Watching You: A Novel

They ate pizzas in front of the TV. Dad was back in his usual spot next to Mum on the sofa, Freddie once again relegated to the armchair. He saw his mum turn her head a couple of degrees every now and then, almost as if she was checking that Dad was still there.

There was a charge in the room, as though everyone was nursing a secret too big to be entirely contained. Freddie stole a glance at his dad. When was it going to come? When was he going to take him aside and quietly inform him that he was the one who’d logged into Freddie’s secret account and seen his photos and that he knew exactly what he’d been doing and what he intended to do about it?

‘Good week?’ his dad asked him in a way that could have been loaded with hidden meaning (Has your week been unfavourably affected by the fact that I hacked into your files and discovered your reams of schoolgirl photos?) or nothing more than a casual enquiry after his week.

‘Not bad,’ Freddie replied. ‘Pretty boring. How was Spain?’

‘Well, thank you for asking.’ His dad gave him one of his dry smiles and a cocked eyebrow. ‘It was superb. Wonderful children, wonderful staff, lots of learning, lots of fun. Unforgettable, I think it wouldn’t be stretching things too far to say.’

Freddie’s mum threw his dad a look. ‘How’s the baby?’

‘The bab—? Oh, the baby? Doing very well apparently. They’re still in the special care unit. But it seems that they’re out of the woods.’

‘Is it a boy or a girl?’

‘It’s a girl, I believe. But please do not ask me her name or how much she weighs because I have absolutely no idea.’

His dad smiled and squeezed Mum’s knee. The gesture felt like an odd afterthought and for a moment Freddie felt that neither he nor his mother quite believed in the existence of this premature baby. For a moment the already charged air filled with small particles of yet another substance, a kind of nervous scepticism.

For over a year, since their arrival in Melville, things had stayed on an even keel. For over a year there had been no week-long silences, no strange noises from his parents’ room, no feeling that something was happening within their marriage that he was not privy to but that might tear a hole through his very existence. Melville had been a good move; things had been good in Melville.

After dinner he went back to his room. For a while he flicked through the photos of Romola Brook on his computer screen. He noticed things about her and collected them in the drawers of his mind like mementoes. The strand of her hair nearest her face that was two tones lighter than the rest. Her huge feet, surprisingly endearing. The odd earrings: a gold stud in her left ear, a diamond in the right. The streak of old black varnish on a bitten thumbnail. Something scribbled on the back of her hand that he couldn’t read even when he zoomed in to the nth degree.

In the photo of her leaning down to greet her tiny dog in her hallway, he zoomed in on her hand cupping the dog’s chin, her nose held close to dog’s snout, the tenderness of the moment. He zoomed in even closer to the background, trying to get a sense of her home, of how she lived, of who she might conceivably be.

And then, before he could ask himself what the hell he thought he was doing, he opened a browser, went on to the Forever 21 website and ordered the cinnamon suede skirt.

RECORDED INTERVIEW

Date: 25/03/2017

Location: Trinity Road Police Station, Bristol BS2 0NW

Conducted by: Officers from Somerset & Avon Police

POLICE: So, Ms Mullen. Moving on. We have spoken to your employer, a Miss Dawn Pettifer?

JM: Yes?

POLICE: She came here of her own volition this morning, to tell us that she recalls a recent conversation with you where you apparently told her that your obsession with Tom Fitzwilliam was driving you ‘insane’. Is that correct?

JM: No. No, that’s not true.

POLICE: So, Miss Pettifer was lying?

JM: No, not lying, exactly. I may have said I had a crush on him. I may have said I was preoccupied with him. But I never said I was insane.

POLICE: She claims you were ‘agitated’ when you left work last night.

JM: Well, yes, I probably was. I was about to meet a married man in a hotel room. I was nervous as hell.

POLICE: OK. Moving on. We wanted to talk to you about this object. For the sake of our records, we are referring to item number 4501. A red suede tassel. Do you recognise this tassel, Ms Mullen?

JM: Well, yes, sort of. I mean, it looks like the tassels on my boots. And one fell off.

POLICE: It fell off? When exactly?

JM: God. I don’t know. It was just there. And then it wasn’t. Could have been any time.

POLICE: Well, this was found, Ms Mullen, at the scene of the crime, very close to the victim’s body. Do you have a possible explanation for this?

JM: No. I mean, definitely not. It can’t be from my boot in that case. Because I wasn’t there. So it must be from someone else’s boot.

POLICE: Well, we’ve searched the victim’s house very thoroughly looking for items that this tassel might have dropped from, and there is absolutely nothing even vaguely similar. So, can you explain this being there, Ms Mullen, at the blood-soaked scene of a heinous crime?

JM: No! Of course I can’t. It’s just … well, it’s crazy. I mean, someone must have put it there.

POLICE: You think so? Like who, for example?

JM: Well, I don’t know. I don’t know who would put it there. But it wasn’t me.