Watched: When Road Rage Follows You Home (28 page)

Esther opened the back door and sat on the doorstep as the cat prowled around the corner, breaking into a quickstep when he saw her. He rubbed against her leg, mewing in annoyance at the fact it wasn’t sunny enough to play outside and then pressed past her into the house. Inside, he sniffed the air to make sure it was up to his standards and then strutted into the kitchen, sitting and looking up expectantly.

He wolfed down the food, lapped at the water and then fell asleep on the sofa next to Esther as she watched television. She stroked his back and head, running her fingers along the small tufts of dark hair that were beginning to grow back on the area that had been burned. When they were fully through, it would mean Patch had two black spots on his back.

The cat opened his damaged eye, peering at her crookedly.

‘Are you going to come to our new flat, Patch?’

If going back to sleep was a ‘yes’, then his response was emphatic.

Esther was feeling drowsy herself, an unfamiliar feeling without the assistance of tablets. She lay back onto the sofa, smiling as Patch grumbled at having to move himself. He spread out and pressed into her anyway.

The next thing she knew, the doorbell was ringing and Patch had leapt away, dashing for the back door, where Esther let him out before he started howling. As he bolted for the hedge at the end of the garden, Esther edged around to the front until she could see who was there and then greeting a man from the estate agent’s.

He was young and wearing an ill-fitting suit, presumably some sort of trainee – all spiky hair, bum fluff on his face and far too much enthusiasm. He started by taking photographs at the front of the house, as Esther avoided getting into a conversation about the weather. Instead, she stayed on the driveway, out of shot, checking both ways along the street, Leah’s threat in her mind.

When he was finished, they passed along the side of the house, heading towards the back garden. As they reached the corner, they stopped at the same time, the toxic, unmistakeable aroma of petrol charring the air. It scorched the back of Esther’s throat, as much a taste as a smell.

Esther pressed ahead, trying to pretend there was nothing wrong, but the agent followed his nose until he was standing over the allotment patch she had created along the edge of the boundary. Where there had been neat lines of planted vegetables, the soil was now wet and rancid.

The agent looked at her awkwardly but didn’t say anything, instead taking pictures of the trimmed lawn and clipped hedges, as if dumped cans of flammable liquid was normal.

Esther had dozed on the sofa with Patch for less than an hour – but the sabotage must have happened then. Instinctively, she looked for footprints in the area but there was nothing. The petrol would have already seeped through the soil and in the process of killing off whatever chance her plants had of growing.

The agent measured the space, then they went indoors and he repeated everything. The afternoon was a blur of rushed activity – the surveyor called around and did his thing, the agent phoned to clarify a few details and, eventually, a battered white van pulled up outside.

Esther stood in the doorway watching as a man clambered out and checked the address against a clipboard. She didn’t move during the entire time he spent tying the sign to their gatepost, the two words blazing out in bold emphatic letters from the board: FOR SALE.

Eventually, she closed the door with a quiet click, thinking it may as well have said: ‘The End’.

THIRTY-FIVE: ESTHER

Esther slumped low in the passenger seat of the car. Leah had warned her not to be out by herself, and although Charlie was next to her, she still felt chills from the threat. She tried to take her mind away from it by leafing through the printouts on her lap.

Their limited budget wiped out most of the available properties and, although they wanted to stay in the area for Charlie’s job, they had to be far enough away that Leah and Dougie would leave them alone.

Around his actual work, Charlie had spent his day searching estate agents’ websites for anything that matched their criteria. After everything, he’d ended up with just three places they could afford.

Esther found herself trying to look for positives as they drove to the first one but the burned-out motorbike dumped to the side of the street on their way in wasn’t a good start. As they ventured further onto the estate, the houses became smaller and more densely packed. On a terraced row, there were three boarded-up homes and another half-dozen For Sale signs. Around the corner, someone had knocked a wheelie bin over, leaving mounds of pizza boxes and rotting food on the side of the road. There was graffiti everywhere, with gang tags, swear words and various proclamations about people’s sexual preferences.

By the time Charlie had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting a young girl who had run in front of the car screaming, Esther had pretty much made up her mind.

Charlie parked outside of the flat anyway and switched the engine off. For a moment, neither of them said anything, listening as someone revved an engine over the back of a decaying wooden fence. In front of them was a two-storey red-brick building, the bottom half covered in a layer of black grime. The photo on the estate agent’s printout showed what looked like a balcony overlooking a pretty private garden. In reality, it was the communal walkway that all flats shared, while the ‘garden’ was a patch of grass on the side of a footpath over the back of a fence.

‘What do you think?’ Charlie asked.

‘I think whoever took that photo should enter it for some sort of cropping award.’

‘It’s not the worst – there’s a parking space…’

Esther stared at the crumbling patch of concrete in front of her. ‘If that’s the best selling point it has, then we’re really struggling.’

The engine on the other side of the fence went silent, replaced by a couple arguing. Esther knew she was being the archetypal middle-class snob by pre-judging the area – but there was no point in swapping one hellhole for another.

‘We can’t afford to be fussy,’ Charlie said.

‘I know… let’s just look at the other two places first.’

‘Don’t you even want to go inside? I organised the three viewings.’

Esther stared up at ‘To Let’ sign next to the grime-covered window. Someone had used a marker pen to draw the letter ‘I’ in between the two words.

‘Let’s skip this one.’

As Charlie drove to the next place, Esther read through the second set of notes. Given the smoke and mirrors that had been played with the first flat, she wasn’t holding out much hope that the ‘comfortable, quiet residential area’, ‘pleasant garden’ and ‘lovingly restored’ claims, would turn out to be accurate.

Esther began to feel more and more hopeful that perhaps it would be all right as Charlie followed her directions. They passed a brightly coloured primary school with a lush field on one side and a nursery on the other. Esther remembered the name from when she’d been researching schools – it wasn’t in the top five but was nowhere near the worst either. The nearby houses seemed relatively clean and well kept, there were no piles of burning tyres, no ‘welcome to hell’ signs, no gangs roaming the streets.

By the time Charlie parked outside of the two-bedroom semi-detached house, Esther was convinced this was going to be as perfect as they’d get. She double-checked the address on the page with the one on the house, just to make sure it was correct.

Esther and Charlie walked along the path hand-in-hand as she peered from side to side, taking in the plush trimmed lawn on both sides and the row of flowerbeds along the fences.

‘Why is it so cheap?’ Esther asked.

‘I don’t know – the others the estate agent offered were flats but this was a house for the same price. It looks nice enough. The owner’s meeting us for this one.’

Before they got to the end of the path, the front door opened and a short man in his fifties with thinning dark hair emerged. He was wearing a cream cardigan that would have been unfashionable when it was made thirty years back, along with the type of elasticated-waist trousers you could only pull off when you hit a certain age.

He made a point of checking his watch and frowning. ‘I thought we said half-past.’

‘Sorry,’ Charlie replied, ‘we were a little lost.’

The man tutted as he held the front door open with one arm, still checking his watch with the other. Esther knew it couldn’t be any later than twenty-five-to – so they were five minutes late at the most.

Esther soon forgot that as they were taken on the tour: the inside of the house was so much better than she could have hoped. It was part-furnished, clean, spacious and well maintained. The landlord continued to look at his watch anxiously as he answered their questions, telling them it had been empty for around two months but there had never been any problems with it. His brother-in-law was a plumber and he kept an electrician on a retainer to service all of his properties, so there wouldn’t be any maintenance problems.

Esther tried not to talk too much but she could see only opportunity. If they could squeeze everything into the second bedroom, they wouldn’t even need to use storage, which would free up some money.

As the landlord led them into the kitchen, Esther knew the house was perfect. The wide window was showing off a rich expanse of turf at the back, which had been well looked after. It was a third of the size of their garden but still a patch of land they could relax in. Flowers were blooming along the bottom fence: no overgrown hedges, no low side gate that people could step over. This was a house they could live in comfortably.

Esther continued staring out of the window, glancing back towards the rest of the house at intervals and only half paying attention as Charlie continued to question the landlord, who was bobbing from one foot to the other next to the door.

‘…so you only need one month’s rent as deposit?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Do you need referees or anything like that? We don’t really have any.’

‘No, no, I tend to judge people how I see them. You seem like nice people.’

Charlie was clearly uncomfortable but finally got to the point. ‘Thank you… er… do you mind if I ask why the rent is so cheap? There aren’t any other houses at that rate.’

There was an awkward pause and when the landlord replied, his words came out far too quickly. ‘I own a few houses now, so I suppose I don’t need to be raking it in.’

‘But wouldn’t these places go really quickly? I don’t understand why it’s been empty for two months.’

‘Me either, mate.’ The landlord laughed but it sounded forced and Esther turned to face the room, now worried. The man checked his watch again and then peered over his shoulder towards the front door. ‘I’ve really got to be going. If you want to think about it and come back to me, that’s fine.’

‘Can I just ask you about—’

‘—No, I’ve got to go.’

The landlord started walking towards the front door, checking over his shoulder that they were following.

At the door, Charlie stopped and turned to Esther. ‘What do you think?’

‘I like it.’

The landlord was already wrestling the door open. ‘I’ve got to go, I’m running late. You can come back to me later or tomorrow. I’ll give you my card.’

Esther had one foot out of the door when the rumbling began. At first she wondered if it was her imagination but then it felt like the type of earthquake you read about or saw in movies, not something that happened in England. She was unbalanced anyway from being half in, half out of the house but the tremor made her stumble into Charlie.

As the train howled away into the distance, horn blaring, the landlord stepped around them as if nothing had happened. He started to walk away without a word – no wonder he’d wanted them to be there at a certain time.

‘How close is the train line?’ Charlie called.

‘It runs along the back of the house.’

‘Were you going to tell us how close it was?’

‘You never asked.’

‘How would we know?’

The landlord shrugged as he reached the road, one hand on his car door. ‘Dunno, mate.’

‘How often do the trains go past?’

‘Dunno, mate.’

Before they could ask anything else, he was in his car and roaring away down the road.

They got their answer courtesy of the next-door neighbour – a squat pensioner with a grin that didn’t match her words. ‘Bloody things come past every twenty minutes – starts at about six, ends at about ten. I can’t hear them at my age anyway but if you want my advice, you’ll stay well clear.’

Esther was feeling pretty down as they reached the third house around half-a-mile away. The estate agent was another watch-checker, though, given it was well after-hours, that wasn’t as much of a surprise.

The flat was on the ground floor, underneath another empty property, meaning they could end up with anyone above them. The advert called it ‘deceptively spacious’, but the claim was certainly more deceptive than the apartment was spacious.

There was a small garden, box bathroom, tiny spare bedroom, not much bigger main bedroom and a cramped kitchen. The only room of any size was the living room, which had patchy wallpaper and a thin carpet but could have been worse.

‘Is there anything we need to know?’ Charlie asked.

The agent squirmed a little before waving them into the back garden. Esther’s first thought was how pleasant the view was – the sun was just beginning to dip in the sky, with an orangey glow burned across the horizon.

The reason quickly become apparent as he pointed over the back of the fence.

‘You can’t see it but just over that ridge, there’s a sewage works. The owner and previous tenants tell us the smell can be quite bad at times.’

‘Is it bad if you’re indoors?’ Esther asked, sniffing the air.

‘I can’t say for sure how bad it is because I don’t know – but the report does say there are hints of it internally.’

‘How often?’

‘A couple of times a day. I think it’s something to do with a specific treatment they do and the direction of the wind.’

‘Can you give us a minute?’ Charlie asked.