Pulled a Muscle at the Gym

Nigel turned up on Thursday evening with his arm bandaged — nothing dramatic, no cast, just a neat elastic wrap from wrist to elbow, the sort sold at any chemist's and usually indicating a sprain rather than anything more sinister — and an explanation delivered in a voice so level it was, in itself, suspicious.

"Pulled something at the gym," he said, meeting me on the stairs. "New trainer decided I should be lifting more than I'm ready for."

"Which gym?" I asked, trying to make the question sound like polite interest rather than the opening line of an interrogation, though, hand on heart, it was exactly the opening line of an interrogation.

"Fitness Plus, on Commercial Road," he answered without missing a beat, with the sort of smoothness that either means total innocence or means a man already has a backup answer ready for any follow-up question.

I didn't press further — partly because further questions would have turned a polite chat on the stairs into an outright interrogation, and partly because, that same evening, I intended to check online whether "Fitness Plus" on Commercial Road actually existed, which, I admit, already says more about me than I'd like to admit out loud.

(Spoiler: it exists. An ordinary chain gym, dull class timetable, photos of satisfied clients on the website. This did not stop me; it simply added "suspiciously well-prepared cover story" to my growing list of suspicions.)

That same evening, around ten, I was sitting in the kitchen with my laptop, finishing a late plate of pasta, when a sound came up from downstairs — dull, sharp, brief — that stopped me with my fork halfway to my mouth.

It wasn't the sound of a dropped book. I know that sound well, because I make it myself regularly. Nor was it a dropped saucepan — I know that one too. This was something sharper, more… mechanical, if that's the right word for a sound I honestly didn't have the personal experience to describe properly.

I froze, listening. Silence. Then another, quieter, identical sound.

My imagination, which by this point in the story had progressed from "mildly curious" to "professionally paranoid," immediately offered up the only explanation it considered reasonable: gunshots. Muffled, perhaps through a pillow or in a soundproofed room, but gunshots all the same.

I texted Poppy: "Are you up? I think I just heard gunshots downstairs."

The reply came almost instantly, with the kind of speed that suggested either Poppy also suffered from insomnia, or, more likely, she was scrolling her phone instead of sleeping: "Dave, it's ten p.m. in a residential building in London. It's a dropped book."

"Twice, the same book?" I typed.

"Maybe he reads lying down and it keeps sliding off the bed when he falls asleep. Some people do that. Some people read books, Dave, instead of googling burner phones at two in the morning."

This was a fair point, but I chose to ignore it in favour of the more thrilling version of events.

The next morning, running into Nigel by the postboxes, I couldn't help myself:

"How's the arm?"

"Better, thanks," he said, giving his bandaged wrist a small, demonstrative flex. "Trainer says two weeks off heavy lifting."

"It was noisy downstairs last night," I said, trying to make it sound like an offhand neighbourly remark rather than a statement for the record. "Something fall?"

He paused for a beat — that same beat, which had by now become my personal go-to signal, like a traffic light — before answering:

"Ah, yes. Book. Read lying down, fall asleep, it drops. Happens all the time."

Word for word, Poppy's exact version. I couldn't decide whether to be relieved that common sense had apparently prevailed, or unsettled by how perfectly rehearsed the explanation sounded from a man who, in theory, had no way of knowing what we'd texted the night before.

"What book are you reading?" I asked, because if we were going to stick to the story, the story ought to hold up under detail.

"Historical thing," he said, vaguely. "About the war."

"Which war?"

"Dave," he said, with a small laugh that, for the first time, had a genuine note of tiredness under it, not the performed kind, "are you quite all right? You've been asking me so many questions lately I'm starting to feel like a suspect in an interview room rather than a neighbour with a sore arm."

That was the first shot that truly landed, and it landed dead centre. I felt myself go red — not from shame, but from that particular irritation you feel when you're caught out mid-exposure of someone else.

"Sorry," I said. "Occupational hazard. I spend all day finding discrepancies in logistics reports, the habit doesn't switch off in the evening."

"I understand," he said, and something in his tone suggested he might genuinely understand — far better than I could have imagined at the time.

We went our separate ways, each carrying our own private set of suspicions, and I spent the rest of the day replaying every detail of that exchange, looking for a crack to pry at. By evening I'd found exactly one: no normal person reading a historical book about a war hesitates over the simple follow-up "which war," unless he either isn't reading it at all, or has just invented its existence on the spot, standing by the postboxes.

I added it to the board on its own line: "'Book about the war' — story incomplete, follow up."

The line looked ridiculous. I left it where it was.

That evening I rang Poppy to recount the postbox conversation in full, every detail included — the intonation, the pause, the way he flexed his bandaged wrist, as if presenting evidence of his own innocence.

"Do you hear yourself?" she asked, once I'd finished. "You're analysing your neighbour's tone of voice like you're building a case for a jury."

"Evidence matters, Poppy."

"Evidence is fingerprints and CCTV footage, Dave. What you've described is 'man paused slightly before answering a question about a novel.' Anyone would pause if their upstairs neighbour suddenly started interrogating them about the plot of their bedtime reading."

"So you don't believe the gunshots?"

"I do not believe the gunshots," she confirmed, with the finality that usually meant the end of a debate, except this time, to my quiet satisfaction, it carried on. "But I'll grant you the gym story sounds a bit too smooth for a man who's clearly lying about something. That something is probably just a lot more mundane than superheroics, though."

"Such as?"

"Such as: he's secretly taking martial arts classes and is embarrassed about it. Or he's part of some underground historical re-enactment society and fights with wooden swords on Tuesdays. Respectable-looking people have the strangest hobbies, Dave, and almost none of them involve fighting crime."

I considered this. The re-enactment theory was, I'll admit, rather elegant — it explained the bruises, the bandages, the strange noises — but it didn't explain the three burner phones, the bloodstain on the cuff, or the coincidences with the news, and I said as much to Poppy.

"Fine," she sighed after a pause. "Then I've got better news for you. It seems I'm not the only one lately wondering about your neighbour."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean I spoke to Mrs Higgins downstairs today, picking up a parcel, and she let slip that Nigel has a 'remarkably busy social life for a man who's supposedly just an insurance clerk.' Dave, the concierge knows more about him than you think. You should talk to her."

This thought, oddly enough, hadn't occurred to me with any real clarity until then, though it should have — Mrs Higgins was a living archive of everything happening in the building, and my oversight had simply been in thinking of her as a source on overdue parcels rather than on secret neighbourly lives.

"Tomorrow, first thing," I said, already reaching for my notebook to plan the morning.

"Just," Poppy added before hanging up, "try not to come across like you're conducting an interrogation. You're not very good at it."