I guessed that some of that was due to the sale of the council-owned properties, which had stood out like sore thumbs twenty years before because of their uniform yellow doors. Now it was impossible to distinguish them from those that had always been in the private sector, and I wondered how many of them were still owned by the council tenants who had bought at rock-bottom prices. If Wendy Stanhope was to be believed, most of them had sold up within a year to achieve a 100 percent return on their investment, but the wiser ones had stayed and watched their investments grow.
I crossed the road and paused beside Sharon Percy's gate. Her house was almost as natty as ours, with Austrian blinds in the windows and a clump of Pampas grass in the front garden, but I couldn't believe she hadn't cut and run the minute she saw a profit. I knew she'd bought the house because Libby's letters had ranted on for months about how Jock's thirty quid a week had paid for Sharon's bedroom, but I found it difficult to equate the new subdued classiness of number 28 with the simpering peroxide blonde in Wendy's photograph.
I looked into her downstairs window-more curious than expectant--and was taken aback when her flour-white face, slashed red lips and heavily outlined eyes appeared briefly behind the pane. I recalled Libby's nickname for her, 'the bleached vampire,' but she looked more pathetic than predatory that morning. An aging woman trying to paint away the ravages of time. Was Geoffrey Spalding still with her? Or had his infatuation died along with her sex appeal? I felt an absurd desire to raise my hand in greeting before I remembered that we'd never spoken and that, if she'd known me at all twenty years ago, she certainly wouldn't recognize me now.
I barely glanced at Annie's house as I moved on to number 32. Even when I'd stood in front of her boarded-up house in the months following her death, her ghost had never troubled me, and I certainly didn't expect to be bothered by it now.
In the end, the only ghosts that lingered here were lonely mothers..
Maureen Slater opened her door before I could knock, and thrust out a miniature hand to pull me inside. 'I don't want anyone to see you,' she said.
'They won't know who I am.'
'They'll guess. Everyone talks.'
I wondered why that mattered when there was no one left who remembered Annie, and decided that by 'everyone' she meant Sharon. I thought it would be counterproductive to say I'd already been seen, and followed her down the corridor to the kitchen, catching glimpses of the two ground-floor rooms as I passed their open doors.
The sitting room looked as though it was rarely used, but the dining room had been converted into a comfortable den with brightly colored bean bags littering the floor, a cushioned sofa along one wall and a wide- screen television in the corner. It was already switched on, showing a daytime magazine program, and the rumpled duvet on the sofa and the fug of smoke in the room suggested Maureen had either been watching it all night or had started early. She closed the door as we passed to deaden the volume.
Even though Maureen's was an end-of-terrace house, the layout inside was identical to ours, as indeed was every alternate house in the row: sitting room and dining room on the right with the corridor running past the stairs on the left-hand side toward the kitchen at the back. The in-between houses were built in mirror image so that corridors adjoined corridors on one side, and living space adjoined living space on the other. Upstairs, in precisely the same way, it was either the bedrooms or stairwells that adjoined. In order to allow for a window in the dining rooms, the kitchens were offset against the ends of the houses and shared a party wall with the people on the corridor side. As none of the structures was built to modern soundproof standards, the inevitable result was that we all came to know our neighbors rather better than we would have liked.
Indeed, it had been Sam's permanent complaint that we should have done some 'noise' research before we bought number 5. On the corridor side, number 7-the side that acted as a sound buffer-lived an elderly couple, who rarely spoke above whispers even when they were in their kitchen. On the living-space side, number 3-the side that acted like a huge echo chamber divided by a thin vibrating wall-were the Charles children, whose nighttime screaming had kept us awake. One day, in a spirit of optimism, Sam invited both couples in for drinks and suggested they swap houses so that peace could break out all 'round, but Paul Charles took exception to some of the things Sam claimed to have heard through the wall and treated him with hostility from that moment on.
I had often wondered if a similar situation had existed with Annie, although, of the many complaints made against her, the question of noise had never been mentioned. In fact it was more likely she had been a victim of it and had suffered in silence while her life was made a misery. Certainly Michael Percy and Alan Slater had taken great pleasure from teasing her in public, and I couldn't believe they hadn't continued the sport in private by shouting insults at her through the party walls.
'Danny phoned last night,' said Maureen, pulling out a chair in the kitchen and pressing me on to it. 'You seem to be making quite a hit with him.' She had a trace of the Midlands in her voice, which showed itself in the hard 'g' she added to 'ing,' but whether she had been born there or whether she had learned it from her parents I didn't know.
Like everything else about her it set my teeth on edge, and I had to glue a smile to my face to mask my dislike. Whatever Wendy Stanhope may have said about her brutal treatment at the hands of her husband, I'd always thought there was something evil about Maureen Slater, perhaps because I held her responsible for the hate campaign against Annie. I'm sure she knew what my real feelings were, but for the moment she was prepared to go along with the pretense of friendship.
'The feeling's mutual,' I assured her. 'Danny's a nice fellow.'
She busied herself with cups and saucers. I had written to her many times over the years, seeking answers, but the only response I had ever received was the one a week ago, agreeing to this meeting. I assumed it was my contact with Danny that had persuaded her to change her mind, and I wondered how far she suspected that I had sought him out deliberately and how far she was worried about what he had been telling me. There was, after all, so much that she wouldn't want me to know.
'You're the only person who thinks so,' she said, filling a kettle at the sink. 'Danny's been in and out of trouble since he was ten ... fighting ... stealing cars ... he started shooting heroin when he was twelve.' She paused, waiting for an answer. When I didn't give one, she went on a little tartly, 'Not the type most mothers want hanging around teenage boys. He says he's been out drinking with your lads.'
'He has. They've met up with him on Portland a couple of times.'
'You know he smokes cannabis.'
'Yes.'
'He's probably offering it to your kids,' she said with a touch of malice, as if the idea pleased her.
