The Girl Next Door

‘We can walk there,’ she says at last, ‘it’s only ten minutes.’

‘Right,’ Rob says, ‘Campbell, Faulkner – update me soon as you can. Send a car after us to the house, we’ll need a family liaison officer. I want everyone on this. Jesus, sixteen. The press’ll have a bloody field day.’

Madeline leads the way, back across Sorrow’s Meadow, out of the wooded area and down Acre Lane towards where Ashdon High Street meets the river. The small town is quiet; it’s a Monday night. Driving through, you’d have seen nothing, heard nothing. The Edwards house looms in front of them, one of a pair set back slightly from the road, and the DCI puts his hand on her arm at the edge of their drive: a gravel affair, primroses either side, stiff with the cold. There’s a bird bath to the left, frozen solid in the February air. Madeline looks to the house next door, separated from the Edwards’ by a thin grass strip. Lights off, except for one. The Goodwins’ place. Both houses are huge in comparison to Madeline’s; security systems glow in the darkness. Behind the garage doors lurk expensive, silent cars.

‘Just the basics for now,’ Rob says, ‘until we have the full picture.’

‘Are we mentioning Nathan Warren?’

Madeline’s question goes unanswered; the door opens before either of them can even knock and then there they are, framed before the police in the bright light of the house, Rachel Edwards and her husband Ian. Rachel looks like Clare – that same striking face, beautiful without needing to try. They recognise her from the town; she can see the flash of hope on their faces. Madeline steps forward.

‘Mr and Mrs Edwards. This is DCI Rob Sturgeon, my colleague at Chelmsford Police Force. We have news on your daughter. May we come in?’

Chapter Three

Jane

Monday 4th February, 9.00 p.m.

The curtain is thick and warm between my fingers from my vantage point at the living-room window. The minute I closed the door on Rachel and Ian, I texted Harry to come home, my fingers fumbling slightly in my haste. I wish I hadn’t had the glass of wine earlier, wish my mind was clearer, sharper, ready to help the neighbours. There is no sign yet of the police. What’s taking them so long?

What’s happened, Harry replied, why do you need me home? I told him to use the back door, to be as quick as he could. I want all my children under my roof, where I can see them.

As I wait for him at the window, blue lights spill suddenly across the pavement, illuminating our house in their morbid glow. My heart thuds. It might be good news, I think. But nobody comes to start a search party; I don’t hear the whirr of helicopters out looking. Just two detectives crunching up the drive, followed by a third woman who quickly gets out of the police car. Then the slam of the Edwards’ front door, the flicker of lights in their living room. Still, I think to myself, you never know. I keep telling myself that, although my insides feel cold. Eventually, when there is no sign of further movement, I draw the curtains, blocking the police car out, then check on Sophie and Finn in their beds, listen to their breathing for a full minute. My babies. I don’t go into the master bedroom; Jack has closed the door. I don’t want to disturb him now, there is no point. My husband doesn’t take well to being disturbed.

‘Mum?’ I jump at Harry’s voice; the gruffness of it always surprises me now; how quickly he has lost the boyish tones of his youth. Still only seventeen, he looms above me in the corridor. He must have come up the stairs behind me, his socked feet soundless on the thick white carpet.

‘I didn’t hear you come in,’ I say, gesturing to him to come back downstairs, away from the rest of our sleeping family.

Downstairs, I lock all the doors and windows, check them twice as Harry fetches a glass of water from the sink, drinks it greedily in exactly the same way he did as a ten-year-old.

‘What’s going on?’ he says, ‘I saw the police car outside.’

‘Nothing,’ I say quickly, ‘false alarm next door. Something to do with their security system.’ There is no point worrying him, not now, not when I don’t know the full story. The houses down this end of the town are used to things like this; we have state-of-the-art security systems now which, despite their cost, are triggered unnecessarily more often than not. A small irritation of the rich. My son doesn’t think anything of it.

I watch Harry closely as he pulls open the fridge door, scans the shelves.

‘Didn’t you just have a pizza?’ I say lightly, placing my hand on the small of his back, and he turns round, gives me a rare grin.

‘Well, yeah. But you wanted me home before I could finish the second. What was up?’

‘Oh,’ I say, ‘it was when next door’s alarm first went off. I thought it was the real thing. Didn’t want to be alone, as it were.’ One of the houses across the way was burgled last year; two men in balaclavas. It’s the only crime I’ve ever heard of in Ashdon. Bad things don’t tend to happen here.

He frowns. ‘Dad not in?’

I pause, a micro-second. ‘He’s asleep, came home with a bit of a headache, poor thing.’

My son grunts, having already lost interest in favour of leftover pasta in the fridge. My eyes flit over the half-drunk bottle of white wine next to it, but I make myself turn away, tell Harry I’m going up to get some sleep. I avert my eyes from the windows, not wanting to see what may or may not be unfolding next door.

When I go into our master bedroom, Jack is asleep, his familiar body curled in an S shape, his dark hair vivid on the pillow. I stare at my husband for a full two minutes before climbing in next to him. The scent of whiskey on his breath makes me feel sick. He didn’t mean it, I keep telling myself, it was the heat of the moment. That’s all. After a while, I put in my earbuds, turn my face into the duvet. I can’t help Rachel Edwards now. The police are next door, they are doing their job. I think back to what Jack told me when we first moved to Ashdon. You will love it here. A gorgeous little town in rural Essex. A place where bad things don’t happen. A place to fix our marriage.

I fall asleep with both sets of fingers crossed for Clare.

Chapter Four

Jane

Tuesday 5th February

The morning dawns grey and cold, and there is a second when I forget the events of last night, think only of the soft pillow beneath my head and the brushed cotton sheets beneath my body. Only the best for my wife, Jack had said, presenting them to me on moving day, as though Egyptian fabric could make up for the broken rib he’d inflicted on me in our old house. He’d pleaded with me over that one, and I knew why – if it went on his record, he’d never practise as a GP again. So it didn’t, and here we are. I am still the doctor’s wife. My children have two parents, a happy home. We all make sacrifices, and besides, the sheets are beautiful. I run my hand over them, soft and cool beneath my fingers. The room is very still; Jack is already up.

Then I remember, and it hits me: Clare didn’t come home from school. Immediately, I am up out of bed, racing into my children’s bedrooms, flicking on the lights. I am met with a grunt from Harry, the duvet yanked up over his head, the smell of teenage boy permeating everything. Finn and Sophie are the opposite – already awake and crowing in delight at the sight of me, their little fingers reaching out for a morning kiss.

I decide to go to the Edwards’ house this morning, just after I’ve taken the children to school. Harry likes walking by himself nowadays, usually leaves before us, just after Jack. I suppose you don’t need your mum holding your hand at seventeen. I cannot concentrate on making breakfast; my hands shake slightly as I pour milk onto the children’s cereal, my eyes darting constantly to the window as though expecting to see Clare waving at me through the glass. But the street is silent, the same as it always is. I allow myself a flicker of hope. Rachel will probably ring any minute, I think, although I don’t think she’s ever picked up the phone to me in her life; she’ll ring me and tell me it was all a false alarm, and we’ll laugh about what a nightmare teenagers can be, how they’ll turn us grey before we know it.

Jack was bleary-eyed when he left for the surgery. He tossed and turned a lot in the night; I kept still, like a board. I hesitated a minute before going next door, but I could hardly leave things as they were last night, could I? For all I knew, Clare could’ve been tucked up in bed by then, sleeping off a hangover. I didn’t hear anything with my earbuds in. Like I said, I still thought it might be okay, even then.

The air feels strange inside the Edwards’ porch – stiff with shock. I notice Clare’s trainers on the shoe rack, just inside the front door – black with pink stripes. For a moment, I think she must be home safe and sound and feel a huge wave of relief, the tension lifting out of my body, just for a second. Ian is the one who comes out to speak to me, his voice hushed.

‘Rachel’s not in a state to speak, Jane,’ he says. ‘They found our Clare last night.’ Found.

She’s not his Clare, not really, she’s Mark’s daughter. There were lots of whispers when Rachel remarried; people saying it was too soon, inappropriate. Mark died of lung cancer about three years ago.

I feel my face changing as he tells me, the shock seeping into my skin.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, ‘I’m so sorry, Ian.’ The words seem inadequate, inarticulate.

He stares at me. He looks as if he hasn’t slept and his breath smells faintly of alcohol – not that I can blame him for that.

‘Do they know what happened?’ I ask, biting my lip, and that’s when he tells me, the words pouring out of him like poison. She was found by Nathan Warren, the man who lives down by the river. She was wearing her school uniform, he says. They think someone attacked her, bashed her head repeatedly against the ground. She was alone. It was minus two. The police have closed off Sorrow’s Meadow. A family liaison officer is in the kitchen as we speak.

I shudder, try not to let him see. Sorrow’s Meadow runs across the back of Ashdon, surrounding us all, trapping us in. I used to take Sophie there sometimes, let her play in the flowers. I can’t imagine I’ll be doing that any more. And Nathan Warren – the name makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Everyone knows Nathan – he lives alone, in his mother’s old house, used to have a job as a caretaker up at the school. Apparently they let him go a few years ago after one of the mothers complained about him. Said he’d followed her daughter back from school. Nothing ever came of it though, as far as I know. It was all before our time. Hearsay. And hearsay can be dangerous, destructive.

I wonder if Ian and Rachel know about it, if the police have a record. Nausea runs through me, and for a horrible moment I panic that I am going to be sick, right on their doorstep. I imagine the vomit splashing onto Clare’s trainers.

‘Please,’ I say to Ian, ‘let me know if there’s anything I can do. For either of you. We’re just next door. We’re here for you.’

He nods, his mouth a tight line. A woman appears behind him – young, short brown hair. Not exactly pretty, but she has kind eyes.

‘This is Theresa,’ Ian says, ‘she’s our support officer.’

‘Family liaison,’ Theresa says, stretching out a hand for me to shake. ‘And you are?’

I don’t like her tone. ‘I’m Jane Goodwin,’ I say, ‘I live next door.’

She smiles at me, and immediately, I feel as though I’ve probably imagined the odd tone. ‘The Edwards are lucky to have good neighbours,’ she says to me in a low voice. ‘It’s times like this when communities can really pull together.’

‘Of course,’ I say to her, ‘my husband and I will do anything we can to help.’

I think of myself tucked up in bed last night, crossing my fingers for poor Clare. It was no good, of course. She was probably already dead.

The police haven’t spoken to us yet, though I imagine they’ll come knocking. The news spread like wildfire today – everyone was talking about it at the school pick-up. No one’s using the word murder, not yet, but no one thinks it was an accident either.

‘I heard it was Nathan Warren that found her,’ Tricia hissed at me this afternoon, as we stood by the school gates. ‘I wonder what the police make of that. D’you remember that fuss a few years back, when he lost his job at the school?’

I nod. I always felt a bit sorry for him; people said he’d had an accident a couple of years ago, that it had affected his mind a bit. He was painting the roof for his mother, Sandra had told me, fell off the ladder, hit his head on the stone. But other people insist he’s never been right, that there’s something more sinister about him. The way he looks at you, one of the mothers had said once, I wouldn’t want him alone with my daughter, put it that way.

I didn’t want to let the children out of my sight today, wanted to wrap my arms around them and never let go. But Jack said we had to carry on as normal, not panic until they release more information. I didn’t like the way he looked at me when he said it, like I was paranoid, overprotective.

Thank God it didn’t take long to find her, at least, I said to Jack when he got home this afternoon, but he didn’t reply. He said he’d had a hard day at the surgery. I told him it was okay, that I understood he was tired, that I knew he hadn’t meant what he said last night. I wondered if he’d forgotten, even, in all the drama over Clare.

Harry was horribly shocked at the news; I spoke to him as soon as he got in from school.

‘I’m so sorry, darling,’ I said to him, ‘I know this must be a dreadful shock, her being around your age. The police are doing everything they can.’ His face went completely white; I got him a chocolate biscuit from the cupboard, usually reserved for special occasions. The last thing I need is multiple trips to the dentist. I put a hand on his arm but he shrugged away from me, took himself off upstairs.

‘Let him be for a bit,’ Jack said to me, ‘he’ll come around.’

I stared after Harry, wondering. My son has become closed off to me these last few months; he mentions school friends, but never girls. It’s normal for teenage boys to be private, Tricia told me a few weeks ago, you probably wouldn’t want to know what goes on inside his mind anyway! She’d laughed, like it was a joke. But I do want to know. I want to know everything.

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