by Kim Newman
You decide the best policy is total honesty. You go through everything, telling as much of the truth as you know. The only thing you hold back is Mary’s ‘confession’. After all, she didn’t kill Warwick: you can alibi her for that. But she could have killed McKinnell. She was paid for it. In advance.
To cover for this dishonesty, you vouch that Hackwill alleged James tried to kill him. You are confident — aren’t you? — that he was lying. Repeating his lie doesn’t hurt James. If anything, it reinforces Hackwill’s crookedness.
You don’t want to talk about the boots. You mention them but not that you can’t believe they were natural things. Police statements do not require apports.
You are very tired.
Between interviews, you wonder about the immediate and long-term future. You suspect your business is in ruins. You can’t stop thinking of Mary. If you come out of this together, it’ll be worth it. You’d accept the deaths of any number of crooked businessmen; you’d let Robert Hackwill get away with murder; you’d see your business go under. If you and Mary have each other, you’re ahead.
When you get back to Sedgwater, you’ll have to break up with Marie-Laure. There’ll be a fuss about that, but you don’t care.
You haven’t seen Mary for four days. And it’s agony, a heart-stabbing pain.
You write it into the official record. In your police statement, you say that at a certain point during the week you fell in love with Mary Yatman. It’s a fact that can be used in evidence, for or against both of you. It makes you feel better.
Finally, the question comes. ‘Mr Marion, at any time, did Miss Yatman confide in you that she had been hired to murder Mr McKinnell?’
If you tell the truth, go to 238. If you lie, go to 251.
231
‘Can we help him, Dr Cross?’
‘Marion is physically stable, Susan.’
‘This read-out. All these criss-crossing lines, different colours.’
‘Strands of the construct. Lives, if you will.’
‘And the colour-bursts before the flatlines?’
‘Deaths, mostly. Or stalemates. Sometimes, just a loss of interest.’
‘What happens when Marion has only flatlines?’
‘At this point, that’s not an immediate probability.’
‘Come on, Doctor. There are more ends than beginnings. Eventually, Marion will run out of lines.’
‘So far, we haven’t observed any alternatives in which he becomes immortal. Though quite a few stray into what we might call the fantastic.’
‘If they all end, will he wake up?’
‘Remember, Susan, he isn’t, in any useful sense, asleep.’
‘You’re interested in seeing how the lines weave, aren’t you? More than in upsetting the chessboard. Is there a best-seller in Marion syndrome?’
‘That’s harsh. I had considered a paper, but we don’t yet have the philosophical apparatus to cope with Keith Marion, much less the medical. And given the way things are outside his skull, coping is a more realistic approach than helping. I’m not sure if we should even try to help.’
‘What are we for, then?’
‘Paying him some attention?’
Begin again?
232
You can’t do it. Your knife is raised. You only have to step out of the hut and stick it into Hackwill’s neck. James will do Reg Jessup. Then you get out of here fast. Whoever killed McKinnell will take the blame.
But your feet won’t work. Dead man’s boots anchor you.
‘It’s a fucking wind-up,’ Hackwill shouts.
He deserves to die. But you can’t kill him.
‘Robbo,’ Jessup shouts, like a pantomime audience, ‘behind you!’
Now, too late, you move. You step out of the hut as Hackwill turns. His hand grips your wrist and you drop the knife.
He has a knife too — you gave it to him, remember? Suddenly its cold blade is under your chin, the flat pressing against your Adam’s apple.
‘So I was right,’ Hackwill says. ‘It was you bastards. You were chickenshit at school and you’re chickenshit now.’
Jessup scuttles away from James.
Your brother looks at you. It’s like the copse. Only this time Hackwill has you and James is looking on. You remember the choices you had.
James doesn’t have a choice, doesn’t have to think. Knife out, he comes at you in a run.
The knife is taken away from your throat. You feel a warm gush of relief. No, a warm gush of blood. James is close, fury in his eyes. He’ll kill Hackwill. But you don’t live to see it.
Go to 0.
233
You put the file down on the desk. You did that once before, you remember. Are you pre-programmed for this?
‘It’s gone, isn’t it?’
You look at Sally. You know what she means.
‘The need to know?’
You nod.
‘I envy you,’ she says.
You leave her office, in the clear. You are free.
And so on.
Begin again?
234
You get a grip on the coat and intend never to let go. You open your mouth to yell. Sean must have woken everyone up. Rainwater pours into your throat.
The person you’ve got hold of bends. You are beyond cold and fear.
Something thuds into your forehead. A knife-point. Weight is exerted, your skull splits. It doesn’t hurt. Which shows how serious it is.
Go to 0.
235
When you wake up, the mystery is solved. It was Mary. You always knew she was dangerous. You are commended. If you hadn’t gone for help, the rest of you might have died.
Mary confesses. There’s something strange there. In detail, she explains how she murdered them all, McKinnell, Hackwill, Jessup. She never says why she did it, and she never says why she confessed. She is found guilty but insane and disappears into a special hospital.
But you killed Hackwill. You know you did.
James doesn’t want to talk about it.
While you were yomping to the village, things happened at the Compound. He has picked up fresh scars and wants to dissolve the business. After the publicity, you suppose you wouldn’t get many clients anyway. When the Marion brothers offer you a Murder Weekend, they really mean it.
You marry Marie-Laure, get a job as PE teacher at Ash Grove, and have two children, John and Jean.
Mary sits in a cell, not speaking. James emigrates. Mum dies.
In 2014, Sam Hackwill — Robert’s daughter — visits you and asks about the murders. She has grown up a nervous wreck, fatherless and out of control. She has screened everything about the case, which is extensive since Mary is the ‘sexiest’ female murderer since Myra Hindley. Sam’s head is stuffed full of the contradictions.
‘The how is established,’ she says, ‘but the why is up in the air.’
By now, you remember it as if you’d seen Mary kill Hackwill and Jessup. You’ve edited your own mind to fit the official version. Remembering a film from childhood, you print the legend.
‘Mr Marion, have you any idea?’
You don’t like to disappoint this watery-eyed girl with an open wound for a heart. You know she’s had dependency problems. Growing up with Robert Hackwill as a living father might have been worse. She talks as if he were a saint but he must have been a domestic tyrant, a bully in every room of the house of his life.
You shake your head. ‘When we were just kids, Mary was wild. Sometimes, she’d explode. I think, deep down, she never got over that. She used to say she had a monster inside her.’
That was in all the texts now. Other people remembered.
‘Maybe, sometimes, the monster came out. Your dad just happened to be in the way.’
‘If there was only a reason.’
‘Maybe at school, your dad dragged her into a copse and hurt her.’
You didn’t mean to say that.
Sam thinks about it. She is arguing against the
mental image you’ve given her.
‘Robert did do things like that,’ you say.
A tear tracks down from Sam’s eye, following the line of a coral cheek implant.
‘I know,’ she says, tinily. ‘I didn’t want to remember.’
John comes into the room, wanting to ask you about filling in his mandatory work-experience form, and backs out.
You pat Sam’s shoulder. She is crying now. She grabs you and you hold her, not the way you once held her father, but from the front, her face against your chest.
‘I didn’t want to think I was right,’ she says. ‘I wanted to think he was the man Mum talks about, the good man. But he hurt me. When I was little.’
You’ve never regretted killing Hackwill less than you do now. But you do regret not knowing the full story. You always will.
Sam Hackwill composes herself, and leaves.
A year later, Mary Yatman is killed in a prison riot. You’ll never know now.
And so on.
Begin again?
236
You lie awake in righteous triumph, certain James is lying awake in angry frustration. After a while, you regret your pettiness. Just because James scored and you didn’t is no reason to piss on his parade. In the next room, Shearer does a Captain Chainsaw act, snoring mechanically.
You should be tired, but you can’t sleep.
The next day, you and James are both groggy, hung-over even. Of the group, only Shearer seems to have had a good night’s sleep. Afterwards, you’ll always blame your blurry mind and slowed reactions for the accident.
Because James is dead, only you come to court to be found responsible.
James, Shearer, Sean, McKinnell.
By a miracle, Mary survives, though as a paraplegic. She testifies against you.
Because of James, your family don’t support you.
You aren’t sure if you could have helped. Certainly, you could have cut yourself loose from Hackwill’s team and tried to crawl down to where James was hanging, the others dangling freely below him, their weight dragging on him. You could have taken the fall with them, probably. But you could also have taken the strain. If one of the others — Mary? Shearer? — had got a grip, you could have clung to the mountain.
But you didn’t.
For the rest of your life, you go over and over those few seconds. When you didn’t do anything.
You remember the look in James’s eyes as his fingers lost hold on the outcrop. It was the copse all over again except that this time, you thought first.
Before the courts, before your family, before Mary, he blamed you. But not before you blamed yourself.
And so on.
Begin again?
237
You smarten yourself up, start jogging home after dropping the kids off at school and while Marie-Laure’s out at work. At first, it’s murder. Your legs just won’t work. Then it gets easier. Marie-Laure comments that you’re looking better.
You’re bored with vegging out and the circular conversations everyone you know has.
You can speak Japanese. You can broker multi-million-dollar deals. You can organise events. But you can’t get a job. And you are anchored by Marie-Laure and the kids and your own past indolence to this life.
You come to despise the old Keith. What a fucking loser!
But you are the old Keith.
No matter how much you jog, that jiggling pouch of gut won’t go away. And your head never quite clears. The old Keith has polluted it permanently. You find chunks of him surfacing.
Every night, you try to think for a while in Japanese. It becomes harder and harder. But you know how to roll a joint. And Vince’s prattle about comics begins to make sense.
This is your hell. You’re being punished for daring to question what you had with Ro and J and J.
Your new kids are dullards. All they do is watch telly and whine. You miss Jeremy and Jessica with an ache you never thought possible, even more than you miss Ro; than you miss your whole life.
You can’t go back. You try, but it doesn’t work.
You have a feeling that the switch only works if two Keiths are trying for it at the same time, and why would the other one — who is presumably living your old life — ever want to come back here?
Bastard.
No, you’re the bastard. He’s a lucky bastard.
Years pass, crushing you, breaking you.
Eventually, bored, you tell Vince the whole thing. He is fascinated. Alternate realities crop up every week in comics, so he knows all about them. He is surprised by the detail of your story but doesn’t take it as real. It’s exactly the sad fantasy (‘I’m really a princess in exile’) a complete lump of a loser like Keith Marion would come up with.
After that, you yourself mostly forget that you weren’t always here. Life grinds on.
And so on.
Begin again?
238
‘No,’ you say. ‘Where did you get that from?’
You should just have said ‘No’. Asking the question was like admitting that you lied. The policeman takes a note.
‘That’ll be all, sir,’ he says.
He knows you’ve just lied. He’s writing off your whole statement as a lie. And your statement is the only alibi Mary has for Warwick’s death. It turns out he was strangled before being thrown into the culvert.
You are let go.
Only at the trial does it come out that it was Reg Jessup who said Mary was hired by Hackwill to murder McKinnell.
Hackwill slips the country, and goes on the run like Lord Lucan. But the smaller fish left behind all go down for various offences. Jessup turns queen’s evidence, and trades his inside story — which he also sells to the Comet on Sunday for a five-figure sum — for a vastly reduced sentence for some minor crimes.
The complex intricacies of the Discount Development, which turns out to have siphoned millions of pounds of council-tax-payers’ money out of Sedgwater, wouldn’t be such a sexy story if it weren’t for the murders.
Mary is always referred to as a WPC in the press. They run pictures of her in uniform, airbrushing the famous Scary Mary stare — they ask ex-schoolfellows about her and discover the nickname — into something of Countess Dracula proportions.
You visit her in prison, holding her fingers through mesh. Loving her is agony. She tells you to cut her loose but you can’t. Marie-Laure will have you back but you can’t face that.
You are lucky to escape prosecution as an accomplice. In the end, the lawyers do a deal you aren’t a party to, whereby you aren’t called. You would have given your testimony, affording Mary an alibi for Warwick, and probably have wound up charged with perjury for telling the truth.
And you couldn’t alibi her for McKinnell.
Even you wonder whether she slipped upstairs that morning and stabbed McKinnell. The knife — McKinnell’s — was found in the grass near the cottage, thrown into the storm from the bathroom window. If Mary killed Ben McKinnell, it wouldn’t stop you loving her.
She is found guilty and gets life. She accepts it and co-operates only dutifully with the appeals.
Hackwill shows up dead in a hotel room in Belize, killed by a teenage girl, a prostitute. You think he’s escaped justice and has doomed Mary by dying without saying who he had kill Warwick and McKinnell.
Bastard.
Years pass. The dead, useless weight of absentee love turns your heart to stone. You drive Marie-Laure away without even having to beat her. You stop writing to Mary in prison, visit her only rarely. Any contact at all makes the love flare up like an old wound.
You get back to work. In the aftermath of the scandal, you and James lose control of your business. Sean Rye, of all people, steps in and organises a financial package. You still run the courses, but the bank is your master.
There is no joy in doing what you do. There never is.
When Mary is killed in a prison riot, it freezes you solid. You don’t love her any less because she’s dead
. You still walk and talk but you’re dead too. You just wait. You don’t believe you’ll be reunited with your other half in death. You think you’re both gone for ever, into the void.
Occasionally, some Fortean publication brings up the boots. There is magic in the world. Terrible magic, perhaps. So maybe there is something.
Maybe Mary — another Mary who goes with the other Doc Martens? — goes on somewhere. Maybe there are an infinite number of Marys and infinite Keiths. Maybe this horrible love of yours is satisfied somewhere.
It’s no comfort: if you ever believe it, you hate those other Keiths and Marys who are themselves and not you, and even feel contempt at the thought that there might be other Keiths and Marys who don’t realise the love that consumes you.
Life grinds on.
And so on.
Begin again?
239
You don’t bury the tin. This time, you keep your marbles. You find that funny both as a grown-up and as a kid, but in different ways.
At school, you see faces superimposed over grubby kids’, the faces of the adults they will become. You know enough now to stay away from Mary Yatman, and are horrified when Shane Bush’s gang pick on poor, dim-witted Timmy Gossett.
After a while, Shane starts picking on you. ‘You’re mental, you are.’
‘And you’re going to be a failure as a van-driver.’
‘What?’
‘Forget it.’
‘Yahh, Mental.’
You remember this kind of treatment as crippling but it seems silly. Shane may be bigger than you but you can’t take him seriously as a threat even when he tries to beat you up.
Two days before the event, you tell Shane’s gang who will score the goals in the World Cup final. After Bobby Moore’s lads have won the cup, you’re a hero too.