The Neighbour Read online

  THE

  NEIGHBOUR

  FIONA CUMMINS

  Contents

  Prologue: Saturday, 20 July 1985

  1. Now

  2. Sunday, 29 July 2018

  3. Now

  4. Sunday, 29 July 2018

  5. Now

  6. Sunday, 29 July 2018

  7. Now

  8. Sunday, 29 July 2018

  9. Now

  10. Sunday, 29 July 2018

  11. Sunday, 29 July 2018

  12. Sunday, 29 July 2018

  13. Monday, 30 July 2018

  14. Now

  15. Monday, 30 July 2018

  16. Now

  17. Monday, 30 July 2018

  18. Monday, 30 July 2018

  19. Monday, 30 July 2018

  20. Now

  21. Monday, 30 July 2018

  22. Now

  23. Monday, 30 July 2018

  24. Now

  25. Monday, 30 July 2018

  26. Monday, 30 July 2018

  27. Now

  28. Monday, 30 July 2018

  29. Monday, 30 July 2018

  30. Now

  31. Monday, 30 July 2018

  32. Monday, 30 July 2018

  33. Now

  34. Monday, 30 July 2018

  35. Monday, 30 July 2018

  36. Now

  37. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  38. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  39. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  40. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  41. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  42. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  43. Now

  44. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  45. Now

  46. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  47. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  48. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  49. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  50. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  51. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  52. Now

  53. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  54. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  55. Now

  56. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  57. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  58. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  59. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  60. Now

  61. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  62. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  63. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  64. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  65. Now

  66. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  67. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  68. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  69. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  70. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  71. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  72. Tuesday, 31 July 2018

  73. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  74. Now

  75. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  76. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  77. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  78. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  79. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  80. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  81. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  82. Now

  83. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  84. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  85. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  86. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  87. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  88. Now

  89. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  90. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  91. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  92. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  93. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  94. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  95. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  96. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  97. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  98. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  99. Now

  100. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  101. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  102. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  103. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  104. Wednesday, 1 August 2018

  105. Wednesday, 8 August 2018

  106. Wednesday, 29 August 2018

  107. Wednesday, 29 August 2018

  108. Wednesday, 29 August 2018

  109. Wednesday, 29 August 2018

  110. Now

  Acknowledgements

  For Mum and Dad, with love always

  Abandon all hope, ye who enter here

  – Dante

  PROLOGUE

  Saturday, 20 July 1985

  18 The Avenue – 3 p.m.

  GRAND REOPENING AND PUPPET SHOW TODAY

  At first, the children were laughing.

  The snap of crocodile teeth. A ballerina in a tutu tripping over her feet. The painted cheeks of a policeman blowing out a breath.

  The limbs of the puppets jerked with a peculiar sort of grace, and the Doll & Fancy Dress Emporium echoed with the sound of merry voices and a promise of new beginnings.

  There were two girls and two boys, dropped off by their unsuspecting parents. A handful of years between them. Gap-toothed and radiant with the possibilities of lives yet to be lived. Not knowing that in a few minutes’ time a clock would be set, a countdown, their fates decided in the dark heart of a toy shop on that summer’s afternoon. Four clockwork mice, whirring busily on their wheels until one day they stop moving. Run-down. Dead.

  Not this week or next. Not in ten years from now. But at a distant point in a future they could not yet imagine, when they had put away the games of childhood and were weighted down with the responsibilities of middle age. When the memory of what happened next was buried under faded fancy dress costumes and decades of dust.

  In the mouth of the candy-cane-striped booth positioned at the back of the shop, the puppets swooped and whirled on their strings, and the children clapped and smiled at each other.

  The show was almost at its end when the last puppet appeared. The grand finale. But there was no cheer of encouragement, no high, excited voices. Instead, the children fell silent and watchful.

  This puppet was not carved from sycamore like the others. Its body was a loose formation of silk and lace scraps from a Victorian mourning costume, hemmed with black feathers, all glossy iridescence. When its strings were manipulated, it seemed to fly.

  But this did not interest the children. They were staring at the puppet’s head. Not a face made shiny with beeswax or carved into a leer or with ruddy cheeks, but something much darker than that.

  The decapitated head of a carrion crow.

  Its eyes were fixed open, two brown buttons pressed into a headdress of feathers, the tip of its beak like the curve of a hook. A glimpse of ragged edges where it had been torn from its body.

  Two of the children exchanged glances. A nervous giggle slipped from another. The dolls in their boxes high up on the shelves looked on, glee in their painted faces. The tin soldiers seemed to stand up straighter. The whole shop paused to draw in breath.

  And so no one noticed a small girl – the youngest of the group – back away from the puppet theatre with its dead crow’s head and limp feathers, stumbling over her best shoes, finding her way to a storeroom that should have been locked.

  No one saw her scramble between the old boxes and piles of dust sheets, tears wetting her face, or stopped her from squeezing through rails of fraying costumes, spider webs catching in her hair, until she found herself crouching behind a deep, wooden chest, curiosity driving her to open it.

  No one noticed her at all.

  Until the screaming began.

  1

  Now

  Every killing has a taste of its own. I expect you didn’t know that.

  Young women are sweetened with hope, less astringent than their older selves, who reek of experience, bitter as sorrel leaves.

  The boys – yes, they remain boys un
til they have earned the right to be called men – are seasoned with bravado, but lack piquancy. As the life ebbs from them, they taste of metal and shyness and tears.

  The older generation are over-salted with loss and grief. They have absorbed the hurts of lives that have been lived, storm-battered but surviving. They do not accept death. They fight against the injustice of a thief like me.

  As their airways constrict, as each pull of breath grows ragged and reluctant, their faces are sketched with panic, the dusty tapestries of their histories unfurling as the darkness takes hold. Their flavourings are persistence and regret.

  I am telling you this now because I still possess the faintest of hopes that somewhere you can hear me as I hear the police sirens lacerating the silence. The sound makes my teeth itch, like a blade being honed on a steel.

  As the reckoning approaches, I suppose there is a need to unburden myself, to seek absolution for the sins I have committed. I am not sorry for what I have done. The remorse I feel is not for the lives I have taken, but for what each act of murder has cost me.

  The power to take a life is a gift not many possess. I have always understood this. I do not have many talents and I am grateful for it.

  But the world is not so forgiving.

  Some will call me a monster, deserving of a death sentence myself. It is fair, I suppose. But I am not a monster. I have never been a monster.

  I am a keeper of secrets.

  And I am not alone.

  The greengrocer’s boy stuffing shiny apples into paper bags and pound coins into his pockets; the piano teacher who makes house calls, sneaking glimpses at his pupils’ bare knees; the exhausted mother who fantasizes about shoving the pram she is pushing into oncoming traffic; the families who move in – and out of – The Avenue, as ceaseless as time.

  We all hide secrets, dark and ugly.

  You.

  Me.

  And every one of us on this dirt-filled earth.

  This is the last time I will feel the sun on my face or hear the greetings of the blackbirds or inhale the scent of damask roses. Perhaps I deserve to spend the rest of my days in a cage, condemned to a life without freedom, as I have condemned others. Hush, now. Listen. Can you hear, as I do, the thunder of the funeral drums?

  The police are almost upon me.

  And so I’ll begin. Because the time has come to finish it. Because the only way to start this story is at its end.

  2

  Sunday, 29 July 2018

  The Avenue – 3.31 p.m.

  The removal van packed with the furniture and hopes of the Lockwood family brushed against the rhododendron bushes that surrounded The Avenue, breaking off one of the blooms.

  That flower floated to the pavement, petals torn and mangled. The van driver, intent on finding the right house, did not notice the damage he had caused. Neither did the Lockwoods.

  As heat trembled the air around them, this family had no idea of how they would come to pray that 25 The Avenue had remained a blurry photograph on the estate agent’s website, or that by the end of the summer, their lives would be as ruined as the stem bleeding sap onto the concrete.

  Music drifted across the sun-withered afternoon, touching leaves so dry the swell of notes might shake them free, before floating through the open windows of several nearby houses.

  Those houses, grouped like guardians in this modest street on the edge of a small town near the Essex coast, had been standing there for many years and borne witness to it all.

  From behind the curtains of one of those houses, someone watched the Lockwood family crawl into the driveway behind the moving truck, snap off the radio and emerge from the silver shell of their car, unfolding legs and shaking out arms cramped by hours of travel.

  An older woman, attractive, wearing crumpled linen trousers, shielded her eyes, and squeezed the hand of a man, who did not squeeze it back. A boy, eight or nine, bounced around, tugging at his mother’s arm. A teenage girl, languid-limbed and insouciant, brushed her thumb across the screen of her mobile phone and did not look up at the house at all.

  The someone watched this family, shiny with promise, and wondered which of them would break first. Because nobody came to The Avenue without death seeping through the gaps in their walls.

  Some new families handled the proximity of murder better than others. Two or three had left within weeks, wearing the financial pain of a quick sale. But which details of the killings had the estate agent shared with the latest arrivals? How much should be shared, and when?

  Before these questions could be answered, the decision was made.

  A wail first. High-pitched. Insistent. Joined by another, and another, rising in rhythm and intensity. A concerto; the solo instruments of police sirens, a rolling bass line of distant traffic and the alto voices of the birds that nestled in this tree-lined avenue, and the woods beyond.

  The woods beyond.

  The neighbour glanced down the street to the archway of branches and brambles that crowned one of five public entrances to Blatches Woods. Thirty-seven acres of greenery tucked into this pocket of suburbia, criss-crossed with footpaths and bridleways. A place to get lost in. Thirty-seven acres that had come to dominate the newspaper headlines and breakfast tables; that had lowered property prices; that had cast a pall across this most ordinary of places.

  The word rolled around the neighbour’s mouth. Pall. A cloth used for spreading over a coffin.

  The Avenue filled with noise and blue light as the police cars – two, three, four of them – swerved into the kerb in front of the footpath that led to the south-east corner of the woodland. A van – FORENSIC SERVICES imprinted across its side – followed a minute later.

  Officers – some uniformed, some not – gathered in a knot, waiting for the white suits to ready themselves. One – his hand on the collar of a dog – was being sick. Even from behind the safety of the window, their sense of urgency was palpable. A need to cut through the decaying strings of vines that crept across the carpet moss and bracken, to trample deeper into the dense wall of trees, to interrogate the dog-walker or jogger or whoever had found it this time.

  From downstairs, the click of the back door and the sounds of the kettle being filled. A dozen butterflies took flight in the neighbour’s stomach. A glance at the clock. Around fifteen minutes before the door-knockings and questions would begin again.

  The Lockwoods were watching this scene unfold with the frozen expressions of comic-book characters: eyes widened; mouths slack and loose; splayed fingers pressed to cheeks. Their bodies were angled towards the police cars in the way that plants are pulled towards the sun. Not a flicker of movement between them, mesmerized by the sight of Mrs Lockwood’s favourite television crime dramas seemingly brought to life opposite their new home, a bruise on the surface of their fresh start.

  All except the girl, who was taking photographs with her phone.

  Three hours later, when the removal men had left and the sun was dipping below the horizon, but the air still ripe with heat, they brought out the body.

  A single-use sheet covered the fifth victim’s face, but the detective inspector on the scene – white-faced and trembling – was more concerned with accelerated decomposition in the hot weather than contaminants, and the cadaver was hurried into the mortuary van.

  There was no wind to lift the sheet and expose this unfortunate soul to the journalists and photographers, the TV anchors and camera crews who filled The Avenue with their noise and coffee cups and cars that mounted the pavements at awkward angles. But there was no need.

  Everybody knew what lay beneath because it was always the same.

  A body, fully clothed. A painted face, subtle blush across the cheekbones; lips berry-coloured; lashes lengthened, dark and thick; a light foundation to disguise pallor mortis. As if the victim was not dead, but waiting to be played with, to be kissed back to life by a parent, a lover, a child.

  Shoes removed. Hair brushed. Each eye gouged from its bloodied socket w
ith a scalpel and replaced with a miniature glass replica.

  The handiwork of a killer the newspapers had named the Doll Maker.

  And the face at the window knew who that killer was.

  3

  Now

  Four little monkeys jumping on the bed, one fell off and bumped its head. Mummy called the doctor and the doctor said, ‘No more monkeys jumping on the bed.’

  Four of them moved into 25 The Avenue on that summer’s afternoon, but when the end came, only three of them moved out. I could hear the boy crying as they loaded up the car, a knife-edge I-want-my-mother kind of cry, but I would not pry. I thought about coming out to say goodbye, to wish them well on the next chapter of life’s journey, but what business of it was mine? Enough damage had been done.

  Damage. When you say it aloud, there’s a melody to it, a teasing introduction that finishes on a hard, aggressive note. We all damage others. A thoughtless word. A deliberate exclusion. A knife in the back. But you, of all people, understand that.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. If there’s one lesson I’ve learned, it’s that getting ahead of oneself is always a mistake. Pride comes before a fall. Don’t sell the skin until you’ve caught the bear.

  So where were we? That’s right. The Lockwoods. Garrick. Aster. And young Evan. But it was Olivia Lockwood who interested me. The mother at the heart of the family.

  Except, it turns out, she wasn’t its heart at all, but an ugly tumour that needed cutting out.

  4

  Sunday, 29 July 2018

  25 The Avenue – 7.36 p.m.

  ‘I still can’t believe how cheap this place was.’

  Garrick Lockwood ran his hand along the oak bannister, admiring its sturdiness. His architect’s eye ignored the damp patches, the hallway that felt too small, the cheap laminate floorboards that ran the length of the house. All he could see was potential.

  His wife Olivia, who was in the kitchen, stopped rummaging in a cardboard box for glasses and the bottle of Prosecco she had bought for the occasion. ‘Are you being serious?’

  ‘Deadly.’

  It was an unfortunate turn of phrase.

  ‘That’s not funny, Garrick.’

  He chuckled, a low rumble of amusement. ‘I wasn’t trying to be funny. But it’s true. By the time I’ve finished here, it’s going to be stunning. They’ll be queuing up to take it off our hands.’