The Family Next Door Read online

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  FIONA CUMMINS

  Rattle

  The Collector

  FIONA CUMMINS

  The Family Next Door

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  1

  2

  3

  4

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  Teaser chapter

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PINNACLE BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2020 Fiona Cummins

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  PINNACLE BOOKS and the Pinnacle logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-0-7860-4623-2

  First Pinnacle paperback printing: February 2020

  Electronic edition:

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-4624-9 (e-book)

  ISBN-10: 0-7860-4624-4 (e-book)

  Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

  —DANTE

  PROLOGUE

  Saturday 20th July 1985, 3:00 P.M.

  18 The Avenue

  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 toyshop 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 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 one another.

  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, its beak like the curve of a hook. A glimpse of ragged edges where the head 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 theater 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 racks of fraying costumes, spiderwebs 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 until 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 oversalted 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 figh t 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 flavorings 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 29th July 2018, 3:31 P.M.

  The Avenue

  The moving 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.

  But as heat trembled in 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 real estate agent’s website, and no idea that by the end of the summer, their lives would be as scarred 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, and 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.

  That 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 to 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 real 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 neighbor 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, crisscrossed 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 neighbor’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 curb in front of the footpath that led to the southeast 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 neighbor’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 toward the police cars in the way that plants are pulled toward the sun. Not a flicker of movement between them, mesmerized by the sight of Mrs. Lockwood’s favorite 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 moving men had left and the sun was dipping below the horizon, but the air was 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 parked 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-colored; lashes lengthened, dark and thick; a light foundation to disguise pallor mortis. As if the victim were 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 with 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

  Four little monkeys jumping on the bed,

  one fell off and bumped its head.

  Mummy ca lled the doctor and the doctor said,

  “No more monkeys jumping on the bed.”

  Now

  Four of them moved into 25 The Avenue on that summer’s afternoon, but when the end came, only three of them left. 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 good-bye, 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 tumor that needed cutting out.

  4

  Sunday 29th July 2018, 7:36 P.M.

  25 The Avenue

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

  Garrick Lockwood ran his hand along the oak banister, 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?”