“What do you mean, fallen through?” Emma roamed around her living room with her phone at her ear, banging into the boxes of stock that she still hadn’t got used to having in her way.
“I’m afraid the buyers have changed their minds,” her real estate agent told her, in a tone that made Emma feel as if he blamed her. Maybe she’d deterred her shop’s buyers by being too openly sad about the sale. Perhaps she should’ve smiled graciously and wished them luck, rather than showing them round with a how-dare-you-buy-my-life sullenness. After all, it wasn’t their fault. It was nobody’s fault, as her mum kept reminding her. So why did she feel so furious?
“They decided to go another way,” the agent added.
“What does that even mean?”
“A different property, I assume.”
They were taking their secondhand electrics elsewhere. Probably to a place with cheaper overheads and higher footfall. Emma had never liked the idea of her shop being filled with rewired TVs, but she needed the money from the sale. Needed it to pay the rent on her flat and settle invoices while she searched for a job. To keep her afloat, in control, for when Zeb came home and everything would be okay.
She managed not to swear until she’d hung up. Then she flung her phone across the room, where it landed in a box of 1920s jewelry and sank into its glittery depths. Suddenly Emma felt suffocated, felt heat coming off the leather handbags lined up along every baseboard.
It took her a moment to realize her phone was ringing again. Its vibration sounded metallic against the brooches and hairpins inside the box. She dug in her hand, praying the buyers had had a drastic change of heart within the last thirty seconds.
But it wasn’t her real estate agent.
“Zeb!”
She tried to tame her enthusiasm as she stabbed at the screen. There was no reply. A rustling came down the line.
“Zeb? Can you hear me?”
A buzz of voices now, faint and fragmented, and something like the clink of glass. Emma’s spirits dived again. He’d clearly pocket-called her. Why did it sound like he was in a bar? At eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning?
“Hello?” Frustration rose through her. “Zeb, are you there?”
There was a tinny echo on the line. She hung up and tried to call him back—once, twice, no answer—then sent a text: Just want to know you’re okay.
She watched as the Delivered notification appeared, but not the Read. With a growl she deliberately aimed for the box of jewelry this time, torpedoing her phone to the bottom.
She needed to get out of the house. Pulling on her scruffy running gear (how did the joggers around here always manage to look so glamorous?), Emma stuck earbuds into her ears, turned up her iPod, and escaped into the hallway.
“Oh!” She almost ran into two uniformed PCs just outside her door. “Sorry.” She pulled out the buds, feeling disrespectful even for thinking of listening to a frivolous post-punk playlist when her neighbors were into their second day of hell.
“Emma Brighton?” the male PC with the earnest face asked.
She nodded, dropped her earbuds, fumbled to scoop them up.
“Could we ask you a few questions?”
“Of course.” She stepped back inside and held the door for them. “Please . . .”
They squinted around, as if wondering whether all her boxes were stuffed with knockoff DVDs. She’d spilled Gilbert’s food earlier: Seeds were crumbled on the carpet where the police stood in their regulation black shoes. The woman had auburn hair in a neat bun, the man a slightly gangly way of holding himself that reminded her of Zeb.
“You may be aware that your neighbor Freya Harlow is unfortunately missing.”
She swallowed. “Yes. It’s horrible. Have there been any . . . ?”
“When did you last see her?”
“Erm, it would’ve been Thursday morning. I saw her out of my window, leaving for school.”
Her cheeks warmed at this half-confession of her interest in the Harlows. She hated the image of herself as a nosy neighbor or a bored spectator of others’ lives. Was that what she’d become since her shop had closed, since Zeb had left?
“Did you notice anything out of the ordinary?”
Emma looked toward her window as if to re-create her last sighting of Freya. There she was in a navy Puffa jacket, ponytail flopping to one side as she paused to read something on her phone. Was Emma’s memory tainted by the knowledge that Freya had vanished, or had the teenager really seemed subdued? Had she hunched her shoulders as she’d studied her phone?
She recalled now that Steph had come out of the house, calling after her daughter. Freya had looked irritated, shoving her phone into her pocket as she’d spun around. Steph had handed her what looked like a couple of banknotes, and touched Freya’s arm before she’d left. Did Steph remember that casual see-you-later touch? Had she been replaying it endlessly? Perhaps convincing herself, as Emma was now, that Freya hadn’t responded, had maybe even shrugged her off.
“I guess I’ve seen her happier,” Emma said.
“Was she upset?”
“No, no. She just wasn’t as full of beans as she sometimes seems.”
“Have you noticed other changes in her recently?”
“I don’t really know her.”
“But you did notice she was less . . . ‘full of beans’ on Thursday?” The PC said it like Emma had coined the phrase.
“It was just an observation. I only saw her for a moment. And I . . . I wouldn’t like to say what’s normal behavior for her.”
But Freya’s demeanor that morning had snagged her attention, even if she was only properly registering it now. Mainly because Freya’s carefree bounciness had been a source of amazement to her for a while. Her own experience of being a teenager had been so different, so bogged down by self-consciousness and insecurity.
“What about her parents?”
Emma blinked. “What about them?”
“Any observations about Mr. or Mrs. Harlow?”
She seemed to have been cast in the role of observer. But even before Freya’s disappearance, hadn’t her impressions of her neighbors often changed with her moods? Mostly their family life had appeared golden, but on her more bitter days, which she was ashamed to think of now, she’d been able to persuade herself it was all a front.
“They’re going through something unimaginable,” she said. “I’ve never even heard them argue before.”
The woman looked at her keenly. “Does that mean you have since?”
“A-a few raised voices. Understandable in the circumstances.”
The man made a note and Emma felt uneasy again. Had she said too much, too little? Would any of this help Freya? Sometimes lately, she feared she’d lost the ability to make the right judgments. She’d begun to question her own instincts, on everything from the decision to sell her shop to the wording of her texts to Zeb.
And the silent calls to her landline. She couldn’t even trust her instincts on those. The first had come a few days ago, then another while Steph had been there last night and a third a few hours later, around one a.m. She’d been able to hear whispery breathing each time, painting her skin with goose bumps. But that didn’t mean they were a genuine concern, worth dwelling on amid everything else. Did it?
“One last thing,” said the male officer. “Your other neighbor, Chris Watson.” He gestured downward. “Did you happen to notice whether he was at home on Thursday afternoon? Whether his car was here?”
Emma frowned at the change in focus. She conjured a mental picture of Chris, whom she’d had only a little interaction with since moving into the building. Approximately early forties . . . wife was a nurse . . . That was all she could muster. He and Vicky seemed to keep a low profile on the street, aside from Chris’s branded car and the self-printed fliers he sometimes posted through letterboxes.
Or maybe she’d just never paid much attention to them, even though they lived beneath her. Evidently it was only the Harlows she’d developed a fascination with as her own life had deflated.
The police were waiting, pens poised.
“I can’t remember,” she said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t notice if he was home or not. Is he . . . involved?”
“We’re just asking about people who know Freya.”
Emma had so many more questions, but the PCs were preparing to go. They cast a final swift glance around, then subtly wiped their feet on her mat, perhaps to dislodge the hamster food wedged in their soles.
After they’d gone, she rescued her phone from the swamp of brooches, even more anxious than before for a reply from Zeb. There was nothing on the screen except a vicious-looking scratch. Emma slid her finger up and down it, her thoughts tumbling with Freya and Steph and Paul and Chris Watson and Zeb. As her temples began to throb, she decided to take a walk instead of a run, still craving the outdoors but feeling slower, heavier, as if the police’s questions had added extra weight to her small frame.
As soon as she left the house she was confronted by Freya’s face, enlarged and replicated in high-gloss, high-res, full color. Her eyes were unnaturally blue, the medal round her neck the brightest gold, the flush to her cheeks the shade of strawberries. The effect was overwhelming, unavoidably reminiscent of the shiny, sporty girls Emma had half idolized and half hated at school. And the words shouting below that smile: have you seen freya?
Emma suspected the police wouldn’t have stretched their resources to these ultra-quality posters. She imagined Steph laboring all night after leaving Emma’s flat, her printer in overdrive. I could’ve done that, she thought. That’s one thing I could’ve done.
Her gaze flickered to Chris Watson’s car. Its monochrome driving-school logo was like the antithesis of the vibrant posters. Emma dipped her head and hurried on.
Freya’s image turned the corner with her, continued to punctuate her route until she smelled the river and felt guiltily glad to escape the teenager’s dazzling gaze. The river path was one of the things Emma loved about living here. The rainbow of moored, swaying narrowboats; the pub gardens with fairy lights threaded into their fences; the German restaurant with outdoor benches and strong beer, where she’d been for lunch with Zeb and her parents a few times. But today the gloom of the sky was reflected in the water, the whole scene a rolling wash of gray.
She walked as far as Kingston Bridge, where she’d once seen a mo will you marry me? banner hanging from the railings. She remembered how she’d grinned, imagining the story behind it, the unknown Mo’s reaction . . . but as she approached the bridge today, she stopped dead.
Paul Harlow was in the middle of it, talking to a woman in a red coat. The pair stood a small distance apart, their backs to Emma, staring downriver. They could have been mistaken for strangers who happened to have stopped in the same spot, but she could tell by the angle of their heads and the movement of their bodies that they were talking. As Emma watched, their conversation grew more animated. The woman reached for Paul’s arm but he yanked it away and stormed off toward the opposite bank.
The woman stayed on the bridge. She leaned both palms on the pale stone barrier, watching Paul go. Then her head turned to stare down at the water and her shoulders shook as if she was crying.
All the way home, Emma pondered what she’d seen. Was the woman connected to Freya? Did Steph know about the meeting, which had seemed so emotionally charged? Emma thought of the shouting from last night, the smashing glass. And the evening before that: Steph at the bottom of the stairs and Paul’s shadow stretching down toward her.
She didn’t know what to make of any of it.
As she let herself into the house, she peered up at the Harlows’ windows, then down at Chris’s, seeing no movement in either. Her pulse hopped when she pushed the main door and it hit something on the other side . . . someone, in fact. Steph was standing behind it, reaching into the mail basket attached to the reverse of their letterbox. She drew back, holding a small white parcel.
“Steph,” Emma said.
Her neighbor’s face was ashen, emerging out of the loop of a green scarf. Emma tried to compose herself to ask, Are you okay, any news, what did the school say? but stalled as her neighbor dug her hand into the envelope she was clutching, and pulled out a hardback book.
“Did you order this?” Steph asked.
Emma was taken aback by her urgent tone. “Erm . . . no.”
“It isn’t yours?”
Emma squinted at the title. Confusion made the words blur a little. How to Be a Better Parent. The cover showed a woman in a yellow dress and a boy in his early teens, facing each other in opposite armchairs, the woman leaning toward the boy, as if listening earnestly.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“It came through the door, but it isn’t addressed to anybody . . .” Steph’s eyes glazed as though her thoughts were galloping. Emma glanced at the book again, a flame of anxiety igniting in the back of her mind.
She hadn’t ordered it. That much was true. So why was it making her feel so strange?
Steph opened it, and gasped as orange liquid dripped out of its middle. Emma jerked back, clapping a hand over her mouth. The rest of a crushed raw egg slopped out of the book’s pages and spread in a sticky puddle at Steph’s feet.
“What the hell?” Emma said into her palm.
The sight of the egg sliming their hall floor, some still leaking from the book in Steph’s hands, brought back a sickening memory from years before. Steph was like a statue, holding the book open, staring at the blobs of yolk and fragments of shell clinging to its pages.
“I don’t . . .” Steph’s voice was soft and hoarse. “What does this mean?”
“I have no idea.” Emma wondered whether her neighbor could tell her heart was booming, paranoia creeping up around her neck. There’s no reason this would be aimed at you, she told herself. The Harlows are the victims here.
“Our doorstep was egged two weeks ago,” Steph said.
Emma snapped to attention. “Really? I never saw that.”
“I didn’t think anything of it at the time.” Steph’s voice was shaking now. “I assumed it was a random prank so I cleaned it straight up and forgot about it. But now . . . This can’t be a coincidence, surely. And this book . . .” She slapped it shut and stared at the title. “Maybe it’s trying to tell us something. That this is our fault.” She closed her eyes, dropping her chin as if something had landed on her shoulders. “Oh, God,” she whispered.
“Maybe it’s just some nasty stranger stirring up trouble.”
Steph opened her eyes. Her pupils were huge. “I have to call Paul. And our family liaison officer.”
Emma nodded. She wasn’t sorry that Steph now seemed eager to wrap up the conversation: Her insides were still churning. Neither was she sorry when her neighbor suggested they didn’t disturb the egg in case the police needed to examine it.
She was light-headed as she watched Steph run up the stairs clutching the soiled parenting book. The door to the upper flat slammed. Emma found herself checking her hair and clothes, even though the egg hadn’t touched her. She hurried into her flat and washed her hands until they were scarlet.