The Housewarming: A completely unputdownable psychological thriller with a shocking twist Page 5

  Understanding himself dismissed, Matt returns to the house and somehow manages to get the pyjamas back upstairs. When he returns to the kitchen, Ava is crying. The family liaison officer – Lorraine, was it? – has moved to sit beside her and is holding her hand. It is a strangely intimate sight, a woman he doesn’t know sitting so close to his wife, holding her hand.

  ‘Do you need anything?’ he asks, feeling something dropping inside him – the weight, perhaps, of his own helplessness. ‘I could make some tea or something.’

  Ava shakes her head. ‘No. No tea.’

  He hovers. He wants to say something to comfort her. More, he wants to bring Abi home, bring her home in his arms and say, look, Ava, I found her. I found our little girl.

  He meets Lorraine’s eye and cocks his head: I’m going.

  She nods.

  ‘I’ve got my phone,’ he adds.

  Outside, a German shepherd sniffs and circles at the end of the Lovegoods’ drive while his handler looks on. Ian Mitchell is at the front of Matt and Ava’s house, his dog sniffing and pawing at the back tyre of their old Volkswagen. The rain has started again. Not lashing down, but heavy enough. No one appears to notice.

  ‘Have they found something?’ Matt asks.

  ‘There’s a scent here.’ Ian nods at the gutter. ‘Your mate Mr Johnson found her toy here, is that right?’

  Matt nods. ‘Yes. Yes, he did. He brought it in. It’s in the house. Or they might have taken it.’

  ‘No!’ It’s Ava’s voice. Matt turns to see her running from the side return; she is at the front of the house now, pushing past him, heading for the other dog. The other dog is sniffing the ground at the end of Johnnie Lovegood’s driveway.

  ‘You’re wasting your time,’ Ava is yelling, all trace of her usual cool demeanour utterly gone. ‘That’s where she fell. She fell there, she cut her knee right there and got blood on the pavement. Trust me, you’re wasting your time; please, please, you’re wasting your time.’

  The dog handlers exchange a glance. Matt doesn’t like what he reads there.

  ‘Mrs Atkins, if you can just come back inside…’ Lorraine is ushering his wife away with a carefully placed arm around her shoulder. The air fills with the crackle of walkie-talkies. Lorraine’s persuasive tone reaches him without the sense.

  Ava bucks, her arms flail, her hands close into fists. She shakes Lorraine off, turns to him, her face desperate. ‘But she fell! Matt! Tell them! They could be out looking for her instead of sniffing round here. They need to search up by the river. Tell them!’

  ‘My wife is right,’ Matt says. ‘She fell exactly there, this morning. I was there. She cut her knee and it bled all over. She grazed her hands too. But that was before. Look, shall I show you the way to the lock? I think it’d be better to look where she’s most likely to have gone.’

  Both dogs are sniffing now in the gutter; one jumps back a little, barking.

  ‘That’s where we found her toy – you know that,’ he says to the handlers, fighting to keep his voice level. He knows he should let them do their job, but they’re going backwards and they don’t know what he knows and they’re not listening, for Christ’s sake, they’re not hearing what Ava’s telling them. ‘Surely we’re wasting time here?’ he insists. ‘Didn’t you hear my wife?’

  They nod, but it’s a kiss-off. The dogs sniff around, trail back, back along the pavement. At the end of next door’s drive they stop again, sniffing, circling, sniffing, barking. Another female officer swabs the pavement, puts the swab in a tiny vial.

  ‘You’ll find blood there, I can tell you that right now. It’s Abi’s. From her knee. She fell. How many times?’ Feeling his temper rise, Matt bites his tongue.

  The dogs and their handlers continue to the end of the road. The end of the road where he last saw his daughter. They stop at the corner, bark, sniff the ground like crazed coke addicts.

  ‘That’ll be her blood too. She sat down right there earlier this morning.’

  A raindrop drips from his brow. The rain has thickened. How far could she have gone? Quite far, if she took off at a clip, if she knew she was being naughty. At the thought of her in mischievous mode, his eyes fill. That gleam in her eyes – he can see her, oh God, he can see her as if she’s right there, the challenge of her cheeky smile, the smile she always gives him when he pretends to look away while she takes a bite of his toast, when he looks back and pretends to be shocked and says, ‘Hey, who’s been eating my toast?’ Oh God, he can see her laughing hysterically, mouth full, shaking her head: not me, Daddy. Not me.

  He grabs his bike and cycles towards the river, tears running with the rain. Outside a terraced house adjacent to the chandlery, two women in expensive wellies and raincoats are deep in conversation, their dogs on leads.

  ‘Hi, hi, sorry, excuse me, I’m looking for my little girl. Have you seen a little girl? She’s two years old. Blue coat. Cream woolly hat?’

  They stare back, a look of mild concern. Kids wander off all the time, he reads. She’ll turn up.

  ‘We’re on Riverside Drive if you see anything. Number eighty-eight. Her name’s Abi.’

  They nod, their expressions still little more than worry.

  ‘Hope you find her,’ one of them calls out as he rides on.

  At the mouth of the bridge, brown ducks reach their beaks to the water, dip their heads beneath the surface. Abi loves to feed those ducks. The water is high, but still, still it’s quite shallow. The river’s calm, surely she couldn’t have…

  No. No.

  Through a steady oncoming parade of pedestrians, he wheels his bike over the footbridge, over the bottle-green water. Yes, the river is high, very high. Abi would have no chance, she…

  No.

  The buzz of an engine. There, on the river, an RNLI boat speeds towards the lock.

  His vision blackens. He bends and retches but nothing comes up. He spits on the ground, grips the railings while his head clears.

  ‘Excuse me.’ One of the women has crossed the bridge and is waving at him. ‘Excuse me! Did you say a cream bobble hat?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, wheeling his bike around. ‘Yes, cream. Woolly hat, yes. Did you see her?’

  ‘I think there was one on the wall.’ She gestures towards Thameside Lane and together they return to where he left them. ‘It was on the wall either of the Thames View or the Fisherman’s Arms, or failing that…’

  He doesn’t hear the rest. He has clipped his feet in, is already pedalling, calling his thanks over his shoulder.

  The rain is lighter now – a gently insistent mist. There is nothing on either of the pub walls. He cycles slowly, eyes on stalks, breathing shallow, past the flickering tape at the end of his road, down, down towards the school. If she did tag along with another family, she would, could possibly, have wandered down this way. But when he reaches Kingston Bridge, he turns back. This is ridiculous; she would not, could not have come this far. It wouldn’t occur to her. The hat is not on any wall, not on this side, not on the other.

  But it was there.

  That means Abi left the street. It means she got at least that far. A hat doesn’t fall onto a wall. That means someone found her hat on the ground and put it in a safe place, where it could be found. People round here do that; they take care of one another. No one would steal a little girl’s hat. If it has gone, that means one of the searchers must have found it. If Abi has gone, it means that someone has found her. If someone has found her, lost and upset, they will have done the right thing, of course they will: taken her to a safe place. This is a neighbourhood where people put lost hats and gloves on walls. This is a neighbourhood where people return lost children. Even if Abi can’t remember her address, whoever finds her will simply call the police. He has made her rehearse where she lives, is pretty sure she can give at least the road. But it will take the police a while to coordinate, budget cuts being what they are. Yes, whoever found that hat will be part of the search. No one round here would take a hat.
No one round here would leave a lone toddler on her own. No one round here would take a child.

  Ninety-nine per cent of people are good.

  Six

  Matt

  Matt lifts Fred and lowers him, lifts and lowers, enjoying the daft gurgling noises he makes, the way his hands clasp at his chest, his wise old man expression.

  ‘Soon have you out on the footy field,’ he says. ‘Or rugby if your Uncle Neil has anything to do with it.’

  He hands the baby back to Ava before stretching out his hamstrings. Last time he didn’t warm up was the last time he didn’t warm up – a torn hamstring hurts like hell and it actually made the skin go black on the back of his thigh.

  ‘See you in a bit.’ He kisses Ava on the head, tries not to notice the stale, oily smell of her hair, to wonder if she has changed back into her pyjamas or if she never got dressed in the first place.

  Neil is already outside his house, one hand pressed against his van. When he sees Matt, he straightens up and gives a brisk wave.

  Matt jogs to a standstill and waits while Neil ties his laces, one stocky, slightly porcine leg propped on the white stone slab that tops the dwarf wall in front of his house, his thick torso bent over. Now into his thirties, he’s getting love handles. No time for rugby anymore, not with the hours he works, and maybe a few too many pints of a weekend, not to mention the Friday-night takeaways.

  He stands, claps and chafes his hands together.

  ‘You OK?’ Matt asks.

  ‘Knackered,’ Neil says, matter-of-fact, and spits on the pavement. ‘Work’s been mad.’ His eyes are red – yes, he looks overworked.

  ‘We’ll take it slow to start then.’

  After a cursory warm-up – Neil is a quick knee-bend, spit on the ground and off we go man – they begin to jog, no faster than a brisk walk at first, heading left down Main Street.

  ‘Job in Surbiton,’ Neil says once they hit their stride. ‘Loft, kitchen extension, then, get this, they want all the internal walls on the ground floor taken down. All of them. No walls at all, just the staircase. No hallway, nothing.’

  ‘Can you do that? I mean, I know you can, but in a domestic dwelling?’

  ‘Structural engineer’s looking at it.’

  ‘Johnnie?’

  ‘God, no.’ He spits again, as if for emphasis. ‘Some guy lives up in Sunbury, seems like a good bloke actually. Thorough, you know?’

  Matt nods. ‘So he thinks he can do it?’

  Neil sniffs, the deft head-flick of a footballer, a third spit into the gutter. ‘Can’t see why not. Enough steels will hold anything up. Just can’t understand why they don’t want a hallway. I mean, where are they going to put all the crap, the coats and shoes and all that?’

  ‘You can go too minimalist, I suppose,’ Matt offers.

  ‘Too right. It’s a house not a bloody art gallery. And it’s Surbiton, not New York, know what I mean? All a bit marble floor in a council flat if you ask me.’

  The residential part of the main road recedes; a bus rumbles past the scattered shopfronts, the Indian takeaway, a chippy, a nail bar and two pubs – almost the sum total of Hampton Wick village. Out on the street, it’s dead, the only evidence of life a group of four old men smoking roll-ups outside the Woodcutter. Matt and Neil continue, tacitly agreeing to head under the railway bridge and back up Thameside. Any further and they’ll have to cross Kingston Bridge and run up the riverbank. Which means crossing by Teddington Lock.

  And that’s not an option.

  ‘We need to have you guys round,’ Matt says, out of habit. ‘Maybe a takeaway on Friday?’

  ‘I’ll check with Bel. Work’s been mad.’

  No, then. As usual. ‘So you said.’

  ‘How’s your work going anyway?’

  ‘Good. Busy.’

  ‘You still doing that place in Kensington?’

  ‘Almost finished. Looks good. I’ll send you some pics.’

  ‘What did you end up doing?’

  Neil’s interest is real. When they were at school, he used to joke that he was all good in practice; Matt all good in theory. This, in fact, has manifested itself exactly – Neil on the building side, Matt a city architect – something that amuses them both. But Matt is thankful that he’s not a domestic architect. He loves Neil, he does, but Neil doesn’t like being told what to do by anyone, let alone his best mate, so it would have pushed things had they worked together. As it is, they can keep their professional lives apart without any awkwardness.

  It was Ava who pointed out to Matt that Neil’s authority issues might stem from never having known his father, from being the man of the house since he was old enough to remember, although Matt has never spoken about this with him. Certainly it is this independent spirit more than anything that has spurred him on to work so hard and start his own business. He is – has always been – frank about wanting to be his own boss and to earn as much money as he possibly can. By twenty-eight, when Matt was barely qualified, Neil had installed his mother in a new-build riverside flat, for which he paid cash by borrowing against the mortgage he took out on the former family home. By contrast, Matt’s parents sold their house to him at a ridiculously competitive price when they moved back north and helped him substantially with the deposit. As it stands, neither of them could possibly afford to move to the street they live on now had they not lived there since childhood.

  ‘The front is all that’s left of the original,’ Matt says against the hum of a passing car and the whiff of stale alcohol from Neil’s deepening breaths. ‘The entire front is Victorian, London brick, then you go in and boom! Glass, clean lines, white colour palette; you’d think it was a brand-new building. Which it is. Apart from the front. You have to go inside to realise it’s all a facade.’

  ‘Wicked. Sounds awesome. So will that help you with the directorship?’

  ‘Hopefully. We’ll have to see. Bidding for a cool project in the East End right now, an old brewery, so we’ll see if that comes through.’

  Eight kilometres later, up and around Twickenham and back down again, they duck back along Thameside Lane, past the playing fields, and finally right into Riverside Drive. The Lovegoods’ larger detached house stands at the end, its freshly laid York stone driveway not yet greened, its newly planted beds for the moment free from weeds. The paintwork is immaculate.

  A few more strides and they’re outside Matt and Ava’s semi.

  Matt wipes his forehead with the back of his hand and nods towards the Lovegoods’ pristine house. ‘Did you get the invite for their housewarming?’

  Neil is panting, hands on his hips. He too looks at the house, back to Matt. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You going?’

  He wrinkles his nose. ‘Bella’s bending my ear about it. Wants to see the flashy kitchen and all that, so she can go one better. I’ll have to stop her sneaking upstairs for a nosy round, though she won’t be the only one, I don’t suppose.’ A grin crosses his face but falls almost instantly into a frown. ‘I can do without it, to be honest. Don’t think I can stand Lovecrap treating me like the staff, do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Yeah. He’s a bit—’

  ‘Of a tw—’

  ‘A bit superior I was going to say.’ Matt holds up a palm and smiles.

  ‘You want to try working for him – he’s a bloody nightmare.’

  ‘Ava’s not keen either,’ Matt cuts in. He doesn’t like it when Neil gets all chippy, especially now that Matt’s career is taking off. It’s not the first time he’s had a go at Johnnie Lovegood.

  ‘Understandable,’ Neil says.

  ‘Too soon, she’s saying, with all the neighbours, but I’m going to try to persuade her. She needs to get out.’

  ‘Right. Not like they’ll mind if she doesn’t though, I suppose.’

  ‘Of course not. But I was thinking it might do her good, you know? It’s been easier for me. At work I’m not surrounded by people who were here that day, who know. If I meet a client, they don’t k
now anything about me personally and I’m concentrating on the job, which keeps my mind off things, but it’s not like that for Ava. Every time she goes out, she sees someone who knows or who helped. I completely understand that, but she can’t hide from everyone forever or she’ll end up never being able to go out again. I need to find a way of building her up, getting her confidence back.’

  They both study the ground. It isn’t lost on Matt, and he’s sure it isn’t lost on Neil either, that they have run for almost an hour and only now, when it is the moment to part ways, is he saying what he has intended to say since they set out. For him and Ava, the invitation has landed heavily, but it will have weighed on Neil and Bella too. It is almost a year since Abi went missing, since the past became forever entangled with the present, exerting a force so powerful that not mentioning it is always a conscious and sometimes rather exhausting act of avoidance.

  ‘How’s she doing?’ Neil kicks at a weed that has sprouted between the paving stones. ‘I’m sorry I’ve been so busy. Work’s been—’

  ‘Mad, yeah. You said. Don’t worry about it. There’s nothing you can do.’ Matt stares for a moment at his trainers. There is a hole starting on the big toe of the right one. ‘I mean, she doesn’t see anyone, but you know that,’ he adds, after a moment. ‘I just thought if I could get her to go, even for an hour, she might… She’s trying to get out during the day now, and I guess I just thought that if she could find it in herself to go, she could sit with Fred in the corner if she needs to, keep herself to herself. Perfect excuse not to be the life and soul. And it’s not far to go home if she needs to duck out.’ He wonders who exactly he’s trying to convince.

  ‘Sure, sure.’

  ‘Sometimes I wish I’d told her.’

  ‘Nah,’ says Neil. ‘Nothing to be gained.’ He glances over at the Lovegoods’ place, an expression of disgust crossing his face. ‘He’s a dick though. Rubber Johnnie.’

  Matt laughs. ‘He’s not that bad. And his wife’s really nice. Jennifer. It’d be great if you and Bel come. Ava might feel supported… enough to try to come for a bit. And it might be good for the four of us to get together, y’know? It’s been ages.’