“It just seems a bit over the top; that’s all I’m saying.”
“Not to me.” We stand in the open doorway, Ella in her car seat between us. Mark looks at his watch, even though he only just checked the time. “You don’t have to come. You can drop me at the police station and go on to work, if you’d rather.”
“Don’t be silly—of course I’ll come.”
“Silly? I’d hardly call a dead rabbit—”
“I didn’t mean the rabbit! Christ, Anna! I meant: ‘Don’t be silly, I’m not going to leave you to go to the police on your own.’” Mark exhales noisily and stands squarely facing me. “I’m on your side, you know.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
There’s a shout from next door. “Merry Christmas!”
Robert Drake is standing outside his house, his hands on the railings between our driveways.
“Bit early, isn’t it?” Mark slips easily into Jovial Neighbor mode, going down the steps to greet Robert through the railings.
“First one off for six years—I’m going to milk it.”
“I don’t blame you. Six years!”
I watch them shake hands through the railings.
“Still on for Christmas drinks at mine?”
“Absolutely,” Mark says, with far more enthusiasm than I’d be able to muster. Robert holds a party every year. He canceled it last year, out of respect for my parents, but the invitation for this year’s dropped through the door a couple of weeks ago. Presumably my mourning period is over. “What can we bring?”
“Just yourselves. Unless you want soft drinks. Not many of those around. Ha!”
Dad and Billy used to play golf with Robert from time to time, but Mum never joined them. She said Robert was smug. I look at him now—at his expensive shirt and his confident stance—and think she was right. Robert Drake has the innate arrogance of someone so on top of their professional game that they adopt the same position in their private life.
Fuck off, Robert.
The voice in my head is so clear I think for a moment I’ve said it out loud. I imagine Mark’s face, and Robert’s, and stifle a snort of laughter that erupts from nowhere. I think perhaps I’m going mad, the way I think my mum did after Dad died. Laughing at things that weren’t funny, crying at things that weren’t sad. My world feels tipped upside down and this man next door, with his cheery Christmas greetings and his jokes about soft drinks, feels not just insignificant but inappropriate after the events of the last twenty-four hours.
My mother was murdered, I want to tell him. Now someone’s threatening me.
I don’t, of course. But it occurs to me that Robert, with his penchant for wandering outside to chat to the neighbors, might have seen something useful. I join Mark by the railings.
“Did you see anyone outside our house this morning?”
Robert stops short, his festive cheer dimmed by the intensity of my stare. “Not that I recall.” He’s a tall man, but not broad, like Mark. He stoops slightly, and I imagine him leaning over the operating table, scalpel in hand. I shiver. Imagine that same hand slicing open a rabbit . . .
“Were you outside the house late last night?”
The abruptness of my question is followed by an awkward pause.
Robert looks at Mark, even though it’s me who asked the question. “Should I have been?”
“Someone put a rabbit on our doormat,” Mark explains. “There was blood all over the steps. We wondered if you might have seen anything.”
“Good God. A rabbit? What a peculiar . . . But why?”
I examine his face, looking for any sign that he’s faking. “You didn’t see anyone?” Even as I ask, I’m not sure what answer I’m expecting. Yes, I watched someone put a mutilated rabbit outside your house, but didn’t think to ask what the hell they were doing. Or: Yes, I put it there as a joke. Ha ha. An early Christmas present.
“I wasn’t back till late last night . . . Both your cars were in the driveway, but there were no lights on. And I’m afraid I had a lie-in this morning. Off till New Year. I know: lucky bugger, eh?”
This is stupid. Robert Drake is the sort of neighbor who starts community-watch schemes and reports cold callers. If he had seen someone putting a rabbit on our step, he’d have told us. As for putting it there himself . . . the man’s a doctor, not a psychopath.
I turn to Mark. “We should get going.”
“Sure.” He picks up Ella’s car seat, takes it to his car, and straps it in with no sense of urgency. I sit in the back next to her.
I don’t think Mark is taking this seriously. My parents were murdered. How much more proof does he want? The anonymous card. A dead rabbit. These aren’t normal events.
He stands for a while outside the closed car door, then moves away. I hear the crunch of gravel underfoot. I stroke Ella’s cheek with one outstretched finger and wait for Mark to lock the front door. I have a sudden memory of waiting in the car for my parents, sitting in the back like this, while Dad tapped the steering wheel and Mum rushed back to the house for something she’d forgotten.
“I wish you could meet them,” I say to Ella.
When I left university I desperately wanted a place of my own. I’d had a taste of independence—seen a world outside of Eastbourne—and I liked it. But the charity sector is designed for job satisfaction, not salary goals, and the property ladder remained stubbornly out of my grasp. I moved back home and never left.
Dad was fond of reminding me I didn’t know how good I had it.
“Kicked out at sixteen to learn the trade, I was. You’d never have caught my old man doing laundry for Bill and me past our teens.”
I was fairly confident that Granddad Johnson had never been near a washing machine in his life, his wife having been the sort of woman who reveled in homemaking and shooed intruders from the kitchen.
“I worked twelve-hour days for years. By the time I was your age I had a flat in Soho and a wallet full of fifties.”
I exchanged a conspiratorial grin with Mum. Neither of us pointed out that it had been Granddad who had lined up the apprenticeship at a friend’s garage, and Granny who had sent food parcels up with the car delivery service. Not to mention the fact that in 1983 it was still possible to buy a flat in London for fifty grand. I changed the subject before he claimed he’d been sent up chimneys as a schoolboy.
I was never academic, but I’d inherited my parents’ work ethic. I admired them both for the hours they put into making the family business a success and did my best to emulate them.
“Find a job you love,” Dad was fond of saying, “and you’ll never do a day’s work in your life.”
The trouble was, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I got a place at Warwick to do sociology, scraped a bachelor’s degree with honors, and left with no clearer idea. The first step on my career path was an accidental one. I took a job with Save the Children, collected a red vest and clipboard, and traipsed the streets, knocking on doors. Some people were kind, others less so, but I soon discovered I did have a little of my parents’ charm, after all. I simply hadn’t ever been that passionate about selling cars. I recruited more monthly donors that first month than the rest of the team put together. A temporary promotion to regional supervisor ended when a position became vacant for the national post, and I slid into a desk that felt a world away from the exam halls of an undiagnosed dyslexic teen who would never amount to anything. “Chip off the old block,” Dad said.
I worked closely with the fund-raising team, thought up innovative ideas for raising awareness, and looked after my three-hundred-strong team of door knockers across the country. I defended them fiercely from middle-class complaints about “legalized begging” and praised each and every one of my staff for the contribution they made to children around the globe. I loved the job I’d found. But it wasn’t well paid. Living at home was the only option.
Besides, uncool though it might have been to admit it, I liked living at home. Not for the clean laundry or the home-cooked meals, or my dad’s infamous wine cellar, but because my parents were genuinely good company. They made me laugh. They were interested and interesting. We chatted late into the night about plans, politics, people. We discussed our problems. There were no secrets. Or so they pretended.
I think of the vodka bottle beneath my parents’ desk; the others secreted around the house. Of the kitchen table littered with empty wine bottles, yet always spotless by the time I got up in the morning.
Toward the end of my first term at Warwick I spent the weekend with Sam, a friend from my residence hall, at her parents’ house. The absence of wine at dinner felt strange, like they’d dished up a meal without knives or forks. A few weeks later I asked Sam if her parents minded her drinking.
“Why would they?”
“Aren’t they teetotal?”
Sam laughed. “Teetotal? You should see Mum on the sherries at Christmas.”
My cheeks burned. “I thought . . . They didn’t drink when I came to stay.”
She shrugged. “Can’t say I’d noticed. Sometimes they drink, sometimes they don’t. Like most people, I guess.”
“I guess so.”
Most people didn’t drink every evening? Most people didn’t fix a gin and tonic when they got home from work, saying it was “six o’clock somewhere”?
Most people.
“All set?” Mark gets into the car and puts on his seat belt. He looks at me in the rearview mirror, then twists around to see me properly. He clears his throat, a subconscious habit I recognize from our early meetings. It’s a form of punctuation. A full stop between what’s been said and what he’s about to say. A way of saying: Listen to me now—this is important.
“After we’ve been to the police . . .” He hesitates.
“Yes?”
“We could make an appointment for you to see someone.”
I raise an eyebrow. See someone. The middle-class euphemism for go find a shrink—you’re going nuts. “I don’t need to see another counselor.”
“Anniversaries can do funny things.”
“Hilarious,” I joke, but Mark doesn’t smile. He turns back around and starts the car.
“Think about it, at least.”
There’s nothing to think about. It’s the police I need, not a shrink.
But as we pull out of the drive I take a sharp breath and lean across Ella to put a hand on the window. Maybe I do need a shrink. For a second, that woman walking . . . It isn’t Mum, of course, but I’m shocked by the intensity of my disappointment, by the very fact that a part of me thought it might be. Yesterday, on the anniversary of her death, I felt her presence so strongly that today I’m conjuring up ghosts where none exist.
And yet I have the strangest feeling . . .
Who says ghosts don’t exist?
Doctors? Psychiatrists?
Mark?
Maybe it’s possible to summon the dead. Maybe it’s possible they return of their own accord. Maybe—just maybe—my mother has a message for me.
I share none of this with Mark. But I stare out the window as we drive to the station, willing myself to see ghosts, to see some sort of sign.
If Mum’s trying to tell me what really happened the day she died, I’m listening.