The Dilemma

by Abbie Taylor

  ‘Someone let me down,’ she said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A friend.’ Unexpectedly, a sob clogged her throat. ‘A friend at work for a long time.’

  Will came to her. The warm, familiar smell of him. His sweat, the minty scent from his breath.

  ‘Your friend Molly?’ he said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The nurse on your ward? Frizzy blonde hair? Sort of plump?’

  Dawn rubbed her eyes. She was so tired she couldn’t think straight. Who on earth was Will talking about?

  ‘Do you mean Mandy?’ she asked.

  ‘Mandy, yes. Sorry. That was it.’

  The coffee filters and the tissue paper, poking from the drawer. Everything a mish-mash, all jumbled up together.

  ‘How do you know Mandy?’ Dawn asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How do you know Mandy? When did you meet her?’

  Will went to reply. Then something seemed to catch in his throat and he had to stop to cough. He cleared his throat several times, patting his hand to his chest.

  ‘I think you must have mentioned her,’ he said when he had recovered. ‘When you were telling me one of your nursing stories.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She had no recollection of it. It just showed the way she was so vague and distracted recently. She pulled the box of filters from the drawer. As she did so, Milly’s collar was dislodged, poking out from its tissue covering. For some reason, Dawn saw again Martin Cummings, Mr Farnley’s neighbour, grabbing at the collar of the excited dog on the road. The dog’s red-gold coat, and the collar, standing out from it, a bright, distinctive blue.

  Mrs Cummings saying: Walking Boris for him.

  Dawn frowned and shut the drawer. She placed a filter in the coffee machine.

  ‘How strong do you like your coffee?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I normally drink instant, remember?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Of course.’ She was still distracted.

  A young man Gordon happened to meet on the Common has been helping out …

  Another memory: Will entering the café at Tooting Bec Common, the rain dripping from his hair. Boris bouncing ahead of him, his bright blue collar vivid around his throat.

  He belongs to a friend. He can’t walk him at the moment so I’m doing it for him.

  Dawn turned. She hadn’t noticed how dark the kitchen had become. In the gloom, Will was suddenly unfamiliar, a lumpy, distorted shape. She stood there, looking at him, the box of filters dangling from her hand.

  Will’s eyebrows bunched behind his glasses. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Dawn went on looking at him. She said slowly, ‘It’s you, isn’t it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were there that day. On the ward. The day Mrs Walker died.’

  As soon as the words were out, Dawn clicked her tongue at herself. This was ridiculous! She was starting to lose her mind. Was there anyone at all now that she didn’t suspect? She was so messed-up and paranoid she hardly knew what she was saying any more.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m not feeling very—’

  The words died as she saw his face.

  They stood, inches apart, in the murky light. Apart from the motion of their breathing, both of them were still.

  ‘Stupid,’ Will said then. ‘Stupid to think you didn’t know.’

  Dawn had to catch her breath. She had to feel about her for support, to clutch at the handle of the drawer.

  ‘I always knew you were an intelligent woman,’ Will said. ‘That day in Sussex. When you mentioned the limp from my hernia repair. You were telling me then, weren’t you, that you’d seen me on your ward.’

  The words were buzzing in her head. Hernia repair. Mandy in the Day Ward, her back to the side room, busy discharging a patient. A patient whose bed faced over her shoulder, directly towards Mrs Walker’s ECG screen. But he couldn’t … the bed must have been thirty feet away … From behind his glasses, Will’s small eyes bored in on hers. His grey, northern eyes. We can see further in the mountains than other people.

  Dawn said stupidly, ‘You can read ECGs.’

  ‘A bit,’ Will said. ‘Mainly just from what I’ve seen on the telly. Actually, at first I thought it must be broken. Then that ditzy little student nurse came running out of the room, screaming, and that’s when I thought, Hmm. Something funny going on here.

  She was having some kind of nightmare. She was imagining this. This was Will here. Will!

  ‘How …?’ It came out as a whisper. ‘How did you find me?’

  He shrugged. ‘Boris and I followed you from your house when you were walking your dog. I would have found some way to talk to you eventually. Boris is a good conversation starter. But then that kid in the café inhaled his lunch and made things very easy.’

  ‘I meant … I meant, how did you know me? Who I was?’

  ‘Your tubby little blonde nurse … Mandy, is it? Never stops talking? I said you seemed very young to be a Matron and she filled me in on your life story. All about your parents and where you were from and why you’d gone into nursing. Bit of research took care of the rest.’

  The kitchen looked so strange. The white surfaces too floaty and pale, the corners and ceiling too dark. Everything was strange. Gone was Will’s meek, shambly air. He was standing straighter, his shoulders up and back. His voice had hardened. Even his accent had changed, the vowels shorter, the consonants glottal and staccato. This was not Will. This was a stranger, standing here in her kitchen. Oh, so easy to wonder how women could be so gullible, falling for the tricks and charms of a con man. How they could hand over their life-savings and self-respect to someone they knew nothing about. Someone whose friends they had never seen. Whose family they had never met. But this was different. She knew Will. She knew him! They had lived down the road from each other; they had known each other since they were ten years old.

  ‘How could you do this?’ She was utterly bewildered. ‘We were at school together.’

  Will made an impatient, clicking sound with his tongue. ‘No, we weren’t.’

  ‘But …’ The tall, fair boy in the playground, easing the cup from the hedgehog’s nose. ‘But Will.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Will.’ Fiercely now. ‘The real Will. If you’re not him, how could you know about him?’

  The stranger in her kitchen was looking oddly at her. ‘You told me.’

  She stared.

  ‘Everything I needed to know,’ he said, ‘you handed to me on a plate. All I had to do was agree.’

  Our farm was a few miles away.

  Will?

  That’s right!

  She was sick. Sick at heart. The hedgehog. Will’s hands that night, holding her face. Mr Farnley. Clive. Her hands slipped on the drawer, jerking it out a couple of inches.

  ‘You never did have a fiancée with cancer. Did you?’

  ‘No. But I do have an ex-wife, alive and well in Bromley.’

  Will seemed to think this was funny. She didn’t have the energy to ask him his real name. No matter what he told her now, it would be meaningless. Yet another lie.

  Will’s manner had changed. Now the casual air became sharp and alert. ‘What’s the matter with you anyway? What’s with all this prissiness? You did know, didn’t you?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘But you must have. The limp … my hernia … you must have realized …’

  ‘I didn’t know. If I did, why in God’s name wouldn’t I have said?’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Shit.’ Will took off his glasses. He shoved his hair back with his hand. ‘Shit.’

  ‘If I didn’t know,’ Dawn cried, ‘why would I have pretended? Why would I have let it go on for so long?’

  ‘How the hell would I know?’ Will snapped. ‘To get more on me, to get me in deeper. I thought you must have been playing some kind of game. I never could figure out how much you knew.’

  ‘You killed my dog. You kill
ed Milly. Do you honestly think I would have stood back and let that happen?’

  ‘I had to kill her. You were dithering so bloody much, you needed a push. Anyway, you said yourself, she was old.’

  ‘Old?’ Dawn shouted. ‘Old? Is that the same reason you wanted me to kill that old man? What the hell is wrong with you? You’re sick. Sick!’

  ‘Come off it.’ Will’s voice dripped with disgust. ‘Don’t come like that with me, all nursy and pure. Who are you to talk? You killed that old lady.’

  ‘That was different.’

  ‘No. I watched you do it. I saw your face. You liked doing it. You liked the control.’

  She opened her mouth but nothing came out.

  ‘Oh yes.’ Will pointed his glasses at her. ‘Don’t pretend otherwise. She was a burden to you. A sign you and your precious hospital had failed. Lying there under your nose, taking up space. Like that old git, slowly crumbling away, sitting on a fortune someone else could make use of. You’re a nurse, you know the score. People reach a stage where they’d be better off dead. Where they don’t even want to keep going themselves any more. And what’s so shocking about that? If they’re on the way out anyway, what’s the big deal with helping them to move on?’

  He was pacing up and down between her and the doorway, still pointing the glasses at her. He didn’t appear to have any difficulty seeing without them. ‘You know all this. You know it. I saw it that day in your face, the day you killed her.’

  Dawn couldn’t argue. She was too unsteady, her legs heavy, trapped in an invisible sludge. If she tried to move, she would fall.

  ‘The two of us could work well together,’ Will said. ‘I bring them in, you finish them off. I’ve got a few lined up, ripe and ready to go. I’m good at that sort of thing. You’d be amazed how many lonely old people there are in this city, ready to clutch any stranger to their breast in exchange for a few cups of tea and a kind word. No one would make the connection between the two of us. It would be easy. Like I said – I always did think you were intelligent.’

  His voice had softened. For a moment he was back, the old Will, looking at her in the old, admiring way. The shambly, eager Will who had walked with her in Sussex and held her face in the darkness. The shy, charming Will who had coerced a grieving elderly man into leaving him his house and all his money. Dawn’s hands tightened on the drawer. Without the glasses, his face seemed emptier, the eyes taking up less space than usual. The tininess of them gave them a cruel look.

  She managed to stand away from the sink. ‘I’m calling the police.’

  Will laughed. ‘You? I don’t think so.’

  ‘Let me past, please.’

  Will stayed where he was, blocking her path to the door.

  ‘You’re going nowhere,’ he said, and his voice had changed again. Ugly now, low and deliberate. ‘Smug bitch. Who do you think you are?’

  In the dark, his tiny eyes contrasted with his big shoulders and large farmer’s hands. Through her daze, Dawn felt a sudden fear. None of her friends knew Will. No one she knew had ever seen them together. No one knew she was here with him alone.

  He took a step towards her. She backed away. Something sharp poked at her back. The corner of the drawer.

  The doorbell rang.

  The deep jangle blasted into the silence. Dawn jumped against the drawer. Will didn’t move. His gaze remained fixed on hers.

  ‘Hello?’ A tapping sound from the hall. ‘Hello-o? Dawn?’

  Dawn didn’t have to turn her head to know who it was. Her neighbour, Eileen Warren. Peering through the window beside the front door, her hands to her face.

  ‘Dawn?’ she called. ‘Is everything all right? I know you’re there. I can see you standing in your kitchen.’

  The dismay on Will’s face brought Dawn to her senses. In a loud, defiant voice, she said, ‘Just coming, Eileen.’

  The relief of it! And the triumph. To stop her, Will would have to attack her right there and then, with Eileen watching the whole thing through the glass. Deliberately, facing him, she marched past, pushing off his arm. His clammy skin recoiled from hers. He didn’t like it one bit but he had no choice.

  She flung the front door open.

  ‘Eileen—’

  ‘Oh, Dawn.’ Eileen’s voice quivered. ‘Isn’t it awful? Did you hear on the radio?’

  Before Dawn could respond, she was aware of Will coming up behind her. And she saw, at the same time as he must, the dark, empty path stretching towards the gate. The only person on it this frail old lady, standing there alone.

  She had a fraction of a second to decide what to do.

  ‘I can’t talk now, Eileen.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Goodbye!’

  She had never spoken so rudely to her neighbour before. She stepped back into the hall and went to slam the door but something was blocking it. Dawn looked down. Will’s foot, planted in the frame.

  ‘Hello, Eileen,’ he said pleasantly. ‘I’m Will. A good friend of Dawn’s.’

  ‘Oh.’ Eileen grew flustered at the sight of such a very large man. ‘Eileen Warren. From just over the road.’

  ‘What were you saying was on the radio just now?’ Will asked.

  ‘Oh dear. The train crash at Clapham Junction. An hour ago. The bridge has collapsed on to the road. Just outside your hospital, Dawn.’

  ‘How terrible.’ Dawn could feel Will looking at her.

  ‘Lucky you’re not working tonight, isn’t it? You’d have been run off your feet.’

  ‘Eileen,’ Dawn’s voice was high with panic. ‘I really do have to go.’ She tried to force the door shut again but Will’s foot was still in the way. Bewildered now, Eileen looked back and forth between the two of them. Dawn signalled to her with her eyes, dipping her eyebrows, sliding her gaze sideways to Will and back again. He’s mad. Get help.

  Eileen’s brow had lowered as well. She’d seen the message. She’d seen it. Thank God.

  ‘Why do you keep doing that with your eyes?’ Eileen asked.

  ‘No reason. Nothing.’ Oh Jesus. If Will thought Eileen knew, he would grab her there and then and yank her in. She could feel him deciding whether or not to do it; he was a hair’s breadth from reaching out his hand.

  A bitter, familiar smell wafted from the kitchen.

  ‘Your coffee.’ Frantically, Dawn turned on Will. ‘It’s ready. You should pour it before it gets cold.’

  ‘But I don’t know where you keep your cups.’

  Dawn said desperately, ‘Well, I don’t know what sugar or milk you take.’

  She tried to force him to keep looking at her, to lock him with her gaze. His eyes flicked from her to Eileen. Clearly he still hadn’t made his decision.

  Dawn made it for him.

  ‘Eileen, sorry but I really have to go now. See you soon.’

  She made one final attempt to close the door but she couldn’t. She had no choice but to leave it. Turn her back and walk to the kitchen, hoping against hope that Will would let Eileen go and come after her. The back door was right there in front of her; he wouldn’t want to risk her running out that way. She heard his footsteps approach. Thank God! Thank God! Now, at least, Eileen was safe. Now it was just her and Will. What would his next move be? Would he lunge at her, make some sort of attack? Would Eileen go home and think to herself that something hadn’t seemed right and come back with someone? One of the neighbours? She had to have noticed how strangely Dawn was behaving. Not knowing what else to do, Dawn picked up the percolator and began to slosh the coffee into a mug.

  Will’s footsteps had followed her to the kitchen door. But there they stopped.

  ‘Come on in,’ Dawn heard him say. ‘Join us for a cuppa.’

  Eileen had not left.

  Don’t come in, Dawn kept thinking. Don’t come in. She saw now her mistake. She shouldn’t have left the hall until she was sure that Eileen had gone. The coffee slopped from the mug into the open drawer in front of her. Slopped over Milly’s collar in its t
issue wrapping. Over the cardiac Resus kit, bulging with emergency masks and syringes.

  And over something else.

  Everything seemed to slow. It was like the time the child had been thrust into her arms in the café; like all the times she had ever dealt with an emergency at the hospital, where all the unimportant details around her faded and all she had to do was focus on what was under her nose.

  Dora’s extra-strength sleeping pills.

  Nestled at the very back of the drawer, where Dawn had stored them after clearing out the sitting-room. The kind you could pull in two so that the powder spilled out. And that wasn’t all. Dawn looked from the sleeping pills back to the Resus kit. Packed with every kind of drug that might need to be given quickly in a crisis.

  Including a full syringe of Potassium Chloride.

  Dawn jerked her head to glance at Will. He was still in the doorway, occupied with Eileen. She looked back at the Resus kit. A stinging heat was rising in her face. The sleeping powders first. Then, when he was ready, the syringe. A half an hour should do it, if only she could hold out that long. It would be as simple as that. No one had ever seen her and Will together. She doubted that he had mentioned her to anyone he knew. Eileen would not remember, or very little; she was so frail these days she could barely remember what she’d had for breakfast.

  Even Will’s car was conveniently abandoned a couple of miles away from the house.

  Easy. So easy. After all, she had killed two people already.

  She moved through her little bubble of calm. By the time the slowness around her had sped back up, the coffee was ready, the mug filled to the brim. Dawn took it and almost ran to the kitchen door. Eileen was peering anxiously from the porch. She had taken a couple of steps back, out of Will’s reach. She did know something was wrong.

  Dawn thrust the mug at Will. ‘There you are.’

  Too surprised to refuse, he took it from her.

  ‘Go on.’ Dawn put her hands on her hips. ‘Taste it. See what you think.’

  Both of Will’s hands were taken up now, one with his glasses, one with the mug of hot liquid. To grab Eileen, he would first have to drop one or both of them, creating a great deal of awkward mess and noise. Reluctantly, he lifted the mug and took a sip.