The Girl Next Door Read Online Free PDF Page A

Alan and Rosemary have a shufti,” said Maureen. “You lot can see the pics whenever you want.”
    Eventually the album was rearranged so that everyone couldsee but no one could see well. George placed one finger on a dim-looking snap of five children crowded together in what was apparently the entrance to a small cave. Out of focus, it thus looked as if Robert Batchelor had taken it through a thick fog. “Me and Stanley and Norman and poor Moira,” said George. He called her “poor” because she, the youngest but one of them, like Robert, the eldest, was dead.
    “Who’s that?” said Rosemary, pointing to a boy with a mop of curly hair.
    “Don’t know.” George produced a magnifying glass, enlarging the boy’s face to a blur. “Could be Bill Johnson.”
    The other photographs on the page were of little interest to Alan and Rosemary, being of interiors of the Batchelor house in Tycehurst Hill, of Stanley holding a cricket bat, and, mysteriously to anyone not familiar with Norman’s life history, a small shot of a table covered in a checked cloth.
    “Look at that,” said Norman. “I took that. Fancy you keeping that, George. I was born on that table. My mum was walking about the house, waiting for the nurse to come, in labour, of course, though we were never told that part. It was never put into words, though that’s what it was. George and Moira carried it out into the garden for Robert to get that shot on account of it was too dark in the kitchen. Fancy you keeping that. Can you unstick it, George, and let me have it?”
    “No, I can’t. It’d spoil the album.” George looked around him. “You want to see any more? I ask because my leg’s giving me hell.”
    “Give it here,” said Maureen. “Let Alan and Rosemary have a closer look.”
    She lifted the album and laid it across Alan’s knees. “Robert took some more of the tunnels on the next page,” said George.
    Alan turned it over, and there she was, sitting on a pile of bricks with Stanley on one side of her and Michael Winwood on the other. She was wearing a summer frock, and her hair, a nearly black darkbrown, hung in ripples over her shoulders and halfway down her back. Alan started at the sight, something like a shiver, sudden enough to make Rosemary turn on him a look of concern. That hair—she sometimes wore it in pigtails, and the waves appeared when the plaits were undone.
    “There she is,” said Stanley, craning his neck to see. “She doesn’t look like that now, but you can still see the young Daphne in her.”
    Hurriedly, Alan turned the page to a set of some ten or eleven photos of Stanley’s dog.
    “Nipper. There he is, my first dog. I reckon I’ve had ten since then, they all lived to a good age.” Stanley sighed. “Alfie died last year aged eighteen. I won’t have another, not now. It’d be sad for him if I went first, and I easily might at my age.”
    A thin blight settled on the meeting after that. They were old and hadn’t long to last and they shirked facing it. Alan asked where Stanley was living now and was told Theydon Bois, a not-far-distant village in the forest. Alan wanted to ask for more about Daphne but hesitated and asked after Michael Winwood instead. North West London, he was told, and then he got up to go.
    “Should we get in touch with the police?”
    “Let sleeping dogs lie,” said Stanley. “Or bones, should I say?”
    “Better let them know.” George shifted his bad leg and winced. “I’ll tell them, if you like. I mean, I built Warlock and I’ve got those pictures. I’m the one to do it. They’re not taking my album out of the house, though.”
    “We could try to find some of the others too,” said Norman. “Maureen could do that. Genius with the technology, aren’t you, Maureen?”
    “More like the phone book,” said his sister-in-law.

3
    A LAN AND R OSEMARY walked back up Traps Hill. In the days when they both belonged to the tennis club, they used to run up that hill. Now