The Perfect Neighbours. Rachel Sargeant
Sunday, 19 December
The spotlight is set into the ceiling so prisoners can’t get at it. Helen’s head hurts from the glare but she doesn’t shield her eyes. The moment she closes them, the images will flood back. Jagged photos in a digital picture frame, moving upwards and sideways, repeating and holding. She doesn’t know which one will torment her first. If she’s lucky, it’s the child’s cello, on its back, neck broken, blood smeared around the sound holes.
But it could be the blood-cherry cheesecake. Or the matted, pink-black belly fur of the dead dog. Or the gaping crew-neck sweater oozing its obscene innards onto the parquet floor. Or Gary.
She sits on the edge of the bed, her arms cradling her knees. If she could focus on the cello, the rest might fade. She must grab the sticky instrument; drag it into view; admire the thickening stains on the polished wood; remember the small, expert hand that once pressed against the fingerboard; and strain to hear the soothing sound of his playing. But it won’t be enough to block out the other images. Seventeen days so far and nothing has dimmed.
She stands up and paces the floor, her joints grating from lack of exercise. They let her walk in the yard at the back of the police station, but the snow piled at the fence reminded her of the cell so she asked to go back in. White room. White loo in the corner, no seat or lid. The only stab of colour is the green button by the door. She presses it.
“Please, sit yourself. Your lawyer will visit you in a little time,” the desk sergeant tells her through the intercom.
No point in arguing; it’s doubtful his English is up to it and, even after eight months in the country, she’s still another expat Brit who can’t be bothered to learn German.
She flops onto the bed. The mattress smells like Marigold gloves. Washing-up, Gary doing the drying. But another view of Gary invades – folded ankles, empty expression, crimson shoulder. She fights the vision and tries to see Gary at their kitchen sink. Tries to make him smile. Make him speak. She curls up, exhausted by the effort.
The door bolts deactivate but she stays foetal. It’s the lawyer, Karola. The ruddy-faced neighbour who keeps spaniels in her back garden and waves at her on Mondays when they put their dustbins out. She’s Frau Barton to her now, the only bilingual German-trained lawyer the school can find at short notice. These days she’s more used to picking up dog poo than counselling women charged with murder.
Helen rolls towards the wall.
“Why didn’t you mention Sascha Jakobsen?” Karola asks.
The name shoots through Helen. She says nothing.
“He’s told the police that you were with him at the outdoor pool in Dortmannhausen.”
Helen sits up. “He said that?”
“The police searched the frozen pool site again. You’d better tell me everything,” Karola says, perching on the bed. Dark trouser suit, darker soul.
Helen draws her legs up, away from her. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“How long have you known Jakobsen?”
Why ask when she knows the answer? The school is a goldfish bowl and they both swim in it. Karola Barton knows every bit of her business. All the neighbours do, all the neighbours that are still alive.
Helen says: “It wasn’t like that.”
Karola stands up. The crease of her trousers is plumb-line vertical. “What was it like, Mrs Taylor?”
Monday, 5 April
Eight Months Earlier
Gary squeezed Helen’s hand. “Excited?”
She said nothing. Was she excited? New start in a new country. As a full-time wife. She managed a smile and nodded.
They drove off the A road – the Landstrasse as Gary called it – into a grey, built-up area. She thought of the coach trip she’d made with a Year 10 class to Bulgaria; communist-built apartment blocks on the outskirts of Sofia.
Gary pulled up at traffic lights and pointed. “And behind there is the Niers International School.”
Through the spike-topped metal fence on the right she made out rows of full bicycle stands. It looked like a provincial railway station.
“But you can’t see it properly from here,” he added.
A pot-bellied man in a dark uniform was standing by a sentry hut, the wooden roof scabby and cracked.
“You have guards?” she asked.
“Don’t mind Klaus. We have two full-time security men to patrol the site. The parents like it. Except our guys spend most of the time playing toy soldiers in their little house.”
Helen laughed until she noticed Ausländer Raus spray-painted on a bus shelter. “Does that mean what I think it means?”
The light went green, and they turned left.
“Foreigners Out – but you hardly ever see that stuff. Most of the Germans love the international school,” he said. “Lots of locals work here in support roles, and the parents spend good money in the town.”
He’d told her about the parents before. Most worked for big international companies in Düsseldorf, and others were rich locals prepared to pay for an English-speaking education. And some were teachers.
“Think about it, Helen,” Gary had said when they sat down with their pros and cons sheet on one of his weekend visits, agonizing over where to live. “Not yet, but in a few years, if we have children, it could be their school. There are so many perks, as well as the salary.”
That had been the clincher: Gary could earn more staying out here than the two of them put together in the UK. Helen had stopped being stubborn in light of the cold hard figures. She quit her job and put her house up for rent.
He went over a speed bump, and she felt the seatbelt rub against her collarbone.
“Have you noticed the street names?” He pointed at one, multisyllabic, a jumble of Ls and Es. “Can you read them?”
She shook her head. They had been driving non-stop since Calais. The traffic signs after the border into Germany had become a strident Teutonic yellow. Here the street names were in white, more like British ones, but they were unpronounceable.
Gary crawled along at 20 mph and seemed unfazed by the need to slalom his way around parked cars, playing children, and speed bumps. She glanced at his profile – round cheekbones, smooth jaw, patient eyes. Who would have thought affability could be so magnetic? Her stomach settled.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“About Birmingham.” Where they first met.
At the teachers’ conference in the university bar after the speeches, he’d been the gentle-faced man in the noisy crowd. The one everyone wanted to talk to. A kind of jig took place as people vied for a position next to him. And when he caught her looking and smiled, Helen – never normally part of a pack – took it as her cue to join the reel. By the end of the evening she and Gary were the only people still dancing.
“No regrets?” he asked.
Was she still scared about the move? It had taken her long enough to make up her mind. She stroked his arm and smiled. Not scared now; a little apprehensive, maybe.
“Nearly