No One Would Do What The Lamberts Have Done E-Book

Sophie Hannah

• Herausgeber: Bedford Square Publishers
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 487

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'The twist is perfection. I think it's just about the cleverest thing I've ever read' Gillian McAllister You think it will never happen to you: the ring of the bell, the policeman on the doorstep. What he says traps you in a nightmare that starts with the words, 'I'm afraid…' Sally Lambert is also afraid, and desperate enough to consider the unthinkable. Is it really, definitely, impossible to escape from this horror? Maybe not. There's always something you can do, right? Of course, no one would ever do this particular something – except the Lamberts, who might have to. No one has ever gone this far. Until Sally decides that the Lamberts will…

Leseprobe

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BEDFORDSQUAREPUBLISHERS.CO.UK

No One WouldDo WhatThe LambertsHave Done

SophieHannah

For Carolyn and Jamie, my dream publishers for 20 years and counting, with lots of love

and for my beloved Chunk Plunkett

Last but not least, for Chunk’s furry brother Brewstie – my favourite person in Level 2, and forever my Star Word.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Part 2

Acknowledgements

Also by Sophie Hannah

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part 1

Monday 16 September 2024

Connor

PC Connor Chantree was afraid he’d already ruined everything and was about to be sent abruptly on his way. He should have explained to Large first, and only then handed over the bundle of papers. He’d done his best to uncrush them, straighten them out, smooth away creases and brush off what dirt he could. Then he’d arranged them into a rectangular shape, which had taken far longer than he’d expected it to. He’d added two red elastic bands, top and bottom.

The result was unimpressive. It sat in the middle of Large’s desk and seemed to drink in the baffled stares of both men; and yes, Connor checked with himself, those battered pages did look thirsty in a way those not in the room would have called impossible.

Somehow, increasing the tidiness of the bundle’s presentation had achieved the opposite of what Connor had wanted. The document (was that the right name for a few hundred pages? Should he think of it as something else? A book?) looked nothing like the sort of pristine, sharp-cornered contender he’d hoped to create.

Contender? Words were appearing in Connor’s head that he was sure hadn’t been there before he’d read the… thing. Ideas too. Like this one: the spruced-up, rectangularised heap looked as if it was trying to mock convention – as if it had scuffed itself and kicked itself about a bit in an act of deliberate defiance. Even to Connor, its curator – curator? – it seemed to be saying, ‘And your point is?’, whereas the mess of maimed and defeated pages he’d seen on first opening the box had screamed a different message at him: ‘Pay attention! Help! Put me together!’

There was a strong chance, of course, that he was imagining some of this. He wished he’d brought in the soggy box, exactly as he’d received it and without reading any of the contents, and simply handed it over. ‘Above my pay grade,’ he could have said as he’d passed the problem on to Large.

Who was he kidding? He couldn’t have done that; the possibility hadn’t occurred to him because it had never existed. He’d felt duty-bound to drop everything and read the thing from start to finish before doing anything else. The physical package had been left for him, marked for his attention, and with it had come a powerful sense of duty that couldn’t be shirked.

‘What’s this, Chantree?’ Large said. ‘Why is the name Lambert back on my desk?’

‘Sir, I think you need to read it,’ said Connor. ‘Fairly urgently.’

Large picked it up and removed the elastic band at the top. He spent nearly five minutes reading small sections from randomly chosen pages. ‘So,’ he said eventually, in the voice of one forced to consume many disadvantageous and depressing realities all at once. ‘You’ve written a novel about the Lambert family and their recent travails. I’ll admit it: I’d prefer to live in a world where that hadn’t happened. And in second place – my runner-up choice – would be not knowing it had happened and never finding out.’

Connor didn’t think he ought to know what the word ‘travails’ meant. It alarmed him that he did. ‘Sir, I didn’t write it—’

‘Then who did?’

‘—and I’m not sure it’s a novel.’

‘It looks like a novel.’ Large kept his eyes fixed on the bundle, in the careful way a king might watch someone he suspected of being a treasonous imposter about to stage a coup. ‘It has a title – one that’s probably too long to fit on a cover. Just in case you were thinking of publishing it, which would have all sorts of legal…’ Large broke off, but not before Connor had frightened himself even more by finishing the sentence in his head with the word ‘ramifications’, another one he didn’t think he ought to know.

‘But you say you didn’t write it.’ Large frowned. ‘Then what is it? Where did it come from?’

‘Sir, you need to read it yourself. I can’t—’

‘And I’m not going to do that.’ Large smiled conspiratorially, as if they had both known all along they would end up here and could now unite in celebration. ‘Tell me what you hope I’d think or do if I read it. That will move us further forward without undue suffering accruing to me.’

Connor had read the thing twice and still had no idea what he thought ought to happen next. He had even less of a clue what Large’s response might be. He couldn’t say that, though. It was too vague, and likely to get him waved out of Large’s office.

He said, ‘You’d wonder, like I’m wondering, whether the coroner maybe got it wrong. Whether perhaps there’s reason to suspect—’

‘I see. That’ll do, Chantree. Thank you.’ Large let the manuscript fall from his hands. It landed on his desk with a thud. ‘Take it away, please, whatever and whoever’s it is. You know as well as I do: the autopsy ruled out any deliberate action. Suicide, murder – both possibilities were eliminated, happily for all concerned. Let’s not seek out further trouble, shall we?’

‘But then what killed her?’ said Connor. ‘Healthy young people don’t just die for no reason. Look, I’m not saying it wasn’t a natural death. We know it was. And there’s nothing in those pages to support a murder charge, if that’s what you’re worried about. CPS won’t touch it. But given that the autopsy found no trace of—’

‘Chantree.’

This, Connor recognised, was the point beyond which no more of his unsolicited words would be allowed to pass. ‘Sir?’

‘The Lamberts have been through enough. Don’t you think?’

‘Definitely.’ He’d heard the unspoken bit at the end too – partly thanks to you, you stupid, gullible git – whether Large had silent-said it or not. Connor had been silent-saying it to himself every day, at least ten times a day, since the truth had come out.

That was assuming the truth was what they all now believed it to be. And if it wasn’t, how could it possibly be down to him, Connor, to correct the mistake? The extent to which he felt chosen was impossible to ignore. Yet, who in their right mind would choose him? He was very much an ‘I do my best’ kind of person, but not at all an ‘I’m determined never to give up until I get the result I want’ sort. The difference between the two approaches, and which camp he fell into, was made clear to him soon after he’d got married 16 months ago. He was the most useless variant of the ‘I do my best’ type – the sort that tended to have a wistful ‘Oh well!’ attached to it.

Whoever had left the box for him had picked the wrong person. They’d have done better to target his wife, Flo. Nothing fazed her. She’d have strolled into Large’s office with far less trepidation than Connor had felt as he’d hovered on the threshold, not caring that she didn’t work in the same building or profession.

‘I trust you won’t be offended if I point out that the Gaveys suffered too,’ said Large.

The Lamberts and the Gaveys. Connor had been transfixed and now felt haunted – no, that wasn’t an exaggeration – by the way the two families had been presented as a sort of entwined pair, predestined to be enemies to the death; that was what the voice in the pages implied over and over again.

Whose voice was it, for God’s sake?

If only Large would read the manuscript…

‘Yes, sir,’ Connor said. ‘All things considered, there’s been an incredible amount of suffering on both sides. Lamberts and Gaveys.’

‘We agree, then. No need for any more. Good.’ Large sounded jollier. ‘Is there anything else you’d like to say before you leave and take this malodorous clump with you?’

Connor had sprayed the pages with his wife’s strongest perfume – ‘1996’, it was called – but for some reason the scent hadn’t stuck and the original pong had reasserted itself: a blend of earth and meat, as if the bundle of paper had been buried in the ground alongside a dead body, then dug up a few weeks later.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Pardon?’ said Large.

‘There is something else I’d like to say.’ He had to try. If he didn’t take inspired action now, he never would. He found it alarming whenever Flo started to rant about her willingness to die on hills, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to rest easy until he’d seen the view from the one he was about to ascend. (Last week, he’d have said ‘climb’.)

‘Is it about the Lamberts?’ asked Large. ‘The very finished-and-concluded matter of the Lamberts, about which no more needs to be said, ever?’

‘No, sir.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘My sister’s tattoo,’ said Connor.

‘Are you being serious, Chantree?’

‘Yes, sir. You see…’ Was he going to take the plunge? Was he a dickhead?

Yes. Probably. ‘My mum begged her not to do it, but there’s no telling our Danielle. She’ll always do what she wants, and enjoys it even more if it pisses you off. So she got inked up, right, and it’s… well, I don’t mind tatts, but it’s pretty bad. Covers the whole of her left thigh, and, sir, that’s not a small area.’ Connor made sure not to look at Large’s enormous stomach as he said this. ‘And Mum thinks everyone who gets a tattoo’s going to be unemployed forever or end up dead or in prison, which is obviously daft, but she’s right about our Danielle’s tattoo. It looks awful.’

‘Chantree—’

‘Sir, let me finish.’

‘Are you trying to trick me into wondering whether a natural death was a murder, via an analogy involving a bad tattoo? My money’s on yes.’

‘It’s meant to be an animal skull, but it looks like a motorbike that’s been tortured to death, Mum says. I’ve never seen her so distraught. Couldn’t stop crying for days. Absolutely gutted, she was. It’s hard to explain if you don’t know her—’

‘Don’t try,’ Large advised. ‘Just get on with it, if you must.’

These weren’t ideal storytelling conditions, Connor thought. Ideally, his tale would unfold in a more relaxed way, and without his audience already having seen through his aim in telling it.

‘Mum thought she only had two choices,’ he said, ‘and she hated them both: either change her mind and be fine with the tattoo – try and convince herself it wasn’t the disaster she thought it was so that she and our Danielle could still see each other and have a good relationship – or else stop seeing her own daughter, like, distance herself, maybe just see her for Christmas and birthdays, that kind of thing. Sounds extreme, I know, but, sir, you don’t know how much Mum hates tattoos.’

‘I’m starting to get an idea,’ said Large.

‘And our Danielle wore nothing but shorts that were, like, up here, to show it off. Mum was convinced she had to make this awful choice: her only daughter or her… integrity, I suppose you’d call it.’

‘No need for the “only”,’ said Large.

‘Pardon, sir?’

‘Her daughter or her integrity: that’s the choice. It doesn’t matter how many daughters she’s got. She could have fourteen.’

‘No, she’s only got one,’ said Connor. ‘It’s just me and our Danielle.’

Large shook his head. ‘Doesn’t matter. The “only” acts as a distraction. We don’t need to wonder if the dilemma would be less painful if she had some daughters to spare. It wouldn’t be.’ He eyed the stained manuscript. Leaning forward, he tapped his fingers on the title page, then looked up at Connor expectantly. ‘Well? Go on. What did she choose?’

‘Neither of the options she hated, thanks to my wife, Flo, who explained to her about the boxes and saved the day.’

Large sighed. ‘What boxes?’

‘It’s a thought experiment,’ Connor told him. ‘You imagine you have two boxes, right? Both big, both empty. And neither one ever has to have any contact with the other. They can just sit side by side, quite separately, being none of each other’s business. That’s what Flo told Mum. She said, “There’s no need to change your opinion about Danielle’s tattoo, or tattoos in general. In Box Number One, you put your acceptance of all the pain and anger you’re feeling, and all the crying and raging and pillow-thumping you need to do about it. You’ll always hate that Danielle’s vandalised her body, you’ll never be okay with it – and you just, like, fully accept that. You don’t judge yourself for it or try to change your thoughts or feelings about it, just stick them all in Box One. Then, in Box Two, you put all your feelings and wishes and hopes for Danielle and your relationship with her. In Box Two, you want only the best for her, and trust her to make her own decisions and to know what’s right for her. You accept all her choices and love her no matter what. In Box Two, you’re just there for her.” That’s what Flo said, and it saved Mum’s sanity and the relationship. She and our Danielle are closer than ever, because both boxes were full of acceptance. And acceptance and acceptance can’t ever be at war, you see, sir. Nothing can ever be at war with itself. It’s like Flo says: accepting that we don’t like or want something doesn’t mean we have to push anything away – either our true feelings or the thing we dislike.’

‘I see. Is your wife some sort of counsellor?’ Large asked.

‘No. She’s got her own catering company, though. Sir, speaking of boxes, this’ – Connor put his hand on the manuscript – ‘arrived in a box with my name on it. A big, damp cardboard box that disintegrated when I opened it. The pages had been stuffed in, no particular order – some scrunched, some folded, some flat. It took me ages to arrange them so they made sense. I think if you read it the way I’ve put it together, you’ll have as many questions as I’ve got. Think of it like this: we’ve got Box One over here,’ Connor drew a square shape in the air with his fingers, ‘where we know it was natural causes because a coroner said so—’

‘That’s the only box I’m interested in,’ said Large.

‘—but there’s also Box Two, the one I found sitting between my car and our garage door a few days ago, with this… book, thing, inside it, but all jumbled up. And in that box what happened was—’

‘Inside or outside?’ Large interrupted.

‘Huh?’

‘Your garage.’

‘Outside,’ said Connor. ‘There’s no room for the car inside the garage. It’s still full of unopened boxes from when we moved.’

‘Always unpack straight away, Chantree, or you’ll never get the job finished.’

‘Yes, sir. Sir, in Box Two, there’s a murder.’

‘I don’t like Box Two.’

‘A description of one, anyway,’ Connor pressed on. ‘It’s one that’ll be impossible to prove because nothing physical happened. So, we still get to keep our Box One, because there’s no evidence—’

‘What do you mean, “nothing physical”?’ asked Large.

‘Please consider reading the… thing, sir. If whoever wrote it is telling the truth… Though I don’t think they can be…’ Connor felt obliged to interrupt himself with this caveat.

‘If it’s a pack of lies, I don’t need to read it,’ said Large.

‘But I don’t think it’s that either. It feels very… true.’ It was the only way Connor could think to describe it. ‘Sir, I’ll be honest: I’ve got absolutely no idea what it is, who wrote it or who left it for me. And it contains the most unflattering portrait of me – looks and personality – that anyone will ever write, I hope, but it’s still important that you know what’s in it, and nothing I can tell you about it could convey the full… effect. You need to see it for yourself. Just… please forget the horrible description of me as soon as you’ve read it, if you wouldn’t mind. And don’t share it with anyone if you can help it. Not even as a joke.’ I’m feeling bad enough about myself as it is, Connor considered adding, just in case appearing as pitiable as possible might help the cause.

No need. Large was reaching for the smelly bundle of paper, removing the second of the elastic bands.

No OneWould DoWhat The LambertsHave Done

by me

1

Mum didn’t think I was on her side. Not at the start, and not for a long time.

That doesn’t mean she thought I wasn’t. It just means she didn’t know I was, or how passionately I was, and so it didn’t occur to her to think it. I don’t blame her for that. I could easily have made it clear – maybe I should have, since trying to protect her from the truth was pointless and she ended up finding out anyway – but I chose not to. Also, it’s just the way most people are: they don’t think or believe a thing unless they already know it, which is a shame. Actually, it’s one of the biggest, most possibility-limiting shames humanity has to contend with, but that’s hardly Mum’s fault.

If she’d known from the beginning that I was on her side, and especially if she’d known what I’d be able to achieve once I put my mind to it, she could have spared herself a lot of suffering. She’d have been so much happier on The Day of the Policeman, for a start.

That wasn’t the start, though. That was the middle, and on that day, 17 June 2024 at 4.45pm, I was also unaware of… yes, I’m going to call it what it is, or was: my own brilliant potential. In fact, I could just as easily call 17 June The Day of the Potential, because there was so much of the stuff swirling around – for greatness and for harm, both equally strong at that point and all mixed up together, billowing through our house, gushing down the street, covering the village green so that you couldn’t see it anymore. (I mean, not really, since none of those things were observable events, but also: yes, really).

This is what happened in the conventional sense of the word ‘happened’ – the bell rang. Mum opened the door, and there he was – the policeman. I heard a male voice followed by Mum’s, but didn’t pay much attention. I was in my room, letting Champ win a series of tug of war games with the knitted carrot toy. Even after he’d lolloped off downstairs to see who our visitor was, I didn’t start to listen deliberately. I was a bit irritated that Champ had ditched me, and said something sarcastic like, ‘Right, great. Let’s race to the door. This is Swaffham Tilney, after all, so it’s bound to be someone thrilling.’

Then I heard Mum sounding worried and restrained, not at all her usual welcoming self. And I noticed she wasn’t inviting the policeman in, which was odd because she normally tried to pull everyone into our house and give them treats and what she called ‘the full tour’, as if we lived in Buckingham Palace and not a converted hayloft that used to be a dilapidated outbuilding belonging to The Farmer (who’s actually the only person in Swaffham Tilney whose name I don’t know; he must have one, but everyone calls him The Farmer).

The policeman eventually tried to invite himself into the house, saying it might be easier to speak inside. Mum said no, it wouldn’t be, not for her. I couldn’t see her – I was on the upstairs landing by now, hovering at the window above the front door – but I could see the policeman standing on the pavement, shifting from foot to foot, looking as if he wasn’t enjoying himself, or perhaps he needed to go to the toilet. He was young, with a long, oblong head that reminded me of the brush from the dustpan and brush set in our utility room cupboard – rectangular and bristly. He had a way of speaking that made it sound as if he was leaning heavily on each word.

Then I heard him say horrible things that I knew were lies, one after another. Quickly, I ran through a truncated version of the meditation I learned with Mum in Abbots Langley, hoping it would have an instant calming effect:

Praise Ricky, Thank Ricky, Ricky loves me.

Praise Ricky, Thank Ricky, Ricky loves me.

I knew that wasn’t how inner peace meditation ought to be done, but what about when an unforeseeable emergency happens and you need instant tranquility or else your heart will explode? That was how I felt. If you have to be calm first in order for a calming mantra to work, that’s a problem.

It didn’t work. And then Champ started to bark and I thought I might be sick, except there was nothing in me to throw up. He’s normally quiet when people come to the house – usually the only thing that sets him off is when he hears dogs barking on television – but he could sense Mum was terrified, so he got scared too. I didn’t blame him. What made it extra chilling was that Mum’s never frightened or sad. She’s always cheerful. Only a week or so before The Day of the Policeman, I heard her tell Champ that, after listening to the latest episode of one of her two favourite podcasts, she’d finally realised her purpose in life at the age of 53. ‘Shall I tell you what it is, Champy?’ she said. ‘It’s Enjollification, with a capital E. Do you know what that means? You don’t, do you? No, you don’t. You’re a gorgeous boy, aren’t you? Yes, you are!’

While she hugged him and stroked the fuzzy hair under his chin, I worked out what ‘Enjollification’ had to mean, and felt pleased with myself when Mum confirmed it: ‘It means making people feel as jolly as possible, including me. I invented the word today, but it’s always been my purpose, and do you know what, Champy? It’s so useful and… enlightening to know that about myself.’ By the time she’d finished explaining, I’d downgraded my achievement in guessing correctly – the meaning would have been obvious to anyone, probably – though not to our policeman visitor, who didn’t sound clever or perceptive. He sounded like a ‘This is just the way it has to be’ person. (Anyone intelligent knows that nothing is ever just the way anything has to be.)

Mum had decided, understandably, that the policeman didn’t deserve to be Enjollified. I glared down at the top of his head, beaming all my viciousness at the points I decided were his most vulnerable: those tiny pink patches between the light brown bristles that sprouted from his skull. I remember hoping I’d carry on feeling as savagely vengeful as I felt at that moment. Believe me, it’s a less horrible emotion to grapple with than pure terror. The current of vindictiveness running through me was proof that I had power, even though I could have done so much more in the moment. I could have sent the policeman running from our home, screaming, never to return, but I was neither quick-thinking nor brave enough on 17 June.

Anyway, then he said it, as I’d known he would from the second I’d started to concentrate on what was going on. He said the dreaded name – Gavey – and the inevitability of it felt like a double layer of something stifling wrapping around me, inescapable, as indoors as it was outdoors, as stitched into the earth of every flowerbed and plant pot in Swaffham Tilney as it was blown into every cloud in the sky and dissolving into every drop of the water in the lode by the path where Mum and Dad walk Champ – and spreading from there to all the other lodes in the surrounding fenland. As I eavesdropped from the landing, trying to take in every word the policeman was saying, trying not to panic, I felt that sticky inevitability coating the walls and carpet and ceiling around me as well as every inch of what Dad likes to call ‘our special little corner of ancient England’.

The Gaveys.

Of course this disruption to an until-now-happy day in the life of the Lambert family turned out to have the Gaveys behind it.

2

Monday 17 June 2024

Sally

Once the policeman has said what he came to say and is ready to leave her alone, at least for the time being, Sally Lambert begins to close her front door. She does it as gradually and quietly as she can, wanting to be able to watch through the gap as he walks away. She has to check he’s really going; can’t wait for her outside not to have him in it anymore. She stares after him – Connor something; she’s already forgotten his surname – as he walks to his car, gets in it and drives to the corner, past The Barn and The Farmhouse.

Now he’s slowing to a stop; now he’s indicating. Sally waits, still looking, until his silver Audi turns onto the main road, which isn’t anyone sensible’s idea of a main road but is called that by all the residents of Bussow Court, apart from Sally. She used to say it too, but stopped after Vinie Skinner told her Deryn and Jimmy Dickinson, owners of The Granary and the first to move into Bussow Court, had created and launched the nickname deliberately in order to produce a feeling of inferiority in those Swaffham Tilney residents who lived on that road rather than off it. Sally believes this story is highly likely to be true. Vinie has it in for Deryn Dickinson for sure, but it wouldn’t have occurred to her to make that up.

Finally, the policeman is gone. Sally pulls her front door wide open, then slams it shut as hard as she can. She falls to the floor with a loud wail, forgetting, in her distress, that Champ, her Welsh Terrier, might be alarmed, and so might her daughter, Rhiannon, who is upstairs and must have heard. Actually, Ree is more likely to be embarrassed than worried; she’s 17 and finding much of what Sally does embarrassing these days – which means Sally ought to stop making strange, howling noises, but she can’t. For the first time in her adult life, she can’t control what her body is doing (slouching in a heap by the front door, her back hunched against it), or the sounds she’s making.

It’s only when Champ starts to lick her face that she realises she’s crying. Shuddering, too, as if she’s just climbed out of icy water and has nothing warm to wrap herself in. Champ clambers into her lap in order to be able to lick more effectively.

Sally puts her arms round him and buries her face in his wiry coat, which feels soft sometimes and hard sometimes. Today it feels soft. ‘It’ll be okay, Champy,’ she tries to say, but only gets half of it out. Shall we sing your day song? she thinks of saying next, but doesn’t even manage one word of that. His day song would be impossible anyway, she realises, because of the last line. She has sung it hundreds of times without understanding that it’s a sad, desperate song, not a celebratory one. Now, whatever happens next, she’ll never be able to sing it again.

Wait – she knows what she’ll do; she’ll turn Champ’s other song, his night song, into a day and night song. One song is more than enough for a three-year-old Welshie, so why does Sally feel so sorry for him? That’s easy – because of the policeman, the lies, the danger – and it’s also not the right question. Why is Sally feeling sorry for herself, when she should be thinking only of Champ? Why is she thinking about a milky-pink-coloured bottle of gardenia body lotion that she had when she was 13? She’s fine now, she’s a grown-up, she’s so over that stupid incident. It wasn’t even anything in the first place, and she hasn’t thought about it for 40 years.

At least it makes sense that Furbert, her first beloved Welsh Terrier, should come into her mind now, but she doesn’t need to feel sorry for him, not anymore. He is safe, content and well looked after in Dog Heaven, from which exalted vantage point he can clearly see that Sally’s love for him is just as much a part of her daily life as it was while he was alive. You don’t stop loving someone once they’re gone.

And you don’t start either, thinks Sally, and suddenly she can smell that gardenia lotion and is wailing louder than when she started, though Champ’s fuzzy hair is muffling it, thank God. Ree must have her headphones on, or else there’s no way she wouldn’t have heard.

Or else she can hear everything and doesn’t care. Likely.

No, that’s not fair, Sally corrects herself. She wouldn’t have thought something so disloyal if her sister and the Facebook business hadn’t come up in conversation yesterday and Ree hadn’t taken the opportunity to mention that she’d always been able to see it from Auntie Vicky’s point of view as well as Sally’s.

Champ shakes his head vigorously, so Sally has to move hers. He looks at her searchingly, as if to say, ‘What’s going on? Why are you thinking about all these bad things from the past and imagining everyone’s against you? Remember, I’m here! I’m on your side, all the way and all the time.’

Yes. Right. Good point. Champ adores Sally. He sleeps draped across her legs or curled up next to her head every night, much to her husband Mark’s disgruntlement. And Champ needs Sally’s help; he’s the only person she ought to be thinking about right now. Champ’s personhood – and before it, Furbert’s – is, has been, endlessly debated in the Lambert household. Sally acknowledges that, from a strictly factual point of view, Champ is a dog and not a human, but she allows herself to include him in the category of ‘people’ when she says things like ‘Champ’s the only person who hasn’t eaten yet’, because it would make no sense to say ‘Champ’s the only dog…’ when the rest of the Lamberts (those present in bodily form in Swaffham Tilney, at least; those who need to eat because they’re not permanently-nourished souls in a canine paradise) aren’t dogs.

It’s good that Ree hasn’t come downstairs, thinks Sally. It means she hasn’t been caught in her unravelling. She might still get away with it. She has time to get herself together, though not much. Mark’s gone to pick Tobes up from school after his exam and they could be back any second, but if she locks the front door and doesn’t open it until her face looks normal again, and if Ree keeps those headphones on, then maybe no one needs to find out that Sally collapsed in a heap and began to disintegrate. Champ won’t tell anyone. (Obviously she doesn’t mind him knowing; he’d never mock her for it or use it against her.)

She’ll have to tell Mark, Ree and Tobes about the policeman, but that’s okay. The only part she needs them not to know, because she wants to forget it quickly herself, is that Sally Lambert is capable of falling apart.

3

Champ’s day song. Champ’s night song. Auntie Vicky and the Facebook business.

You might not need to know about the first or the last of those – we’ll see – but you definitely need to know about the middle one, and it would feel strange to tell you about that without mentioning the day song, because we Lamberts for a long time viewed them very much as a pair.

So, Champ has a day song and a night song. His day song was adapted – by Mum, who else? – from the song ‘You Are My Sunshine’. Mum doesn’t know how to write tunes, so she takes famous songs, changes the words and then calls them ‘her’ songs, as if she’s written them.

As I made my slow and full-of-dread way downstairs on The Day of the Policeman, I heard Mum whisper to Champy that she was sorry she was too upset to sing him his day song. The last line was the problem, she explained, and she didn’t want to start and then not be able to finish. Nor did she feel together enough to come up with a new last line.

As I heard her say those words, I made a vow to myself: ‘When this battle of ours against the Gaveys and Cambridgeshire Police is won – which it will be, by me, with or without help – Mum will once again be able to sing Champy’s day song to him all the way to the end, without crying. That will be my measure of victory. When she can do that again, that’s when I’ll know everything’s okay.’

I was naive to imagine that singing the song happily would be possible for Mum ever again, even after the most resounding triumph over our enemies. We cannot always forget miseries and traumas of the past, unfortunately.

Here’s how Champ’s day song goes:

You are my Champy,

my only Champy.

You make me happy

when skies are grey.

You’ll never know, Champ,

how much I love you.

Please don’t take my Champy away.

The thing is, if you’ve lived for nearly nine years with the mild anxiety that someone might report your first, occasionally bitey (though never with malicious intent), dog to the relevant authorities, leading to him being taken away and possibly worse, and then it actually happens to your second – a policeman comes to the door and threatens him, using lies and ominous hints as weapons – then you’re unlikely ever again to be able to sing the words ‘Please don’t take my Champy away’ without bursting into tears. So far, Mum hasn’t managed it.

I used to be jealous of Champ’s sunshine song. For a while, I had a bit of an obsession with picking holes in it. I’d tell myself that it didn’t make sense and that the lyrics were stupid, that they only worked if the song was being sung about a person who could remove themselves from a relationship with the singer if they wanted to. Champ was never going to take himself away from Mum. Dogs never want to do that, if their owners love them – apart from briefly, maybe to the other side of the room or to the garden. But they always come back. And even if the song is being sung about a person, the lyrics are confusing. One minute the ‘You’ character is being told they are something, then the next minute they’re being begged not to take away that same something, as if it’s a different object. Yes, the meaning is clear, but it’s still clumsy.

I’ll admit, it’s also true that I’d never have thought to pick holes in a harmless song if I hadn’t been jealous – which I’m absolutely not anymore, I’m pleased to report. My envy was extinguished in about two seconds flat when I remembered Mum’s and my trip to Abbots Langley to learn how to meditate, and that Mum chose my name as her Star Word – just mine, not as one of many, or alongside the rest of the family’s. I chose Ricky and she chose me. (I don’t love Ricky more than Mum, Dad or Tobes, by the way. I do almost worship him, however.)

Champ’s night song was supposed to be his bedtime song, but he’s never accepted that he has a bedtime. Even when he’s tired, he’ll sit in the lounge with Mum and Dad and try to watch TV until he gets bored and starts chewing a rug tassel, or the leg of a chair, or a corner of a cushion. Eventually he falls asleep, stretched out and belly up, and stays like that until Mum and Dad go to bed. He’ll then follow them upstairs and do his best to sleep balanced across Mum for the rest of the night. That’s why Mum started calling what was originally his bedtime song his ‘night song’ instead, because it would have taken her too long to say ‘Taking Champ Out For A Wee In The Middle Of The Night Song’.

This is Champ’s night song, and when you see the lyrics you’ll wonder, if you’re sane and sensible, how on earth it managed to cause so much controversy. You need to sing it to the tune of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ by Arthur Christopher Benson and Edward Elgar:

Land of cute and furry -

Champy, you’re the best.

You’re barky, not purry!

You pass every test!

Louder still and louder

Does thy snoring get.

God who made thee cuddly

Make thee cuddlier yet!

God who made thee cuddly

Make thee cuddlier yet!

I’ve noticed that I said something inaccurate and I have to correct it, because Lamberts aren’t liars: Champ’s night song didn’t ‘cause’ any controversy. Every single bit of the trouble was created not by the song but by evil people. Nothing went into Mum’s version of it apart from her love for Champy. It wasn’t about England. It wasn’t about a country. It was about a dog, and anyone who couldn’t see that was and is a fool who cares about absolute nonsense more than they care about saving the life of an innocent Welsh Terrier.

I seem to have got myself riled up, so I’m going to save the story of Auntie Vicky and the Facebook business for another time. I wouldn’t enjoy telling it in my present mood.

4

Monday 17 June 2024

Sally

Sally is still in a heap with her back pressed against the front door when she hears Mark’s car drive past their house a few minutes later. Or maybe it’s an hour later; she has no idea how much time has passed. Champ is draped across her legs, asleep on his side, front and back paws stretched out as if he’s trying to mimic three sides of a trapezium. Sally has stopped crying, which she supposes is something. What she hasn’t done is go to the lounge where her phone is, call anyone, summon help of any kind, look up any useful information.

She will need to move so that Mark and Toby can get inside the house, she thinks. That can be the start of her doing something, of taking decisive action. That will be soon enough. There’s a good chance it’s been less than fifteen minutes since PC Connor Chantree left, and it takes days if not weeks or months for a situation like this to go from just started to too late. Sally knows she’ll get a handle on it. Mark and Toby’s return is just the catalyst she needs.

And it was definitely them she heard, cruising past the front door on their way to the far end of the development where the twelve parking spaces are separated from one another by neatly planted rows of shrubs: six spots for Bussow Court residents’ cars and six for visitors. Unlike Mark, Sally is no expert on different sorts of engines and the noises they make, but she was nevertheless able to identify her husband’s car from the sound of muffled pounding that accompanied its passing: a song (if you can call it that, which Sally doesn’t think she credibly can) that belongs to a genre her children call ‘drill’. There could be no clearer signal of the proximity of Toby Lambert, Sally and Mark’s 16-year-old son, than the whooshing-past-the-front-door of a throbbing racket of the sort Sally just heard. Drill is Toby’s latest obsession, and of course he wants to listen to as many of his favourite tracks as possible on the way back from his Music GCSE exam, which was this afternoon.

Sally is thankful that she couldn’t hear any of the lyrics and hopes none of the neighbours did either. Ree, eighteen months older than Tobes and certain her own current tastes are more sophisticated (love songs aimed at God, written and performed by members of the controversial Hillsong Church, though Ree insists she’s an atheist), has been known to shout-sing a brilliant mockery of a typical Toby number: ‘Co-caine-up-my-nose/Gonna-give-it-to-my-hoes/Cos-that’s-just-the-way-it-goes’.

No one from Bussow Court has yet complained about Toby’s ‘music’ (‘Shouldn’t two years of GCSE-level study have taught him what music is and isn’t?’ Mark has grumbled more than once) and Sally has fretted for a while that it’s surely only a matter of time. At home there’s a strict headphones-only rule – all the Lamberts agree that they don’t want to be noise-polluted by the others – but Sally knows Toby always wins The Battle of When To Switch It Off whenever it’s just him and Mark in the car, and today he’ll have won it decisively, as it’s a GCSE day.

Sally can imagine exactly how it went: Mark will have pressed the off switch as he turned right into Swaffham Tilney off the B1102, and Tobes will have turned it back on again, saying, ‘Can’t I listen while we drive through the village? Pleeeeease? Come on, Dad, I’ve just done an exam.’ Reluctantly, Mark will have agreed. Then he’ll have reached out again – a hopeful arm, spurred on by desperate ears – as they approached the turning for Bussow Court. Toby, ready with his next move, will have blocked Mark’s hand before it touched the on-off button. ‘What difference will, like, ten more seconds make?’ he’ll have said plaintively.

All right. Can you at least turn it right down, though?

No, Dad, you fun-sponge. Music like this needs to be loud. The windows are shut, aren’t they? Relax your trim.

And later Mark will say to Sally, ‘I didn’t want to crash the car while arm-wrestling with him, and I didn’t have the energy to argue,’ and then rant for a full twenty minutes about the inconsiderateness of teenagers, having somehow found the requisite energy for that, and oblivious to whether Sally might in fact rather listen to one of Toby’s awful drill tracks than this rant-liloquy she’s heard Mark perform several dozen times before.

Except it isn’t going to happen like that this time. Nothing that’s part of the Lamberts’ ordinary routine will fit into the rest of this unbearable day. The pattern is about to be disrupted by what Sally will say the second she has someone to say it to, and soon – really, startlingly soon, she’ll hear Mark and Toby’s footsteps any second now – no one will be able to think about anything but the nightmare that came knocking at the door of The Hayloft today, the one that is gone for now but will keep coming back, keep knocking. The one that might get gradually worse and worse until…

No. That cannot be allowed to happen. Can’t be considered, let alone tolerated, as a possibility. I will kill absolutely everyone if I have to, Sally thinks, and very happily go to prison for the rest of my life. It will be worth it.I’ll take the two longest, fattest-bladed knives from the wooden block next to the kettle and plunge, twist and gouge them into the chests of anyone who comes to the door and…

A crazy idea cauterises her murderous fantasy: she could leave the house now – take Champ and just go. Why give anybody, close family member or policeman, the chance to turn up and say anything at all? There’s still time to escape. Look how long it’s taking Mark and Tobes to get here. Does this prove Mark’s point? Sally wonders. Like the Gaveys (who bought The Stables six weeks after the Lamberts bought The Hayloft) and like Deryn and Jimmy Dickinson from The Granary, Mark believes that The Farmer positioned the parking spaces for Bussow Court unacceptably far away from the houses. Sally has always been in the other camp, the ‘how can any sane human believe that between twenty and forty footsteps is too far?’ camp, along with Vinie and Graham Skinner from The Barn and Conrad Kennedy from The Byre.

No, she can’t escape. She’d bump into Mark and Toby. Her car is parked in The Hayloft’s visitor space. But what if she were to leave on foot? ‘Just taking Champ out for a quick walk before I start on dinner,’ she can say if Mark’s outside the front door when she opens it.

And then she could go…

Where, without her car? She could ring a taxi if she took her phone, but to whose house or office would she ask to be taken? Who can help her? And why is she fantasising about escaping from her entire family instead of looking forward to the help and comfort they might give her?

Sally doesn’t need a degree in psychology to know the answer to that last one. She offers a silent hat-tip to her late father, who died fortreen years ago. Thanks, Dad. Great work.

She hears a key in the lock and shuffles to one side, trying to disturb Champ as little as possible. He opens an eye but is asleep again by the time Mark and Tobes have come in and shut the door behind them.

‘Why are you sitting in the hall?’ Mark looks down at Sally and chuckles. ‘Have our chairs and sofas been repossessed? Bailiffs been?’

She shakes her head.

‘Sal?’ Mark sounds worried. ‘Has something happened?’

‘Mum, are you okay?’ asks Toby.

Another shake. No. She is not okay. Then she tries to smile and says, ‘I will be.’ Don’t wait, though. Like: eat, have a shower. Watch some telly. It might take me a while. This would be a good joke if only she could make the words come out.

‘You don’t look okay,’ says Mark.

But does she look strong? That’s more important. Unhappy but strong, shocked but unbeatable – either of those could work. She is a mother of four, so she has no choice. She has to be strong, for Tobes, Ree, Champ, and…

Arguably, no deceased Welsh Terrier needs his former owner to be strong for his sake, but Sally can’t bear, ever, to think of Ree, Tobes and Champ without also thinking of Furbert. And she wasn’t just his owner, she was – is – his adoring mother, just as she is to the other three. Furthermore, she isn’t at all willing to think of herself as someone who now has one child fewer than she once had, so, yes, absolutely, she has to be strong for Furbs’s sake too.

Sally only remembers that she heard footsteps thudding down the stairs a moment ago when Ree is bending down in front of her, angry-faced. She’s removed all her makeup since Sally last saw her. ‘Aren’t you going to tell them?’ she says.

Does this mean Ree knows? Did she hear the conversation between Sally and the policeman, and is she here to bring everyone up to speed? If so, maybe Sally won’t need to speak for a few more minutes, by which time speaking will hopefully feel easier.

‘We’ve been ratted out to the feds,’ Ree says. ‘Except we haven’t done anything. It’s that fucking lying Gavey bitch. I swear to God, she ought to just die.’

Yes, thinks Sally. That would be helpful.

5

I said before that Lamberts aren’t liars. It’s true. Gaveys are liars and enemies, and Lamberts are truthful and good. Which means I need to be as honest as I can, as soon as I can: there’s something I’m not telling you. It’s about me. I’m not saying anything that isn’t true, but I’m leaving out something that is – a big, important detail. I’m allowing, creating, significant omissions.

Would anything I’m leaving out make you think much less of me if you knew it? Almost certainly. I’ll tell you eventually, but I need you to like and trust me more, and hate and fear the Gaveys more, before I do. If I approached it in any other way, you might drop this book in disgust, and I need you to keep reading.

(Oh, my God – am I writing a book? I hope that’s a quick and easy thing to do, because going through the nightmare our family’s just been through in real life, real time, was long and gruelling, and I’m nowhere near fully recovered, so I’m only really looking for quick, easy experiences for the foreseeable future.)

Why do I need other people to know the truth? Partly because I can’t bear the thought of being the only one, but that’s not all it is. The main thing is: this is my next assigned task. Just as I was sure from the start that dealing with the problem our family faced was mainly my job, I’m sure now that sharing my first-person, first-hand account with the world is my next mission, assigned to me by a force more powerful than myself.

No one will ever understand exactly what happened unless I tell them, because I’m the one who made it happen.

Also, and of equal importance: why does no one ever question why we need to know about 11 September, 2001, or why the Second World War started? Old people like Mum and Dad are always going on about the importance of knowing all that stuff (how often has Dad gone off on one of his ‘The trouble is, young people these days don’t get taught proper history, so they can’t see the dangers’ rants?), but what almost no one realises is that history is the-Lamberts-versus-the-Gaveys as much as it’s the Brexit Referendum or Henry VIII’s six wives. None of those things is a more or less significant element of the battle between good and evil than any of the others.

That’s why people need to hear this story – and I also happen to believe there’s a moral duty to spread the word whenever you hear of good winning and evil losing. That’s Enjollification in action. As Mum said once, after she’d identified her purpose in life thanks to that podcast, ‘Only Enjollification can bring salvation to the nation.’ She was being silly, but she was right.

So, yes, I am currently withholding a few important facts, and I have a powerful and good reason for doing so. I’m meant to tell the story of The Lamberts and The Gaveys in exactly this way, just as the Gaveys were always meant to come for us. Mum would hate this idea and try to persuade me out of believing it, but it’s true. She’s not the only one with a purpose. The Gaveys arrived in our lives for a reason: so that we could do what was required of us and become who we were always destined to be – and, what’s more, I was certain of this from the moment Mum and I first saw Lesley Gavey outside our old house, before I’d ever heard the name ‘Gavey’. I knew instantly that the appearance of this crying woman in our street somehow represented the start of the battle that would be the making of me. (Well… to be strictly accurate, I kind of both knew it and didn’t know at the same time. I definitely sensed it on some level, though.)

I can’t remember at what point I began to appreciate that our names sounded too good together for it to be a coincidence: ‘The Lamberts and the Gaveys’. Doesn’t it sound like a pairing that’s bound to have a war of substance behind it? I think it’s up there with ‘The Hatfields and the McCoys’, ‘The Montagues and the Capulets’, ‘The Starks and the Lannisters’. (Also ‘The Farmer and the Cowman’ from the musical Oklahoma!, though they’re not families.)

There’s a reason why these enemy name pairings work so well when you say them together, though for ages I couldn’t work out what it was. It’s partly the balance of syllables and sounds, but it’s not only that. The main thing, I think, is that with each pair, you can’t tell simply from hearing the names which side is good and which evil, so the intrigue factor is massive. ‘Both sound as if they could be lovely,’ you might think, and you can’t wait to find out what went wrong between these normal-sounding people. You tell yourself that maybe their feud is the result of a misunderstanding.

It’s important that you don’t misunderstand the wickedness of the Gaveys. Might they have done less harm in different circumstances? Of course. Appalling life experiences might lead any of us to do terrible things with great regret, but they don’t make a person innately evil. Trust me when I say the Gaveys had to be crushed, and don’t quibble when you find out the full truth later on. I promise you, no immunity or favours are ever granted to quibblers once evil has taken hold of a village or a country or a world.

Repeat after me:

Alastair Gavey, CEO of a telecommunications consultancy that has words in its name like ‘Core’, ‘Network’ and ‘Refresh’ (trust me, they don’t make any more sense in their correct order), 58 years old. Address: The Stables, Bussow Court, Swaffham Tilney, Cambridgeshire, CB25 0TS. Evil.

Lesley Gavey, self-proclaimed (unconvincingly: see several previous failed career attempts) podcast producer/sponger-off her husband. 54 years old. Address: as above. Evil.

Tess Gavey, A-level student at Bottisham Village College. 17 years old. Address: as above. Evil. By far the worst of all the Gaveys. (In my opinion only, I should say. Mum would strenuously disagree.)

6

Monday 17 June 2024

Sally

Mark’s face is a mixture of impatience and confusion. ‘Who?’ he says. ‘Which bitch?’

At first he assumed ‘the Gavey bitch’ must be the mother, not the teenage daughter. Yet it was Ree who said it, and Sally is the one who thinks Lesley Gavey is a crazy bitch; it’s Sally who theorises, speculates and invents scary scenarios around Lesley as if it’s her favourite hobby. Whereas Ree hasn’t ever said much about Lesley, and has said plenty about what a justifiably unpopular loser Tess Gavey is. Tess is in Ree’s class at sixth-form college; they have two A-levels in common, English Language and Literature (combined) and Sociology.

So Ree knows everything, thinks Sally; she heard what PC Chantree said. In which case, why the hell didn’t she come downstairs straight away, to check Sally was okay? Maybe because Ree’s not okay herself.

Has silent crying been happening on both floors of The Hayloft? Yes. Ree’s eyes are watery and red. She’s as imaginative as Sally is, perhaps more so: she too will have brought all the worst-case scenarios to vivid life in her mind.

Perhaps she hoped to stay and weep in her room for a while longer, but Sally scuppered that plan by maintaining her uninformative silence in the face of the quite reasonable questions that have been aimed at her.

‘Ratted out for what?’ says Tobes.

‘Nothing! He didn’t do it!’ Ree wails. ‘Right, Mum? I don’t get it: why didn’t you tell the cop he didn’t do it? I mean… did he do it?’ She bursts into tears, which she tries to scare away with a string of obscenities. ‘Please tell me he didn’t.’

‘Of course he didn’t,’ says Sally. Thank God Champ is completely, indisputably innocent. That’s something good she can hold on to. Gratitude is so important, even at a time like this.

‘Then why the fuck didn’t you say that to the policeman?’ demands Ree.

‘Who didn’t do what?’ Mark asks. ‘Could everyone please calm down?’

‘Everyone is calm apart from me, and no, I can’t,’ says Ree. ‘That bitch Tess Gavey is trying to get Champ killed. Lying about him so he’ll be taken away and put down.’

‘What the fuck?’ says Tobes.

‘Can everyone stop swearing, please? Champ?’ Mark asks Sally. ‘Champ is the one who’s been accused? Not Toby?’

‘’Bout time someone shared the load of unjust accusations,’ Tobes mutters.

‘Don’t joke about it,’ Ree snaps at him. ‘Champ’s life is literally under threat.’

‘No, it’s not.’ Tobes looks at Sally. ‘It’s not, is it, Mum?’

Every cell in her body begs to be allowed to say, ‘No, of course it’s not’, to bring a smile of relief to her son’s face, but she doesn’t know, and she doesn’t want to dish out false hope. And what little she does know is all bad.