The Shape of Snakes

by Minette Walters

  The woman smiled unpleasantly. "Too right. You treated us like dirt."

  "Not at all," said Wendy firmly. "I made a point of extending the same courtesy to you and your family as I did to everyone else."

  "Yeah, well maybe you made that a bit obvious. You never liked us, that's for sure."

  Wendy nodded immediately. "Yes, that is certainly true," she confessed. "In fact, it was a lot worse. I couldn't bear you ... couldn't bear your children ... couldn't bear to have you in my house. My heart used to sink every time you came knocking on our door because I knew I'd face a struggle between the complete revulsion you all inspired in me and my duty as a Christian."

  The directness of this response took Maureen aback, as if she believed vicars' wives should deal only in euphemism. "There you are then," she said doubtfully. "That proves you treated us like dirt."

  "Oh, I don't think so," murmured Wendy, "otherwise you wouldn't be so surprised to hear me agree with you. I said I struggled with my revulsion, not that I gave in to it. Our door was never closed to you, Maureen, not even after the theft of my brooch. We gave you and your children every assistance even though you were quite the most unpleasant family we'd ever had dealings with."

  I watched Alan's head sink deeper into his hands.

  "What about Michael Percy?" demanded Maureen belligerently. "He was a thief same as mine, but you couldn't do enough for him ... always turning out to hold his hand while the tart"�she jerked her chin at Sharon�"was otherwise engaged. But your pet ends up pistol-whipping old ladies and my lad comes good. So how did that happen, eh? Explain that."

  Wendy shook her head. "I don't claim to know the answers, Maureen. All I can do is tell the truth as I see it." She, too, looked at Alan. "In any case, it's Alan you should be asking, not me. He's the only one who knows his story."

  "Yeah, well, maybe I was a better mother than you thought I was," said Maureen triumphantly. "How do you like that for an explanation?"

  "You were no better than me," said Sharon in a tight little voice. "The only difference between us was that yours were frightened of you, and mine wasn't."

  "More fool you then," retorted Maureen, her eyes glinting to have lured the woman into the open. "Look where it's got you. Your Michael's such an embarrassment to you, you haven't spoken to him in years ... or that bitch of a wife who shopped him." She gave a harsh laugh. "Not that I blame you. He was a wrong 'un through and through. Do you think my kids would have thieved if he hadn't shown them how? Do you think Annie would have been stinking of piss if he hadn't found her and done the honors?" She pointed her cigarette at Sharon's heart. "That makes you sit up and take notice, doesn't it? You didn't even know he was in her house that night, let alone used her as a piss pot."

  I glanced irresolutely at Sharon and was shocked by her terrible pallor. "Are you suggesting Michael killed her?" I asked Maureen.

  "Helped her on her way maybe. He told Alan he got home about 8:30, saw that her door wasn't properly shut and went in to see if he could nick something. He found her lying on the rug in her sitting room, reckoned she was drunk and thought it'd be funny to piss on her." She broke off on a laugh. "The place stank of cats so he didn't reckon she'd notice when she came 'round."

  "What happened?"

  She gave a careless shrug. "He said she started moaning so he got the hell out in case she went for him. But the chances are he's lying through his teeth, and he gave her a kicking as well. It's what he liked doing."

  I glanced at Alan's bent head. "Was Alan with him?"

  '"Course he wasn't," snapped Maureen. "He's already told you he never touched her. But you'd rather believe it of him than Michael, wouldn't you? You're like her,"�she cast a baleful look at Wendy�"always think well of one and ill of the other."

  Wendy leaned forward, propping her elbows on her knees and examining Maureen curiously. "Why is it so important that Alan wasn't there?" she asked.

  A ferocious frown gathered on Maureen's face. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "You seem so determined to push the blame on to Sharon's son but, if I've understood correctly, it was your son who performed the same disgusting act on Mrs. Ranelagh a few weeks later. Yet none of you seems too worried about that."

  "So?"

  "It suggests that something worse happened to Annie than happened to Mrs. Ranelagh ... something you don't want Alan associated with."

  Was it my imagination or was Maureen scared? Certainly Alan was�if his head dropped any lower, I thought, it would be touching his knees.

  "Michael told us about it afterward ... gave us the idea," said Derek suddenly. "Seemed only fair to do to the nigger-lover what was done to the nigger. They both thought they could bad-mouth us and get away with it."

  "That's right," said Maureen. "But it was Michael did it first, just like always. He was a bad influence, that boy. Everything evil in this street started with him and his mother, but it was always us got pilloried for it."

  "What about rape?" I said cynically. "Whose idea was that? Because it certainly wasn't Michael's. He thrashed Alan within an inch of his life when he did it to Rosie. Doesn't that count as something evil?"

  It was a form of words�spoken in angry defense of someone who wasn't there to defend himself�yet time stood still as soon as I'd uttered them. No one moved on the sofa. It was as if they believed that stillness could somehow freeze us all in time and space and leave my knowledge forever unspoken. My first reaction was surprise that Derek seemed to understand what I was talking about until I remembered Michael saying that Alan hadn't come to blows with him until after Rosie's rape.

  My second reaction was entirely physical as the reason for their petrified expressions dawned on me. Alan had raped Annie, too ... Oh, dear God! Forget control. Forget justice. Forget revenge. Twenty years of reasoned evolution were overturned in a second, and I regressed to a primeval desire to kill.

  I leaped on Alan like a tigress�my revulsion�my fear� my hatred�everything�racing in a torrent through my blood. "You FUCKING little SHIT!" I roared, slamming his head against the wall. "She was DYING, for Christ's sake. How DARE you violate a dying woman?"

  He cringed away from me. "I never ... only in her mouth..."

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Maureen's claws reach out to scratch my face. And with every ounce of hatred that I had I planted my fist between her teeth.

  It would have turned into a free-for-all if Geoffrey hadn't been a pacifist at heart. He pulled me off Maureen by seizing me by the arms and spinning me 'round behind him. "Enough," he said sharply, standing between me and the sofa. "Control your mother," he ordered Alan, "or I'll ask Mrs. Stanhope to call the police."

  It was an unnecessary instruction because Alan was already holding her back with an arm hooked 'round her neck, but mention of the police at least persuaded her to sink back into her seat. She eyed Geoffrey balefully. "You're in no position to play God," she spat. "Your hands are as dirty as ours."

  He lowered his head like a terrier after a ferret, and stared fixedly at her. "Mrs. Ranelagh says Annie was beaten up in her house two or three hours before I passed her�and those are the injuries she died of�so don't accuse me of having dirty hands. You're the only one 'round here got free with a baseball bat."

  Maureen's narrowed gaze focused on me. "You're being fed a pack of lies. A week ago this bitch was saying it was Derek gave Annie a thrashing before dumping her in the street ... Now she's trying to put the blame on me. Well, how could I have got the fat cow through her front door? Tell me that."

  "She got herself out," I said, breathing deeply through my nose to try to quell the shudders that were jolting my body with electric shocks. "She had a fractured skull ... a broken arm ... she'd been unconscious for God knows how long with your filthy son all over her ... but she still had enough will to live to stagger out into the street and look for help." I made another lunge forward, only to be blocked by Geoffrey. "And no one gave it to her because they thought she was drunk.
"

  "Your husband being one," she snarled.

  I pressed a finger to the tic of hate that throbbed beneath my lip. "I think she came to my end of the street because she knew I was the only person who would help her. I even think she may have knocked on my door�and I feel so damn guilty I wasn't there, because I was sitting at school waiting for parasites like you and Derek to come and talk to me about your children's progress." I dropped abruptly onto my chair again, energy spent. "Some joke, eh? We all knew the only direction your children were ever going was toward prison."

  "Don't you call us para�" began Derek.

  But Geoffrey cut him short. "What did you do to Rosie?" he demanded of Alan.

  "Don't answer him, son," snapped Maureen, spitting blood. "Just because that bitch of a teacher tells lies about us, it doesn't mean we have to start explaining ourselves."

  "It damn well does," said Geoffrey belligerently. "If he raped my Rosie I want to know about it. He ought to be locked up."

  "Your Rosie?" demanded Maureen, dashing the blood from her mouth with the cuff of her sleeve. "That's rich, that is. How come she's yours all of a sudden when you couldn't get shot of her quick enough to move in with the tart?"

  "More to the point, Maureen," said Wendy forcefully, "when did Alan tell you about his part in all of this? And why did you do nothing to stop it getting any worse?"

  She shrank into the back of the sofa. "You should be asking Derek that," she said mutinously. "He's already said it was him told Alan what to do. What could I have done except take a beating myself ... which is what happened every time Derek reckoned I was interfering."

  But Derek gave an angry shake of his head. "I said I'd take the blame for the schoolteacher." he muttered. "Nothing else."

  "There is nothing else," she snapped angrily. "All we ever did was thieve a few things off the nigger and teach Miss High-and-Mighty here a lesson in manners. All the rest is lies."

  I looked up. "What about the cats?" I asked coldly. "Were they a lesson in manners, too?"

  She dropped her eyes immediately and fumbled for a cigarette.

  "You were too precise about the numbers inside Annie's house. It's not a figure you'd have known if you hadn't notched up each sad little stray as you tortured it."

  Why should this be the key that unlocked Alan? Was a cat's death more dreadful than a woman's? A cat's humiliation harder to forget? A cat's cries more poignant? Apparently so. Annie could die ... I could be humbled ... Rosie could weep ... but an animal must be loved. His anguish was frightening for, as I watched him battle with tears for those long-dead creatures, I found myself wondering if he was still as dissociated from human pain as he so obviously had been then. If so, I had little hope for Beth and her children.

  It would be impossible to relate what he said in the way he said it. Once released, his emotions were a river in spate, sweeping aside everyone's sensibilities but his own and given in stuttered sentences which were barely comprehensible at times. We became party to his mother's hatred of sex, his father's brutal taking of her whenever he wanted it, their drunkenness, their violence toward each other and their children. But, more than anything, he dwelt on Maureen's slaughter of the marmalade cat, repeating over and over that when he tried to stop her she turned the baseball bat on him.

  I asked him why she'd done it and, like Michael, the only explanation he could offer was that it made her feel "good." She laughed when its brains went everywhere, he said, and she wished it had been the nigger's head she'd smashed.

  "What about the other cats?" I asked him. "Why did she go on with it?"

  "Because it sent Annie 'round the bend to have them put through her flap. She took to wailing and hollering all the time and behaving like a crazy woman, and Mum reckoned if she didn't pack up and go of her own accord, it was a dead cert she'd be taken out in a straitjacket."

  "But if hurting animals upset you so much, why did you help?"

  "I wasn't the only one," he muttered. "We all did it�the girls, Mike, Rosie, Bridget. We used to go out looking for strays and bring them home in boxes."

  I wondered sadly if that was the real explanation for Bridget's sacrifice of her hair. "But why, if you knew what was going to happen to them?"

  "It wasn't as bad as having their heads split open."

  "Only if you believe a quick death is worse than a slow one."

  "They didn't all die ... Annie saved most of them ... and that's what we reckoned would happen." He pressed his forehead into his hands. "It was better than having Mum kill them straight off, which is what she wanted to do. It was them dying that got Annie worked up."

  "The ones you put under my floorboards died," I said, "because I didn't know they were there."

  He raised his head with a look of bafflement in his eyes, but didn't say anything.

  "And if you'd refused your mother," I pointed out, "none of the cats need have died. Surely Michael was bright enough to work that out even if you couldn't."

  "Us kids wanted rid of Annie, too," he said sullenly. "It wasn't right to make us live next door to a nigger."

  I don't know what was going through Maureen's mind while he spoke. She made one or two halfhearted attempts to stop him but I think she realized it was too late. The odd thing is I believe she was genuinely ashamed of her cruelty�perhaps because it had been the one crime she committed herself. More interestingly, she had eyes only for Sharon when Alan admitted that he and Michael had entered Annie's house together around 8:30 on the night she died.

  "It was Mike spotted the door was ajar," he said. "We were going into his place to watch telly because we knew his mum was out, and he says to me, 'The coon's left her door open.' The place was black as the ace of spades ... no lights ... nothing ... and he says, 'Let's do a prowl before she gets back.' So we creep into the front room and damn near fall over her. It was Mike started it," he insisted. "He turns on the lamp on the table ... reckons she's drunk as a skunk and pulls out his dick�" He broke off, refusing to go any further.

  "Did she speak to you?"

  He raised his eyes briefly to Sharon's. "Kept saying the tart had hit her ... so Mike goes apeshit and kicks her till she shuts up. After that we went down the arcade, and Mike says he'll kill me if I ever breathe a word about his mum ... and I say, 'Who cares? It's good riddance, whoever did it...' "

  "I told you it wasn't us," jeered Maureen with a gloating smile on her face. " 'Look to the tart,' I said. It was her and her son did it between them." She jabbed two fingers in the air at Geoffrey. "That's why you shoved the mad cow in the gutter�because she told you who'd hit her."

  I felt physically sick. Even though I'd suspected Michael had known how Annie had died, I'd always hoped he hadn't been involved. But could a "kicking" at 8:30 have caused the sort of blood-seepage into Annie's thighs that was so obvious in the photographs? I looked at Sharon. "Stand up for your son," 1 wanted to shout at her. Tell them how small he was for his age ... and how murderous kicks like that must have come earlier... from someone who was stronger...

  "Is that true, Geoffrey?" asked Wendy in shocked tones.

  "No," he muttered, looking at Sharon in sudden disbelief. "She didn't say anything ... just kept grabbing at my sleeve, trying to hold herself up ... so I pushed her away..." His voice petered into silence as he began to question how many lies Sharon had fed him. "No wonder you let me think it was my fault," he said resentfully. "Who were you protecting? Yourself or that bloody son of yours?"

  But Sharon's only response was a tiny gesture of denial as the last vestiges of color fled from her face.

  "If she faints she'll hurt herself," I warned.

  "Let her," said Maureen spitefully. "It's no more than she deserves."

  "Oh, for God's sake," I sighed wearily, standing up to help Wendy support the limp body. "If you believed that then why didn't you tell Mr. Drury the truth at the time?"

  But it was a stupid question, which she didn't bother to answer. She had no regrets over Annie's death.
Indeed her only goal had been to steer retribution well away from herself so that she could indulge her spoils to good advantage. And if that meant exploiting men's baser instincts to instill terror in women, then so be it. In a bizarre sort of way I could even admire her for it, for hers was a vicious world, where greed�be it material or sexual�was a way of life, and by her own standards she had made a success of it. Certainly she was the only person in that room who owned her house through the quickness of her mind.

  I touched a hand to Sharon's peroxide hair and it felt dry and dusty beneath my fingers. "The worst thing this lady ever did to Annie was pour a bucket of water over her head and make a few complaints to the council," I told Geoffrey, "but if you can't believe that then you should bugger off and give her a chance to get her son back. Wendy's right. All you've ever done is make her a prisoner to the truth."

  "But�"

  "But what?" I snapped. "Would you rather trust Maureen's version of events? Mine come free, remember, and hers come at a price." I grabbed his elbow and forced him to look at Sharon. "This woman has stood by you for over twenty years�how much longer do you need to know her before you trust her? Or must she always be judged by the rotten standards that you"�I gestured toward the sofa�"and this vermin over here choose to live by?" I spoke as much for myself as I did for Sharon, for I knew all too well the pain of living in an atmosphere of disbelief and distrust. You sink or swim ... fight or give in ... and whichever route you choose, you take it alone.

  Geoffrey gave an uncertain shake of his head.

  I knelt down abruptly in front of Sharon and took her hands in mine. "Sell your house and move," I urged her. "Cut this man out of your life and start again. Make friends with Bridget ... help Michael go straight. He needs his mother's love just as much as he needs his wife's ... and you owe him that much. He thought you were a murderer, Sharon ... but he protected you ... and he doesn't understand why you were so quick to abandon him. Fight for him. Be the mother he wants you to be."

  She was too dazed to grasp what I was talking about and stared helplessly from me to Geoffrey, her subservience to men so ingrained that she would do whatever he told her to do.