Glenn’s eyes changed as he looked at me.
‘Help me. My leg’s trapped,’ he gasped. He bent down, pulling desperately at his leg. When his hands came up again they were black with blood in the monochrome landscape. It trickled down his arm.
‘Look! I’m bleeding! Mel, please… I know you’re in a mess right now. Your life is falling apart, and that’s why you lashed out at me for no reason. You scared me when you ran. I thought you were going to hurt yourself – that’s why I came after you. Please, you have to help me.’
He pleaded, confusion clouding his soft features.
‘Your leg’s gone right through the rusted drum?’
‘Yeah, it’s—’ He looked down, gasped in horror and pain. ‘Oh God, it’s bad, Mel. The metal’s slashed me almost to the bone.’
My smiled reply was as brilliant and cold as the sky above me. There were tears in his eyes.
‘Come on, Mel.’
I didn’t move. Didn’t speak.
‘Call for help. You’re not a killer. You’re not cruel. You’re better than this.’
Was he right, Beth? I thought about my life and everything that had brought me to this point. All the laughter and warmth and good things I had enjoyed, thanks to you. And how all that had been stolen from me by a silly argument, so silly that Chloe couldn’t even remember the details properly. I thought about how much that hurt; the supernova of pain that had now whited out everything else in my life. Then I thought about the secrets, the lies and deception of everyone around me – and the biggest liar of all, Glenn. He had done so much evil, of that I was absolutely certain.
Any minute now. The countdown was almost done.
I sidestepped away from Glenn, then peered over the edge of the creek. His leg did look terrible. The gash flapped wide and gaping, and with each tiny shift of his body, the metal sawed further into flesh. His other leg was tangled in barbed wire.
‘You’re stuck fast. There’s nothing I can do.’
‘You can call an ambulance!’
I patted my pockets, then held my hands out, palms open. ‘Left my phone at home.’
‘Bitch. You fucking bitch!’
One Hundred Five
‘Bitch. You fucking bitch!’
I spat the words with fury. When I got out of the creek – and I would, eventually – I was going to make her pay. It wouldn’t be a fast kill. I’d torture her, like I’d done with the animals and birds I’d trapped as a kid.
Just you wait, Melanie Oak.
I must have instinctively leaned forward towards my intended target. The metal sawed deeper into my flesh, jarring against bone. The pain! I was wild with it, couldn’t bite back the screams.
Somehow I found the inner steel to still myself. I didn’t need Melanie to call for help; I would do it myself. My feverish hands ran over my body.
No, no, no…
My phones weren’t in my coat pockets. Neither of them. What the hell?
The agony of my right leg formed a vice for my mind. My calm control was shredded; pain was all I could think of. I shook my head. I needed to keep it together. Assess my situation calmly.
With only the light of the moon to see by, it was hard to get an exact idea of what was going on. Although I couldn’t see, it felt as if the skin had been sheared from the front of the leg as it had plummeted through the rusted oil drum. I kept thinking of the cakes in Ursula Clarke’s café, with their curled shavings of chocolate on top, and imagining my flesh now looked the same. Far worse, there was a massive gash across the inside of my thigh that was impossible to miss. When I plunged through the metal, it had sliced into me as deep as a butcher’s cleaver. With each beat of my heart, a traitorous pump of blood soaked the material of my trousers.
I needed medical help. Fast.
I forced my mask back on and gave Melanie an innocent, bewildered look.
‘I’m sorry I swore, Mel. But I’m scared… and I think you’re having a breakdown; it’s the only explanation for your behaviour.’ Tears started to fall. ‘I’m begging you, call for help. Come on, Mel, after everything I’ve done for you!’
I knew she would give in to her weak, finer feelings and get me help. And once I was back to full strength, I would make her pay and pay and pay for this.
There were spots in front of my eyes. Blood loss would soon make me pass out. The realisation made me desperate enough to try something different. The tears fell faster – I was a good actor.
‘Okay, Mel, I know you know what I did to Tiffany. But I didn’t mean to. I… I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I need help, psychiatric help, I know that. You’re my friend; you know the goodness in me; you know I’m not a bad person; I just did a bad thing. I think it was losing my mum at such an early age. It broke something in me. My dad used to beat me. He did terrible things to me…’
It was all rubbish, but would get a reaction. Sure enough, she crouched down so that she could see into my eyes better.
* * *
His small, bright blue eyes begged me. Pleading. He had never really known a mother’s love, he said. His father had abused him.
As I crouched down the wind blasted my face, making my eyes water with crocodile tears.
‘Glenn, even if I called for help, it wouldn’t arrive in time. Look at the water level. The tide is coming in.’
* * *
I knew then. I recognised the look in her eyes as she crouched in front of me, because it was the look I have given to my victims: no mercy.
All that time spent with her, laughing, manipulating, and I never once realised the real reason I had been drawn to her. She was a kindred spirit. There was a streak of something diamond-hard inside Melanie Oak.
Still I pleaded and begged. Perhaps she would pity me. I was an animal caught in a trap, and I would do anything to survive. Anything. If it meant gnawing my own leg off, I’d do it. If it meant supplicating before Melanie Oak, I would.
But she stood. Gazed down at me. Started walking away. Slow, nonchalant, no hesitation in her step.
‘Come back. Melanie, come back!’
She was right. The tide was coming in faster than a man could walk. Its distant rush grew closer, the water level rising around me. I was knee-deep now. I didn’t have long. Once I got out of the creek, how long would it take me to crawl across the boggy land? For a second I allowed myself to picture the sea closing over my head, not in a series of waves but one continuous, unstoppable, inescapable motion.
No, I would not die that way.
I pulled at my leg again. Rusty metal carved flesh, ground bone. The pain was agonising, but the will to live was stronger. I yanked at my limb, gritting my teeth and roaring. Already I was weakening, the black spots in front of my eyes growing bigger, my head spinning dizzily. I wouldn’t be able to stand for much longer.
I could not die here, at the hands of a mother. A housewife.
I was a god.
I was all-powerful.
I controlled life and death.
I was as relentless as the tide…
‘Help me! Please help me!’
The full moon was an all-seeing eye gazing down at me, unable to help. I would not give up until I had breathed my last. I would kill Melanie Oak. I would annihilate her family. I would…
The water was rising. It was at the top of my thighs now. My heart pounded, and there was an unfamiliar feeling taking me over, making me splutter and gasp. I had seen it in the eyes of others but never felt it myself.
I was terrified.
One Hundred Six
When I stood and looked down at him, no pity stirred my blood. Yes, there were tears in his eyes, and genuine fear. But I was pleased, because all I could think of were the countless children who would be saved from a horrifying death at his hands. He would never have shown them a drop of mercy.
Are you shocked, Beth? I’ve told you everything that happened from the moment you disappeared, because you need to understand what brought me to this moment. What I had done was for you and y
our father – and now for your little sister or brother. Although I had changed from the person you knew, nothing would ever change how much I love my family. You and your father always wanted to make the world a better place. I had done that by ridding it of Glenn Baker.
I was no longer the woman who’d run around the village a month earlier, panicking and placing my trust in others. I had learned from the liars and manipulators who surrounded me and took advantage. Now I knew that I could only truly trust myself, because anyone else would let me down.
So when I found out about Glenn, there had never been any chance of me going to the police. Collecting evidence had not been my plan, Beth.
If he went to prison, his punishment would never be enough for the pain he had meted out to his victim and her family. He would get out in a few years’ time, and be free to kill again. No one would be safe from him. Not unless I took action.
So I lured him to the marsh. This place of peace and war, of life and death, that had been bombed and machine-gunned by the RAF, then reclaimed by nature. A place of extremes. It seemed fitting.
When I took both his mobiles from his pocket, it was not in order to give them to the police. I had deliberately let them slide onto the floor so that he wouldn’t be able to call for help as I murdered him. I’d been careful to wear my woollen gloves, and rubbed them over the phones as much as possible to smear my fingerprints, should the police choose to check them. But it was doubtful that they would – why would they, when everything had been set up to point to Glenn’s death being a tragic accident? Everyone was familiar with his habit of chucking his coat onto the passenger seat, and it was feasible his phones had fallen from his pockets as he did that.
I had realised he was bound to attack me, though I’d thought it would be when we were out in the open. The plan had always been to run, Beth, knowing you would show me the path across the marsh. Thanks to you, I knew just where to go, and exactly where to leap over the creek so that Glenn would fall into it and go through the rusted drum. I knew you would keep me safe.
I’d even gone online earlier in the evening to double-check what time the tide would be coming in. With the full moon, the spring high tide due in would be a big one, strong and sudden. If blood loss didn’t kill Glenn, drowning would.
It would appear as though he had wandered onto the marsh and been caught out by a tragic set of circumstances. After all, who would want to kill a caring, pleasant guy like him?
There was nothing to link me to any of it. Witnesses at the pub had seen me leave with Jacob; no one had spotted me returning. I was fairly certain I’d get away with murder. And if I didn’t, well, a mum sent mad with grief would receive a lighter sentence, particularly as I was pregnant – I had googled that too.
I’ll admit, Beth, that I surprised myself with how cold and calculating I was. But I had learned from some of the best.
When his screams stopped, I would feel no more than the stars did as they looked down on the scene. He had used your death for his own horrifying ends, and I had stolen the notebook because nothing of you – or Tiffany – should be left with that evil man.
I wasn’t sure what I’d do about the Clarkes yet. I disagreed with your dad. He always was a better person than me. You and he made me the happy person I was, but that had all been shattered. You see, I thought that Chloe should pay for what she had done to you. Maybe your death was an accident, a lashing out in a violent temper. I didn’t care. Chloe took your life; that was all that mattered. She extinguished the light of my life, and took you from me forever. Since that moment, darkness had spread across my soul like a storm cloud over the moon.
Dispensing justice might not bring you back, but it felt right.
I had years yet to make a plan. I would see what happened. Perhaps I’d feel differently when the baby arrived. For now, I stood beneath the full moon, listening to Glenn’s shouts get more desperate. I thought of how I had saved children from screaming by obliterating his life. In the distance the sea was rushing towards me. It was a long way off yet, but it came in faster than a person could walk. I couldn’t hang around to watch Glenn drown. Which was a shame, really.
* * *
I turned. Walked away towards the distant lights of the village as the wind roared its approval and tugged at my clothes. Or was it you, Beth? I swear I heard you whisper to me as I smiled.
‘I love you to bits and whole again.’
Epilogue
The cry for help is ragged and desperate, the voice hitching. There is no one to hear it.
A moon hangs so fat that it oozes an aura into the sky that almost blots out the stars surrounding it. It looks down on land as flat as an open palm, and as unforgiving as a clenched fist, and gives no answer to the screams of fear and rage that float up to it.
This is the wind’s playground. It races across the North Sea and hits the land full force. There is nothing to slow it; no hills, few trees or hedges here on land reclaimed from the water to create the marshes and fertile flats of Lincolnshire. It screams ecstatically, punching the handful of houses it comes across, revelling in its unfettered freedom as it rattles windows. On its journey it picks up the entreaties for help that are echoing into the sky. Hurls them across the landscape, as gleeful as a toddler with a toy.
‘Help me! Please! Help!’
There is no one to catch the words.
No one, except a lone figure, turning, walking away towards lights in the far-off distance.
Also by Barbara Copperthwaite
Invisible
Flowers for the Dead
Acknowledgments
Writing a book is a strange thing. It is a lonely undertaking, and I have spent hours every day holed up on my own as I wrote feverishly. But without the help of others, I wouldn’t be lucky enough to now see my book being published. I owe so many people a debt of thanks.
First and foremost is my partner, Paul, because I couldn’t do any of this without his support. A man of few words, Paul has listened to me when I’ve worried, brought me endless cups of fruit tea, and taken over so many practical things, so that I could wander around with my head almost permanently in a make-believe world from which he was excluded. Thank you for giving me that freedom, and for joining me on this publishing adventure.
My mum also puts up with non-stop phone calls where the only subject I am capable of talking about is my latest book. Luckily, she loves crime (it’s where I get it from!). I couldn’t have done this without her.
Sarah Ward had a sneak peek at the first 20,000 words of a very rough draft of this book. Her encouragement at that stage was key to me keeping going with it, and I’m eternally grateful for her kindness. Neats Wilson, Joanne Robertson, Shell Baker and Anne Williams all cast their expert eyes over the finished product, and their thumbs up meant the world to me, giving me the courage to submit it to Bookouture. I owe you!
Thanks to my agent, Jane Gregory, for all her work behind the scenes, and to Bookouture for having the faith in me to take my book on – particularly to my editor, Keshini Naidoo. She not only commissioned me, but has already turned into someone I trust absolutely to push my work to be better. Bookouture consider themselves a family, and I have to echo that. From the wonderful Kim Nash, who works tirelessly on publicity, to my fellow authors who are always there with advice, commiserations and celebrations, I feel very lucky to have been adopted by them!
I must mention the incredible blogging community, who are some of the most dedicated people I have ever met. For no personal or financial gain whatsoever, they share their passion for books with people. Their enthusiasm for my previous novels helped to keep me going when times got tough. I’d particularly like to thank Book Connectors, a fabulous Facebook group which has been a massive help, along with Crime Book Club, Crime Fiction Addict and UK Crime Book Club. Last but by no mean least, the mighty Facebook group that is THE Book Club (TBC) has been a huge help.
Through TBC, I was able to contact Sara Bain, whose advice on legal matter
s was invaluable to the novel. The fabulous blogger Linda Hill also consulted with a former judge on my behalf. Massive thanks, too, to Kim Pocklington, who was incredibly generous in taking time from her busy role as a nurse to help me with my questions about head injuries and the like. It was so lovely of you, Kim!
Finally, I’d like to thank the village of Friskney, in Lincolnshire, for lending itself as a geographic basis for my story. Luckily, the people actually living there are nothing like my fictional characters in Fenmere, and I enjoyed a happy and peaceful childhood growing up there! This is my homage to the beauty and atmosphere of that place.
A Letter from Barbara
Thank you for reading The Darkest Lies. There are some difficult subjects and emotions covered in it, which were sometimes tough to write, and I hope you feel they were done justice. It would be wonderful to hear your thoughts – and if you have the time to leave a review it would be very much appreciated.
Your support means the world to me, because without readers what is an author? It is you who recommends books you’ve enjoyed to friends, you who leaves reviews that help other people decide whether or not to buy, and you who push me on to keep writing.
If you want to get in touch, or find out the latest on what I’m up to, there are lots of ways: Facebook, Twitter, my blog and website, as well as Goodreads. I’d love to hear from you! And if you’d like to keep up-to-date with all my latest releases, just sign up at the following link. Your email address will never be shared and you can unsubscribe at any time:
Barbara’s Email Sign-Up
Thank you for your continuing support and enthusiasm.
Barbara Copperthwaite
@BCopperthwait
AuthorBarbaraCopperthwaite
The Darkest Lies: A gripping psychological thriller with a shocking twist Page 33