egginess of fresh pasta, a peppery undertone of basil leaves.
And he was turning to go, he honestly was.
But the sun fell upon the cylinder of his telescope, warming up the brass and lighting the fire within him, and the pull of the sky became too much.
As the glowing sphere descended towards the horizon, and the first, faint stars appeared, Fletcher lost himself in the wonder of the moment, the passing of day into night, the relentless cycle of time. It made him feel less than. An ant.
All around him was the sliding darkness of twilight. As the night deepened, a tattered skein of stars was thrown across the sky. He began to catalogue the constellations, muttering the names over and over again.
But it could not drown out the knocking at the back of his head. The small, secret part that whispered to him, that offered up its seductions, nudging at him like a dog that demands to be fed.
Because if he was to aim his telescope downwards and to the left, the gentlest of adjustments, he would have a window into number twenty-five, and the family who had moved in yesterday.
Specifically, the mother and the girl.
But he mustn’t.
With a jerk, he directed his finderscope skywards until his vision was filled by a darkening swathe of fabric, pricked by a thousand silver pins.
And he began to mutter again, repeating the words over and over.
But this time he was not glorifying the stars and the shapes that they made. Even their cold beauty was not enough to distract him.
If Dessie had come home at that moment, had climbed the stairs to rinse out her make-up brushes and shrug off her work clothes, if she had paused outside the door and caught the murmur of Fletcher’s voice, she would have been puzzled by the incantation falling from his lips.
I mustn’t. I mustn’t. I mustn’t.
29
Monday, 30 July 2018
25 The Avenue – 7.30 p.m.
Aster Lockwood stretched out a leg and admired its shape, the colour of her lightly toasted skin and the still-wet red nail polish.
She’d
seen some boys hanging about the street earlier in the day. Too far away to work out if they were worth her time or not, but it always paid to be prepared.
Her music stopped. Fucking Wi-Fi. The crap signal was another to reason to hate this house. She’d turned up the music to drown out her pain-in-the-arse brother, but now he was crying again.
Aster swung her legs over the bed, careful not to smudge her toes, and walked into the hallway. Mum was cooking, the smell of frying onions drifting upstairs. She’d better not be doing burgers for tea. She’d refuse to eat them if she was. All that saturated fat.
She opened Evan’s door without knocking, went straight for the jugular.
‘Be quiet, will you? I’m trying to think.’
She braced herself for an insult in return. Evan always gave as good as he got. Her money was on ‘You’re too stupid to think’, and she was formulating her response when her younger brother lifted his tear-stained face from his pillow.
‘Sorry.’
His voice was small and tight, and the shell that Aster had constructed around herself developed a hairline crack.
She flopped down on the edge of his bed. ‘What’s up?’
‘Mum.’ His tone was sulky.
‘Oh God, what’s she done now?’ Aster inspected her toenails, wondering if they were dry yet. She might go for a walk in a bit, on the off-chance she would bump into those boys.
‘Shouted. Told me I’m selfish.’
Aster smoothed back his fringe. His face was hot and clammy and he was cuddling his old bear. He didn’t seem nine, curled up on his bed, but a much younger version of himself, a throwback to a time when she’d been younger too, and interested in him. ‘Sounds like Mum.’
‘I wanted to ask her something, but she was too busy with her laptop and wouldn’t even listen.’ Evan had torn out pictures of his favourite footballers from magazines and stuck them on the wall with Blu Tack. The sight of them pulled at her in a way she didn’t expect.
‘Tell me if you want,’ she said, surprised by an impulse to protect her brother. Evan checked to see if she was mocking him. Aster smiled to show she meant it.
From under his pillow, he pulled out the plastic rectangle he had found in the treehouse. ‘Do you know what this is?’
Aster laughed. ‘Bloody hell, where did you get that from? The Dark Ages?’
Evan frowned, and tried to snatch it back from his sister.
‘Calm down,’ she said, holding it above her head. ‘Let me have a closer look.’
‘Give it back.’
‘Wait a sec.’
‘GIVE IT BACK.’ Tears welled in Evan’s eyes.
‘I was just looking,’ she said. ‘And I wasn’t laughing at you, I promise.’ She nudged him, trying to make him smile. ‘It’s a cassette, dummy.’
‘What’s a cassette?’
‘You know, a tape. Matthew’s parents have got a few. Old people used to store music on them.’
‘Can I listen to it?’
‘Not unless you’ve got a tape player.’
Evan’s face fell. ‘I haven’t.’
Aster shrugged. ‘Where’d you find it?’
‘In the treehouse. Look –’ Evan showed his sister the writing on the cassette label – ‘what do you think it means?’
She pored over it. ‘Probably someone messing around.’
‘I want to listen,’ he said again. ‘Can you help me find a player, Aster? Please.’ His fingers clutched her arm. ‘Please.’
Aster took in the damp tracks running down his cheeks, the hope in his reddened eyes. He rarely asked her for anything. ‘I’ll do my best,’ she said, already knowing it was a promise she had no idea how to keep.
Back in her bedroom, Aster gazed down on the street below. Mum had called her for dinner ages ago, but she’d pretended not to hear, and her mother hadn’t bothered to fetch her.
It was darker now and the streetlamps were glowing pink lozenges in the summer evening. She leaned out of her window, breathing in floral air underscored by the stink of muck-spreading from the fields beyond. A width of crime scene tape cordoned off the entrance to the woods, rippling in the kiss of the breeze.
In the house opposite, a shape moved behind the curtains. Aster stilled. The shape stilled too. The teenager couldn’t tell how she knew this, but some instinct whispered that the shape – broad-shouldered, tall, a man – was studying her across the valley of the street.
A sort of trembling excitement filled her.
Aster found herself at a crossroads in her young life. She could turn her back on the shape, switch off her bedside lamp and go downstairs, apologize for ignoring her mother and seek comfort in the familiar patterns, the argument of family life.
Or she could do what she was about to do.
Aster’s fingertips closed around the hem of her T-shirt and slowly, deliberately, she pulled it over her head, taking her own sweet time.
A buzzing filled her head, more intoxicating than the vodka Matthew had smuggled into her best friend’s birthday party the weekend before Aster and her family had moved. The nerve-endings in her skin tingled, the tiny hairs on her arms raised and alert with the promise of the unknown.
The girl stood in the half-darkness, dressed only in denim shorts and a pale grey cotton bra. She flicked her gaze to the window opposite.
The shape was still watching.
Reaching behind her back, Aster felt for the hooks and unclasped them, let the flimsy slip of fabric drop to the floor.
She stretched, a purposefully languid movement, arms flung skywards, revelling in the power of being sixteen and the slow-birthing knowledge of her desirability. Of sharing her most secret self with a stranger.
The girl wrapped herself in the heat of the summer evening, enjoying the scent of her own skin, the sense of teetering on the edge of the rest of her life, filled with all the possibilities that lay before her, choices waiting to be picked like plump and shiny fruits.
The shape raised a hand.
Who knows what might have happened next? Aster had flirted with pressing herself against the cool glass of her window, of stepping out of her shorts, of walking boldly across the road and knocking on his door.
But her teenage fantasies were interrupted by a tapping on her bedroom door.
‘Aster, it’s Mum.’ A pause. ‘Can I come in?’
Aster crossed one arm across her breasts, fumbling for her T-shirt, embarrassment staining her cheeks.
‘Wait a sec.’
Decent but still flustered, she opened the door and spoke to her mother through the crack.
‘What is it?’
‘You haven’t eaten, love. Come down for a bit. There’s salad.’
When it came to debating this with her mother or just having dinner, Aster considered eating the lesser of two evils.
‘I’ll be down in a minute.’
‘Aster . . .’
‘I will, OK?’ She didn’t mean to sound impatient but her mother was so irritating. She waited for her to leave, desperate to see if he was still watching. As soon as she heard footsteps on their way downstairs, Aster flew back to the window.
The curtains were drawn, the shape gone. Disappointment settled on her like ash.
30
Now
The first child through the door was blonde and uncertain. She clutched her mother’s hand, her body half turned, a thumb plugging her mouth.
You welcomed her with an understated wave and drew her into the shop with a lollipop from the jar. Her eyes were greedy, gorging on the new toys lining the shelves. She reached for an expensive doll with sticky fingers and I itched to slap her hand away.
Her mother gave her a gentle push and she chose a place to sit at the front of the shop, cross-legged and patient. ‘This is Tallie, she’s five.’
‘Ten minutes.’ I was still smiling then. ‘We’ll wait for the others to arrive.’
The bell above the door rang out. A boy a few years older was next. He was whistling
when he walked in, alone and unhurried. He sat a little distance from Tallie, jiggling a string bag of marbles he had plucked from the tub by the entrance. They clanked together. The sound made my teeth hurt, like drawing nails down a chalkboard.
On the street outside, the Saturday shoppers were going about their business. I had half expected a queue, worried that the shop would be overrun and we would sell out of toys, but not this. Never this.
A breeze caught the banner – GRAND REOPENING AND PUPPET SHOW TODAY – strung across the front, and it gave an embarrassed shudder.
Another two children arrived at the same time. A girl and a boy. Then a lad on his own. He took one look inside the shop and walked out again. The trickle did not swell into a deluge.
The final two arrivals – step-brothers, by the sound of things – had a petty argument at the door and both of them left.
So that was it. Two boys and two girls. The culmination of weeks and weeks of preparation. All that expense.
The small knot of children did not know each other. Strangers flung together by fate. They sat on the floor, watching me, and my insides squirmed. Times were different then. Their parents had left them in good faith. Half an hour’s guilt-free shopping time. Time for a pint, a Campari and soda.
The photographer was even more uncomfortable than I was. ‘I’m sure it will pick up soon,’ he said, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye. He fired off a couple of shots, wrote down their names for the picture caption that would appear in next week’s newspaper and left, relieved to escape the darkening atmosphere. In his hurry, he left the scrap of paper with their names by the till.
I wanted to shut up the shop and crawl away, to lick my wounds in a quiet corner.
But the show must always go on.
And out the puppets came.
31
Monday, 30 July 2018
25 The Avenue – 8.40 p.m.
The back of the house was lit up like a stage. An audience might have observed the silhouette of Garrick Lockwood as he pored over building plans on the dining-room table, a glass of wine in hand, while in the sitting room, Olivia was bent over her laptop, calculating how much she would need to earn next month.
The Neighbour Page 9
