The Magpies (14 page)

‘Would you like a cup of tea? Coffee?’ Kirsty offered, as soon as the policemen were inside and Jamie had shut the door.

‘That would be smashing,’ said the older policeman, and his colleague nodded. ‘Yeah, I’d like a tea, please.’

The older man turned to Jamie. ‘I’m PC Dodds, this is PC Sutton. We’ve had a complaint.’

‘We know what this is about,’ Jamie said. ‘And I can tell you right now, it’s all a load of crap, whatever they’ve said about us.’

Sutton wandered across the room and looked at Jamie’s computer, then moved over to the window and looked out in the direction of his car.

‘What do you mean by that?’ said Dodds, having to speak up above the roar of the boiling kettle.

‘Well, tell me what Lucy and Chris said about us and I’ll tell you what I mean.’

Sutton came back towards them. ‘We’ve had a complaint that you were trespassing in your neighbours’ garden.’

Jamie shook his head. ‘I knew it.’ He sighed. ‘This whole thing is a total waste of your time. But I’ll tell you the story from the beginning.’

He waited until the drinks were ready, then gestured for Dodds and Sutton to sit down.

‘We moved in here in the summer.’ He told them how they had befriended the Newtons, inviting them to dinner, chatting with them whenever they saw them, seemingly getting along fine. ‘Then we went go-karting with them, and that’s when everything went weird. Our friends Heather and Paul came along too, and Paul had an accident, suffered awful head injuries. He’s in a coma right now.’ He swallowed. ‘The thing is, Chris was involved in the accident. He and Paul were racing, and, well, we don’t blame Chris – it was an accident – but since then neither Chris nor Lucy have spoken to us. It’s as if they’re pissed off with us – as if we’d done something to one of their friends. We didn’t really think much of it at first, though we were a bit annoyed that they made no effort to find out how Paul was. They didn’t even send a card.’

‘And then we received the first letter,’ said Kirsty. ‘I’ll show it to you.’

While she dug out the letters from the desk, Jamie said, ‘Basically, the Newtons are harassing us. For no reason. No reason that we can fathom anyway.’

Kirsty handed Dodds the first letter. He read it, then passed it to Sutton, who smirked as he read it. He looked at Kirsty and raised his eyebrows. Jamie could read the young policeman’s mind. Noisy sex. He was wondering if it was true.

‘We were really surprised by the letter. Firstly, we’re not really noisy.’ Jamie cleared his throat, suddenly feeling embarrassed. ‘And secondly, we didn’t understand why they couldn’t come up here and talk to us. They didn’t even refer to us by our names in the letter. We thought it was really odd.’

Dodds leaned forward, nodding sympathetically.

‘And then we received the CD.’

‘The CD? Of what?’

‘Um…it was a recording of us having sex. They’d obviously set up a mike in their bedroom and recorded us. The noises on the CD are a bit muffled, but still quite loud. I can’t believe that we sound so loud downstairs.’

‘Have you still got the CD?’ Sutton asked, looking at Kirsty.

‘Yes, but…’

‘We don’t need to hear it,’ said Dodds, giving his younger colleague a filthy look.

‘We’ve got the CD,’ said Jamie, ‘and we know that Lucy and Chris must have the original file on their computer. We wrote to them, trying to be reasonable. This was after we’d been down there, trying to talk to them. But they wouldn’t answer the door to us.’

‘Did you keep a copy of your letter to them?’

‘No. We had a rough draft but we threw it away. Shit, I wish we had kept a copy, but we thought our letter would resolve the situation.’

‘What did your letter say?’

‘Just that we thought we were friends and that we should be able to sort out any problems by talking about them. It was a very reasonable letter, except that we made the mistake of mentioning their barbecue. We were trying to make the point that when you live in a flat you have to be willing to put up with a small amount of noise – it’s just the way it is. A little while ago they had a barbecue, which was quite noisy, and went on late, and we stressed in the letter that we didn’t complain about their barbecue, so why should they complain about us? This is what we got back.’

He nodded to Kirsty who handed Dodds the second letter.

‘We got this one this evening. I was so annoyed I went down to try to talk to them, but again they wouldn’t answer the door. So I went down the back steps from our bathroom into their garden. I was just going to knock on the back door. I wanted to talk to them. That’s all.’

‘Lucy came out,’ said Kirsty, ‘shouting and making threats. She said she’d call the police, and after Jamie had tried to reason with her, he came back up the steps. That’s the whole story. Jamie was not trespassing.’

Dodds stood up. ‘OK. Well, obviously we’ll have to speak to Mr and Mrs Newton, but as far as I’m concerned this trespassing thing isn’t worth pursuing. I don’t think going into your neighbour’s garden to talk to them counts as the crime of the year. However, I should remind you that if someone asks you to leave their property, and you don’t do so straight away, they have every right to call the police.’

‘I understand that,’ said Jamie. ‘But what about Lucy and Chris’s harassment of us? What can we do about that?’

Dodds shrugged. ‘The only thing I can suggest is that you keep a log, a record, of what goes on. Keep any correspondence between you, including copies of anything you send to them. In fact, I’d strongly suggest that you stop writing to them – and that if you really do need to write to them you do it through a solicitor.’

‘So you’re not going to do anything?’

‘What can we do?’ said Sutton. ‘They haven’t done anything illegal. They haven’t threatened violence, they haven’t written anything obscene. They’ve just complained about the noise they say you make.’

‘But what about the CD?’ said Kirsty. ‘Surely that’s obscene.’

‘I don’t know,’ smirked Sutton, ‘I haven’t heard it.’

Dodds said, ‘It’s perfectly legal to make a recording within the confines of your own home. People do it all the time if they’re trying to make a case with the Environmental Health people against noisy neighbours.’

‘But we’re not noisy neighbours,’ protested Kirsty. ‘Neither of us have ever had problems with any other neighbours we’ve had.’

‘I didn’t say you were noisy. But the Newtons obviously think you are. It might be an idea to check with the council, see if your neighbours have complained about you to them. If they complain about you seriously, the council will send someone round to measure the amount of decibels coming from your flat.’

‘I wish they would. It would make Lucy and Chris look bloody stupid.’

‘Well, perhaps. But I think you should try to ignore them. Just get on with your lives. Keep any letters they send you, and let us know if they do make any threats, but otherwise try not to provoke them. I’m sure in time this will all blow over.’

Jamie saw the policemen out. Sutton looked profoundly relieved that their car was still in one piece.

‘We’re just going to call on Mr and Mrs Newton now,’ said Dodds. ‘We’ll tell them we’ve had a word with you and that you won’t go uninvited into their garden again, OK?’

‘OK. Are you going to mention the letters and the CD?’

‘Do you want me to?’

Jamie thought about it for a second. ‘I think it would only antagonise them.’

‘I agree.’ Dodds paused and looked up at the house. ‘Nice place you’ve got here. Must have set you back a bit.’

‘It took us to the limit of what we could afford. But we love it. It’s everything we want in a home. And we don’t want it to be spoiled by a pair of nightmare neighbours.’

Dodds nodded. ‘The way I see it, it’s like a new cat moving in next to an established cat’s territory. The established cat gets a bit fidgety, a bit jealous of its domain. But once it’s shown the new cat where the boundaries lie, it settles down. That’s what’s happening here. Don’t worry. In six months you’ll all be right as rain. You’ll probably be inviting them for dinner again.’

Jamie didn’t think much of the policeman’s cat metaphor. But he nodded and said, ‘I don’t know about inviting them to dinner. But I hope you’re right. I really do.’

Twelve

The Tube train shuddered and groaned as it pulled out of the station. Kirsty had managed to grab the last seat in the carriage, beating a man with a combover to it by a whisker. Now he stood over her, hanging on to the overhead rail, the
tssk-tssk-tssk
that emanated from his headphones worming its way into her head. All around her people wore frowns, staring into their own personal spaces, wishing the journey away. A woman at one end of the carriage was eating a Big Mac, the gherkin and meat stink filling the train. There was a man with an acoustic guitar at the other end of the carriage, and Kirsty was worried that he would start playing at any moment, bashing out some tuneless rendition of a Beatles standard before lurching along the carriage with his hand out, demanding his reward.

God, she hated the Tube. If the man with the guitar did turn out to be a busker he wouldn’t get anything out of her. She had already given away the last of her spare change to a woman sitting outside the station. Kirsty passed dozens of homeless people every day, and simply couldn’t afford to hand money over very often, but this woman (this girl – she couldn’t have been older than sixteen) had been holding a baby. The sight had chilled Kirsty, and she had reached into her bag and taken out her purse, emptying the coins into her palm and handing them to the girl. This certainly wasn’t the first homeless girl with a baby she had come across, but it was the first since she had found out.

She rested her hands on her stomach, feeling the need to be protective, wishing she wasn’t down here, in the unnatural heat, God-knows-how-many diseases drifting around. She should have got the bus, or taken a taxi. But there had been a part of her that had wanted to play the martyr, so that when she got home she could say to Jamie, ‘I had to go on the Tube because of you.’

She wondered how he would react when she told him – not that she had been on the Tube, but that she was pregnant. OK, she didn’t know for certain. She hadn’t taken a test yet. But her period was four days late, which was unheard of for her, Miss Regular As Clockwork. And she had known anyway. She had felt it at the moment of conception, and she had a feeling Jamie had known too. She was sure he would be delighted – she knew he really wanted children – but was this the right time?

Yes. Yes it was. Despite everything that had been going on. Or maybe even because of it.

She had been thinking about telling him tonight. She knew he wouldn’t be keeping track of her period (he was always surprised when it arrived – ‘What, already? Surely it hasn’t been a month?’), and he had been preoccupied lately anyway, so she knew she wouldn’t be telling him something he already knew, even if he had felt the same sensation as her when it had happened. But she was pissed off with him now. He’d been supposed to pick her up from work, she had waited out the front of the hospital for half-an-hour and he hadn’t turned up. She’ gone back inside to ask if there had been any phone calls. There hadn’t so, in a huff, she had stomped off towards the Tube station. He had forgotten about her. How could he?

To her horror, the man with the guitar pulled it to his stomach and began to play a tune. He did the first verse and chorus of ‘She Loves You’ then stopped and asked everyone in the carriage for cash. I should have been a fortune teller, Kirsty thought. She put her head down and made certain she didn’t catch the busker’s eye. Thankfully, the train pulled into a station before he reached her, and he got off.

She still couldn’t believe Jamie had forgotten about her. It was very unlike him. What if he hadn’t forgotten? What if something had happened to him? She hadn’t been able to get hold of him on his mobile. She had a sudden image of him crashing the car, his head going through the windscreen, shards of glass spraying passers-by as Jamie bounced back in his seat, his lifeless body slumping. She quickly shook away the image. It was replaced by an image of him being attacked in the street, a mugger stabbing him in the chest and grabbing his wallet, Jamie falling to the pavement, soaked in his own blood, grabbing his chest as his life ebbed away.

What was wrong with her? Why did she have to think of such things? She felt beads of cool sweat stand out on her forehead. She looked at her watch. Ten more minutes before this awful journey ended – if they didn’t get delayed, that was. She didn’t feel angry with him any more. She just wanted to get home, to check that he was alright. There had to be a good explanation for his absence. She only hoped something hadn’t happened with Lucy and Chris.

Since the night the police had been round, they hadn’t spoken to the Newtons. Nor had they received any letters, or CDs, from them – not directly anyway. Instead, they had been flooded with hoaxes. Letters, parcels and phone calls. Even emails sent from an anonymous Hotmail account, although neither of them could work out how Lucy and Chris had found out their email addresses (which Jamie had now changed). Of course, none of the hoaxes carried their neighbours’ names, but they knew who was responsible – just like they now knew who had been responsible for the first wave of hoaxes that had started almost as soon as they moved in.

There had been letters from credit card and insurance companies; circulars from Christian organisations; free samples of beauty products that Kirsty might have been pleased with if they hadn’t been so obviously intended to offend: anti-wrinkle cream, hair dye to cover up those grey hairs, cream to rub into your cellulite, wax strips to remove unwanted facial hair. They had received more offers and parcels from websites and magazines, including subscriptions to the Shooting Times, and a porn magazine called Barely Legal, which was full of girls who looked underage but weren’t really. They were sent several monstrosities from ‘Collectables’ companies, such as a porcelain clown that made Kirsty feel physically sick to look at, and a plate commemorating the Royal birth. All of this had to go back, which involved a phone call to the company and a trip to the post office, with a wait for the return label to arrive in between. It was inconvenient and stressful.