People LIke Her(75)

I have already done this walk on Street View several times, so I know what to expect. Right out of the station, past a coffee stall and an Italian restaurant straight out of the 1990s, complete with sign outside advertising paninis. Down the high street, past a pet shop and a Tesco Metro and a Costa and a bus shelter with no glass in it. A left turn at the traffic light just past the library. A long road of terraced houses.

As anticipated, the walk takes me about fifteen minutes.

It looks like a perfectly normal house, from the outside. Two bins in the front garden. The garden itself a little overgrown. Leaded windows.

When I reach the place, I don’t hesitate. For weeks, I’ve been dreaming of the opportunity to give whoever’s been posting pictures of my daughter online a piece of my mind, to shame them, to give them a scare. To stop them. All week, I’ve been imagining this moment. I’m startled by how hard I tap the knocker.

Then I wait.

A minute passes. Two minutes.

After a while. I begin to wonder if there’s anyone home. I realize I’ve assumed that having come all this way, on a Saturday, Pamela Fielding is going to be here to answer the door when I knock on it.

I keep looking up and down the street to see if she’s coming back from the shops or something. One or two people pass. No one gives me a second look.

Eventually, just as I am about to give up hope, I hear something in the house, and a shape appears, a white shape, in the doorway of what I take to be the living room. It moves very slowly, gradually gaining definition in the rippled glass of the little window in the front door.

They get to the door, realize it’s locked, and shuffle away again. I can hear them rooting around for a key in what I assume is a bowl on the sideboard in the front hall. Eventually they locate the one they want. It’s still another three or four minutes before they manage to unlock the door.

“Can I help you?”

The individual who opens the door is a man in his seventies. Seeing me, a stranger, he straightens up, brushes down his trousers, picks something (a toast crumb?) from the lapel of his cardigan. I am pretty sure this man isn’t the person posting pictures of Coco. I am almost certain he’s not the one who broke into my house and stole my wife’s laptop. He looks like the kind of man you see collecting for the British Legion.

His expression is puzzled.

“Hi there,” I say. “Is this . . . ? Is . . . ? Does Pamela Fielding live here?”

“She does,” he says, literally looking me up and down. “Can I ask . . . ?”

I expect if I really was a detective I would have some kind of cover story ready to hand.

“I’m a friend,” I say, eventually. “From work.”

It is perhaps lucky that at exactly that minute it begins to rain. Quite heavily, in fact. It can be heard drumming on the lids of the bins. He looks at me. He looks at the rain.

“You had better come in, then,” he says, after a moment.

There’s a line of shoes along the hallway, several pairs of slippers next to them. The carpet itself is soft and deep, dark brown. I work my shoes off and add them to the lineup.

“Pam,” he calls up the similarly carpeted stairs.

“I’m Eric,” he says, offering me a soft hand to shake. I tell him my name. He gives no sign of recognizing it. “That’s the living room, through there,” he says.

He pauses at the bottom of the stairs, rests one hand on the banister, and calls Pam’s name again. Somewhere over our heads a toilet flushes.

“Can I offer you a cup of tea?”

I say I’d love one. Milk, no sugar. I take a seat in the living room.

It has the air of a room that’s not used every day, the kind that’s reserved for visitors. I also sense they don’t get visitors that often. The instant I sit on the couch I can feel myself sinking into it, and as this process begins, it pulls the enormous crocheted blanket that is hanging over the back of the sofa down around my shoulders. By the time I finally come to a halt, I am looking at the coffee table from between my knees, and my backside is resting at the level of my ankles.

It is hard to escape the feeling I’m not exactly going to be at my most imposing in this position. I grasp the coffee table and pull myself to standing, then rearrange the coffee table doily, scanning the room for somewhere a bit more solid and strategic to plant myself.

I end up perching on one of the soft arms of the sofa.

“Pam,” Eric calls up the stairs for a third time, more emphatically now. “There’s a . . . person come to see you.”

As he’s passing the doorway, he looks in and raises both eyebrows at me at once and says something about Pam living in her own world most of the time.

“She says she hears me calling, but I don’t know she does, really,” he says. “Can I take your coat?” he asks.

I tell him I’m fine.

He tells me to let him know if I want him to turn the fire on.

I give him a thumbs-up.

“One sugar, is it?”

“No sugars,” I tell him, again.

Footsteps on the stairs. A moment of hesitation—Pamela checking her hair in the mirror at the bottom of the stairs? She’s saying something to the man in the kitchen as she comes through, her attention in that direction. Then she sees me. Then she stops.

“Hi, Pamela,” I say.