The Intruder at Number 40 Read online

  ‘Stare away,’ Ryan said. ‘Nice of her to bake you a cake. Lime Park’s like that, though. Great sense of community.’

  She passed him a slice and settled beside him. ‘Where do you live, Ryan? I don’t think I’ve ever asked you. Are you local?’

  ‘I’m over in Bexleyheath,’ he told her. Though the cake was good, sitting next to her was too distracting for eating to be anything but mechanical. ‘Looking to buy, been saving for a deposit for ever.’

  ‘Better late than never,’ Amber said, sighing. ‘It’s all so painful, isn’t it? You know this is the first place I’ve owned? Our flat in Battersea was Jeremy’s from his bachelor days and before that I always rented.’

  ‘If this is your first rung on the ladder, where will you end up?’ Ryan joked, ‘Windsor Castle?’

  ‘Oh, Ryan, you make me laugh. I’m going to miss our chats,’ she said.

  He already knew that she’d make these sorts of remarks to anyone; flirting was like breathing to her. Indeed, there was a sense of an ending for her as she escorted him to the door an hour later. He was under no illusion that he was a casual diversion she would forget the moment the door closed. Which was fine, he accepted that.

  What was unacceptable was any suggestion that he should forget her.

  He was a patient man. Between taking delivery of the device and identifying the opportunity to plant it, he was required to wait more than three months. The mission relied on timing: he’d need to go in after the decorators had finished and, most crucially, once Hetty had approved the job. Weekly walk-bys gave him an idea of how the work was progressing, increased to daily once the builders had retreated and the decorators taken up residence. The whole thing was remarkably efficient compared with some of the extension projects you heard about. At the far end of Lime Park Road, a basement had taken two years to be completed and the couple had separated in the process. The house that came back on the market was bigger and deeper and yet mysteriously slow to shift. (It had, according to Cheryl, lost its soul).

  One day in July, he saw Amber at a terrace table at the café across the road. She was with a typical Lime Park denizen – a posh mum in her forties – and a less typical one: an attractive straight man in his thirties, a bit rough around the edges. As the woman rummaged in the tote at her feet, almost putting her head into the bag in her impatience, the man cast an appreciative gaze Amber’s way. More than appreciative – carnal, Ryan would say. That was the only time he was tempted to expedite his plan: what if Amber ran off with this guy? All Ryan would be left with was Jeremy, which would be no reward for his perseverance.

  Then he saw Hetty’s red Beetle at the kerb one August morning and his blood fired. Of course Amber would not be running off with some casual admirer; the man in the café had been no more of a threat to the Fraser marriage that Ryan himself.

  He waited till the end of the afternoon and phoned Hetty. ‘We have a client looking for an interior designer and I mentioned your beautiful work at the Frasers’ place. Is that all finished up now?’

  ‘Almost! I was just there today, in fact. The decorators are all done with the first floor, they’re just doing the last bits and pieces at the top now.’

  ‘We all know what they say,’ Ryan said chummily. ‘The last ten per cent of the job takes ninety per cent of the time.’

  ‘Not these guys,’ Hetty said. ‘They’re on a penalty if they overrun.’

  She was a ball-breaker: he’d been right to identify her as potentially dangerous. She was also, it transpired, his willing accomplice. ‘I’ll be popping in again on Thursday afternoon if you want to swing by and see the finished article?’ she offered. ‘I’m sure Amber won’t mind.’

  ‘I might take you up on that,’ Ryan said.

  He arrived half an hour early. Amber was not in, which was disappointing in itself, but also advantageous in that she would not divert his attention from the job at hand. The decorators were not native English speakers and a quick call to Hetty was enough to satisfy them that he was not a violent offender or con man.

  ‘You carry on,’ Ryan told them. ‘I’ll have a look around down here while I wait for Hetty.’

  After a safe interval, he slipped off his shoes in consideration of the new carpeting and padded up the stairs to the first floor. The place was unrecognizable, so slick and immaculate as to feel unreal. The master bedroom was plushly carpeted in vanilla, the walls, he was relieved to see, helpfully pale (Farrow & Ball Clunch, Hetty clarified, when she arrived). But the furniture was not yet in, nor any curtains or blinds up at the windows, and the Frasers, displaced from their upper quarters by the decorators, were evidently sleeping in a room at the rear of the first floor. Had they changed their minds and decided on a smaller bedroom for themselves? Couples did, sometimes, valuing the garden outlook over the greater square footage at the front. After a few moments’ hesitation, he resolved to fit the device in the master as intended and to check with Hetty that there had been no permanent change of plan. If there had, he’d somehow have to find a way to sneak back up and switch the thing before he left.

  Shouldering the door closed behind him, he surveyed the empty room, nerves growling like hunger. He clearly recalled Amber and Hetty discussing layout possibilities on their last visit before the sale went through. They’d agreed there were two options for the placement of the bed: opposite the bay against the internal wall, or facing the fireplace against the dividing wall with number 38.

  ‘But what if the couple on the other side have their bed against this wall, too?’ Amber had queried. ‘The headboards will be this close.’ Fingers rigid, she held her palms a few inches apart.

  ‘I think it’s flats next door, actually,’ Hetty said. ‘In which case it might be a living room.’

  Amber’s eyes grew wide. ‘So when you’re in the middle of, you know what, they’re sitting a couple of feet away watching Silent Witness?’

  ‘Yes,’ laughed Hetty. ‘Unless they’ve installed one of those peephole cameras and are watching you, “you know what”.’

  It startled Ryan to remember that last part of the conversation. Had it been what had planted the idea? All at once the reality, the peril, of his trespass torpedoed him and he chided himself for dithering even the few minutes he had. Circling the room with new urgency, he found there was an obvious power point on the left-hand side of the fireplace above the double-height skirting. It was a twin socket, which was ideal, because the alarm wouldn’t be torn out the moment power was needed for something else.

  He slid the prongs into the holes and turned on the switch. There was no light or hum to draw attention to it. Astonishing, in fact, how discreet it looked and how right, the sort of thing you might assume someone else had fitted as a legal requirement, in this case one of the builders. Provided it got past Hetty, the worst-case scenario was that the Frasers’ aesthetic sensibility was on the OCD side and, deeming it an eyesore, they relocated it or ditched it, in neither case stopping to investigate what it was they were handling.

  Actually, that wasn’t the worst-case scenario. The worst-case scenario was that Jeremy Fraser would smash it open, identify the surveillance device and call the police. But that was what a risk was, wasn’t it?

  Hetty arrived soon after and appeared to think nothing of his having waited in the house unaccompanied. ‘Oh Ryan, Amber isn’t around today, as you’ve probably gathered. She had a lunch date she couldn’t get out of and won’t be back till four. It’s just us.’

  ‘That’s no problem. I’ve got to hand it to you, Hetty, from what I’ve seen down here, you’ve done a magnificent job.’ Ryan oohed and aahed dutifully, pointing out the value she’d added.

  ‘The Frasers aren’t worried about that,’ Hetty said. ‘This is a home, a love nest, not an investment. They won’t move for years, if ever.’

  ‘Pleased to hear it,’ Ryan said.

  But when she led the tour into the master bedroom, he had the sensation of standing on a precipice, gulls sweeping past h
is face. His voice sounded hollow as he gestured into the emptiness, saying, ‘They’ve decided against this as their master, have they?’

  ‘No, not at all,’ Hetty said. ‘There’s just been a delay with the en suite, we were waiting for the bath to arrive. But we’re all set now and they’ll be able to move in here as soon as the furniture comes out of storage.’

  Excellent.

  As for her spotting the device, he needn’t have worried, for she had her eyes on a bigger, brighter prize: the famous bathtub. ‘You remember our talking about it? I found it in Oaxaca in Mexico? Come and see it, it’s amazing.’ And she hurried past the smoke alarm into the en suite.

  It was a monster of a tub, the kind of thing slaves spent years hammering to perfection for Cleopatra – or whoever the Mexican equivalent was. ‘Wow, big enough for two,’ he said, allowing his fingers to glance off the gleaming near lip.

  ‘The interior is pewter,’ Hetty said. ‘I’ve already told Amber, if she does ever move, she should take it with her. It’s too precious to leave.’

  As Ryan departed, an older woman was arriving at the gate of number 38. She wore a blue velour tracksuit and her face was blotched with exertion. Well, if she was the occupant of the flat upstairs, he knew which side of the wall he’d prefer to sleep.

  All being well, he’d be able to watch Mrs Fraser in her copper-and-pewter tub, provided she was the sort to leave the bathroom door open, for the camera facilitated 180-degree views with a dewarping function. A motion-detection function would save him trawling through hours of inanimate video. The high-definition images would be streamed direct to his smartphone, a pay-as-you-go procured expressly for the purpose and paid for in cash, though, again, he doubted the efficacy of such a precaution.

  Now he’d got the crime underway, he found he was almost pleasurably fatalistic about it.

  The footage was, at first, more thrilling for the novelty (excellent definition, great colour) than the content. As Hetty had promised, the furniture was delivered within a few days of Ryan’s visit. The bed was positioned facing the window and within close range of the camera; beyond, stood an enormous freestanding wardrobe with mirrored doors and, in the window, a pair of armchairs with voluptuously curved arms. As a team of young men hauled these and other items, removing the protective packaging with the flourishes of magicians, he despaired of Amber Fraser appearing at all. Then, speeding through, he found her. As she entered the room, all heads turned as to an emerging sun and she smiled a greeting, running her hands through her hair. Then, right in front of a roomful of men, she jumped onto the bare mattress and stretched out, pantomiming a nap, doing a little roll from side to side. The watching faces laughed now and she sprang up again, gave a little wave, and exited. This, evidently, was how she supervised workmen.

  Without sound, the video had an effect that was faintly sinister.

  There was nothing for forty-eight hours, but then came the day she moved in the couples’ clothes and arranged their wardrobe. It was a fancy item fitted with fussy little his and her drawers and cubbyholes for an exhaustive collection of shoes. She worked at a lazy pace, stopping frequently to text on her phone or fetch herself coffee. Only as Ryan was growing sleepy did she do what he had been waiting over three months to see: she undressed.

  Well, her body was hands-down the most erotic and arousing he’d ever laid eyes on, slender and toned but with heavy breasts and a proper behind, like one of those insanely proportioned RealDolls he’d read about (and, OK, dreamed of acquiring). Truly this was a woman born to be worshipped. To be touched, too, of course – but you couldn’t have everything.

  She devoted an hour to trying on dresses. One, green and lacy, appeared to be her favourite, and she stalked about the room in it (and a pair of heels) before slipping out of it once more and hanging it on the wardrobe door. Then she lay on top of the bed in just her knickers as if wondering what to do next. Not what Ryan would have hoped, sadly, but when she jumped up again her breasts swung a little in the direction of the camera, which was a delightful bonus. She used her left hand to minimize the bounce, smoothing the right one across her face before dropping both hands to her sides. She still had the heels on.

  Truly, it was like an opening ceremony just for him.

  He was not prepared for the frequency of the marital sex. The Frasers were active in a way he knew to be exclusive to new relationships and couples trying for a baby (they belonged, for all he knew, to both groups). Mostly the action was under the covers and in darkness, but sometimes it was well lit and exposed. The positions varied every once in a while, but it was mostly missionary or her on top. Often, it began with her husband pawing her as she lay on her front, more like a cub that wanted to get a game going rather than an erotic seduction – and then spinning her on to her back. It was mostly fairly fast.

  Incredible how quickly you became inured to free pornography. After the first few weeks, Ryan found himself zooming in on their faces, craving human nuance over the mammalian moves of the sexual act itself. Once Jeremy’s face was square on to the camera and, as he spoke, Ryan strained to lipread; he was fairly certain Jeremy was simply repeating Amber’s name, which was conventional enough. What was odd was her face: still, almost closed, as if transported to another place or perhaps lobotomized. She loved her husband but she didn’t have any wild, obscene lust for him. That, Ryan would have liked to have seen.

  In a novel, he would have witnessed some awful domestic violence or other crime, but the reality was the Frasers got on extremely well. On the few occasions that Amber seemed low, Jeremy comforted her. On the rare occasions that he looked angry, she consoled him. Ryan grew to prefer these non-sexual tableaux: they were more revealing, more involving of their (admittedly uninvited) guest.

  Best of all was when Amber was alone, unselfconscious, and he had her to himself. Most of the days, she dressed in workout clothes and kept them on until the early evening, changing in good time for the return of her husband. The rest, she dressed properly and did her hair and make-up, often beautifying herself well into the late morning, presumably for a lunch date or outing of some sort. Then, hours later, she’d come back and shower or bathe a second time and she’d be back in front of the mirrored wardrobe doors putting on another dress, retouching her face. Occasionally she’d sigh heavily, as if exhausted by the stipulations of her own beauty.

  Ryan followed the strict rule of viewing only at home at night behind closed doors, but it was a time-consuming hobby and, just as he’d willed it, Julie soon arrived at his door and told him she wanted to break up.

  ‘What have you been doing?’ she demanded, and Ryan found himself regarding her with genuine curiosity. Mid-brown hair, mid-brown eyes, mid-height: how mid she was, and how tragic that women – and men, for that matter – were consigned to this ordinariness when you could see how they ached to be special.

  ‘Don’t you have anything to say?’ She spoke in a way that he understood to mean all he had to do was promise to reform and she’d change her mind, but he didn’t because the truth was he didn’t have time for both her and Amber and of course he was going to choose Amber.

  ‘Not really,’ he said.

  As he watched – and rewatched – the images on his phone, ears alert for any approaching noises on the landing outside his room, he felt no guilt. Yes, Amber excited predictable baseness in him, he was not made of stone, but she also inspired something higher, even spiritual. Amber was a religion and he was her believer.

  He was surprised by the relief he felt when, towards Christmastime, the Frasers packed two enormous suitcases and disappeared, presumably for a holiday. (He would not forget the glorious afternoon when Amber had come back from a trip to Selfridges and tried on three new bikinis, one g-string style. In the informal league table of highlights this catapulted straight into his top five.)

  Safe in the knowledge that the couple were off-site, he would have liked to have broken into number 40 somehow, taken an item of underwear for himself, but
of course the Frasers had a state-of-the-art alarm system. There was risk-taking and then there was walking into the police station and giving yourself up.

  He spent Christmas with his mother, scratching constantly at the infestation of thoughts about Ronnie Corbett in Sorry! and, more disquietingly, Anthony Perkins in Psycho.

  One day in January, something new and disturbing happened. Amber appeared in the bedroom sobbing and threw herself violently onto the bed. She clutched her chest and writhed in pain as if suffering a cardiac arrest; she beat her fists against the pillow like a child denied her birthday. Was this emotional or medical, then? He couldn’t be sure. Had he been watching the footage live, he might have been tempted to phone for an ambulance, but there was a lag of several hours and all he could do was wait, appalled, to see how it ended.

  After an hour or so of this recumbent anguish, Amber got to her feet and stumbled from the room. She didn’t come back for days. During this period, a grave-faced Jeremy continued to move in and out of the room, still sleeping there at first, until he too abandoned ship and returned only each morning to select clothes from the wardrobe and get ready for work. Where had Amber gone? Was she still in the house? Ryan suppressed feelings of panic that she might have been hospitalized: no, he’d seen her leave the room on her own two feet, she’d definitely not been injured. Most likely, she was still there, but using a different bedroom. Perhaps she and Jeremy had had a row.

  When, finally, Jeremy packed a holdall with clothes, Ryan understood that the couple were separating and Jeremy moving out. Now Amber was back in view. She’d come into the room and stare at herself in the wardrobe mirror. Once, she stood right in front of the camera, tore a bangle from her wrist and flung it into the en suite. Overbalancing, she fell, landing close to the alarm, peering at it with bitter eyes before getting up from the floor. Where she’d previously been helpless, now she was furious, a fury that could not be contained, judging by her pacing. Pained by her pain, Ryan decided to pay a visit, rehearsing a line about it being a courtesy call to follow up the sale (albeit nine months after the event) and ask if she might like the property revalued. He imagined himself saying, ‘Everything all right? You look a bit off colour,’ prompting a confession of marital breakdown and the grateful acceptance of estate-agently sympathy.