The Watcher (19 page)

She could not meet Tom like this. When the two of them arrived at the same time, turning into the drive from different directions, Gillian realised that she would have to get through the situation somehow.

It was almost half past ten. Tom was later than usual too.

‘Where’ve you been?’ he asked, surprised.

‘In London,’ she said truthfully. ‘Christmas shopping.’ She realised she was not carrying a single bag. ‘Well . . . I didn’t find anything. Then I had a bite to eat and wasn’t watching the time. Then there was the snow. It’s almost gridlocked on the roads.’

‘And what about Becky?’

‘She’s at Darcy’s for a sleepover. Her birthday party.’

They put their cars in the garage and went inside. Chuck came up to them, mewling and rubbing up against their legs. The answering machine was flashing, a sign that they had messages waiting.

‘I got jittery in the car and I’m all sweaty now,’ said Gillian. ‘I think I’ll just have a quick shower.’

Tom nodded distractedly and pressed the button on the answering machine. There was only one message waiting.

The voice that filled the room was not one that either of them knew.

‘Yes, hello . . . Samson Segal here. I . . . I live a few doors down your road. At the end of the street. My brother was your client once. I . . . well, I wanted to say that your daughter is at my house. She was locked outside your house and in a bit of a state about it, so . . . I let her come over to my place. You can come pick her up any time.’ He paused. It was clear that he was one of those people who did not like to talk on answering machines. ‘So . . . see you soon.’ Another pause. Stressed breathing. Then he hung up.

‘What?’ asked Tom, incredulous.

Gillian had been stopped mid-track on her way to the shower. She turned around. ‘No way! She was supposed to be staying the night with Darcy!’

‘Why did she go to some complete stranger’s house?’ shouted Tom in shock and anger. ‘Why weren’t you here?’

‘And why weren’t you?’ screamed Gillian.

‘I was at my tennis club. I said I’d be back late.’

‘You’re always back late! If you had your way, I’d never get out. I’d always be here holding the fort. You barely live here now!’

‘Do you think this is the right moment to argue about it?’ hissed Tom.

Gillian pushed past him and took her coat. ‘I’m going to fetch my daughter!’

‘I’m coming too,’ said Tom.

A few minutes later they rang the bell at the Segals’ house. After just a few seconds the door opened and Samson was standing opposite them.

‘I . . . th-thought that it would . . . be you,’ he stuttered.

Tom pushed past him into the hall. ‘Where’s our daughter?’

‘Sh . . . she fell asleep w-watching TV.’

Without waiting for an invitation, Tom went towards where he heard voices that sounded like a television programme. Gillian smiled apologetically at Samson and followed her husband.

The television was on in the living room. Becky was lying on a sofa, sleeping. Gavin Segal sat in the armchair next to her and was fully absorbed in the documentary on television. A woman was sitting at the dining room table doing her nails.

Gavin got up immediately.

‘Mr Ward . . .’

‘How did Becky get here?’ asked Tom sharply.

‘Tom . . .’ said Gillian in a soothing voice.

‘My brother happened to walk past your house this evening when your daughter was ringing your doorbell. She was beside herself and crying,’ explained Gavin. ‘She’d been at a friend of hers, if I understand right. And no one was at home. He didn’t want her to just stay there in the snow so he brought her here.’

‘But I said right away that he should leave a message with you,’ the woman said.

Becky opened her eyes and looked at her parents in surprise. Then she jumped up and squeaked with joy. ‘Dad!’ She threw her arms around him.

‘That was nice of you, Mr Segal,’ said Gillian to Samson, who was standing shyly behind her. ‘My daughter was supposed to be staying at her friend’s house. Otherwise of course one of us would have been there.’

‘I had a massive fight with Darcy,’ explained Becky. ‘So I didn’t want to stay.’

‘Does Darcy’s mum know you went home?’ asked Gillian.

‘Yes, I told her.’

‘And she didn’t think to check whether we would be there?’ asked Tom, dumbfounded.

‘She has fifteen children staying over,’ reminded Gillian. ‘She’s probably not got a moment to think!’

‘Still . . . it’s not on that . . .’

She wished Tom would just stop blaming everyone. She felt bad enough as it was.

My daughter could not get in because I was in bed with my lover.

And it was true: unlike Tom, she had not said she would be out. Becky had been sure she would find her mum at home.

A dangerous stranger could have come and abducted her . . .

‘I liked taking care of Becky,’ said Samson. ‘You kn-know, I like children.’

‘Yes, thank you,’ said Tom, who finally, reluctantly, realised that Samson Segal had not done anything wrong.

‘I-if you need me . . . I’ve got time.’

‘My brother-in-law is unemployed,’ injected the woman pointedly, waving her hands about to help her nail polish dry more quickly.

‘Thank you,’ repeated Tom. He wanted to go home. He found the whole situation unbearable, Gillian knew that. The shrill woman with her dark red fingernails, stuttering Samson Segal, his tired and rundown-looking brother, the stuffy living room, the blaring television. He was angry and it was clear to Gillian that his anger was directed mainly at her. Because she had not been there. Because she had allowed the situation to arise.

He maintained a stony silence on the short walk home. He did not say anything when they got in either. Only later, when Gillian had put Becky to bed and had a shower, did he suddenly say, ‘I don’t like him. If you ask me, he’s got more than one screw loose.’

He lay in bed, holding a book but not actually reading. He was just staring at the wall.

Gillian was standing in the middle of the room, combing her wet hair. ‘Who?’

‘That Segal chap. With the funny name. Samson Segal. Something odd about him.’

‘Why do you say that? He’s shy and inhibited, but he’s very friendly.’

‘He’s not normal,’ insisted Tom. ‘Who lives like that? He’s in his mid thirties at least. Can barely say a word without getting himself tied up in knots. There’s no woman in his life and—’

‘How do you know?’

‘I can feel it. He’s too uptight for a woman. So where does he make up for that? With children!’

Gillian shook her head. ‘You’re unreasonable, Tom. You were being unreasonable earlier, too. Mr Segal did just what a good neighbour should do. He helped our family out of a difficult situation. Now you’re making him sound like some child molester. I’m happy he was there at the right time. It could have been anyone else – and that thought makes me feel queasy.’

‘Right,’ said Tom. He put the book down and sat up. ‘I think that is just what bugs me so much: why did he just
happen
to pass by yet again?’

‘Yet again?’

‘Don’t you remember last Saturday? When we left the house. He was standing on the pavement right by our hedge. What was he doing there?’

‘No idea. He was going for a walk. Maybe he just stops now and then to look at the houses. His sister-in-law said he was unemployed, after all. He must spend all day hanging around the neighbourhood. He doesn’t have anything better to do.’

‘It’s our house he’s hanging around!’ said Tom.

‘Because you saw him one Saturday?’ retorted Gillian, although she could not help starting to feel a little uneasy. She was remembering Tara’s last visit. When she accompanied Tara to the door, Samson had just been going past. Tara had remarked that he had been around when she arrived. Samson Segal did seem to be crossing the Ward family’s path quite a lot recently.

It might still be coincidence.

She slipped into bed and pulled up the covers. She suddenly thought about John. It was just a few hours since she had slept with him. And now she was lying next to Tom again and they were being ratty with one another because the evening had given both of them such a shock.

This is how it feels to have a double life, thought Gillian. On the one hand passionate sex with a thrilling and rather puzzling man in an almost bare London flat – and then back to the well-kept little house in Thorpe Bay with the usual marital strife and worries about their child.

‘Becky has to learn not to just go off with strangers,’ said Tom. ‘I really thought she knew that by now!’ He was not going to let it rest.

Gillian rolled her eyes. ‘She does. But he’s a neighbour – if a distant neighbour. She’s seen him around, in any case.’

‘So what? Often it’s just such neighbours, people that children trust, who are the problem.’

‘I’ll have a good chat with her about it tomorrow,’ said Gillian.

And I won’t see John again
, she swore to herself.
I can’t let another situation like this arise.

She did not only mean the fact that her daughter had been locked out and unable to cope. She meant all the lying. The rush to get home. Feeling ashamed and needing to shower.

Probably she was not made to live a double life.

She suddenly started to cry quietly, subdued, into her pillow. She thought how it had been in bed with John. How wild. How tender. She thought about his bare flat that stood in such stark contrast to her own house with its little turret and bay windows.

She longed to be back there.

She was going to call Tara the next day and tell her everything. Well, almost everything. She would leave out the dark side of John’s past. She would simply tell Tara that he had always had his own company. And as Tara had not lived and worked in London eight years ago, she did not know the Burton case. But it was not the Burton case that was the problem.

The problem was Tom and Becky and their life together.

She had to talk to someone. She needed advice about what, for heaven’s sake, she was to do.

She started sobbing when she realised that Tara would probably not be able to help her this time.

‘Just a few days until Christmas and we’re sitting here after a second gruesome murder, without the faintest hint of a clue,’ said Peter Fielder glumly. ‘Out there a killer is on the loose who murders women in complete depravity, and we aren’t any closer to catching him.’

He was sitting in his office, at his usual ungodly hour, surrounded by the special silence of an almost empty large building. Christy McMarrow was there, of course. She was sitting opposite and had brought them coffee. The two of them were exhausted – completely shattered, in fact. The weekend, in as much as it was a synonym for
free time
and
sleeping in
, had not lived up to its promise at all. Not after an estate agent had called the police from a remote house in a wood beyond Tunbridge Wells because in the house’s bathroom he had found the body of one of his clients. She had obviously been dead for a good week. The tea towel stuffed deep into her throat had caused the inspector on the scene to phone Detective Inspector Fielder at Scotland Yard immediately. With Christy, he had fought through the heavy snow to the godforsaken wood that same evening. In and around London, traffic had been thrown into chaos, but somehow they managed to reach their destination. What they saw there was as horrific and disturbing as what they had seen in Carla Roberts’s flat. However, in addition there was the fact that the house was so isolated.

‘You’d go crazy out here,’ Peter had said to Christy. He was perplexed that people chose such strange places to live.

In those first hours, Luke Palm, the London estate agent, was the person who gave them important information about the murdered woman. Fielder found him sitting, ashen, downstairs in the living room. An attentive policewoman had poured him a cup of tea from a thermos, but it did not look as though he had drunk even a sip of it. He held out his brimming mug carefully, as if he were expecting someone to take it away again. Fielder could see that he was making gulping sounds and wetting his lips repeatedly.

He told Fielder what he knew of the dead woman. She was Anne Westley, in her late sixties and a widower for the past three years. She and her husband had bought the house as a home in which to enjoy their retirement, but her husband had died as soon as they had finished renovating it. Anne had not been able to bear its isolated location any longer and so had asked him, Luke Palm, to arrange for it to be sold. She had also asked him to look for a flat for her in London. After a while, it had seemed odd to him that it had become completely impossible to reach her, although he had found people seriously interested in buying the property, and had left a message with the news on her answering machine. That was why he had driven over. And then to find . . .

At this point in his account he began to shake so much that his tea spilt on to the floor. Fielder carefully took the mug from his hand, although Palm barely registered that he had done so.

‘Was there anything specific that made you worried?’ he asked cautiously. ‘You couldn’t reach her. I understand that. But for you to drive out here . . . it’s not exactly round the corner from where you live. Was there anything else? Something that made you uneasy? It could be important.’

Palm thought, but he could not remember anything. ‘No, I’m afraid not. I mean, it was rather unsettling to know that a woman who was almost seventy lived out here all on her own. But I wasn’t thinking about a crime. I was worried that she might have had a nasty fall and be lying somewhere in the house, unable to reach the phone. No one would have known.’

‘Mrs Westley didn’t mention that anything odd had happened?’

‘Something odd?’

Fielder was thinking of the lift movements that Carla Roberts had noticed shortly before she was murdered. ‘Something that unsettled her?’

‘She didn’t tell me about anything.’

‘Why had she decided to sell up now? Just before Christmas, in the middle of winter . . . Is that a normal time for people to move?’