The Girls Beneath

PRAISE FOR ROSS ARMSTRONG

‘Addictive and eerie, you’ll finish the book wanting to chat about it’ – Closer Magazine, Must Read

‘A twisted homage to Hitchcock set in a recognisably post-Brexit broken Britain. Tense, fast-moving and with an increasingly unreliable narrator, The Watcher has all the hallmarks of a winner.’ – Martyn Waites

‘Ross Armstrong will feed your appetite for suspense’ – Evening Standard

‘Unreliable narrator + Rear Window-esque plot = sure-fire hit’ – The Sun

‘Brilliantly written… this psychological thriller is definitely one that will keep you up to the early hours. Five Stars.’ – Heat, Book of the Week

‘A dark, unsettling page turner’ – Claire Douglas, author of Local Girl Missing.

‘Creepy and compelling’ – Debbie Howells author of The Bones of You

‘The Watcher is an intense, unsettling read… one that had me feeling like I needed to keep checking over my shoulder as I read.; – Lisa Hall, author of Between You and Me

ROSS ARMSTRONG is an actor and writer based in North London. He studied English Literature at Warwick University and acting at RADA. As a stage and screen actor he has performed in the West End, Broadway and in theatres across the UK, where he has worked opposite actors such as Jude Law, Joseph Fiennes, Kim Cattrall and Maxine Peake. Ross’ debut title The Watcher was a top twenty bestseller and has been longlisted for the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger.

The Girls Beneath

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018

Copyright © Ross Armstrong 2018

Ross Armstrong asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

First edition published with the title Head Case in Great Britain in 2018

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © January 2018 ISBN: 9780008182267

Version: 2018-10-29

For all those who

think differently

‘Hush little baby

Hush quite a lot

Bad babies get rabies

And have to be shot’

CONTENTS

Cover

Praise

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Documented Telephone Conversation #1

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Documented Telephone Conversation #2

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Documented Memory Project #1

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Documented Memory Project #2: Tape

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Documented Memory Project #3

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Documented Telephone Conversation #3

Chapter 33

I remember, a note, she passed… Documented Memory Project #4

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Afters

Acknowledgements

Extract

7 days till it comes.

1

‘Dee. Dah dah dah dee dah, dah dah, dee dah…’

It was a year of miracles. The year I learned how to walk and talk again, the year I met Emre Bartu and the year the girls went missing.

But first came December.

The weekend before my first week as a Police Community Support Officer began. The last week in which my brain’s valleys, ridges, streets and avenues remained in perfect working order.

Back when I thought a lot differently. Before I became ‘Better Than Normal’ as Ryans says. He says that because in some ways I definitely am. Better than you, I mean. No offence.

It’s a Christmas gift that will lie under my brain stem, wrapped in the folds of my cerebellum, romantically lit by my angular and supramarginal gyrus, for the rest of my grateful life.

So let’s go back to the last week when the inside of my skull was anatomically ‘correct’ and aesthetically as it had been since the day I was born.

When my brain functioned as it does for the ‘normals’. The others. The ones devoid of irregularity or uniqueness. No offence.

Before the fractures. Before the accident.

If it was an accident.

2

‘So it’s you

The one I thought I knew, I knew,

No matter what we put the other through

It’s always you’

The truth about Gary Canning is revealed to me by Anita herself. Like most things, I don’t see it coming.

I imagine Gary as a P.E. teacher, displaying his sporting prowess and gym-earned physique to the kids of Tower Hamlets as he coaxes the unwilling into exertions like rugby, basketball or maybe even worse. But in actuality, Gary is a Geography teacher with a fair to middling beard. It has pretty good coverage but is patchy in a way that suggests inconstancy of character, a fatal lack of conviction in his genes, or a rather flawed grooming technique. I know this because I find his picture on social media. That’s when I first see the face of Gary Canning.

Gary Canning blogs about food and travel and seems to have ambition beyond the school system. Photos find him caught candidly by the camera lens in clearly orchestrated scenarios, curated to paint him as a soulful character; playing a banjo with his eyes closed, or blowing bubbles with some sort of child, or larking in a European villa while holding a float to his head like it’s an antenna, in a move that will soon be lauded by his fawning friends as ‘classic Gary bants’.

He lists his favourite world cities as Tangier, Iquitos and Bobo-Dioulasso. Only half of one of which I’ve ever heard of. But I guess it isn’t surprising Gary Canning has been to places I’ve never even heard spoken aloud. Given that I’ve never even been to Paris. I thought about taking Anita once but then I forgot to book the tickets and my life moved on. But I’m sure Gary Canning’s been to Paris. Paris is child’s play for Gary Canning. Gary Canning probably went to Paris without even realising it. Because that’s just Gary Canning. Good old Gary Canning.

Anita’s hours have always seemed wildly inconsistent for a job I’d always thought was fairly strict in terms of time frame. Which I’ve never wanted to bring up for fear that it will seem like I’m misunderstanding her life, or being sexist, or teacherist, or some kind of combination of everything that shows me for the true chauvinist idiot I didn’t know I was.

When her late-homes stretched to late nights, I stopped asking questions, as I disappeared into my world. One dominated by online gaming and films I’d seen when I was younger but wanted to watch again to check if they’re still good. Or the lure of sports results on my phone, or direr still, merely staring blankly at the screen glow waiting for that appetising hit of something. Not even current affairs; I can’t handle that, everything is a killing or a manhunt and it gets me down. No, I prefer the safer land of sports news. Where the only tragedies are poor tactics. Where the only manhunt is inane ‘gossip’ about a Portuguese manager ‘tracking’ some sixteen-year-old French-African midfield wunderkind.

The Thursday night before the Monday I’m due to start my latest career experiment begins typically. Anita arrives home and I detach myself from the smart phone umbilical cord to greet her with my best conversation and the second half of a bottle of wine that I’ve started before her arrival. Already one in, having apparently ‘decompressed’ with a single glass on the way home ‘with her colleagues’, she tells me about her day and I listen loyally, retroactively defending her where appropriate from the passive-aggressive comments made by the head of the History department, my mind only occasionally drifting to how much a truly world class defender costs these days and what exactly I’m going to do with the rest of my life.

I’m always a good listener because it’s easier when the other person talks. After all, I know all my stories and listening is more relaxing than talking.

She suggests we go into the bedroom so she can tell me something. This is nothing particularly new as we both like lying down and the light is more relaxing in there. She’s never loved the feel of my parents’ old house but it suits our situation and I like it just fine. But then, I’m easy going, genial to a fault perhaps. I’ve always wanted a simple life, which is the subject our conversation turns to as we both stare at the childish glow-in-the-dark stars we’d put up on ‘the night of the moving in’, which had somehow stuck around to bother the ceiling with their pretty and naive shimmer.

It feels like we’re on the cusp of so many new things tonight. I don’t know why I’ve chosen tonight, in particular. But I have. Call it instinct.

I go to kiss her but she instinctively lifts a limb to flick me away like a holiday fly. It’s a feeling I’ve become used to of late. Her eyes flicker with uncertainty before she speaks.

‘What do you do in your training anyway? Is it all rolling over cars and firing at moving targets?’

‘Yes, it’s a bit like that but without the guns. Or the car, or the excitement,’ I reply, adjusting my head on the pillow.

‘Ha. I think you’re going to be really good,’ she says, turning her head to me, her cheek gaining a green sheen from the plastic stars that barely light the room at all.

‘I did do a personality test the other day though,’ I say.

‘Did they find anything?’

‘Ho ho. Yes actually. They said I was very empathetic.’

‘Good,’ she says, pushing her hair behind her ear.

‘Compassionate.’ ‘Good. Well. You are.’

‘And they thought compassion might be my main strength, as they said I’d scored very badly on observation.’

This does make her laugh, like hot tea, warming and over-stimulating me. But she soon cools. She seems to pull away, sensing a renewed push for intimacy in the air. Not that she fears my close proximity; we’ve remained very intimate, in all ways but one. And I’m told that’s a bit of a thing with relationships after a while.

‘They said that if I’d scored any lower they’d have had to declare me legally blind.’

She laughs, somewhat nervously, I think.

‘Although he said that some blind people have scored very well on these tests, so that’s probably unfair on them.’

As she laughs, I realise I don’t have to tell her anything about my personality. She’s the person who knows me better than any other. Who has been witness to my best and worst emotions. This is the being that I had picked above any other to eat with and sleep next to, the one person whose hair it is vaguely permissible to randomly stroke and smell, who has looked at my face over the past six years a good deal more than I’ve had to myself. She knows me from the tiniest colour in my eyes to the softest things I’ve ever said. I reach down into my pocket.

‘You’re just… I’d say your personality is… doughy.’

‘Sorry what?’ I say.

‘Doughy. Just a lovely, happy, doughy man.’

‘Kind of sounds like you’re saying my personality is fat.’

‘No, you’re not fat,’ she says.

‘No, I know I’m not,’ I say, vocally straining.

‘I mean, soft. Lovely. Like bread.’

Our eyes lock and she withdraws her hands, as if thinking four moves ahead and wanting no part of what comes next.

We turn and look up at the fake stars in a silence that turns over many times. It has endless pockets where it feels like one of us may speak. It runs on and on until at one point it has a little hate in it and at another a delicacy so fragile that it would shatter if you were to reach out and touch it.

Then I feel something. One of the tiny stars has fallen and is resting on my thigh. Then Anita looks down at it and finds a look somewhere between care worker and executioner. As she tells me that she’s been doing it with Gary Canning in the staff room after school for a term and a half. Her back against the pigeonholes. Her pencil skirt hitched up.

She doesn’t say all of that of course, but that’s what I hear. I want to be angry and after she leaves I do a lot of pacing and fist clenching as I examine Gary Canning’s social media output. I’m not really the sort of guy who raises his voice. I’m naturally better with compassion than passion, I suppose, and it’s not good to force these things. And she’s my best friend. It’s hard to be angry with your best friend with tears in her eyes.

The fact that she’s already arranged to stay with a friend leaves me logistically as well as emotionally lonely. But I’m always good with my own company and nothing if not resilient. Although resilient isn’t the word she used in the only moments of our conversation that bordered on unkind. Something about ‘ambition’, I don’t know. I log onto a gaming community as my heart pounds away further back in the mix.

The last time my heart pumped so hard, was during a training session with a self-defence specialist. I made myself a dead-weight to prove the demonstrator couldn’t lift me and the next thing I knew we were both on the matted ground, him with his knee poised over my chest, having dug it into me as we fell together. I gasped for breath as I looked up at the crowd of faces who leant over me. I hadn’t been so vulnerable since I was a child. And here I am again.

I met Anita at the party of a university friend I was already making plans to see less. I was pretending to be a smoker, and doing it pretty badly, as an excuse to not be inside with some awful people. Passable on their own, the flat was small and the men in particular were drunk and brash, which was a potion that ensured we were both having a terrible time. She spotted me coughing on a light cigarette, like a child taking it as a punishment, and we quickly decided that as we both hated smoking we should persevere together, mostly to stay away from the noise and fury of fellow twenty-two year olds newly arrived in London and convincing themselves they were ‘cool bro’, and having a ‘wicked time’. Batting away my cynicism on a cluster of topics, she made me laugh more than anyone had in my three years as an undergraduate and when it rained we sheltered under a tree and stayed until the last drops from the fern tumbled into the mud below our huddled bodies.

I want the days after she leaves to be the kind of textbook break up weekend I’ve always heard about, comprised of time spent in my pants and regular doses of alcohol, but that’s a little too close to the norm for comfort. So instead, I run, racking up 15k the day after she leaves and double that on the day after. Getting fit again has been one of the pleasures of the training process, but today I am running just to run. A picture show clicks on through my head with every thud that my feet beat on the tarmac. Each sting observed and recognised. I look out on the streets and streets that pass and see little of interest, which is at least in perfect keeping with the training officer’s perception of my observation skills, and Anita’s of my consistency. Somewhere in the distance, Gary Canning rests his back against the pigeonholes and doesn’t even laugh. He breathes deep and leans, blissfully unaware of me, and thinks of India.

I reflect on this as I reach into the pocket of the jeans I was wearing the night she left. I may never be praised for my instinct, I think to myself, as I look at the tiny box in front of me. The one my father had pulled out in front of my mother in far more romantic surroundings many years earlier, under real stars, under the lights of Paris.

I think about my sense of timing, as I examine the little diamond before me. And as I wipe my eyes with my index finger and thumb, I laugh.

3

‘You’re my little one

Say I didn’t love in vain

Please quit crying honey

Cos it sounds like a hurricane’

It’s one degree below freezing on Seven Sisters Road but I’m not complaining. The first thing officers have to combat is the weather. Christmas is three weeks away and snow has settled, shrouding Tottenham in a crisp white blanket. Towelling it up like a baby after a bath. Hugging it close and singing it a lullaby.

I breathe into my gloved hands and watch the cloud stream onto them and then up into the slate coloured sky. If you don’t like being out on the street, then try another profession. It’s our job to know our neighbourhood, which means mostly being out on foot or on your bike. Fortunately for me I’ve got one advantage. I know these roads like the back of my arse. I’ve lived here most of my life.

I’ve watched corner-shop keepers get older and kids I went to school with become upstanding members of the community or, more frequently, go the other way. I’ve seen their little brothers, once new born babies who held on tightly to my finger in their mother’s arms, grow up to get their very own ASBOs. I’ve given them out myself.

Or rather ABCs, the ASBO is the last resort before criminal charges are brought. An ABC comes before that.

That’s my first act on my first day, Monday at 10.10 a.m. Drawing up an Acceptable Behaviour Contract for my schoolmate Dom Minton’s half-brother, Eli. He’ll probably be the last kid around here to get one, as they’re soon to become defunct, so I suppose you could say this is a bit of a Kodak moment.

Eli has a birthmark that wine-stains the top left hand side of his face and I feel sorry for the kid. School is hard enough without the kind of stares it must bring.

I take advice from my sergeant on it all. I look at Eli’s case notes and write down a few of his greatest hits. Then I ask if he would agree to the reasonable suggestion that he should’ve thought better of them.

The severity of his list of misdemeanours escalates sharply. Something dark in me struggles not to laugh when I glance at them over his shoulder as he reads:

CONTRACT

I will get to school on time.

I will not graffiti my school toilet wall.

I will not climb into any lift shafts.

I will not throw rocks and debris at passers-by.

I will not attempt to set fire to people.

‘Does that sound fair, Eli?’ I say.

He looks up and recognises me. It helps that I know his brother. But he’s saying nothing.

‘Think you can manage not to set fire to anyone? For a while? Maybe try not to ignite anyone just for this week and see how it feels. Sound like a plan?’

I’ll probably learn not to take the piss at some point but I’m new at this. He looks at me, stone-faced, then signs.

‘And you understand the consequences of not sticking to the contract, don’t you? Eli?’

All I hear is the sound of engines and tyres on the road.

‘Eli? I need to hear you say it, mate.’

He looks up again, having been fascinated by the pavement for a few seconds.

‘Yes I do, PCSO Mondrian.’

He leans quite heavily on the ‘SO’ and not so much the ‘PC’ as if to make a point, but I still pat him on the shoulder and attempt a smile that aims for reassuring, while steering clear of any local-bobby-earnestness that might engage his gag reflex.

He barely looks half of his fourteen years to me. But then he did throw a brick at a pram and try to set fire to an old man so perhaps I shouldn’t feel too sorry for him.

I wish I didn’t feel this way. But living around here, experience tends to toughen your opinions.

His dad grabs him by the shoulder I patted and leads him back to their car, clearly not delighted at having to take an hour off work for that. I hope he isn’t too hard on him, I hope he isn’t one of those dads, but then it’s difficult to tell. Eli pulls away as if the shoulder already holds a fresh bruise that’s more than a little tender.

On Tuesday I see my first dead body. I’m early on the scene at a gruesome traffic accident, a head-on collision that’s killed the driver of Vehicle 1 instantly. His chest and the steering wheel are an item. His jaw is locked wide open. His passenger and the driver of Vehicle 2 are taken away and are in critical condition. I meditate on the nature of suffering, the end of things and déjà vu. Then I sack it all off, take an early lunch and have a steak and kidney pie.

On Wednesday I check out a break-in where the intruder has done nothing but broken a window, nicked one laptop and shat on the bed. People are very strange. Some watch videos of executions. Some change names on gravestones so they become rude words. Some are purely vindictive with their poo.

On Thursday the highlight is standing out in the cold for five hours, making sure the peaceful demo about closing the local library doesn’t erupt into a volcano of bloodshed. There’s no chance of that. It was more the sort of event where someone erects a cake stall, but on this occasion no one even did that.

Thursday’s lowlight is getting a call telling me that Eli has neglected to turn up for school. His dad, out of town for a few days, was contacted immediately and ominously asked in a mutter over the phone if he could ‘deal with it’ himself. None of this seems very good for Eli, so seeking some other option I trudge over to his brother Dom’s house.

‘What can I say, the kid’s an evil little fucker at times,’ Dom says, hands tucked into his jogging bottoms. ‘But he’s my brother.’ This much I have already gleaned.