The Killer Inside

by cass green

  Anastasia nods vigorously, eyes shining with tears that are welling there and gets up from the bench.

  ‘No point putting it off any longer then, is there?’ she says, and Liam gets up too.

  They start to walk back towards the car park and then Liam notices a figure standing just by the start of the path. A middle-aged man, strongly built, who is staring at them oddly.

  Anya pushes ahead and Liam wants to call her back because there is something unnerving about this guy. That’s when he notices something in his hands, which he is holding lightly behind his back.

  It’s a golf club.

  Fear sparks inside him now and he cries, ‘Anastasia!’ But she walks up to the man and squeezes his arm. A look passes between them. Anastasia gives a tiny shake of the head and a rueful downturn of the lips before climbing into the black car she was leaning against earlier on.

  ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ says Liam and he knows his voice sounds scared and childish, but he can’t care about that because, too quickly, the man is raising the golf club over his head and Liam’s next sound is a cry of shock and pain.

  I think I placed too much hope in the transformative effect of the baby’s arrival.

  Of course, it is a massive change for the two of them in all the usual ways: the sleepless nights, mess and disruption. That’s not what I mean, though.

  I believed – and maybe she did too – that some form of alchemy would occur inside her after the birth, something that would turn that baffling, numb place she manages to hide so well into something that beat and pulsed with powerful, all-encompassing emotion.

  I know I was changed by my two births in all sorts of ways, good and bad, and I suppose I just assumed she would be the same, even though she marched to a different drum in all sorts of ways.

  The pure love I felt when I saw their little faces was a surprise. Where had that been? I couldn’t understand where it could have been hiding until then.

  I hoped my daughter might find that love too. But I am really not sure she has. And in anyone else, I would just say, ‘Wait and see. Let her find it in her own time.’ But this is Anastasia. My dear, darling, complicated Anastasia.

  When she told us the terrible story about that Alice woman, both Patrick and I cried.

  We were devastated that our daughter had been responsible for something so horrific and, yes, I’ll admit this, that she had to see it. We were frightened that it would scar her for the rest of her life.

  We wanted to blame him, that Liam boy.

  I never really asked for details about how Patrick persuaded him to stay away.

  But he sounded like the sort of person who would probably do anything for the right price. I’m not too concerned about that, I’m sorry. My daughter is my priority.

  Anya remained dry-eyed while she told us about what happened at the station. It was when Patrick left the room that she grabbed both my hands and whispered something I have never forgotten, which chilled me and saddened me to my core.

  Her expression was momentarily wild and she hissed, ‘There’s something missing inside me, Mum. I know I’m meant to feel awful but I just want to forget about it all. Is that normal?’

  What on earth could I say to that? Patrick came into the room and she drew back and gave me a warning look about repeating what she had said. I didn’t know what to do or say and left it at that. But the next chance I had, I suggested she see a therapist again. She followed my advice, but I am not sure she ever really allowed herself to tell the truth in those sessions.

  We couldn’t have been happier when she met Elliott. Of course, we were surprised, at first. Their backgrounds were so different and, in the beginning, we thought there may be elements of that other, disastrous, relationship at play. But we quickly fell in love with Elliott too. He has an essential sweetness to him that she needs in a partner. He balances her out. I believed, I really did, that maybe she had grown out of the more problematic aspects of her character.

  Then that Michael man came back into her life.

  She has no remorse for what happened to him, not really.

  For my daughter, it is a little like watching her actions through a screen. She knows they are directly connected to her, yet she is able to tidy them away.

  She didn’t spend her childhood pulling the wings off insects, if that’s what you are thinking. She doesn’t, as far as I am concerned, nurse violent urges or have an inability to care about people. My daughter loves me and her father. She loves Elliott.

  Patrick doesn’t want to hear any of this, as usual. He says it’s ‘a bit of the baby blues, that’s all, nothing to panic about’. He never would truly discuss it. Says now that I need to concentrate my efforts on getting well and to stop panicking about matters that are largely in my head.

  He doesn’t see things he doesn’t want to see.

  A couple of days after Olivia was born I went round to the house. I had been keeping my illness from Anya for a while but knew I would have to tell her soon. It terrified me that the one person in the world who truly understood her, and loved her all the same, was on borrowed time. But I was so elated at the birth of my granddaughter that I kept putting it off. Who wants to talk about death when birth is so very much nicer?

  Elliott told me Anya was just changing the baby but I could go up, so I climbed the stairs, feeling the effort as though there were three times as many.

  I came to the small room they had converted into a nursery with primrose yellow walls and a border of silver moons and stars. My heart lifted as I saw my daughter bending over the wooden changing table, two tiny pink legs waving around near her hand. But the baby wasn’t happy about being changed and began to grizzle.

  I watched in horror as Anya grabbed one of Olivia’s feet, quite roughly, and swore before telling her to ‘Stop it.’ As if the baby was being disagreeable on purpose!

  I rushed in and she started to cry, saying she was just sore and tired and hadn’t meant it.

  I took over and told her to nap, while I changed the baby’s nappy with shaking hands.

  I carried Olivia – so very carefully – downstairs. Elliott was making tea, oblivious, in the kitchen. I wondered again about talking to him – really talking to him. But I’d tried before and sounded a bit mad, plus I wasn’t sure what he did and didn’t know.

  I smiled as his whole face lit up at the sight of his baby daughter, swaddled and sleepy now in a yellow crocheted blanket.

  He is besotted with Olivia, I think.

  Thank goodness.

  But he can’t be there all the time, can he? And he would never believe me. He thinks she is so much better than he is, that’s the trouble. That’s why she chose him.

  Now she has the baby, it changes everything.

  Anya isn’t the priority, for the first time ever.

  I have to think about Olivia now.

  SUMMER 2019

  IRENE

  The handles of the plastic shopper were biting into her palm so she stopped for a moment to swap hands. Irene could have sworn this bag was now twice as heavy as it had been when she left the shop. She’d only needed a few essentials – eggs, milk, a tin of beans – but everything felt so exhausting these days.

  It had been an effort to force herself out and about, as she kept being advised she must do. People had been very kind though, overall, and she had been pleasantly surprised by how many friends she appeared to have. She supposed that was one small silver lining to it all.

  Huffing now, she began to trudge up the small incline that would take her to her own corner. It was like having sandbags attached to her arms and legs all the time. She had forgotten how bone-tiring sadness was. Or maybe it was her age. She was trying not to nap like an old lady, but it was hard when she fell into bed and then her mind seemed to switch on like a bright light that searched all the dark corners for answers she could never find.

  As she rounded the corner to her own road, she saw that a police car was parked right outside her hous
e. Her heart seemed to kick in her chest and she felt her breath come faster.

  It couldn’t be for her, surely? She mentally scanned for any reason her neighbours might have the police round. Cathy at number 14 had that business with her son, Kyle, a while back, but that seemed to be over now and Irene had seen him going off at rush hour in a shirt and tie recently.

  A strange thought leaked through her now, one that she didn’t quite know what to do with.

  Most people got a shock when the police came to visit because they thought it might signify bad news about a loved one.

  But Irene didn’t have anyone left to lose.

  When she was almost alongside the car, both doors opened, and two women in plainclothes got out, both impossibly young-looking.

  One may have been Chinese, with a short black bob and glasses over eyes that were peering keenly at Irene. She was small and slim and the other, with a brown ponytail and a straining blue blouse, was smiling, a bit nervously, Irene thought.

  ‘Mrs Copeland?’ The Chinese one approached her now. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Amy Jin and this is Detective Constable Katie Morgan. Would it be okay if we came in and had a chat with you?’

  Irene realized, afterwards, that she hadn’t even offered them a cup of tea.

  Her heart was still beating uncomfortably hard, even though she’d had that strange thought before. There was something in their manner – a kind of intense focus – that alerted her to the fact they were here about something serious. Something that directly involved Irene. She brushed away a guilty feeling; she hadn’t done anything wrong. Everyone knew this was how the police made you feel.

  ‘Mrs Copeland,’ said the one called Jin, leaning forward in her seat and clasping her hands together in quite a mannish way for such a slip of a girl. ‘We are here about the death of your son, Michael.’

  The jolt from these words brought Irene’s hand to her chest, as though to stop her heart from bursting right through her flowered blouse and onto the carpet.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, although it might have been so quiet only she heard it.

  ‘You are aware, Mrs Copeland,’ the policewoman continued in a firm, but kind voice, ‘that your son’s death was believed to be a result of suicide.’

  ‘Yes,’ louder now, maybe too loud.

  ‘Well, someone has come forward to say that they believe there may have been foul play involved.’

  Foul play.

  ‘What does that mean exactly?’ Irene pressed the hand against her chest and tried to get her breath.

  ‘Would you like a glass of water?’ said the other policewoman and Irene wanted them to get on with it, to explain why they were here, but she was aware that she might be on the verge of some sort of panic attack again, like when she was in that café. She didn’t want to be keeling over, so she said, ‘Yes, yes please,’ and the policewoman got up quickly.

  ‘Kitchen’s through there,’ said Irene, wafting her hand in the general direction.

  She stared down at her hands, suddenly oddly self-conscious in the silence that remained, with the Chinese lady still looking at her.

  ‘There you go, have a sip of that,’ said the other one and she drank down half the glass, grateful for the distraction.

  ‘Are you okay to continue?’ said the Chinese one. DS Jin, that was it.

  She nodded and mashed her hands together hard in her lap.

  ‘As I was saying, we have had a tip-off about possible—’

  ‘Yes, foul play, you said, already.’ Irene was suddenly impatient to hear the rest. ‘But what does that mean, exactly?’

  DS Jin paused. ‘Mrs Copeland, this person claims to know for a fact that Michael was not alone at Petrel Point and that he may have been pushed from the cliff.’

  It was funny, now that the words were out there, that Irene didn’t faint or cry, or pass out. She was suddenly suffused with a feeling of numb calm. Later, she would understand that it was perhaps a bitter sort of satisfaction that her deepest belief – that Michael wouldn’t have done this to her – was correct.

  The two policewomen were staring at her intently now, the larger one perched on the edge of the sofa as though she might have to catch Irene in a dead slump.

  Irene took a breath in through her nose and let it out slowly.

  ‘I see,’ she said. ‘And did the person see this happen?’

  The two police officers exchanged glances then.

  ‘We are not sure, Mrs Copeland. But we have been told he had an altercation with a woman.’

  ‘A woman?’ said Irene, then. ‘But why would a woman …’

  She gasped, breaking off the end of her sentence and both policewomen leaned forwards as though pulled by strings simultaneously. They waited for her to continue but she was staring up at the ceiling now, reliving the look on that Anastasia’s face at her front door.

  One of them cleared her throat in a deliberate way.

  ‘Mrs Copeland,’ she said, ‘do you know a young woman called Anastasia Ryland?’

  Irene looked back at the Chinese one; the name gone again in all this stress.

  And then, a breach occurred like something had been severed inside. She began to sob hard, hot tears that wrenched from so deep within it felt as though her insides were being yanked out.

  Later, she leaned her head back against the chair and closed her aching eyes. The policewomen had been very kind, asking if they could ring a friend to be with her, but Irene had wanted only to be left alone to try to process this violent swerve in her life.

  She had been hungry for detail, once she had cried and made tea and managed to get a grip on herself, but they weren’t able to tell her too much. Irene kept asking, ‘Why now?’ Why had this supposed witness not done the right thing when they should have, a year ago? But all the officers would say was that this ‘individual’ had personal reasons for not coming forward at the time, but that their circumstances had changed in a way that made it now possible.

  They also said some things Irene didn’t understand about there being no other hard evidence at this late stage to prove the story. At the time she hadn’t been able to take in why they were emphasizing this so much, but now, she understood with a dropping sensation in her stomach, that they might not have much to go on. If someone – her, that Anastasia – had done this to Michael and somehow got off, then she thought she would rather be where she was this morning. In total ignorance. She didn’t think she would be able to stand that.

  Irene’s head was throbbing from her explosive crying episode – funny how she would have felt embarrassed to cry like that in front of strangers a year ago – and she hefted herself up from her chair to get some paracetamol from the cupboard. She didn’t like to take medicines on an empty stomach but she felt as though her throat would simply clamp shut if she tried to eat anything.

  As she climbed the stairs to get to the bathroom cabinet, she found herself going over, yet again, how that woman could have been connected to Michael. He had been trying to find out something about Liam, and Liam was the connection.

  When she had tried to explain this to the policewomen, it had all come out garbled. She’d noticed them exchange looks again when she said that Michael had apparently been on a mission to discover what had happened to his brother. The English policewoman, or at least the non-Chinese one, had written notes rather frantically when she told them her youngest son hadn’t been seen by his family since 2003.

  They asked the same questions that had come up when he first left.

  ‘Was his passport missing?’ Yes.

  ‘Were any clothes missing?’ Not really.

  ‘Has there been any contact with him whatsoever since the last time you saw him?’ Just that postcard. She was able to show them that and they asked if they could take it with them, which seemed a bit strange.

  ‘Was there any reason to suspect Liam may have been in any trouble?’

  Irene had hesitated before she’d said, ‘No.’ They had noticed it, for sure. But s
he couldn’t bring herself to say that he might have been involved with drugs. Maybe it was because she imagined their expressions might shift; harden. She would go from being the poor bereaved mother of the victim to someone who had criminal elements in the family.

  Irene winced and filled the tooth mug with water from the bathroom tap, before swallowing the two painkillers. Each seemed to catch, scratching her throat as it went down.

  Despite needing to be alone earlier, she suddenly had a strong desire to tell someone. Quickly dismissing her local friends, kind though they were, her mind settled on Rowan. She had seen the other woman a few times since Michael’s death and rather liked her, despite her odd ways. Yes, she would ask her to come over, especially as Rowan deserved to be told this new information.

  Irene made her way down to the telephone in the kitchen and looked for Rowan’s number in the address book she kept near it.

  Frustratingly, the call went to voicemail and Irene was about to hang up, when she forced herself to speak. She hated these message things.

  ‘Rowan,’ she said, aware of how wavering and old she sounded to her own ears. ‘It’s Irene, here. Irene Copeland. I wondered if you might be able to drop by … I …’ she tried to swallow, her mouth suddenly desert-dry. ‘I have something I need to talk to you about,’ she said. ‘About, about my Michael. Well, thank you. Goodbye.’

  She hadn’t really known how to sign off – never did on these messages – but the prospect of Rowan’s company was welcome. That was, of course, if she got the message and wasn’t off on some whale-singing course or something.

  She clearly wasn’t though, because less than fifteen minutes later Irene heard a soft, tentative knock at the front door. The bell had stopped working some time ago and, without Michael, she hadn’t been able to fix it.

  Feeling a lightening inside, she got up from the sofa, where she had been trying to watch a little television to take her mind off things, and made her way to the front door. It didn’t look like Rowan standing there – someone taller, slimmer, surely?

  When she opened the door, it wasn’t Rowan. It was a young man, tall and skinny, but with muscled arms coming from a faded yellow T-shirt. He had glasses and the sort of red beard people wore when they were dressing up as comedy Scotsmen. He was probably one of those homeless people, who sold sponges and whatnot, but casting her gaze around, Irene couldn’t seem to see anything other than a large rucksack that was resting by his feet.