In a Cottage In a Wood: The gripping new psychological thriller from the bestselling author of The Woman Next Door
minutes, she’s connected with a bored-sounding woman who tells her someone will look on the system for further information and then puts her on hold again.
Neve sighs and entertains the possibility of hanging up. But no, she needs to see this through.
Eventually a different woman comes to the phone. She sounds a little warmer.
‘Hello, you were asking about the suicide from Waterloo Bridge on December twenty-first?’ she says.
‘Yes, that’s right.’ Neve’s heart speeds up and she finds herself clutching the receiver, her hand damp. There’s a pause.
‘I’m afraid a body was found the following morning.’
‘Oh …’ Neve puffs out the word in a sigh. She didn’t know what else she had been expecting, but the news still feels electric and cold in her stomach.
‘Did you know the individual?’ the woman continues brightly.
‘Well, no, I was just there. You see …’
She finds herself recounting the whole thing again, while the woman on the other end of the phone clucks, ‘Oh dear’ and ‘What a shame,’ at key points.
When she has finished, the woman lowers her voice a fraction before speaking again. ‘Look,’ she says. ‘It’s very common in these situations to feel guilty and think you could have done something. But put it this way, this was someone who was serious.’
‘What do you mean?’ says Neve, sitting forward in her chair.
‘Well,’ there’s a pause, ‘she made certain provisions to make sure she sank quickly.’
Neve quickly scans her memories of what the woman, Isabelle, had looked like. There was no coat that could be filled with stones, à la Virginia Woolf. She wasn’t carrying anything. So how on earth did she weigh herself down enough to drown? She pictures that silky dress, clinging to Isabelle’s thin frame. The swishiness of it and the jarring sense that it was from another, more glamorous time.
‘I just don’t get it,’ she says miserably. ‘She was only wearing an evening dress.’
There’s a brief silence and then the woman speaks all in a rush. ‘Look, I’m not sure whether I ought to release this information without the family’s permission but you were the one who had to see it all so, well …’
She clears her throat and lowers her voice further. ‘It was the hem of her dress, you see,’ she says. ‘She’d sewed lead curtain tape all around the bottom of it. This was enough extra weight for someone of that size to sink.’
Neve’s stomach lurches. ‘Oh God,’ she says. ‘That’s awful.’
‘Yes, it’s terrible,’ says the woman. ‘She had obviously done her homework. In that stretch of the Thames, most people are rescued before there’s any prospect of drowning, you see. Such a shame. She really meant business, the poor thing.’
‘No more for me, thanks Stephen.’ Steve’s mother Celia puts a small, neat hand, tipped with shell-pink polish, on top of her glass of wine. She has been nursing the same glass for the last two hours.
Her husband Bill is engaging their son in a lengthy discussion about the shortcomings of the M4 and the A406. This is a follow-on from the same conversation earlier.
Steve nods and is trying to look interested, while simultaneously shooting looks at his small daughter, who is sitting with a mutinous expression on her face. Lottie has been recently reprimanded by her grandmother for whining and looks ready to blow at any moment.
They are sitting at the table with the wreckage of Christmas dinner in front of them. The gold tablecloth is a battleground of spilled peas, which Lottie had refused to eat, rings from glasses and small lumpy mounds of red wax from the festive candle that is melting like a squashed volcano in the middle of the table.
Neve stifles a yawn.
Today seems to have been going on for an eternity. At five a.m. she was woken from a dream about Daniel by the study door opening and the sound of feet padding across the floorboards.
She’d kept her eyes firmly closed, then felt laboured breathing hot on her cheek. After a moment Lottie had announced in a stage whisper that, ‘Mummy and Daddy say it is too early to see if Santa has been.’
‘That’s because it is too early,’ Neve had groggily replied. Then, when Lottie showed no sign of going back to bed, ‘Why don’t you go and have a look on your own?’
She hadn’t even been aware, really, of what she was saying; she’d only wanted Lottie to go away. And she certainly didn’t remember saying, ‘Yes, you definitely are allowed to get started on the presents,’ as was later claimed by the little curly-haired Judas.
But it turned out she had committed a crime of major proportions an hour later when she heard raised voices from the sitting room.
Lottie had gaily skipped away and unwrapped everything under the tree, including everyone else’s gifts. She had eaten a whole selection box and was starting on the handmade Belgian chocolates meant for her grandma before anyone else got up.
Lou had been tearful because a special moment – when the family all discovered the presents together – had been ruined. She had been planning to film the whole thing. Lou was, in Neve’s opinion, an obsessive chronicler of her family life. She would have unfollowed her sister on Facebook because of this, had she been able to get away with it.
Steve, surveying his guilty-faced daughter, and the colourful piles of ripped paper, wore an expression that wasn’t at all Christian. Neve was in the doghouse.
He spent the rest of the morning cooking and refused all offers of help, while retaining a beleaguered air.
Lou has been brittle with tension all day. She doesn’t like Celia and Bill, Neve knows this. But she seems to think that if she refrains from criticizing them, even to Neve, then she will somehow find a deeper reservoir of tolerance.
Neve has resolved to be the model guest for the rest of the day. When Bill resorts to one of his favourite topics of conversation – namely, the fact that the ‘UK is an island with limited resources and it’s time something was done about our border controls’ – Neve smiles sweetly and suggests she clear the table and wash up.
Celia regards her as she hands over her smeared plate.
‘So how is the flat hunting going, Neve?’ she says. Neve hears Lou quietly sigh.
‘Bit slowly,’ she says with a small laugh. ‘Everywhere is so expensive. But I am looking!’ She sets her jaw as she picks up more plates, hoping for a quick exit from this conversation. But Celia isn’t finished.
‘Have you ever thought about moving back to your home town?’ she says. ‘Do you have any people there? Remind me. I mean,’ she adds, hurriedly, ‘I know you don’t have your mum and dad any more, but is there anyone else? Wider family?’
Lou shoots her a panicked look. Celia knows full well that Lou and Neve are the only ones left. Steve has two siblings with five children between them, several aunts and uncles, and his grandparents only died in the last couple of years. He’s positively rotten with family, thinks Neve. He has no idea what it is like to be an island that only contains two, yet is still somehow crowded.
She feels a sharp tug of love for her sister now and the urge to say something shocking and untrue, like, ‘No one that isn’t inside,’ but knows her sister will be even more upset with her.
Neve decides to ignore the question.
‘Shall I make you some tea, when I’m done washing up?’
Wrong-footed, Celia blinks at her without replying.