Page 24 of The Tapes
Upstairs, I head into Dad’s bedroom and open a few drawers, then look under the bed. There’s still plenty to be cleared, though I figure this will be the last room. I can’t quite bring myself to get rid of all Dad’s clothes yet, even though they should be some of the easier items. There will be a finality that I don’t think I can face before the funeral.
Peter seemingly has no such problems. He was in the room for around five minutes and it sounded as if he was looking for something he knew was in here. If it was a memento – such as the watch – he could have said he was taking it, and the chances of me objecting would be very low.
Reading my brother has always been difficult, and that was before the quarterly Botox injections. There are no signs of anything in particular that’s been moved around, and, althoughthe dresser drawer was fractionally open, I think it might have been like that before.
I stand in the upstairs window, looking to the street below, realising how mad I must have sounded when I was talking to Peter about a strange woman watching the house. She probably was looking for her keys, something like that. Since listening to Mum’s tapes, I feel more on edge than before – especially at Dad’s house.
It’s mid-afternoon and I should return to work. Mark wasn’t overly happy at me skipping out a few hours ago, but it was hard for him to say no considering the police wanted to talk. I stole another hour and a bit at Dad’s house, part looking for the jewellery box, part waiting for my brother and it’s going to be pushing my luck to take the rest of the day off.
Except Peter’s dig about the Rowetts stuck. He was trying to be cruel and it worked, becauseJake Rowett will be on my mind all day now. But my brother accidentally had a point: the Rowettswerepeople that Mum and Dad knew well back then.
And if Mumdidsteal a jewellery box, it could have easily been from someone very, very nearby.
As soon as that idea appeared, I knew I wasn’t heading back to the office.
Dad’s house is not where I grew up. He bought it years ago with a mix of withdrawing some pension money early, the life insurance from Peter’s mum’s death, plus various scraps of savings. It’s the sort of thing people of his generation seemed to be able to do at will. They wanted a bigger house, so they bought a bigger house.
The road where we lived as a family is around fifteen minutes away by car. The house is in the middle of a long row of terraces. Cars line both sides of the street, leaving a tight gap through themiddle, and the parking spot is almost five minutes away, at the back of a pizza shop.
It’s been a trippy, time-twisting day or so – and the walk back towards my old house is no different. There’s the corner where my old friend, Marie, knocked on a door, then ran – except the person who owned the house was already walking in the other direction and watched her do it. The woman threatened to march the pair of us home and tell our parents what she’d done.
After that, there’s the house that always had a pink front door; then the one where the owner used to leave his work van on the street outside, taking up an extra parking space that led to a fist fight with his neighbour. There’s Mr Mintrim’s house; a man who permanently seemed eighty, and used to sit in a deckchair on the pavement when the sun was out.
The memories flood back as I reach the street where I lived the first nineteen years of my life. There are more cars; more satellite dishes, but so little has actually changed. There are still ‘no free papers’ postcards in people’s front windows; still varying degrees of threats and requests for people not to park in front of the houses. When I pass my old home, the tiny crack in the corner of the downstairs front window is still there. There’s tinsel in the upstairs window, even though we’re months away from the festive period.
The house directly next door belongs to the Rowetts and my bedroom shared a wall with theirs for those entire nineteen years.
Mum and Dad were friends with them largely by default – and, of every house from which my mother could’ve stolen a jewellery box, it has to be at the top.
Plus, Jake Rowett being the Earring Killer would make me feel a lot better about a few aspects of my life.
I knock on the Rowetts’ door and wait. I would’ve done this in years gone by, when Mum sent me round to ask for teabags, milk, something like that.
Such a long time has passed.
There’s no answer, so I try tapping the window, before it occurs to me that our old neighbour could’ve moved. It’s possible, even if they were the sort who’d live in the same place forever.
Thirty seconds or so pass and I’m about to try knocking again when the front door opens and catches on the chain. An eye appears, darting both ways until settling on me. ‘Who is it?’ a woman’s voice asks.
‘It’s me, Allie. It’s Eve.’
There’s a momentary pause and then the door closes, before there’s the scratching scrape of a chain being unlatched. When it’s re-opened, a short old woman is standing in front of me, one hand on her hip. I’m a little teapot.
I’ve not seen Allie Rowett in a good ten years, and she must’ve shrunk by four or five inches in that time. Her hair is starting to thin; the fuzzy grey curls no longer long down her back as they used to be.
‘Eve, love. My God. What are you doing round here?’
‘I came to tell you that Dad died. We’re having the funeral on Friday.’
She stares, mouth open, until a surprised-sounding: ‘Oh…’ It takes a second or two for her to absorb the information, until she adds: ‘Thanks for telling me.’ She asks about the time and place, and, once I tell her, she’s already worked it out in her head. There’s a bus that connects to another bus, but she’ll make it.
‘Was he ill?’ she asks.
‘Sort of. He had a heart attack last year and the doctor said he’d have to change his diet and start walking every day. Dad decided it wasn’t for him, so I guess it was inevitable in the end.’
Allie nods along. She knew my father for long enough that the stubborn streak wouldn’t have been a surprise.
‘You know Jake died a few months back,’ she says.
