Featured Excerpt: Nosy Neighbors by Freya Sampson

Seven

DOROTHY

The first Dorothy knew of the events in flat one was the sound of the siren. Initially, she gave little thought to its distant wail. Her grocery delivery had arrived this afternoon, and she was enjoying a particularly delicious cream eclair while she wrote a sternly worded letter to the council about a loose paving stone outside. And so it was not until the ambulance turned into Poet’s Road, and its wail became so deafening that Dorothy could no longer hear Tristan and Isolde, that she began to take note.

She watched it approach, but it was only when it pulled to a stop in front of her window that she felt her heart rate start to quicken. It was not here for someone in Shelley House, surely? Dorothy swallowed some eclair, but her throat was dry and she gagged. The siren had stopped but the blue light was still revolving, its fluorescent rays so dazzling that she was forced to close her eyes.

The sticky sensation of hot asphalt under her bare feet.

Dorothy dropped her cake fork and it clattered onto the plate.

The shout of a man as he tried to catch up with her, the feel of his fingers grabbing her arm.

She heard footsteps running and a buzzer sounding somewhere within the building.

The pity in the paramedic’s eyes.

Dorothy jumped up from the table so abruptly that her plate tilted and smashed to the floor, splattering crème pâtissière over her slippers. She ignored it as she rushed toward her front door, pressing her eye against the small glass circle. Two uniformed paramedics were standing in the hallway, their backs to her as they talked to someone. Who on earth was it? Perhaps Gloria? This would not be the first time she had ended up in a physical altercation with one of her gentlemen friends. Or maybe the man from flat four, given his obvious rampant drug usage? But when one of the paramedics stepped aside, Dorothy saw the pink-haired girl standing in the lobby, her face the color of milk. Was she ill? She was waving her hands around and then she turned and strode into flat one, the paramedics hot on her heels.

Dorothy felt the air leave her lungs.

Joseph Chambers.

The door to flat one was still open, and from this distance Dorothy could make out the paramedics standing behind a low table, looking down at something on the floor. Dorothy felt herself sway and grabbed hold of the doorframe to steady herself. She must sit down before she collapsed and needed the efforts of a paramedic herself. She shuffled across to the table, bone china crunching under her slippered feet as she dropped into her chair. Had he had a heart attack and dropped dead, right there on the floor? He had always seemed so healthy, bounding off on his ridiculous daily runs, but perhaps he had had a dickey heart all along. Or maybe it had been a stroke; a time-bomb blood clot in the arteries of his brain, so large that it wiped him out in seconds?

Dorothy’s throat was parched and she reached for her teacup, her hand shaking as she lifted it to her lips and took a sip. How many times had she dreamed of this moment over the past three decades, fantasizing about the myriad ways in which Joseph might finally get his comeuppance? How many thousands of nights had she lain awake imagining the way she would feel when he was gone from her life for good? In her dreams, she had always been dancing for joy, cracking open the cooking sherry to celebrate, yet now she felt only cold and numb. It must be the shock.

A police car pulled up behind the ambulance and two officers climbed out, one of them tossing an empty burger wrapper toward the bin as he climbed the steps. It missed and landed on the pavement, but Dorothy’s diary sat untouched. A few passersby stopped to gawk at the emergency vehicles, no doubt wondering what gruesome events had taken place in Hell House. Dorothy’s insides coiled like a cage full of venomous snakes, but she did not rise from the table or take her eyes off the window.

Finally, after what felt like hours but her watch told her was only eighteen minutes, the front door opened again. The paramedics wheeled out a gurney covered with a white sheet, but Dorothy caught a flash of gray hair and a pair of old running trainers sticking out the bottom. For a brief moment she found herself wondering if the body would still feel warm to the touch or if it was already turning cold. She shivered and pulled her cardigan around her shoulders. The paramedics carried the gurney down the steps and loaded it carefully into the back of the ambulance, then the rear doors slammed shut and the vehicle pulled off.

Dorothy did not take her eyes off the ambulance until it disappeared from view. It was only once it had turned the corner out of Poet’s Road that she realized she was not the only one watching Joseph Chambers take his final journey from Shelley House. The pink-haired girl was standing on the front step, her arms crossed over her body. Her usual scowl was gone and she looked suddenly very young, little more than a child. She stared down the empty road for a moment longer before turning and walking back into the building, allowing the front door to slam violently behind her.

Excerpted from Nosy Neighbors by Freya Sampson Copyright © 2024 by Freya Sampson. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.