It was supposed to be a double execution: the unfaithful wife, the disloyal brother. My first instinct about punishment being the motive was spot on; I just got the wrong man. It was Dom, not Max, who staged the scene. Max’s death was part retribution, part expediency—a means of covering up Dom’s crime. I can imagine the look on Max’s face all too well. Whatever he said to Dom in the pub, whether he deliberately lied to provoke Dom, or was simply teasing him to get back at his brother, he turned up that morning ready to help the twins have a happy birthday party, and instead he had a gun shoved in his hand and pointed at his head. I know exactly how that feels.
“And now it’s your turn.”
He leans closer and something catches the faint beam of light, making it flash in the dark. A knife. Closer still. The blade gleams as it slices through the darkness. I grind my teeth together and close my eyes, picturing Annabel’s and Aidan’s faces, remembering how perfectly their bodies fit into my sides, cuddled safely against me, and how good it feels to stroke their hair and kiss them goodnight. I think of them as tiny babies, the heat of their soft bodies as I tucked them into the crook of my arm. I picture them as curious toddlers, kicking their little boots through autumn leaves in excitement. I remember picnics and plays, sports days and swimming meets . . . cheering the twins on when they won, comforting them when they lost. My beautiful twins, so similar to look at yet each unique in personality: Annabel daring, Aidan so shy; both hovering on the brink of their teenage years. Little people in the making—my little people.
I’ve heard it said that a person’s life is supposed to flash in front of their eyes as they think they’re about to die, but it’s my children’s happily haphazard, precious lives that play in my imagination as I stare at Dom’s face and acknowledge the cold, hard, inescapable truth: My husband is a killer.
His hand brushes across my mouth and instinctively I turn my face, sinking my teeth into the flesh of his palm.
“You bitch. You fucking bitch.” He reels back. “I shouldn’t have called that ambulance. I should have let you bleed to death.”
He climbs on to the bed, straddling me, his weight pressing down; I am trapped, helpless. I want to fight but there is no strength left in me. I feel my body giving up and hear a voice inside my head calling out to Annabel and Aidan, begging them to forgive me for leaving them yet again.
Who will look after them when I’m gone?
My mind feels fuzzy now; his thighs are crushing my chest, his knees squeezing the sides of my head like a vice, and I can scarcely draw a breath. I need to keep fighting: I can’t give up . . . but I feel my strength leaving me. Soon, I will vanish once more into the bright-dark. Only perhaps this time there will be no brightness, only bottomless, endless dark.
Come on, Mum, don’t be soft, you can do it!
I try to resist as he grabs hold of my bound wrists with one hand and yanks them above my head, but the violent motion wrenches every ligament in my shoulders and the pressure of his fingers on my bones leaves me weak with pain. I cry out but the sound is muffled against his chest as he leans forward, the knife angled upwards. His arm jerks out, a stabbing punch, and there is a snapping noise.
He’s cut the cords around my wrists.
My arms drop and I half groan, half wail; sobs wrack through my body and my lungs feel tight with fear.
“I can’t take any more,” I whisper, rocking my head from side to side as he cuts the cords binding my ankles. “Please, it’s enough.”
“You’re right. But don’t worry. There’s only one more choice left for you to make, Maddie. I wonder if you will make it.”
“What is it?” There’s hardly enough breath in my body to say the words.
“A deal.”
“A . . . What kind of deal?” I don’t trust Dom to keep his side of any bargain.
“Turns out I didn’t need to go all the way to Manchester to be offered that job. My reputation preceded me,” he brags. “But I thought I might leave the decision to you. All you have to do is tell the police that you’ve remembered. That it was Max who shot you. Then I’ll let you go. You’ll never have to see me again. Or—and this is where you need to think carefully, for once, if you can do that—I can leave you here to die. No one knows you’re here, and by the time they find you it’ll be too late.”
“So that’s why you’ve brought me here. To play your mind games with me, break me down until I give you a way out. But you won’t get away with this. Lucy—”
“Is quite happy at home with the children, and I’m sure she’d happily keep looking after them after the tragedy of your disappearance—when the police discover that you simply couldn’t get over the death of your lover and you wash up on the Thames foreshore.”
“You wouldn’t . . . Lucy wouldn’t. I don’t believe you!” I strain my voice to shout the words, as much to convince myself as to denounce Dom for the liar I know him to be.
He’s pacing the room now, but suddenly he strides towards the bed, towering over me, hand raised. “Don’t look so frightened,” he says, reaching out a hand to stroke my hair.
I flinch in recognition. “It was you, wasn’t it? Stroking my hair, trying to smother me as I slept, telling me that I was just having nightmares when I woke up choking.”
“Twice I almost suffocated you,” he says, looking pleased with himself. “The first time when I signed the release forms for you to be put into a coma, and then again when I visited you. But then I figured it would be so much more fun to keep you alive, watch you suffer. Watch me and Lucy. We’re good together, if I do say so myself. We always have been.” His wink is cocky.
I tell myself he’s bluffing. I’ve been wrong about Lucy, but I won’t make that mistake again. I hope she has been looking after the twins, but I no longer believe she’s been trying to steal them from me. I wouldn’t wish my husband on my worst enemy, and I simply don’t believe Lucy is that.
She’s in as much danger as the children, I think suddenly. She doesn’t know I’m awake; she doesn’t know Dom was the gunman. Maybe he’s been spinning her a line all this time about Max, how worthless he was, how shameful my behavior. Lucy won’t realize she’s living under the same roof as a killer. I hold my breath in horror at the thought.
Or perhaps she does know. Perhaps Dom has her so terrified that she’s forcing herself to stay quiet, play along and avoid lighting his short fuse, just as I did for all those years. He’s holding her captive . . .
The twins too.
“You haven’t hurt them, have you?” I ask, the words grazing my throat, my eyes drawn to the tiny specks of blood on his shirt collar, surely from shaving cuts. “If you’ve laid so much as a finger on my children—”
The fist crashing into the side of my face knocks me sideways and, taken by surprise, I tumble off the bed, landing heavily on the rough wood floor. Everything goes black for a second and I rest my forehead on the boards, trying not to be sick. My cheekbone, already tender from banging it against the bathroom doorframe, hurts so badly I can’t believe it’s not broken. Pain shoots into my temples; my head throbs.
“You have no right to question me. What business is it of yours what I do? You forfeited the right to ask anything of me the day you slept with my brother and lied about the twins being mine.”
“But I didn’t . . . I never . . .” I can taste blood in my mouth and I’m not sure where it’s coming from. My left arm, bruised from taking all my weight when I fell, feels like it’s no longer part of my body, and I have to concentrate hard to lift a hand to touch my face. My fingertips come away wet, but I can’t tell if it’s from my nose or the gash at the corner of my mouth. I look up at Dom and realize the cut must have been caused by his wedding ring. I can’t believe he’s actually wearing it; he hasn’t returned mine to me, and I’m glad. Once, I wore it with so much pride, until it became a symbol of subservience . . . then fear.
I feel almost like I’m floating above the room, looking down at the pair of us. I see myself—dama
ged body, half-broken mind—and remember my surprised joy when Dom slipped his mother’s sapphire engagement ring on my finger, the butterflies inside me as I said yes, the pride and joy I felt as we exchanged our wedding vows.
“You’ve got till tomorrow morning to make up your mind. I’ll be back then for your decision.”
There is no question in my mind: I will do anything to protect my children, to get back to them.
Daddy’s the one who usually likes tricks.
I look at the face of my husband, the man I once loved so much, and a terrible thought sinks like a stone to the bottom of my heart as he turns away from me and heads to the door, the key turning in the lock as he closes it behind him with a soft thud: Maybe I’m the last one to die. Maybe they’re all already dead.
FORTY-THREE
I shouldn’t have let him leave; I should have kept him here, said yes immediately to his sick deal, anything to prevent him going home to the twins. What if he’s lying again? What if he doesn’t come back? I’m going to die alone here, barely able to move, starving to death, and no one will be able to help me—help my children. And it’s my fault for not stopping him. Surely he wouldn’t. It’s one thing punishing me, but not the children. I can’t believe he could hurt a child . . .
Then I remember Annabel’s diary. Someone was trying to hurt her, and I still don’t know who, and I want to read my daughter’s words again, to try to work out if there were any clues I missed. But where is it? I remember hunting frantically through the suitcase in the bright-dark, my unconscious mind replaying my desperate search before the birthday party, one last check that everything was packed and ready. But I found only the tickets, the photo, and nothing else. The diary was gone.
Has someone taken it?
I remember my conviction that the man who pulled the trigger had a double motive: to punish me and to silence my daughter. The police told me Max was the gunman; Dom has schemed to lead me down the same blind alley. It was all a lie: a smokescreen, a cover-up. Now I realize it was actually Dom who fired that bullet, and I was the only target in his sights. Me—and Max. And that changes everything . . .
It means Max was a victim too, guilty of aggravating his brother but not necessarily of grooming Annabel. Maybe someone else was pestering her—a teacher, a neighbor, the parent of a friend. She drew cartoons of them all in her diary, and I freeze in horror at the thought that this monster could still be out there, plaguing her to this day.
I wish I had Annabel’s diary to help me work out who did this. Max or a stranger. Or someone close to our family . . . It’s impossible to know, and I still can’t get it out of my head that it just seemed so logical for the gunman and my daughter’s would-be abuser to be one and the same man. Only the rules of logic don’t apply here; everything is being played out by Dom’s rules. What was it he once said to me, about the first rule of dating Dominic Castle?
Expect the unexpected . . .
Bluff and double-bluff.
Suddenly my heart starts pounding as I come full circle and wonder if my first gut instinct was right all along: that one monster is responsible for both crimes. And that can only mean that the man who was pestering Annabel to touch him is returning home right this second, killing time while he waits for me to make my choice, to decide which way the axe should fall.
If it hasn’t fallen already . . .
And now there is nothing and no one standing between my husband and my daughter.
* * *
Minutes, hours pass. My nerves are in shreds. I try to stay calm. I must think logically. Dom, Max or a stranger—who was harassing my daughter?
I think back to the words I remember from her diary, the disgusting touch of the man who was stalking her, his eyes following her round the room . . . Not classroom.
Round the room.
Under our own roof. Surely Max or Dom: it has to be one of them . . . But nothing I remember points to either, and once again I feel that sick desperation that I failed to protect my daughter—that I missed the signs. Were there any?
I remember Annabel’s increasing self-consciousness. But she was growing up; surely that body-coyness is a natural development. I remember how she’d grown tired of Max’s jokes and had started asking friends’ mums for lifts home. She rolled her eyes when Max came round, and I remember telling her not to be rude when she asked how long he was staying as soon as we sat down to Sunday lunch one day. But children get bored of adults. There was surely nothing unusual in any of those things.
And Dom. The Tickle Monster. Always pulling his little princess close for a hug in passing, or for a lazy cuddle in bed at the weekends. But I was there the whole time; his affection towards the children was a good thing. Or was I just being naive?
Annabel had refused to tell me when I asked. She wouldn’t give me a name, and I was loath to press her for details, sensing her distress and confusion. I’d planned to ask her again once we were in our place of safety. Only we never made it, and I need to know if I’ve just allowed a monster to walk back into my home. One who believes the children aren’t his; who doesn’t care about them any more.
I close my eyes and empty my mind, and try to allow memory to surface and give up the answer to my most pressing question of all: Who wanted to hurt my daughter?
* * *
“It’s fine, Dom. It doesn’t matter. Honest. It’s been a long day after a hard week. We’re both tired.” I knew I should feel disappointment, but it was relief that surged through me as Dom rolled away from me and stood up. I pressed my head back into the pillows, trying not to move, just waiting for him to go.
“I’ll see you downstairs. I said I’d take the kids swimming.” He yanked up his boxers unceremoniously and reached out for his chinos.
It was Sunday afternoon and the twins were watching the entire box set of an American comedy series that Max had brought round yesterday. Seeing how engrossed they were, Dom had gestured to me. It had taken me a couple of minutes to interpret his raised eyebrows; it was a long time since we’d done anything as spontaneously romantic as sneak into our bedroom in the middle of the afternoon. Eventually I’d got the message and we’d headed upstairs.
But I’d felt awkward, on edge knowing the children were just downstairs, and Dom had seemed impatient, almost angry. There was no attempt at seduction: he’d just wanted to lie down on the bed and get on with it. After the briefest rough fumble, though, it had become obvious that it wasn’t going to happen. He’d hidden his embarrassment well, but I’d dreaded to think how he might take it out on me later.
“That sounds nice,” I told him. “It’s been a while since we all went swimming together.”
“I said I’ll take them. It’ll make a change for them to hang out in the pool with their dad instead of good old Uncle Max. And I’m taking them to Richmond. Much nicer there. Not so many lecherous old pervs loitering around. Might treat them to pizza afterwards.”
“Sure. Sounds lovely,” I said, feeling excluded but acknowledging that Dom was right: he did need to spend more time with the children.
Annabel hadn’t been so keen. “I want to watch this.” Lying flat on the floor on her tummy, she didn’t take her eyes off the screen.
“The pool will be shut soon.” Dom had all three swimming bags over his shoulder already.
“Come on, Bel,” Aidan said, pausing the DVD. “You can show off that new dive Uncle Max taught you last week.”
“And we can have a dip in the jacuzzi afterwards, too,” Dom added. The twins always loved the hot bubbles, pretending they were floating on top of a volcano.
“Really? Cool. As long as we don’t have to go in the sauna. Uncle Max always makes us go in there after swimming, hey, Bel?” Aidan said.
“Full of sweaty old men,” Annabel said over her shoulder, not looking round.
“You’ve never mentioned that?” I frowned. “I’ll have a word with Uncle Max. I don’t like the sound of that at all. They’re not naked in there, are they?”
> “Don’t be ridiculous,” Dom said.
“Well, I don’t know, do I? You do change in a cubicle, don’t you, Bel?” I continued, thinking I should insist on going along after all. “You don’t get undressed in the communal bit?” She was growing up so fast, and sometimes I didn’t think she quite realized it. It was hard to counsel caution without making her overly self-conscious. I wanted her to be safe without making her paranoid. Public pools were such a nightmare of worry for parents, I thought.
“Course I do, Mum,” she said, looking at me like I’d lost my mind. “Most of the time, anyway. If they’re not all full.”
“She can come in a cubicle with me. It’ll be fine. Stop worrying,” Dom said. “Now, kids, no more stalling, grab your things. Last one to the car has to answer to the Tickle Monster.”
The twins scrambled to their feet, leaving me to turn off the DVD and tidy up the mess of books, games and magazines strewn across the living-room floor. I busied myself for the rest of the afternoon, trying not to worry about the children—they were safe with their dad, after all—trying not to dread the evening, once the children were in bed, when Dom and I would be alone again. It was unusual for him to be home; he was generally out most evenings now, even at weekends, seeing old clients or meeting prospective ones. I hoped he wouldn’t be expecting a repeat performance of this afternoon.
Maybe I’d give Lucy a call and see if she and Jasper fancied popping over for an impromptu sleepover and supper . . . Safety in numbers.
* * *
Nothing particularly suspicious springs to my mind. It would be easy to over-analyze and misinterpret, I think, trying not to let fear for the children railroad my imagination into dark, paranoid places. To know that I couldn’t protect my children in the outside world is one thing; that I left them vulnerable to harm under my own roof is devastating. If I’d ever seen anything that made me uncomfortable, either between Max and the children or with Dom, I know I wouldn’t have let it pass. But Annabel’s words had been clear.
The Perfect Family Page 24