Watching Over You Read online

  But one weekend, on impulse, she’d put the house on the market. A couple and their young daughter had come to view it during the next week and Charley had agreed to a sale quicker than she had anticipated. Finding herself with nowhere to go, rather than rush into things, she decided to find a temporary place to tide her over. Seeing a flat for rent in Trentham, over in the south of the city, she decided to take a look.

  Thirty-seven Warwick Avenue was situated in a quiet cul-de-sac full of pre-war semi-detached properties and town houses. The respectable, leafy avenue had the air of belonging in a wealthier suburb rather than Stoke-on-Trent. Less than a mile from the site of the former Hem Heath colliery, it had a mixture of old and new. Mature rambling houses, some with three floors; old sash windows, some replaced, some original. Dotted amongst them, a few newly built semi-detached properties.

  Charley parked up at the end of the cul-de-sac, spotting two large bay windows to the right of the entrance of number thirty-seven and two more directly above. She looked up, trying to guess how many flats the property had been split into. She reckoned on four: two up and two down. If that was the case, they wouldn’t be very big but they would be big enough for her.

  The house was set at the far end of a block of four. There were no properties at the head of the road and it opened onto a large playing field. Charley could see into one of the rooms downstairs as she made her way up six white-washed stone steps to the Wedgwood-blue entrance door. The paintwork looked fresh and inviting – pale walls and a light-polished wooden floor. But there was no furniture; perhaps this was the one she’d come to view.

  She rang the doorbell and waited, glancing up the avenue. Even though this was a short-term lease, the flat still needed to be satisfactory. From first impressions, it seemed acceptable. Cars parked on the road were mostly new; orderly gardens on either side, hedges on the whole trimmed and neat.

  Pride, she thought. People took pride living here. She liked that.

  The door opened behind her and Charley turned to see a young woman, mid-thirties at a guess. She was of small build, dramatically thin with long auburn hair and steely blue eyes – friendly eyes, Charley noted. Her smile was warm too, lips with a dash of pink rose lipstick, but her skin was ashen, a cluster of spots around her chin. She wore cropped black trousers and a long-sleeved blue shirt with a granddad collar. Barefoot, showing painted red toenails.

  ‘Hi, there. You must be Charley.’ The woman held the door open. ‘Come on in.’

  She was shown into a large entrance, which she assumed had originally been a grand hallway in one house. Now the doorway to what she thought could have been the sitting room had a front door lock on it, with the letter A to its left. As she stepped in farther, Charley glanced upstairs to see a door at the top with the letter B on it. Great – it looked as if there were only two flats after all.

  She caught a whiff of artificial air freshener as she glanced around the clean and tidy hallway. The flooring was a mosaic effect, multi-coloured browns, whites and blues, the room edged by a large wooden skirting board. Charley was sure the tiles were original Minton, made there in the Potteries, and wondered if they were as old as the house.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ella.

  Charley looked up. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Yes, they’re original. There were some in the Palace of Westminster until recently, you know. They’d been there since it was rebuilt after the Great Fire of London. These were here when I bought the property and they have never, to my knowledge, been covered up. There was an old couple in here before me. Died within a few weeks of each other – true love. Come on, I’ll show you the flat.’

  Charley followed Ella down the side of the stairs and along a small corridor to the door with the letter A on it, waited while it was unlocked.

  ‘This is it.’ Ella stood to one side again so that Charley could go in first.

  She stepped through into a long hallway. A door to her right took her into a bright mass of space, the room she’d seen on her way in. Light flooded in through the bay windows, almost side by side, and across polished floorboards, bouncing off walls painted a shade of cream. An Adams-style fireplace with a coal fire effect heater took over a chimney breast. Despite the empty room – Charley knew the flat came unfurnished – she could already picture herself curled up on her settee pushed up against the wall there, with a glass of wine and a book to hand.

  In a line to the back of the property was first a kitchen, then a bedroom with a walk-in closet and a small bathroom. All the rooms were bright and airy; all the fittings looked untouched.

  ‘Will I be the first tenant?’ she asked as the smell of fresh paint hit her nostrils in every room.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Ella. ‘I decided to spruce the place up a bit. It does have only the one bedroom, though. Are you moving in on your own?’

  ‘Yes.’ Charley didn’t offer anything more than that and she was thankful that Ella didn’t ask. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to hold back the tears. It was great to think of a new beginning but letting go of her past would take a lot longer than putting everything away into boxes.

  Ella showed her into the bedroom, a decent-sized double with French doors that led to a tiny flagged area. She pointed out to the garden.

  ‘The fence around the edge separates your space from mine. I can use my back door or the entry at the side of the property to get to it, but you’re welcome to use my garden area if you wish. It gives you the best of both. We get the sun at the front in the morning and around here for most of the afternoon. It’s great for catching a ray or two.

  ‘And that’s it,’ said Ella as they moved back into the front room again. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It’s lovely,’ said Charley, feeling the warmth of the house. What she had seen had been inviting and seemed a good place to settle. ‘And do you have any problems with the open area at the side?’

  ‘Not really. Sometimes kids play footie on there but it’s big enough to take it.’

  ‘No loiterers?’

  ‘No, but that might be because we also have our own resident Neighbourhood Watch.’ Ella pointed upwards to the property directly facing them. Another town house. It, too, was at the end of a block of four.

  Charley followed her gaze to see a woman in an upstairs window. She seemed to be sitting down by the way she filled the bottom half of the window only. From what Charley could make out – a shot of grey hair and hunched shoulders – she assumed she was elderly.

  ‘That’s Jean; she’s housebound, poor thing.’ Ella waved to her. ‘I only know her name because I hear the girl who comes to look after her shouting goodbye when she leaves. I’ve been here near on six months and I’ve never seen her, apart from in that window. I reckon she knows everything that goes on. Thinks we can’t see her behind those blinds, though.’

  ‘You mean she spies on you?’ Charley baulked.

  ‘Yeah, I suppose she does.’ Ella frowned. ‘I hadn’t thought of it that way. She just seems to always be in the window. I’m sure she doesn’t watch us, more gazes out at the world. She lives alone. It seems all she has left in her life. But you’ll get used to her if you take the flat.’

  ‘And no one minds?’

  Ella shrugged. ‘Why should they? And we’re the last houses in the avenue so she can’t see that much.’

  Charley looked up to the window, just as the woman waved back at Ella. She found herself waving too. It would be rude not to, she supposed. Even so, she wasn’t sure she wanted a neighbour seeing her every move. It seemed a little creepy.

  But, as she turned back to the room and saw the sun flooding in, filling it with warmth that she knew she could settle into, she realised that, for the first time in ages, she felt relaxed walking into somewhere. It was important that she felt comfortable; she spent a lot of time at home. Her job wasn’t too anti-social, hours-wise, even though she often took paperwork home, s
o mostly her nights were free. Maybe, if she positioned her furniture as she’d imagined when she’d first seen the room, she could spend a fair bit of time sitting in the bay window to the right, gazing down the avenue. Pretty much like Jean, she suspected.

  She turned to Ella and nodded. ‘I’ll take it.’

  ‘Really?’ Ella grinned. ‘That’s great news.’

  Charley smiled shyly. ‘It’s kind of a new beginning for me.’

  ‘That’s settled then. I’m sure we’ll get along like a house on fire.’

  Looking down from her upstairs window, Jean Cooper was glad to see the new woman waving back alongside her neighbour, Ella. She’d watched her approach and go into the house; clocked her arriving in her car first; written down the make, model, and registration number in her notebook. A white Ford, if her eyesight served her well, which, even with age, it usually did – although she had recently sent off for some new binoculars, lighter, more compact.

  The car had a fairly new registration plate, showing Jean that the woman had money, or an ability to get money if it was on tick. She liked people to provide for themselves if they lived in Warwick Avenue; she hated scroungers who milked the system. There were plenty of them dotted around the city – lots in every city, no doubt.

  Jean prided herself on having been a hard worker. Apart from working limited hours as she had raised her two sons, she’d been a full-time care assistant until retiring at the age of sixty. Even then, eight years ago, people had been more willing to work. She couldn’t understand for the life of her the layabouts of today.

  Tom, the tabby cat who had made his home with her some years ago, stirred at the bottom of her bed. She smiled at him, envious as he stretched out supple limbs. Jean wished she had half of Tom’s grace; it wasn’t easy growing old with osteoporosis but she was determined to stay in Warwick Avenue for as long as she could. She liked it here. They were all ordinary people, the slightest thing making one or the other spin out of control, their worlds crashing down in no end of different ways, good or bad.

  She picked up her binoculars and looked down once more. The women had moved from the window so there was nothing more for her to see.

  She had to admit to being surprised when her home help, young Ruby, told her she’d seen an advertisement in the newsagent’s window. The last person had left Ella’s house in such a hurry a few months ago. She’d been a woman too, although slightly younger, early twenties Jean reckoned, and had stayed for three weeks and two days before moving out as quickly as she had moved in. Jean had never found out why but she had her suspicions.

  It was a few minutes before she saw them come into view again. Jean leaned forward a little. She was a beauty, the new woman, quite tall and thin, no fat on her to talk about; medium build with dark brown hair. From what she could see, her clothes looked clean and presentable. Jean remembered a time when she’d been good-looking too. She’d also had dark hair that fell below her shoulders, not the wiry-grey mess she’d been left with after her menopause. But her eyes were her best asset, closely followed by her hearing – she could hear a lot of what went on in Warwick Avenue.

  Living there since she’d been married, Jean knew most of the neighbours in the houses near to her. She knew that Mr Reynolds from number thirty-three had been thrown out by his wife because he’d been ‘getting his end away with that ugly floozy.’ She knew before the house became empty that Mr and Mrs Morrison from number twenty-eight were doing a moonlight flit. Then there had been all the rigmarole over Diane and Terry Gregson’s teenage son as he’d been caught in a stolen car, which had brought the police straight to their door and netted Matthew Gregson a custodial sentence in a youth detention centre.

  They were all listed down in her notebooks. She glanced over at the pile. There were forty-eight altogether; she had begun writing things down when she’d retired and filled one every two months. Opening a new notebook was like starting at the beginning of a novel. Jean loved running a hand over the first page, anticipation of what she would write exciting her. And if there was nothing to see, she would switch to her laptop and search the internet for a while – with one eye on the avenue, of course.

  With everything quiet, Jean made a note of all she could see. Then she picked up a new ball of wool and removed the paper wrapping around its middle. She’d decided to knit herself a cardigan. Snazzy purple, she smiled – might as well do something useful to while away the time.

  As she started on the first row, she wondered whether Ella would be able to hide her drunken episodes from the new woman or if this tenant would leave too. They’d been regular occurrences since Ella had moved in six months ago. Jean often wondered where she’d been to when she came home in that state. She hadn’t seen her with a proper boyfriend since she’d moved in, but she had seen her bring home lots of men, just for the one night. If she looked back through her notebooks, she could count how many. If she was having trouble sleeping, she could also tell you what time they left, whether that night or the next morning. But she did know without looking how many of them returned: none.

  Jean wasn’t quite sure if she pitied her neighbour or not, wasn’t sure if she should. She’d seen her living a double life and had given up second-guessing who the real Ella was a long time ago. You never really knew people, did you? There was good and bad in everyone, Jean did know that, and terrible things put places on maps, like it or not.

  Still, she was good at keeping secrets. She’d found out the hard way there was no point in telling the truth.

  Chapter Three

  At eight thirty that evening, Ella grabbed her handbag and almost bounced down the front steps to the pavement and into a waiting taxi. She slid into the back seat and closed the door.

  ‘Rendezvous, Marsh Street,’ she told him.

  They set off for the city centre, and she gazed idly out of the car window as they drove down Trentham Road. She ran a finger up and down her leg from her knee to the hem of her short skirt. In anticipation, her hand moved to the neckline of her sheer blouse, fingertips running over the naked area of her chest. She couldn’t wait to get into Hanley now. It had taken her a few hours to control her anger today but, God, she needed to be screwed.

  She turned slightly to see the driver studying her through his rear-view mirror. Not taking her heavily made-up eyes from his, she ran her tongue suggestively over red-coated lips, fingers trailing across her skin. While he adjusted the mirror to get a better view, she moved her hand down inside her blouse, splaying her fingers and rubbing the palm of her hand back and forth across her nipple. Already she could feel it erect, sense the heat building up between her legs. The driver crunched his gears and she laughed silently before looking away. Who was she to give a free show? And besides, she was saving herself. It was her night tonight.

  Finding the website One Night Only four months ago had been ecstasy for Ella. The danger of a one-night stand didn’t bother her – no one could abuse her more than she’d been abused before – but here she pulled the strings. If she wanted rough sex, she had rough sex. If she wanted to be dominated, she would be. If she wanted to be an out-of-control bitch, that was fine too. One thing was certain – after the disaster of last week’s attempts in Chicago Rock where she’d gone home alone and horny, if she didn’t find a release tonight, she’d crack and that wouldn’t be good for her. She needed to rid herself of all the tension building up inside.

  Tonight was the third time she’d used One Night Only that month. The first had been with a man; the second with a woman. This time it was with Alex, with no profile picture, so who knew? Not that she minded either way as long as she got what she wanted.

  Minutes later they were heading towards Hanley, down Victoria Road. Ella’s senses heightened and she crossed her legs to keep the feeling at bay. Erotic thoughts ran through her mind – images of men and women, women and women, groups, all with legs entwined, hands and mouths everywhere.
/>   She found her mind wandering back to meeting Charley the week before. God, she was hot and so, so attractive, with her glossy dark hair and tall, thin physique. Her tanned legs had looked fantastic, high heels adding to their magnetism, making Ella want to reach out and touch. But she wouldn’t do anything yet. She would bide her time.

  One day she would have her – or rather, one day Cassandra would have her. Cassandra was the name she used for the website. But for the foreseeable future, Charley would get to know Ella. Maybe that was all she’d get; she’d have to figure her out first. And if she wasn’t for turning, then she would find someone else.

  Or maybe she could turn her, make her into a personal challenge.

  The taxi driver pulled up outside Rendezvous. He turned his shoulder and peered at her, smiling lasciviously. Ella bristled. Did he really think she would stoop that low, the stupid prick? And he reeked too. The taxi smelt similar – she’d put a bet on it being his stale body odour. She paid her fare quickly; there was no way she’d be leaving him a tip.

  As she entered the bar, excitement fizzed up inside her again as she speculated what Alex would look like. She really wanted a man. She wanted to be screwed hard tonight.

  The room was half wooden panels, half floral wallpaper, a modern take on a gentleman’s club, with a couple of booths and round stout stools at rectangular tables. It was busy for a mid-week evening, about two thirds of the tables to her right occupied with people socialising and a number of men standing around the bar area. Ella checked her watch. She was fifteen minutes late. Date or not, she didn’t give a stuff about keeping anyone waiting; that way he or she would be eager to get going. And if she didn’t like the look of her date, she would screw and go as quickly as possible.