The Other Half Lives aka The Dead Lie Down

the park gates and up the path, past the lodge. With Ruth’s coat draped over her arm, Charlie walked towards the house. She’d been hoping to have another chat with Ruth, but perhaps it was better this way, since Charlie was also curious to meet Aidan, see what sort of man confesses to a murder that neither he nor anyone else has committed.

She’d got as far as the small porch when a tall, thin man wearing a yellow fluorescent jacket over a grey suit darted out of the house, nearly banging into her. He had a wispy beard, glasses with large lenses. Charlie thought he looked exactly as a goat would, if animals were people. There was a flare of recognition in his eyes when he saw her. ‘Oh,’ he said.

‘You know who I am?’ Stupid question. Who in Spilling didn’t know? It was a small town and Charlie was its most famous fuck-up.

‘I know that coat,’ he said, looking down at it to avoid meeting Charlie’s eye. ‘Ruth picked a bad time to lose it with the boiler packing in. It breaks down every three months on average, and Muggins here has to spend a day twiddling my thumbs, waiting for the engineers. Never be a landlord, that’d be my advice to you.’

‘You’re not Aidan, then,’ said Charlie.

The goat extended his hand. ‘Malcolm Fenton, Area Manager for Parks and Landscapes. I’ll take that off you if you like.’

Charlie hesitated. If she gave the coat to Fenton, she’d lose her opportunity to talk to Ruth again. Mainly she wanted to ask about the newspaper article. What was Ruth’s interest in her? She was about to tell Fenton she’d catch Ruth at work when she saw that she’d lost his attention. ‘On time for once,’ he said, looking over her shoulder. ‘Excuse me.’ Charlie turned and watched him trot down the porch steps. Beyond the park gates, prevented from entering by the two black bollards, was a white van with the words ‘Winchelsea Combi Boilers’ painted in blue on its side.

Fenton pulled a large bunch of keys out of his pocket, unlocked something at the top of one of the bollards and lowered it into the ground. Behind the van’s greasy windscreen, one of the men from Winchelsea Combi Boilers chewed gum with a ferocity that made Charlie wonder if it wasn’t gum at all but an organ torn from its rightful owner’s body.

She glanced at the lodge’s open door, started to edge towards it. ‘Sorry,’ Fenton shouted after her. ‘I’d rather you didn’t go in. I know you’re a policewoman, but all the same.’ He looked apologetic. Policewoman-did people still say that? ‘If you leave the coat with me, I’ll see Ruth gets it.’

‘The door’s wide open,’ Charlie pointed out. ‘The boiler repairmen are going in, presumably.’

‘They practically live here,’ said Fenton irritably. ‘I don’t mean to be ungracious, but Ruth’s a private person. I know for a fact she wouldn’t want me to let a stranger into her home.’ He sighed. ‘This is a little awkward. I mean, clearly Ruth’s made herself known to you if you’ve got her coat, but…’ He looked away quickly, annoyed with himself for saying too much. ‘She didn’t tell me she was going to make contact with you, or to expect you, so I’m afraid I can’t let you in.’

Fenton’s choice of words made Charlie feel uneasy. Had Ruth confided in him about Aidan’s bizarre confession? No, it didn’t fit. Made herself known to you. That implied Ruth was someone the police might either want or need to know about, that there was a pre-existing connection of some sort between them. Charlie couldn’t understand it.

‘Do you know a Mary Trelease?’ she asked.

No adverse reaction to the name. Fenton considered it, then shook his head.

‘Is that CCTV?’ Charlie was looking at the lodge’s roof. She’d spotted another camera on the other side of the porch, above a ground-floor window. Was that why there were leaves clinging to the house’s every surface, for camouflage? ‘When were the cameras put in?’

‘Why do you want to know that?’ asked Fenton.

Charlie substituted a smile for an answer.

‘The park had an infestation of teenage thugs a while back. Ruth suggested installing CCTV. The council thought it was a good idea.’ His tone was defensive.

‘When you say Ruth’s a private person…?’ Charlie began.

‘I don’t like the slant of your questions. Ruth’s a perfectly ordinary woman and an excellent tenant. She takes her responsibilities seriously, that’s all. Hers is a service tenancy.’ Fenton sighed, as if he’d been tricked into saying more than he wanted to. ‘The lodge tenant, in exchange for a much-reduced rent, is supposed to be of assistance in the park when necessary, particularly in emergencies and out of hours. If someone falls down and breaks their leg on the path, Ruth would be expected to get involved-she’s got a list of emergency numbers, but she’d be the first point of contact.’

‘Most of the private people I know wouldn’t live in a public park,’ said Charlie, guessing that Fenton had been surprised by Ruth’s suggestion of installing surveillance cameras, or else why the guarded reaction? Had it been a suggestion or a request, a plea? What was it about his model tenant that Fenton was withholding out of loyalty?

His resistance was like bellows to a fire. Charlie was tempted to run up the steps and into Blantyre Lodge after the men from Winchelsea Combi Boilers. How much of Ruth Bussey’s home would she be able to see before Fenton dragged her out? Mad people’s houses had a distinctive look about them; you knew instantly. She sighed. That way lay an official complaint, which was all she needed. She slipped the article from the Rawndesley and Spilling Telegraph out of the coat’s pocket and put it in her bag.

‘Put that back,’ Fenton snapped. Oh, he knew Charlie’s history all right, and she knew his type. He wouldn’t have dared take that tone with the police under normal circumstances. Only with an officer he knew had been disgraced and nearly fired.

She’d changed her mind about giving him the coat. ‘I don’t feel comfortable about leaving this with a stranger,’ she said. ‘Ask Ruth to make contact with me again if she wants it back.’

After Blantyre Park, Charlie told herself she was going straight to work to get on with the chore that had been hanging over her for the past fortnight: drafting Counsellor Vesey’s survey and accompanying letter. She told herself again and again, but no matter how many times she repeated the instruction, her brain defied her, and she found herself driving out to the Winstanley estate. She’d had enough of hearing second-hand reports; she wanted to meet the still-alive Mary Trelease, see if she was frightened, as Gibbs had claimed, or if there was anything about her that might frighten someone else.

Like Aidan Seed. Charlie frowned at the idea. It would be a strange reaction to fear, pretending you’d killed somebody. Unless you can’t bear the thought that they exist. So you pretend they don’t any more, and you cast yourself in the role of killer because it makes you feel brave instead of like their victim… Charlie smirked at her silly theory. It was impossible to speculate, that was what made this different from every other situation she’d dealt with since joining the police. Different, and harder to stop thinking about. Usually she could come up with some sort of hypothesis to use as a starting point, however wrong it turned out to be. Not now. She could think of literally nothing that would explain the behaviour of Ruth Bussey and Aidan Seed-even a rampant shared insanity didn’t seem to fit the bill. It made her feel stupid, which she hated.

At the cul-de-sac end of Megson Crescent, three young boys with shaved heads were doing wheelies on their bikes. When Charlie got out of her car and they saw her uniform, they disappeared so fast that she couldn’t help thinking of the scene in the film E.T., where the kids pedal so hard they take off into the sky.

She locked her car. Loud, aggressive music was coming from one of the houses at the far end of the road, near where the boys had been. She supposed she’d better try and track them down to whichever house they’d holed up in, encourage them to make their way to school. Not that their teachers would thank her for it.

As she walked along the cul-de-sac, she counted off the odd numbers. Five and seven each had a boarded-up window. In a first-floor window at number nine, she saw parts of small faces before the curtains were yanked shut. She knew that if she rang the doorbell, she’d get no answer.

Higher priority than the boys was getting that music turned down. As she got closer to the house it was coming from, she felt the pavement shake under her feet. She couldn’t believe it when she saw the number on the door: fifteen. The thumping noise was coming from Mary Trelease’s house. Ruth Bussey had said Mary Trelease was around forty, so what was she doing listening to…? Charlie dismissed the ridiculous thought, embarrassed by it. What were forty-year-olds supposed to listen to? James Galway, with the volume turned down extra-low so as not