Chapter 24 We Make a Good Team #2
He looks at me like I’m tricking him. “Seriously, that’s your job? You’re an anthropologist?” he asks, genuinely surprised.
“God, no. I sold out, almost immediately. I only use my knowledge for evil,” I tell him. “I sell people things they don’t need. Shiny stuff. I work in branding.”
Worked in, I correct in my head.
Matt’s eyebrows rise again, and he gives a series of little nods. “Nice. Nice. Cool job. Branding. The dark arts. Very good. Very impressed.”
I feel my cheeks flush, and for the first time in our conversation, I am self-conscious.
I try to set us back on track. I need to know who that man was who shouted at Marina, and why.
“So, Chris and Marina Carmine, Number Fifteen. What else do we know about them?”
Matt snaps back to the topic. “Okay, let’s see. She’s in finance and he’s in…construction, in some way, works on corporate builds in Dubai and South Africa. This the kind of thing you’re after?”
I confirm it is, and he continues.
“I didn’t get the vibe that she wanted kids, but who knows? She seems to be pretty ‘structured,’ if you know what I mean.” He stops suddenly. “Why are you asking? Did something happen?”
“I saw someone arguing with Marina,” I tell him. “A man who I assumed was her husband, Chris, but then I saw Chris today, and the man I saw arguing with her was definitely not him.”
Matt looks at me, askance. “Hang on—are you spying on people?”
I pull up short, unexpectedly exposed, but Matt’s expression softens.
“No judgment—I get it—they basically live opposite you. It’s hard to miss stuff sometimes, working from home. Especially for an anthropologist, I’d imagine.” He grins. It’s a playful jibe but under it I see his slight concern that I might be fully mad.
“So, this other guy?” he continues. “What did he look like?”
I hesitate before answering. “He was bigger than Chris, taller, broader, ashy-light hair. Imposing, very serious-looking. They obviously knew each other well.”
Matt’s eyes widen in interest. “Oh. Okay. So”—he pauses and shifts into a whisper—“an affair, you think? Wow.” His tone is suddenly serious. “Poor Chris.”
I consider telling Matt that I have skin in this game, that I was in Chris’s position just months ago and somehow this all feels tied together in my mind. But I don’t.
“Yeah, it looked like a pretty intense thing,” I confess, careful not to disclose too much.
“A stormy affair, very salacious,” he mutters, before leaning in to say, “Yep. It’s hard not to pick up on weird stuff like this when you work from home.
I’ll be honest—I’ve seen some stuff. Not that stuff, but…
stuff.” He stops a moment, unsure whether to continue.
“I know way too much about people here, without even trying. It’s nuts.
So, freedom of information and all that: pretty much everyone our end of the street works in offices, or wherever, so out by eight, home by six or seven.
Then you’ve got the school-run gang, some parents, but it’s mainly nannies or whoever.
Arabella Number Nineteen works out of the house on and off, not clear on all that.
Then you’ve got the retirees: Pam at Number Seventeen and Malcolm at Fourteen, and Gloria at Ten.
But they’re usually out doing something or other during the day—wild swimming most mornings, park clear-up, ushering the fun run most weekends.
Then there’s Aoife, Number Twenty-one, which is obviously a thing in itself; she’s mostly out.
Then the Malones, at Nine, and Harrisons, Twenty-two—they are larger families, do weekends at the grandparents’, Sussex and Devon, in that order.
Richard, Number Eleven, runs a hedge fund and has houses in Switzerland and Tuscany and New York, so you’ll rarely see him. He’s got a wife in one of them.”
“Does he have a Bentley?” I interject.
Matt nods. “Yes, Richard has the Bentley. And then there’s Greg, Number Twelve, who is kind of in the Richard bracket but with way more macho swagger and brown hair, not gray. He runs every day…bitchy vibes.”
I nod deeply; I know Greg. “Apparently, he tried to buy my house?”
Matt’s face drops suddenly. “What?” he says, as if he must have misheard. “How did you know that? Someone told you that?”
He looks genuinely concerned by the revelation.
“Pam mentioned it. I saw him arguing with her and Marina the first day I arrived, they seemed to be trying to stop him from coming over. He was angry, with me or them, not sure.”
Matt’s expression has slipped from concern to thinly veiled anger.
“Jesus. That guy. Wow, I’m surprised Pam told you that, though. She’s not usually…Anyway, I’d say stay away from Greg. He’s a loose cannon. What a dickhead, your first day. What was he even planning on saying?”
“No idea,” I confess. “But I heard him talking to someone at the deli about how I wouldn’t have moved here if I knew something.”
“Knew what?” he asks, genuinely curious.
I’m relieved to see Matt doesn’t seem to know what the terrible thing is.
I shrug. “I don’t know.”
“Anyway, where was I…Oh, yeah, there’s also Lucy Kiefler at Number Twenty-three. Have you met her?”
I shake my head.
“She had a sort of…breakdown, so she’s having a year off.
But she’s never in: cold-swimming with Pam around seven a.m., then you’ll see her volunteering at the church café, and then the charity shop next to the greengrocer, and pretty much everywhere, really.
She does a lot of walking. She’s nice, but intense. ”
“You’ve basically got a running schedule of everyone’s lives.”
“Not consciously. I’ve just lived here a long time now,” he says, with an uncharacteristic air of weariness.
Then he taps both hands down on the table between us.
“So, an intense affair at Number Fifteen. Kind of surprised I missed that. What’s your plan?
Tell Chris? Storm into their bedroom, ‘gotcha’-style? ”
I snort a laugh and it feels good. “Imagine. Of course not. It’s got absolutely nothing to do with me.
I plan to do nothing. Not my life,” I protest, hands up in surrender.
“No. Each to their own. I’ve got quite enough on my own plate.
I just want to know who I’m living around, I guess, who to trust.” I cringe internally at my own brutal honesty.
Matt reaches out and high-fives me. “That’s the London spirit. That said, I would probably end up telling Chris if I was the one who’d noticed it—I see him at the gym every now and then and I’ve got terrible impulse control. Speaking of which, would you like to go on an actual date? With me.”
I stare at his ridiculously handsome face, back-footed.
“Sorry, what?” I ask, then quickly follow up. “I mean, I thought you said you weren’t in a relationship space right now?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. I just like hanging out with you,” he says, with a smile. “Thought I’d ask, just in case you felt the same. I feel bizarrely comfortable with you, have since the first day we met. Besides, we make a good team,” he says simply.
“Team?”
“Yeah, neighborhood-snooping team. Affair busters, or enablers, whichever, I’m easy. I don’t know—dinner tomorrow night? I’ve got a good feeling about this.”
He gestures between us in a move that I’m pretty sure would look stupid coming from anyone else.
“Okay. Yeah, let’s do it,” I say. “An actual date. And don’t you dare tell Chris any of that if you see him at the gym.”
—
When I get home Blue is not waiting for me at the back door, and suddenly I am worried for him.
As I make myself a simple dinner of cold cuts, I think about the neighbors Matt mentioned earlier, a tapestry of my street emerging. Any of those houses could contain a basement like the one I saw.
I think about all the people on the street, their lives playing out in the buildings around me.
I try not to linger too long on the idea of Lucy Kiefler, and the breakdown that has led her to take a year of her life out, and how it seems a hair’s breadth from my own story.
I can’t help but think of the blond man who is not Marina’s husband. Perhaps their argument was him threatening to tell Chris the truth, to ruin her marriage? Or could they have been arguing about something far darker?
As I wash up my plate, a meow sounds from the back door and I see Blue’s eyes reflect holographically in the half-light.
I open the door, and he cheerfully hops inside, heading straight to his food bowl.
I watch him gobble down his food and then I gently remove his collar, placing it on the charger, the footage landing into the app as I do.
I take my laptop into the living room and bring it up.
If I watch any of this, then I have to acknowledge that I am stalking these people.
I stare at the new thumbnail, and its blur of greenery and wall, and it looks so innocuous, as if I might see no more than back gardens and grass. And maybe I will—what a fittingly uneventful ending to my cat camera era.
This really will be the last one, I tell myself, because in the real world, as with Matt and his niece, not everyone is hiding something terrible, and some lives really are what they appear to be.