Fullepub 
Chapter Eighteen
EIGHTEEN
In the corners of the room, bodies formed from gathering shadows, faceless, shifting, approaching and receding, dissipating back to nothingness. Irene lay awake, listening to her breath come short and ragged in her chest, the sound of blood thick in her ears, dread weighing on her, pressing her body down into the bed.
Something had woken her. A fox in the churchyard? Or some drunkard out in the lane, shouting at nothing, or—there! No, there it was again, a sound. A creak on the stair? Irene held her breath, too afraid to reach over and turn on the light. A few seconds passed, a few more. Perhaps she had imagined it? Perhaps she had been dreaming? She exhaled, slowly, turning onto her side. There! Again! A tread. No doubt about it, and not—thankfully—on her stairs, but next door. She knew the sound well; she’d listened to Angela go up and down those stairs at all hours for years.
Was it an echo she was hearing, of Angela’s footsteps? Was this a normal response to grief, just like her visions of William, coming whistling along the lane in the evenings or standing over by the window when she woke, always on the point of turning, always on the point of saying, Fancy a cuppa, Reenie?
Around the edges of her vision, something moved; Irene gripped the bedcover so tightly her fingers ached.
How would Angela appear to her, Irene wondered, if she came? Would she be herself, always a little jittery, her knee forever bouncing as she sat, one skinny leg crossed over the other, chatting about the book she’d just finished, her hands always working away at something, rolling a cigarette or pulling at a thread from her linen shirt? Would she be herself, or would she be something else, would she come crooked, her neck broken, her sweet wine breath mingling with rot?
Then—there was no doubt about this now—Irene heard someone walk along the corridor on the other side of the partition wall. A soft tread, not like Angela’s drunken shuffle, and not some muffled, indistinct, imagined noise, but footsteps. Careful and unmistakable.
There was someone next door, and it was not a ghost. It was an intruder. More than most things, Irene dreaded an intruder. She dreaded the moment at which the intruder would realize that there was someone home, a witness they would have to deal with. She dreaded the moment of reckoning, the moment at which she, the frail pensioner alone in bed, would come to understand the sort of intruder this was: an opportunist, out to snatch a wallet or a laptop computer, or something else. Someone in search of a plaything. Those terrible, pitiful stories you heard, of old ladies beaten, assaulted, eyes blackened, nightdresses soiled.
There, again! Another noise, someone moving back and forth, perhaps, along the corridor. Looking for something? Myerson, Irene thought. The man who’d made Angela cry. The man who’d lied about having ever been there at all. She’d not liked the look of him at all, not liked the way his eyes slid over her, underestimating her all the while. Stupid old fool, he’d thought. She could almost hear him muttering. Nosy old cow.
Well. She might as well fulfill her curtain-twitching destiny, then, mightn’t she? She felt in the darkness for the light switch and clicked on the lamp, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the light. Maneuvering herself into a sitting position, she reached for her spectacles. Her mobile phone, inevitably, was not next to her bed. The blasted phone was never where she needed it to be; no matter where she was or what she was doing, it was always in another room.
She crept down the stairs, feeling her way along the stairwell in the dark, not wanting to attract attention by turning on the downstairs lights. Stupid, she muttered to herself. Blundering around in the darkness—never mind twisting an ankle, you’ll break a hip.
As Irene reached the last step, as carefully she tested with one slippered foot that she had quite definitely reached the ground floor, she heard from next door a louder sound, a sudden whump! as though someone had stumbled, and she cried out, “Who is that? I can hear you. I’m calling the police! The police are coming!” She sounded laughably indignant, even to her own ears. “Do you hear me?”
Silence answered.
Two police officers, one young, stocky, fresh-faced, the other older, a woman in her thirties, weary-looking, stood outside Angela’s house, hands on hips. “The door’s locked,” the stocky one told Irene. He tried the door handle again, just to show her. “No sign of anyone tampering with it. No sign of any damage to the windows.” He shrugged, apologetic. “There’s no sign of a break-in.”
“There’s someone in there,” Irene, shuffling over to join the police officers, insisted. “I heard them. I heard them walking around.”
“And you say the house is empty? You’re sure it hasn’t been rented out?”
“No, it’s definitely empty, they haven’t even finished clearing it, and the thing is, there was a man here today, and he lied about the fact he’d been here before, and I just . . . I just . . .”
The woman pursed her lips. “So, someone’s been hanging around the property, then?”
“Well . . . no, that’s not what I’m saying, but a woman died here. A couple of months ago, a woman died, and you . . . not you, but the police, said it was an accident, only I’m not sure that’s right, because now the son’s died, and doesn’t that seem strange to you?”
The woman blinked, slowly. “Sorry,” she said, “you’re saying there have been two suspicious deaths at the property?”
“No, no, only one, the son died somewhere else. . . . I just . . . I’m not some time waster,” Irene said. “But there’s someone next door, and . . . frankly, I’m frightened.”
The stocky one nodded. “Right you are,” he said, giving Irene a smile. He raised his fist and thumped it firmly against the door. They all waited. He thumped again. And then a light came on.
Irene almost fell over the policewoman in her haste to back away from the door. “There is someone there!” she cried, at once terrified and triumphant. A few moments later, the door swung open, and there stood Carla, her expression thunderous.
Later, after they’d sorted everything out with the police, after Carla had explained who she was and how she’d every right to be there, she accepted Irene’s offer of a three a.m. cup of tea. “You shouldn’t be crashing around in there,” Irene said to her, aggrieved. “Not in the middle of the night.”
“With respect, Irene . . .” As Carla accepted a mug of tea she raised her chin a little, so that she was looking down the bridge of her nose as she spoke. “I can go there whenever I want. It’s my house. I mean, it will be. So I will go there whenever it suits me.”
“But—”
“I’m sorry I disturbed you,” Carla went on, her tone betraying not one iota of contrition, “but I’ve been sleeping badly, if at all, of late, and so sometimes instead of lying in bed staring at the ceiling, I get up and I get on with things, whether that be correspondence, or cleaning, or in this case coming here to look for something I mislaid earlier—”
“What?” Irene snapped, infuriated by Carla’s manner, by her blithe disregard for Irene’s peace of mind. “What on earth did you need so urgently at two o’clock in the morning?”
“None of your business!” Carla slammed her mug down on the kitchen counter, spilling tea onto the floor. “Sorry,” she said, and she reached for a sheet of kitchen towel, crouched down to mop up the spill. “God!” She stayed down there, crouched over, her arms hanging loose at her sides, her face pressed against her knees. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I’m sorry.”
Irene reached out a hand, placed it gently on Carla’s shoulder. “It’s all right,” she said, taken aback, a little, by this display of weakness. “Come on, up you come.”
Carla stood. She was crying—not loudly, or demonstratively, but in a quiet, dignified, Carla sort of way—tears sliding elegantly down her cheeks, dripping from her jawline onto the collar of her crisp white shirt. She closed her eyes and pressed the heels of her hands against her cheekbones.
“Come on now,” Irene said gently, coaxing her, as though she were an animal, or a small child. “Take your tea, there, that’s right,” she said, and she led Carla from the kitchen to the living room, where they sat, side by side, on the sofa.
“I had some things,” Carla said after a while, “in a bag. Some clothes and a couple of jewelry boxes. I had them with me when I came here today—I mean, yesterday—whenever it was. I’m sure I did.”
“And now you can’t find them?”
Carla nodded.
“They were . . . valuable?”
Carla shrugged. “Not terribly. I don’t know . . . my mother’s engagement ring, that’s probably worth a bit, but the medal, a Saint Christopher . . . It belonged to my son.”
“Oh, Carla.”
“I can’t lose it, I can’t, we bought it for his christening, we had it engraved. . . .” She shook her head, blinking away tears. “He never wore it, of course, he was too little, but he loved to look at it, to get it out of the box, he wanted to play with it, you know how kids are. But I always said that he couldn’t keep hold of it, that it was precious, that he had to put it away, and that I would look after it for him, I would keep it safe for him. . . . I promised to keep it safe for him, and I did, for all this time, and now—” She broke off, turning her face away.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Irene said. “But why bring it to the house—were you on your way somewhere? Did you stop off anywhere, perhaps? A shop, perhaps you set them down . . . ?”
“No, no. I didn’t go anywhere else. I was just . . . I wanted them with me, those things. I wanted them with me. . . .” She turned her head away.
“You wanted them with you?” Irene didn’t understand.
“I was . . . I was in despair,” Carla said. She turned back and their eyes met.
Irene’s hand flew to her mouth. She understood now. “Oh, Carla,” she said. “Oh no.”
Carla shook her head again. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters. Of course it does.” Irene rested her hand gently on top of Carla’s. “Your son, and then your sister and Daniel, so close together—it feels like too much to bear.”
Carla smiled, withdrawing her hand, wiping the tears from her cheeks. “We’ve not had much luck,” she said.
“You’re grieving,” Irene said. “You can’t think straight when you’re grieving. I was the same when I lost my husband, I thought about it. Putting an end to it. There didn’t seem much point in going on, just me, you know, no one else. Your sister pulled me out of it, you know. She just kept coming round, bringing those little pastries she liked, the almond ones, Swedish? Danish, that’s it, or sometimes some soup, or just coffee, whatever, and she’d be chattering away, about what she was reading, you know, that sort of thing. She saved my life, Angie did.” Carla’s face seemed to darken; she turned her head away. “I know that things weren’t always good between you and her, but she loved you,” Irene said. “And . . . well, I know you loved Daniel, didn’t you, he meant a great deal—”
Carla got to her feet. “You need to go back to bed,” she said briskly, carrying her mug back to the kitchen. “I’ve kept you up.”
“Well, I don’t sleep terribly well anyway,” Irene said. “It’s all right, if you’d like to rest here, if—”
“Oh, no,” Carla said, as though the idea were abhorrent. She was back from the kitchen, all trace of emotion wiped from her face. She stood in the doorway, back straight, chin tilted toward the ceiling moldings, her mouth a line. “Don’t get up, Irene, please,” she said. “Thank you for the tea. And I’m sorry about the disturbance, I’ll . . . I’ll be going home now, so I won’t bother you again.”
“Carla, I . . .” Irene paused. She wanted to say something reassuring, something hopeful, something conciliatory. She couldn’t think of a single thing. Instead, she asked: “You will be all right, won’t you?”
For a moment, Carla appeared not to understand that question, and then she blushed. “Oh, God. Yes, of course. You don’t have to worry about that. I’m not sure I ever would have gone through with it. The imagining of it is one thing, isn’t it, and then the reality . . .” She tailed off. “I brought the dog’s lead,” she said. Irene shuddered, her skin crawling from her tailbone to the nape of her neck, at the thought of it, of another body next door, waiting, undiscovered, behind those paper-thin walls.
“Not my dog, of course,” Carla was saying, “I don’t have one. My ex-husband did, though, and I think that somewhere in my subconscious I was ensuring that I wouldn’t go through with it.” She smiled, a strange, private smile. “I think I must have known that I would look at the lead and I would think of his little dog, I would think of how much he loved the dog, and of how much he loved me, and that would pull me back.” She shrugged, her expression soft. “That’s what I think now, anyway.”
“Oh!” Irene said, remembering all of a sudden. “I forgot to say. Your ex-husband, he came looking for you. He was here—”
“Here?”
“Well, outside, in the lane, knocking on Angela’s door. I didn’t recognize him at first, but then I remembered that he’d come before, I’d seen him out there talking to Angela, so—”
Carla shook her head. “No, that couldn’t have been Theo.”
“It was, it was definitely—”
“You’re mistaken, Irene, there is no way that my husband—”
“I saw him with her,” Irene insisted. “I saw them, out there, in the lane. She was crying. Angela was crying. I think they were arguing.”
“Irene.” Carla’s voice rose, two spots of dark color appearing in her cheeks. “Theo didn’t speak to my sister, he would never—”
“He had his little dog with him. A little terrier of some sort, black and tan.”
Carla blinked slowly. “You saw him with Angela?” she asked. Irene nodded. “When?”
“I’m not sure, it was—”
“How many times?”
“Just the once, I think. They were outside in the lane. Angela was crying.”
“When, Irene?”
“A week or two,” Irene said, “before she died.”
• • •Back upstairs in bed, Irene lay awake, watching a gray light creep through the gap in the curtains. It was almost morning. She’d returned to bed feeling exhausted, knowing it was unlikely she would sleep. It was true what she’d said to Carla about her wakefulness, short sleeping being yet another side effect of old age. But she doubted she’d have slept no matter how she’d been feeling or what her age; the stricken look on Carla’s face when Irene had mentioned Theo Myerson’s visit would have kept her awake no matter what.
