Blackstoke Read online

  ‘Is there one?’ asked Christian.

  ‘Not yet, but there should be.’

  ‘And I assume you want us involved?’ said Peter.

  ‘Yes, of course. We should share responsibility over it. This is a lovely little corner, we need to take good care of it.’

  Peter tried very hard not to sigh. Last thing he wanted at this stage was more responsibility.

  ‘Isn’t this a gated community?’ asked David. Peter pointed at him, as if to say ‘good one’.

  ‘And?’ replied Fletcher, taking a healthy slug of wine. He’s either thirsty or he’s already got the taste today, thought Peter.

  ‘Well, don’t we already pay a fee to a security and maintenance firm to keep an eye on that sort of thing? We have a gate security guard, I’d hate to see him put out of a job.’

  Fletcher fixed David with a vibrant stare, one that seemed honed by hours of eyeing down the opposition in the House of Commons. ‘That changes nothing.’

  David laughed nervously. ‘Well what I’m asking is, do we really need a neighbourhood watch?’

  ‘Well our new postcode does have an absurdly high crime rate. Over three hundred and fifty reported incidents of crime in the past year. I think that’s ample justification, don’t you?’

  ‘This place wasn’t even built for most of this past year,’ said Christian, shifting in his seat as if uncomfortable with the words coming out of his own mouth. ‘Are you saying that the building site was somehow a crime hotbed?’ He looked at Pam and Peter for support.

  ‘It does seem strange,’ said Pam.

  ‘The stats don’t lie,’ hurried Fletcher, pulling a folded piece of paper from his inner jacket pocket. ‘See for yourself.’

  The document was laid flat on the kitchen island, in front of David and Christian, like a corpse on a mortuary slab ready for examination.

  ‘There,’ said Fletcher, jabbing at a map on the paper. ‘Surely that is cause for concern.’ He pulled back with an air of triumph, and sipped his champagne while examining the kitchen fittings, as if his work here was done.

  Peter peered over reluctantly, as did Pam. The map showed about ten square miles of the vicinity, and sure enough, the stats were grossly higher in their postcode than in the surrounding area, depicted by a jagged red square set against green, like an unpolished ruby lying on grass.

  ‘Why is that?’ asked David. ‘There must be a reason.’

  ‘Who knows?’ replied Fletcher, reclaiming the paper. ‘But one can never be too careful.’

  ‘It seems not,’ added Christian, a note of indecision obvious in his voice.

  ‘Wouldn’t chasing up the mobile mast installation be more important at this point?’ said David. ‘We’re still in the stone age here.’

  ‘Very true,’ added Peter.

  ‘I can’t make that hurry along,’ replied Fletcher. ‘No strings I can pull there. But I can with this. Priorities folks, priorities. So if I make myself the main signatory, would one of you chaps co-sign? Formalise this arrangement? It needs two signatories to be recognised by the national Neighbourhood Watch organisation. Plus there’s a bursary to get you up and running, it won’t cost a thing.’

  Peter felt a familiar flush at the back of his neck, one that he occasionally felt at work and felt far more at high school. The inexorable reverse tractor beam of peer pressure. His desire for fewer responsibilities clawed him some backbone. ‘Is this really necessary? It seems a bit… keen.’

  ‘Crime is statistically lower in areas that have a formally recognised neighbourhood watch scheme,’ puffed Fletcher. ‘It acts as a deterrent in itself, since criminals can see it on the online interactive maps.’

  Peter caught David narrow his eyes in mocking doubt, but his mouth had opened before he could stop himself—his resistance proving extremely short-lived. ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘Good man, Peter,’ said Fletcher, slapping him on the arm. ‘I knew there’d be at least one real man here.’

  The words left his mouth like an alligator of verbal offence, floating into the middle of the room predatorily, waiting for someone to bite. Whether he meant it to come out like that or not, Peter recognised the not-so-subtle dig at the Lyons and steeled himself. David’s eyes clouded gloomily, and Christian merely stared at Fletcher with pity. They must have heard this so many times before, and each had their own reaction to it.

  Pam suddenly filled the room with words, trying to pause the brimming ire. ‘Peter are you sure you need to take on something else at the minute? We’ve got so much going on, you’ll end up spreading yourself too thin…’

  ‘Says the woman who forgot to buy dinner for her family!’ Peter replied too quickly, so eager to move the conversation on that he blurted out something he certainly shouldn’t. The atmosphere, already fragile, crystallised in an instant. Pam’s face flushed hurt, then bitterness.

  ‘You can’t speak to your wife like that Peter,’ said Fletcher, admonishing him pompously.

  Peter stared at a spot on the table, knowing he couldn’t undo this latest faux pas. He felt the eyes of their guests on him. He waited for it—that first shuffle of someone edging to the door. He hoped it wouldn't come, because when the house emptied he’d be alone with an angry Pam. And he knew he deserved as good as she’d give.

  He searched desperately for a joke to smooth over what he said—a carefully judged remark that was part apology, part self-deprecation. But he couldn’t think of anything. Moreover, the only thought that really gained any foothold in his frantic mindscape was bitterness and indignant anger. Pam was causing trouble for him again. How could she lead him to make such a complete repugnant twat out of himself in front of these savvy and sophisticated new neighbours? Fuck you Pam, he thought coldly—but guilt came back again quickly.

  ‘It’s been a stressful few weeks for all of us,’ he eventually said, but it was an excuse nobody seemed ready to take on. He felt the heat on his neck, just a little prickle at first, down by his Adam’s apple. He knew a full-flush beet-red blush was on the way, and he couldn’t bear the thought of it. ‘I’ll just take the bin out,’ he says. ‘Excuse me.’

  He motioned for the broad kitchen exit, but stopped and turned. He grabbed the carrier bag that Christian and David brought the cheese gift in, and stuffed the cork and the cork wire from the rose into it, all the while knowing full well that what he was doing was extremely awkward and only digging his social hole deeper.

  Without further ado, he headed to the door. ‘Goodnight,’ he said and exited into the cool evening air, which came to his burning cheeks like a cold face mask after a sauna.

  16

  She had only just finished looping the thick rope lead around Dewey’s collar when Grace heard a door slam somewhere. Dewey’s ears pricked immediately at the sound, and she glanced in its direction. She had felt exposed and shy since the confrontation with Quint Fenchurch, feelings she was burying hard and fast, but that didn’t stop her from hoping she didn’t bump into anybody, especially not him.

  The noise had come from the big house on the corner with the fancy Iron Rise plaque—not the biggest one the MP lived in. The man who owned Iron Rise was walking down the drive holding a white rag in his hand. She realised quickly it wasn’t a rag at all, but an empty carrier bag, and his march, twinned with the urgent clatter of the door shutting, seemed to suggest not all was right in his world. She couldn’t for the life of her work out the importance of the carrier bag, and found it funny, the way he was gripping it like a wounded pheasant.

  She lowered her gaze, and pretended to fuss with Dewey’s lead. She was wearing wellies, scuffed combats and a raincoat, her usual evening walking wear. It wasn’t really all that cold tonight, but when the winter sun went down it certainly dropped a number of degrees—the kind of thing only evening dog walkers noticed.

  She planned to head into the cul-de-sac between the two bigger houses to see what was down there, but tonight she felt like going the other way, strictly to avoid any conversa
tion with the man opposite, who had thrown his carrier bag into the black wheelie bin and was staring up at the sky. Trouble at mill, evidently. But a change in route to avoid him would mean walking past the Fenchurch house and risking Quint’s scrutinising gaze.

  Grace weighed the two up, but before she could make her mind up, Dewey made it up for her by running towards the middle of the cul-de-sac, his huge body and lithe frame dragging her bodily (and embarrassingly) along behind him. The scrape of her shoes as she tried to regain her balance echoed in the night, causing the man opposite to turn. She tried to remember his name but couldn’t, remembering only that he had a decent taste in red wine.

  Dewey moved with purposeful strong strides. The man at the house stared, and Grace found herself straightening her back into a runner’s stance, and tried to feign that she was jogging alongside Dewey in some deranged evening fitness activity. Dewey interpreted her acceleration as nothing more than encouragement, so he pushed harder away.

  Grace wanted the ground to swallow her up, and had to throw any pretence of control out of the window. ‘Dewey!’ she whispered harshly, with no reaction. The man on the corner seemed to break out of his own reverie, and moved out into the cul-de-sac with his arms wide.

  ‘Hey boy, stop!’ he shouted, spreading himself. Dewey side-stepped him easily, but the change in direction wrenched the rope from Grace’s wrist. She yelled as the cord burned her skin, and clattered into the man, who caught her. She smelt wine and office sweat as she landed against him. It was a smell she was familiar with. He rightened her, holding her shoulders, his face flushed at the sudden intimacy.

  ‘Dewey!’ she shouted, before saying to the man ‘Thanks…’

  ‘Peter,’ he said. ‘The dog’s Dewey?’ They both started to run after the dog.

  ‘Yeah. I don’t know what’s got into him. Dewey!’

  Dewey was charging ahead out of the cul-de-sac and down a footpath at the bottom, between the hedgerows separating Peter’s house from the politician’s. The streetlights no longer reached him as he disappeared into the foliage. He barked twice, and Grace recognised the urgency of the bark. It was the sound Dewey made when someone was at the door and he wanted to take a gander at them. It always comforted Grace, because it meant Dewey was watching out for her—but this time it did no such thing. It scared her, hearing her dog’s bellows in a different context.

  She chased after him, and her neighbour, Peter, appeared at her side, matching her. She was fitter than he was, not through anything other than dog walking and youth, and his strides were more ragged.

  ‘It’s okay, I’ll get him,’ she said to him, as the hedges narrowed around her at the mouth of the footpath.

  ‘No, let me help, it’s bloody dark this way,’ he said between pants.

  Dewey hollered again, as if to let them know they were on the right track—a little reminder of his genetic roots as a hunting dog in previous generations, with the hound running on ahead to chase down their quarry. What Dewey was after right now was anyone’s guess, and it unnerved Grace that her gentle giant was so animated.

  The hedgerows opened into a flattened muddy field, with piles of earth in a row to their left and the blackness of woodland to their right. In the distance the lights of the main road into the estate blinked, over a long field of shallow tree stumps standing like an army of squat, flat-capped gnomes. This was the non-glamorous side of their new home—the shineless banality of the sacrifices needed to create the new. It made Grace feel quite hollow, that her new comfort had come at the expense of so much greenery.

  ‘Where is he?’ said Peter, arriving just behind her.

  ‘Dewey!’ Grace shouted, only to be answered by the silent flicker of breeze.

  They stood listening, waiting, when under that same whisper of breeze came the sound of a low growl. Peter tapped her forearm, and pointed to the woods to their right, and sure enough, Grace could just make out Dewey’s pale grey coat against the darker forest.

  Taking a few steps towards him, the growl getting louder, she saw his head was high, his ears pricked, his legs bent in readiness. He was fixed on the woods. Grace looked at the trees, but because of the pitch darkness, could see nothing at all. No lights within, no visible movement, just black nothing. But Dewey was mesmerised.

  She reached him, and patted his fur. ‘Dewey, calm down boy,’ she whispered.

  ‘Can you smell that?’ Peter said, appearing next to them.

  ‘Ummm… yeah,’ Grace replied. Come to think of it, she could. There was something in the air.

  ‘My kids have noticed it, but something really does stink out here.’

  Dewey shifted, and his growl went up a pitch. It sounded less aggressive, even though his stance was the same. Grace thought he sounded… scared. He had moved in front of the two people, still fixed on the trees, as if shielding them. ‘Come on Dew,’ she said, patting his behind.

  But Dewey’s head began to sag, his shoulders withered, his growl became more pleading. He made sounds Grace hadn’t heard him make since he was a puppy. His head bobbed up and down.

  ‘What on earth has he seen?’ Peter asked.

  ‘Not a clue,’ replied Grace. ‘Dewey, come on.’

  Grace had built her adult life around control and hard work, in the way that her own hard work had brought her control. She took no stock in messing about or dilly dallying. She was a woman of action and decision. So this, seeing her dog this way, in such a strange place, chiselled away some of that control to reveal coiled unease beneath. To feel this powerless over something was new to her, and she hated it.

  ‘Now Dewey, come on,’ she said firmly. She tugged his lead back to make the point.

  Then deep in the trees, so quiet it could have been imagined, something cracked. A branch maybe.

  Dewey turned to look at her with wet, wide eyes and then looked back to the woods. He fell quiet. They all stood there in silence, Grace wondering if she’d actually heard it, a deep, disconcerting unrest growing.

  She didn’t feel, somehow, that they were alone.

  Then… Dewey briefly nuzzled Peter’s hand, and began trotting back to the footpath, the hedges and the estate. Grace and Peter followed just behind. Grace was completely dumbfounded, and even the bloke running with her was quiet.

  Dewey didn’t run ahead, or panic—he merely kept pace a couple of yards ahead of them, and almost guided them out of the enclosed footpath. As they emerged into the sodium wash of the cul-de-sac street lamps, Dewey didn’t stop. Peter slowed in front of his house, and shouted, ‘See you, I suppose.’

  ‘Yeah thanks for the help,’ Grace replied, not even beginning to slow with him, mainly because Dewey simply showed no signs of stopping at all, even if she tried to make him. This was a side to her dog that she had simply never come across before. The affable hound was now a picture of agitation and peculiarity. And she couldn’t shake the sound she’d heard, and the disquiet it prompted.

  As Grace passed Iron Rise, the house Peter lived in, she noticed someone on the front step, haloed by the porch light.

  No, she thought. Herself, and a married man, emerging from the darkness of the bushes—all seen by that man’s wife.

  Pam. She remembered her name. And even though she couldn’t make out her expression thanks to the casting shadows, Grace could see that her body language had tensed, her arms frozen and her shoulders suddenly bunched.

  Oh shit.

  Dewey kept her pressing on, for which she was grateful. Any excuse to get away from the burgeoning domestic. He loped over the road to Grace’s front door, but instead of waiting patiently, he head butted the side gate open, causing it to swing ajar with a clang. Grace’s concern and confusion grew. Once in the side passage of the house, she let go of his lead and latched the side gate behind them, while a veil of acute sadness settled around her.

  She knew this was coming. It had to be coming sooner or later. She had seen it in her only other pet when she was younger, a rabbit called Onesie. She was
a beautiful, friendly, fluffy thing—a Cheshire lop with big ears and bigger feet—that suddenly, over the course of a weekend, lost half its body weight, became confused, sprayed an almost neon-yellow urine everywhere (which was odd since she had even managed to toilet train the damn thing).

  Grace had slept by the cage on the Sunday night, and was awoken by the urgent flopping of furry limbs against the metal bars. Onesie was having some kind of huge seizure, and after a couple of seconds of critical indecision on Grace’s part (what do I do?!), Onesie stopped moving and her chest puffed out one last time with an audible wheeze.

  It was odd, and something Grace wasn’t very proud of, but for the next couple of years at least, that look in Onesie’s eyes, with the backdrop of that high-pitched whistling death rattle, was the only thing she could see when she shut her eyes at night. It was like she was cursing herself over and over again, torturing herself, with the idea that she could have done something as soon as she’d noticed Onesie’s erratic behaviour.

  And now, she was seeing history start to repeat itself, with dear old Dewey showing similar signs. Her heart felt slowly crushed as she came around the corner of the house into the garden, to see Dewey darting about animatedly, and relieving himself in random spots. She sat on the step and watched him, tears stinging her cheeks, until he nudged her to take them both inside.

  17

  That damn espresso machine was still a mystery. Pam would have given anything for a cup of any kind of coffee—a genuine, synapse-blasting, honest-to-god hit of deep, black caffeine. She checked the cupboard for instant mix, but couldn’t find any. She knew she hadn’t bought any—the failings of yesterday’s shopping trip had been made abundantly clear to her—but that didn’t stop her wondering if Peter had stashed any.

  Peter. Upstairs, getting ready for work. The kids already gone, Alice off first to avoid being near those twins from The Shining sequel, leaving Jacob to that particular duty.