The Hit List

by Holly Seddon

  When they’d first moved in together after months of bobbing between their respective flatshares, they’d spent every spare penny setting up home. Catching the train to IKEA, travelling back with bags splitting, flat-pack escapees sliding out from boxes. Everything embossed with newness and hope. ‘This is our whisk,’ Greg had said, holding it aloft like the Lion King cub. She smiles at the memory, just for a moment. Then thinks guiltily of that little metal whisk, cold and unused in the drawer. Greg left her everything and nothing.

  Greg handled most of the finances and paperwork. But for day-to-day cash, for salary payments, they kept separate accounts. He didn’t even get sent paper statements that she could dig out and look through now. What would she even be looking for? A chunk of cash drawn out to pay someone for something? Was he being blackmailed? Did he owe money?

  A draught snakes up the stairs from the street and whistles under her front door. She tucks her feet into her lopsided slipper boots and opens Greg’s laptop again. Perhaps she could still access his internet banking. She was pretty sure he’d have saved the password to autofill. Convenience over safety.

  She opens his normal browser and goes to the bank website. As predicted, his username and password populate the fields but when she tries to log on, she gets a message to say that the account is closed and to contact the branch during opening hours. Someone must have notified them about his death, possibly her mother or Greg’s dad. Marianne was probably told, in that netherworld between death and starting to live again. Either way, she doesn’t remember.

  She sets a reminder on her phone to call Greg’s bank in her lunchbreak tomorrow and turns back to his laptop. Reminders. It was Greg who convinced her to give up paper organisers after she left her Filofax on the bus and briefly lost control of her life. Greg used his Google account for everything: his email, calendar, contacts, reminders. If he was involved in something dangerous, the details could still be in his calendar.

  Her phone buzzes next to her. The delivery app tells her that her food will arrive in just a few minutes.

  Marianne reopens Greg’s email and clicks the calendar icon on the right. She navigates back to 2020, to 9 September, when he emailed Jenna. There’s no mention of his ex but there is an all-day appointment set for ‘Bluebell’.

  Who is Bluebell? A client, perhaps? Maybe something happened to Bluebell and she needed specialist legal advice, and that’s why Greg emailed Jenna that night. Please let it be that.

  She clicks to the next day:

  Jenna

  13.33

  Euston

  The doorbell rings sharply while Marianne stares at the screen; her hollow eyes stare back in the reflection.

  Sam

  The delivery guy at Marianne Heywood’s door is losing patience. He’s rung the bell three times already, shifting from one foot to another and tucking his bike out of the way of irritated passers-by. When the door finally opens, the target is apologetic, gesturing awkwardly and flashing a placatory smile.

  She’s wearing baggy, old-fashioned pyjamas tucked into woollen boots. No make-up, probably not planning to go out. She matches the photo, there’s no doubt it’s her. A mane of curly brown hair, dark blue eyes, very pale skin.

  She’s a slight woman. I know from the dossier that she’s five foot two but she looks even smaller than that. Childlike, really. But they are often the ones who will surprise you. The ones with a blind fury in their bones and something dark and rotten crawling just below the surface. I know the power of that latent fury better than anyone.

  Marianne takes the plastic bag of food, practically curtsying as the guy leaves. She takes a quick look around the street from side to side, then shuts the door.

  She didn’t notice me sitting on a bench in the small scrub of lawn across the road, scattering bread for the dirty pigeons.

  I noticed everything that I’ve trained myself to notice. The shuttered-up space beneath her flat. The single lock on her street door. The thin windows at the front, companion pieces to the shaky sash panes at the back, all of their thin strings frayed and creaking.

  And I noticed the fragility of her bones. I saw every trickle of red blood and bead of blue that was right there beneath her translucent skin. I sat perfectly still, breathing calmly, blinking slowly, and I watched the very life of her throbbing and bursting to get out.

  Marianne

  The food congeals in foil trays, untouched on the table. A cold chill creeps up Marianne’s spine; her eyes water with exhaustion. She knows she should eat or she won’t be able to function properly, and as she scoops out lukewarm rice, her empty gut swills with acid. The grains have clumped together and insect-like flecks of yellow and pink loosen and tumble down.

  They used to get a takeaway every Friday. A shared marital treat, one they limped towards through hard weeks. Now it’s just a utilitarian solution for laziness.

  Marianne dumps spoonfuls of bright red tikka masala on top until it seeps into the rice, a greasy ribbon of oil catching the light. Stomach churning, she plunges her fork in and stares at the red mess on the steel prongs. Her mouth fills with saliva but she can’t bring herself to part her lips.

  On the Wednesday before he died, Greg had emailed Jenna out of the blue.

  By 8 a.m. on the Thursday, Jenna was on a train, bound for Euston.

  Where did the ex-lovers go? Greg didn’t have money for secret assignations in hotel rooms, although Jenna did. When Greg came home that night she’d barely noticed. Glared into her marking while he reheated Thursday’s lasagne for what would be their last supper.

  She almost turned Noah down when he asked her out those few months ago. It was too soon after Greg, it wasn’t fair to his memory. And she was already carrying the guilt of one regrettable assignation.

  Noah had coloured red as she opened her mouth but said nothing, gaping at him like an idiot. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It was inappropriate to ask you, will you just forget I said anything?’ He’d turned to go and she’d reached out, brushed the skin on his arm with her fingertips and then snapped her hand away, wondering if he too had felt the electric charge fizz between them.

  ‘Don’t say sorry,’ she said. ‘I’d love to go for a drink with you.’

  She felt so conflicted, so guilty, that she nearly denied herself a second chance. And all the while Greg had been meeting up with his ex on the side. But why?

  Marianne slides her food away with a long exhalation. The fork drops, flecking an angry line of red across the table. The ribbons are all knotted again.

  *

  Jenna could answer at least some of these questions. Greg had reached out to her, while he was pushing Marianne away, keeping her in the dark. Whether it was as simple as missing her, or as complex as needing legal advice, Jenna had clearly been a trusted confidante. Someone he could call on to drop everything.

  Marianne searches in Greg’s inbox and then writes down Jenna’s email address before opening the email app on her own phone. Marianne and Jenna didn’t know each other but she could hardly email from Greg’s account and haunt the living fuck out of someone who is probably still grieving. The ghosts of first loves tend to linger.

  Marianne tries to picture Jenna at Greg’s funeral, held up in Scotland because Marianne had no energy to fight about it. Jenna would surely have come to pay her respects – the whole town seemed to turn out, a vague grey mass – but if she did, Marianne was unaware. She’d taken one of her mum’s nerve pills and glided through the day half a world away from everyone else.

  Dear Jenna,

  It’s Marianne, Greg Darrow’s wife, here.

  I’m sorry to email you out of the blue like this and I really hope this doesn’t cause you any distress. I was clearing some of Greg’s things and I found out that he met with you before he died. I would really like to understand why. I am not judging you in any way for anything, I’d just really appreciate some honesty.

  Thank you,

  Marianne

  With a hollow feelin
g, Marianne replaces ‘wife’ with ‘widow’ and then sends it before she can proofread it away to nothing. It’s Sunday and Jenna is unlikely to reply, but it feels like something at least.

  *

  What might Greg have found if it was Marianne who had died and her husband who’d been left to rifle through her digital underwear drawer?

  She had secrets of her own. Who didn’t? But she’d been careful. She’d created a folder in her email account with a bland and misleading name and tucked everything from her ex-pupil, Marc, in there.

  That careful deception, those furtive messages, were a bigger admittance of guilt than anything. And nothing had actually happened, not then.

  She’d not always been secretive. The postcards, ironic pictures and pithy little messages she’d received from Marc had been in plain sight.

  ‘Why is he sending you postcards?’ Greg asked one day in 2019, having never mentioned it before.

  ‘He’s just glad I helped him with his A levels,’ she said, her cheeks colouring. ‘And I think he’s finding the transition to university a bit hard.’

  Up until that point, she could tell herself whatever story she wished about this thing, this situation. Putting those postcards in a cupboard in the flat, not hiding them. But afterwards, when she switched to email and included the words ‘my husband found your postcards and I think email is better’, she’d upgraded the unspoken into something more concrete. But still nothing had happened.

  There’s no one to make excuses to now. But if there were, Marianne would say that Greg was distant where Marc was available. That Greg was brooding, troubled by the world and everyone in it, while Marc was at the sweet stage of barely looking beyond his own adolescent worries. She could say that chatting to Marc, emailing him about thoughts as they drifted to her, sharing jokes that Greg might once have enjoyed were he still paying attention, helped insulate her from what was happening in her marriage. She might even say, troubling a confession though it is, that listening to Marc’s worries and encouraging his young mind to stay the course, allowed Marianne to nurture, to mother almost, in a way Greg had curtailed.

  And every time she sent and immediately hid an email, nothing had happened. And every time she’d read an email from him, in another room to Greg, smiling secretly before she archived it away, still nothing had actually happened. She never even saw him again until after Greg had died.

  But while he was still alive, Greg barely mentioned it again. Not even as a joke. No references to ‘postcards from your fancy piece’, no prods in the rib when jokes about toy boys came up. She should have been angry when he first queried those cards, the sides of his mouth twisting down as he held the small stack by their corners as if they were contaminated.

  She should have been angry. What he was implying was … it was something she should have been angry about. But she couldn’t allow herself anger, couldn’t allow herself to switch on any feelings because she knew that some of those feelings were simply not OK.

  *

  There is so much more to go through. Years and years of calendar appointments and reminders. The hard part is knowing where to start and what to look for. Marianne reopens Greg’s calendar and clicks all the way back to 26 July 2014, a date scorched onto her heart.

  THE WEDDING OF THE CENTURY!!!

  14.00

  Leyton Great Hall

  Greg had ‘invited’ her to it so it sat in her Google calendar too, even though she was still living out of a Filofax back then. He’d carefully added the full address of the venue – as if she didn’t know.

  God, they were young to get married. It hadn’t felt like it then, but it certainly feels like it now. London-young anyway; she’d walked down the aisle an old maid by the standards of her native Devon.

  Marianne clicks on through his calendar. A zoetrope of memories. Honeymoon flights, mortgage-broker appointments, dinner reservations on anniversaries and birthdays. Milestones embroidered with just a few lines of code.

  She slows when she reaches 19 March 2015.

  Interview – Case worker

  10.00

  Hidden Humans

  Lambeth

  That job was everything he wanted. They’d celebrated with sparkling wine and fish and chips when he’d got the call. It was slightly less money than the animal charity paid, but money had never been his driving force. She remembers the acute pride she felt, so sharp it was physical. Her husband, her principled, hard-working, optimistic man. He was the best of them, and she could not have loved him more.

  When he got going in the role, he talked optimistically about all the change he hoped would come; the women whose lives had been turned around with support; the solicitors he’d found who would work on cases pro bono; the exploited, homeless runaway who had been rehomed. The change came years later when nothing had improved despite him doing that work.

  ‘Every month, there are more people in need and the government don’t do anything. In fact, they make it worse. I had three trafficked people last month who were being made to clean schools, never seeing proper wages – that’s not just apathy, that’s fucking profiting from slavery. If the local government aren’t even checking their suppliers, what hope do we have?’

  ‘What do you want me to say, Greg?’

  ‘Which cleaning contractors does your school use?’

  Marianne had tried not to sigh. ‘I don’t know. I’ll ask.’

  She’d forgotten though, hadn’t she.

  Marianne scrolls on through months and years, watching the number of personal appointments sputter to nothing, crowded out by work. He gave it his all, but it was never enough.

  She reaches Friday, 27 September 2019 and sees a whole day for ‘Bluebell’ again. No other details, but this is the first occurrence. She clicks on, faster and faster, finding more and more Bluebell days as she goes. ‘Bluebell’ at least once a month right up until the day he contacted Jenna.

  Who the fuck is Bluebell?

  Sam

  I tap my unregistered Oyster card along the same little strip of London that I always travel through. Then I am seen by traffic cameras on the A3 as I drive, a frown scoring my forehead. I buy a modest dinner for later, paying with cash. My undisguised head with its grey temples gives a nod to the security guard manning the door of the miniature supermarket, one of the many I visit that are laced along the A-roads snaking their way out of the city. I am so completely visible that I am almost transparent, tugged along on the tides of middle-class life.

  I am seen in all these places, wearing my true face, because I need to be a functioning human. I need to be normal. I have routines that make sense because I need alibis. And when I have to switch off my humanity and slip below the line into the deepest darkness, these strings of normality dangling through my days are all I have to pull me back up.

  Sometimes, they slip from my grasp altogether.

  Marianne

  ‘Bluebell?’

  Marianne says it out loud, hoping to dislodge something, some tiny little petal of a memory but there’s nothing there.

  ‘Bluebell.’

  It could be a client. Perhaps. Or a nickname for a lover. Or a favourite prostitute. It could be a dog or a fucking boat for all she knows. Bluebell. Every month, for over a year.

  This time yesterday she was still mourning him acutely, simply. Now a whole new raft of feelings are flooding in. Fear and confusion at the helm, followed shortly by a nagging sense of stupidity at trusting someone so completely. Even shades of jealousy. Greg, her open book, was anything but. And she has no idea of her place in his story. Or whether she’s really going to be the victim of its bad ending. There’s nothing else to do but keep looking. No one else will have any answers for her. Marianne thinks again of calling Noah, but what would she say? In the early months a relationship is a fragile thing; one gust of wind could send it scattering. Let alone a great storm of paranoia and fear.

  No, there’s nothing else for it. She searches in Greg’s email for ‘Blue
bell’. Nothing comes up beyond the appointments she’d already found in his calendar. If he was emailing someone called Bluebell, he was doing it from his work account. Or that secret dark web email account that I can’t get into.

  Above her, she hears a scratching sound. It’s very slight at first and she has to strain to hear it. It sounds like the cautious scraping of a knife on wood, growing more frenzied. For one dark second, she imagines it belongs to metal on wood, a hook, Death’s sceptre.

  Mice.

  The scratching spreads. It sounds like a fleet of discrete blades working their way down the wall, trying to carve their way into the room. The offices either side of her are empty, but apparently the old crumbling walls and the roof are not. She imagines their fast little bodies, scrambling over each other and slinking around inside the wall.

  On her hand, Marianne writes ‘poison’ in black ink.

  She stares at the letters she’s just written, so casual in their murderous intent. Is that how easy it is? Is she vermin as far as someone is concerned?

  Turning the stereo on to drown out the mice, she searches in Greg’s laptop’s documents folder. It’s a wild mess of work notes, old job applications, out-of-date CVs and wedding speeches. Odds and sods.

  Bluebell is not hiding here.

  She opens his photos and scrolls through, barely able to look. His beautiful face, guileless and optimistic. The two of them, young and stupid with love. Their wedding day, faces aching from smiles, his hair growing more tousled as the day drew on, her hair unpinned and loose by the end. Make-up slipping from her happy wet eyes. The two of them dancing and laughing to ‘Come On Eileen’, her wedding dress hitched up around her knees. The way he looks at her. Like she’s the only person in the whole world. Like she is his world. Who took this picture? Who cares now?