by cass green
‘Do you or the baby need medical assistance, Elliott?’ said the policeman, a burly man with thinning hair across his scalp and large pale eyes.
I shook my head.
‘I’ll be okay,’ I said, ‘but we need to find her. We need to find my wife.’ I was babbling now, the anaesthetic of shock wearing off and leaving sharp, cold panic in its wake.
I was about to push past him again and he lifted a meaty hand to stop me. ‘Do you have any idea where she is, Elliott?’ he said, his constant use of my name annoying me now for some reason.
‘No, she could be any—’ I started, then stopped. It was as though I was in the eye of the storm now; a place of utter stillness and certainty.
I knew exactly where she had gone.
‘Her mum and dad,’ I said. ‘She’s gone to them. She always goes to them.’
DS Jin was reluctant to let me come at first, especially with Livi. I yelled that Anya would listen to me and they would only make it worse. After exchanged looks between her and the other plainclothes officer – a man about my age with glasses and a dark beard – she agreed.
We drove through the streets of Casterbourne towards Lathebridge with the siren on in an unmarked car, and two panda cars following. I cradled the baby close to my chest, silently begging her not to cry as she began to grizzle in the back of the car, wishing we could travel faster, even though the motion was making my head hurt even more, and the urge to be sick was almost overwhelming.
Faces on the streets I knew so well turned to us in unison as we sped through the town. As we shot past the road that would lead to school, I imagined being in that building on a weekday and hearing these sirens so close by. The kids would be all of a babble over it. They’d think something cool, something exciting, was happening.
As we came into Lathebridge we drove down the coast road to the house and I saw our car, parked on the drive, like she had been coming round for Sunday dinner.
DS Jin turned to me, her face severe.
‘Elliott, you’ve to stay here until we tell you, do you understand?’
I nodded miserably, and she and the other officer were out of the car as one, slamming the door behind them and hurrying up the white stone steps to the large black and stained-glass front door. They knocked and shouted that they were police but nothing happened.
One of the policemen appeared from the side of the house that faced the coast, where the big bay window was, and his expression turned my spine to ice as he began yelling and gesticulating, which set off what seemed like an explosion of movement.
And I knew that things had gone from being bad to true horror.
A short, red battering ram was produced and pounded into the beautiful old door, with its distinctive lion-shaped knocker I had seen a million times.
I was out of the car now.
I heard a uniformed officer – I don’t even know if it was a man or a woman – call my name from where they were standing at the front of the house, but I ignored them and ran past the broken, open door and into the cool, tiled hallway. I was carrying Livi, which is something that still haunts me. I don’t remember if I squeezed too hard, or even if she woke up. I just remember the warm density of her in my arms. That she was there, where she should never have been.
In my memory of it, there are no crackling radios, none of the shouting and urgent activity that must have been taking place.It’s as though it happened in a dream state.
All I can hear is my own fearful, rasping breath. I see the heads of the police officers slowly turning towards me and mouthing urgently words I can’t hear from angry, frightened faces.
I saw Julia first.
She was lying on their long red sofa, her head back against a cushion as though she had dropped off into a pleasant nap. Her glasses had fallen onto her chest. The top of her head was now a mashed, pulpy mess of pink and white. The shotgun was on her chest.
Patrick was next to her but slumped sideways so I hadn’t seen him at first. I wasn’t able to see the damage to his head and learned of it only later.
Hands were reaching out for me. I think I screamed; I must have screamed. Then I pushed past the PC standing with an ashen face in the doorway and climbed the stairs two at a time, past another policeman who was just standing there doing nothing and into Anya’s childhood bedroom.
Lilac wallpaper, flowered curtains. Bookshelves that still held all the books she had loved as a child: the Jacqueline Wilsons, the Harry Potters, the horsey books. A big arty picture of the three of them, black and white, tumbling about and laughing.
I seemed to see each part of her in stages. First, my wife’s feet in her scuffed red Converse, up to her legs in the only jeans she could get into since Livi’s birth, then the flowery nursing top that crossed over at the front.
Finally, her face. What was left of it.
Hands were yanking me away then and I was bellowing, ‘Anya, Anya,’ over and over again, the pain something I won’t be able to describe, ever. I was crying and shouting, clawing at my own skin as though trying to escape from being me.
And then gentle but firm hands were taking Olivia from me and saying, ‘It’s over, Elliott. It’s over. Let’s go.’
SPRING 2021
IRENE
Irene checks her suitcase for probably the tenth time that morning, then her handbag to make sure she has her tickets and passport.
She isn’t being picked up by Frank for another half an hour for the journey to Heathrow. Irene takes a Rennie from the peeling packet in the bottom of her handbag in an attempt to quell the nerves fluttering in her stomach.
It is such a long way. She can’t even pronounce the name of the airport in Bangkok – Suvarnabhumi. How on earth is she going to cope if people don’t speak English? And what about all that spicy food? She liked the unusual new things that Liam cooked her on his last visit, but they had given her awful indigestion afterwards.
Irene looks at her watch. Twenty minutes until Frank gets here. He is always on time.
She wishes now she hadn’t turned down his offer to come with her to Thailand. But maybe next time. Everything is still so new. Having her son back in her life is a blessing she thanks God for every single day – now she has decided to give God a second chance. Having a new friend in the form of Frank is lovely too, but she doesn’t want to rush anything, after all.
When Liam had been in the hospital, stabbed in the stomach by that woman whose name she still can’t bring herself to say, she thought she might lose him again. It felt like the cruellest, most unfair joke that the world could play on a person, to bring him back into her life and take him away again. But the wound had been ‘quite superficial’ the doctor explained to her. He was smiling gently as he said it, and Irene had been struck by the difference in doctors, after Michael, when the news was good.
Her eyes flick to the mantelpiece and she looks at the pictures of her boys from a lifetime ago. She blinks back tears as she thinks about the sacrifice Michael made in trying to find his brother. This is something she knows still haunts Liam. She held him when he cried and told her he was so sorry for staying away all that time.
But it is what it is, and they must make the most of what they have now.
Two years ago, she had been alone in the world. A mother with two lost sons. Now one has come back to her, like a wonderful gift. And she has a new friend, Frank, not to mention Rowan, with her wacky baccy and her funny teas and her kindness.
Irene feels a jolt of pleasure at the thought of seeing Liam’s beautiful Pimchan and baby Aroon, who is such a big boy now.
She opens her case once again to check she has the Percy Pig sweeties Aroon likes. She knows she shouldn’t give them to him because they are bad for his little teeth, but isn’t that what grannies are for?
Irene re-zips the case and decides to have one last wee before Frank arrives. He’ll be here any minute and she doesn’t want to keep him waiting.
ELLIOTT
‘Not too high, Liv!’
She’s about to object, but I swing her round and let her lie back, eyes shining as she holds out her arms to the sides, and smiling so all of her small, neat teeth are on show.
‘Down! Down, Daddy!’ she says, and I place her gently on her feet. She toddles over to the sandpit then, where she left her bucket before, and begins to dig furiously there, chatting in her own babble of half-coherent language as she does so.
I can hear the sound of the North Circular thundering by from here. It’s not that far from our flat either, but closer to this playground, Livi’s favoured one. I don’t mind it, despite all the news reports about the dangers of bringing up children in London. I worry about her lungs sometimes, breathing in all that crap every day.
But most of all I worry that she has retained something of that day in the farthest parts of her baby memory.
I had to come home, after. Back to London, where I belong.
I couldn’t stay in Casterbourne, of course, and now I’m not even sure I want to be near the English coast for some time yet. No, I am happier here, in the stinky, anonymous heart of the city where I am just Mr Little again to the Year Twos I teach in the slightly struggling school. I’m not the ‘tragic husband of multiple murderer Anya Ryland’ as one tabloid put it. Zoe had pulled the iPad out of my hand and almost slapped me for reading that one, in those terrible, black days afterwards when I could barely function as a human being, let alone a dad.
We see her often, her and her new girlfriend Hayley. She’s Scottish, loves kids. Livi adores her.
Livi is too young to ask questions about her mother but I know the day is coming, and not that far away. What can I tell her?
Patrick’s fingerprints were on the gun as well as Anya’s, but the police think these were older.
They say that Anya shot herself, then Julia shot Patrick, then herself. Gentle, cultured Julia, with a shotgun in her hands. I can’t seem to picture this. Not that I try.
Although no one can ever know now exactly what happened, it probably played out like this:
I picture her walking to the front door and using her key to go into the house she grew up in. Maybe Julia was napping, the chemo having taken a lot out of her that day.
Maybe Patrick said something like, ‘What’s up, sweetie?’ but she ignored him and went to where he kept the shotgun. She knew how to load it because Patrick had shown her once.
I think she wanted to be with them, when she did it. It had to be there. And they wouldn’t be able to live without her.
It was all or nothing, when you were a Ryland. Julia knew, I think, more than I ever understood, what Anya was capable of. I think she was trying to warn me that day in her study, when she suggested I let her know if Anya’s behaviour ever ‘worried’ me. At the time, I thought it was concern about Anya’s well-being.
But maybe it was fear of what Anya might do.
Patrick, it turned out afterwards, was under investigation for defrauding investors in his company. Julia was much sicker than any of us had known.
I think about the picture they had on top of their piano sometimes, taken on a French holiday when Anya was a child. They are sitting at a sunlit table outside a café, the table crowded with baskets of food. Patrick has a tall glass of beer in front of him, Julia a glass of red. Anya is holding up a glass of Coke and making a silly face at the camera.
The perfect middle-class family on holiday.
They would always be together now.
A wave of grief hits me, as it often does, and I take deep breaths. One day at a time. That’s what my counsellor says. I may never get over this, but a time will come when I can live with it.
I get angry at Anya sometimes. I was so very grateful that she chose me, you see. I thought she was better than me inside. But I don’t know whether she would have been able to change.
I still miss her, despite everything she did. But when I try and imagine a different outcome – knowing she had killed two people – I don’t think we could have survived that.
Anya wasn’t ‘better than me’, after all. This is a strange, unsettling thought. I guess if I have learned anything, it’s that remorse means something. You can never undo a terrible act. But you should at least carry its weight.
‘Daddy! Daddy!’
I am jolted from my gloomy reverie by small daughter, who is lying on her back and making angels in the sand with her chubby arms and legs. She is cackling like a lunatic as she does it and my heart is packed with love.
From a passing car I hear a blast of music – ‘Have a Nice Day’ by Stereophonics. I used to find this song thoroughly annoying because of its ubiquity. But now, I feel something that I can only describe as not exactly pleasure … but like the shadow of a familiar feeling I may have again.
I haven’t been able to listen to music since it happened. Every song had an association with Anya and our life together. It’s only now I realize how painfully I’ve missed it.
Perhaps I’ll get Spotify or Apple Music going again and try to find something new to listen to. A brand-new genre of music. I mean, I’ve never really given jazz much of a go.
There’s a teacher at school, Evie, who says she likes jazz. She’s very nice, and I think there is a possibility she likes me. Maybe it’s time I paid this more attention.
I have been living in the dark for so long. You could say, I was here even before my wife and my parents-in-law died; my marriage weighed down by secrets. Maybe it started that night when I was twelve and I played a part in Mrs Mack’s murder. This even resulted in a certain blindness on my part; an inability to see beyond my own guilty conscience.
But perhaps there comes a time when you have to give yourself a break and step back into the light.
I walk over to Livi and lift her from the sand, then hold her squirming body high in the air, turning her in circles in the air. Sand tinkles gently onto me and she laughs and laughs, hands outstretched, her halo of red hair caught by the late afternoon sunshine.
Acknowledgements
Considering what dark imaginations they all have, the crime writing community is such a supportive and kind place. I think that with this book more than any other, they helped get me to the finish line.
Aside from the daily laughs, gossip and support, I had expert advice from the writerly ex-cops I know. Thank you so much, Clare Mackintosh and Rebecca Bradbury, who assisted me with the authenticity of certain scenes. I owe a massive debt to Katerina Diamond, who came up with the book’s title. I couldn’t quite find the right one this time, but as soon as she said, ‘What about The Killer Inside?’ everyone went, ‘Ah …’
I am also grateful to private eye Mike LaCorte of Conflict International, who gave me advice on tracing someone who’s quite determined to disappear. (I’ll be bearing this in mind, should I ever have the need …)
I hadn’t been in a primary school for a few years when I started writing this book and chatting with Peachey David helped me craft certain scenes. Thank you, too, to Anthony David for letting me visit St Paul’s Mill Hill School to shadow a teacher in Year Six. Michael Biggs was a lovely person to spend the day with and is clearly, rightly, adored by every one of his pupils (Mr David, I think he probably deserves a pay rise …)
I’d like to thank Emma Haughton for being such a huge support and reading this book when I wasn’t even exactly sure what it was going to be.
Inbali Iserles, Geri Ryan and Rosie Thornton were all immensely helpful with Cambridge knowledge I needed for this book and any faults there are definitely my own.
Thanks to the publishing professionals I rely on so much in this funny old job of mine. Mark Stanton, my agent (Stan, you are indeed The Man), my amazing editors Sarah Hodgson and Finn Cotton, publicist Emilie Chambeyron and eagle-eyed copy editor extraordinaire Rhian McKay. You are all bloody brilliant, basically.
Pete, Joe and Harry, you’re the absolute best. I’m so proud of each one of you and immensely grateful I get to hang out with you all.
Finally, to every reader who has got in touch to say they have enjoyed one of my books, you have no idea what this means. Please don’t ever stop!
Caroline Green, London, May 2019
Keep Reading …
Loved The Killer Inside? Enjoy another psychological thriller from Cass Green …
One stolen baby. Two desperate strangers. One night of terror.
Click here to order a copy of Don’t You Cry.
About the Author
Cass Green is a bestselling author of psychological thrillers and an award-winning writer of fiction for young people under the name Caroline Green. Her first novel for adults, The Woman Next Door, was a No.1 ebook bestseller, while the follow-up, In a Cottage in a Wood, was a USA Today bestseller and a Sunday Times top ten bestseller. She is the writer in residence at East Barnet School and teaches courses in Writing for Children at City University and Crime Fiction at City Lit. She lives in London with her family.
@carolinesgreen
Also by Cass Green
The Woman Next Door
In a Cottage in a Wood
Don’t You Cry
About the Publisher
Australia
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Canada
HarperCollins Canada
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