by Ryan Casey
Brian looked back at Annie. She was staring down at her phone, keeping her attention from him.
Then he looked back at Michael. “If I come inside this house, I want the truth. The full truth.”
“And you’ll get it,” Michael said. “Whether you get out, well. That’s something we’ll have to figure out as we go.”
Brian shook his head, a bitter taste filling his mouth. “You won’t get away with this.”
“Maybe not. But I’ll try. Now step the hell inside or we’ll be dealing with more than just your life here. We’ll be dealing with your family’s life, too.”
Brian wanted to beat the fuck out of Michael for that. He wasn’t taking any threats from a creepy shit like him.
But this guy seemed to know things about him. How he knew, Brian couldn’t be sure. But he wasn’t willing to gamble with his family. Not again.
He swallowed a lump in his throat. Looked at the pathway in front of him.
Then, he took a deep breath and walked inside the Reed household.
He felt the gun press into his lower back as he made his way towards the living room. He got the sense that someone was sat in there, waiting for him.
When the living room door opened, he saw Sammi Reed sitting there. She was rubbing her hands together. Her eyes were streaming.
Streaming like the eyes of someone guilty.
But it wasn’t just Sammi Reed.
There were two other people, too.
“Sit down, Brian. Put your wrists out. And then you’re going to listen very fucking closely to what we have to say.”
Forty-Five
Brian McDone felt the cuffs snap around his wrists and in that terrifying moment, he felt all of his power slip away.
The Reed living room was dark and gloomy. The curtains were shut completely. There was a humidity to the air, a clamour of sweat that suggested a lot of time had been spent in this lounge, stressing out. On top of the fireplace, a clock ticked, the only sound in the room.
Most of all, there was an air of all round shock.
Brian had been expecting to find Sammi Reed in this house. When he’d come here, he’d had images of walking to the door and pulling her up for what he now knew. She’d tweaked those blog posts to point more to Bobby Wisdom. She must’ve known he was stalking Elaine and decided to make him sound even creepier all along.
She’d been involved in the covering up of Elaine Schumer’s death. Her best friend’s death.
And Brian had a feeling that there was more to it than that. The way Michael had desperately confessed to Elaine’s killing as he stared down at the drop from the BetterLives building. He’d been begging for Brian to believe him. He’d been eager for him to swallow it.
But Brian hadn’t.
And now he saw there was much, much more to this case than he first thought.
“We’re good people. I mean, we pay our taxes. We don’t screw up.”
“Clearly,” Brian said, raising his wrists, which were already feeling chapped. “Good citizens wrap handcuffs around police officers’ wrists and point guns to their backs—”
“Michael overreacted. We’re just… we’re just trying to reach the best solution here. For everybody.”
“For everybody? Or for yourselves?”
The man went quiet then. He was sitting on a wooden chair in the middle of his plush cream rug. Behind him, the television glowed with Sky News’ latest reports. It all seemed like such an ordinary setup.
Except it wasn’t.
Because the man sitting opposite him was Sammi, and Michael Read’s father, Will.
And beside him, Sammi and Michael Read’s mother, Karen.
“What happened to Elaine was a horrendous accident,” Will said.
“So you keep saying. But you’re not doing the best job of letting your children speak—”
“There’s nothing to say,” Will interrupted. He was a solidly built man with a bald head and a stern voice that Brian figured was very difficult to argue against. But the most striking thing about him was his normality. This whole family was just a normal family, other than their secrets.
And their secrets were dark. Darker than most.
Will took a deep breath and pulled his chair closer to Brian. “My daughter’s just finished her degree. She has her whole life ahead of her.”
“What did you do, Sammi?” Brian asked. He looked right at Sammi. He could tell she was uncomfortable about this. Totally wounded. She was rigid, holding herself upright. Her lips quivered like the truth was just waiting to spill out.
“Hey,” Will said. “Hey, look at me.”
He grabbed Brian’s face and turned him towards him.
“Will!” Karen shouted.
“I just don’t like it when he tries to get to our daughter.”
“You can’t be grabbing him like that,” Karen said.
“Just be quiet, woman! Jesus.”
Will’s voice echoed around the lounge. His face was a deep shade of red. His shout had silenced the room completely.
He took a deep breath, looked into Brian’s eyes and smiled. “Look. I’m not pretending my kids didn’t do wrong.”
“Good,” Brian said. “Glad we’re on the same page there.”
“But what happened. It was a fucking accident and you need to believe that. You need to drop this obsession of yours. You need to drop it right now.”
“Or what?”
Will opened his mouth. Then he closed it and shook his head. “This family doesn’t have a whole lot else to lose right now. Don’t push our fucking buttons, mate.”
The way Will Reed spoke those words scared Brian. There was a brokenness to them; a total air of defeat that made Brian truly believe that this man was capable of silencing him if he felt he had to.
“Our kids fucked up.”
“So you keep saying.”
“They made a mistake. Haven’t you ever made a mistake?”
“I’ve never killed someone by mistake.”
“Is that so?” Will asked.
Brian frowned. “Um, yes. It’s very bloody true.”
“Hmm,” Will said, leaning back on the creaky wooden chair. “It’s just our Michael over there said you had a real weird moment when you saw the old chief constable getting pulled out the docks.”
Brian felt like he’d been hit by a train. How could they know? How could they possibly fucking know?
“So we did a bit of digging, all of us. I had a chat with an old friend of mine, Stan Walker. You know Stan?”
Brian wanted to throw up. Stan was the guy he’d contacted to ‘deal’ with the rest of the chief constable’s murderous cult. “No. I don’t—”
“See, Stan’s good. Stan and I have done jobs a few times. But the problem with Stan is, when he’s had a few drinks, he has a big mouth. Want to know what he told me?”
Brian couldn’t bring himself to answer.
“He told me he did something big for a pig. Real big. As big as taking out a chief constable.” He chuckled. “Said it’d all come out one day. But hey. He got paid good, and he got to see a pig go down as a bonus. Pretty beautiful, eh?”
Brian felt cold. Stan had betrayed him. He’d set him up all along. Fuck.
“I’ll tell you how this is going to go,” Will said. “You’re going to keep quiet. Very fucking quiet. Or we go to the police about you. And let’s just see how your story weighs up with ours when the truth really emerges.”
“You’ve got nothing on me,” Brian said, growing less certain about his words. “Nothing but fucking speculation.”
“Oh, you’ve no idea what we’ve got on you, mate. No fucking clue.”
Brian didn’t know what to say. He was convinced this family couldn’t know the truth about what he’d done. But he wasn’t exactly in the position to be calling their bluff. “You brought me in here to buy my silence. You sat me down with your little scare tactics and you thought they’d work, did you?”
“If you hadn’t be
en up there,” Sammi said.
Brian turned to Sammi. Everyone turned to Sammi.
“Sam,” Michael said, his eyes wide. “Don’t.”
Sammi curled her head into her knees. Then she lifted her head and glared over at her brother. “Don’t fucking tell me what to do. I’m sick to death of you telling me what to do.”
Michael stood, colour in his face. “You’re sick of me? I’m the one who was willing to take the fucking rap for you.”
“You’re the one who fucking cheated on me!”
Silence followed Sammi’s scream. Total stillness. Brian felt the reverberations of Sammi’s revelation flying around the room. He felt the truth settling in, a sickness getting all the more prominent.
“I loved you,” Sammi said, all out of fight now. “I loved you, and you betrayed me for her.”
“You’re right!” Michael shouted. He was on his feet now, standing right over his sister. Tears rolled down his cheeks. His parents looked on, jaws agape. “I did love you. But—but then I fell for Elaine and you just couldn’t fucking take it, could you?”
“Don’t turn this on me.”
“You killed her, Sammi! You killed her, and you made me help you cover this whole thing up. You made me fucking help you set up Bobby Wisdom. You made me fucking help you bury this whole case. You didn’t do that ’cause you loved me. You did it because you knew you had me around your little fucking finger.”
Again, more silence. Brian found himself staring into space. At the opposite side of the room, so too did Will and Karen, absorbing the twisted reality of their children’s sick secrets.
“You helped me cover up,” Sammi said. “You fucked with her phone and created all those scheduled posts. You rigged the cameras so there was no footage. And you pulled her clothes off after, too, just so she looked more mad. Knew you tearing your fucking work’s clothes were gonna catch up with us eventually. I just knew it.”
“But you were the one who switched her meds, weren’t you?” Michael said.
Sammi shook her head fervently.
“She was sick, and you knew about us, so you exploited that. You took away her herbal stuff and swapped them with those bullshit pills. You pulled the label off and you watched her get worse instead of getting better. You watched her lose her mind. You—you watched her lose her mind then you pushed her into that water tank and you watched the life drift away from her.”
“You could’ve stopped me.”
“I tried. You know fucking well I tried. But it… it was already too late. It was already too fucking late. So here we are.”
Nobody spoke. Not for a while. Brian tried to wrap his head around everything. Elaine really had been having some kind of paranoid breakdown outside the lift after all as Sammi had changed her homeopathic meds to the pills. So Elaine really had been thinking she was taking homeopathic meds all along, but Sammi was switching labels. Shit. She must’ve been plotting to make her life a misery for so long.
Or maybe she just couldn’t stand seeing her friend happier than her.
There was more, too. Michael had sneaked in Baker’s Inn to meet Elaine, taken her up to the roof, and Sammi had followed.
She’d been watching all along, planning to get her revenge on her brother—her lover—and her best friend.
Then everything had gone wrong.
Completely wrong.
Brian didn’t know how the showdown between Michael, Sammi, and Elaine had played out on the roof of that hotel. But he knew that Michael hadn’t killed Elaine. Sammi had done it. Michael had covered for her, sure, in his blind incestuous love. But he hadn’t killed her.
“He knows now.”
Brian looked across the room. It was Will who spoke.
His eyes were glassy, and his face was grey, but he was looking right at Brian. “He knows.”
Brian’s heart started to race.
“So what are we going to do with him?” Karen asked.
Everyone looked back around at Brian.
Nobody said anything. They didn’t have to.
Brian knew what was going to happen next.
Forty-Six
There was something unmeasurably terrible about having your life in the hands of people who weren’t natural born killers.
That might sound like a bit of a weird thing to say. After all, it’s the serial killers people are told to be afraid of. It’s the multiple murderers, the massacrers, all of those kinds who should really be feared. If you are in the company of a serial killer, you know what end you are going to meet. The serial killer doesn’t hide their goal. They don’t hide their motives. They are going to kill you. You know it. They know it. In a way, it’s just poetic justice.
But it’s even worse when ordinary people are debating killing you all because they’re so, so worried about the truth emerging. They’re so eager to grip on to what they believe is control that they are actually willing to silence another individual. That will to silence, to hide the truth, to protect the people you care about, is one of the most powerful forces of all.
Brian McDone knew he was on the wrong side of those forces right now.
He looked back into the bloodshot eyes of Will Reed, the father of Sammi, who had killed Elaine Schumer, and Michael, who had foolishly covered for his sister, allowing her to manipulate him, all because of his twisted love for her. The case had seemed complex, sprawling, but really it came down to a very simple thing in the end.
Elaine had been sleeping with Michael.
Sammi had got jealous.
An argument had gone wrong, and a best friend turned into a killer.
The fine lines between best friend and worst enemy were always bitterly exposed where sex was concerned. And they had been all over again.
Will crouched down in front of Brian and lifted the gun that he’d taken from Michael. Brian felt his heart race and tasted sweat on his lips. His breathing went shaky. He wanted to beg for his life. But more than anything, he wanted to stand his ground. Because Elaine Schumer deserved her justice.
“You know everything,” Will said. Behind, his wife, Karen, covered her eyes and cried. Sammi tucked her head into her legs and shook her head, sobbing as the inevitability of the next step built up inside. Michael looked on with tears in his eyes, like the realisation of what was happening finally battled its way to the surface.
“You don’t have to do anything rash here,” Brian said, finally finding the courage to speak.
Will shook his head. His breathing was heavy. “You don’t speak, okay?”
“You kill me and you’ll never get away with—”
“You don’t fucking speak, mate.”
Will’s shout made Brian jump. He didn’t know what to do or how else to reach these people. Will wasn’t acting on logic. He was acting purely on instinct. He was weighing up what meant more to him—his daughter and son’s freedom, or his own life. “Look,” Brian said, letting all his defences and care drop. “I know how you feel.”
“I told you not to speak,” Will said. He pushed the gun further against Brian’s forehead.
Brian closed his eyes, took a deep breath, then opened them again. “You… You’re right. When you say I’ve done something I’m not proud of, you’re right. I’ve killed someone. I’ve killed someone because I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was doing the good thing for my family by burying that secret. I thought I was getting closure. But trust me, Will. All of you. Trust me when I tell you there’s no coming back from this. There’s no closure. There’s just more secrets and mess until the secrets and mess overflow so much that the truth comes out.”
Will shook his head. His bottom lip quivered. “You know what my children did.”
“And you know what I did.”
“If ... —If I let you go, you’ll go to the police. You’ll turn them in.”
Brian opened his mouth. He was going to bargain with Will. But instead, he knew now wasn’t the time for lies. “You’re right. I will turn them in. I�
�ll tell the truth.”
“Which is why you can’t live. Get up.”
Brian didn’t move. “But you have to see why I’m turning them in. Elaine Schumer was murdered—”
“It was an accident!” Sammi cried.
“Elaine Schumer was murdered by your daughter. Your son covered up for that death. Out of blind love or whatever, he covered up for her.”
Will grabbed Brian’s shoulders and pushed the gun even further into his forehead. “Just get the fuck up.”
Brian didn’t want to stand. But he found himself struggling to his feet. As he moved towards the back of the house, he heard a rattle against the door.
Everyone froze. Everyone went silent.
Then, “Brian? All good in there?”
Brian’s stomach dropped. Shit. It was Annie.
Will’s face went totally pale. “How much does she know?”
“She doesn’t know a thing.”
“How much does she—”
“Nothing!” Brian shouted. “My colleague doesn’t know a thing about you. She doesn’t know a thing about me, either. About what I did. And I haven’t called any backup. I won’t. I’m going to leave that decision to you. But you need to think, Will. You need to think about what you’re doing. You need to think about your children. And you need to think about Elaine Schumer. That girl you met however many times. She’s dead. She’s dead, and there’s no justice for her if you bury this truth. None at all.”
Will pushed Brian further out of the lounge. It took a few disorienting seconds for Brian to realise he was pushing him towards the pantry. “On your knees.”
Brian reluctantly got to his knees as Will locked the pantry door. “I’ll do my part. I’ll go down for what I’ve done. But don’t you take the buck away from your children. Don’t make everyone suffer for a mistake they made.”
Tears were freely rolling down Will’s face now. “Do you have children?”
“I do.”
“Then you’ll know why I have to do this,” Will said.
He squeezed the trigger.
Brian closed his eyes.
In a split second, Brian saw death. He saw the truth of what was going to happen. He saw his fate unfolding in front of him.