I Know I Saw Her

by E.D. Thompson

Genres: Suspense; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Looks can be deceptive....or deadly

Parnell Park is a quiet, suburban street where not much happens.

Alice from number 31 observes the street's inhabitants - lives such as Kevin and Kim, the beautiful couple from across the road, as charmed as they are charming. Her own quiet, single life is hampered by private circumstance, but she craves more.

Then on a visit to London, Alice sees Kim on a passing train. But when she mentions it to Kevin on her return home, he insists that his wife is in the West of Ireland on holiday with friends. But she knows what she saw.

When Alice starts to investigate, her concern for Kim's life intensifies, and she finds herself in a high-stakes game with shadowy rules, hidden dangers - and unexpected temptations. Set over the course of a sultry summer, I Know I Saw Her is a masterfully told suspense novel about desire, appearances and deception, as compelling as it is creepy, full of unexpected turns.

Release date: July 1, 2021

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Print pages: 320

Sample

Someone is lying.

I saw her. I wasn’t sure if she saw me.

Kevin says I couldn’t have, she’s at a friend’s, not even in the same country as I was when I thought I saw her. But I didn’t think I saw her. I saw her.

Someone is lying.

This is a nice house in an avenue of nice houses. Who could possibly live here? At a glance, it is the home of a bank worker’s family, or a shopkeeper’s, maybe. An income bracket to match a substantial but not outrageous mortgage. People who put a bit of 1930s architecture ahead of a master bedroom with en-suite shower room in a shiny new development for the same money. Here, there is stained glass, and mature lime trees in full leaf all along the street. But look again. The windows of this particular house are dirty. The paint on the front door is flaking and a bracket securing the drainpipe has come away. There are slatted blinds on every window.

I observe all this from the driveway. I have just come twenty-five miles to County Armagh from Belfast International airport in a taxi. It is half past nine at night, but it is still light, and warm. I have come home. This is my house. Mine and Joe’s. And I don’t want to go inside.

I trundle my wheelie-case to the step, turn my key in the lock and step onto the coir mat, with a ‘Welcome’ message printed on it that actually makes me bristle with bottled-up anger. The house smells nice, though – wood polish and something good in the oven.

‘I’m home!’ I call.

There is a muffled answer from upstairs. Sounds like Joe is in the attic. I pick through the week’s post, which is resting in a casserole dish on the kitchen table, as I wait to hear him land safely on the upstairs floorboards and thud downstairs. Charity appeals, mainly. One from HMRC, which I’ll read properly tomorrow. A reminder from the optician, and supermarket bumph.

Joe appears in the kitchen doorway, in jeans, a t-shirt and bare feet. He is carrying an electric fan – that must be what he was hunting for in the attic.

‘Hi,’ I say, throwing down the post and opening my arms for a hug.

‘So, how was Kate?’ he asks, squeezing me tightly.

‘Tired, I think,’ I say. ‘I wish you’d come with me. She’d love to see you. The kids would love to see you.’

Kate is my niece – well, my sort-of-niece – but we’ve always had something special between us. I first met her when she was thirteen and I was twenty-four and we just hit it off. I never thought of her as a child, exactly, and now she’s thirty-nine and has three kids of her own.

‘I’ve made a pie and a bowl of coleslaw,’ Joe says. ‘We can eat it now or wait a while, whatever you want.’

I’ve been travelling since the late afternoon and all I’ve had to eat and drink was a bottle of water and some crisps.

‘Let’s eat now,’ I say. ‘Then I need an early night.’

‘Shall I open a bottle of wine?’ Joe asks.

I hesitate. I haven’t been sleeping well and I don’t think alcohol is helping. I drift off easily enough, but waken a couple of hours later and can’t get back. I’ve heard drink can do that. Yet I see in Joe’s face that he wants my homecoming to be some sort of celebration, and he’s been on his own all week.

I say yes.

As Joe gets out plates and big serving spoons, I think again, as I keep thinking, about Kate. By accident, really, I caught a slightly earlier train from Gatwick to East Croydon station and the taxi delivered me to their new place in a few minutes.

I was on the front doorstep, hadn’t even rung the bell yet, when I heard Kate practically screaming at George, her husband. She was shouting: ‘When will you stop kidding yourself, George? We’re not “bohemian”, we’re poor. We’re the fucking Cratchits. Hand to fucking mouth. And I’m sick of it.’

I would have crept away, gone for a walk or found somewhere for a coffee, come back later, but Kate looked up from where she was standing in the front room and saw me. She mouthed, ‘Oh shit,’ and put her head in her hands for just a second. Then she looked up again, waved to me, smiled and called, ‘I’m coming!’ What could I do? What could I say?

‘So, all the little ’uns happy to see you?’ asks Joe.

‘They’re not so little any more,’ I tell him, with a smile. ‘Well, Conall isn’t, anyway. He starts big school in September.’ Kate was worried about paying for his uniform. I know she went round some charity shops looking for a second-hand blazer, then came home and cried. I asked her to let me help. In the past, she would have brushed aside such an idea, but this time she accepted, tearfully. She was happily skint for years, but it’s different now that Conall is old enough to feel embarrassed, plus, she’s staring forty in the face and things aren’t getting any better.

‘Will they come over in August?’ Joe asks.

‘Kate and the kids will,’ I say. ‘Not George – he’s got a part.’

‘Great!’ Joe says. ‘What is it?’

‘Oh, it’s in one of those tiny shows in a room above a pub,’ I say. ‘Some Brexit satire.’

‘But George voted Leave,’ Joe says.

‘You know George. Show him any size of an audience and he’s your man. This food is so good.’ And it is. Joe can really cook. But I’m conscious that everything we’re eating was in the fridge or freezer before I left – obviously. That’s why we’re having coleslaw, for example, and not fresh salad leaves.

‘Did you beat him at the game?’ Joe asks, with a big smile.

‘Oh, yes,’ I say. ‘I saw Miss Ramsey, my old history teacher, in Bella Italia, Leicester Square. Had a little chat with her, to George’s consternation.’

George and I have this thing between us. It started when he and Kate hadn’t been together long, when they were both at RADA. Kate had invited me to come and stay at the big, filthy flat a lot of them shared in Bloomsbury.

George was a Home Counties boy, who considered himself an authority on London, compared with Kate, who’d never been there before her drama college auditions. He delighted in giving me lots of advice about disguising my tourist status, which, if displayed, would surely see me pickpocketed on the Tube and variously taken advantage of.

He told me London wasn’t like a provincial town where everyone knew everyone and people looked out for each other. Everybody was a stranger here. No-one said hello to anyone in the street. There would be no eye contact and no smiles. It was the sheer size of it. It was a genuine metropolis. It was just the way it was.

That was all right, until we were queuing in the British Museum gift shop for some postcards and who should I spot but Jane Ennis, who went to school with me and copied all my answers in French tests, which wasn’t smart as I wasn’t very good. We laughed and hugged and I smiled at George and told him it wasn’t so different to a provincial town after all – you could still bump into someone you knew. George huffed and said it was a fluke, that he had never run into anyone from home in all his time there. And then, the next day, we found ourselves in the queue for the Tower of London with my old Girl Guide leader, who was delighted, but hardly all that surprised, to see me.

Ever since then, I have regarded it as a challenge to encounter someone I know when in London visiting Kate and George. It’s childish, but it’s very satisfying when I win, which I often do.

‘Anyone else?’ Joe asks.

‘Well, I thought I saw Kim Kennedy on the train in East Croydon station,’ I said. ‘I was on the platform and she was heading for Victoria. But I’ve just seen Kevin out watering his hanging baskets – he doesn’t seem like a hanging baskets kind of guy, does he? I wonder why he has them? – and he insisted Kim’s at a friend’s somewhere in County Galway, so I must have made a mistake.’

Joe shrugs and tops up my wine.

‘You still won,’ he says.

‘I did.’ I smile.

I didn’t make a mistake, though. I did see Kim Kennedy on that train. So either she isn’t telling Kevin the truth or he isn’t telling me. Not that I suppose it matters, and not that it’s remotely any of my business, but someone is definitely lying.

‘How has she been?’ I ask Linzi. ‘Did she notice I wasn’t coming in?’

‘Notice?’ Linzi says. ‘She hasn’t stopped complaining about it all week.’

Linzi is a care worker at Mum’s home. She has the bloated face and enormous chest of a woman who eats and drinks too much, yet you can see that when she was seventeen she was probably a real heartbreaker. I’d guess she’s late thirties now, although it’s hard to be sure, because of the weight she’s carrying.

‘Sorry,’ I say.

Linzi stops in the corridor and looks at me. ‘You’ve nothing to be sorry for. You need a wee break. Everybody needs a wee break.’

We walk into the day room.

‘Ruby. Alice is here to see you. Show her your nails, that the girl did for you yesterday. Show Alice your lovely nails, Ruby.’

Mum looks up, looks at Linzi, glances at me, looks at her nails.

‘It wouldn’t have been my choice of colour,’ she says, apparently to the backs of her hands, stretched out flat in mid-air, just above her knees.

I sit down in the chair next to hers.

‘Oh? What colour would you have chosen?’

It’s always easier if there’s already a conversation starter, rather than trying to begin talking from cold.

‘I like pink,’ Mum says, ‘although when the girl did my colours she said I should always go for a baby pink and never a coral.’

‘So you had your colours done, too?’ I ask.

‘That was ages ago, Ruby,’ Linzi says. ‘Do you still remember that?’ Then turning to me, ‘She has a powerful memory, Alice.’

Yes and no. Mum unfailingly remembers that I was to bring her some cinnamon lozenges, or emery boards or new pyjamas, and will bite my head off if I forget them, but on certain days she will have deleted her entire marriage to my late father and my whole childhood and youth.

Before I went to Croydon, I brought her a photograph of her on her seventieth, with her two older brothers, now deceased, all lined up in front of the fireplace. She said, ‘Will you put that in a frame for Mummy? She would love one of the three of us together.’

‘Mummy’ – my grandmother – would have been 104 when that picture of her elderly children was snapped, had she not died twenty years earlier.

Once, Mum told me about the two hilarious men who had come to visit them in the day room the night before. They had played pranks and told jokes and generally been the best visitors ever. She hoped they’d come back soon. When I asked Linzi, it turned out there had been no visitors – they’d been watching Ant and Dec.

This from a woman who’d launched a small business, driven an expensive car, solved cryptic crosswords for fun and thought nothing of reading a book in an evening. She’d even more or less designed the bungalow I grew up in and how glad I was that she didn’t know it had been sold to pay her care home fees.

After leaving Mum, I have to do a big shop. With no money coming in over the summer, I should drive to Lidl, but instead I go to Nicholson’s, because it’s nicer. Following the stultifying heat of the care home, the supermarket’s air-con is delicious. It’s too hot again today to think of cooking big meals, so I pick up eggs and cheese and salad ingredients and some wheaten bread.

I am hesitating at the dessert chiller when someone reaches across and sets a packet of two caramel choux buns in my trolley.

‘You know you want to.’

It’s Kevin Kennedy, carrying a punnet of strawberries and two bottles of wine.

I blush. Kevin Kennedy makes me nervous because I find him attractive and feel in my gut that he knows this. There is absolutely no foundation for my suspicion. I have never come anywhere near flirting with him, or, I think, said or done anything to give myself away. Yet there is just something in the way he is with me, something like a gently mocking smirk just a millimetre below the surface. He knows. I’m sure of it.

‘You haven’t seen Elvis in the chilled meats, then?’ he asks, with a lopsided smile someone, some time, has told him is sexy.

I don’t immediately understand what he’s getting at.

‘Oh!’ I say, twigging that he’s teasing me over my supposed sighting of his wife at East Croydon station, when she’s actually in the west of Ireland. ‘No! And no Lord Lucan at the hot food deli.’

I immediately hate myself. Kevin was making fun of me and I not only let him, but I joined in. Weak, weak. I experience a tiny, despicable moment of hoping that Kim is the one who is lying – lying to Kevin so that she can be with her lover in London. I’ve no idea if this is likely. The Kennedys only moved into Parnell Park about eighteen months ago and I don’t know them well. She is a lecturer, I think in travel and tourism, or something like that. Kevin, I understand, goes to Belfast three evenings a week to sub-edit for a newspaper. I’m not sure which one. The rest of the time, he seems to be at home. He’s about my age, well-spoken and, I suspect, very, very clever, yet he doesn’t appear to have a career. I don’t think Kim is as bright as him, but she seems to bring home the bacon and is, I’d guess, ten years younger.

‘Any plans for the summer, now school’s out?’ Kevin asks.

‘No, not really,’ I say. ‘I finished a week before the end of term, because the teacher I was subbing for came back, and so I took the opportunity of popping over to London. How about you?’

‘Actually, I’ve just been to the travel agent to book us a couple of weeks in Île de Ré,’ Kevin says.

‘Oh, I know it!’ I say, delighted to be able to keep up. ‘We stayed in Saint-Clément-des-Baleines, years ago. Whereabouts will you be based?’

‘Saint-Martin,’ Kevin says. ‘Near the harbour.’

‘Nice,’ I say.

As I head for the tills, I think two things. First, Kevin Kennedy is too cool to push a trolley or carry a wire basket, so must have to go to the shops with considerable frequency if each trip is limited to what he can carry in his arms. Second, who books a simple holiday for two in France through a travel agent, these days? Why didn’t he just do it online?

I wonder what Kevin knows about Joe. I have no idea how much most of our neighbours are aware of – I stopped considering their opinions on Joe and me way back. I had to. It may be that we are the talk of Parnell Park; it may be that we are of no lingering interest whatsoever.

Time to go home. I’ll ask Joe to make us an omelette for lunch – he’s much better at it than I am. If I spend some time with him first, then I won’t feel so bad dragging the sun lounger down to the bottom of the garden and taking a while for myself.

It might be the heat, and all the bare flesh on show, but for the first time in years, I find myself thinking about sex these days and how I would quite like to have some. Kevin Kennedy has flashed through my mind in this regard, but in reality I suspect something cruel in him and think what I really need is someone kind. At fifty-one I’m not too old to have expectations, am I?

The indicator light on the Corsa is playing up again, after repeated repairs. I need to raise the funds for a newer car.

One reason to book a holiday through a travel agent is for the ATOL insurance, should anything go wrong.

Another reason is that a holiday booked through a travel agent is somehow more concrete, so would make a better present or a surprise. Or provide you with better cover, if, for example, someone was lying about something.

I was hanging on by my fingertips in school for the last few weeks. The truth is, I’m a dinosaur in the classroom. I trained with blackboards, not interactive whiteboards. Technology leapt in during my baby years at home and I never caught up. When I tried to go back, I struggled. Without a job, I couldn’t seem to find the opportunities to go on the right courses to bring my skills up to date. Subbing was a lifeline, financially, so I kept on putting myself up for it, but I’ve been out of my depth for years. When I’m out of work, I’m terrified about the lack of income; when I’m in work, I live in a state of high anxiety.

I had a sweet spell last Christmas, where I was reading Atonement and Tess of the d’Urbervilles with the sixth form of an all-girls school. The only device we used was an electric kettle in the corner, and we took it in turns to bring in cake or cookies. We strolled through each lesson, yet a lot of learning went on. When that teacher returned to her rightful role I could have cried. I was back in the bear pit of early-morning phone calls from whoever, asking me to be in school by 8.30 a.m., to face God knows what.

Not all new approaches fill me with dread, though. Safeguarding training is a step forward. It is correct, in my opinion, that anyone working with vulnerable people, like children or the elderly, should be vigilant about signs of abuse or neglect. I have seen the eye-rolling when I submit paperwork recording a bruise here, a scab there. Yes, probably they are innocuous, but what if they are not? What if everyone who has one piece of a potential jigsaw puzzle fails to put it forward, and the picture doesn’t emerge until it’s too late?

That’s probably why I phone the police. I make it clear that I’m not reporting a missing person or accusing anyone of foul play, I am merely giving my small fragment of what might or might not ever turn out to be a bigger jigsaw, just in case my little piece was vital. Just in case.

I suppose I know they will ask for my name and address, but I don’t expect them to call round to the house.

When the doorbell rings, I am in the front room, reading.

I hear Joe thud out of the kitchen and scurry upstairs, give him a moment and go to answer.

Two female officers, in uniform, albeit shirtsleeves, are on the doorstep.

‘Mrs Payne? Alice Payne? You spoke to someone this morning?’

‘Yes!’

‘Can we come in?’

I think of Joe, hiding upstairs.

‘Would it be all right if we talked in the garden?’ I say.

The women exchange a look, but the smaller one says, ‘The garden’s fine.’

As we walk round to the side gate, I notice their huge, heavy belts loaded with all sorts of gadgetry. How on earth could they ever run in those, I wonder, if called upon to pursue a suspect on foot?

Not used to guests in my garden, it only now dawns on me that there isn’t really anywhere to sit. There is my scruffy sun lounger and a wooden picnic table, but I could hardly expect the police officers to sprawl on one or throw their legs over the fixed seating of the other.

‘We’re fine to stand,’ says the taller woman, reading my thoughts.

‘Mrs Payne,’ begins the other.

‘Ali, please, call me Ali,’ I say.

‘Ali, could you just tell us again where you believe you saw Mrs Kennedy?’

She hasn’t taken out a notebook, I notice.

‘Yes, of course. I was standing on the platform at East Croydon train station. Mrs Kennedy was sitting by the window on a train coming from Gatwick airport, heading for Victoria.’

‘Ali, you say the train was coming from Gatwick – do you mean it was coming from Gatwick direction?’ The smaller one, still.

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘Which means it was on t. . .