She stops and looks over her shoulder. ‘That I’ll get you out of this?’
I shake my head. ‘That we’ll make him pay.’
Chapter Thirty-Four
Laura
‘Laura,’ Liam begs, his voice sounding weaker, the blood leaking out of him onto the muddy ground, washed away by the rain.
I look down on him, feeling no sympathy and no regret. I don’t even feel bad to see him in pain. If it was a fox caught in the trap, I would feel something, I would cry, but with Liam I am only relieved. His eyes search my face. He can’t believe I’ve betrayed him.
But I have. I’ve lied to him. I’ve lied to everyone. Like Liam, I became an actor, better than him even, because I knew what the consequences were if I failed. Every smile, every touch, every gesture of kindness or tenderness has been pretend.
I have feigned being in love with him, faked being the perfect, adoring wife, for every second that we’ve been here. And there is some triumph in that. In knowing that I have tricked him just like he tricked me. Every time he touched me, I would shudder, and he took it for pleasure, when really it was revulsion. Every time he held my hand, I had to fight not to yank it out of his grip. Every time he kissed me, I had to kiss him back as though I meant it. I have learned to contain my terror and my grief and my hatred; to mask them behind a smile.
I have had to hide my innermost thoughts from everyone, even from myself. I have kept them locked away in a far recess of my mind, so they would never reveal themselves, accidentally slipping out and tracing a path across my face that he might notice. I have forced the real me into hiding.
I lied to my mother, to my friends and to the world, at first because I was ashamed and then later because it was the only way to survive. And finally, because it was the only way to escape. I have gritted my teeth and smiled until my face ached, because I knew it would be worth it to one day be free of him.
It was easy in the end, a simple matter to convince Liam that I’d love a holiday, that I think it might help me to heal; and what place more romantic than Scotland? He agreed eagerly, thinking it was a sign that I was moving out of my depression and finally starting to be happy again. And in fact, I was starting to become happier. Now I had a purpose and I could see a faint chink of light on the horizon, my spirits did lift. Hope was a tiny flicker at first, it didn’t dare to flame bright, and I feared that any moment it might be snuffed out. Now though, as I look down on him, caught in the trap, bleeding out, the hope burns as brightly as the lightning still scoring the island.
I couldn’t have done it alone, of course. It’s Mia who made it happen, who devised the plan and carried most of it out. She’d been plotting for six months before she even met me. After she made her way to Scotland she went to a hospital and had her broken arm fixed, then she found a grotty place to rent with cash and no questions asked.
Afterwards, she used her remaining money to hire a private detective to find Liam. Her plan was to lure him somewhere private where she could kill him. She even bought a gun for the purpose. But then, after the private detective found him, following Mia’s lead that he might have turned up at a vet’s with a wounded dog on or around Boxing Day, and she learned that he was already involved with another woman – me – she knew she’d need to change her plans. That was when she first approached me, appearing in the garden that day and scaring the life out of me before offering me a way out of my nightmare.
The only part of the strategy that we couldn’t work out was where to carry out the revenge. It was solved when I first read my mum’s will. There was a life insurance policy and I was the beneficiary. I was to receive three hundred thousand pounds. I knew it was my mum’s way of looking out for me when she was gone, and I also knew that there was no better use for the money.
I told Mia about it and managed to keep it a secret from Liam. I gave Mia my ID documents and she opened a bank account for me online and called the insurance company pretending to be me. Once they paid the three hundred thousand pounds from the policy into the account, Mia used half to buy the isle of Shura, which was going cheap, though neither of us knew the reason why.
The idea was to trap Liam in a place where he couldn’t escape, so he’d know what it was like to be hunted by an invisible prey; what it was like to be stalked, to be victimised, to be starved, to be controlled; to, above all, feel fear. We wanted him to know just a sliver of what we have endured at his hands.
I thought it might be too difficult to pull off, too twisted a revenge, when really all I wanted was for my nightmare to be over.
‘It’s never over,’ Mia argued. ‘If we don’t do this, he’ll kill you eventually.’
Her words seeped in. I knew they were true. The bruises on my body seemed to throb with the knowledge too.
‘And he’ll get away with it,’ she went on. ‘And then he’ll find another woman and do the same to her.’
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Killing someone – becoming a murderer – was that something I could do? Was it the right thing? Was it right to make him suffer the way he had made us suffer?
I thought of my mother and I knew the answer was yes.
‘He’s a policeman,’ I said, weakly. ‘How can we manage to trick him?’
Mia snorted. ‘No he isn’t. I found out from the private investigator I hired. He’s not a policeman or a detective. He never was. He lied to us both. It was to make us afraid, so we’d be less likely to report him. He’s never had a job. He’s been living off money his mum left him.’
I had suspected it, but hearing the truth was altogether different. My whole life was a lie; nothing felt real any more, except for one thing: the terror coursing through my body; a feeling that never faded or ebbed but just kept building like a floodwater, always rising.
‘I’m ready,’ I said, turning back to Mia and looking her in the eye. ‘Tell me what I need to do.’
Our plan took a while to work out. Every day Mia would sneak into the back garden over the fence and I’d go out with Isis – or rather Jet – and we’d hide behind the shed and discuss the plan. Mia gave me a throwaway phone, too, which I hid on silent in a plastic bag, taped to the underside of the bed.
She visited the island and worked everything out and when she came back, she explained how she would hide on the island in a cave at the base of the cliffs. Mia wanted not just revenge, but, as she put it, to fuck with him. ‘I want him to feel the fear that I felt; that you feel,’ she told me, with a steely glimmer in her eye. ‘I want him to know what it’s like to have someone control your life and then destroy it. I want to make him play the game and lose.’
She told me all about Will, and what Liam did to him, and I told her my theory that Liam had murdered my mother and my cat. Mia’s hunger for revenge fuelled my own. Every day that we plotted I grew stronger, imagining my freedom. Things improved when Mia, pretending to be me, registered at a new GP surgery and managed to get me a prescription for anti-depressants and the pill, which she slipped me and I kept hidden in a box of tampons.
We arranged to communicate once we were on the island via cryptic notes left beneath a pile of stones on the beach resembling a cairn, something I built on the first day there and which I told Liam was a memorial for my mum. Whenever one of us had a message we would replace a stone from the top of the pile to signal the other person. Mia also left a note in the guest book – a deliberate coded message for Liam – which he didn’t get, but which made me smile.
‘Stay was cut short unfortunately, but it was wonderful until then. Tried looking for the burial site but couldn’t find it. I look forward to visiting in the future. A warning to guests; stay away from the cliffs. A fall could be fatal.’
She was referring to her life with Will being cut short, and referring to her own burial site, the ditch Liam left her in. She warned us away from the cliffs because at the bottom of them was the cave where she was camping out, hiding, waiting to put our plan into action.
The satellite phone
in the cottage was my idea, to make sure Liam didn’t get suspicious from the very beginning, but we made sure that we took the charger out of the box. I have to say I enjoyed watching Liam’s frustration when he realised we had no means of escape and no one to call for help. It was beyond satisfying to see him going through just some of the terror he made me feel every day.
I used the cairn to warn Mia that there was a fourth, unexpected stranger on the island. I hadn’t been able to believe it at first – the chances of it seemed so impossible – and it wasn’t until Liam and I found the squatter’s campsite in the castle that I put it together and realised we weren’t alone.
I wanted to pull the plug immediately on our plans and left another note for Mia in the cairn, but she wouldn’t have it. We’d come this far, and she thought it worth risking it. She believed whoever was holed up in the castle would leave us alone, not wanting to get caught. And they did leave us alone. The problem was that Liam thought that they were the person who had stood at the window watching us; that they were responsible for the etching of the word ‘DEVIL’ on the window and the electricity being cut and the food being stolen and the woodpile being wrecked, when in fact it was Mia who had done it all. When I lay in bed listening to her scratching the word ‘DEVIL’ into the window downstairs, I was terrified that Liam would wake up and catch her. I couldn’t sleep for fear he was on to us.
I tried everything I could to keep Liam away from the castle, to stop him from confronting the stranger, but of course he wouldn’t listen.
When he discovered the boathouse, I had no time to warn Mia, and so the only thing I could do was to throw myself out of the boat. I knew if we left the island then that was it – all our plans would have been for nothing. So, even though Liam has left me terrified of water, as soon as he took his eyes off me to look over his shoulder, I launched myself over the edge of the boat and into the freezing waters of the loch. If I drowned, I told myself at least I would die on my own terms and it would be my choice.
I was the one, too, who left the glass angel on the ground by Liam as he slept. Mia wanted him to see it; she believed it would be the final puzzle piece that would jolt his memory and make him realise who was stalking him and why. But when I woke up, I remembered the story Mia told me of how she’d fled through the snow with her feet bleeding, glass splinters embedded in them, and so I placed it where I knew Liam would step on it.
I wanted to make him suffer; to let him have one more taste of his own medicine.
While he went hungry, I was eating trail mix that I’d hidden in my pockets. When he asked me to grab the shotgun shells at the castle, I did, but I also picked up the empty ones from the pile of rubbish and while he slept, I was the one who replaced the shells he’d loaded in the gun with blanks.
And all the while, I remembered my mother and I remembered the beatings he’d given me and I thought about what he’d done to my cat and to Will and to Mia, and who knows, maybe even to other women before her.
He thought I was weak and that I would never fight back. He got that wrong.
‘I need help,’ Liam begs weakly, flopping backwards in a river of mud.
The rain has almost completely eased; the thunder and lightning are rolling off and out to sea.
‘There’s no help coming,’ I say to him. Then I crouch down beside him again, no longer afraid that he has the strength to hurt me.
Mia joins me. Liam looks between us in disbelief, clearly still shocked that he’s fallen victim to our plot, struggling to understand how Mia is alive and how we managed to fool him.
His face crumples and he lets out an almighty bellow of rage. It’s the cry of a lone wolf caught in a trap. He knows his time is running out, and that no one is coming to help.
The Stalker
Pain engulfs me. My leg feels as if it is on fire, like it’s being roasted over an open flame. The metal teeth of the trap have torn through flesh and are sucking on the bone.
I throw my head back and howl in agony as much as in rage. When I open my eyes, Mia is still kneeling beside me. My angel. I still don’t understand how she’s here. I buried her in a snowy ditch. She was dead.
There was a big search for her and Will. I followed it online. But they never found the bodies. I study her. Is she real? She doesn’t look like herself. There’s an expression on her face that I don’t recognise. It comes to me just then what it is: defiance. She isn’t afraid of me and she wants me to know it.
I let out another howl of frustration, my hands squeezing my leg, hoping to stem the bleeding and mute the pain. The jaws won’t give though. The metal teeth keep gnawing.
With tears in my eyes I glance at Laura, my other angel. Why is she not doing anything to help?
‘Help me,’ I say to her again, as the flames lick higher. I can feel my heart straining as blood leaks out of me. My hands are hot and sticky with it.
Laura looks at me not with the same defiance as Mia, but with something I recognise all the same. It’s the look my mother used to give me: disgust. Like there is something wrong with me; like she hates me, like she sees the devil in me.
I blink in surprise. Has Laura been pretending all this time to love me? How has she hidden it so well? I thought I knew her. I thought she was different.
I lift a hand to touch her cheek but she pulls away and my hand flops to the ground. ‘You were my angel,’ I say to her. ‘You were meant to save me.’
‘Guess you’re going to Hell then,’ she says.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Laura
We stand up and watch Liam as he slowly bleeds out. Still, I feel nothing except relief. I understand finally what the Celts were thinking when it came to meting out justice to those who’d committed crimes against the tribe.
When Liam finally takes his last breath, it feels as if a great dark weight has been lifted off of me. I feel unshackled. The fear that’s crippled me these last months dissolves like my breath in the cold night air. It’s there one moment, gone the next. I could take flight.
I turn to Mia, who stands beside me like a statue, head bent, not taking her gaze off Liam’s face. She grinds her teeth and breathes hard as she looks down on Liam’s body and her shoulders start to shake violently. I put my arm around her. ‘Are you OK?’ I say.
She clings to me. ‘No.’
I hold her tightly. ‘It’s OK,’ I whisper. ‘We did it.’
‘He isn’t coming back,’ she says. She pulls back to look at me and I see that she doesn’t mean Liam.
‘Will?’ I ask.
She nods, tears falling down her cheeks. I soothe her. She swallows hard and wipes her arm across her face.
‘Here,’ I say to her.
She looks down. I’m holding out her engagement ring. She takes it, her face stricken, before she fights off the sadness and smiles at me through her tears. She slips the ring onto her finger. ‘Thank you,’ she says. I unclasp the Celtic cross and give that back to her too. Her bottom lip wobbles, but only for a moment, and then her expression hardens.
‘You should go,’ I say.
‘I know,’ she answers. ‘But what about you?’ She glances down at the body.
‘I’ll be fine,’ I tell her, and I mean it.
Mia and I hug one last time before she walks off through the woods towards the cliffs, where she’ll find her boat and pack her things and leave, like the ghost she is.
In a few weeks’ time we’ll meet again. She’s given me back my life and I’ll give her back her dog.
Chapter Thirty-Six
I watch Mia walk away, heading for the cliffs, and then disappear from view into the first tinge of dawn light.
When I turn back around, I see a man standing a few feet away. I let out a gasp of fright. I recognise him instantly. It’s the man from the pub who was watching me strangely and who told me about the island being haunted. He’s the man who’s been squatting in the castle, whose boat and gun we stole. How long has he been standing there? What did he see? Did h
e watch Mia and me together talking over the body?
‘What happened?’ he asks gruffly, nodding at Liam’s body.
My heart rattles like a freight train. I knew there was a risk if Mia and I kept on with our plan once we knew that he was on the island too, but it was a risk we had to take. We couldn’t back out. I did my best to keep Liam away from the castle, not wanting him to blame the wrong person, and I hoped that the man would steer clear of us too.
‘There was an accident,’ I stammer to the man. ‘He stood in an animal trap.’
He narrows his eyes at me. ‘That’s odd, that,’ he says. ‘Because I know this island back to front and there wasnae any trap here yesterday.’
Oh god. I can feel the tremor starting in my ankles, riding up to my knees. He glances at his shotgun, which I’m holding in my hand.
‘That’s mine,’ he says. ‘You stole it. And my boat.’ He reaches for it and snatches it out of my hand.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, stumbling backwards. ‘And about the boat too. It capsized. I’ll pay you whatever it takes to replace it.’ I risk a look in his eyes. He’s scrutinising me with a hard stare, and I flush to the roots of my hair. He looks at Liam’s body. He knows I’m lying. He knows this was no accident.
He turns back to look at me. ‘No matter,’ he says.
My heart skips a beat. I blink at him not daring to breathe. But he says nothing more. He’s waiting for me to talk.
‘You’re a McKay, aren’t you?’ I blurt.
He frowns at me, taken aback, but I can see that I’m right.
‘It’s your mother and brother, Elliot, who are buried on the island, isn’t it?’ I ask, jerking my head in the direction of the churchyard.
The Stalker Page 22