Page 64 of Don't Let Him In

She scrolls down looking for a gift shop, a pharmacy, a boutique, any kind of shop that would sell fancy soaps, but there’s nothing. Just a butcher, a farm shop, a florist, an art shop, a pet shop, a bookshop, and a delicatessen. She looks at the time: 6:05. All the shops have closed by now. She’ll try calling them in the morning.

FIFTY-EIGHT

Martha pulls up outside the empty restaurant in Folkestone. Its plate-glass windows are plastered from the inside with graphics advertising its coming incarnation as a Turkish barbecue restaurant and she can hear sounds of drilling and banging coming from within. She finds a place to park just around the corner and heads back.

It’s ten on a damp Friday morning. She’s left Milly in charge of the shop and feels a heightened sense of panic about how she should be getting on with the day’s orders and deliveries, but she also knows she cannot focus, cannot concentrate, until she has confirmed her suspicions about Al’s current whereabouts one way or the other. As if to fuel her resolve, the sound of a seagull cawing overhead breaks into her thoughts, reminding her why she’s here.

She stands at the closed door of the restaurant for a moment, knocking tentatively and then a little louder before pushing the door and entering. Three men turn and stare at her. A fourth man, wearing a high-vis vest over a smart jumper and trousers, approaches her and says, “Sorry, madam, you can’t be in here, it’s a building site. Health and safety.”

“Could I just ask you something? Quickly.”

The man sighs, puts a clipboard down on a shelf, and gestures to her to leave the building with him. On the pavement, he closes the door behind him and looks at her with polite impatience.

“This place,” she says. “Are you in charge of the development?”

“Yes. I’m the site manager. If you have any complaints, or—”

“No,” she cuts in. “No. Nothing like that. I just wondered if you knew this man.” She pulls out her phone and shows him a photograph of Al. “His name is Alistair Grey. I think he’s doing some work with the owners of this place? He’s been on-site a couple of times?”

The man peers at the photo and enlarges it with his fingertips. “No,” he says decisively. “No. I don’t know this man. I’ve never seen him. He’s not involved with this project or with the owners of the project. I’m sorry.”

“Good,” she says. “Thank you. That’s helpful.”

He nods and then turns and heads back into the restaurant.

Martha sighs. She’d known already that this place was just a cover for something else Al was doing the day the tracker had followed him here.

She gets back into her car and looks up the big white seaside house on her Maps app. It’s a seven-minute drive from here. She presses start on the app and heads out of Folkestone.

The house sits on top of a cliff, up a winding road with three full hairpin bends along its course. It lies between two equally handsome white houses and has a wide portico in its middle and tall windows on both sides allowing dual-aspect views to the sea and, Martha assumes, the coast of northern France. Even on a day like this, with the sky a thick, patchy gray, the sun a milky smudge where the clouds come apart, the sea a pebble-dashed expanse of dirty beige, it is truly exquisite. There is no car parked outside this house, no signs of life inside. Martha gets out of her car and goes to the front door. She rings the bell and clears her throat. Nobody comes. She waits a moment more and then walks from the portico to the side window. Here, she can see into a huge open-plan kitchen, all very trendy and unfitted, with open shelves, jars, rough-hewn pottery, a wine rack built into the wall. There’s a large farmhouse-styletable covered in family detritus—paperwork, books, a scarf, charging cables, makeup—so a woman lives here, clearly. Her stomach clenches and unclenches. She looks for signs of Al, but can’t see any.

She goes to the window on the other side of the house. Through this one she sees a huge double reception room, a large circular dining table closest to the window, a big jute bowl at its center filled with pomegranates and some other unidentifiable fruits. This leads through to a living area—low-slung chairs, a gigantic modular sofa, views through a picture window out to the sea through a frame of cedar trees and palms. The walls are filled with colorful art and there are plants everywhere and it is, Martha realizes, exactly as she would decorate such a house, all so very much to her taste, and as she thinks this, her eye is caught by a cluster of photographs on a cabinet to the side of the dining table and she sees a lovely woman with very dark hair and a blunt fringe, trendy sunglasses, dark lips. She stands behind a teenage girl with pale hair, wide eyes, a pierced nose, and a similar-looking boy, the tallest in the photograph by half a foot. And there, with his arm around all three of them, is a nice-looking man in a band T-shirt and jeans, floppy fair hair falling over his brow, sunglasses on his head, a tattoo of some kind on his forearm, and he is immediately familiar to Martha.

She knows who he is, and whose house this is. It’s Paddy Swann. The man who owned the beautiful restaurant Al had taken her to in Whitstable a couple of years ago, that lovely, kind man with the sweet smile who had come to their table and asked how they had enjoyed their meal. He also owned the restaurant where Al had bought a bottle of champagne the night that Nala had been ill, when he said he’d been sleeping in the staff room of a hotel. And Martha knows that this man is dead now, because after she found that receipt in Alistair’s coat pocket, she had googled the restaurant and seen the news articles about Paddy Swann being pushed under the wheels of a tube train at Leicester Square on a Wednesday night about fifteen months ago.

Which means this amazing house must now belong to Paddy’s widow, a woman called Nina, according to the news articles.

And there it is; it falls into place. Her husband is having an affair with Nina Swann. He is living here in this beautiful house, with its large, airy rooms and its tasteful furnishings and its quirky teenagers and its views and all the money that is clearly a part of the life of Nina Swann. He lives here, pretending, no doubt, that Martha does not exist. That Nala does not exist. That Jonah and Troy do not exist. That her perfect cottage that she is so proud of and has worked so hard on, her business and her life and her choices and her priorities and her body and her hair and her love and her joy, and all the things that make MarthaMartha, do not exist, that they all pale and fade and shrink and die in the light of all of this. And this is what he wanted, after all. A rich woman. A view of the sea. Another life. This is where he’s been. This place. Here.

FIFTY-NINETWENTY-ONE MONTHS AGO

How do I explain my obsession with Paddy Swann? I can’t. But for a while it takes over my life. I pore over his website, over the details of his life. I buy his cookbooks, which are full of staged “lifestyle” photos of him and his restaurants and his home and his family, and I read them from cover to cover. I want to understand him, this average man with his above-average life. I want to emulate it somehow. But more than that, I want to ruin it.

There. I said it. Call me petty. Call me tragic. But I cannot forget the way he talked to me that night back in the early 1990s when I was just starting out in my life, and I cannot forget the way he touched my wife that night, the way he pushed his body against the back of her chair, the way he acted as though I did not exist. I cannot forget the disgust and the embarrassment of that moment in his restaurant a year ago. I have never felt like this before. Vindictive, I think, is the best word to describe it.

Yes.

I am vindictive.

A few months into my surveillance of the Swann family, I learn that Nina Swann is having an affair.

He is younger than her. Possibly, it occurs to me, the same age as Ash’s crush, Ritchie Lloyd. They meet for lunch at a café in Folkestone. They hold hands under the table. I take a surreptitious photograph. He is tall and his hair, although he is young, is on the verge of turning white, just as mine did in my early forties. I’d been appalled at the time, contemplated dying it, I recall, even took to wearing a baseball cap to cover it up. But then, as my early forties drifted toward my late forties and I felt respectably old rather than the wrong side of young, the salt and pepper turned silver and soon I realized that it was a blessing.Mad Menwas all the rage at the time and the expression “silver fox” was being bandied about and I embraced my silver hair and made it my pride and joy. My USP, in fact. There is a certain type of woman who cannot resist a well-dressed man with a full head of prematurely silver hair. And now, from this side of the busy café, it looks as if Nina Swann might be one of them.

I follow him afterward. He works at a record shop in the trendy, creative corner of the town. I wonder how they met. I wonder how long it’s been going on. He seems to be shy and slightly awkward. I can’t imagine him having a wife and family at home. It feels more likely that he’s a “failure to launch” specimen, maybe even still at home with his parents. They meet again a couple of days later. I told Martha I was working with a fledgling pub with rooms in Folkestone. What I’m actually doing is staying at a pub with rooms in Folkestone. It’s cheap and perfectly pleasant, nice touches, stylish bathrooms, a view, if I stretch onto my tiptoes, of the sea. This is how all-consuming my obsession has become—I am spending my own money in order to carry out my surveillance of this man and his family. The awful thing is that I’m quite enjoying it. Maybe I should have been a detective. A spy. I once thought about pretending I was a spy to explain my erratic behavior to an ex, but I realized I had no idea what spies actually do.

This time, Nina and her lover meet at night in a kind of back-street dive bar with vinyl-covered banquettes and movie posters on the walls and a putrid watery-red light over everything. They sit in a dark corner, which I feel is quite brazen—her undertaking a visible affair in this town so close to where she lives, close to the parents of the children her children went to school with, her colleagues, her husband’s colleagues. For a moment, I wonder if I imagined the physical contact between them in the café two days earlier. They chat easily now, but I don’t see any contact, any touching. Maybe they are just friends? Maybe, when your husband works every single night of his life and your children both live away from home and you are clinging on to the last vestiges of your hotness by your black-painted fingernails, just being in the company of a younger man who thinks you’re amazing is enough to fill the vacuum? Maybe it’s a little ego boost, nothing more?

I stare at my phone and nurse my gin and tonic and keep my head down. A few minutes later, they finish the dregs of their drinks and silently leave the bar, heading, as I follow surreptitiously behind them, for a door to the side of the bar that leads to a block of three apartments upstairs. I see a window light up on the second floor, then the swish of a drawn curtain.

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