The Woman Next Door(57)

She couldn’t face her usual place. This salon, Hair by Jayne, was small and tatty and doing a bustling trade with chatty, elderly women having perms. She asked the stylist just to ‘make it look better, I don’t care’ and studiously avoided eye contact and conversation until it was done.

Now as she leaves her bedroom, she pulls the belt of her dressing gown around her narrowing middle. She hasn’t been able to face food, telling Mark and Tilly that she has been hit by a virus. Which doesn’t explain the hair.

Or why Hester is suddenly in her kitchen, seemingly all the time.

In the first few days after that horror trip to the river, she tried to convince Hester that she was too sick for visitors. But Hester had chirped, ‘Nonsense, you just need a rest! I’ll be back later with something home-cooked!’ and bustled off home. She came back later with a shepherd’s pie that Tilly said tasted ‘kind of weird’. It lay congealing on the side until Melissa had guiltily gouged the fatty, solid mass of it into the bin.

Hester made old-fashioned so-called ‘comfort food’, but it didn’t offer much in the way of solace. Devoid of even garlic, chilli, or coriander, it wasn’t the kind of thing her family was accustomed to eating. She was secretly glad Tilly was as fussy about this as she was about Melissa’s more adventurous cookery.

Hester came back with something else, Melissa forgets what, a day or so later. She had breezed in and sat down at the kitchen table as though nothing had happened there. As though they were normal neighbours who hadn’t hefted the lumpen weight of a dead man onto plastic together. As though Melissa wasn’t a murderer and Hester an accessory.

Every time she saw Hester, she felt even worse. And resentment towards the small, fussy woman was beginning to spread like a poison inside her. What would have happened if they had just called the police? It was Hester who had really come up with the bulk of the plan. She had been the one who first suggested getting rid of the, of Jamie’s, body. She had suggested the place in Dorset and insisted on driving them there.

She had been so eager to help. Such a good, concerned neighbour.

Mark had asked why Hester was suddenly coming round to their house with gifts of food. ‘I mean, you don’t even like her!’ he said.

‘I do!’ Melissa had protested feebly. ‘We’ve sort of … reconnected.’

Mark made a frustrated sound she couldn’t interpret and left the room.

Melissa walks down the stairs on wobbly legs. She knows she must try and eat something.

Tilly is still asleep at midday, Mark at the hospital.

In the kitchen she makes an espresso and then takes it to the table, where she opens her MacBook and goes through the secret ritual she has done every day for the last week and a half.

She is itching, as always, to Google, ‘body found in Dorset river’, but forces herself instead to browse Dorset local news sites. If anyone wants to know, she will say the family is thinking of buying a holiday home there and she is interested in learning about the area. As subterfuge goes, it is pathetic. Yet still she scrolls through pages of stories about car accidents and robberies and primary school children winning prizes before deleting her browser history.

Still nothing.

In some ways she would feel better if his body turned up. Waiting for disaster to fall is eating at her like a malignancy. She forensically analyses the many reasons the police might come to her door in the middle of the night, every night. It seems her brain is to do this, rather than sleep, between the hours of 1 a.m. and 4 a.m.

There’s a sound at the French doors now and Melissa slams down the lid of the laptop and rises to her feet in one movement, heart pulsing in her ribcage almost painfully.

Saskia peers in, framing her face with the curve of her hand. She mouths, ‘Let me in!’ before doing some comedy rapping with her fists on the glass.

Melissa tries to smile but her cheeks are too stiff; her whole face feels rigid. She has been avoiding Saskia, citing stomach flu that started around the time of the party. But the sight of her now causes a shift inside Melissa. A need for human comfort swells inside her. She hurries over and opens the door.

‘What the fuck, Lissa?’ says Saskia.

Then she is holding her because Melissa is suddenly sobbing into her warm, spicy-scented shoulder. She is much smaller than her friend, and Saskia’s arms envelop her now as she emits worried little ‘ssh’ sounds.

Melissa tries to laugh and pulls away after a time. Her face is blotched and puffy with tears and exhaustion.

‘God, I don’t know where that came from,’ she says, trying to inject normality into her tone. ‘I’ve been a bit under the weather. I’m sorry.’ Her voice bubbles with mucus and she goes to get kitchen towel from under the sink, before honking loudly into it.

Her friend regards her carefully.

‘What’s happened?’ says Saskia quietly. ‘Is it Mark? Has he done it again?’

For a moment Melissa is utterly confused. Done what again? Then it comes to her and she can’t help the bitter laugh that forces its way out. She experiences a sharp stab of nostalgia for the time when this was the worst of her worries.

‘Ah, no, no, nothing like that,’ she says feebly. ‘Look, have a seat. I promise to stop blubbing now and I’ll make you a coffee.’

‘I don’t want coffee,’ says Saskia, taking her sunglasses off her head and sitting down at the table. ‘I just want to know whether you’re all right. We’ve barely spoken for two weeks.’