‘Why couldn’t you have been a good girl?’
Blood had soaked into his shirt, his trouser legs, glistening wet and black.
‘She’d never have done this if it weren’t for you!’
Emma faltered, stumbled forward, the WPC calling to her, ‘Please stay back!’
‘If you hadn’t got yourself pregnant,’ Arthur shouted. ‘If you hadn’t acted like a whore!’
Emma opened her mouth but nothing came out. She turned to face her godmother, needing her support.
‘What’s happened?’ Emma said, but her voice was too weak to carry. ‘I don’t understand, what’s happened to Elaine? What’s happened to my mum?’ Emma shouted, turning towards the WPC standing by the barn’s open doors.
Another policeman stepped out from the barn, white-gloved hands holding a shotgun wrapped in an evidence bag, the shotgun Arthur kept in the boot room at home, the gun he’d taught Emma, taught Elaine, how to load, aim, shoot.
Emma took one more step forward, the WPC too busy holding Arthur to stop her.
She could feel Maggie behind her. Maggie’s gasp turned into a sob, a wail of grief and of horror as she, too, looked into the barn.
Maggie’s strong hands pulled Emma backwards, away from the door, held her tight to her chest. She wept openly, her tears falling into Emma’s hair.
Emma stayed silent. Her insides frozen, her face paralysed and pressed to Maggie’s soft chest. She couldn’t close her eyes, couldn’t blink away what she had seen in the barn, the sight of her stepmother’s dead body forever etched into her fourteen-year-old mind.
So much blood.
Dark and oozing, dried to flaky black pools in some places, wet and thick and red in others.
So much blood.
And Maggie held her and sobbed, her whole body shaking, repeating the words, ‘I’m so sorry,’ into her ear.
Arthur was crying, his back turned to his daughter, unable to look at her at all.
People whispered behind her, the crowd’s muttering a hum of collective shock.
And Emma stood with her eyes wide open, stared at the barn and remembered what was inside it, knew she would never forget what she had seen.
Her stepmother’s body, slumped on the hay-strewn floor, the shotgun having done its deadly damage.
Her Elaine.
Elaine, the only mother she had ever known, had ever wanted, had shot herself.
And Emma knew she had done it because of her.
It was all her fault.
Seven years ago
Emma
Wednesday, 11th August, 2010
A numbness washed over her. No tears, no screams, no cries.
She sat in the bar, alone. Maggie had gone out to fetch tea, sugar, staples from the shop to help with the shock. Even Maggie, it seemed, couldn’t bear to be next to Emma, knowing what Emma had done. What she had pushed Elaine to do.
Was it really her fault? Had she really driven her stepmother to this?
She wanted James to come back, to hold her and tell her … what would he tell her? That yes, it was her fault, like everything else, but he still loved her nonetheless. Is that what she needed to hear?
Maybe she just needed his arms around her.
She pulled her knees up to her chest, but her stitches were sore and her stomach tender, her body screaming in pain at the movement.
The chair she was sitting on was swirled with patterns, cream feathery shapes decorating the green fabric. Each looked like a curled up foetus, each like the baby they had ripped from inside her, had killed to save her own life.
And still nothing.
She was empty.
Shock, a voice in her head spoke up. It’s the shock.
But Emma couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe there was any excuse for this feeling of nothingness. Her baby was dead, her stepmother was dead, her father hated her, had always hated her and even Maggie had fled her side at the earliest excuse.
She heard a car pull up outside. Looked up out of the window and saw the roof-mounted sign of a taxi.
James.
And suddenly she felt something, she felt hope, relief.
He had come back.
He was home, had come to see her, make sure she was all right.
She jumped from her chair, ignored the pain in her belly, ran to the door and flung it open, ran outside without even pausing to put her trainers on.
There was the taxi, outside James’s house.
The driver had stepped outside it, was knocking on James’s front door.
There must be a mistake. Surely the car was bringing James home; why was the cab empty? Why was the driver knocking on the door of the house?
Emma slowed, her eyes locked on the door.
It must be Lois, she thought, Lois ordered a taxi to take her to the station or something, she was going to greet James as he arrived on the train.
The door opened.
James stepped out.
He wasn’t expecting to see her, she could see it in his face: shock, disbelief, a hint of, what was it, anger? But she pushed that last thought away. He couldn’t be angry with her, too.
‘James!’ She could hear the anguish in her own voice, spilling out with each syllable.
He picked up his pace as he walked towards her, signalling to the taxi driver that he’d just be a minute. He grabbed her by the upper arm, pulled her off the street and into the alley that separated his house from the pub.
He hissed a harsh, ‘Ssssh,’ looking both ways down the street to make sure no one was watching, listening. ‘What are you doing?’ he said. ‘Haven’t you got me into enough trouble already, telling your dad about me, without talking to me openly in the street? What the fuck are you thinking?’
She opened her lips to begin, but where would she start? That she had wanted to see him, she needed him, she’d never have told her dad about them. That their baby was dead, her stepmother was dead, that Emma had fucked everything up and she didn’t know what to do?
James ran one hand through his hair, the other still gripping Emma’s arm and she knew that she had to choose what to say carefully because he got annoyed when she mumbled or mixed up her words.
But where should she start?
The hardness in his eyes made her throat ache with smothered grief. She wanted to ask him what they were going to do, how he was going to help her, ask him where he had been all this time but she found herself crying instead. The only words she could find, when her sobs receded, were simply, ‘It’s all my fault.’
His eyes scanned Emma up and down, his top lip lifted at the corner, the way it always did just before he was about to kiss her, run his fingers across her still-developing body.
But he didn’t kiss her, not yet.
His grip on her arm didn’t let up, his fingers needling her flesh. He pulled her towards him and whispered in her ear, his lips hot and moist against her lobe. ‘Your father visited my mother yesterday, after you told him about us. Do you know that?’ He spoke quietly, vehemently.
‘I’m sorry,’ Emma said helplessly and James sneered.
‘I have to leave,’ he said, ‘because if I don’t, he’ll come after me.’
‘I didn’t tell him,’ Emma shook her head as she spoke. She looked up into his eyes, those beautiful blues that could be so kind when he wanted them to be, so caring.
‘You couldn’t even keep us a secret, couldn’t even do that simplest thing properly,’ he said, his face cold. ‘I should have known you couldn’t handle this, that you’re too young and useless.’
He dropped her arm and her skin felt tender and bruised where he’d held her.
She looked down at the ground, struggling not to cry. Just two days ago James had held her in his arms, said, ‘Yes, just like that, just like that,’ and she had felt so happy, so pleased she was pleasing him, this man who was handsome and strong and brave, lying with her in a sunny wheat field, her hair in his fists as he held her head in position.
And now he was leaving her.
James went on, his voice soft and callous. ‘You’re just a little idiot, that’s all, a stupid little girl.’
Emma snapped her head up. ‘Why would you say that? How can you be so cruel?’
James licked his lips. ‘You didn’t know what you were doing when you came on to me; that’s what I’ve been telling myself. It’s much better than what my mother thinks: that you fucked an older man, fucked me, got pregnant, because you wanted to trap me.’
Emma took a step backwards in shock. ‘She said that?’ Emma followed James’s gaze to his childhood home, imagined Lois spitting out those words, surrounded by photos of her son. ‘You don’t think that though, James?’
James stroked Emma’s cheek, pinching her flesh between finger and thumb. ‘You’ve let me down, that much I know.’
She tried to right herself, to stand tall with her head held high, but she was light headed and dizzy, her belly tender and aching at the sides.
She closed her eyes, tried to steady her mind so she could steady herself, but the image of Elaine’s body floated behind her closed lids. The deep-seated feeling of wrongness worming its way inside her, making a nest in her guts.
When she opened her eyes James was smiling at her sadly.
‘My mother says I’m better off without you.’ He searched her eyes with his own. ‘She thinks that you’re trouble and will only get me into trouble too.’
‘I need you,’ Emma said. ‘I’m not trouble.’
‘Really?’ He raised his eyebrows, cocked his head. ‘My mum said Elaine’s dead. That she shot herself. Is that true?’
Emma nodded, tried to swallow back the tears but the lump in her throat was too big, she felt the threat of a sob rise up her throat. She waited for his arms to engulf her, to pull her back into him and let her cry.
But he didn’t.
‘Why did Elaine do it, do you think?’ he asked, his mouth to her ear, his breath warm.
She tried to say, ‘I don’t know,’ but choked on the words.
‘Mum says it’s because of you.’ His whisper sounded so sweet in her ear, so at odds with his words. ‘Because of all the terrible things you’ve done.’
She tried to say it wasn’t true, that Lois was lying, but the words, the blame, felt so at home in her ear she couldn’t refute them.
James tilted her chin, wiped her tears with his thumb and kissed her full on the mouth. She felt his tongue squirm inside her, push open her teeth, felt his hands grip her waist and pull her in. She was still crying, trying to digest the things he had said, tasted the salt of her own tears along with his tongue. She stifled a sob and he groaned, lowered his hands to her bottom and felt her.
Her stitches were burning, her throat sore from crying, her hands limp and useless at her sides.
But she needed him.
She loved him.
And, almost as suddenly as it began, it stopped. James pulled back. The cab beeped its horn. He turned away, ready to leave.
‘Wait!’ she called, her head dizzy with confusion and fear. ‘You can’t leave me!’
‘It’s because of you I have to go.’ He was still walking away.
She followed.
‘Are you coming back?’ Her voice was small, but something was on fire inside her, her eyes still fixed on his house.
‘My mum’s right,’ he said. ‘You’re just a filthy slut, a whore, and you’ll forget about me as soon as I’m gone.’
‘Please,’ she choked out, but he had stepped away. The taxi door closed; she heard the engine roar to life. Her mind was numb, her chest hot and hands shaking. She looked away, couldn’t bear to see him leave her.
After the taxi drove off, her eyes stayed fixed on that house.
And then she thought of the woman who had poured poison in James’s ear.
Who had persuaded him to leave.
Who was leaving her with no one.
Lois.
Maggie
Monday, 20th November, 2017
‘But Maggie,’ Jennifer said, steering her car through the police car park exit. ‘Who else would it have been? I know you thought the world of Emma, but who else would have reason to hurt Lois like that?’
And Maggie looked, open-mouthed, at the woman driving her home, her neighbour for over twenty years.
‘I told you,’ Maggie said, raising her voice, ‘just like I told them. It was Nuala Greene, James’s widow. She did it.’
Jennifer coughed, checked the blind spot to her right, her thick, wire-wool hair concealing her expression.
‘It was.’ Maggie shifted in her seat. Outside, rain still pattered the window.
‘But what evidence is there?’ Jennifer said, her voice strained. Her eyes were red as if she, too, had been crying. Maggie hoped she had. Hoped everyone had been crying for the loss of her goddaughter.
‘I know it’s hard for you, Maggie, terribly hard, but you can’t just go blaming random people.’
‘I’m not blaming random people! It was her! She stayed on Friday night, took the room in the pub. There must still be her DNA on the bedsheets, for heaven’s sake!’
‘Nobody else saw her, let alone spoke to her. Why didn’t you tell anyone you had a paying guest? Why didn’t Emma tell anyone she was staying? You had a full pub on Friday night, according to Toby, and none of them knew about this Nuala Greene.’
‘They knew about her car, though.’ Maggie lifted a biro that was rattling in the car door pocket, wrote red hatchback on the back of her hand.
‘What, the one on Shore Road? That was gone by Saturday morning, no one saw it again.’
Jennifer looked over at Maggie, patted the woman’s knee with her left hand. ‘It’s just your word for it, Maggie. The police won’t waste resources based on one person’s word, not when they already have so much evidence pointing at Emma.’
‘What are you trying to say? That I made it up, that I’m mad?’
‘No, of course not! But you’ve had such a shock and you were in such a state yesterday, understandably. I think that maybe the shock has played havoc in some way with your, you know—’
‘With my mind?’
‘I just think it’s strange that you didn’t mention this woman to anyone until after the fact. You said yourself the police found evidence that Emma had been searching for James online, had found details of his death on the internet on Saturday. Could it be possible that you got confused, that Emma told you James was dead, had been married to a woman called Nuala Greene, and that the shock of everything jumbled this up in your head?’
‘She was here, I saw her, spoke to her, carried her bloody bag upstairs and you think I imagined it?’
‘No! Oh, Maggie, I don’t know what I think, but it all just seems so out of place, so odd. And such a coincidence that Emma finds James online the same day you say this Nuala Greene woman comes to the village.’
‘Nuala only told Lois about James’s death this weekend, that was why she came all the way down here. And Emma probably only searched for James online off the back of Nuala Greene’s visit.’
‘If Nuala came to tell Lois that her son had died, why would she end up killing her? It doesn’t make sense, does it?’
‘None of it makes sense!’ Maggie closed her eyes, rubbed her temples, and there it all was again, the blood, the iron doorstop, the brain matter on the kitchen wall. And despite it all, the suicide letters, internet searches, the bank statements Emma had strewn across the cellar floor, it didn’t make sense.
‘I’ll have to make them believe me,’ Maggie said, her mind winding up, into life. ‘I’ll give them evidence if that’s what they need. I’ll make them realise she was here all along. Her tyre tracks would still be in the fields.’
‘It’s been raining since Saturday, Maggie, the fields are washed clean of tracks.’
‘I’ll give them a full description, her looks, mannerisms.’
‘You could have got all that from the internet, Twitter and the like.’
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‘I have to make them believe me!’ Maggie said.
She knew Emma far better than any of them. She knew the tenacity inside that girl. She couldn’t see it; Emma taking the gun, sitting beside the woman she had supposedly beaten to death and pointing it at her face, the barrel an inch below her jaw. She couldn’t see Emma pulling the trigger. Couldn’t imagine the desolation she would had to have felt, the loneliness, the despair. Surely she would have noticed it if Emma had been so low, so close to suicide?
And then she thought of the letters, the suicide letters the police found in Emma’s drawer.
Then she saw Emma’s face, her sweet face, ruined by the shotgun between her knees. The same gun Elaine had used to shoot herself, the gun Arthur had given to Emma on the day it was released from police evidence, a sick gift reminding her, always, of where Arthur placed the blame of Elaine’s death, the gun Emma had kept ever since in a holdall stored inside her divan.
For the police it fitted so neatly, Emma killing the woman she blamed for her fall from grace, before killing herself with that gun, in the home of the man she had never stopped loving.
They drove the rest of the way in silence, Jennifer still wearing her sympathetic, closed-lipped smile. No other cars passed them, no cyclists or ramblers braved the rain.
They drove past the track that led to Maggie’s field and she thought of Nuala, her bitten fingers, thin wrists. The look in her eye when Maggie told her that James had, at nineteen years of age, slept with a girl barely fourteen.
They drove on through the village, along Shore Road where Lois’s house was still draped with police tape, already sagging from the near-constant rain. That house had been Nuala’s destination all along; it made sense it would end there for her too, made sense to Maggie at least.
They passed the pub, also cordoned off, and followed the road round the back to the dairy farm and the Hill’s stone-built farmhouse, a low wide building with a dark slate roof and sash windows framed in black wood.
‘Another day or so and you’ll be back in the pub,’ Jennifer said inside, standing in the doorway of the spare room. ‘But you know we’re always here if you need us, Jon and I. You don’t have to deal with any of this alone.’
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