The Woman Next Door by Cass Green

Author:Cass Green
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780008203559
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2016-06-17T04:00:00+00:00

MELISSA

She knows now that the moment for confession has gone. She meant it, for one wild and crazy moment, she really did. But Hester is right. They have to see this through now. Thank goodness one of them can be so clear-headed.

As countryside passes unseen beyond the van’s black windows, Melissa ponders all the ways they could be caught. They have left a trail of breadcrumbs, should the police come looking.

The van will have appeared on countless CCTV cameras by now and Automatic Number Plate Recognition technology would lead the police straight to Hester’s door, as she said. Then there is the whole AA business. And every inch of Fleet Services will have artificial eyes trained on it 24 hours a day.

All this is without the digital trail she has left at home. Melissa remembers how she looked up Scarrow Hall on her MacBook and then printed off various maps from Google. Even if she deletes the browser history, this information could easily be dredged up by people in the know.

But the crucial part is that they’d have to be looking in the first place. Melissa worries at a fingernail and then, tasting the thick chemical resin there, pulls her hand away and lets it rest in her lap. Yesterday, a lifetime ago, she had that done. It’s insane that this can be a mere twenty-four hours later.

Her mood seems to ricochet like a power ball between two hard certainties: one minute she is certain she will be in handcuffs within a week, and then she is filled with wild belief that they really might pull this off.

Melissa glances over at Hester, who is peering intently through the windscreen. She thinks about when they first met. How can they have ended up here on this road, with Jamie’s dead body a few feet behind them?

***

Tilly was a grumpy baby and it seemed like there was one drama after another as she grew. She was forever coming down with some bug or other, needing ear grommets, or falling off a bike and smashing her front teeth.

Melissa wondered now whether she herself had been a bit depressed in those days without realizing it. She wanted to claim it was her own mother’s fault for never showing her how it all should be done. But really she knew that deep down she didn’t feel that she deserved to be a mother. Mark had pressurized her into having a baby in the first place and secretly she had hoped it wouldn’t happen. When it did, she loved Tilly in a way that frightened her and made her feel entirely inadequate to the task.

Hester used to take Melissa off for the afternoon sometimes and it was a godsend at the time. Tilly would come home covered in flour, or glitter (sometimes both) that Melissa would be hoovering up for the rest of the day, but at least she’d had a rest and some headspace for a few hours. She was grateful.

But, she remembers with a disquieting feeling now, Hester would go that little bit too far.

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