The Magpies (34 page)
‘Of course. Anything.’
He put down his drink. He had only drunk half of it. ‘I need to get into the Newtons’ flat. I’ve been to the police about Lucy and Chris and they think I’m inventing it all. The same happened to Letitia and David. If I can get into the basement flat I might be able to find some evidence. A key to my flat, for example, to prove that Chris could have got into my flat to plant that virus. Or a diary. That would be good. There has to be something in there that will incriminate them, especially if I put it together with Letitia’s letter and remind the police that Chris has been involved in two accidents: three if you include Kirsty’s miscarriage.’
‘Isn’t that enough? Surely if you remind the police about Letitia’s friend…’
‘No, because there’s no evidence. It would never stand up in court. It wouldn’t even get to court. I need something more. I’m certain that if I get into their flat I’ll find it.’
Mary nodded. ‘So what can I do?’
‘I need them out of the way for an hour or so. Maybe you could ask them to dinner or something.’
‘But, Jamie, they don’t like me.’
‘I know. Lucy says you’re a witch.’
Mary raised an eyebrow. ‘Does she indeed. I wish I was. I’d turn her into a mouse and let Lennon play with her.’
Jamie laughed.
Mary said, ‘I’ve got an idea. Stay here. I’ll be back in a minute.’
She left Jamie on his own and left the flat. She was gone for over half an hour, leaving him twiddling his thumbs, wishing he had his cigarettes with him. He chewed his fingernails, trying to work out another way to get into the flat if Mary couldn’t help him. What was she doing? He had a sudden horrible feeling that she had gone to tell Lucy and Chris what he planned to do; that she was colluding with them. A minute later she came back, and he realised he was being paranoid and ridiculous. She had Brian with her.
Jamie stood up and Brian said, ‘Mary’s just explained everything to me. I just feel sorry that I didn’t know about it before.’
Jamie shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘You should have told us, Jamie. We might have been able to help.’
‘I didn’t know you well enough, and anyway, nobody I told ever believed me. Apart from a friend at work.’ Yes, and his attempts to help had ended disastrously.
Brian nodded. ‘We’re here to help you now. We don’t want people like that living in these flats. It makes me feel ill. I quite understand your need to gather evidence, so’ – he looked at the ceiling – ‘as much as it will pain me to have those people eating from our plates and drinking from our cups, Linda and I will invite them to dinner. We’ve always got on alright with them. Obviously, we’re lucky that we don’t live in the flat directly above them.’
Jamie took hold of Brian’s hand and shook it. ‘Thank you so much.’
Mary said, ‘How will you get into the flat?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t break in because I don’t want them to know I’ve been in there.’
‘I think we can help on that score too,’ Brian said. ‘An elderly couple used to live in the basement flat.’
‘Mr and Mrs Chambers,’ said Mary.
‘Yes, and Linda and I were very good friends with them. It was very sad: Mr Chambers died and Mrs Chambers ended up in a home. Anyway, they were quite forgetful – a bit of a scatty old couple, actually. They locked themselves out a couple of times. In the end, they gave me a key in case they did it again. I’ve still got it. I know I should have given it back when they moved out, but I forgot. Luckily.’
‘Problem solved,’ said Mary.
‘Assuming the Newtons accept our dinner invitation.’
Jamie waited while Brian went upstairs and looked for the key. A few minutes later he returned and handed it to Jamie. ‘I just hope they haven’t changed the locks. If you go back to your flat now, I’ll call you and let you know if they’ve accepted the invitation.’
‘OK.’
Before he left, Mary hugged him. ‘We’ll sort this out for you, Jamie. Don’t you worry.’
Later that evening, the phone rang. It was Brian.
‘It’s all set,’ he said. ‘They were delighted to accept. I told them we’d planned a dinner party, even bought all the ingredients, and then our friends had dropped out. They didn’t seem to mind that they were last minute replacements.’
‘So when is it?’
‘Tomorrow night. Seven-thirty.’
They had worked out a series of signs. When Lucy and Chris arrived at the top flat, Linda would stamp twice on the kitchen floor. Hearing this, Mary would then ring Jamie, letting the phone ring twice before hanging up. That was his cue.
He sat beside the phone, every muscle in his body tense.
The phone rang. Once, twice. Went dead.
He picked up the key that Brian had given him. His arms felt weak. But there was no way he was going to back out. This had to be done. Chris was a murderer; Lucy his accomplice. Jamie was the only person who could do something about it. He wasn’t really thinking about justice, or the greater good. He wasn’t even thinking about revenge. He merely wanted his life back.
He had decided to wait five minutes before going downstairs. He could imagine Lucy and Chris getting up there then realising they had forgotten something: a bottle of red wine perhaps.. He’d be in the flat and they would come down and find him. He shuddered at the thought.
He watched the clock for five minutes, counting every second, part of him hoping Lucy or Chris
would
come down the stairs so he wouldn’t have to go through with this. He forced himself to get a grip.
The five minutes were up. He walked out into the hallway, closing the flat door quietly behind him. He opened the front door, gripping the basement flat key firmly in his sweaty palm. It was dark. He had thought about this: it would be OK to turn the lights on in the flat. Lucy and Chris were well out of the way. Unless they leaned out of Brian and Linda’s front window and peered down, they would never see that their lights were on.
He went down the steps to the basement. Now was the first moment of truth. Had they changed the locks since they had moved in? At first he thought the key wasn’t going to fit, but it was because his hand was trembling. It slid into the lock, he turned it and the door opened.
He stepped inside.
He stood in the hallway, thinking that they must surely be able to hear his heart beating from the top flat. There was a strange smell in the air; a smell that had once wafted up to his and Kirsty’s nostrils. He still couldn’t identify it, but it made him feel ill.
The layout of the flat was the same as those above it: living room and kitchen at the front; bedrooms and bathroom at the back. He opened the door to what he knew must be the main bedroom and squinted into the semi-darkness. This bedroom had patio doors which led into the garden. There was something odd about the room. The curtains were open and the moon shone in, creating a little light. It took him a second, while his eyes adjusted, to realise that the room contained only a single bed.
He must have got it wrong - this must be the spare room. And yet when he opened the other bedroom door he saw that this bedroom too only had a single bed in it. Hanging above the bed were pictures of Chris: huge, blown-up pictures. There were tins of men’s deodorant on the bedside table. Mansize tissues; computer magazines. It was clearly Chris’s bedroom.
He closed the door and looked back into the other bedroom. The walls were blank, painted magnolia, no pictures or posters. There were women’s perfumes, make-up on a dressing table, a hi-fi with large speakers. Lucy’s care assistant uniform hung on the front of the wardrobe.
Separate rooms.
He could imagine Lucy lying alone in this bedroom with her phone, recording him and Kirsty making love. Did she get a thrill out of it? Maybe she masturbated while she did it. Was Chris in the room too? Did they play the recordings back for their own private titillation? He felt angry, all of a sudden.
He pulled the door to, a little too firmly. The door banged and he froze, his heart booming. He flicked the light on in the living room, still terrified that Lucy or Chris would appear at any moment and ask him what the fuck he was doing. It was so strange seeing the place where his tormentors lived. He had begun to imagine them as trolls that lived under a bridge. He thought they would live in some squalid cavern, pages of newspapers stuck all over the walls like the rooms of serial killers in movies. Instead, the room looked perfectly normal with its sofa, armchairs, coffee table and rug – but look closer and there was something ‘off’ about the room. There were no personal touches, no ornaments on the mantelpiece, no books anywhere. There was no mess, no photos of family, nothing that indicated that real people lived here. It was like being in some future museum where a typical early 21st century living room had been reconstructed, but they’d left out all the personal touches, the things that would make it real. There were no wedding photos anywhere either, Jamie noticed, no photos of Lucy and Chris together at all, just a number of pictures of them both on their own. What with the separate bedrooms, it made Jamie wonder if the Newtons’ marriage was a sham. It made a sick kind of sense. Two psychopaths getting together, getting married and living together, but only because they realised they could work better as a team. They were two people who were incapable of love, hugely egotistical – as the pictures of Chris in his bedroom testified – and narcissistic. He shuddered. This place gave him the creeps.
Jamie noticed another strange thing: there were two televisions. One looked like a normal TV – almost the same as Jamie’s, in fact, with a DVD player underneath it – but the other was in one of those old-fashioned wooden television cabinets, with the doors closed. He could see flickering light around the edges of these closed cabinet doors. Weird. He opened the doors of the cabinet.
It wasn’t an ordinary television. The picture was in black and white, grainy and unclear. The present date and time were displayed in the bottom left hand corner of the screen. Jamie realised he was looking at a CCTV monitor which was displaying a live picture of somebody’s living room.
His
living room.
He stepped back. ‘Fuck,’ he said aloud. That was his sofa, his bookcase, his armchair. There was the picture Kirsty had brought with her from the house she shared with the other nurses: the picture of the mermaid on a rock.
He bent double. He felt as if someone had punched him in the kidneys. Lucy and Chris had not only been listening to them. They been watching them. There had to be a tiny camera hidden somewhere in the flat, somewhere opposite the sofa. He tried to picture it, but couldn’t work out where it could be hidden. But he would look for it later. He would find the fucking thing and tear it out of the wall and stamp on it, grind it into the floorboards.
Jesus Christ. How long had this been going on for?
He noticed something else. The CCTV monitor was resting on top of a hard drive. It wasn’t recording now, but…
Oh fuck.
He looked around, frenziedly scouring the shelves of the bookcase which housed mostly DVDs with handwritten titles on the spines: J&K 1: PARTY; J&K 2: DECORATING; all the way up to 12: J ALONE.
He pulled the DVD labelled J&K 11 from the shelf and inserted it into the player attached to the ordinary TV. He pressed ‘play’ and after a few seconds an image appeared. It was him and Kirsty standing in the living room. Kirsty doing the ironing. The video was silent, but Jamie could remember what they had been talking about. He watched their lips move. He watched them move over onto the sofa. They were talking about the baby; the miscarriage. Kirsty started to cry and Jamie held her, crying too.
He pressed stop. Hatred and anger flowed through him, replacing the sadness. He clenched his fists and stood up. He wanted to smash everything in the room; he wanted to destroy this place, the home of the those fuckers, those…
He told himself to calm down. He took more deep breaths.
Then he noticed a DVD labelled J&K 8: AWAY. He slotted it into the DVD player and pressed play. Again, it was the interior of their living room, empty. Nothing happened for the first couple of minutes and Jamie almost switched it off, but something told him to wait – and at the two minute mark someone entered the room. Chris. Jamie’s mouth went dry. He watched Chris walk over to the hidden camera and peer into it.
Staring straight at the lens, Chris smiled coldly, then licked his lips.
Lucy followed Chris into the room, looking around, before settling down on the sofa. Chris was out of shot now – this must have been when he installed the virus on Jamie’s PC – and all Jamie could see was Lucy sitting immobile on the sofa, staring impassively at the camera. Then, still looking into the lens, she leaned back and pulled her skirt up around her hips. She had no underwear on and Jamie watched stunned as she began to touch herself, her head thrown back as she masturbated for a couple of minutes until she came, her mouth opening wide for a moment before closing, her expression one of release rather than ecstasy. Then she pulled her skirt back down over her knees and sat still again, her hands crossed modestly in her lap.
Jamie pressed stop, terrified of what he might see next.
He tried to think straight. How had they got in to the flat? They must have a key.
He needed to find it. He was sure he had enough evidence now to go to the police with, but if he could find the key he would feel safer. He wouldn’t be afraid they would come in and murder him in his bed while he slept. Because surely that was next? They had killed his unborn daughter, driven out Kirsty. He knew Chris had killed before. Jamie was certain he was next on the list, and his experiences with the police so far told him they wouldn’t be quick to act.
He dropped the DVD on the floor and moved over to the desk. He pulled open the top drawer and began to rifle through it. Electricity bills, bank statements, Council Tax bills. Nothing useful. He opened another drawer. There were photos of Chris, standing on a sandy beach, pointing out to sea and smiling. There was a newspaper cutting: MAN IN COMA AFTER KARTING ACCIDENT.
