Page 48 of The Stranger in Her House

‘Too late for what?’ I ask. But there is no response. ‘Hello? Hello?’

The line has gone dead. I stare at the phone for a moment and press the redial button. She doesn’t answer and the number rings out. If this is supposed to be a joke, it’s a sick one.

CHAPTER 38

CONNIE

When the page on the Rightmove app loads, I hit the arm of the sofa with the palm of my hand in frustration. A film of dust becomes airborne before settling again in the same place. Paul has reduced the price on Gwen’s house by another £30,000. It’s been on the market for weeks now and this is the third time it’s been reduced. The estate agent still shows people around it, but Joe Lawson says the number of interested parties has dropped significantly.

I’m convinced my behaviour has got something to do with the price drop. Over the last few weeks, I’ve made multiple offers and viewing appointments from fake email accounts to suck up the estate agency’s time. I’ve poured live cockroaches I bought from a pet food supplier through the letter box. I’ve caught mice in humane traps in the fields behind the house and pushed them – gently, I might add – through a cat flap in the back door. And just for good measure, I placed in the borders surrounding the foundations Japanese knotweed roots and shoots that I dug up from outside derelict properties in town. I know it’s a fast-spreading weedthat, if found, puts buyers off and often prevents banks making mortgage offers.

None of this is going to prevent the sale of Gwen’s house forever, but they’ve been successful stalling tactics. However, at this new listing price, I have a feeling it might finally shift.

I know that I should’ve walked away from this mess by now, closed the chapter in my life titled ‘Paul Michael’ and moved on to a new project, leaving him to enjoy his spoils. But my brain isn’t wired to give in to defeat so easily.

Two days ago and under a pseudonym, I made a genuine appointment with the estate agent to look around Gwen’s place myself. Paul had removed the camera doorbell so didn’t know I was there. While the young man occupied himself in the lounge on his phone, I made my way from room to room, eventually finishing in the kitchen and undoing the catch on the back door. Walter had been unimpressed when I told him my plan.

‘It’s madness,’ he warned me. ‘You’re not thinking straight.’

‘About which part?’ I asked.

‘All of it! You’re putting yourself at an unnecessary risk. If Paul knows you’re poking about in his business, what makes you think he won’t go after you too?’

‘Because I’m not an eighty-two-year-old woman with dementia.’

‘But he’s still potentially very dangerous. You said it yourself, you think he’s a serial killer.’

When someone else uses those words, it almost sounds too far-fetched to be true. Books and films would have you believe almost every neighbourhood has its own serial murderer. But in reality, apparently their numbers are infinitesimally small. In fact, there are only thought to be a handful of active ones in the UK at any one time. At least, they’re the ones the police suspect. And to my knowledge, they don’t suspect Paul of anything.

Walter has a point, but I’m fed up of being taken advantage of. Ironic, I know, given how many people’s trusts I’ve abused over the years. But I need to see this through, even if it’s to my own detriment. And Gwen’s sofa, with its dusty arms, is where I find myself now, hiding out, taking a break from quietly sifting through every object and scrap of paper Paul left behind after his purge of her belongings.

I’ve spent much of the last couple of days here, one ear cocked, ready to run the moment I hear a van pull up outside or a key turning in the lock. But nothing has happened yet. I don’t know what I’m looking for but I won’t be satisfied until I’ve inched my way through every room like a forensic detective. I’ve taken a few keepsakes for myself, and this morning I left that horrible jade-green porcelain cat with the long neck at the back door ready to carry home later. I hate the thing but I know how much Gwen adored it, so maybe I’ll grow to at least tolerate it.

‘It’s ugly, isn’t it?’ she told me once when she saw me glaring at it.

‘Why do you keep it?’

A devilish grin slowly crept across her face. ‘Because it means I won.’ I asked her what she meant but she gave me a wink and tapped her nose, indicating the conversation was over.

I make my way through her house and into the utility room, where bulging black refuse sacks are scattered across the floor. Why hasn’t Paul thrown them out yet? I reach to untie one and flinch when a handful of cockroaches scuttle away to the darkness under the washing machine. I assume they’re mine and thriving here. The first bag contains some of Gwen’s old clothes, like her tights and underwear and stuff Paul wouldn’t have been able to sell or give away. At the bottom is a pink baby blanket, a dressing gown and two matching towels with the name Connie embroidered on them in red looped lettering. I remember when I first found them, a fewdays after I’d inserted myself into her life. They were hidden away on the top shelf of her wardrobe in a wooden box.

‘Who’s Connie?’ I asked casually later that day.

‘The daughter Bill and I hoped to adopt,’ she replied, wistfully. ‘We were living in Spain when we met a young local woman who’d got herself into trouble.’

Been there and done that, I remember thinking.

‘The day we were supposed to bring her home, the mother changed her mind and kept her,’ she continued. ‘We’d never even seen her, but the loss was immeasurable.’

By the end of the week, I was calling myself by Connie’s name. And capitalising on Gwen’s grief, confusion and lifelong wish to be a mum is pretty high on my list of many, many regrets. I can only hope the genuine kindness and affection I grew to have for her in our time together went a little way towards making up for the manipulation.

I hold the blanket and dressing gown to my nose but they smell of nothing more than time past. For decades, Gwen treasured them and now Paul wants to toss them out as if they don’t matter. I consider what I could do with them, but I’m at a loss. I leave them next to the ornamental cat to take home with me later anyway.

The second bag contains mostly old household utility bills of Gwen’s, dating back some twenty years. Deeper, there are handwritten envelopes with foreign postmarks from the 1960s. I open one and it appears they’re letters Bill wrote to Gwen when they were first dating. I recall her telling me how the bank that employed him had been expanding into Munich, and he was subsequently posted there for a year. Once a fortnight he’d fly home for a long weekend. And they’d write each other long letters while they were apart. Nowadays it would be FaceTime and texts.

I know I’m intruding into their private correspondence but I’ve already stepped over so many lines when it comes to Gwen thatone more won’t do any extra damage. In the first letter I read, Bill is discussing their future and how he can’t wait for them to marry once he returns to the UK permanently. I notice how he always signs his letters off with the words ‘Forever Yours’. No one has ever written me a love letter, or email, or even a text with words to that effect. I matter to so few people that I barely get an ‘x’. Gwen only ever spoke in glowing terms to me of her husband, and it used to make me wish I’d met him. In a different universe, they’d have been my parents. I’d have been the baby girl that they’d adopted from a teenage mum. I’d have had a much better life as Connie Wright than I did as Rachel Evans.

These letters also make me wish that I had a Bill in my life, someone who loved me so completely that, even when separated by countries, I’d still feel his presence as much through his words as his person. I’ve tried to convince myself I’m completely self-sufficient and that I’m all I need. But deep down I wonder if I’m kidding myself. It’s not like I haven’t tried. However, none of my relationships survived for more than a few weeks or a handful of months. You learn from your parents’ example, and Caz’s was to show me it’s perfectly acceptable to allow men to take advantage of you sexually, emotionally and financially. I did what she did: I lavished them in scraps of battered love and attention to make them want to stay with me. Without fail, they either became bored, took what they wanted or felt smothered and moved on. Eventually I went the opposite way and became aloof and left them before they had the chance to do the same to me. There was never any middle ground. No matter how they vanished from my life, the result was always the same. I’m alone.

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