The Watcher (6 page)

‘To my question. Why you didn’t tell me?’

‘I want my own Internet connection!’

‘That’s not an answer.’

‘Everyone in my class—’

‘Rubbish! Everyone in your class does not have their own connection, there’s no need. The Internet—’

‘Is terribly dangerous, full of evil men who try to groom girls in chat rooms and then—’

‘Unfortunately, yes, they do exist,’ said Gillian. ‘But that’s just one of the dangers. The main reason is that I think you’re too young to spend hours in front of the computer every day without any checks. It’s not good.’

‘Why not?’ asked Becky.

‘Because it’s more important for you to do your homework, meet your friends, have some exercise,’ said Gillian, and even she could hear that she sounded like a nanny.

Becky rolled her eyes. ‘Mum, I’m twelve. You still treat me as if I were five.’

‘That’s just not true.’

‘It is. Even when I want to go and see Darcy, you come along because you think something might happen to me on the way. And you absolutely hate talking to her mum. Why don’t you let me go on my own?’

‘Because it’s dark. Because—’

‘Why can’t you just trust me?’ asked Becky. At that moment she saw her father, who had opened the front door and was standing in the bright light of the hall. Without waiting for an answer from her mother, she ran to him and threw herself into his arms.

Gillian followed her slowly, pensively.

She jumped as the beam of light slid along the wall behind the television. A moment later, she wondered if she had imagined it. Or dreamt it. She had fallen asleep, in spite of the whodunit she was watching being exciting. But that often happened to her. She was a morning person. From half past five she was awake with lots of get-up-and-go energy. In the evening it was a different story . . . Sometimes she went to bed at eight.

She sat up in her armchair.

She listened for noises outside. She could not hear anything.

She had noticed the same thing three or four times recently: that a car came out here, in the evening, in the dark. She had heard the engine. She had seen the headlights’ beam glide across the living room wall. And then – nothing. Not a sound, a light, nothing. As if someone had stopped and turned the engine and the headlights off.

And was just sitting there . . .
doing what?

Anne Westley was not a woman who was easily scared. The first time she had stood up, stepped outside and even walked down the paved garden path to the gate. She had tried to make something out, but it was almost impossible out here. The wood grew right up to the edge of her property. Anne knew that a night was never completely black, but out here it was. Almost impenetrably so.

And the position of her house was what made the appearance of a car so strange. There was not even a road anywhere nearby. Some distance away there was a remote car park, from which point a number of footpaths led into the woods. At the weekend, especially in the summer, there was a certain amount of activity there, but in the winter, and particularly once it was dark, almost no one went there. Maybe just a couple looking for a quiet spot. But a couple wouldn’t go further into the woods and force their car down the narrow track that ended at Anne’s garden gate.

She stood up, went to the window and tried to look out, but all she saw was her own face reflected in the glass. She switched off the little lamp in the corner, and the television. The room was now in complete darkness. She strained to see outside. It was hard to make anything out. It was more that she could sense the garden with its many bushes, high grass and now bare fruit trees. In the summer she had harvested baskets and baskets of cherries, apples and pears. She had spent weeks making jams and jellies that she poured into big jars, sealing them with elastic bands before adding stickers and neatly labelling each one.

Making jam, she always thought of Sean. Of how he had been excited about the fruit trees and their own jam. She knew that she had only harvested and boiled up the fruit for his sake. She wasn’t a big jam-eater. In her lifetime she wouldn’t manage to eat all the jam stockpiled in the cellar. One day she would die, and then, along with everything else, tons of jars and their contents would have to be disposed of.

She and Sean had discovered the house eight years earlier when they were out on a walk. They had gone on an outing to Tunbridge Wells, a pretty town that nestled among fields, meadows, hills and woods on the western edge of Kent. The area was famous for its fruit trees and its endless fields of hops. The summers were warm and every spring the sweet, heavy scent of the fruit trees’ blossom hung in the air. Sean and Anne had wandered through a wood full of bluebells and anemones, and suddenly the house had appeared before them. It was an old gamekeeper’s house or hunter’s lodge, by the look of it. It was pretty dilapidated, obviously uninhabited and not particularly inviting. But that hadn’t put Sean off. He had fallen in love with the garden and could not stop talking about it.

‘It’s so big! All those fruit trees. The lilac bushes. Laburnum, jasmine . . . everything you could wish for. And surrounded by the woods. It’s what I’ve been looking for. What I’ve been waiting for!’

She hadn’t needed any of that. They had both been sixty years old, and Anne had thought it would be more sensible not to burden themselves with a large garden that would mean hard physical work. Sean had of course argued the exact opposite. ‘We can allow ourselves the garden just because we will retire in a few years. Then we’ll have lots of time and needn’t rush the work. We’re not the kind of people to sit in a flat all day and stare out of the window. Come on, let’s give it a go! Let’s try something new one more time!’

They had managed to buy the house. In fact, it hadn’t been hard. No one else had wanted it.

And from then on all their free time, every weekend and all their holidays, had been spent there in the woods, renovating the house bit by bit. It was a laborious task, but to Anne’s surprise they had found it very satisfying. They had sanded down old parquet flooring, laid tiles in the kitchen and bathrooms, painted walls, had new windows put in, broken through walls and created larger rooms where previously there had been many small ones. They had put down a large area of decking for a south-facing terrace. It had a wooden railing around the edge and steps leading down to the garden. They had cut down a few trees, to let in more light. And Anne had made herself a studio up under the roof. She had discovered painting a few years earlier and it had become a passion of hers.

She wondered if she should go out to see if a car was parked outside, but the cold outside put her off. And no doubt she wouldn’t see anything anyway. Perhaps she had only imagined the beam of light this time. She had been dozing, after all. Perhaps she had even fallen asleep.

But something had woken her.

She tried to brush away the eerie feeling that had crept up on her. She really was all alone out here. She was fine with that during the hours of daylight, but in the evenings she sometimes had to tell herself to get a grip, to stop all kinds of unsettling thoughts from taking over.

She turned the light on again and went into the kitchen. It was a beautiful room of white-stained wood, with an Aga and a long breakfast bar opposite the terrace door where you could read the paper and sip at a cup of coffee. She poured herself a drop of whisky, downed it in one, and then chased it with another. Normally she didn’t react to problems with alcohol, but for the moment it seemed to help calm her nerves.

After Sean’s death, she had not once tried to find comfort in drink. She had not sought any help anywhere. In her experience, work was the best medicine for all psychological problems, and so she had plunged into gardening and painting, so coming through the hard first year. Now two and a half more years had passed, and she had everything under control. Herself, her pain and her life out here far from anyone.

Sean had died when everything was ready. In the middle of summer, just a few weeks after his sixty-fifth birthday. He had stopped working in June, just four weeks after Anne had retired from her job as a GP. At the beginning of July they had wanted to throw a house-warming party for the new house. They planned to have it in the garden, which seemed to be sinking under a sea of blossoming jasmine. They had invited almost eighty people; almost all of them had said they would come. The day before the party, Sean had climbed up on to the roof, because he had his mind set on tacking fairy lights to the guttering. Coming down, he had missed the top rung of the ladder and fallen to the ground. It didn’t seem too dramatic; he only broke the head of his thigh bone. Nothing worse than that. Of course he was angry and disappointed to be lying in the hospital and having to cancel his party. But then he had contracted a lung infection, antibiotics didn’t help at all, and within four weeks he was dead. Anne didn’t have time to really understand what was happening.

She had buried him. Sometime in November, she, in turn, climbed up on to the roof and took down the fairy lights – a stupid, garish chain of bulbs not worth anything, let alone the damage they had caused.

After a second drink, Anne finally relaxed. She decided that she had imagined the headlights’ beam. Something on television had probably woken her up. A scream, a gunshot. That was what you got in whodunits.

Still, tonight she would use the safety chain on the front door, which she normally didn’t do. And she would close the shutters on all the downstairs windows.

That couldn’t do any harm.

‘And? What do you spend your days doing now?’ asked Bartek.

It was loud in the pub. Every table was taken. Everyone was laughing, chatting, drinking. Shouting. Samson was not all that fond of the pub, but Bartek always insisted, and as Bartek was his only friend, he didn’t want to upset him. They sometimes met here on Fridays, if Bartek had the day off. They met up early, at six or half-six. Bartek’s girlfriend gave him aggro if he spent all evening in the pub with a friend, so they normally went home by half-eight at the latest. Samson had come by car, although that meant he couldn’t drink. But he was never a big drinker and taking the bus seemed to him like too much hassle. He had no wish to stand in the cold at the bus stop, let alone walk all the way. As usual, he had spent the whole day wandering around outside. He had had enough of that now.

He had inherited the car from his mother. He knew that Millie held it against him. Even now, after all these years. She could never get over it when other people had what she herself wanted.

‘Well, I don’t just sit around at home, if that’s what you mean,’ Samson replied to Bartek’s question. ‘I’d get bored. And this week Millie’s shift starts in the afternoon, so she’d be around half the day and . . . well, you know. I can do without her company.’

Millie worked in a care home for old people. Samson knew that she hated her work. When he heard her talking about her patients, he shivered at the thought of one day being old and completely at the mercy of someone like her.

‘I don’t know how you can stand it,’ said Bartek. ‘Still living with your brother and sister-in-law! You’re much too old for that!’

‘But the house is mine too!’

‘Then let them pay you your share as rent, but find somewhere else. You’re treated badly there!’

‘I’m afraid of growing old alone if I live on my own,’ said Samson quietly.

Bartek raised his eyebrows. ‘How old are you? Thirty-four! It’s time you found a woman to live with! Don’t you plan on marrying one day and starting a family?’

Samson took a sip of his alcohol-free beer.

Bartek had touched on a delicate point. They talked about it sometimes: marriage, having children, living a normal life. Bartek, who had had a steady girlfriend for years, did not find the topic easy either. His girlfriend had wanted to get married for a long time, but Bartek, although he was almost forty, was afraid of the commitment. Samson had never wanted to admit that he had different issues and had hidden them behind a fear of commitment that he did not in fact have. On the contrary, he longed for nothing so much as a wife. A house, a garden, children, a dog . . . He could picture it in his mind, and often he thought he would give everything for it to become reality. But the embarrassing – and in his mind strange – truth was that he had never even had a girlfriend. Neither at school nor since. Never. So he had never even come close to the whole issue of marriage.

‘Well . . .’ he answered evasively. ‘It’s not like you meet a woman every day who you want to marry!’

‘My girlfriend’s got me to that point now,’ said Bartek, and he did not look quite so unhappy at the thought of it. ‘She gave me an ultimatum. Maybe that was good. Next summer we’re going for it. There’ll be a big party, everyone’s coming. You’re invited too, of course!’

‘Nice,’ said Samson, and tried not to sound too envious. Bartek was always lucky. Always, in every way. They had met before Samson did deliveries for the frozen foods firm, when he was working for a chauffeur services company. Bartek worked there too, but unlike Samson he had not been let go. Someone like Bartek never lost his job. Everyone liked him too much, from his boss to his colleagues to the clients. When a car was booked, they often asked for him specifically.
Can we have Bartek? Can we have the really nice Pole?

Bartek spoke perfect English but with a charming East European accent that went down well, particularly with women. He knew how to keep people entertained with stories from his life, which were normally completely made up but told in a way that hooked his listeners.

Samson, who would lie awake at night and go over and over in his mind why women constantly ignored him and why he was always the first to be let go when a company needed to make redundancies, had often wondered if it was down to his grotesquely boring biography. What did he have to tell people about? Or perhaps it was his name. Who was called Samson? If there was one thing he could not forgive his late parents, it was that they had given him that name. His mother had read a book during her pregnancy in which someone was called Samson, and she had liked the name. Samson’s brother, who was two years older than him, had been luckier. Gavin was a name that did not attract teasing all through school.