The Woman Next Door(33)

‘NO!’ she says. Almost shouts, in fact.

I give her a weak smile of relief.

What on earth would I have done if she’d said yes? She would like to call the police now?

She sits down at the opposite end of the kitchen table and begins to fiddle with her phone, barely looking at me. It’s clear she is in no mood to communicate.

So we just sit there, in silence, waiting for the evening to move on. It’s actually quite pleasant in a strange way.

We stay like this for half an hour or more and then she seems to erupt from the table like an explosion, announcing, ‘That’s it, we’re going. I can’t do this any longer.’

‘Fine,’ I say with a sigh. ‘Let’s go.’

Of course then we have a tedious row about which of us is going to drive.

‘You don’t know this van,’ I say. As if I drive it all the time.

‘How bloody hard can it be?!’ she snaps, but I will not be budged. We go back and forth for a few minutes until she gives in.

It is a lovely evening, quite balmy, after yesterday’s rain. No other neighbours are about as we get into the van, which is a relief. Now all I have to do is drive.

I glance at Melissa in the passenger seat. She has a mutinous look plastered on her face that quite spoils her looks. I think she is still sulking.

When the engine turns over first time I give a silent prayer of thanks. But the journey gets off to a bad start nonetheless. Backing out of the drive, there is a thump as I accidentally reverse into the gatepost. There’s a nasty grinding sound of metal against metal and the wheels spin in an alarming way for a moment. Melissa cries out and Bertie begins to bark in earnest from the footwell.

‘Be quiet, Bertie!’ I snap.

With a whine, he turns in a circle and snuggles down next to Melissa’s feet. I don’t think she likes dogs very much because she keeps moving her legs to the side. She made rather a fuss about him lying there, in fact, but when I pointed out that the alternative was to have him on her lap, she backed down. However, I have noticed her shifting her legs whenever the poor dog looks for comfort by trying to lie close. Honestly. How can she object to Bertie when he is lying there so sweetly? Some people are very strange.

Neither of us speaks as I pull out onto the road, accidentally crunching the gears from one through to three until I get the hang of things. Come on, Hester. You can do this, I tell myself.

I hope I haven’t caused any damage to the gatepost. I don’t much care about the van, as long as it can get us from A to B. But it will be inconvenient to have to mend the fence between our houses.

We have agreed the route in advance and so head out through the quiet streets of North London towards the M25. The quicker way is via the North Circular, but that feels so much more conspicuous.

I’m still having trouble with the gears and there are a few unpleasant noises before I get the hang of things again. Melissa melodramatically winces every time this happens, which is really rather unnecessary, not to mention off-putting.

I glance at her. Her face looks gaunt in the wash of the street lights, her eyes hollowed out, as though she has aged in just twenty-four hours. It’s strange, but I feel quite the opposite.

The air heater seems to be fixed so warm air blasts into our faces. Melissa fiddles with the controls for some time to no avail before sighing and turning her face to the window. There is a residual smell of paint in the van and the atmosphere could become quite unpleasant in time. Still, we have bigger concerns on that front. Let’s just hope those ice packs do the business.

We’re coming through the quiet country roads of Hadley Wood when she finally speaks in a tightly wound tone.

‘Hester,’ she says, ‘I sincerely hope you aren’t going to drive at 30 miles per hour the whole way. We won’t get to Dorset until tomorrow afternoon at this rate.’

It’s only then that I realize I’m gripping the steering wheel so hard my knuckles bleach white. The nervous driving is something Terry used to like to tease me about and it was very unfair, not to mention unfunny. He would say things like ‘Oh look, a hearse is about to overtake us’, or ‘Here comes a toddler on a tricycle’ when we were on the motorway.

I didn’t rise to the bait but what he didn’t know was that I would picture his face, quite clearly, slamming against the dashboard. I could see his nose splintering like plywood and the plum-coloured black eyes. It all helped stop me from shouting at him and losing control of myself. Yes, that’s a little extreme perhaps, but there was no need for unkind teasing.

I breathe slowly in through my nose and out through my mouth now before I reply.

‘There are speed cameras around here, actually. I think the very last thing we want is to be noticed, don’t you? Under the circumstances?’

She huffs a bit and then says, ‘Yeah, but if you drive like this you’ll attract just as much attention anyway.’

‘I assure you,’ I say, through gritted teeth, ‘that I will drive at the acceptable speed on the motorway.’

We lapse into silence then.

It’s extraordinary, how easy it is to forget about the cargo we are carrying back there. I could almost convince myself we are going on a girls-only camping trip somewhere, if it weren’t for the fact that it was night-time. Maybe when all this is over we really can do something of that nature?

Tilly could come along too. We could spend the evening talking and toasting marshmallows over a campfire. I’ve always wanted to do that. It would be such a lot of fun.