Page 83 of The Housewarming

I call Matt.

‘Ava?’

‘Bella just called. You need to come home now. I’m calling Sharon Farnham. I’m calling the police.’

Thirty-Eight

Ava

Matt taps everything into his phone while I drive to the police station, trying not to rant at the wheel. We start low, make a sensible list: the sloth toy, the odd behaviours, Neil’s washing in the machine, the tool bag. But hysteria rises exponentially, up and away to febrile theories worthy of later seasons of television dramas fresh out of ideas. In one, Abi is being looked after by a contact of Bella’s in a country far away, Neil and Bella waiting until the dust settles, when they will collect their visas and fly to live under aliases with her as their own child. In this theory, their kitchen extension is being put on hold not because of spiralling fertility fees but because they’re saving money for this midnight flit into obscurity.

‘Unless,’ I say.

‘Unless what?’

‘Do you know the monkey experiment?’

He shakes his head. I pass through the lights, take a left.

‘I read about it once. They put a monkey and her baby in a cage and slowly turn up the heat on the cage floor. The mother picks up her baby to protect it from the heat. She holds her baby up, keeping it off the floor while the heat increases, burning her feet. She hops from foot to foot until at last—’

‘She lies down?’

‘No. That’s the thing. She puts the baby on the floor and stands on it.’

‘Oh for God’s sake.’ Matt looks appalled. ‘What the hell did you tell me that for?’

‘Bella.’ I glance at him.

‘Bella?’

‘Think about it. Bella is the only other person who knew the name of the toy. And when Abi went missing, she was nowhere to be seen. What if… what if she did something terrible in a jealous rage and Neil covered for her? And what if, now the heat has been turned up too high, she’s thrown him on the floor to protect herself?’

He shakes his head. ‘No. Stop. We need to stop.’

I nod. We’re being mad. Suspicion has driven us both mad.

‘The fact is,’ I say, ‘we don’t know anything at all.’

‘We do. Just nothing that, alone, is worth mentioning. But it’s not about one piece of information, is it?’

‘Right. But we don’t want to appear mad. So, no conspiracy theories, just the facts. And maybe not mention that we felt her presence at the housewarming party?’

Incredibly, this makes us laugh – a dark spark of grim connection, muscle memory long forgotten.

Detective Inspector Sharon Farnham leads us into an interview room made to look like a living room and asks us to sit down on a firm beige sofa. On the phone, she offered to come to us, but I said no, that we preferred to come here. I didn’t want Neil or Bella to see a police car outside our house.

Matt lets me do the talking, which I do whilst feeding Fred and with a nasty, creeping sense of treachery. Matt takes over and I listen with a terrible stillness, a block in my guts. If we are wrong, what remains of our life is lost; we deserve to be excommunicated from our closest friends and anyone who ever loved us.

If we are right, it is worse.

DI Farnham listens, the device on the table recording every word.

‘And then I saw the bag,’ Matt is saying now. ‘And I remembered I hardly saw him that day. I mean, that’s the thing when everyone’s concentrating on a common task… the focus is elsewhere. I thought he was with other neighbours. Ava thought he was with me. I didn’t even think about where Bella might be.’ He looks at me. ‘We didn’t think about any of that, did we? We had no reason to suspect either of them.’

I glance at Farnham, whose expression gives nothing away. She must think we are insane. Or rats, betraying our closest friends like this with no more than scraps to go on. Whatever she feels, she is staying quiet. Perhaps she is indulging us, nothing more. Perhaps she is trained simply to listen in the hope that, sooner or later, someone will say something that leads to a solution, to an arrest, to a conviction. Perhaps it’s us she’s waiting for: a fatal slip of the tongue that will allow her to click the cuffs around our wrists.

‘The thing is,’ Matt continues, ‘the dogs never went inside the Lovegoods’ kitchen, did they? So if she was in that bag…’ He covers his mouth; his eyes close.

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