After taking a few deep breaths, I lead a reluctant Cora into our bedroom and change her nappy, ready for our outing, then I get changed out of my dungarees, into a blue jumper dress. A bit of make-up and a chunky belt later, I’m ready to escape this hell for a couple of hours.
Ethan barges in. He’s holding a letter, which sends my pulse racing again. He drops it on the worktop and begins to search the room, high and low. ‘Ethan, what’s happened?’
He holds his finger to his mouth and points to the letter, which I pick up and read.
NEW FRIENDS, OLD FRIEND.
* * *
GOOD NEIGHBOURS MEAN THE WORLD, DON’T THEY? THEY LOOK OUT FOR EACH OTHER AND THE CHILDREN. ARE YOU FINALLY STARTING TO FIT IN? DID YOU FALL FOR CLOVER LANE ALL OVER AGAIN? YOU ARE BLOOMING, TOO, GEMMA. BEAUTIFULLY RADIANT – BUT THEN AGAIN, NEW LIFE CAN DO THAT TO A MOTHER. PREGNANCY AND BIRTH ARE ONE OF LIFE’S MIRACLES. TWO LOVELY CHILDREN, SQUIDGE AND CORA, AND ANOTHER ON THE WAY. KEEP THEM CLOSE. IT’S SO DANGEROUS OUT THERE, ESPECIALLY IN THE WOODS. XXX
Fall – that word. The person who sent our hamper is the same person sending the letters. I gasp as I think of the woods and my children at the same time. Also, no one but Morgan and Ethan knows about my pregnancy or that I call Morgan Squidge, which can only mean one thing.
Ethan is all over the room, checking high and low. He’s frantically pulling furniture away from the wall, checking our photo frames and even looking underneath the settee. I want to say so much but I keep my mouth firmly closed. ‘Ethan,’ I say in a loud whisper.
He places his finger to his mouth again as his gaze leads to the ceiling. The fire alarm looks quite new.
I hurry over and whisper in his ear. ‘Did you put that up?’
He frantically shakes his head as he grabs a chair to stand on. Once up, he unclips the fire alarm from the artexed ceiling to reveal the mains lead and a thinner black lead. He turns the detector towards me and I gasp. Instead of a backup battery, there is a small microphone. He tugs the lead. It’s coming from the loft space. Ethan jumps off the chair, leaving the alarm dangling, and runs out of the apartment. Before I have time to think, he’s already heading to Aunt Dorette’s office, the room where the loft hatch is, with a torch in his hand.
I grab Cora who giggles. She seems to think we’re doing something fun so I force a smile back. ‘Is it safe to talk?’ I’m almost running across the hallway to keep up.
He shrugs and shakes his head, so I keep my mouth shut. Behind the office door is a loft pole. He manages to open the hatch with ease and brings the ladders down.
I pop Cora on the rug and follow him up into the freezing cold loft space that stinks of damp. It’s not boarded and I can’t leave Cora, so I stay on the top step, watching Ethan tread carefully on the beams. There are boxes galore full of magazines, old clothes, damp books, old pictures that are covered in mould and a million spider webs. Ethan is too far away for me to get any hint of what he’s found. I can’t even see torchlight because he’s so far away and the boxes act like a fortress. What I can see is a little path through them.
Cora giggles again and looks up at me.
The torch flickers. Ethan is on his way back. My heart thrums at the thought of what he’s found. I descend the ladders and he clunks down them after me. That’s when he places a small portable storage device on the desk. I feel sick, violated.
Ethan tells me something I’ve already worked out. ‘Someone has been listening to everything we’ve said.’
Twenty-Seven
Gemma
We were at the police station for ages and now we’re finally back in the pickup. It’s late so I called Morgan, asking her to wait for me at a café by her school. There’s no way we’d let her go back to that house without me or Ethan being there.
I know Ethan is deep in thought but I need to say something to break the deafening silence. He’s barely spoken since the interview and it’s unnerving me. I start thinking aloud, trying to work through what we spoke about. ‘The police said, whoever fitted the device knew that us not having Wi-Fi was a problem. To work around it, they had to enter our house to retrieve and replenish the hard drive. The number of hours that had been recorded told us all that there was someone in the house on Monday night. They swapped the hard drive before running off. I can’t believe someone has been sneaking in while we’ve been there.’ I shiver at the thought.
Ethan grips the steering wheel like he wants to strangle it. He doesn’t say anything. I’m proud of how restrained he was at the police station given that he’s had a few outbursts lately.
I continue. ‘We didn’t hear them because the TV is always on loud or Cora is always making a noise. They’ve had it so easy.’
‘It makes me sick to think that someone has been listening to everything we say.’ He hits the steering wheel as we slow down at a junction.
‘Same, and I don’t think the police believed us, especially when they found nothing else in the house. The intruder seems to have come and gone like a ghost, leaving nothing behind.’ A chill runs through me.
While we were being interviewed, we gave another officer our keys. They dusted the loft hatch and Aunt Dorette’s office for prints. ‘It’s going to be weeks before forensics process everything,’ I say. The look on the police officer’s face told me that he doubted us. We’re a long way off from being a priority for them. To top things off they were all called out to attend to a tree that had fallen on several cars during a recent storm. Great, no one believes us and even if they did they’re too busy dealing with emergency callouts. ‘I can’t believe they brought up your arrest,’ I continue saying to Ethan. ‘You were cleared. There was no reason to do that. The police officer even seemed happy to tell us that the neighbours had accused us of writing the letters. They’re all as bad as each other, the police and the neighbours. They hate outsiders and they hate us.’ Everything is a mess, a terrifying mess. I put my phone in my bag, glad I took a photo of the recent letter.
Ethan lets out a long sigh. ‘I agree. We need to focus on getting the job done fast so we can leave.’
Is he suggesting that we stay there after all that’s happened? ‘I’m scared, Ethan. I don’t want to go back.’
‘I know. I don’t either but we don’t have the funds to start staying in hotels if we’re to finish this project. Whoever it is couldn’t get into the apartment, which is why they had to go in through the loft. Also, I’m not letting these arseholes run us out of the house. We need to make sure we don’t leave the main door on the latch again and we’ll be okay.’
‘But we didn’t leave it on the latch last night.’
