Chapter 51 Pam and Mouse
Pam and Mouse
Pam is woken every morning by the shaft of summer light that makes its way under the edge of her bedroom blind, gently warming a thin line of her right cheek and eye.
She stirs, and her cat, Mouse, lets out a yawn before wandering up the duvet to Pam’s side for her morning snuggle.
Pam pulls Mouse’s soft white fur close, like a child with a teddy, or, she imagines, a mother with a child.
Mouse purrs and lolls her head against Pam’s pillow.
“Monday, lovely Monday,” Pam singsongs. “Shall we have breakfast in the garden, Mouse? Looks like a nice sunny one.”
The cat stands and mounts Pam’s chest.
“Ouff. You’re getting heavy, treasure,” Pam puffs out, caught off guard.
Pam lifts the cat off her chest and pulls back the covers to start her day.
In her tidy, well-stocked kitchen, Pam prepares their breakfasts, then carries their respective dishes outside into the sunshine.
Mouse leaps ahead past her, along the garden path, jumping up onto the sun-drenched bench against the back wall of the garden.
They sit, Pam with her yogurt and muesli on her knee and Mouse crouched beside her, cracking through her kibble loudly before swallowing greedily.
Sun-soaked calm descends.
Then Pam’s thoughts move to her usual morning rituals. She ferrets out her phone from her pocket. She likes to check the door camera every morning; she has done so since the incident across the street. Things hit differently when you get into your late sixties.
Lucy Kiefler, of course, experienced the worst of it, among the surviving street residents. As a former St. John Ambulance volunteer, she ran into Number 18 the night of the fire. She saw what she saw, and it obviously took a toll. The poor girl deserved a slowdown, all things considered.
Pam brings up her motion-sensor doorbell videos from last night. Her camera isn’t one of the ostentatious ones; it’s very discreet, the bell and the camera separate devices. She didn’t want people on the street to feel like they were being watched.
She’s tried not to get too interested with comings and goings and focus instead on the bigger picture, safety.
The world is too swallowed up in its phones already, and she doesn’t want to go down that rabbit hole.
But she has gotten used to the everyday drama on the street: the whirlwind of Aoife’s comings and goings, the mysterious new neighbor across the street with the handsome Persian blue cat and the budding romance with Matt, who it now seems is looking after his sister’s baby.
Pam rations her viewing to only the time it takes to eat breakfast. Now she spoons cool alpine yogurt into her mouth and presses play.
Yesterday’s activities unfold in short, motion-sensor-activated edits: the late post; Aoife arriving back home in a car and going into her house; then suddenly someone running down the street—there is an unmistakable urgency to the way they move.
Pam places her spoon down in her bowl, no longer interested in breakfast. She leans in.
—
It is Frankie, running. Suddenly Frankie turns, runs straight toward the camera, and begins pounding on Pam’s front door, clearly in the grip of a severe panic attack.
She sinks out of shot. Moments later, Aoife also appears at Pam’s gate and, having seen the commotion, sinks out of view beside Frankie.
Pam watches, a hand to her mouth, as finally Aoife rises, helping Frankie up and back across the street to her own home, the pair then disappearing inside Frankie’s house.
Pam skips the video on: Aoife leaves Frankie’s house, then Frankie leaves and drives away, returning forty-five minutes later. She leaves the house again on foot just before 3 p.m.
Frankie does not return, but instead Aoife does, dressed for the red carpet.
Aoife’s driver arrives, they talk, Aoife clearly agitated about something.
Aoife pounds urgently on Frankie’s front door before kneeling to shout something through the letterbox.
The driver, looking annoyed, chivvies her on and the two depart.
Frankie still does not return.
One hour and forty-four minutes later, Pam squints at the screen to make out a fox nosing around her bin store. She tuts.
Pam watches herself return from the opera, oblivious to the earlier drama on the street.
Half an hour later, Eric, the taller of the two men who, in some way, live with Marina at Number 15, walks past Pam’s house on his way to theirs, carrying a bunch of flowers.
Pam infers an apology or an anniversary. She doesn’t particularly understand the situation in their house, but there are more important issues at stake.
At 11:03 p.m., a car parks outside Pam’s house. Pam straightens. The car door opens but no interior lights switch on inside, which makes Pam squint into the screen again.
A man exits the car, looks down the street, then turns.
Pam sees his face. It’s Dr. Williams, Simon, the newest member of the medical staff at her old surgery.
Simon started the same year she retired.
He doesn’t live on this street—she knows that—he lives two roads over on Lockheath Road, if she recalls.
She’s seen him walk by quite regularly, on the way to the clinic, she’s always assumed, but she’s never seen him visiting or interacting with anyone on Northcroft Road before now.
It’s something that she’d remember. Pam recalls the few occasions she conversed with him.
It was a feeling she had, nothing more, something slightly off about the way he was.
He was very self-aware, very “on it,” almost too “on it,” his paperwork always immaculately kept and up to date: an A* student. But somehow not quite there.
Pam leans in and watches him gallantly open the passenger door for someone. But there is something wrong with his passenger. They do not get out.
Pam pulls the screen closer, her expression tight and tense.
The mood on the sunlit bench has shifted, and Mouse, having finished her kibble, unceremoniously jumps down and dashes away into the bushes.
On the screen, Pam watches as Dr. Williams scans the street, her own windows included, before helping a seemingly inebriated woman across the road. They mount the steps to Number 18 and Pam realizes the slouching woman must be Frankie.
Frankie moved in only a week ago. How could she and Dr. Williams be this close already? And why was Frankie so overwrought earlier in the afternoon? Pam does not like the feel of any of this.
The motion sensor triggers just under one hour later. Pam watches as Dr. Williams exits Number 18 again, a full black bin bag heavy in his hands. He deposits it in the trunk of his car and drives away.
The next motion is at 5:30 a.m. Milk is being delivered; she watches the milkman place two red-capped bottles outside Frankie’s house.
The footage flips to live, all recordings viewed.
“Right,” Pam says, staring at the live screen. Frankie’s milk sits warming in the morning sun. A sickly, cloying feeling rises up inside Pam, just as it did two years ago, before the fire across the street.
She gets up from the bench and strides back through her house and across the street.
Pam rings Frankie’s bell and waits.
Birds tweet in the surrounding trees and a dog barks a few streets away. Pam looks up and down the empty street, thoughts whirring.
She rings the doorbell again. She waits thirty seconds…one minute. She knocks now, too, then makes a decision.
She didn’t do anything that night two years ago. She heard the argument, and she did nothing, and look what happened. If she had knocked….
You can tell yourself things aren’t your concern—she knows that—but they are if they happen in front of you and you do nothing. They all knew the Phillipses were having a tough time.
She turns on her heels and heads quickly back to her house.
In her study, she flicks through the three brown envelopes she keeps in her desk drawer, until she finds the one marked No. 18.
Pam rips open the brown envelope and digs out the keys.
—
Pam enters Frankie’s house.
“Halloo? Frankie, it’s Pam from across the road. I’m so sorry to have to do this but I’m a bit concerned. And I’d kick myself if I didn’t at least check on you. Can you hear me? Are you okay? Frankie?”
Pam stops, stock-still, in the hallway. A noise is coming from upstairs. She listens, unmoving, as the noise comes again.
It’s a throaty meow, loud and clear.
Pam is caught in the uncharacteristic position of not knowing what to do: she both does, and does not, want to go upstairs.
She is scared, of course, of what Dr. Williams was doing here and why Frankie was even with him, and she is scared of how he dragged Frankie’s limp body into the house a few hours ago.
But most of all she is scared of what she might find up there, like Lucy Kiefler did.
The cat’s meowing increases; it knows she is here. Pam lifts her phone, tapping the emergency services number in, ready, should she need it.
She has seen dead bodies before, of course. She was a practicing doctor for almost forty years.
Slowly, she ascends the steps. The noise is coming from the main bathroom, on the landing, and the door is closed.
“Halloo, Frankie! It’s Pam from across the road. Just wanted to make sure you’re okay? Can you hear me in there?”
Another noise, more resonant than the cat, a groaning, throttled sound. Pam’s breath catches in her throat.
“Frankie?!”
Pam races up the final steps to the landing. The noise comes again, haunting and insistent, and then the sound of something splashing into water.
Pam grabs the bathroom door handle, but it is locked.
The groan comes again, gasps, splutters. Pam realizes she has no choice.
She throws her weight against the door, and the latch pops.
Frankie is unconscious, her whole body trembling in the water. Pam immediately recognizes the signs of hypothermia. The room is cold. Pam locks the window as she runs to the bathtub.
She hauls her from the water, out onto the floor like a beached mermaid, quickly blanketing her in thick pink towels.
“It’s okay,” Pam mutters over and over, “it’s okay. You’re going to be okay. Just stay with me.”
But Pam can see Frankie has quite advanced hypothermia. She couldn’t possibly say if Frankie is going to be okay.
Pam continues to bundle her up in anything she can reach, a bath mat, towels, her own jumper.
Frankie slips out of consciousness as Pam presses dial with a free hand.
Downstairs an Irish voice rises to meet Pam: “Hello? Frankie? Are you okay? The door was—”
“Up here. Quickly,” Pam shouts down, and moments later Aoife is sent to find blankets, as Pam’s call connects with the emergency line.