The House Across the Street Read online

  ‘I’ve been considering moving to London,’ Katy admitted. ‘Funnily enough, it was Mrs Reynolds who put the idea in my head. She said Bexhill is the dullest town in England and I ought to be whooping it up in a big city. She was right: Bexhill is dull. Dancing at the Pavilion on a Saturday night is as good as it gets. The only boys I ever meet are the ones I went to school with, and half of them are married now with a couple of kids.’

  ‘I’d suggest you came up to Nottingham, as I’d love you to be there, but I don’t think it’s a very good place unless you are at the university. Besides, I won’t be there after my finals this June. London is where everything is happening now, so I’m told.’

  Katy smiled at her brother. ‘I wouldn’t want to cramp your style in Nottingham. And anyway, if I go to London you can come and stay with me there.’

  As Katy buttered some bread for sandwiches she thought about her parents. Katy had once got a sneaky peek at their wedding certificate. They were married in July of 1941, and she had been born in March the same year, four months earlier. As she understood it, that wasn’t unusual then; they said people lived for the moment, and many women found themselves to be pregnant after their man had been sent off abroad. But it was extremely hard to imagine her mother ever having being swept away by passion. She was so totally disapproving of pre-marital sex. When she’d tried to explain about the birds and bees to Katy, she looked and sounded like she was almost choking at the thought of such things. Perhaps she’d had a hard time, though, being on her own with a new baby.

  But that didn’t exactly explain why her dad had ever been sufficiently attracted to Hilda to even speak to her, let alone sleep with her. Albert was almost Hilda’s exact opposite: kind, caring, soft spoken. He was a tall, handsome man with thick dark hair, good teeth and a ready smile.

  She longed to ask her mother about those days and her romance with Albert, but Hilda wasn’t the kind to confide in anyone; she found personal questions an affront, even if they were from her children.

  It wasn’t just the problems with her mother that made Katy want to leave home. She also longed for the hustle and bustle of London. Here in Bexhill she felt she was under a microscope. If it wasn’t her mother cross-examining her, it was friends and neighbours constantly watching her.

  Bexhill wasn’t just dull, it was dead! A story had gone round that the police had once pulled the vicar in for questioning because he was out after nine on a winter’s evening. They were convinced he was a burglar, and refused to believe he was visiting a sick old lady, until he took off his scarf and showed his dog collar.

  That story had always amused Katy. And yet, despite the town’s shortcomings, she had affection for it. Aside from the sea, it had wide tree-lined roads, at least where she lived, and more lively towns like Hastings or Brighton were only a bus ride away.

  Rob had left the kitchen to take their mother her tea and cake. As he came back into the kitchen, Katy was brought back to the present.

  ‘Looks like the fire is coming under control now,’ he said. ‘But no one in there could’ve survived.’

  Katy ran into the sitting room and looked out of the window. Rob was right, the flames were no longer licking as vigorously up the front of the house, and the blaze in the front room appeared to have died down. A lump came up in her throat; even if Mrs Reynolds was safely at her daughter’s, losing her home and all her personal possessions was terrible. But much worse was the possibility that such a lovely woman had died in the fire. That was too tragic to even contemplate.

  Rob came up behind her. ‘Mr and Mrs Harding won’t be able to go back into their house,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘It might not have burned down as such, but the smoke will have damaged everything. They are old and frail, and I don’t think they’ve got any family to go to.’

  Katy could think of nothing to say to that, so she pointed out she had sandwiches to make. They both turned away from the window and the devastation outside and went back into the kitchen. Rob stoked up the Rayburn while Katy started on the sandwiches.

  ‘Are you going to tell Mum and Dad you won’t come home for the holidays again?’ she asked her brother. ‘Or will you just make excuses each time?’

  Rob looked sheepish. ‘I think the excuses route. I’m not as brave as you.’

  ‘I think it’s more diplomatic, actually. I mean it won’t make Dad so sad, will it? I don’t like the thought of walking away from him either, but I suppose parents do expect their kids to leave at some time.’

  ‘Maybe Mum will be nicer to Dad once they are alone?’ Rob suggested.

  Almost as if he’d heard his name being mentioned, the back door opened and Albert came in on a blast of icy-cold air. ‘Brrr, it’s freezing out there,’ he said, rubbing his hands together. ‘Mr and Mrs Harding are going along to the Bradys, down the road. They play bridge with them, so it’s better for them than here.’

  ‘What about the Suttons?’ Rob asked. They were the couple who lived on the other side of number 26.

  ‘Well, as their house isn’t attached to number 26 it hasn’t been damaged. They went in with firemen to check it. They said it stinks of smoke but it’s okay. Anyway, they are going to their daughter’s until it clears. She’s on her way.’

  ‘Did the firemen find out if Mrs Reynolds was in there?’ Katy asked.

  Albert frowned. ‘They don’t know yet. Mrs Harding said she was at home earlier in the evening, as she heard her television. It was switched off later, so hopefully that means she went out. But the firemen can’t get in there just yet to check. We’ll just have to cross our fingers that she’s safe somewhere else.’

  ‘Do they have any idea of how it started?’ Rob asked.

  ‘I heard one of the policemen say they suspected arson. But they won’t be able to confirm or rule that out until the fire is properly out and the house has cooled down.’ He paused, his dark eyes glinting with what looked like emotional tears. ‘If it was set deliberately and Mrs Reynolds died in there, I would want to personally throttle the person who did that to her.’

  When Katy woke up the following morning, for a moment or two she thought she’d been dreaming there was a fire. Church bells were ringing down at Little Common, summoning the faithful to eight o’clock communion. She felt she ought to be angry that they’d woken her at eight on a Sunday – after all, she’d only got back to bed at five this morning. But there was something comforting about the bells, as if nothing really bad could happen within the sound of them.

  She got up and went into the spare room to look out of the window. But there it was, worse than she’d expected, a blackened, still smoking wreck of a house, the roof half caved in, windows gone and the once neat front garden trampled and full of burned debris. Even through the closed window she could smell that dank, half-charred, half-chemical smell of ruin.

  It was too early for people to be out – and bitterly cold, too – and, as Rob and her parents appeared to still be asleep, she went back to bed.

  By eleven that morning it had begun to snow, and Katy sat up on the window seat in the sitting room watching what was going on in the street. Aside from people coming to look at the burnt-out house, there were several firemen. Katy got the idea the house was either too hot or too dangerous to go in, as they stood in groups outside. There was police activity too, mostly knocking on the doors of residents on that side of the road, though a young constable knocked at their door to ask what they’d seen the previous night. There were also men in civilian clothes looking up at the house and these, Katy assumed, were building inspectors or surveyors.

  It was just after lunch when Katy brought a cup of tea into the sitting room, intending to sit and read a book. She saw policemen coming out of number 26 carrying someone covered up on a stretcher.

  She almost dropped her tea in shock, because by that time she and the rest of the family were certain there couldn’t have been any fatalities. But then, to her further horror, a second stretcher was carried out.

  Just
to look at the faces of the police and firemen was to know they were as distressed as she was. She saw that while she and her family had been eating their lunch at the back of the house, a big pile of burned furniture and what looked like doors had been hauled out of the house and added to the debris in the garden. So presumably the firemen had found the two bodies beneath it all.

  Sobbing, Katy ran into the dining room where her father and brother were sitting in the armchairs either side of the fire reading the Sunday papers. ‘There’s two bodies,’ she blurted out. ‘The police just carried them out.’

  Both Rob and her father were too shocked to speak for a moment or two. They just stared at her as if not understanding.

  ‘How absolutely dreadful,’ Albert said eventually, his voice hushed and shaky. ‘Her poor family! Do you think the other body was her daughter?’

  Katy began to cry. ‘The daughter she usually goes to on a Saturday night has two small children. She once said they never stayed overnight, so I doubt it was her,’ she sobbed out.

  ‘There is another daughter, and a son,’ Albert said thoughtfully. ‘She said the daughter was a career girl. I seem to remember she was going in for law. The boy lives in Manchester.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right, I remember she told me that too,’ Katy said. ‘She even suggested I try to get legal secretarial work, as it’s better paid than normal stuff.’

  ‘So if it was arson, someone is responsible for two deaths,’ Rob said, his face set and flushed with anger. ‘That is such a horrible thought, here in Bexhill of all places, where nothing happens.’

  ‘Don’t let’s talk about this in front of your mother,’ Albert said in a low voice. ‘I couldn’t bear to hear her going on and on about it all evening. She’s had a thing about Mrs Reynolds ever since I went over there to fix an overflowing cistern.’

  ‘Where is Mum, anyway?’ Rob asked.

  ‘She just went out for a walk,’ Albert said. ‘Heaven only knows why, when it’s so cold. But there was no talking to her; I even offered to go with her, and she nearly bit my head off. But she should’ve been home by now, it’s nearly dark.’

  ‘I’ll go and make a start on laying the tea,’ Katy said. ‘Not that I feel like eating anything after seeing those two stretchers.’

  2

  Katy woke to find a dull grey light in her room and knew immediately it had snowed in the night.

  As a child she had always been thrilled by snow, but after the events of the previous day she couldn’t have cared less if there had been an earthquake or a hurricane during the night.

  Flora, a woman at work, had once told her that her next-door neighbour had died unexpectedly. ‘I felt as if I’d been kicked in the stomach,’ she’d said. ‘But it was very odd, because we were never that close.’

  At the time, Katy thought it was a weird thing to say. Yet that was just how she felt now: winded, sore inside, yet unable to grasp why she should be so affected. Was it because she had wanted to know more about Gloria Reynolds? Or because she felt guilty she’d watched her so often?

  But death was new to Katy; until now she’d never experienced it. Both sets of grandparents had died before she was born. So maybe it was this way for everyone?

  She thought she would ask her friend Jilly, because she came from a big extended family that discussed anything and everything. She would know if Katy’s reaction was normal.

  When she got up and drew back the curtains, despite her mood she was moved to see a thick white blanket of snow covering the garden.

  The bare flower beds, the old lawn roller, the apple tree, fences and her father’s shed were all magically transformed into a winter wonderland like a scene from a fairy tale. Yet it didn’t seem right that the world should look so pretty when something so awful had taken place such a short while before.

  An hour later, Katy was trudging down the road to get to work wearing a pair of tartan trousers under her dress, two jumpers and her brown winter coat, plus a green woolly hat, gloves, matching scarf and wellington boots. Her indoor shoes were tucked in her handbag. Snow on a Monday before the gritting trucks could get out meant some of her workmates living out of town might not come in today, so that meant she’d have more work than usual. A depressing thought.

  Yet, despite the cold, she was glad to be out of the house, as there had been a tense atmosphere over breakfast. Usually her mother’s bad moods were signalled in advance by banging plates and cupboard doors, and sooner or later an outburst would erupt. But today hadn’t been like that – no noise, not even any sniping – in fact, to an outsider it would have seemed calm and ordinary. But Katy knew better; she’d observed the humourless smirks, felt the concealed venom. This was when her mother was brewing up for something.

  Rob said he’d heard their father arguing with her late last night. He couldn’t hear well enough to discover what it was about, though.

  Katy thought their mother was probably bad-mouthing Mrs Reynolds again, as she had on Sunday morning, when Albert had lost his patience. He always said it was bad form to speak ill of the dead.

  But if Katy had thought going to work would be a distraction, she was wrong. The tragedy had been reported on the local news, and as everyone in the office knew Katy lived in Collington Avenue, right across the street from the burnt-out house, they were eagerly awaiting her inside information.

  Even Mr Marshfield, the senior partner, came out of his office purposely to ask questions. Normally the only time he spoke to Katy was to summon her for dictation.

  ‘Mrs Reynolds was a client,’ he said, looking very concerned. ‘Such a bubbly woman, I liked her very much. And it seems her daughter died with her?’

  Katy had never heard the man admit he liked anyone before. She and the other girls had nicknamed him ‘Eeyore’ because, like the dour donkey in Winnie-the-Pooh, he was a complete pessimist, and his long, thin face never broke into a smile.

  ‘It’s not been confirmed who the second woman was, Mr Marshfield. I hope it wasn’t her daughter, but then whoever it is, she belongs to someone. The police seem to think the fire was started on purpose, but why would anyone want to kill such a nice woman?’

  ‘A jilted lover, perhaps?’ Mrs Edwards, Marshfield’s secretary, suggested. She was a hopeless romantic, buying wedding magazines to drool over the pictures and plan her sons’ nuptials, even though none of the four was even going steady. She also had a vivid imagination fuelled by reading lurid thrillers.

  ‘Maybe having the dress shop was just a front,’ Sandra, the dopey filing clerk, suggested. ‘She might have been a spy!’

  ‘Yes, that’s extremely likely,’ Mr Marshfield retorted with sarcasm. ‘Now get on with your work, Sandra, and make sure you put the correspondence in the right files.’

  All through the day the subject of Mrs Reynolds’ untimely and horrible death came up. Nothing much ever happened in Bexhill so it was hardly surprising that anyone who had even the most tenuous link with the dead woman wanted to discuss it. People who had never been in the office of Franklin, Spencer and Marshfield before made excuses to do so – so many, in fact, the staff were forced to lay newspaper by the office door to soak up the snow they tramped in.

  It was on the way home – earlier than usual, because it had begun to snow again – that Katy’s mind turned to the last time she’d actually had a conversation with the shopkeeper. She’d gone into Gloria’s Gowns in late November to look for a dress to wear to go out dancing at Christmas. She could see Gloria in her mind’s eye right now, a voluptuous lady with an hourglass figure. That day she’d been wearing a red sheath dress with a wide black patent-leather belt and matching high heels, her chestnut hair fixed up as usual in a beehive, red-and-black dangly earrings, and her make-up so well done her complexion looked flawless.

  ‘So glad you called in, Katy,’ she said. ‘Because I’ve got the perfect party dress for you.’

  She pulled an emerald-green chiffon dress off the rail and shook it to show off how the fabric fluttered. �
��A great contrast with your pretty hair, and look at the way the skirt swirls.’

  As always, Katy was bowled over not just by the way that Gloria knew what would suit her customers, but how she made each one feel special.

  When Katy came out of the changing room in the dress, which fitted her like a glove and made her feel like a Hollywood star, Gloria clapped her hands with delight.

  ‘I thought of you as soon as it came in,’ she said. ‘It is perfect for you: the colour and the fit. But, my dear, you should be wearing it somewhere far more exciting than Bexhill.’

  She went on to say how she sensed that huge changes were happening in England, starting now in London. ‘I felt it last time I was there,’ she said. ‘Finally, the whole prissy fifties Doris Day thing is over. They’ve got gorgeous little shops opening up everywhere; they call them boutiques, and the outrageous, sexy clothes are made by young, talented designers. Then there’s the discotheques, too – dance halls are old hat now. If I was your age, Katy, I’d be up there like a shot to join in.’

  Katy had seen articles in glossy magazines to this effect, but Gloria’s enthusiasm made it seem so much more real and attainable.

  ‘But there’s my job at the solicitors,’ Katy said. ‘What if I couldn’t find such a good one in London?’

  ‘Don’t be daft, Katy, there are thousands of solicitors in London, and you’ll find a job that will pay you twice as much as you get here, because good secretaries like you are like gold dust. My Elsie is a legal secretary, so I do know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘But there’s all my friends here. London can be very lonely, I’m told.’

  ‘Oh, Katy, a girl like you will soon make new friends. You share a flat with some other girls and – hey presto! – soon it will be parties, dancing, meeting ambitious young men who are going somewhere. I bet the only men who ask you to dance at the Pavilion on a Saturday night are either grease monkeys or work in a shop.’