Free The Sudden Departure of the Frasers by Louise Candlish

unmodernized kind.
    All of a sudden, I didn’t have much time to play with.
    ‘Our finance guy and his wife just went to a specialist,’ Jeremy told me. ‘Apparently he has the highest success rate in the UK, so if and when the time comes we’ll go to him.’
    ‘After the summer then,’ I agreed. And before I could prevent it I had conjured an image of myself lying in the garden in a bikini – a revealing black one that would pass for underwear from a distance – stretching my arms high above my head as I soaked up the sun, all too aware of dark eyes watching from the upstairs window next door.



Chapter 5
Christy, April 2013
    She was inexplicably nervous about returning to work after the move, a mood only exacerbated by a puzzling episode that occurred as she left the house on Monday morning.
    Locking the door behind her, she was aware of someone on the other side of the hedge in the doorway of number 38: restless feet shuffled, breath was expelled with wheezy impatience, and the word ‘Unbelievable’ was uttered more than once in a furious male undertone. Then came the abrupt drilling of the doorbell. After a wait of only two or three seconds, much too brief for anyone to have reasonably been expected to react, the caller rang again, holding the bell down to produce a loud, unremitting sound that made Christy wince. Inside the house, it must have been thunderous enough to wake a man from a coma. Who rang a doorbell like that at eight o’clock in the morning? Presumably not the rude shaggy guy, since he lived there – unless he’d locked himself out and had some poor flatmate he was trying to rouse?
    She wondered about the woman downstairs, Felicity. Was the visitor for her, frustrated by her continued absence? She was still with her daughter in the country, judging bythe silence that belied the nightly and most likely timer-operated lamplight at the lower window. Christy had watched the estate agent plant a ‘Sold’ sign in the flower bed by the gate, but she knew the property had not yet been vacated because furniture and pictures were visible between curtains left neither closed nor open.
    Reaching the pavement, she saw that it was in fact the upper flat this caller wanted, for he had moved from the doorstep and was now yelling up at the window. He was a portly, middle-aged man in a business suit and buffed shoes, his face flushed with anger.
    ‘I know you’re in there! You could at least have the decency to come down and speak to me!’
    He returned to the door and stabbed the bell a third time before calling up again, tone loaded with sarcasm, ‘Well, thanks for the letter, mate. Nice way to treat your friends!’
    Storming up the path, thwarted and displeased, he hesitated at the sight of Christy’s surprised expression before shouldering past her.
    Inevitably, they were heading for the same place, the train station, and by chance boarded the same carriage. Though she sought his eye a couple of times, not so much in expectation of an explanation as an acknowledgement, he did not reciprocate.
    She did, however, overhear a brief interaction between him and another commuter, a woman who evidently recognized him and initiated an exchange of Lime Park credentials. He was nodding, both voice and flesh-tone rather calmer now: ‘Trinity Avenue, I know it, yes, justbehind the school, isn’t it? We’re on the other side of the park, Lime Park Road.’
    ‘Very nice,’ the woman said approvingly and, stamping grounds established, the two returned to their newspapers.
    Not just a ‘friend’, then, Christy thought: a neighbour.
    Work re-exerted its customary hypnotic power, all thoughts suppressed beyond those billed to the client, and it took fewer than three hours for her to feel as if she’d never left her desk at the agency ten days ago, never closed the door on her rented flat that final time, never
heard
of Lime Park, much less taken up residence there. Eating a sandwich with Ellen at lunchtime, she