Also by Lisa Jewell

Ralph’s Party

Thirtynothing

One-Hit Wonder

Vince & Joy

A Friend of the Family

31 Dream Street

The Truth About Melody Browne

After the Party

The Making of Us

Before I Met You

The House We Grew Up In

The Third Wife

The Girls

I Found You

Then She Was Gone

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Epub ISBN: 9781473538344

Version 1.0

Published by Century 2018

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Copyright © Lisa Jewell 2018

Cover: Getty images

Lisa Jewell has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in Great Britain by Century in 2018

Century
The Penguin Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA

www.penguin.co.uk

Century is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

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

ISBN 9781780896434

You’re not the only one watching.

Gripping psychological suspense from the #1 bestselling author of Then She Was Gone.
_______________

You’re back home after four years working abroad, new husband in tow.

You’re keen to find a place of your own. But for now you’re crashing in your big brother’s spare room.

That’s when you meet the man next door.

He’s the head teacher at the local school. Twice your age. Extraordinarily attractive. You find yourself watching him.

All the time.

But you never dreamed that your innocent crush might become a deadly obsession.

Or that someone is watching you.
_______________

Family secrets, illicit passion and an unexplained murder? It can only be the gripping new novel from Lisa Jewell.

Prologue

24 March

DC Rose Pelham kneels down; she can see something behind the kitchen door, just in front of the bin. For a minute she thinks it’s a bloodstained twist of tissue, maybe, or an old bandage. Then she thinks perhaps it is a dead flower. But as she looks at it more closely she can see that it’s a tassel. A red suede tassel. The sort that might once have been attached to a handbag, or to a boot.

It sits just on top of a small puddle of blood, strongly suggesting that it had fallen there in the aftermath of the murder. She photographs it in situ from many angles and then, with her gloved fingers, she plucks the tassel from the floor and drops it into an evidence bag which she seals.

She stands up and turns to survey the scene of the crime: a scruffy kitchen, old-fashioned pine units, a green Aga piled with pots and pans, a large wooden table piled with table mats and exercise books and newspapers and folded washing, a small extension to the rear with a cheap timber glazed roof, double doors to the garden, a study area with a laptop, a printer, a shredder, a table lamp.

It’s an innocuous room; bland even. A kitchen like a million other kitchens all across the country. A kitchen for drinking coffee in, for doing homework and eating breakfast and reading newspapers in. Not a kitchen for dark secrets or crimes of passion. Not a kitchen for murdering someone in.

But there, on the floor, is a body, splayed face down inside a large, vaguely kidney-shaped pool of blood. The knife that had been used is in the kitchen sink, thoroughly washed down with a soapy sponge. The attack on the victim had been frenzied: at least twenty knife wounds to the neck, back and shoulders. But little in the way of blood has spread to other areas of the kitchen – no handprints, no smears, no spatters – leading Rose to the conclusion that the attack had been unexpected, fast and efficient and that the victim had had little chance to put up a fight.

Rose takes a marker pen from her jacket pocket and writes on the bag containing the red suede tassel.

Description: ‘Red suede/suedette tassel.’

Location: ‘In front of fridge, just inside door from hallway.’

Date and time of collection: ‘Friday 24 March 2017, 11.48 p.m.’

It’s probably nothing, she muses, just a thing fallen from a fancy handbag. But nothing was often everything in forensics.

Nothing could often be the answer to the whole bloody thing.

1

2 January

Joey Mullen laid the flowers against the gravestone and ran her fingertip across the words engraved into the pink-veined granite.

‘Happy new year, Mum,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t come to see you yesterday. Alfie and I had shocking hangovers. We went to a party over in Frenchay, at Candy’s new flat. Remember Candy? Candy Boyd? She was in my year at school, she had all that long blond hair that she could sit on? You really liked her because she always said hello to you if she passed you on the street? Anyway, she’s doing really well, she’s a physiotherapist. Or … a chiropractor? Anyway, something like that. She cried when I told her you were dead. Everyone cries when I tell them. Everyone loved you so much, Mum. Everyone wished you were their mum. I was so lucky to have a mum like you. I wish I hadn’t stayed away for so long now. If I’d known what was going to happen, I would never have gone away at all. And I’m sorry you never got to meet Alfie. He’s adorable. He’s working at a wine bar in town at the moment, but he wants to be a painter-decorator. He’s at his mum’s now, actually, painting her kitchen. Or at least, he’s supposed to be! She’s probably made him sit down and watch TV with her, knowing her. And him. He’s a bit of a procrastinator. Takes him a while to get going. But you’d love him, Mum. He’s the cutest, sweetest, nicest guy and he’s so in love with me and he treats me so well and I know how much of a worry I was to you when I was younger. I know what I put you through and I’m so, so sorry. But I wish you could see me now. I’m growing up, Mum. I’m finally growing up!’

She sighed.

‘Anyway, I’d better go now. It’ll be getting dark soon and then I’ll get really scared. I love you, Mum. I miss you. I wish you weren’t dead. I wish I could go to your house and have a cup of tea with you, have a good gossip, have a bitch about Jack and Rebecca. I could tell you about the gold taps. Or maybe I could tell you about the gold taps now? No, I’ll tell you about the gold taps next time. Give you something to look forward to.

‘Sleep tight, Mum. I love you.’

Joey climbed the steep lane from Lower Melville to the parade of houses above. Even in the sodium gloom of a January afternoon, the houses of Melville Heights popped like a row of children’s building blocks: red, yellow, turquoise, purple, lime, sage, fuchsia, red again. They sat atop a terraced embankment looking down on to the small streets of Lower Melville like guests at a private party that no one else was invited to.

Iconic was the word that people used to describe this row of twenty-seven Victorian villas: the iconic painted houses of Melville Heights. Joey had seen them from a distance for most of her life. They were the sign that they were less than twenty minutes from home on long car journeys of her childhood. They followed her to work; they guided her home again. She’d been to a party once, in the pink house, when she was a student. Split crudely into flats and bedsits, smelling of damp and cooked mince, it hadn’t felt bright pink on the inside. But the views from up there were breathtaking: the River Avon pausing to arc picturesquely on its mile-long journey to the city, the patchwork fields beyond, the bulge of the landscape on the horizon into a plump hill crowned with trees that blossomed every spring into puffballs of hopeful green.

She’d dreamed of living up here as a child, oscillated between which house would be hers: the lilac or the pink. And as she grew older, the sky blue or the sage. And now, at twenty-six, she found herself living in the cobalt-blue house. Number 14. Not a sign of a lifetime of hard work and rich rewards, but a fringe benefit of her older brother’s lifetime of hard work and rich rewards.

Jack was ten years older than Joey and a consultant heart surgeon at Bristol General Hospital, one of the youngest in the county’s history. Two years ago he’d married a woman called Rebecca. Rebecca was nice, but brittle and rather humourless. Joey had always thought her lovely brother would end up with a fun-loving, no-nonsense nurse or maybe a jolly children’s doctor. But for some reason he’d chosen a strait-laced systems analyst from Staffordshire.

They’d bought their cobalt house ten months ago, when Joey was still farting about in the Balearics hosting foam parties. She hadn’t even realised it was one of the painted houses until Jack had taken her to see it when she moved back to Bristol three months ago.

‘You bought a painted house,’ she’d said, her hand against her heart. ‘You bought a painted house and you didn’t tell me.’

‘You didn’t ask,’ he’d responded. ‘And anyway, it wasn’t my idea. It was Rebecca’s. She virtually bribed the old lady who was living here to sell up. Said it was literally the only house in Bristol she wanted to live in.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ she’d said, her eyes roaming over the tasteful interior of taupe and teal and copper and grey. ‘The most beautiful house I’ve ever seen.’

‘I’m glad you like it,’ Jack had said, ‘because Rebecca and I were wondering if you two would like to live here for a while. Just until you get yourselves sorted out.’

‘Oh my God,’ she’d said, her hands at her mouth. ‘Are you serious? Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure,’ he’d replied, taking her by the hand. ‘Come and see the attic room. It’s completely self-contained – perfect for a pair of newlyweds.’ He’d nudged her and grinned at her.

Joey had grinned back. No one was more surprised than she was that she had come back from Ibiza with a husband.

His name was Alfie Butter and he was very good-looking. Far too good-looking for her. Or at least, so she’d thought in the aqua haze of Ibizan nights. In the gunmetal gloom of a Bristol winter the blue, blue eyes were just blue, the Titian hair was just red, the golden tan was just sun-damage. Alfie was just a regular guy.

They’d married barefoot on the beach. Joey had worn a pink chiffon slip dress and carried a posy of pink and peridot Lantanas. Alfie had worn a white T-shirt and pink shorts, and white bougainvillea blossom in his hair. Their marriage had been witnessed by the managers of the hotel where they both worked. Afterwards they’d had dinner on a terrace with a few friends, taken a few pills, danced until the sun came up, spent the next day in bed and then and only then did they phone their families to tell them what they’d done.

She would have had a proper wedding if her mother had still been alive. But she was dead and Joey’s dad was not really a wedding kind of a man, nor a flying-out-to-Ibiza kind of a man, and Joey’s parents had themselves married secretly at Gretna Green when her mum was four months pregnant with Jack.

‘Ah, well,’ her father said, with a note of relief. ‘I suppose it’s a family tradition.’

‘Hi,’ she called out in the hallway, testing for the presence of her sister-in-law. Rebecca made a lot of noise about how delighted she was to be housing a pair of twenty-something lovebirds in her immaculate, brand-new guest suite – ‘It’s just so brilliant that we had the space for you! Really, it’s just brilliant having you here. Totally brilliant’ – but her demeanour told a different story. She hid from them. All the time. In fact, she was hiding from Joey right now, pretending to be arranging things in their huge walk-in pantry.

‘Oh, hi!’ she said, turning disingenuously at Joey’s greeting, a jar of horseradish in her hand. ‘I didn’t hear you come in!’

Joey smiled brightly. She’d totally heard her coming in. There was a mug of freshly made tea still steaming on the kitchen table, a newspaper half read, a half-eaten packet of supermarket sushi. Joey pictured Rebecca Mullen twitching at the sound of Joey’s key in the lock, looking for her escape, scurrying into the pantry and randomly picking up a jar of horseradish.

‘Sorry, I did shout out hello.’

‘It’s fine. It’s fine. I’m just …’ She waved the jar of horseradish in a vague arc around the pantry.

‘Nest-building?’

‘Yes!’ said Rebecca. ‘Yes. I am. Nest-building. Exactly.’

Both their eyes fell to Rebecca’s rounded stomach. Her first baby was due in four months. It was a girl baby who would, on or around 1 May, become Joey’s niece. One of the reasons, Joey imagined, that Rebecca had agreed to let her and Alfie have their guest suite was that Joey was a trained nursery nurse. Not that she’d touched a baby since she was eighteen. But still, she had all the skills. She could, in theory, change a nappy in forty-eight seconds flat.

There was a stained-glass window halfway up the oak staircase that ran up the front of the house. Joey often stopped here to press her nose to the clear parts of the design, enjoying being able to see out with anyone seeing in. It was early afternoon, almost dusk at this time of the year; the trees on the hills on the other side of the river were bare and slightly awkward.

She watched a shiny black car turn from the main road in the village below and begin its ascent up the escarpment towards the terrace. The only cars that came up here were those of residents and visitors. She waited for a while longer to see who it might be. The car parked on the other side of the street and she watched a woman get out of the passenger side, a boyish, thirty-something woman with jaw-length, light brown hair wearing a hoodie and jeans. She stood by the back door while a young boy climbed out, about fourteen years old, the spitting image of her. Then a rather handsome older man got out of the driver’s side, tall and leggy in a crumpled sky-blue polo shirt and dark jeans, short dark hair, white at the temples. He went to the boot of the car and pulled out two medium-sized suitcases, with a certain appealing effortlessness. He handed one to his son, passed a pile of coats and a carrier bag to his wife and then they crossed the road and let themselves into the yellow house.

Joey carried on up the stairs, the image of the attractive older man returning from his family Christmas break already fading from her consciousness.

2

6 January

Joey saw Tom Fitzwilliam again a few days later. This time it was in the village. He was coming out of the bookshop, wearing a suit and talking to someone on the phone. He said goodbye to the person on the phone, pressed his finger to the screen to end the call and slid the phone into his jacket pocket. She saw his face as he turned left out of the shop. It held the residue of a smile. His upturned mouth made a different shape of his face. It turned up more on one side then the other. An eyebrow followed suit. A hand went to his silver-tipped hair as the wind blew it asunder. The smile turned to a grimace and made another shape of his face again. His jaw hardened. His forehead bunched. A slow blink of his eyes. And then he was walking towards his black car parked across the street, a blip blip of the locking system, a flash of lights, long legs folded away into the driver’s side. Gone.

But a shadow of him lingered on in her consciousness.

Alfie had been a crush. For months she’d watched him around the resort, made up stories about him based on tiny scraps of information she’d collected from people who’d interacted with him. No one knew where he was from. Someone thought he might have been a writer. Someone else said he was a vet. He’d had long hair then, dark red, tied back in a ponytail or sometimes a man-bun. He had a small red beard and a big fit body, a tattoo of a climbing rose all the way up his trunk, another of a pair of wings across his shoulders. He often had a guitar hanging from a strap around his chest. He rarely wore a top when he wasn’t working. He had a smile for everyone, a swagger and a cheek.

In Joey’s imagination, Alfie Butter was kind of otherworldly; she ascribed to him a sort of supernatural persona, and tried to imagine what they would talk about if their paths were ever to cross. Then one day he’d stopped her at the back of the resort next to the laundry and his blue, blue eyes had locked on to hers and he’d smiled and said, ‘Joey, right?’

She’d said yes, she was Joey.

‘Someone tells me you’re a Bristol girl. Is that right?’

Yes, she’d said, yes, that was right.

‘Whereabouts?’

‘Frenchay?’

He’d punched the air. ‘I knew it!’ he’d said. ‘I just knew it! You know when you get that feeling in your gut, and someone said you were from Bristol and I just thought Frenchay girl. Got to be. And I was right! I’m a Frenchay boy!’

Wow, she’d said, wow. It was a small, small world, she’d told him. Which school did you go to?

And Alfie had turned out to be neither supernatural nor otherworldly, a vet nor a poet, nor even very good at playing the guitar, but spectacularly good in bed and a very good hugger. He’d had her name tattooed on his ankle two weeks after their first encounter. He said he’d never felt like this about anyone, in his life, ever. He slung his heavy arm across her shoulder whenever they walked together. He pulled her on to his lap whenever she walked past him. He said he’d follow her to the ends of the earth. Then, when her mother died and she said she wanted to come home, he said he’d follow her back to Bristol. He’d proposed to her after she returned from her mother’s funeral. They’d married two weeks after that.

But what do you do with an unattainable crush once it’s yours to keep? What does it become? Should there perhaps be a word to describe it? Because that’s the thing with getting what you want: all that yearning and dreaming and fantasising leaves a great big hole that can only be filled with more yearning and dreaming and fantasising. And maybe that’s what lay at the root of Joey’s sudden and unexpected obsession with Tom Fitzwilliam. Maybe he arrived at the precise moment that the hole in Joey’s interior fantasy life needed filling.

And if it hadn’t been him, maybe it would have been someone else instead.

3

23 January

Tom Fitzwilliam was fifty-one and he was, according to Jack, a lovely, lovely man.

Not that Joey had asked her brother for his opinion of their neighbour – it had been offered, spontaneously, apropos of an article in the local newspaper about an award that the local school had just won.

‘Oh, look,’ he said, the paper spread open in front of him on the kitchen table. ‘That’s our neighbour, lives two doors down.’ He tapped a photo with his forefinger. ‘Tom Fitzwilliam. Lovely, lovely man.’

Joey peered over Jack’s shoulder, a half-washed saucepan in one hand, a washing-up sponge in the other. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’ve seen him, I think. Black car?’

‘Yes, that’s right. He’s the headmaster of our local state school. A “superhead”.’ He made quotes in the air with his fingers. ‘Brought in after a bad Ofsted. His school just won something and now everyone loves him.’

‘That’s nice,’ said Joey. ‘Do you know him, then?’

‘Yeah. Kind of. He and his wife were very helpful when we were having the building works done. They used to send us texts during the day to let us know what was happening and calmed down some other not-so-nice neighbours who were getting their knickers in a knot about dust and noise. Nice people.’

Joey shrugged. Jack thought everyone was nice.

‘So.’ He closed the paper and folded it in half. ‘How did the interview go?’

Joey slung the tea towel over the side of the sink. ‘It was OK.’

She’d applied for a job at the Melville, the famous boutique hotel and bar in the village: front-of-house manager. The pleasant woman interviewing her could tell the moment she walked in that she was not fit for purpose and Joey had made no effort to convince her otherwise.

‘Glorified receptionist,’ she said now. ‘Plus four night shifts a week. No thank you.’

She didn’t look at Jack, didn’t want to witness his reaction to yet more evidence that his little sister was a total loser. She had quite wanted the job; the hotel was beautiful, the owner was nice and the pay was good. The problem was that she couldn’t actually see herself in the job. The problem was … well, the problem was her. She was nearly twenty-seven. In three years’ time she would be thirty. She was a married woman. But for some reason, she still felt like a child.

‘Fair enough,’ he said, turning the pages of the newspaper mechanically. ‘I’m sure something will come up, eventually.’

‘Bound to,’ she said, her heart not reaching her words.

Then, ‘Jack, are you OK about me and Alfie being here? Like, really?’

She watched her brother roll his eyes good-naturedly. ‘Joey. For God’s sake. How many times do I have to tell you? I love having you here. And Alfie too. It’s a pleasure.’

‘What about Rebecca, though? Are you sure she’s not regretting it?’

‘She’s fine, Joey. We’re both fine. It’s all good.’

‘Do you promise?’

‘Yes, Joey. I promise.’

Joey got a job three days later. It was a terrible, terrible job, but it was a job. She was now a party coordinator at a notoriously rough soft play centre in the city called Whackadoo. The uniform was an acid-yellow polo shirt with red pull-on trousers. The pay was reasonable and the hours were fine. The manager was a big, butch woman with a crew cut called Dawn to whom Joey had taken an instant liking. It could all have been worse, of course it could. Anything could always be worse. But not much.

All employees of Whackadoo were required to spend their first week on the floor. ‘Nobody gets to sit in an office here until they’ve cleaned the toilets halfway through a party for thirty eight-year-old boys,’ Dawn had said, a grim twinkle in her eye.

‘Can’t be any worse than cleaning vomit and Jägerbombs off the bar after a fourteen-hour stag party,’ Joey had replied.

‘Probably not,’ Dawn had conceded. ‘Probably not. Can you start tomorrow?’

Joey stopped in the village on her way home from the interview and ordered herself a large gin and tonic in the cosy bar of the Melville Hotel. It was early for gin and tonic. The man sitting two tables away was still having breakfast. She told herself it was celebratory but in reality, she needed something to blunt the edges of her terror and self-loathing.

Whackadoo.

Windowless cavern of unthinkable noise and bad smells. Breeze-block hellhole of spilt drinks and tantrums, where a child shat in the ball pond at least once a day apparently. She shuddered and knocked back another glug of gin. The man eating his breakfast looked at her curiously. She blinked at him imperiously.

You could see the painted houses from down here, a bolt of running colour across the tops of the narrow Georgian windows. There was the cobalt blue of Jack and Rebecca’s house, the canary yellow of Tom Fitzwilliam’s. It was another world up there. Rarefied. And she, a half-formed woman working in a soft play centre: what on earth was she doing up there?

She looked down at her bitten nails, her scuffed boots, her old chinos. She thought about the elderly pants she was wearing, the decrepit bra. She knew she was two months past a timely trip to the hairdresser. She was drinking gin alone in a hotel bar on a Thursday at not even midday. And then she thought of herself only five months ago, tanned and lean, clutching her bouquet, the talcum sand between her toes, the sun shining down from a vivid blue sky, standing at Alfie’s side; young, beautiful, in paradise, in love. ‘You are the loveliest thing I have ever seen,’ her boss had said, wiping a tear from her own cheek. ‘So young, so perfect, so pure.’

She switched on her phone and scrolled through her gallery until she got to the wedding photos. For a few minutes she wallowed in the memories of the happiest day of her life, until she heard the bar door open and looked up.

It was him.

Tom Fitzwilliam.

The head teacher.

He pulled off his suit jacket and draped it across the back of a chair, resting a leather shoulder bag on the seat. Then, slowly, in a way that suggested either self-consciousness or a complete lack of self-consciousness, he sauntered to the bar. The barman appeared to know him. He made him a lime and soda, and told him he’d bring his food to the table when it was ready.

Joey watched him walking back to his table. He wore a blue shirt with a subtle check. The bottom buttons, she noticed, strained very gently against a slight softness and Joey felt a strange wave of pleasure, a sense of excitement about the unapologetic contours of his body, the suggestion of meals enjoyed and worries forgotten about over a bottle of decent wine. She found herself wanting to slide her fingers between those tensed buttons, to touch, just for a moment, the soft flesh beneath.

The thought shocked her, left her slightly winded. She turned her attention to her gin and tonic, aware that her glass was virtually empty, aware that it was time for her to leave. But she didn’t want to move. She couldn’t move. She was suddenly stultified by a terrible and unexpected longing. She turned slightly to catch a glimpse of his feet, his ankles, the rumpled cowl of grey cotton sock, the worn hide of black leather lace-up shoes, an inch of pale, bare flesh just there, between the sock and the hem of the trousers she’d been aware of him slowly tugging up before sitting down.

She was in the hard grip of a shocking physical attraction. She turned her eyes away from his feet and back to her empty glass and then to the wedding photos on her phone, which had only 2 per cent charge left and was about to die. But she couldn’t, she simply couldn’t sit here staring into an empty gin glass. Not now. Not in front of this man.

She was aware of him taking papers out of his shoulder bag, shuffling them around, pulling a pen from somewhere, holding it airily away from him in one hand, clicking and unclicking, clicking and unclicking, bringing it down to make a mark on the paper, putting it away from him again. Click, click. One foot bouncing slightly against the fulcrum of the other. She would leave when the waiter came with his food. That was what she’d do. When he was distracted.

The screen of her phone turned black, finally giving up its ghost. She slipped it into her handbag and stared at the floor until finally the barman disappeared at the sound of a buzzer somewhere behind him and reappeared a moment later with some kind of sandwich on a wooden board arranged alongside a glossy hillock of herbs and curly leaves. She saw Tom move paperwork out of the way, smiling generously at the barman.

‘Thank you,’ she heard him say as she picked up her jacket and squeezed her way between her chair and the table, almost knocking it over in her keenness to leave without being noticed. ‘That looks lovely,’ he was saying as she crossed the bar, her heavy boots making a loud knocking sound against the dove-grey floor tiles, the strap of her shoulder bag refusing to sit properly against her shoulder, her trailing jacket knocking over a small display of leaflets about the village farmers’ market as she passed.

The barman called over, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll pick them up.’

‘Thank you,’ she said.

She wrenched open the door and threw herself out on to the street, but not before, for just one flickering second, her eyes had met his and something terrible had passed between them, something that she could only describe as a mutual fascination.

4

26 January

Joey stared at Alfie sitting on the bed, cross-legged, the laptop open and balanced on his knees. His once flowing red locks were short now, growing back from the brutal number two he’d inflicted on himself when they got back to the UK that had made his head look suddenly slightly too small for his body. His lower face was covered in a mulch of four-day stubble. He was wearing a grey vest with deep-cut armholes that showed off most of his tattoos and a pair of elderly Gap underpants. He was huge. A solid brick wall of a man. Even sitting on a slightly fey bed he looked like a Celtic warrior. A Celtic warrior who’d forgotten to get dressed.

She scrutinised his hard, young man’s body. And then she thought of Tom Fitzwilliam’s soft, grown-up body and she wondered what would happen to Alfie’s hard body as the years passed. Would he turn to fat or to sinew? Would he still be Alfie Butter, crap guitarist, brilliant hugger, hopeless painter and decorator, big-hearted romantic, attentive lover? Or would he be someone else? How could it be possible that she didn’t know? That no one could tell her? That she would just have to trust in the universe to bring everything to some kind of satisfactory conclusion? How could it be?

Joey felt her brain swell and roil. She thought of her nasty Whackadoo uniform, the smell of fried nuggets and boys’ toilets. She thought of Tom Fitzwilliam, the click, click, click of his ballpoint pen. She thought of the feeling that had enveloped her when he was in the bar, the feeling that had taken her the most part of the afternoon and evening to purge. She thought of her mother, the lack of her, the loss and she felt, suddenly, dreadfully, out of control.

‘Are you OK?’ said Alfie, looking at her curiously.

‘Mhm.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah,’ she said, making herself smile. ‘Sure. Possibly having a tiny, baby, shit-job-missing-Ibiza crisis, but nothing worse than that.’

‘Come here,’ he said, big freckled arms spread apart, ‘I’ll hug it away for you.’

She acquiesced although part of her wanted to shout, A hug is not always the right answer, you know. But as she felt his arms around her, his warm breath against the crown of her head, she thought that it might not be an answer, but it was certainly better than yet another question.

She stopped at the corner shop on her way home the next day. It was the end of the first day of her new job and she felt rubbed raw by the rudeness of people, the loudness of children, the lack of sunlight, the sheer length of the day. She wanted to go home and shower and put on joggers and a hoodie and drink a cup of tea. But mainly she wanted wine. Lots of wine.

As she turned into the booze aisle of the shop she saw Tom Fitzwilliam’s wife. What was her name again? Jack had told her but she couldn’t remember. Something beginning with an ‘N’, she thought. She had her hand in the chilled drinks cabinet, about to pull out a bottle of cold mineral water. She was flushed, her hair sweaty and tied back, wearing shiny black leggings and a black fitted top that revealed a slightly sinewy, over-worked-out physique. On her wrist was a lipstick-pink fitness tracker. On her feet were bright white trainers.

She turned slightly as she became aware of Joey’s eyes upon her. She smiled coolly, then took the bottle to the till at the other side of the shop. Joey could hear her from here, chatting to the cashier. She was well spoken with a slightly northern slant to some of her words. She told the cashier that she’d just started running again, a new year’s resolution after a broken ankle the year before had put her out of action. It was wonderful, she said, to be pounding the tarmac again. She always felt out of sorts when she wasn’t running regularly. Two miles a day cleared out the cobwebs, she said, got the cogs turning.

Joey peered around the corner of the cereal aisle to get a better look at the woman Tom Fitzwilliam had chosen to marry. She looked weightless, sprite-like. Everything about her was delicate, sinuous, as though she’d been drawn with sharpened pencils. Joey was small, but Tom’s wife was doll-like, with hair as fine as gossamer and a button nose. She imagined those tiny hands grasping his soft waist. She wondered if he’d ever been unfaithful to her. She wondered how often they had sex. She imagined, suddenly, this tiny child’s toy of a woman astride her big, handsome husband, her head tipped back.

She grabbed a bottle of something cheap with a screw-top lid and took it quickly to the till. As she walked back up the hill towards the painted houses she saw Tom’s wife just ahead of her, a matchstick silhouette clutching a bottle of water, shoulders hunched against the bitter January wind.

And there, high above, in the pale backlight of a top-floor window in the Fitzwilliams’ house, she saw a small beam of a light, the movement of a person, the fall of a heavy curtain, sudden darkness.

5

27 January

Freddie Fitzwilliam switched off his digital binoculars, let the curtain drop and wheeled his chair back across the bedroom floor, from the window to his computer. There was a shiny track in the carpet now recording the many journeys he’d made by office chair from one side of his room to the other. He was the captain of his own ship up here, in his attic room with its sweeping views across the village and the river valley and the landscape beyond. The digital binoculars had been a Christmas gift from his mum and dad. They had revolutionised his life. He could now clearly see Jenna Tripp’s road from here. He could also see the dimpled glass of Bess Ridley’s bathroom which occasionally shimmered and radiated with the suggestion of naked flesh behind. He could see Jenna and Bess meeting up each morning outside Jenna’s house in their tacky Academy uniforms: short, short skirts and bare legs even in the chill of January, linking arms, sharing earbuds, gossip. He could even see what flavour Pringles they were eating.

Freddie didn’t go to the Academy where his dad was headmaster. He went to a private boys’ school across the other side of town that took him half an hour to walk to every morning. He’d been in Melville for one year and one month since he’d woken up one morning in his old house in Mold and been told that they were moving to Bristol and that they were moving next week and that no, they weren’t coming back. His dad was a bigwig head teacher. The government sent him all over the country to ‘special measures’ schools, schools that were on the brink of being shut down because they were so fucking terrible. This one had been so fucking terrible that they’d had to sack the old head and have him walked off the premises the same day: something to do with embezzling school funds, something really bad.

At first Freddie had hated it here. His school was shit; it looked like a prison and it smelled worse. The teachers were all really old and very British, not like his old school where they’d been mostly fresh-faced Europeans. He liked European teachers; he could impress them by talking to them in their mother tongues. They always loved that. He could get away with murder if he could compliment a teacher in fluent Spanish or whatever.

Freddie could speak six languages: French, Spanish, German, Italian, Mandarin and Welsh. The Welsh he’d picked up when they lived in Mold; the rest he’d taught himself. He could also speak in about twenty different accents to such an extent that locals couldn’t tell he was putting it on. He was going to join MI5 when he left university. His parents had been telling him all his life that the government would love a clever little bastard like him, and he tended to agree with them. What else could he possibly do with all these brains, all these facts, the constant spin and bubble of his brilliant mind? It had to go somewhere. And, of course, the digital binoculars (and the Smartwatch spy camera and the spy glasses and the spy software built into his Samsung Galaxy) had played right into the whole Freddie’s-going-to-be-a-spy narrative that he and his parents had been writing for nearly fifteen years.

And at first that was what he’d used them for.

In the absence of any friends or any real desire to have friends, Freddie had spent the past year or so compiling a dossier called The Melville Papers, a kind of quasi-local paper about the local community. In it he reported on the comings and goings in Lower Melville as seen from his perch at the top of the house. He logged the visitors to the Melville Hotel – once he had seen Cate Blanchett going in; she was really, really small. He logged the dog walkers – White-haired man with miniature schnauzer left home 8 p.m., returned 8.27 – and the joggers – two middle-aged women with big bottoms, left home 7.30, returned 8.45, bought expensive crisps from the deli. He logged the occasional infraction of the law – a dog walker failing to collect their dog’s poo, countless episodes of double parking or parking on the zigzag lines by the zebra crossing, at least three shoplifting episodes, one of which had ended with the shopkeeper chasing the man all the way to the other side of the village before almost having a heart attack.

But recently, Freddie had found his focus shifting from the humdrum and the day to day; there were after all only so many times he could make a note of the white-haired man walking his miniature schnauzer before it stopped being interesting. Nowadays, Freddie found most of his attention being taken up by logging girls. It was strange because Freddie had never liked girls, not ever. A dislike of girls had, in fact, been one of his defining characteristics. He had assumed that not liking girls was his default setting.

But apparently not.

Jenna and Bess were the two prettiest girls in the village by far. Jenna was tall and athletically built with fine dark hair and quite a big bust. Bess was small with what appeared to be naturally blond hair which she wore quite short with a fringe that hung in her eyes. They were older than Freddie, year eleven to his year ten. He spent most of his time logging them now; he knew what nights they did after-school clubs, what days they did PE, what their favourite Starbucks drinks were, how often they changed their earrings.

Yes, Jenna and Bess were by far his favourites. But there was someone new now. She’d moved into the blue house two doors down a few weeks ago and she was really pretty. He’d first seen her in the restaurant at the Melville down in the village when he was having dinner with his mum and dad. She’d been with a man. He was big and rough-looking with shaved red hair and tattoos that you could see through the fabric of his shirt. Freddie had heard her first, her Bristol accent, a loud laugh. He’d been intrigued, turned his head just a few degrees to check her out. She was necking wine in a floaty top. She had a really full mouth, big white teeth, white-blond hair in a messy bun, gold hoop earrings, small feet in blood-red suede boots with little tassels. And that was what he called her while he tried to find a way to discover her real name.

He called her Red Boots.

He was watching her now; he’d watched her get off the bus in the village, then lost her for a while before picking her up again trailing a few feet behind his mum up the hill. He zoomed in tighter and tighter until he was close enough to see that she looked terrible and now, as he uploaded the film on to his laptop he zoomed in further still and there, in one frame, he saw a yellow T-shirt worn underneath a big ugly coat. He went right in on it: there was the familiar yellow and red of the Whackadoo logo. He passed Whackadoo every morning on his way to school, a big yellow breeze-block building with a huge plastic toucan outside. It was for kids or something.

Christ, he thought, Red Boots is working at Whackadoo. What kind of crap job was that? He saved the film into the top-secret folder that no one in his house was even halfway clever enough to uncover. Then he went downstairs to ask his mum what he was having for supper.

6

3 February

Jenna Tripp kicked off her black trainers, unknotted her nylon tie, dropped her rucksack at the bottom of the stairs, pulled the hairband from her ponytail, rubbed at her aching scalp with her fingertips and called out for her mum.

‘In here!’

She peered round the door into the living room. Her mum was perched on the edge of the leather sofa, the laptop on the coffee table in front of her, a notepad to one side of her, her phone on the other. Her pale gold hair was scraped back into a ponytail. She looked pretty with her hair off her face; you could see the fine angles of her bone structure, the shadowy dip below each cheekbone, the delicacy of her jawline. She’d been a model for a short while in her teens. There was a framed photo of her modelling a bikini on a windswept beach nailed to the wall outside Jenna’s bedroom. Her arms were wrapped tight around her body (it had been November apparently) and she was smiling up into the sky above. She was pure joy to behold.

‘Check out there, will you?’ she said now, sucking her e-cigarette and releasing a thick trail of berry-scented vapour. ‘Can you see a blue Lexus? One of those hatchbacks?’

Jenna sighed and pulled back one drawn curtain. She looked left and right around the small turning where their cottage was and then back at her mum. ‘No blue Lexus,’ she said.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘I’m sure. There’s a blue Ford Focus, but that’s the only blue car out there.’

‘Oh, that’s Mike’s car. That’s fine.’

She didn’t ask her mum more about the blue Lexus. She knew what her mum thought about the blue Lexus. She let the curtain drop and went into the kitchen. She boiled the kettle and made herself a low-calorie hot chocolate into which she dropped a small handful of marshmallows (she’d recently learned that marshmallows were surprisingly low in calories) and then she took the hot chocolate, her school bag and her phone to her room. She stopped on the way to study the photo of her mum. Frances Tripp. Or Frankie Miller as she’d been known in her modelling and acting days. She’d changed back to Frances in her twenties when she’d married Jenna’s dad and started campaigning for animal rights. He told her it would give her more gravitas. Jenna wished she’d known the girl in the photo, the carefree beauty with the wind in her hair and the sky reflected in her shining eyes. She reckoned she’d have liked her.

‘By the way!’ Her mother’s girlish voice followed her up the stairs to the landing.

‘Yes!’

‘Did you change the bulb in your vanity mirror?’

Jenna paused before she replied, her shoulders falling. ‘No,’ she said, although it would have been easier in some ways to say yes.

‘Right,’ said her mum. ‘Odd. Very odd.’

Jenna opened the door to her bedroom, slipped through and closed it behind her before she got pulled into any further conversation about the bulb in her vanity mirror. There was a Snapchat from Bess on her phone. It was a photo of her holding the local paper next to her face, pulling a kissy-face at a photo of Mr Fitzwilliam on page eight. She’d scribbled a pink love heart around both of them. Jenna tutted. Seriously, what was wrong with the girl? Mr Fitzwilliam was so old.

‘He has charisma,’ Bess had said once. ‘Plus he smells good.’

‘How do you know how he smells?’

‘I make a point of sniffing when I’m close. And he does this thing …’

‘What thing?’ Jenna had said.

‘This thing with his pen. He clicks it.’ Bess had mimed clicking a pen.

‘He clicks it?’

‘Yeah. It’s hot.’

‘You’re on glue, mate, I swear.’

She replied to Bess’s message now: Meth head.

Bess replied with a sequence of crystal emojis. Jenna smiled and put her phone on her bedside table to charge. Bess was the best friend in the world, the best friend she’d ever had. They were like sisters. Like twins. She’d known Bess for four years, ever since her mum and dad had split up and she’d drawn the short straw and moved to Lower Melville with her mum while her little brother Ethan had stayed with Dad in Weston-super-Mare. Not that there was anything wrong with Lower Melville. The cottage (or what Jenna’s mum referred to as a cottage, but was actually a tired post-war terrace with pebble-dashed walls) was in fact the house her mum had grown up in and while the cottage was as scruffy as it had always been, the village around it no longer was. Kids at her school thought she was posh because she lived here. They were so wrong.

‘Jen!’

She closed her eyes at the sound of her mother’s voice climbing up the stairs.

‘Jenna!’

‘Yes!’

‘Check out the back, will you? Tell me if that man’s still sitting in his window.’

She drew in her breath and held it hard inside her for as long as she could.

‘Why?’

‘You know why.’

She did know why, but sometimes she needed her mum to find the words to explain these obsessions, in the hope that it might wake her up to the nonsense of what she was saying.

She let her breath out, put down her hot chocolate and knelt on her bed. There was a man sitting in his window at the back of the terrace that faced the end of their garden. He was side on and absorbed in something on a screen in front of him. She watched him lift a teacup to his lips, take a sip, put the cup back down, run his hand briefly round the back of his neck, and then start moving his fingers over a keyboard.

‘No!’ she shouted down to her mother. ‘There’s no one there. No man.’

There was a beat of silence, filled, Jenna assumed, not with feelings of relief, but of disappointment.

‘Good,’ her mother said a moment later. ‘Good. Let me know if he comes back.’

‘I will.’

‘Thanks, darling.’

Jenna’s phone pinged. Another Snapchat from Bess. The photo of Mr Fitzwilliam from the paper, his face covered over in Bess’s lipstick kisses.

Jenna smiled and sent another message.

U R madder than my mum.

7

There was a photo of Tom Fitzwilliam on page eight of the local paper. He was standing at the entrance to the Academy, his arms folded across his stomach, a thin blue tie blown slightly askew by the wind, looking at the camera sternly with a half-buried smile. The headline said ‘SUPERHEAD TACKLES GANGS’.

Joey did not read the accompanying article. She was too intent on absorbing every last detail of the photograph: the lanyard around his neck on a yellow strap. The dull gleam of the narrow gold band on his ring finger. The way his waistband sat, no belt, slightly slack, just above his hip bones. The jut of his chin. The wide slope of his shoulders. The slight disarray of his hair in the same breeze that had disordered his tie. And the way he stood in full and complete possession of his surroundings.

My school. My kids. My responsibility.

Tom Fitzwilliam.

SUPERHEAD.

She touched the outline of his stomach with one outstretched fingertip, caressing the image thoughtfully as she remembered the potent look they’d exchanged a week ago as she’d left the bar at the Melville. And then she jumped at the suggestion of a hand against her waist and a sudden bloom of warm breath on the side of her neck. It was Alfie, smelling of daytime sleep and stale T-shirt.

‘Fuck, Alf, you made me jump!’

‘Sorry, angel.’

His arm snaked around her body from behind and he buried his face in her shoulder and planted his mouth firmly against her skin. ‘Mm,’ he said, breathing her in. ‘You smell fucking gorgeous.’

‘I do not smell gorgeous. I smell of chips and boys’ farts.’