“Look here. Look at my eyes. People said we had the same eyes.” She held Maeve’s head so Maeve could see. All these months, and she hadn’t noticed. Hadn’t suspected. But Maeve could finally see the truth as she died. She saw through the dyed hair, the clothes. “That’s right. I wasn’t Callum’s girlfriend. He never had a girlfriend. It’s me, Jen. Jennifer McAllister. Callum’s sister.”
Maeve tried to speak, but it hurt too much. She tasted more blood in her mouth.
“No, no. Don’t strain yourself. It’ll only make it hurt more.”
Lorna—no, Jennifer—placed her arm around Maeve’s shoulder, supported her.
“I’ll talk. You can listen. I told you there wasn’t anyone else in the house. Just me. It was me living in the ballroom. I didn’t have anywhere else to stay the past few months. I’ve put all my money into this and my rent. Sorry. That’s not your problem, is it? That’s not what you want to know. You want to know about Lorna. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do this all by myself. I needed one of you, and the best way to befriend one of you was to become one of you. So I picked Lorna, because she was the easiest to impersonate. Unmarried, not even a girlfriend, no children. She lived alone in a city distant from her immediate family. And she wasn’t on social media. She didn’t even have any old social media pages until I made that Facebook profile for you to find. She made it too easy, really. I had Callum’s pictures of her. Of all of you. He took so many pictures. It was easy to match her hair and we already had the same bra size. But I did get my nose done. Got it to match Lorna’s, best I could anyway. Amazing how adjusting something so small can change your face entirely.”
Each time Maeve tried to pull in air, she got less and less into her lungs. Tears dropped from Lorna’s—from Jen’s—face onto Maeve’s cheek. Jen’s hands were shaking as she brushed Maeve’s face.
“Does it hurt? I didn’t want to hurt you. I looked up videos on where to stab where it would cause the least amount of pain. But maybe they were wrong. Or I got it wrong. I don’t know. So much has gone tits-up today, ever since MacLeod showed up. And then James. It wasn’t . . . They weren’t . . . I’ve been scrambling.”
Maeve coughed. Warm blood on her lips. Jen wiped it away.
“Shh. Okay. It’s okay. You want to know the truth. I owe you that. You helped me so much, and I owe you that much. Let me start at the beginning. You rest. I’ll tell you the story. I’ll start here. With this house. Our dad bought it in 1982. He loved the outdoors, our dad, and he’d been itching for a place in the Highlands as long as we could remember. Mum always said we couldn’t afford it, a second home, but one day he shows up with this ring of keys and says we’re going for a drive. Mum thought, okay, it’s probably a cottage or croft house or something, and then we reach the crest of the drive and there’s Wolfheather House. Mum pitched a fit, but it was too late for her to do anything about it.
“It was completely uninhabitable. No one had lived in it since the fifties. Dad fixed it up in starts and stops for almost a decade. Every penny we had went to this house. No holidays. No big Christmases. Mum bought most of our clothes secondhand from charity shops. Callum and I hated it, but we never said. There was never any arguing with Dad. But every time he brought us up here, instead of helping, we’d run and hide. Sneak around the old servants’ staircases. Sit up here in the attic and listen to the rain. We had more fun living in the walls of this house than in the house itself.
“It wasn’t until ’93 that Dad realized the only way he was going to get any return on his investment was if he turned the place into a bed and breakfast. He was furious with himself. Like somehow he’d failed as a father. I mean, he probably had, but none of us cared by that point. Mom was too tired, and Callum and I were going to university. Dad hated the English, and he hated London and anything near it, so Cahill was perfect. Callum and I were going to room together, but Mum really wanted us to try and live apart, be our own people, she said, so we did. For her sake. I found this house share with three other girls who seemed fairly nice, but I didn’t know them all that well. I heard later they called me the Ghost because they only knew I’d been in the house if they saw my food disappear or if my coat had moved. Callum found Caldwell Street, obviously. He used to tell me about the fights in the house. How things seemed to be escalating. How little cliques kept being made then broken then remade, but he never seemed concerned. Part of the experience, he said, of going to uni.”
Jen’s warm tears continued to drop on Maeve’s cheeks.
“Everything was normal until we went home for Christmas break. God, I wish we hadn’t. We found out then that Dad had lost his job in November. His entire career at one company and he was the first let go when the layoffs started. And we didn’t have any savings. It had all gone into this house. We thought that was why Mum looked so sick, but it wasn’t. She looked sick because she was sick. Cancer. Started in her left breast and spread to her lungs, liver, and lymph nodes. Two years she’d been diagnosed and she’d hid it from us, Dad too. Do you know how strange it is to sit around the Christmas tree with your family, a hot cup of mulled wine in your hands and a fire crackling, and know that one of you won’t be around the next Christmas? None of us mentioned it the next Christmas, the three of us sitting there, Mum knowing it should have been her and not Callum who was missing.”
She paused to wipe her face. Maeve tried to speak, but Jen hushed her and stroked her hair.
“Don’t try to talk. It will only make it hurt. I’m sorry. I’m almost done. So, when we went back to Cahill that January, Callum, being his noble self, wanted to help Mum and Dad out, so that’s why he finally gave in to Oliver and agreed to use his part-time job in the uni office to steal test papers. He wanted to tell me about it, but I was too busy clubbing and drinking and sleeping around. God, I was such a cliché.
“Callum thought the pregnancy scare would change me. I showed up at Caldwell Street that morning crying, mascara all down my face, and Callum went out and bought the pregnancy test for me because I was so scared I could barely move. But as soon as I saw it was negative, it was like it never happened. I went back to partying. Which is how I ended up at your party in May. I ignored Callum the whole time, and, because I knew how angry it would make him, I flirted with Oliver. My hair was ginger then. My natural color. And after the fight, I went up to Oliver’s room and we had sex while the rest of you were letting Callum drink himself to oblivion. Later, I was sleeping when Ellie put her hand over his nose and mouth and watched him die. Dad was the one who told me. After the police called him, he rang me and started crying. I thought Mum had died. I’d never heard him cry. I cried, too, but not because I was sad. Because I was angry.
“I lived with that anger for twenty years until I finally realized what I could do with it. Social media made it so easy to find all of you, except Lorna, like I said. I had to change my name and move to Edinburgh to befriend her in person. But I was most nervous when meeting you, Maeve. If I couldn’t fool you, I knew I couldn’t fool the others. But you believed me. Beautiful, wonderful Maeve, you fell for it all, and that’s when I knew it could work. When we talked about Caldwell Street, I used what I knew from Callum—he used to tell me everything about all of you. God, I couldn’t get him to shut up sometimes. And I used what I’d learned from Lorna to get you to tell me more. And I saved it all. Wrote it down in those notebooks you found so that I’d never forget.
“The only person who knew any of this was our younger cousin, James. God, James was supposed to set up the rooms for us and check us in, like I told you. I just never told you he was my cousin. But he wasn’t supposed to be here. Stupid, stupid Jamie. He was only five when Callum died, but we were the only cousins each of us had. When Dad finally had to sell Wolfheather House, it was Jamie who got the idea to get a job with the new owner. MacLeod, what a pompous ass. But Jamie wasn’t supposed to die. That was my fault. I underestimated Ellie. Underestimated the effect this house has on people. Do you know how hard it was not to cry when I saw him? How h
ard it was not to kill Ellie right then and there? But I couldn’t. Because Lorna Torrington did not know that man and would not have cried, so neither could I.”
Barking interrupted her. Maeve turned her head and, through clouded vision, saw the blurred outline of Gizmo in the doorway.
“Hello, Gizmo,” Jen cooed. “Ellie let him out of the attic by accident. He’s the one that scratched her and he’s been running around here almost all day, probably looking for Lorna, poor thing. Lorna wouldn’t go anywhere without him. She thought we were coming here together, you see. That’s how I got her in the car. But she had to bring Gizmo, and I couldn’t hurt him. Only a monster would hurt a dog. It’s all right, Gizmo. I’m almost done here.”
The dog. The dog could save her, Maeve thought, and she reached out her hand, hoping he would come near. Defend her from her attacker. Let her run her fingers through his soft fur and give her the strength to rise and run. He lay down in the doorway and rested his head between his paws.
Maeve wheezed. “Please . . .”
“Gizmo and I have become good friends, haven’t we? That’s how Lorna and I first met. I befriended her at the dog park a couple years back, right after my nose job. Offered to watch him when she went on business trips.”
Jen kissed her on the forehead.
“Everything was going so well. Until MacLeod returned. I’m sorry I set you up for his death, but I couldn’t have Oliver or Ellie suspecting me, could I? I strangled him this morning before everyone else woke up. I came down first and saw the lit fire in the lobby and I knew there was someone else here. I found him back here, poking around the rooms. I pretended to be a confused guest and he led me back to the lobby. Then I strangled him while his back was turned. I put the twine in your pocket, Maeve. When Oliver was interrogating you. I’m sorry. It was between you and Ellie, and you were standing closer to me. And then to make matters worse, James showed up!” She shook her head. “I still don’t know why. He chickened out, I think. Never left the island on Friday and hid in the house all morning. I wanted to ask him why, but thanks to Ellie I never got the chance. I don’t know why he let us find him. Some things are always left unanswered, I suppose.”
Maeve’s vision grew darker. The sun was setting. It was about that time, wasn’t it?
“My plan was always to kill you last, but when James died, I thought about letting you live. I really did. You’re a cool person when you’re not trying to impress other people. And it would be nice to have a friend after all this.”
Blood dripped down the inside of Maeve’s throat, and she coughed. Couldn’t stop, gasped for mouthfuls of air.
“I’m so sorry, but I had to go through with it in the end. Because how could I let you live when you were the one that stopped them from calling the police in the first place?”
Jen stopped stroking her hair.
A memory came to Maeve. Bubbled to the surface like the blood at her lips. Standing around Callum’s body, someone asking what they should do, and Oliver—Oliver reached for the phone on the wall, but Maeve had raised her arm and said, “No.” Maeve said they should talk about this in the kitchen first and then decide what they should do. And for that one moment in her life, they had listened to her and followed her instruction rather than the other way around, and it had been so exhilarating that she forgot the reason they were all gathering in the kitchen in the first place.
“Do you even remember telling me that, that first night in Edinburgh? You were so drunk. I knew everyone had lied about something that night, but I never knew it was your fault that the police never suspected he’d been murdered. That it was because of you that Ellie got to walk away.”
Jen rested her head on Maeve’s shoulder.
“But I want you to know that it’s not all your fault. We all did some bad things that year. Things we wish we could take back. Each of us is to blame. Just some more than most.”
She adjusted her grip on the blade.
“I’m going to remove this now, and you’re going to bleed out. But it’ll be all right. I’ll be here with you the whole time. I won’t leave until you’re gone. I promise.”
The edge of the knife cut the inside of Maeve’s body as Jen withdrew the blade. Blood spread down her belly, over her shirt, a blossoming stain like a flower in bloom. Her head went fuzzy. Jen helped her lie back and Maeve watched the water stains on the ceiling twisting into shapes. Into the picture of a grungy front room with a worn brown armchair and a sagging pink sofa. And she could hear music—Take That—and smell crisps and cigarette smoke. Hollis offered her an Oreo while Ellie gave her new dress a thumbs-up and Oliver glanced her way and smiled. And Lorna—the real Lorna—rolled her eyes with a smirk and a shrug and opened a book. And there in the back garden was Callum, sitting alone, looking up at the stars, and she sat beside him and took his hand in hers, and together they looked at the dark sky, and Maeve said, “I’m sorry.”
And Callum looked at her with eyes she never thought she’d see again and said, “I know. But that’s not enough.”
Jen
The rising moon illuminated Wolfheather House like a picture on a postcard, the horrors that happened inside censored by brick walls. Several hours had passed since Maeve died, since she had killed her, and Jen wasn’t entirely sure where all that time had gone. She remembered crying over Maeve’s body, wishing Maeve hadn’t needed to die. But the next thing she remembered was sitting in the attic where she and Callum had once hid as children, wrapped in the moth-eaten quilt of their mother’s, a quilt now stained with Ellie’s blood. She had lost so much time, and there was still so much work to do, work she had to complete on her own now that James, too, had been taken from her. That work was almost done now, but not quite.
Now she was outside. Jen looked down from the sky and into the trunk of the Vauxhall. Lorna’s gray body lay curled in the fetal position. Thank god the trunk latch hadn’t broken yesterday. The smell bothered her, but after everything she’d been through this weekend, this was a minor inconvenience. She hefted the body from the boot and dragged it into the house.
The generator was running now, and the lights hummed inside the house. Gizmo, tethered to the front desk, barked and growled, but she cooed to him and continued hefting the body up the stairs. Her arms were tired, her back sore. But this was important. This had to be done before she could finish the diary she planned to leave for the police. Because eventually the police would come, and she wasn’t going to be here to explain everything when they did. The diary would have to suffice.
She dragged Lorna to the room with all the rest. Sat her on the pink sofa between Hollis and Maeve. She stood back and examined the picture she had taken off Hollis’s body, the one she’d accidentally dropped down the sofa cushions. A stupid mistake, but one that had given her an idea. Her brother had loved photographs, and what better way to document all that she had done for him than one last group picture of the residents of 215 Caldwell Street?
Pp. 122–123
Hollis told me last night that the end of the world is different for different people. He was right. It could be a reformed alcoholic giving in to a drink on a lonely New Year’s Eve. Or wrecking your parents’ Rolls-Royce when you weren’t even supposed to be out. The loss of a job. A spouse discovering your lover. Failing an audition. A pet’s death. A parent’s rejection. A loved one moving out of the country. Shop security finding that pinched lipstick in your bag.
When I was five, the end of the world was not getting this final Happy Meal toy I needed to make the complete set. It was the thing I wanted most in the world, but it was also something that was denied me, for no reason I could see. I don’t remember what that toy was, and if I had it now, it would only be packed in the basement or the attic of Wolfheather House with all of the other detritus from my and Callum’s childhood. But I remember the feeling of how much I wanted it and how much it hurt not to have it.
But our end of the world changes as we age. In spring 1995, I didn’t care about Hap
py Meal toys anymore. I was most afraid of becoming a disappointment. Disappointing myself and disappointing my parents. I know it was the same for Callum. We were twins, after all. And the same was true for the others. This is why I don’t hate them for what they did, despite what you might think. Like most teens who grew up with school as the source of their biggest dreams and biggest fears—who were taught by society that if they failed school, they would fail life—failure was the end of the world. They had the tunnel vision that comes with adolescence. The belief that nothing in life would ever be more important than what they were experiencing right at that moment. Not even life itself.
So I don’t want you to think it was stupid of them to let Callum die over something we adults view as silly as cheating on a few exams. Because to them it was what mattered most.
But that doesn’t mean I was going to let them get away with it.
ONE MONTH LATER
12
Linda
Linda Drummond finished reading and slid the photocopied pages of the diary back across the table to DS Khan.
“I want to see the photo,” she said.
“Linda, I don’t think—”
“The detective from Scotland told me about the photo, so I want to see it. They said they sent you a copy.”
“You don’t want to see your father that way.”
Linda could see how easy it was for DS Khan, with his calm, measured voice and deep brown eyes, to comfort victims. But Linda didn’t want to be comforted. She didn’t deserve it.
“I want to know what this psycho”—she shoved the pages again—“decided was a suitable punishment for a mistake my father made when he was nineteen. Show me the photo they found with the diary.” She straightened her shoulders and stared DS Khan in the eye until he sagged and sighed.
“Wait here.”
He returned two minutes later with a manila folder and took his seat across from her, but he didn’t open the folder right away. He kept both hands on top as if preventing monsters from leaping out.
They Did Bad Things Page 28