With my uncaught foot, I kicked backwards, hard.
He yelled again and let go of my other foot. I scrabbled forward for the hammer, barely feeling the wetness of blood dripping down my nose, my mouth, out of my cut lip.
Get up, get up, get up!
It was back in my grasp. The swords of dead kings could not have had such a steely glitter to me. I gained my feet and snatched open the door to the hall.
He was after me in an instant.
I did not have time to try the front door, running instead for the back of the house, through the labyrinth of passages; the hall with the winding marble staircase, the corridor, the cavernous kitchen; while he, the monster at the centre, growling and bleeding and bellowing curses, came after, a mere second behind, so close I could feel his hot, fetid breath upon my neck, and when I did I whirled around with the hammer, screaming, and he would duck back, but only for an instant.
He’s going to catch me. He’s going to catch me and kill me.
I skidded into the kitchen, saw the knives.
No he isn’t.
It was in my other hand just as his arms seized tight around my waist, and I was stabbing him in the hand, reaching back to stab him in the thigh, in the belly, anywhere I could reach despite the awkward angle, while he screamed obscenities and let me go.
I had dropped the hammer, keeping hold of the knife, and the kitchen door was in front of me, on a simple latch lock.
I flung it open and was through.
My bare feet touched wet grass, iced with early evening dew. The breeze I had wept for and dreamed of stroked my body, but I had no time nor thought to savour it.
I ran.
I ran as I’d never run in my life. The field seemed endless. No matter how my legs pumped down into the damp green, the trees remained elusive, receding from me as quickly as I approached them.
I ran in utter silence, my hard breathing and the susurrus of the grass my only company. There was a sharp howl, an almost inarticulate cry of baffled rage, rising to an insistent baying.
It was drawing closer.
I hadn’t thought I could run any faster. I’d been wrong. I knew that if I looked back I would see him, tearing over the grass behind me, my death written on his face.
But I didn’t look back. You should never look back.
Then the trees came to meet me. The muddy ground was strewn with treacherous roots, painfully jarring and tripping my feet. My fate was upon me. I looked up at the twining branches in desperation. The wind whipped cold droplets over me; it was raining.
Something started out of the brush. It contrasted sharply with the dusk, and the brown-grey bracken. It was black and white. It burst into the air, soundlessly. I saw with the perfect clarity of terror what it was. It was a magpie. A meaningless detail. A root tripped me up. I put my hands out to steady my fall, one still grasping the knife.
They met nothing.
The riverbank sloped away, hidden from all eyes by the trees and bracken surrounding the edge of the stream. I rolled down the bank, my fall half-broken by stray plants and long grass. Alex poised on the lip of the bank, shouting in fury, as I plunged, grabbing futilely for purchase on the river’s banks, into the cold and swollen water.
And just like that I was out, as though I had been bodily evicted from my own memory.
I was Margot again and I was standing on the blue rug, facing that fucking velvet sofa with its stained upholstery, its extra decades of desolation and dust.
Katie.
I knew where Katie Browne was.
The rug was heavy, terribly heavy, but I heaved a corner of it back.
Set into the stone tiles was a trap door; such as I had seen in innumerable plays and films. Its edges were lined in black metal bolted to a wooden frame. A thick black ring lay flat in a depression made to fit it.
I seized this, pulled, pulled again. At first I thought it was just heavy, until I saw the keyhole just under the ring – made to fit some big, antiquated barrel key.
I swore.
Nothing happened, except that from below, there was the rat-tat-tat again.
‘Katie?’ I shouted, dropping to my knees. ‘Katie, is that you in there?’
There was silence. Then, very muffled but still audible, threaded with disbelief: ‘Mrs Lewis?’
‘Oh my God!’ And weird and inappropriate as it sounds, I wanted to laugh with joy. ‘Oh my God, you’re alive! Katie, where does he keep the key?’
‘The key?’
‘The trapdoor is locked. Do you know where he keeps the key?’ I shouted into the flush join between trapdoor and floor.
Her reply was inaudible.
‘I can’t hear you!’
‘I don’t know . . . I don’t know!’
‘Katie, look, listen, it doesn’t matter. I’m going to call the police and they’ll get you out, all right? I promise. Sit tight.’
‘OK,’ came the thin, muffled reply.
‘Good girl.’
I stood up, rubbing at the back of my neck. The phone. Bloody hell, the phone would be in the hallway.
The hallway – where the hell was that? There was a door in the wall next to the velvet sofa, and I pushed it open.
Bingo.
The handset was old and grubby, but it still let out a profound purring once I lifted the receiver to my ear.
I jabbed in 999, glancing towards the front door.
It was open, just a crack.
My stomach hollowed out in dread. In all of the excitement, I had not heard anyone come in.
‘Police, ambulance or fire brigade?’ chirped the voice on the other end.
Something very cold pressed itself into the back of my neck. The receiver was being lifted out of my hands, and I let it go.
‘Put your hands up,’ he said.
I raised them, slowly. The wallpaper in the hall was dark pink, in a fleur-de-lys pattern, faintly stained.
‘Turn around,’ he said.
He still had that whispery voice.
I turned, hands raised, and there he was, in a dirty blue Parka, his blond hair now greying, shorn close, and missing up to the crown of his head.
His watery blue eyes met mine over the barrel of the shotgun he was holding.
‘Oh, Bethan,’ he said, ‘you’ve been such a bad, bad girl.’
29
‘Move,’ he said, motioning me back to the other room with the gun.
I was tempted, recklessly tempted, to tell him to go to hell, to shoot me where I stood, if that’s what he was going to do, for I would do nothing to oblige him, contemptible bully that he was; not a single thing, not any more.
But there was more than myself to think about. Katie was in there.
I had to get Katie out somehow.
I let him walk me back, watched him unlock the trapdoor, the shotgun still trained on me.
I remembered something else – I never used to look at him; never used to dare, or desire to, but I looked at him now.
I gave him a long cold stare.
‘Get in,’ he said.
Hands raised, I preceded him down the stairs to the underworld, along the dusty corridor, to the door at the bottom. The black and white tiles were down here too, black and white like magpies, and flecked in places with tiny maroon spatters that I realized were old blood.
I wondered how much of it was mine.
My jaw tightened.
I was back in Martin’s office, and his crowded wall of pictures and scraps of notes rose before me, like a rocky bluff before a rudderless ship.
All of those girls . . .
The barrel was a cold circle pressing against the back of my neck. He was handing me something. Down, past my elbow, I saw him holding out the key to the door.
He was breathing hard. On some level, he was enjoying himself.
‘Hurry up. I haven’t got all day.’
I bit my tongue and took the unpleasantly warm key from his sweaty hand. It turned smoothly in the lock.
&nb
sp; ‘I don’t understand it,’ he said, and his voice was full of hidden rage and a whiny self-pity. ‘Why did you come back here? Is it money? Is that what you’re after?’
Within, Katie Browne pressed herself into the far corner in a filthy pink nightshirt, and her face was dirty and bruised. It was also horrified and hopeless.
I gave her a long cool look too. It’s not over yet.
Her bruised bottom lip curled inwards.
‘Don’t you ignore me,’ I could hear the approaching thunder of his rage in that voice – that childlike rage that could brook not an instant’s frustration, not a particle of disapproval. ‘Why are you back here?’
I turned to face him. ‘You drove me here, you dumb bastard, when you dragged me into your car,’ I said. ‘You tell me why I’m here.’
He twitched, and his breathing was a little faster, and like lightning he slapped me across the face, hard enough to make my ears ring.
But I was not afraid any more, because his rage was as nothing compared to my own. The memory of this underground room with its mouldy foam, the stench of terror, made my blood sing in my ears, my heart pound like a drum.
With this rage I would accomplish great and terrible things.
‘Don’t you dare get cheeky with me, you fucking whore!’ he roared. His eyes were lamps lit with madness, and just for that second, he forgot himself, lowered the gun, just a fraction. ‘We could have been a match made in heaven, but you ruined it!’
I let my tongue dab lightly at my lip, where he had cut me. I was rewarded with the taste of salt and iron; it was like a bit between my teeth.
I bit down hard.
‘Oh, you are no match for me.’
There in the underworld, drawn by the scent of blood, I attacked.
The padlock and chain were out of my pocket in a flash, and I lashed out with it, hard, across his face; a metal scourge that tore into his flesh, his eyes. Blood squirted out, spattering me, and he let out a stunned yell, but I was possessed – I realized that all that really stops us from hurting one another is not strength of body but strength of will, and now every ounce of my strength was going into slashing him again and again with the chain, the sharp edges of the padlock cutting into him while he screamed and fought with the gun. It went off, but it was too close, firing wildly to the side. Its roiling blast was as vague and irrelevant as distant thunder and all I could see was him, through a veil of fast-moving scarlet fragments.
How dare he touch me. How dare he touch those girls. I will kill him. I will kill him . . .
He was forcing me back, using the gun as a club, but he was blinded with his own blood and I cared nothing for my own safety. But still he was stronger, filled with a terrible stocky brute strength, like a bull, and he was bearing me backwards; he was going to push me over.
‘Katie!’ I screamed. ‘Get out!’
There was silence behind me, but I did not turn to look at her. I saw only him; he filled my vision. He raised his hand quickly to swipe at his face, and his left eye was half-closed and torn, swollen; blood leaking out from behind the lid.
Suddenly the gun was dropped and both of his hands were around my neck; he was squeezing hard, so hard I could hear cartilage popping beneath his fingers.
I caught the gun and smashed the butt, full force, into his temple.
He let out a soft, sucking ooph sound and dropped slowly to his knees. Then, with a dumb animal groan, he toppled forward, his face striking the floor of the cellar with a sick wet smack.
I came back to myself then.
The gun was raised over his head, and I realized that I was moments away from dashing his brains out with it.
I paused, as though time was suspended, the very dust having ceased to drift in the light of that single bulb. My discarded scourge lay at my feet, his strands of sandy hair matted with crimson gore.
I lowered the gun, and I was shaking now – shaking so hard that it seemed as though the very floor shook beneath me. My hands were smeared with scarlet.
‘Oh,’ I said out loud, though my crushed throat strangled the words. ‘Oh.’
I have discovered what my enemy discovered all those years ago.
There is a killer inside me.
‘Oh,’ I said again, and raised my raddled hands to my mouth. They trembled against it. ‘Oh.’
At my feet, he sighed out shallow, broken breaths.
Whatever force had risen up in me was now going – slinking away, its work done, back into the depths of my subconscious, leaving me there, utterly abandoned and alone.
Except I was not alone. Katie was with me.
Dear God, I must have scared her half to death.
We had to get out of there. I had to get to the phone. I had to tell people what had happened.
Oh, God, what on earth would I say?
‘It’s all right, Katie,’ I rasped, not taking my eyes off the wounded man. I picked up the chain and began to wind it around his slack wrists as, half-dead or not, there was no way I was turning my back on him. ‘It’s over now. We’re going home.’
From behind me, there was a soft choking sound.
‘Katie?’
I turned.
Oh no. Oh no, no, no . . .
That single shot had found its target.
Katie was lying on her back, and her belly was a gaping red hole, soaking through her thin cotton nightshirt. Her eyes were open, staring, and a little red rivulet was running out of the side of her mouth as she coughed again, then again, then was still.
30
After weeks of therapy, I think I remember the first part of the story.
I’m not being coy or peekabooish with you. I genuinely don’t remember most of it, and the parts I do, well, they are strange and askew, like old photographs, badly stored. Some patches have faded into nothing. Some have curled and warped into weird shapes, as though exposed to open flame. In other places they are jewel-bright, vivid as the day they were taken, but without context, like single jigsaw pieces, unable to tell the story of the whole.
I am walking down a hospital corridor, looking for the toilets. I am very upset, very frightened. Someone I love is in trouble, and from glances, circumspect lowering of voices, ornate and contextually inappropriate kindnesses, I suspect that this person is about to die.
All they will tell me is that she’s fallen. She slipped on the ice and hit her head.
But she looks terrible. Her head is a mass of bandages, her eyelids heavy and puffed over her eyes – and she lies in an attitude she does not even have in sleep, her lips pursed around a plastic tube that seems made of something more vital than she is right now. Not even her fraying mass of grey hair is visible. She is in some special unit, in her own room on the ward in a kind of glass box. Everything smells wrong; it’s that hospital smell, and forever after that smell will make me batey and bitey, like a trapped, feral animal.
At her side, something on a trolley beeps in time with her heart. That and her slow, gasping breaths, her chest rising and falling, are the only signs that she is alive at all.
They’ve called me away from school. First day back at school, I’m sure it was, and the cheap uniform with its neat darning over the torn holes and hem feels strange on me, as though it must be worn in again. I think I had only been there an hour before the headmaster came to get me, before . . . ah yes, I remember – before Miss Costas drove me here.
My heavy school shoes make a clumping sound against the linoleum. I am like a filled balloon, about to burst with dread.
‘Ah, there you are!’
I look round, and about thirty feet behind me I can see that social worker, Alan or Alex or whatever his name is. He is doing his stupid smile at me, and waving, and speeding up along the corridor to meet me, practically running.
I, conversely, can feel myself still walking forwards, trying to pretend I didn’t hear him though I obviously looked round, and I am aware that this is a shockingly rude way to treat an adult, particularly one who has powe
r over me.
But I really don’t want to talk to him, especially not right now. He gives me the creeps.
I don’t have the courage to front it out, so I stop and wait for him to catch up with me. He’s still doing the smile.
‘There you are,’ he says, coming to a halt in front of me, and his gaze flicks quickly up and down the corridor before resting on my face. ‘They just rang me at the office. I’ve been looking all over for you.’
Since I have been where you’d expect to find me, I have nothing to reply to this. I let my glance fall downwards towards my ugly cheap shoes. I can feel his attention burning into the crown of my head.
‘Such terrible news,’ he says, rubbing his hands together. ‘She was such a nice lady.’
I shoot him a look, before I can stop myself.
‘Is a nice lady. So sorry. I meant, she was nice when I met her.’
I look away. My eyes are filling up again, too fast for me to control. His hand, when it lands on my shoulder, pats me awkwardly, heavily, while I dash furiously at my wet face, not wanting to break down in front of him.
He gives my shoulder a final squeeze.
‘I hate to bring this up,’ he says, lowering his voice, ‘but we have to make arrangements for you while your grandmother isn’t able to take care of you.’
‘I’m staying here, with Nanna,’ I say, blinking back my tears. ‘I don’t want to go anywhere else.’
‘All right,’ he says, after a couple of seconds. ‘You can stay here. At least for tonight. Come on, now.’ He has hold of my arm, is guiding me forward.
I hesitate, digging my heels in, and I can sense the flicker of displeasure in him as I resist. ‘Come where?’
The smile is back. ‘You need to pack a bag to tide you over for your stay, and then we’ll come right back here, I promise.’
I am suddenly aware of an overwhelming feeling of wrong – of fear – that bites hard enough for me to sense even through my misery. I do not want to go anywhere with him.
Dear Amy Page 28