It was a perverse story-time for us both. Landon and I had known each other since we were knee-high to grasshoppers. I still had memories, tucked away in my back pocket for when I was trying to sleep at night, of Mum reading to us both; always hidden inside our own personal pillow fort, with Mum doing the voices for each character. It crossed my mind that I should start reading Jada’s status updates with an accent, or trying to sound more masculine or feminine for the sake of animation. But it probably wouldn’t have been appropriate.
I’d started to have thoughts like that; bleed-throughs, from what was okay to what had stopped being okay, as though Mum had taken all these things with her.
‘“Reports from police suggest this could be the start of something much bigger and that young women, sharing characteristics with either victim, should be especially vigilant.”’
I dropped my phone. ‘Do they mean a spree?’
‘“Detective Sergeant Laing is due to hold a press conference at the end of this week, to mark five weeks since the murder of– since the murder of Evelyn Wainwright–”’ I heard the crack in his voice when he forced out Mum’s name, but we both pretended it hadn’t happened. ‘“–amid fears that the killer will strike again before the month is out, members of the public want to know whether there’s more the police could be doing to catch the man responsible.”’ A long pause passed. ‘Do you think he’ll kill again?’
Madison and I had talked a lot – maybe even too much – about what the infamous ‘he’ might do next. He’d been the hot topic around the dining room table, after every news report, on the drives to college. Our speculation around the stranger’s likely course of action knew no limits, with my own theories becoming wilder and less likely with every nightmare. But no matter the news reports or police actions, my own answer didn’t change.
‘I don’t know why anyone would assume he won’t…’
8
DS Laing hadn’t returned any of the three messages that I’d left for her. So I went to the police station. I hovered in the reception area for nearly twenty minutes and made mental impressions of the wanted posters and the warning signs that crowded the space. There was a photo-fit image of a man wanted in relation to a string of robberies; a written and detailed description of a woman who was scamming local businesses for insurance; a flyer, hanging limp and unloved, to advertise a victim support group. The bottom was a fringe pattern, with each finger boasting the number of the person running the group. There were only two left, and I felt a twist in my stomach that might have been sadness. Although ‘sad’ had become a default emotion so it was sometimes difficult to tell.
‘Sarah, I’m really sorry to have kept you.’
I’d been staring so hard at the offer of support that I didn’t even realise Laing had walked over to me. ‘It’s okay. You’re working on the case?’
She made her lips into a thin line. ‘As best as we can.’
‘I’ve been reading more about Jada Burns.’ I shrugged off my backpack and pulled out a handful of printouts. There were webpages popping up all over the place to talk about the murders, and the victims. ‘There are men here,’ I thumbed the pages, ‘who are posting shit all over the internet about women who get killed. How, they wouldn’t just be random victims of a violent crime and–’
‘Sarah,’ she eased the papers away from me, ‘this sort of thing happens all the time when a high-profile case appears.’
‘So, you know about them?’
She spoke into the pages. ‘Not these people, specifically. I only know this happens.’
‘Will you talk to them?’
‘The people responsible for this?’ she asked, and I nodded. ‘Sarah, there’s not a huge amount we can do about people posting harmful opinions on the internet. I’ll take these notes you’ve made,’ she fanned them, as though assessing the quantity, ‘but for the time being we’re going to have to follow up more on the concrete leads we have here.’
It was the first hint she’d made at there being leads at all, never mind concrete ones. ‘No one’s told us what’s happening.’
‘Your family liaison hasn’t been visiting?’
‘Well, no, she has. But she just tells us the investigation is ongoing.’
‘Which it is,’ she explained softly as though talking to someone five years my junior.
‘But we can’t know anything about it?’
She frowned and then stood, a not-so-subtle hint that my time with her was up. ‘As soon as we have something that you should know, then we’ll be in touch. But for the time being you need to keep doing what you’re doing.’
I don’t know what I’m doing, I thought, but I nodded like I understood.
‘Your mum wanted you to go on having a life.’
‘So that’s what I should do,’ I snapped, ‘sort my life out?’
Her frown deepened and I wondered what life experiences she’d got tucked away in the creases of her forehead; whether she knew what an ask it was, that I might have a life after all of this.
‘It’s Halloween this weekend, right?’ she said, as though the date might have skipped my attention. ‘You’re young. See your friends. Make the most of all of this.’
The horror? I wanted to ask, but instead I said, ‘Is it safe?’
‘Of course it’s safe,’ she answered without skipping a beat, using the exact same tone I’d heard her use during television interviews. Somehow, the assuredness of it made me trust her less again.
Madison was late home from work so I cooked dinner for us. Pasta with homemade tomato and basil sauce, served with a side of garlic bread.
‘I’d like to go to a party with Landon and everyone this weekend, if you’re okay with that.’
‘I’m not.’ She spooned a heap of pasta into her mouth and made a dramatised sound of appreciation. ‘Oh, Sarah, you’ve done well. I needed a hearty meal after today. Tell me about your day? Much happening?’
‘Wait, what?’
‘I asked about your day.’
‘I asked about a party.’
‘Could you pass the bread?’ Her mouth was full again; she gestured the bread bowl towards her. ‘You asked if I was okay with a party, and I’m not.’
‘But why?’
‘Because it isn’t safe.’
‘DS Laing said it was.’
Madison dropped her fork. ‘When did she say that?’
‘Earlier today when I went to the police station to talk to her.’
‘Well,’ she hesitated, ‘DS Laing is talking shit.’
My eyes spread. ‘Mad, come on–’
‘Sarah,’ she picked her fork up and pointed at me with it, as though she’d use it to conduct whatever speech was coming, ‘there is a murderer walking around the streets. He took my best friend away from me a month ago. Now, my foster daughter wants to go wandering around in a room full of people who are wearing masks. Walk me through the logic here, you’re an adult. Why do you think you should go to a party?’ She jabbed at the air with her fork periodically to underscore certain words, but a handful rang out to me without any extra emphasis: best friend; foster daughter; adult. She speared three pieces of pasta onto the empty prongs. ‘I’m not losing you.’
There was a heavy silence between us then. Madison might have been waiting for me to back-chat her, and for a second or two I thought I might. But there were better options.
‘Chinese?’
‘I’m sorry?’ She looked up, but kept her head lowered towards her bowl.
‘Halloween takeaway. Do you want Chinese, or pizza?’
‘Pizza, I think.’
‘Romantic comedies?’
‘Exclusively from the 1990s?’
‘Deal.’ I smiled. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. You’re young and you’re allowed to have fun. But I’m not losing you,’ she repeated, and flashed a tight smile back at me. ‘I’ll make sure that I finish on time on Friday, so you just worry about getting the films lined up and the pizza ordered
. Plus garlic bread.’
‘I can go to collect the pizza when you’re on your way home?’
She blinked hard. ‘Just get it delivered.’ She chewed through another mouthful. ‘If they deliver it before I get here, use the spyhole…’ She hovered like the sentence might continue but then changed her mind. I heard the end of it all the same: Use the spyhole. And don’t let him in.
9
The pizza deliveryman left the order on the front doorstep and, as instructed, kept the change as a tip. Madison had already called to say she’d be late, but that gave me a freehand to choose the first film: Notting Hill. ‘One day I’ll meet Hugh Grant and he’ll fall head over heels in love with me,’ Mum used to say, whenever we watched anything with even a flicker of the actor in. She was more beautiful than Julia Roberts though. I wish I’d told her that.
The two food boxes were keeping warm in the oven when Madison rushed in. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she said, freeing herself from her coat and hanging it on the nearest empty peg. ‘Work finished on time but the traffic through town had other ideas and – can I smell…’ she made a show of inhaling hard, ‘can I smell garlic bread?’
I laughed. ‘I put everything in the oven to keep warm.’
‘Did you put the plates in?’
‘Oh, I– shit, I didn’t think.’
She kissed my cheek. ‘Just kidding, darling girl, anyone who doesn’t eat their pizza straight from the box is clearly a heathen of the worst order. Get comfy, I’ll grab the food. Need a drink?’
‘Juice, please,’ I said, already halfway to the living room.
‘Want a beer?’
‘I’m seventeen.’
‘Hm.’ She made a show of thinking. ‘Want a beer anyway?’
The opening scenes were playing out when Madison came into the living room, carrying two pizza boxes like a tray, with two beer bottles perched on top. She set everything down on the coffee table and waited for a natural interlude – Hugh Grant’s housemate was running down the stairs for our first encounter with him – before she spoke.
‘Top box is the garlic bread. I can smell it.’
I tried to manoeuvre the second box free but the front doorbell chiming in the background distracted me. I lost my grip and knocked both boxes onto the floor, their contents spilling but only slightly.
‘Hey,’ Madison reached out to catch my hand, ‘hey, it’s okay. Trick or treaters most likely, okay?’ She saw me look at the spilled food. ‘Five-minute rule. Don’t sweat it, darling. I’ll get rid of the kids, okay? Just – you just give yourself a second.’
It wasn’t until I reached down to collect the boxes and the small avalanche of pizza that had dropped from them that I realised I was shaking. It wasn’t a violent shake – like on the night it happened – but a tremor. I held my hand out flat and took deep breaths, waiting for the movements to steady, and I listened to the safety of Madison’s voice – ‘Cute costumes, take whatever you want.’ – to remind me where I was. But no sooner had she made her way back into me – ‘Are you okay, darling girl?’ – and the same thing happened again: the doorbell; the jerk; the tremor.
‘I’ll disconnect that damn bell.’
She disappeared again – and again I tried to remind myself to breathe.
After the seventh round of trick or treat visitors, Madison went as far to put a sign on the door. ‘Not celebrating Halloween’, it read, and I heard the grunts of disappointment from teenagers when the Post-it note turned them away. Halfway through You’ve Got Mail the letterbox clunked open and closed, and it would have made for perfect comedic timing, had Madison not found a newspaper clipping showing details of Mum’s murder lying on the inside mat. ‘What a trick’ was written in red block capitals, shielding the bottom half of Mum’s face.
‘Why would someone–’
‘Because someone’s an arsehole.’ Madison balled the paper up. ‘I’ll throw this. Skip the film back a minute? I’m not missing the good bits.’ She tried to sound light-hearted but there was a crack in her voice that I recognised as hurt. By the time she came back into the living room, though, it sounded more like anger. ‘What sort of a creature would even do that?’ She landed heavy on the sofa. ‘I’m going to call the police tomorrow.’
The police were yet to do anything about murder, so it seemed unlikely that they’d be put out by Halloween pranksters. After her third angry outburst – and after skipping the film back through the same minute, for the second time – we settled down to watch the rest of the picture in perfect silence. Madison reached over to my side of the sofa just once, to give my hand a squeeze, then went back to her own space until the credits rolled. The names of the actors were scrolling up and away on the screen when she clicked the pause button.
‘Are we done for the night, kid?’
I hadn’t noticed the last thirty minutes of the film, so it seemed wasteful for us both to pretend to watch another. ‘If that’s okay?’
‘Sure it is.’ She hit the stop button and, as though hitting a switch in me as well as on the remote, I shuddered into quiet tears. ‘Oh Christ, Sarah, okay, darling girl.’ She closed the gap between us and pulled an arm around me. ‘What do you need?’
I shook my head: I don’t know what I need. All she’d done was turn the film off before the credits rolled; a sacrilege offence in Mum’s presence – in which I wasn’t, and never would be again. After every motion picture, in the cinema or at home, Mum would stay rooted to the seat until the final screen flashed on; the one with the company logos, that the average viewer hardly ever spotted. She’d missed a deleted scene in a film once, she told me, and swore never to let it happen again.
‘Shit,’ Madison whispered, more to herself, ‘the credits.’
I leaned hard into her and let the tears come. There was a creeping relief spreading up my back, as though the muscles had been holding on to shudders and shakes for the entire day. And they were giving way.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I sobbed into her chest.
‘No, darling, I am. I should have– shouldn’t have.’ She squeezed me. While I was pressed hard against her she said, ‘I should have remembered, because I always bloody hated watching those credits straight through.’
Crying gave way to laughter, then, although the noises were indistinct to begin with. I pushed myself upright and wiped away black tears; my mascara must have been somewhere around my chin.
‘She was a pain for it, wasn’t she?’ I sniffed hard, a redundant effort after heavy crying. It only made me more nasal. ‘But she was never going to miss another–’
‘Deleted scene,’ she finished, and smile. ‘Yeah, yeah. I heard it.’
Before I could reply the doorbell chiming cut me off and Madison’s eyes tipped back at the noise. She heaved herself up from the sofa and stomped towards the door – ‘So help me God…’ – making a beeline for whoever the intruder was. I leaned over to the side table and grabbed tissues, one after the other to blot my nose, first, and then my eyes that, despite the laughter, looked to still be leaking bad feeling. I couldn’t switch the crying off once it had started. But I usually at least managed to save it for the shower, or bedtime.
‘What do you mean an incident?’ I heard Madison say. In a knee-jerk reaction my stomach clenched. ‘I’m going to need more than that.’ The other person was inaudible but Madison’s tone had already changed; she sounded worried, unnerved. ‘Well, why isn’t DS Laing here herself to explain all of this?’
I scampered from the sofa to the doorway like a dog with its tail lit. There were two officers standing on the porch; they were in uniform, so they mustn’t have been Laing’s ranking. Two women, and one stood closer to Madison than the other; I guessed this was the one who’d done the talking.
‘If we can just come in to explain…’ she said, sounding exhausted. She trailed off when she saw me, though, and she took on that awkward look I’d noticed people have. Since Mum, I had an innate ability to make people feel uncomfortable without even tryi
ng; something I’d gone notably out of my way to achieve before she’d died. But apparently all I’d needed to do was be the witness to a violent crime, because now friends, classmates and complete strangers all gave me the same initial look-over: blank eyes, a vacant stare, and the foot shuffle that implied they might run – if they thought they could get away with it.
No one spoke. But the longer the silence dragged out, the more certain I felt of their reason for being there. A noise escaped me; not quite a laugh, more like a shriek, the prelude to a whimper. It was a nervous sound that prefaced–
‘He’s done it again, hasn’t he?’
The officer’s lips formed a thin line. ‘If we can just come in…’ she repeated. But I couldn’t quite hear much from anyone after that.
10
Esther Thompson was a thirty-year-old woman who lived with her cat on the other side of the city. Phrasing it that way made her sound a million miles away from Madison’s house. In reality, Esther was probably a ten-minute car ride away from us when she was being murdered. The early reports all leaned heavily on her having a cat and I couldn’t work out why. It might have been to show she wasn’t really that lonely; or maybe it was the opposite. Maybe they were trying to show her as a premature spinster. It’s a wonder that they didn’t make her maimed and misshapen by the claws of a hungry cat instead. But I suppose when you’re selling murder you’ve already got a decent enough hook to carry the story.
The officers had asked us not to watch the news until there was more information available; their meaning being, I guessed, that the news didn’t know shit about what was happening. But that didn’t stop the tweets and the status updates from flooding in; they were the first to mention the cat, to imply the loneliness of the woman. I was only ever a scroll away from finding out more information on the latest victim, so in the end the police gave in. The one who’d done the talking handed me the remote – ‘There hasn’t been anything to confirm it was the same attacker.’ – with a helping of attitude, and then she went back to guarding the door.
Sincerely, Yours Page 4