AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘I’ll get a Travelodge tonight,’ he says now to his friend.
‘Don’t be daft.’ Neil throws his bowl in the sink. Matt knows that deep down Neil would prefer it if he did stay in a hotel, given the apparent state of things with Bella, but that these are not words that can be exchanged between them.
‘Nah,’ he says. ‘I need to be on my own, I think.’
‘Cool. If that’s what you want to do.’
‘Sure.’
Five minutes later, Matt hurries down the stairs. The front door is open and Neil is loading some gear into the back of his van.
‘Shall I shut the door?’ he calls out, aware of the crashing irony of the question only after it leaves him.
‘Yeah. I just need one more thing.’ Neil disappears into the side return, presumably to fetch more tools from his shed. Neil’s is a super-shed – concrete base, reinforced and insulated, the door twice padlocked against theft. Very Neil, thinks Matt, almost smiling as he makes his way to the van, passing behind the open back doors. A glance inside reveals the electric cement mixer, a stiff yard brush, a pickaxe, a couple of spades.
He climbs up into the front of the van. A moment later, Neil walks back down the front path, singing to himself and carrying a large red tool bag the size of a small suitcase. He disappears momentarily; Matt hears the van doors slam behind him. Another second and Neil is clambering into the front.
‘Right,’ he says, starting the engine. A blast of music. He turns the radio down. ‘All set?’
‘Yep.’ Matt clutches his sports bag on his lap, his rucksack with his laptop snug between his feet.
Neil pulls out of the street. As yet, the traffic is thin. Above, peach and grey clouds give way to white, September establishing itself: chilly mornings, warm days. They chat, Matt thinks later, about nothing. The weather, Neil’s job, Matt’s job. Neil drops him at the station, toots the horn as he drives away. Matt waves him off but turns before the van disappears out of sight.
It is only later, on the train into Waterloo, that Neil will appear again in his mind’s eye, carrying his red tool bag down his front path, singing to himself. The image will release in Matt a toxic cloud of spores, which will reproduce through the cells and tissue of him until, later still, when he grabs a takeaway flat white from a bar on Villiers Street, he will pinpoint the source of the rot and discover that it wasn’t words or body language or any kind of misplaced gesture but an object as innocuous as a bag, a new red tool bag, carried with perfect nonchalance down a suburban front path, and even then, it is only because of everything else that has gone before, everything that Ava said last night, that this apparently harmless detail is the one that finally sickens him.
He is early for his meeting. In the public garden at the back of the Embankment, he sits on a bench and sips his coffee in the sun. Commuters bustle by – urgent, purposeful. He thinks back to that day, to Neil showing the cop around the Lovegoods’ kitchen extension.
‘Listen.’ Neil placed a hand on Matt’s arm, his voice quiet and low. ‘We’re just going to check Johnnie’s place.’
He was so natural, so open. Matt remembers the policeman, who looked about eighteen.
Sitting now in the sun, he remembers too how he went inside to look for himself. He has not stopped to wonder why, why he would check after Neil had checked. Was there a subconscious lack of trust even then? He doesn’t think so. Abi was his daughter; it was normal to rest his bike against the wall and step into his next-door neighbours’ house. It was normal to creep up the hall, listening out for Neil and the police officer talking on the first floor. It was normal to stand at the kitchen door and stare through the glass to Neil’s work site.
But there was almost nothing there – only the shell of a large hangar-like room, the ceiling held up with great rolled-steel joists, the back wall to the garden almost entirely gone. A house on stilts. Venetian, he thought then, or a Tudor jetty. He remembers thinking it, even in that charged moment, remembers how random thoughts like that came to him that day, as if from some earlier version of himself. Standing there staring, he remembered his and Ava’s kitchen looking like that – a smaller model – when Neil did their extension. Two brooms, two spades and a pickaxe leant against the right-hand wall, a neat pile of rubble at their base. Neil was always a tidy worker. A tool bag lay at the far side next to the open-mouthed, frog-like drum of Neil’s electric mixer, the same one in which Matt had helped him mix concrete. A lone washing machine stood over to the left, connected to a standpipe. On top of the washing machine, a mud-splashed radio, a half-eaten packet of digestive biscuits, a kettle, also spattered with dried muddy water and three grotty white mugs with the Radio Jackie logo just about visible under streaks of dried coffee.
Hearing voices coming down the stairs, he hurried back to the front door, though too slowly to avoid being caught in the hallway by Neil and the cop.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Just needed to look for myself, you know?’
Neilvolunteeredto show the policeman round, he thinks now, trying to fit it all together with this horrible poisonous feeling. He himself double-checked. But what bothers him, what bothers him now, is that in amongst the brushes, the spades, the heavy tools and the cement mixer, the mugs and the kettle, the radio and the half-eaten packet of biscuits on the top of the lone washing machine was Neil’s tool bag. Neil’s brand-new black tool bag, the white stitching still bright. The size of a small suitcase. He didn’t think about it at the time; it wasn’t one of the thousand random thoughts he had that day, but now he remembers that Neil told him it cost a couple of ton. Two hundred pounds. The Rolls-Royce of tool bags.
But it was black, with white stitching, still bright. It was new. And it was not red.
Afterwards, Neil suggested they split up.
‘I’ll head to Kingston,’ he said. Said he would check Bushy Park.
Did he?
A wave of nausea threatens to bring up the coffee he has just drunk. He puts his head between his knees and feels the sun on the back of his neck. His forehead pricks with perspiration and all he can see is that bag. The size of it. The brand-new condition of it. The size. The size, the size, the size.
When Ava knocked for Neil, he was at home, which was unusual but not alarm-bell-ringing. Later, when the more unpleasant glimmer of suspicion fell upon them and their best friends, the dogs sniffed their way around their house too and found nothing. Nothing. Because Abi wasn’t – had never – been there. Afterwards, he and Neil separated again. They only hooked up in the evening – Neil said he’d been far as Barnes, handing out the printed photographs and taping posters to lamp posts from Strawberry Hill to Richmond.
Had he?
No idea. Matt knows only that they searched until midnight. Abi’s jacket was found the next morning.
But Bella told Ava that Neil was out all night, which means he didn’t go home, not then.
