THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR, page 1
Tony Parsons
* * *
THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR
CONTENTS
THE NIGHT I LEFT YOU
PART ONE: LANA CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
PART TWO: ROMAN CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
PART THREE: LANA CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
PART FOUR: ROMAN CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
PART FIVE: LANA CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tony Parsons is a bestselling novelist and an award-winning journalist. His books have been published in over forty languages and his multi-million selling novel Man and Boy won The Book of The Year prize in 2000. Most recently, he created the Max Wolfe crime series. Tony lives in London with his family.
Also by Tony Parsons
Man and Boy
One For My Baby
Man and Wife
The Family Way
Stories We Could Tell
My Favourite Wife
Starting Over
Men from the Boys
Catching the Sun
The Murder Bag (Max Wolfe #1)
The Slaughter Man (Max Wolfe #2)
The Hanging Club (Max Wolfe #3)
Die Last (Max Wolfe #4)
Girl on Fire (Max Wolfe #5)
#taken (Max Wolfe #6)
Your Neighbour’s Wife
Max Wolfe Digital Shorts
Dead Time
Fresh Blood
Tell Him He’s Dead
For my mother’s six brothers – Rich, Jim, Bert, John, Tub and Alfie Wood.
The best uncles that any boy ever had.
THE NIGHT I LEFT YOU
I did not want to leave you.
You know that, don’t you? You know it in your blood and bones, you know it in your heart and soul.
Leaving you felt like the end of the world. It was the end of the world – at least that other world, that lost world where we didn’t know how lucky we were, the world where we were too young and dumb to count our blessings.
But I woke up near the end of the night and you were gone.
I knew – it’s true – that you were not gone far, and you were not gone long, for your side of the bed was still warm from your body, and the soft dent of you was still there.
But you were no longer where you should have been.
You were no longer sleeping by my side.
And still caught somewhere between dreams and waking, I whispered your name into the darkness. And as if in response, from somewhere deep inside our home, there were sounds that should not be there.
Muffled, scuffling sounds, angry but muted.
These were unmistakably the sounds of violence but it was not a violence that felt the need to raise its voice. These were choked, suffocated noises, brutal and coarse and smothered, as if all of this nasty business could be done and over and finished without ever waking the neighbours.
I slid from our bed, heart pounding, and my palm brushed against the place where you had slept by my side, and your body heat touched my hand even as my bare toes felt the night-time cold, making me shiver.
There was only the deep night silence as I reached our bedroom door and eased it open. The choked, scuffling sounds were gone and I wondered if I had heard them in a bad dream, only a dream, but one of those dreams that seem so real.
Then the sounds began again, and I said your name – louder now, calling for you to come back to me, suddenly terrified that this was the night that I had always dreaded.
The night I would lose you.
I said your name again – louder, insistent – as if it was the only word I had ever known. Then I said your name a third time as if it was, in the end, the only word in the world that really mattered a damn to me.
But still you did not come back to me.
And so I went looking for you.
I walked along the dark hall – did I hear urgent murmuring voices or were they just inside my head? – and then I went down the stairs until finally I stood outside the closed door of the living room.
Such a strange name, isn’t it? The living room. It makes you wonder what all the other rooms are for. I turned the doorknob to the living room and took two paces into pitch-black darkness heavy with silence, a silence that seemed to be holding its breath.
And all the lights came on at once.
And those lights were blinding and there it was waiting for us just as it had always been waiting, the thing that explodes in a life and changes it forever.
And I thought – this is how our world ends.
I felt total, all-consuming panic in the blaze of light so bright that I had to squeeze my eyes shut for a moment, a glare so dazzling it tattooed a black star on my retina.
They were in our home.
They were in this living room, these strangers with blood in their eyes.
They were here in our home that all at once was no longer a home.
Their hands all over everything we loved. And then they were on me as they were already on you, and I saw your face as they forced you to your knees, then to the floor. Two of them were forcing you to the ground, your head twisted sideways, your mouth and nose contorted against the hardwood floor and even then I thought it might all go away, even as late as that I believed they might just take what they wanted and flee, and I would go after them half-heartedly, not wanting to catch them, not really, and then the night would be split by the sound of a police siren coming to the rescue and I could stop running and it would be over and I would return to you and you would be unbroken and we would be as we were before.
But none of that happened.
What happened was this.
They had you down on the ground, one of them facing you with his hands on the back of your head, gripping it like a basketball, pushing your face into the floor, while the other was kneeling on your back, placing a knee at the base of your spine, pressing his full weight down, pinning you to the ground.
And as I watched with my arms pinned behind my back I thought that the knee against the base of the spine was not something that came naturally, it was a move that needed to be learned, to be taught and practised and mastered.
There was a terrifying efficiency about their cruelty.
They were professionals.
And I struggled and I fought but the one who had me put his hands on my neck from behind, expertly choking the life out of me, swinging me from side to side like a large animal with something smaller and weaker and dying in its mouth.
And as my breathing stopped it was the sudden jolt of terror that made my head spasm backwards, connecting hard with something both soft and hard – a combination of eyeball, bridge of the nose and the fragile bone of eye socket – that made him let me go.
And as he reeled away, clawing at his ruined eye, I saw that our front door was still slightly ajar.
A halo of street light gleamed around its ragged edges where they had forced it open and then pushed it not quite shut.
And I know I should have stayed and fought for you.
Do you think I don’t know that?
On the day I die I will tell myself that I should have stayed.
I should have got a knife from the kitchen and shoved it in their rotten faces.
I should have fought them for you.
I should have killed them all.
I should have stayed.
I should never have left you.
But I screamed your name.
And then I ran.
PART ONE
* * *
LANA
1
Saturday, 29 August
We were moving into our new home when an old hippy lady came out of the cottage opposite carrying a large glass jar of home-made honey. Her home was beautiful, the front almost completely covered with a pink tangle of oleander, so that her cottage seemed to be spun from the flower, like a magical home in a deep dark wood in a fairy tale.
‘Welcome!’ she called. ‘I do hope you like honey.’
As a city girl – born, bred and by nature – I was not very comfortable with the whole knocking-on-your-neighbours’-door thing. I was more of the avoid-eye-contact-with-your-neighbour-at-all-costs type.
In my city, my long-lost city, if you lived next door to someone for ten years or so then you might possibly nod coldly to them at Christmas. But out here it was clearly different. Out here among the green rolling hills of Oxfordshire – only an hour’s commute to the city although it felt like another planet – your new neighbour brought you home-made honey before the removal men had started unloading the lorry. She told me her name – Sally Berry. She was an elderly flower child, part of the hippy diaspora that had headed for the country half a lifetime ago, seventy-five if she was a day, with fine, snow-white hair still streaked with natural blonde highlights like souvenirs of all those lost Sixties summers. Her silver-and-gold locks fell to the shoulders of a faded denim jacket embroidered with little flowers and peace signs.
Her lovely blue eyes sparkled behind wire-rimmed specs.
I told her my name – Lana Wade – and mumbled my thanks, tongue-tied and shy in the presence of this kind stranger, our new neighbour, as I stared at her golden gift, the late summer sun warming the glass jar of honey in my hands.
‘Store it as long as you like,’ Sally Berry said. ‘You can keep honey forever. Honey was found in the tombs of the pharaohs.’
I must have looked doubtful.
‘Honey never goes bad!’ she assured me. ‘Eat it after a thousand years and it’s the same as eating it after a day!’ She turned to look at the removal lorry. ‘Is that your husband? The one in the white T-shirt? He’s very good-looking, isn’t he?’
Roman, my husband, had one of those faces that looks made to be seen in profile – a strong chin and a high forehead and an attractively broken nose, like the face you might see on a coin in the British Museum or on a bottle of Paul Newman salad dressing.
His tight blond curls were darkened and matted with sweat and his white T-shirt, so pristine when we had set out today, was now smeared with the grime of moving. My boy looked good. He stood at the back of the lorry, grinning at us, one hand raised in salute.
‘Is he an actor?’ Sally asked.
‘A doctor,’ I said, feeling that familiar pang of pride that I knew would never fade. ‘Roman’s a doctor.’
Roman was helping the removal men to unload our only sofa. My husband was not the type who liked to stand around and watch the help.
Roman and the youngest, fittest, most elaborately tattooed of the removal men came staggering up the short gravel driveway with the sofa between them.
Sally Berry watched him approvingly.
‘Welcome,’ she smiled. ‘Dr Wade.’
People like being around doctors, I find. They trust doctors. They respect doctors. They find doctors a reassuring presence. But I guessed that Sally would have brought home-made honey for any new neighbour.
‘I love honey,’ Roman said, slightly breathless at the far end of the sofa, but maintaining his impeccable bedside manner. ‘Thank you so much.’
His smile was dazzling.
‘I do hope you’ll be happy here,’ Sally said, beaming at the pair of us. ‘Nobody ever leaves the Gardens.’
‘Why would they?’ Roman gasped. ‘Clean air. No crime. Good schools. All this living space. What could you get in the city for this money? Why would anyone ever move out?’
He sounds like an estate agent, I thought – a mean thought – as they lugged the sofa into the house. But I knew that Roman was not simply being polite to our new neighbour. He was still selling our new home to me, as if I still needed convincing.
And I did.
I desperately wanted this to be a happy day. A new start for us. To leave the past behind and all of that.
But today was not the same for Roman as it was for me. For my husband, we were moving home. And for me, it felt more like exile.
Roman came out of the house and stood panting by my side, staring at the street with something like wonder. Drenched in the sunshine of a late summer afternoon, Castle Gardens – although I never heard anyone call it anything but the Gardens – looked like a city dweller’s dream of the countryside. Sally’s small thatched cottage, swathed in all those pink oleander shrubs, must have originally been the home of some kind of gatekeeper or estate worker or minor retainer. Roman smiled at it with wonder, as if it might be made out of gingerbread.
Apart from Sally’s pink cottage, there were four honey-coloured houses, all postcard-perfect Cotswold architecture, two on each side of the Gardens, none of them exactly the same size. We were in the smallest.
At the far end of the Gardens stood the manor house – much older and larger than its neighbours, its stone a shade darker from the passing of a few extra centuries, more flaxen than honey, the ancient walls lush with the deep dark green of Boston ivy, looking like the distilled essence of some lost England of a hundred years ago.
The manor house stood apart from the rest of the Gardens behind iron gates designed for horse and carriage, not car, with gently rising lawns that looked as though they had been cut with nail scissors, at the end of a grey ribbon of a driveway, behind tall trees that I could not name. It looked like the grand old house in a Gothic novel, waiting to be woken from some bewitched sleep.
Roman sighed by my side, and I leaned against him.
The Gardens might lose some of its romance in the middle of a cold grey winter but on a big blue day in late August with the smell of cut grass in the air and the sun gently toasting all that soft yellow stone, it was beautiful.
Our new home, I thought.
Then there was a sensation so light on the back of my hand that I took it for a summer breeze. But a bee had landed, attracted no doubt by my jar of home-made honey, and I held my breath, waiting for it to sting me. The bee seemed to stare around, getting its bearings, its wings making a blurry rotation movement like a tiny helicopter, its inky legs kicking in strange jerking movements.
‘Human beings can learn a lot from bees,’ Sally told me, watching the one on my hand, making it clear that I shouldn’t even think about swatting it. ‘Their work ethic. Their sense of duty. Their compassion and their sacrifice. Bees live their brief lives in the service of a greater good. Bees are the essence of resilience!’
The bee abruptly lifted from my hand and meandered off into the unbroken blue sky. As we watched it go Roman slipped his arm around my waist and I could smell the sweat mixing with his cologne and feel his hopes for this place coming off him in waves.
I smiled at him, touched by his happiness, and he grinned, scooping me up in his arms, and Sally Berry clapped and the removal guys cheered as my husband carried me across the threshold of this house of dreams, our second shot at building a happy home, the place where we would try to begin again.
2
Our back garden was a jungle.
Someone must have loved it once because it was edged with the tiny graveyards of dead flowers, but nature and neglect had long since reclaimed it for the wild. The grass was waist high and a collapsed trellis of blackened roses sagged and dipped into the deep end of a swimming pool that looked more like a stagnant pond. A pair of scrawny foxes dozed by the pool’s rusting metal ladder, almost invisible in the late afternoon shadows of a droopy willow. The level of the pool’s filthy water was a good metre lower than it should have been.
Taking a break from unpacking, I settled in a nook I had discovered at the top and the back of the house, a secret little alcove with a window seat that was just about big enough for tea for two although there wouldn’t have been room to swing a chocolate digestive – cosy was definitely the word. I contemplated how much work it was going to be to tame our jungle.
In contrast, the garden next door had a lawn as smooth as a snooker table, the grass cut in sharply alternative shades of pale green and dark green, the neat flower beds a riot of colour – pale lemon Japanese primroses and fresh white roses, the garden’s tall fences covered with banks of purple wisteria. Immaculately green-uniformed gardeners silently watered and pruned, manicured and fussed as a young woman did lazy laps of a swimming pool that was as blue as a David Hockney Californian canvas with nothing on its surface but dappled late summer sunshine. The woman emerged at the far end and, even from this distance, she was stunning. Tall and tanned – no, mixed race – she looked like one of those genetically blessed girls I had once photographed for fashion magazines, but ten years older now and married into serious money.
The beauty next door wrapped a white towel around her bony shoulders and, checking her phone, walked slowly around the pool and into her honey-coloured house, ignoring the gardeners who, it seemed to me, were all trying their best not to stare at her.
