The Breakdown(77)

what about his other reasoning, that the calls are coming from someone close to me?

Fear comes back, doubling in size, settling inside me, squeezing the breath from me to make more room for itself. It dries my mouth, sends names ricocheting around my brain. It could be anybody. One of my friends’

husbands, the lovely man who comes every few months to clean the windows, the man from the alarm company, the new neighbour down the road, a father from school.

I go through every man I know and end up suspecting them all. I don’t ask myself why any of them would want to do such a thing, I ask myself – why not? Any one of them could be a psychopath.

Not wanting Alex to come along with his little

daughters and find me sitting here, like a stalker, I leave the park. I should go home but what if I find that someone’s been in the house again? They’ve already got past the alarm once but how? Somebody with the technical knowledge to do so. The man from Superior Security Systems? I remember the window I found open after he left that day. Maybe he fixed it in some way so that he could come and go as he pleased. Is he my silent caller?

Reluctant to go back to the house, I drive back to

Browbury and find a hairdresser who can take me

without an appointment. It’s only when I’m sitting in front of the mirror with nothing to do except look at my face that I realise how much the last couple of months have taken out of me. I look gaunt and the hairdresser asks me if I’ve had a recent illness, because my hair





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shows signs of stress. I choose not to tell her that I have early-onset dementia or that I overdosed just a few days before.

I’m so long at the hairdresser that Matthew’s car is already in the drive when I get back. As I pull up outside the front door, it flies open.

‘Thank God! Where have you been?’ he asks, looking

frantic. ‘I’ve been worried about you.’

‘I went to Browbury to do some shopping and have

my hair cut,’ I say mildly.

‘Well, next time, leave a note, or phone and tell me you’re going out. You can’t just wander off, Cass.’

I smart at this. ‘I didn’t just wander off!’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Not really. I’m not going to start telling you my every move, Matthew. I didn’t before and I’m not going to start now.’

‘Before you didn’t have early-onset dementia. I love you, Cass, so of course I worry about you. At least get yourself another mobile so that I can contact you.’

‘All right,’ I say, putting myself in his shoes. ‘I’ll get one tomorrow, I promise.’

TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 29th

When the phone rings the next morning I think about what Alex said about the calls coming from someone I know and take the call.

‘Who are you?’ I ask, interested rather than scared.

‘You’re not who I thought you were, so who are you?’

I put the phone down, feeling strangely victorious, but to my dismay he phones straight back. I stand there wondering if I should answer, knowing that if I don’t he’ll call until I do. But I don’t want to give him what he wants, I don’t want to stand there submissively silent, not any more. I’ve lost too many weeks of my life already.

If I don’t want to lose any more, I need to start standing up to him.

Worried that I’ll end up cracking, I go out to the

garden to get away from the sound of the phone. I think about taking it off the hook so that he can’t get through but I don’t want to anger him any more than I already Title: The Breakdown ARC, Format: 126x198, v1, Output date:08/11/16





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have. The other option is to go out for the day and only come home once Matthew is back. But I’m fed-up being driven from my home. What I need is something to keep me busy.

My eyes fall on my secateurs, which are lying where I left them two months before, the day before Hannah and Andy came round for a barbecue, on the windowsill along with my gloves, so I decide to do a bit of pruning.

It takes me about an hour to get the roses in shape and then I weed steadily until lunchtime, marvelling that whoever is calling me has so much time to spare on a futile exercise, because he must have guessed by now that I’m not going to pick up. I try to work out the sort of man he is but I know that to stereotype him as a loner who has trouble forming relationships would be a mistake. He could be a pillar of the community, a family man, a man with plenty of friends and interests.

The only thing I’m sure about now is that he’s someone I know, and this makes me less frightened than perhaps I should be.

It’s sobering to realise that if hadn’t been for the murder, I would never have put up with his calls in the first place. I would have laughed at him down the phone, called him pathetic, told him that if he didn’t stop annoying me I would call the police. The only reason I didn’t was because I thought he was the murderer and I was so paralysed by fear that I couldn’t do anything. The thought that he has got away with so much for so long makes me determined to bring him out into the open.

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Around one o’clock the calls, which have been getting