Read The Girl Next Door for Free Online Page A

Inspector Colin Quell, who had met on the front path. Alan and Rosemary had walked to York Hill. All the way Alan hadn’t said much because he was anticipating meeting Daphne again after so long and resolving at the same time not to think about it. It would be a long way for her to come at her age. She was two or three years older than he. And how would she come? By tube perhaps. The District Line and then the Central Line. Perhaps Stanley would drive down to Loughton station to meet her. He wouldn’t ask. They went into the living-room, the French windows open tothe garden, it was such a fine sunny day. Maureen brought in a large blue bowl full of spring flowers and set them on the table. Spot ran out into the garden, chasing a squirrel.
    Because it was nearly lunchtime, George offered Pinot Grigio, which Quell refused. He was driving, he said. Most people think all police officers are traffic cops, and one by one (except for Norman) the others also declined, feeling perhaps that Quell would see the drinking of alcohol as somehow offensive and in some way punishable. Food, however, was acceptable, and even Quell took a smoked-salmon sandwich.
    “Well, shall we make a start?” he said. “Don’t need to wait for the others, do we?”
    George began talking about the tunnels, how he thought he and his brothers “poor” Robert and Stanley had been the first to discover them. Not then but later, when he was in his late teens and went into the building trade, he realised the tunnels had been the foundations of a house, the building of which was stopped by the war.
    “So these were the foundations of Warlock?” Quell asked.
    “No, no. Michael Winwood’s father told us not to play there anymore. He stood at the opening to the tunnels and shouted at us to come out. Kids were obedient in those days. We did as we were told. We all came out and went home. After that we never went there again, and at some point the foundations were filled in. I don’t know who took it upon himself to do that and you’ll never find out now. It was all farmland up there, and as soon as I could, our firm—that is my brother Stanley and me—we bought as much as we could, and one of the houses we built was Warlock. I reckon that was just sort of next door to where our tunnels had been. That would have been 1952 or ’53.”
    “When you say you were playing there, what did you play? I mean, there can’t have been much to do in underground passages. Why did you?”
    They looked at Quell pityingly. He spoke from the age of computers and online games, from e-books, DVDs, and CDs, Bluetooth and Skype, smartphones and iPads. They spoke from a distant past when everyone read books and most people had hobbies, made things, played cards and chess, dressed up and played charades, sewed and painted and wrote letters and sent postcards.
    Alan had begun describing what they did, how they wrapped potatoes in clay and baked them on a fire they made in an old water tank, played sardines, a constant favourite, picnicked on cheese sandwiches, played cards, acted bits of history they liked, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Rizzio—the mystified Quell had seen Mary Queen of Shops on TV but never heard of the Scottish Queen—Henry the Eighth and his six wives, the death of Nelson. There was a fortune-teller, very popular this, who sat in a candlelit chamber of the tunnels and told everyone’s future, gazing into someone’s mother’s upturned mixing bowl. Alan faltered a little when he came to the fortune-teller but scarcely heard the doorbell until a low, somehow thrilling voice interrupted and Daphne Furness, followed by a man who had to be Michael Winwood, came into the room.
    Had he seen her in the street, he wouldn’t have known her. Of course he wouldn’t after sixty years. He only knew her now because who else could it be? She was elegant in a black suit, white silk shirt, and very high-heeled shoes. Rosemary always said that elderly women couldn’t wear