Watching You: A Novel

DC Rose Pelham stands in front of number 14 Melville Heights. Accompanying her is DI Philip Makin, her boss. This is his first visit to Melville Heights. He’d been visiting his parents in Bangor last night when the first call came through, but rushed back at the first opportunity. Rose is secretly pleased. What looked like a simple uxoricide – the husband had been covered in the victim’s blood, there was the missing twenty minutes between his arrival home and the call to the emergency services, the affair with a blonde woman half his age, the hearsay about a sado-masochistic relationship between him and his wife – had suddenly within the last few hours became much more complicated. Philip Makin is the most experienced detective on the force. He will bring her back into her depth.

Fourteen Melville Heights is an attractive blue house. It has pronounced bays on the ground and first floor and a panel of stained glass spanning the upper floors through which is visible the outline of a staircase. The house next door is carmine red and flat-fronted, empty at present, its owners seconded to San Francisco for a year. Next to that, of course, is number 16, the Fitzwilliams’ house, still cordoned off with plastic ribbon, blue lights still flashing lazily from two squad cars parked outside. Rose has already visited number 14; they came early this morning to bring Josephine Mullen in for questioning and to examine the rear access at the back of the house. She’d been let in by Josephine Mullen’s brother: Jack Mullen, sleep-rumpled and boyishly handsome, charming beyond words. He’d made her a cappuccino with his shiny noisy machine while they waited for Josephine to get dressed. He’d even sprinkled chocolate powder on it for her.

‘You know,’ he’d said, looking at her earnestly across the kitchen table with his soft, sky-blue eyes, ‘there is literally no way my sister had anything to do with this. I mean, she is genuinely the sweetest, gentlest, loveliest person in the world. Genuinely.’

Oh, how she had wanted to believe him.

But now, a few hours later, the door is opened by a woman. She blinks at them. ‘Hello?’

‘Hello, good afternoon. Mrs Rebecca Mullen? I’m DC Rose Pelham and this is my colleague DI Philip Makin. Could we come in for a minute?’

‘Sure,’ she says. Her fingers are hooked tightly around the edge of the door. She slowly releases them. ‘Please come in.’

‘Great.’ They wipe their feet and follow the woman into the house. The staircase sweeps dramatically to the left and light from the stained glass falls in coloured puddles on to the pale seagrass stair runner. To the left is an antique coat-hook panel, bronze and ivory. Rose scans it quickly as they pass. She finds what she’s looking for and stores it away. Ahead is the kitchen where she sat early this morning drinking Mr Mullen’s cappuccino and to the left is a large living room. Mrs Mullen calls into the kitchen, ‘Jack, the police are here again.’

Jack Mullen appears, less rumpled now, in a grey T-shirt and dark jeans. He smiles anxiously. ‘Is my sister OK?’ he says. ‘Is the lawyer there? Are you letting her go?’

‘Not quite yet, Mr Mullen. Her lawyer arrived about an hour ago; we’ve had a quick chat with them both and things are starting to sort themselves out. Shouldn’t be too long now.’

‘Good,’ he says. ‘Thank God. She sounded so scared when I spoke to her on the phone.’

‘Shall we sit in here, Jack?’ says Mrs Mullen, gesturing at the living room.

‘No,’ says Jack, quite firmly. ‘Let’s sit in the kitchen. It’s cosier.’

Cosy, thinks Rose. Not a word you hear very often in the middle of a murder investigation.

Jack offers them coffee but it’s too late in the day now for coffee so Rose asks for a glass of water instead. Jack and Rebecca sit on one side of the table on a long bench. Rose and Philip sit on pale linen upholstered chairs on the other.

Rose studies Rebecca Mullen’s face. She is not what she might have expected in the context of Jack Mullen. Where Jack is solid and warm and jolly, Rebecca is chilly and wan and tense. She wears a navy shirt dress over her pregnant belly, with a fabric belt that ties just above the bump. Her dark hair is parted on one side and tied back with a plain brown elastic band. She wears a wedding band and a locket around her neck. Her pale hands sit folded together on the table but Rose can hear the tap tap of her ballet pump against the table leg.

‘So,’ she begins, first looking at Philip for affirmation that she should begin the interview. ‘Could you tell us again, Mr Mullen, for DI Makin’s benefit, what you told me this morning about the visit from Mrs Fitzwilliam yesterday lunchtime?’

‘Yes,’ he says brightly. ‘Of course. Well, it was around two o’clock. I was about to leave for work. And the door went. I answered it and it was Mrs Fitzwilliam. She looked a bit … I don’t know. A bit scruffy? Not her usual self. She said she’d had the flu, but she was trying to get herself out of the house. She’d brought us a gift.’

‘And could you show the gift to DI Makin?’

‘Yes, sure. Hold on, it should be … here. Yes.’ He reaches for a package on a shelf by the back door and passes it to her. ‘This is it.’

It’s a cream knitted blanket with yellow and blue blobs on both ends that are apparently supposed to be bunny rabbits, though without Jack Mullen explaining this to her earlier she might not have known.

‘She said it was a gift for the baby. That she’d knitted it herself. She said it was the first thing she’d ever knitted and she apologised for it being a bit amateur.’

‘And Mrs Mullen – were you present during this encounter?’

‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘Yes I was. Jack called me down from my office.’

‘And you were in the hallway?’

‘Yes,’ says Jack. ‘We were all in the hallway.’

‘You didn’t invite Mrs Fitzwilliam in?’

‘No,’ says Jack, shaking his head heavily, a sob catching at the back of his throat. ‘And now I feel so bad that we didn’t invite her in. It was just … she’d been ill and she looked terrible and Rebecca’s pregnant and I thought … we thought … Anyway, we didn’t invite her in. No.’ He sniffs and Rose sees tears in his eyes.

‘So she hands over the package. Then what?’

‘We thanked her profusely. I told her I hoped she was going to get lots of TLC from her family tonight. She said that was unlikely, her husband was staying late at work and her son was going to his first school dance. We talked about that for a while. How he was taking a girl and how thrilled she was about that. She said they must have us over for supper some time. And then she sort of shuffled off.’

‘And then?’

‘I went to work.’

‘And Mrs Mullen? What did you do?’

‘I went back up to my office. Carried on with my work.’

‘And your work is?’

‘I’m a systems analyst, for an accountancy firm.’

‘Ah, so you’re tech savvy?’

‘No more so than most people of my generation.’

‘And Mr Butter, your brother-in-law. He says he got home from visiting his mother at about seven o’clock. Did you see him or hear him return?’

‘No.’

‘And your sister-in-law, Josephine Mullen. She says she returned at about eight o’clock. Did you see or hear her return?’

‘Again, no. I was in my office until nine o’clock or so, when I heard the sirens coming up the hill.’

Rose pulls in her breath, ready to take the questioning around a sharp bend in the road. She consults her notebook, smiles, looks down again and clears her throat. ‘Mrs Mullen, your sister-in-law, she says when she came upstairs last night, at roughly ten past eight, she noticed that you had moved a life-size cardboard cut-out of your husband into the bay window of your office.’

There’s a shard of silence.

‘What?’

‘As she walked past your office door last night, she noticed that a cardboard cut-out of your husband had been moved from a corner of your office to the bay window.’

‘No,’ says Rebecca. ‘No. That’s wrong.’

Rose inhales and smiles. ‘Would you mind?’ she says. ‘Could we have a quick look?’

‘Of course,’ says Rebecca. ‘Please do.’

She moves lightly up the stairs for a woman so far into her pregnancy. ‘Here.’ She pushes open the door of her home office. Her desk faces the wall, there’s a small sofa against the other wall, lots of shelving. Rose casts her gaze across the room, taking in the things she hoped to find in here. There, on the desk, a photograph of a smiling teenage girl with long dark hair, her arm around a Border collie. Tucked in the corner is the cut-out of Jack Mullen. Rose moves to the bay window. From here she can see virtually the whole of Lower Melville Village. She can also see into the mirror bay of the Fitzwilliams’ house. She looks down at the spot below where Mrs Tripp sat last night in the undergrowth watching the houses of Melville Heights and then glances back at Rebecca’s desk, her chair tucked neatly beneath it.

‘Thank you, Mrs Mullen, that’s great.’

At the bottom of the stairs, Rose pauses. ‘Is this your coat, Mrs Mullen?’ she says, pointing at a long black woollen coat with a dark red scarf still threaded through its collar.

‘Yes,’ she says, her breath catching almost, but not quite, inaudibly on the syllable.

‘Would you mind,’ she asks, ‘just trying it on for us?’

Jack steps forward. ‘Er, excuse me?’

‘Just something we need to do, to eliminate a line of inquiry.’

‘A line of inquiry? Into my wife’s coat?’

‘I’m sure it’s nothing, Mr Mullen. Just something that a witness mentioned. We just need to see the coat and then we can move on with the inquiry. If you wouldn’t mind?’

Jack and Rebecca exchange a look. Jack shrugs and Rebecca plucks the coat from the hook and Philip helps her to put it on. Rose makes a mental note of the single large button that holds it together over her bump. She exchanges a brief glance with Philip and then smiles. ‘Great,’ she says brightly. ‘Thank you! And now, just a few more questions, if that’s OK with you both.’

They head back into the kitchen and retake their seats.

‘Moving away from last night for just a moment, and going back quite some time, Mrs Mullen, could you tell us a little bit about the events of 1997? Back when you were living in Burton upon Trent?’

Mr Mullen bridles again. ‘Erm, right, OK. I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all. First my sister, now—’

‘Mr Mullen. I appreciate that this is unsettling, but in an inquiry like this we really can’t afford to ignore any avenue of investigation, even the unlikely ones. We could take Mrs Mullen into the station for questioning but in her condition we’d rather not. So if you wouldn’t mind letting us get on with it?’

She finishes with a broad smile which he returns, being the kind of man hard-wired to return smiles.

‘Thank you.’ She turns back to Rebecca. ‘Mrs Mullen, I know this is probably hard for you to talk about, but it would be really helpful if you could tell us about what happened to your sister, back in 1997. Please.’

‘How do you …?’

‘We just do.’

‘But what’s it got to do with …?’

‘Probably nothing. But we do need to discuss it. Thank you so much.’

Rebecca looks at Jack, who clasps his hand over hers. ‘Well, my sister killed herself.’

‘And your sister was called?’

‘Genevieve. Viva. Viva Hart.’

‘And why did she kill herself?’

‘We don’t know. She didn’t leave a note. But she’d been bullied at school.’

‘I believe you found her diary, after she killed herself?’

‘Yes.’

‘The contents of which led your parents to report one of her schoolteachers to the police?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the name of that teacher was Tom Fitzwilliam?’

Jack Mullen turns sharply to glance at his wife. His jaw is slightly ajar and he makes an odd, breathless noise.

Rebecca drops her head. ‘I don’t know what his name was. I just know it was her English teacher.’

‘Well, we have seen copies of the salient pages of your sister’s diary that were brought to Burton Station by your parents and they clearly state the name of the teacher in question. Tom Fitzwilliam. He was brought in for questioning.’

Rebecca shrugs.

‘And released thirty-five minutes later without charge. And now, twenty years later, you and Tom Fitzwilliam are close neighbours!’

Rebecca folds her arms over her bump, her body language becoming increasingly defensive.

‘Which is a bizarre coincidence whichever way you look at it. Don’t you think?’

Jack peers at Rebecca, trying to get her attention, but her gaze is fixed on a spot on the tabletop, just to the right of Rose’s notepad.

‘It is a coincidence,’ says Rebecca. ‘Very much so.’

‘You must have been quite horrified, in fact, to move into your dream home and find that you were two doors down from the man your family believed was responsible for the death of your little sister.’

‘I didn’t think that about him,’ she says, her fingers plucking at the fabric of her dress around her elbows. ‘I was only a kid. I didn’t know what to think.’

Rose pauses. ‘And your parents? Where are they …?’

‘My mother is dead. She died in 2012. Of cancer. My father … I don’t know where he is. He’s gone off radar. He has a chronic drink problem. He tries to keep away.’

‘So, it’s just you?’

‘Yes. Just me. And now Jack, of course.’

‘And one on the way?’

Rebecca glances at her bump and forces a smile. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘One on the way.’

‘When are you due?’

‘May the first.’

Rose smiles tightly and thinks, Please, for the sake of this unborn child, let this all be wrong, please let this all be the ramblings of a delusional woman and her over-imaginative teenage daughter. Let this just be nonsense.

‘I’d like to show you a photograph, if I may.’ She pulls an envelope from her bag, eases the print out of it and slides it across the table towards Rebecca. Rebecca touches it with the tip of her right index finger.

‘This was taken at the back of your house, last night, at eight eighteen, around the same time that Tom Fitzwilliam got back to his house. It shows someone walking away from the Fitzwilliams’ and turning into the gate at the back of your house. Just here.’ She gestures at the back door.

Rebecca pulls it closer towards her, studies it for a second and then pushes it away again. ‘Who is it?’

‘Well, yes, it’s hard to tell isn’t it? It’s not a great shot. But if you take a close look just here’ – she points at the bright flash point in the centre of the figure – ‘you can just make out a circular shape. Like a large button. They’re enhancing the image right now so we should have a better idea of who this person might be within the next few minutes. But looking at it now, Mrs Mullen, do you have any ideas?’

‘None,’ she said. ‘None whatsoever.’

‘No,’ says Rose, leaving the photograph in the centre of the table. ‘No, that’s fair enough. Right.’ She grips the table and turns to Philip. ‘I think that’s about it for now? Unless there’s anything you wanted to ask, Philip?’

Philip breathes in and runs his fingers down the length of his navy tie. ‘Well, there is just one thing, Mrs Mullen, just quickly before we go.’ He puts on his reading glasses and consults his notebook, slightly vaguely, just as they’d discussed in the car on the way here. ‘Erm, do you happen to know a Mrs Frances Tripp?’

‘Never heard of her.’

‘She lives over there in the village. I believe you’ve had an encounter or two with her. She’s the lady who thinks she’s being persecuted.’

‘No. I don’t know who you mean.’

‘Here, this lady.’ He slides a photo of Mrs Tripp towards her.

‘Oh, yes,’ she says, ‘yes. I think I’ve seen her around. She’s a bit …’

‘Delusional. Yes. Mr Fitzwilliam’s son has a photo, in fact, of the two of you chatting on the street, just a few days ago.’

‘Yes. Yes, I do recall that.’

‘What were you talking about?’

‘She was just talking about all her crazy stuff, you know. All the people who were stalking her. That kind of thing. I was kind of trapped. Couldn’t get away.’

‘So,’ says Philip, removing his glasses and then spreading his fingertips out across the tabletop, ‘here’s a thing. Mrs Tripp received a message from someone on her chat room at about six o’clock yesterday informing her that Tom Fitzwilliam would be having a big meeting of all her stalkers at his house tonight, telling her to come along and take some photos. The woman claimed to be living in Mold, but we’ve traced the IP address and in fact the message was sent from the Melville area.’

Rose sensed a muscle in Rebecca’s jaw clench slightly.

‘And it was convenient, I suppose, that Mrs Tripp was there last night as she was able to clarify that you were in your office all night. She claims to have seen you there. Sitting in your bay window. Except of course your desk isn’t in your bay window, is it? It’s against the wall? And didn’t your sister-in-law claim to have seen a cardboard cut-out in your bay when she passed by your office at around eight o’clock?

‘And this.’ He taps the photograph of the figure on the back path. ‘This could well be you, if you hadn’t in fact been sitting at your desk in your office as you claimed to be. The button on the coat sits quite high up when you wear it over your bump. As does this button on this coat.’ He taps it again; then he breathes out and leans back into his chair. ‘Mrs Mullen, is there anything you’d like to tell us about your movements last night? Anything you haven’t already told us? Anything that might be helpful?’

The following moment is entirely silent.

Jack looks at Rebecca. ‘Bex,’ he urges gently. ‘Bex?’

Rebecca stares pointedly to the right.

‘Mrs Mullen?’ says Philip.

Finally she turns to face Rose and Philip. Her gaze is black and determined. ‘Why on earth’, she says slowly, crisply, ‘would I want to kill Nicola Fitzwilliam?’

Rose inhales sharply. There it is. The crux of it. Why would a heavily pregnant woman go into a neighbour’s kitchen in the dark of night and stab her to death? With or without a twenty-year-long grudge against her husband? It was the question that had been perplexing her ever since Jenna and Frances Tripp had walked into the station this morning with their big bag of curveballs. She’d spent two hours going through everything she had at her disposal, trying to find the thing that would answer the conundrum. And then about an hour ago it had hit her, hard.

Jenna Tripp had told them that Nicola Fitzwilliam had also been a student at Tom Fitzwilliam’s school back in the nineties, although they’d not got together until a few years later. So Rose had read and reread the pages from Genevieve Hart’s diary, and again and again in the sections outlining the terrible bullying campaign she’d been subjected to, the same name kept coming up.

Nikki Lee had been the ringleader and also the puppet master; she stood to one side and let her minions administer the worst of the abuse. Nikki Lee smelled of cigarettes and boys’ aftershave. She bleached her hair and wore it tight off her face revealing cheekbones like razor blades, plucked eyebrows that never moved, eyes like chips of dirty blue ice. She kept her hands in her pockets even when she was kicking Genevieve in the back. She told Genevieve she smelled of teachers’ cum. She spat in her hair and rubbed it in with the ball of her foot. She spread a rumour that Genevieve had chlamydia. She spread another rumour that Genevieve’s cold sore had been caught from a teacher’s cock. She got her acolytes to tear up Genevieve’s art homework – on one occasion a watercolour of her mother’s hair that she’d been working on for a month. She sat on the wall opposite Genevieve’s house at night with her hands in her pockets watching and smoking, her presence sometimes only described by the small burning circle of red growing bigger and smaller. She told Genevieve that if she told anyone about what was happening to her she would kill her pet dog by pushing a piece of scaffolding up its arse until it came out if its mouth. Genevieve described how Nikki Lee watched her what felt like every minute of every day; wherever Viva went, there she was. Waiting, watching, insulting, pinching, spitting, hitting, following, hating, lying, kicking, hurting. For a whole terrible, painful, unthinkable year.

Rose had called the school, asked them to email over the yearbook for Genevieve’s year. They’d obliged within minutes. Rose had sat breathlessly waiting for the attachment to download. And there it was. In her hands. She and Philip had set off for the Mullens’ house thirty seconds later.

Now Rose looks at Rebecca, her heart aching with the awfulness of it all, and she sighs and puts her hand into her bag, one last time, and pulls out one last photo.

‘Here,’ she says. ‘Look at this photo for me, will you?’ She watches Rebecca’s face, waiting for her reaction. ‘Can you tell me who this is?’

‘Yes,’ whispers Rebecca, ‘it’s Nikki Lee.’

‘That’s right. Nikki Lee. Your sister’s bully. The girl who drove her to kill herself. And you know who else this is, don’t you?’

Rebecca’s eyes have filled with tears. She makes a loud noise in the back of her throat trying to pull them back into herself. She nods.

Rose hears Jack murmuring ‘Oh my God’ in the background.

‘It’s Nicola Fitzwilliam,’ says Rebecca.

‘Oh Christ,’ says Jack Mullen. ‘Oh Jesus.’

‘That’s right,’ says Rose gently. ‘That’s right. And now, would you like to tell us, Rebecca? Tell us exactly what happened last night?’

Rebecca Mullen nods. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I’ll tell you everything.’