A Tidy Ending: A Novel

by Joanna Cannon

Genres: Suspense

Synopsis

From the best-selling author of The Trouble with Goats and Sheep and Three Things About Elsie, a delightfully sinister novel about a married woman living a nice, quiet suburban life—but things aren’t always what they seem....

Linda has lived in a quiet neighborhood since fleeing the dark events of her childhood in Wales. Now she sits in her kitchen, wondering if this is all there is: pushing the vacuum around and cooking fish sticks for dinner, a far cry from the glamorous lifestyle she sees in the glossy magazines coming through the mail slot addressed to the previous occupant, Rebecca.

Linda’s husband, Terry, isn’t perfect—he picks his teeth, tracks dirt through the house, and spends most of his time in front of the TV. But that seems fairly standard—until he starts keeping odd hours at work, at around the same time young women in the town start to go missing.

If only Linda could track down and befriend Rebecca, maybe some of that enviable lifestyle would rub off on her and she wouldn’t have to worry about what Terry is up to. But the grass isn’t always greener, and you can’t change who you really are. And some secrets can’t stay buried forever....

 

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Release date: August 2, 2022

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Sample

CHAPTER ONE

“There was another one at the weekend,” I said.

That’s how I remember the whole thing starting. Six weeks ago. Terry stood at the kitchen sink, not listening. You can always tell. Even from the back of someone’s head.

Nineteen, she was. Frail little thing, blond hair, smiling. Picture all over the front pages. I usually do a crossword on my lunch break, because I like to occupy my mind, but I popped into WHSmith instead and bought the paper that looked like it had the most coverage. Terry’s never taken much notice of the news, but I thought this might catch his attention. It was only a few miles away, and people are always so much more interested if they think something might trespass into their own lives.

He was trying to scrub a day’s work out of his hands, even though I’ve told him not to do it in the kitchen, even though he gets his muck all over the draining board. We’d only been moved into the house a couple of weeks, so it happened to be a different kitchen, a different draining board, but his tendencies hadn’t changed one bit. I’d decided the move would be a fresh start. A chance for a different life, to leave all the old things behind us. Except nothing in it was new. We’d only moved to a different house on the same estate, one I’d had my eye on for quite some time, but everything was just as frayed and worn out as it had always been. We had the same discussions, the same unspoken rituals, lived through the same small machinery of our days, and the only fresh thing about it was that it was all played out to unfamiliar wallpaper.

“I’ll have to get a clean cloth and go over that again later,” I said, but my voice disappeared into running water.

I unfolded the newspaper I’d bought and put it next to him when he was eating his dinner, but he pushed it back across the kitchen table and said, “Not now, Linda,” because he didn’t seem to want someone else’s misery interfering with his egg and chips.

“Nineteen,” I said. “Her family are in such a state. Well, they would be, wouldn’t they? I don’t know what the world’s coming to.” Because sometimes, I needed to be both parts of the conversation.

I watched the rise and fall of his throat as the food disappeared.

In the brief pause between a fall and a rise, he said, “I heard it on the radio at work. It’s not our problem to worry about, Linda.”

“Of course it is. There might be a serial killer out there.” I pointed at the paper. “The paper says so.”

“The paper says a lot of things.”

“There are connections,” I said, pressing my finger into the headline on the front page, “with this one and the woman they found off the M6 just before Christmas. Do you remember? Blond, very slim. Lily someone or other.”

Because, no matter how distressing the story, no matter how disturbed we are by it, once the headlines become quiet again, our concern for the people they shout about quietens down too, until there comes a day when we can no longer remember their names.

Terry rested the cutlery at the edge of the plate and leaned back in his seat. “What kind of connections?” he said.

“Well, they didn’t say exactly. The police never do. They always keep their cards close to their chest. I know that better than most.”

He picked up his knife and fork again.

“I don’t know why you have this obsession with the police and what they get up to,” he said. “One minute you won’t give them the time of day, the next you’re falling over yourself to help them.”

“Because they need help, Terry.” I picked up the newspaper and stared at the front page. “Just because I wouldn’t trust a policeman as far as I could throw him doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned my civic duty. Sorting out right from wrong is everyone’s responsibility.”

He glanced at me and then back at his dinner. “There’s probably no connection between them at all. Just a coincidence.”

“But it says in black and white that there is. It wouldn’t be mentioned, would it, if it wasn’t true, and that makes it everybody’s problem, Terry. Even yours.”

Sometimes I watched him eat, just to remind myself how miserable I was. Egg and chips. Steak and chips. Punctured, plastic lasagne in a microwaved square. Buttered bread pushed around the ruins of a meal and into his mouth.

He always said, “Nice chips, Lind,” or “Good bit of steak this, our Linda.”

Years of monotony had crept into the skin around his fingernails. His hands used to look clean. Hopeful. Somewhere along the line, he stopped being able to scrub away the remains of a factory floor, and they began to join us each evening at the kitchen table. He’d edge his empty plate forward an inch—only ever an inch, like an achievement—and he’d stretch the day out of his bones and scrape his chair back across the tiles, and then he’d leave me alone with the smell of a thousand other empty plates to come, and a clock that never stopped ticking, and he’d go off to digest it all in front of the snooker.

After he’d left, I always sat by myself in the kitchen, just for a minute. I needed to visit the silence. To be sure of it. When your ears are filled with the conversation of strangers and the scream of a television set, and the beat of distant traffic, when your head spills over with the unbroken whine of other people’s lives, if you happen to stumble upon one of these pockets of nothing, you should sit in it for a while. It’s the only way to make sense of it all, because it helps you to unpick the rest of the day. Mother always said I lived in a world of my own, but what she didn’t realize was that was the very thing I could never manage to find for myself.

That night, once I’d filled up my ears with the silence, I gave the worktops a good going-over and filled the kettle. I put another load of washing in the machine. Backwards and forwards, measuring my life along the tiles. We think we’re on a journey, but really we’re just carving out the same little paths. Up and down a kitchen, an office, a factory floor, a supermarket aisle. Kidding ourselves we’re moving forward, when all we’re really doing is retracing the same life. Over and over again.

Afterwards, I stood in the carpet-quiet of the hall, trying to fit myself into an evening that waited behind a living room door. There was still some unpacking left to do from the move and I looked over at it, stacked against the far wall. Most of our lives still lingered in cardboard boxes. We’d taken out all the things we actually used, and the rest just shifted around from room to room. DVDs we never watched, books we never read, things Terry hadn’t touched in twelve months but still insisted he might need at some point, and clothes of mine that made me wonder if I used to be a whole other person. All these different versions of who we were and we didn’t feel ready to let any of them go. I told Terry we should put them all in the back bedroom until we had a chance to sort through, but he’d already filled that room up with his junk and heaven knows what else, just like he did in the last house, and so the boxes drifted around, getting under our feet. I stared at them as I listened to Terry giving his opinion to a television set; I listened to the washing machine spinning out the soundtrack of our lives; and over the top of it all I listened to the noise of my own breathing. It filled the whole of the inside of my head, and I must have stood there for a good ten minutes before I managed to take a step into the rest of my night. To sit with Terry as he slurped tea out of his ugly football mug and talked back to the television.

The murder was the first story on the evening news, before the politicians and the footballers, and all the Americans arguing with each other. They used the same photograph as the newspapers, but they showed other pictures as well. Pictures from her childhood. Pony rides and ice creams. Party nights. University days. Evenings out with other girls—other, more fortunate girls. A family photo from last Christmas, everyone at a dinner table, raising their glasses and saying cheers! to the camera. Her entire existence unfolded on a television screen and nineteen years was over in a matter of seconds.

Terry tapped his fingers on the remote control.

“Where do they find all these photographs?” I said.

“They’ve taken them off the internet. People’s whole lives are spread out on there. Anyone can steal a piece of it if they want to.”

I pulled a face. I’d never really bothered with the internet. I didn’t see the point of it when I had my crosswords and my music.

The newsreader was just repeating everything I’d read in the paper, and so I stared at the picture that stayed on the screen. The girl was in a garden, her arms around this big dog. A Labrador, perhaps, or a golden retriever. I can never tell the difference. She was smitten with the dog, you could tell from her face.

“I worry about people’s pets,” I said. “No one thinks about the pets, do they?”

Terry didn’t reply.

“I bet the poor thing wonders where she is,” I said.

I stared into the girl’s eyes and tried to find something there, a clue that she knew what was about to happen to her. If your life was going to end so easily, if it would slide from your hands without a moment’s notice and nineteen years was all you were going to be allowed on this earth, you would think, wouldn’t you, that God would give you a bit of a heads-up? Leave you some kind of Post-it note to make sure you made the most of the little time you had.

I was still staring when the scene changed to a press conference. A group of people sitting on plastic chairs in front of a big advertising board, like they have on the red carpet, except this one said, WEST MIDLANDS POLICE all over it. There was an officer in uniform and a detective inspector, and next to them were the girl’s parents. They were the same people they showed in the Christmas picture, although you never would have known if they hadn’t put it on the bottom of the screen, because grief had stolen them both and distorted their faces beyond recognition.

The police did all the talking. They said everything in that special police language they always use, the kind that makes it sound like they know something you don’t, going through the girl’s last known movements and asking for people to come forward, to report anything suspicious. Although they didn’t elaborate on what “suspicious” might mean, and what’s suspicious to one person is completely aboveboard to somebody else. I’ve found that out to my own detriment. The parents didn’t say anything. They kept their heads down, staring at a collection of microphones on the table and sipping water, but every now and then, one of them looked up with empty eyes, and immediately there was a feeding frenzy of lens shutters. Newspapers trying to capture their distress to put on tomorrow’s front pages, a perfect snapshot of despair to sell a paper, because nothing dilutes your own unhappiness like feeding on the unhappiness of others.

It was only when they panned out that I noticed. Behind the parents and the detectives, and the microphones, they’d put a giant photograph on the screen. It was the picture of the girl with the dog. The girl’s blond hair rested on her shoulders and she had one of those fringes that wasn’t really a fringe, but stray pieces of hair that fell perfectly onto her forehead and framed her face without any persuasion from a hairbrush. My fringe has never done that. My fringe has always had a personality all of its own. I frowned at the picture. Surely Terry saw it as well? It was so obvious. I looked over at him, but he was still watching the screen with one of his expressions and picking at a back tooth. I felt a breath catch in my throat and I was just about to point it out to him, to see if he agreed, but right at that moment he said, “They haven’t got a bloody clue who’s done it, have they?” and changed the channel. It was a sitcom. A middle-aged couple sitting on a settee, watching television, and for a second I thought it was us.

The moment passed. There was no point in saying anything, because Terry never believes a word I say. Hysterical. That’s what he calls me whenever I get in a state about something. “You’re being hysterical again, Linda,” he says and that’s always the end of it. Instead, I stared at the traces of egg yolk around his lips.

“Most murder victims are killed by someone close to them,” he said, without his eyes leaving the television screen.

The egg yolk was gathered deep in the lines at the corners of his mouth, where it would probably stay until morning.

“I know they are,” I said.

CHAPTER TWO

Obviously, I would never go to the police about what I saw at the press conference. I’m no fool.

In the past, each time I’ve been—and I haven’t been that often, I don’t care what they say—they’ve just fobbed me off with one of those volunteer officers and a paper cup filled with lukewarm tea.

The thing is, Linda, that’s how they always start. As though I have to have the thing pointed out to me by someone else, because I’m too stupid to recognize it on my own. It was the same when I reported the suspicious man in Boots, and when I asked them to check on a strange car parked up on the high street. Every time I’ve spotted a man they’ve shown on Crimewatch they’ve never been the least bit interested, and on the last occasion, when I went about a weird noise coming from across the road late at night, they kept me standing on the doorstep. They didn’t even let me into the station. They get it wrong so often. Jumping to conclusions and judging books by covers. They’re overstretched and underfunded. You hear it on the news all the time, and they need help matching the right person to the crime and sorting the guilty from the innocent, or people will just keep on getting hurt. I try to help as often as I can, but you can only do so much. Although it doesn’t mean I trust any of them because I’ve seen firsthand the damage they can do.

One of them came to the house a while ago. A community support officer in a high-visibility vest with a shortwave radio swinging from his pelvis. I saw him making his way down the garden path and Terry let him in the front door. I could hear them, talking in the kitchen in their low voices, so I popped upstairs to get changed because I don’t think it ever hurts to make a good impression. By the time I got back, he was gone and Terry was in his usual chair.

“What did he want, then?” I said.

Terry didn’t take his eyes off the telly. “Nothing much. Just a chat.”

Half an hour later, he turned to me and asked if I’d ever thought of doing an evening class. Terry wouldn’t know an evening class if it hit him in the face. It would’ve been that community support officer, interfering. I thought they were supposed to solve crimes, not send innocent people to learn woodwork.

---

After they found that girl’s body, nothing felt the same.

I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but there was a difference in the air. A gap where something else used to be. There were no kiddies playing out, for a start. You’d normally catch sight of one or two, whizzing past the house on their bikes after school, or you’d hear them somewhere over the hedges and the garden fences. Little voices in their imaginary worlds. Playing dress-up. Being doctors and princesses and models and film stars. Because that’s the best thing about being a child; you can just turn yourself into whoever you want to be. The little voices were gone now, hidden away indoors. Back doors were kept shut. Bolts slid across. Latches dropped. The pavements stayed quiet, and if you did spot someone, they were never alone. It was more than that, though; it felt as though the whole estate was peering back at you, waiting to see what would happen next.

The following day I did what I always did and I watched Terry eat his breakfast before he went to work. I like to sit at the kitchen table and do a crossword with my first cup of tea, because crosswords keep your mind sharp. They make you think about how everything else fits together, because you can’t answer one clue without considering all the others. The radio was on as well, because it made conversation for us and stopped anyone else from having to bother, but the disc jockeys seemed to have forgotten about weather reports and local travel news, and all the other subjects they usually fill the kitchen with, because the only thing they wanted to talk about was the murder. Everyone had so much they needed to discuss, although most of it struggled to find its way over the top of Terry and his cornflakes. He’s such a loud swallower. I’ve asked him on numerous occasions if he could do it more quietly, but he takes not one jot of notice.

They’d found her on some waste ground, down by the canal. She was taking a shortcut back from the supermarket and she still had her shopping with her, tins of cheap soup and a tube of toothpaste. Some of those reduced flowers with a little yellow sticker on the front. Mother always says that you can tell a lot from someone’s shopping bag. It’s a wonder someone found her so quickly, because it’s so quiet down by the canal. You’d never know you were right near a main road, but that’s the apron of trees, I suppose, shielding you from the noise of the traffic. It’s one of the few places left where nature still has the upper hand and it’s peaceful even in winter. I used to go down there all the time to get away from Mother because water always seems to swallow up all the other sounds, even the ones inside your own head.

She was definitely killed in the place where they found her, everyone on the radio—and even the police—were very sure of that, except no one seemed to know exactly why the murder might have happened. They speculated. Talked about boyfriends and ex-boyfriends. Discussed things she may or may not have done, friends she may or may not have had. She was such a good girl, people said, until she got in with the wrong crowd, because you will always be judged by the landscape in which you stand, and being murdered doesn’t stop everyone running over your life with their own particular set of rules and regulations about how we should and shouldn’t all behave. ...