The Neighbour's Secret

by Sharon Bolton

Genres: Domestic Thrillers; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

A new job. A new home. A new start.

It's all Anna wants.

But in a closed rural community, strange traditions and a suspicion of outsiders mean everything is not as it seems.

Three teenage girls have vanished at the annual Gathering as they reach their sixteenth birthday.
No one seems to be investigating.
And a fourth girl begs Anna for help, fearing that she will be next to disappear.

Everyone has secrets.
Anna is watching everyone.
But who is watching Anna?

An unpredictable and wild page-turner, with shocks, surprises and a killer twist for a finale.

Release date: November 7, 2024

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 352

Sample

Had Anna Brown been a more convincing liar, I might have lost interest in her immediately. But lies are so intriguing, aren’t they? Why people tell them, how little they think through the consequences, how desperate they become when in danger of being found out. To my mind, lies are second only to secrets, and those I find deeply exciting. A short while after learning that Anna Brown was a liar, I discovered she was hiding a secret. After that, there was no way I was going to leave her alone.

You might say secrets are my thing.

I first came across her in mid-October, on a day that was crisp and bright, with a downy layer of mist over much of the ground as the sun came up. The trees were still full, and not all of the leaves had turned, but they’d become brittle and when the wind blew, they made the sound that always reminds me of a damp fire crackling.

I’d arrived home the night before in the dark, and was keen to see how the garden had coped during my ten-day absence. What should have been a minor operation had turned complicated with an ensuing infection and I came home from hospital weaker than I’d gone in. I’d still woken early though; I like to think of myself as being the first person in the village to rise. It feels a little like stealing a march on the enemy.

Most of the late roses had faded. I deadheaded where I could reach and rewound a loose strand of honeysuckle. I pulled up the odd weed and was grinding my foot on a snail when I heard voices in the lane outside.

‘I must have missed the rain.’

It was Gardner, my next-door neighbour. He is a big, loud-voiced man in his early forties with an estranged wife and a couple of ill-mannered sons with whom he is fortunate not to live. They visit occasionally – the children, not the wife – and the noise becomes unbearable. I have seven confiscated footballs that have landed on my side of the fence. I deny all knowledge of them, of course; Gardner would insist on having them returned, in spite of the damage they’ve done to my plants.

Gardner is the sort of man who doesn’t read a book from one year to the next but has an opinion on everything. I’ve never seen him take a walk, but he rises early for the gym most mornings. He receives regular deliveries of protein formula, a substance I associate with sickly children and the elderly rather than a man in his prime. I know this because I often take delivery of his parcels when he is out at work.

So, it was definitely Gardner in the lane outside. Needless to say, I had no idea what he was talking about; it hadn’t rained in days. A quick glance at the ground could have told him that.

‘Excuse me?’ The woman replying was as mystified as I, albeit politer than I might have been.

‘Your hair’s wet. Has it been raining?’

‘I swim.’

I’ve witnessed Gardner’s interactions with women many times and they never seem to improve. I was on the verge of returning indoors when the woman spoke again.

‘The lake,’ she said. ‘Top of the lane and through the woods.’

Gardner had obviously asked her where she swam; a smarter man would have worked it out for himself. There is a lane that runs from the back of our small terrace of houses for a quarter mile, ending at a stile. From there a fifteen-minute walk along a public footpath leads to the lake. I say lake, but compared to the splendours of Bassenthwaite, Derwent Water and Thirlmere, our nearest sizeable bodies of water, it’s little more than a large pond. I’d never known anyone swim in it before, but each to their own.

‘Is that safe?’ Gardner was asking.

‘Safe in what way?’

I was warming to the woman. She wasn’t simpering the way so many women did when talking to Gardner. Her voice was factual, challenging.

‘Well, you know. It’s deep.’

‘You can drown in two feet of water. Depth is irrelevant.’

‘It’s not exactly clean.’

‘It’s a lake. It won’t be chlorinated.’

I found myself smiling.

‘I bet it’s cold.’

‘Well, there I can’t argue. Excuse me, I must—’

‘I’m Hugh. Hugh Gardner.’

A short pause. Then, ‘Anna Brown,’ she said, and that’s when I changed my mind and walked right up to the back gate. Some time ago I’d replaced the gravel with flagged stones and so made no sound as I approached to within a couple of feet of where the couple was standing. There is a crack in the wooden panelling and through it I had a rear view of Gardner. He was wearing jeans and a dark jacket, the clothes he always wears to work. He changes into his uniform when he gets there.

I couldn’t see the woman but something about the way she’d given her name had intrigued me. She’d called it out like a declaration, a challenge, almost as though she wasn’t expecting to be believed. Her accent too was a surprise, although obviously I’d noticed this at the start. She was from the south, home counties at a guess.

‘The new baker?’ Gardner isn’t a man to take a hint. ‘I’ve been meaning to pop in but I’ve been on nights. Settling in alright? We’re neighbours, by the way. Next door but one. I’m on the other side of—’

‘Nice to meet you, Mr Gardner. Have a good day.’

I caught a glimpse of a slight figure with damp dark hair moving quickly out of sight. Gardner watched her go, only getting into his vehicle, a ridiculously over-powered American-style truck, when she’d turned the corner. He drove off and I went back indoors.

I had no idea how I’d missed all the signs of occupancy in the house to my left. It had been late when I’d got home and I’d been tired after hours of waiting for prescriptions to be ready and doctors to sign release papers. Even so. Our small terrace of three cottages was once one much bigger house and the dividing walls are plasterboard. Gardner could knock them down with one swing of his fireman’s axe were he so minded. The result is that I can hear almost everything that goes on in both houses. I know what TV programmes Gardner watches, the video games he plays and the music he listens to. I know that he breaks wind several times before he gets out of bed in the morning and that he sings in the shower but never out of it. During sexual intercourse he can maintain an erection for between fifteen and twenty-seven minutes, and while he claims to his mates to be a Labour supporter, he isn’t.

The house on my other side, though, the bakery, had been empty for a year. I’d grown used to the silence, had noticed nothing unusual last night, but now, knowing it was occupied again, it seemed bursting with sound. I heard clattering in the kitchen and an oven being turned on. A tap ran. She dropped something and muttered ‘damn it’. She was working in a hurry. Then light footsteps ran upstairs and the shower sounded. Knowing she was out of the way I went out of the front door and, in the early morning light, took in the transformation next door.

The dull brown panelling, the fake mullioned windows, the dusty plastic loaves and cakes and the red gingham cloths had vanished and in their place was a huge but simple dove-grey fascia reading ‘The Bread Basket’. The new glass in the window was festooned with white bunting and an almost invisible plastic shelving system stood ready for the day’s produce. I squeezed past a cast-iron table and chairs and through the window saw oak shelves and drawers stretching to the ceiling, Perspex display counters, more tables and chairs, dressers, a flagged stone floor. There was a coffee machine, stacks of bottle-green crockery and gleaming silverware.

What I could see, though, was nothing compared to what I could smell. An absolute symphony of scents. The base notes were yeasty from the loaves still proving, but swaying above them, like instruments rising and falling as the music unfolded, were the richness of warm pain aux raisins, a bittersweet whiff of melting chocolate and the caraway seed scent of rye bread. There was sugar in the air too, fine as talcum powder, floating like the hint of a snowstorm and making my nostrils itch.

So many different scents, making me feel warm and cosy, as though I were a child again, but living in the sort of Enid Blyton-infused world I read about, rather than the Mother’s Pride reality. At the same time, an inexplicable sadness was washing over me, as though the smell of The Bread Basket was there to torment, hint at pleasures that could never be mine.

‘Good morning.’

I started. She’d taken me by surprise. I, who pride myself on knowing when my neighbours use the lavatory in the night, simply hadn’t heard Anna Brown open the front door to the bakery and join me on the pavement. I realised I’d closed my eyes.

‘Not open yet, I’m afraid,’ she went on. ‘Not till seven thirty.’

‘No matter.’ I couldn’t meet her eyes. I felt almost as though she’d caught me helping myself to the croissants she’d placed in the window. She’d arranged them perfectly on the rectangular plate and they lay with military precision, golden as the sunrise, curling in on themselves like peeled prawns.

‘I’m Anna,’ she said. ‘I expect you’re my next-door neighbour.’

I dragged my eyes away from the croissants and looked at her carefully. Her hands were covered in flour, so she didn’t hold one out to me and I certainly didn’t offer one either. I don’t like touching people’s hands even when they seem clean. Her apron was dirty too, smeared in flour and grease and what looked like apricot jam. Her eyes were a tiny bit bloodshot and I wondered if it was caused by immersion in lake water.

This time, I admit, I wouldn’t have caught the lie. This time, she’d prepared herself. Her voice was low and steady, and she had no problem making eye contact. I’d have put her age at late thirties. Her shoulder-length hair was the darkest that brown can be before it becomes black. Her skin was clear but starting to line around her eyes and along her brow. She was less attractive than I was expecting, given Gardner’s simpering; in fact, I thought her rather plain, her eyes a little too small and dark, her face rather long. But then I remembered the stream of female visitors I’ve had to suffer over the years and that Gardner is easily pleased.

I introduced myself and made some comment about the changes she’d made to the bakery. It was politely enough meant, but she seemed a little put out.

‘People seem to like the pavement tables,’ she said.

‘We’ll see how popular they are next month,’ I said. ‘When the winds get up.’

I was trying to be helpful; being from the south, she wouldn’t know quite how vicious our Cumbrian winters can be. There are days in January when snow seems to pour down from nearby Tamland Fell like an avalanche, smothering the village in hours, keeping all but the hardiest indoors. November gales could knock the frail from their feet. The idea of creating a café society here was almost funny.

‘There are some tables inside as well,’ she said. ‘And in the courtyard at the back. It’s more sheltered there.’

Courtyard? I didn’t mean to scoff, but really? She had a backyard, all three of us did. I’d transformed mine, through hard work and a not inconsiderable investment, into a modest but thriving garden. Last time I’d looked into the bakery’s backyard, it had been a mess of bins and rubbish left over by the last occupant. I remembered then that I hadn’t looked out of the rear window that morning. The hospital stay had affected me more than I’d realised.

‘I open at half seven,’ she was saying, although she’d told me that already. ‘Come and have breakfast. On me.’

‘I’m diabetic,’ I told her, and after wishing her a good morning – I’m never rude – I went inside.

I couldn’t settle though. The milk I’d bought on my way home last night seemed to cling to my tongue and the Weetabix lay heavy in my stomach, as though I’d forced it down dry. It could have been my imagination – I’d closed all the windows – but the baking smells were stealing into my house. The Today programme – I listen through headphones out of consideration to my neighbours – was dull and uninteresting. I don’t really care whether police in inner cities carry Tasers, and the rising and falling of the pound doesn’t affect me.

I was still sure that Anna Brown was hiding something. She’d collected herself by the time she spoke to me, but Gardner had caught her unawares. I wanted to do the same. So, as the seven thirty news came on I switched off the radio and found my jacket. Naturally, I locked my front door. There is a lot of nonsense talked about rural communities being safe but while it’s hard to imagine a community more rural, I’ve seen nothing particularly trustworthy in the people I live among.

Strangers and visitors see the pretty houses, the grandeur of the surrounding hills and assume they’ve wandered into some sort of bucolic idyll, one with a powerful sense of community in which everyone looks out for each other. They couldn’t be more wrong.

I’ve wondered, sometimes, if it’s the combination of isolation, inclement weather and relative poverty that engenders a meanness of spirit among the local population. Petty crime seems to go hand in hand with high levels of unemployment and when everyday life is a struggle, it’s hard to show much interest in the well-being of one’s neighbours.

Or maybe they just don’t like me.

The bakery door still displayed its ‘closed’ sign. Ms Brown must have seen me through the glass of the front door though because she opened it after only a couple of seconds. She’d changed her apron and washed her hands.

‘Hello again,’ she said. ‘Welcome. Come in.’

I followed her inside, braced against the smell, telling myself it was only chemistry. I would not be so easily seduced a second time.

‘I don’t recall your name,’ I said. I remembered her name perfectly, of course, but I wanted to hear her say it again.

‘Anna Brown,’ she muttered, and I felt a warm glow of triumph. Her eyes had dropped, her cheeks reddened. She didn’t like having to repeat her falsehood but falsehood it was. Anna Brown was not her real name.

‘Where are you from, Anna?’ I used her Christian name deliberately, to make clear our differing social status. Earlier, I’d only told her my family name, implying that she should address me formally.

‘South.’ She retreated behind the counter where I noticed loaves were already lined up neatly, each labelled with a little black card with gold lettering: Sourdough, Wholemeal, Farmhouse, Spinach & Cheese Ciabatta, Sweet Potato & Beetroot Focaccia. I’d never heard of most of the bread I could see in front of me.

‘Have a seat,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit chilly in the courtyard still. The sun doesn’t reach it till mid-morning.’

There were two tables tucked away in a corner of the shop. I had to hand it to her – she’d managed the space very well.

‘Where in the south?’ I pulled out a chair – wood, painted turquoise, with a padded cushion on the seat – and sat.

Her head twitched to the right. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘Oven timer. With you in a sec.’ She vanished.

I’d heard no timer and I have ears like a bat. I made a mental note to check her left hand when she returned. The indentation of a recently removed wedding ring might suggest she was fleeing from a relationship gone wrong.

She returned a few seconds later, bringing nothing with her.

‘Did you leave a similar business behind?’ I paused for effect. ‘In the south?’

‘No.’ She faked industry by rearranging an already perfectly stacked row of loaves. ‘This is a new venture.’

‘What brought you to St Abel’s Chapel?’

She looked up, a fraction too quickly. ‘A vacant shop. Now, what can I get you? Tea, coffee, hot chocolate? Maybe not chocolate, if you’re diabetic. How about coffee and a buttered teacake? There’s a sprinkling of sugar on those, that’s all, and a tablespoon of raisins. That should be OK, shouldn’t it?’

‘I’ve had breakfast. Just tea, please. Indian. Loose. And I like to add my own milk.’

Her smile froze for a split second. ‘Coming up.’

She turned her back on me as she worked, giving me time to take in the Welsh dresser with its row of homemade jams, chutneys and pickles, and its huge plates of scones: one sweet, one savoury. There was a chilled cabinet selling smoked salmon, cured ham and clotted cream. Directly in front of me on the counter, almost like a challenge, was a plate of pork pies, their crenelated crusts gleaming with animal fat.

I was beginning to feel uncomfortable again. Something about the sheer bounty of the shop seemed to be making me feel smaller. It was as though the loaves of sourdough, the croissants, the pork pies and the teacakes were in league with their baker against me. Everything about the bakery yelled professionalism, competence, and yet there was a flaw here. An illusion. All was not as it seemed.

‘You must buy a lot of stock in,’ I said. ‘You can’t produce all of this yourself.’ I nearly added, ‘Especially when you’ve been swimming,’ but stopped myself. Gardner had accused me of spying on him more than once. It was only a matter of time before he bad-mouthed me to our new neighbour and I’d be an idiot to play into his hands.

‘I get up at four,’ she replied, without turning around. ‘I leave everything ready to start proving or baking the night before. And some things, the pies and the heavier cakes, will last a few days.’

I’d already seen a large decorated cake on the counter, protected by a huge Perspex dome. It was a garish affair, covered in black icing, featuring orange pumpkins and cartoon ghosts. ‘Happy Halloween’ read the legend around the base, and a small handwritten note to one side informed customers that Halloween orders were being taken.

‘Is it me, or does the village seem busy today?’ she said, as she poured boiling water. ‘I must have counted twenty vehicles going through already.’

I checked the date on my wristwatch. ‘Sounds about right,’ I replied. ‘By midday you’ll struggle to cross the high street.’

She turned around then, her dark eyebrows almost meeting. ‘Where are they going? There’s nothing up that road. Well, not that I know of.’

‘But then you haven’t lived here long.’

She said nothing else, but her mouth had tightened when she approached again, this time carrying a tray that seemed ridiculously overladen given that I was only expecting tea. She put it down, a little more firmly that she needed to, but then curiosity got the better of her.

‘Is there a hotel up there? A conference centre? A lot of the traffic seemed to be delivery vans.’

She removed a teapot, teacup and saucer, spoon, milk jug, sugar basin and a small side plate. I looked up sharply, saw the challenge in her eyes.

‘It’s a sausage roll.’ She gave me a tight-lipped smile. ‘My own recipe. Just a taste.’

It was small and perfectly formed, golden as a honeycomb, pastry flakes looking ready to fly away like thistledown at any moment. The sausage gleamed at me from both ends, pink and slightly obscene. I felt my stomach turn over.

‘Don’t mind my curiosity,’ she said. ‘I’m a businesswoman. If there’s a big hotel up there, it could be very good for me.’

‘It’s a church,’ I told her. ‘Perhaps they’ll need communion bread.’

I was teasing. I knew she’d be overrun with church-related orders before the day was out. The people who would arrive in the village over the next couple of weeks weren’t known for self-denial. Practically on cue, the doorbell sounded, and Anna didn’t manage to hide her look of relief. I took advantage of her back being turned to bite into the sausage roll, taking around half of it into my mouth. The pastry burst apart on my tongue. The sausage was warm, peppery, with a hint of something I couldn’t quite place, herbal, but with a heat in it. It was gone before I knew it and I found myself trembling. The slick, salty grease of sausage still coated the inside of my mouth and I drank down scalding tea to get rid of it.

The newcomers were church people. They are easy to distinguish from the random tourists who wander through the village from time to time. The church people dress for an outing, for one thing. Their annual gathering is a big deal for them. Tourists are usually in hiking or cycling clothes.

These three, all women, were no exception. Two were in very smart clothes, given how early in the day it was. High heels, sheer tights, fitted jackets and understated make-up. Perfect hair. They were the sort of women who followed Coco Chanel’s fashion trick of putting on their jewellery and then taking one piece off. The younger of the three wore oversized jeans and a college sweatshirt. She had her hands thrust deep into her jeans pockets.

‘Oh my,’ the oldest said. ‘Isn’t this heaven?’

‘Very nice,’ replied the next in line, age wise. The youngest, I’d noticed, was little more than a child. ‘A big improvement. Oh, look, Mum. Gluten-free. What a relief. Good morning, you must be Anna.’

‘Oh, that smell,’ the older one said before Anna could speak.

‘I love what you’ve done to the place,’ said the younger, although she’d said much the same thing already.

They carried on like this for a while, ignoring me, so I got up and put the plate with the half-eaten sausage roll on the counter. I didn’t trust myself not to finish it if it remained on the table. Momentarily distracted from the group fawning over her interior decor, Anna raised her eyebrows.

‘Too rich,’ I said.

Her face twitched, then she turned her back on me.

‘We hear you’re the woman for us,’ the younger one said. ‘We need a cake.’

‘I’m the woman for you,’ Anna agreed, and I could see in a mirror on the wall opposite the counter that she was smiling, a much wider, brighter smile than any she’d bestowed on me. It quite transformed her face. ‘What sort of cake?’ she added.

‘A cake among other things,’ the older one interrupted. ‘But we’ll start with the cake. Only, it must be a really beautiful cake.’

This was getting tiresome. I was Anna’s first customer of the day and her next-door neighbour to boot, and yet she was practically ignoring me. The newcomers hadn’t so much as registered my existence. I might not have been in the shop at all.

‘Wedding? Christening?’ Anna said.

The child was pushed forward. She seemed incapable of looking at anything but the floor and I’d yet to properly see her face. Also, she appeared to be shaking, as though holding back some powerful emotion.

‘A birthday cake, for darling Constance. My goodness, I have no idea where the time goes.’

I’d decided they were three generations of the same family. Daughter, mother, grandmother. Now that I’d reached that conclusion, I could see the family resemblance. All were of a similar height and build, although the girl was slightly taller and quite a bit thinner than the others. All were fair-haired and fair-skinned, the older two with slightly hooked noses, wide mouths and a lot of very white teeth.

I knew, before she opened her mouth, that the girl would be wearing braces. It was the sort of family that set great store by perfect teeth.

‘Sixteenth birthday,’ the mother clarified. ‘We need it in nine days. Does that give you enough time?’

‘Of course,’ Anna replied. ‘Let’s look at designs, shall we? Unless you have something specific in mind. Constance, is it? Very nice to meet you.’

I was getting up. I was going to make some remark about the tea being cold, although it wasn’t. It was actually very good tea. And then something stopped me in my tracks. The girl, Constance, soon to be sixteen years old, had looked up at last.

She was, quite literally, petrified, frozen on the spot. Her eyes were fixed and unblinking. And blood was dripping onto the floor, on either side of her feet.

The cuffs of the girl’s sweatshirt were wet – it was a deep maroon, almost black in colour, or I’d have noticed earlier – and there were damp patches on her jeans, to either side of her hips.

This young girl had slit her wrists and might be about to bleed out in the new bakery.

I settled myself back down and poured another cup.

So, was he mad? Or bad?

Possibly the most frequently asked question of mental health professionals. It was, at the same time, impossible to answer with any degree of integrity. The reasons behind disorders of the mind were as many and varied as their manifestations. Sadly, nuance did not sit well within the criminal justice system.

‘We have eight appointments,’ she told the boy, after she’d introduced herself. ‘Two a week over the next month.’

‘I understand.’ His polite smile stretched a little wider. ‘I’m sorry to be causing so much trouble.’

Jago Moore, seventeen years old, white and very bright, had gone nuts (the headteacher’s words) in the cafeteria of his expensive private school six days earlier. He’d broken crockery, hurled chairs at windows, screamed obscenities and run the length of the long communal dining tables, kicking plates, cutlery and food into the laps of the astonished (and, let’s be honest, probably a bit gleeful) pupils. As a grand finale, he’d stabbed a physics teacher in the abdomen with a dinner knife and at that point, any glee on the part of the boys had turned to terror and they’d stampeded from the hall like wildebeest at the sight of a scaly tail.

Had the knife been a little longer, a little sharper, the young female teacher might not have lived to hear the end-of-lunch bell. As it was, she’d suffered extensive bruising and a bit of non-serious internal bleeding. She was expected back at school in the foreseeable future. Whether the same could be said of her attacker remained to be seen.

‘Could we open the blinds, do you think?’ he asked, his eyes narrowing as he looked at the shielded window. His smile, though, didn’t falter.

The two of them were sitting at one end of a long, thin room, where she’d placed a sofa for her clients and an armchair for herself. A low coffee table held unthreatening magazines. She’d come across the term unthreatening magazines in a manual of best practice and was still trying to figure out what a threatening magazine might be. Guns and Ammo? Black Belt Monthly?

‘I feel claustrophobic with them closed.’ Still that unwavering smile.

‘The blinds are for your privacy,’ she told him. ‘There’s a street outside and a bus stop. Passers-by might be able to see in.’

‘I don’t mind. I’d prefer them open.’ He looked to be on the verge of getting to his feet. ‘I’m going to open them.’

‘I’ll do it.’ She held up a hand to stop him, conscious that already he was setting the terms of their engagement and she was letting him. ‘But if it gets too bright, we may have to reconsider.’

‘It won’t. This room faces west. The sun won’t be directly outside until afternoon.’

She pulled up the blind. He was right about the direction, although she had. . .