Mice

by Gordon Reece

  The storm broke in the middle of the night and I lay awake for a long time listening to it. I’d never heard it rain so hard; when I thought it had reached the fiercest intensity possible, it would rain even harder, even louder. It felt as if the entire world outside my bedroom window had been turned to liquid – everything ran, everything dripped, trickled, spattered, bled.

  The gusts of wind were so violent that they were like lunatic hands beating against the windows, and there were moments when I really thought the glass was about to break and let all that howling, screeching chaos inside. It was as if something dangerous and obscene had escaped from its prison and was running amok. And now it was loose, it would only be subdued again after a titanic struggle.

  As I lay there listening to the deafening torrents of rain drumming on the roof, I imagined the garden and all the surrounding fields flooding, the rising waters slowly loosening Paul Hannigan’s body from its muddy mooring and floating it away on the current for all the world to see. I saw the police in a landscape transformed into one vast lake, leaning from their dinghy and trying to gaff the bloated corpse from the branches of a tree where it had become entangled . . .

  Forty days and forty nights of rain like this would be enough to drown a world, I thought. And I was so full of foreboding about the future that part of me felt that mightn’t be such a bad thing.

  28

  Every day, my first thought on waking up was the same: Today’s the day the police will come.

  I could see it all so clearly: the forensic experts in their white overalls swarming over the kitchen and the patio; the police cadets working their way meticulously across the garden on their hands and knees; the tent they’d erect over the oval rose bed when they found the body; Mum and me pushing our way through the scrum of journalists gathered on the gravel drive; entering the doubtful sanctuary of the waiting police car . . .

  In those days I endowed the police with almost supernatural powers. I didn’t stop to analyse the situation, to see what pieces of the jigsaw they actually had in their hands (a missing man, an abandoned car), I simply felt that they knew what we’d done, that, like the all-seeing eye of God whose penetrating vision no walls could obstruct, they’d seen everything that had gone on inside Honeysuckle Cottage that night.

  Yet, to my continuing surprise, nothing happened. The flashing blue lights, the sickening knock at the front door, still didn’t come. The next few days passed – ostensibly at least – just as they had before. Roger came to teach me in the mornings, Mrs Harris came in the afternoons, I worked on my homework at the dining-room table till Mum came home, practised my flute, prepared dinner with Mum, read my novels and listened to Puccini; Mum went to work and tended each of her cases ‘little and often’ like a careful gardener, and did her best to avoid Blakely’s wandering hands and ugly temper.

  A new week began . . . and still nothing happened.

  The struggle in the kitchen with Paul Hannigan left me feeling physically exhausted for days. At first I slept at any and every opportunity, like a cat – deep, deep sleeps from which I’d wake with a dry mouth and gummy eyes. But once I’d slept the exhaustion off, I started to have serious problems sleeping. I’d had insomnia before, especially when the bullying was at its worst, but those intermittent episodes were nothing compared to the bleak white nights I suffered now.

  When I went up to bed and closed my eyes, I would see Paul Hannigan’s face with astonishing clarity, as if he were standing right in front of me again. The chalky pallor of his skin, the lank, greasy, black hair leaking like oil over his ears and shoulders, the barely visible fuzz of immature beard around his mouth, the way his eyelids flickered wildly as they struggled to stay open, and his eyes rolled back into his head like a medium who’s just made contact with the spirit world. I would hear his voice, the twisted vowels of his ugly accent, his slurred arrogant cocksureness (I know what I want, lady! I know what I want!). Sometimes his voice sounded so real in my head that I became convinced he was actually in the bedroom with me – I even thought I could smell him there, that fetid mixture of alcohol, cigarettes and sweat that enveloped him like a mist. I’d sit up in bed and peer terrified into the darkest corners of my bedroom, expecting to see his silhouette detach itself from the surrounding shadows and walk towards me.

  I tossed and turned, but that malicious weasel face wouldn’t let me sleep. After three nights of this I told Mum, and asked if I could sleep with her until it passed. She readily agreed, giving me one of those reassuring everything will be all right smiles. Enfolded in Mum’s arms that night, snug in her warmth, the shadow of the burglar’s face vanished completely from my mind as if within that magic maternal circle nothing whatsoever could hurt me.

  But what Mum hadn’t told me was that she was suffering from insomnia as well, and although I could fall asleep in her bed easily enough, her own agonized efforts to get to sleep would soon wake me up. After a few nights I went back to my own bed, hoping I might have broken the cycle, but found insomnia still waiting for me there. I was back to square one.

  Reluctantly, we decided to try sleeping pills. Mum had always been strongly against them in the past, fearing they could be addictive. But the little mauve pills she got from Dr Lyle worked wonderfully for me. I took one, half an hour before going to bed and fell into a deep dreamless sleep almost straight away. I cut it down to half a pill, and then to a quarter, and in a week or so I was able to fall asleep within ten minutes of my head hitting the pillow without taking any medication at all.

  That was when the nightmares started.

  The first nightmares were confused, fragmentary affairs. They jumped rapidly from one chamber of horrors to another, like restless flies, unable to settle anywhere for very long. When I woke up I could remember little about them, just the general impression of being pursued the whole night long by some unseen horror (I didn’t have to see it, I knew what – or rather who – it was).

  I only remember two from that time with any clarity. In one, I was in the lounge practising my flute when I looked up to see Paul Hannigan staring at me through the window, his horribly dislocated lower jaw hanging open like a ghost-train ghoul. In the other, Mum and I pulled the body of the burglar out by his feet from under the kitchen table, only to find that it wasn’t Paul Hannigan we’d killed after all, but my dad.

  This nightmare tortured me for days, and not only because the image of Dad face-down in all that blood was so graphic. It was more than that. It gnawed at me like an accusation. Was that what the killing of Paul Hannigan had really been about? I refused to believe it – I couldn’t even kill my feelings for my dad, so how could I possibly want to kill him?

  Gradually, instead of countless confused and disjointed nightmares, I started to have the same one night after night, as if my brain had finally distilled all the horrors I’d lived through into a perfect script that wasn’t to be altered in even the tiniest detail.

  It always began with Mum and me playing croquet in the front garden on an idyllic summer’s day. I was about eight years old, wearing the blue-and-white striped dress that had been my favourite when I was a little girl (there was a period, Mum told me, when I wouldn’t wear anything else). Mum was different too. She looked as if she’d just stepped out of the framed wedding photograph that used to stand on the mantelpiece in the matrimonial home; she wore a flowing white wedding dress and was still young and fresh-faced – the streaks of grey in her hair and the crow’s feet around her eyes were yet to arrive.

  Mum croqueted me and sent my ball racing away across the short grass. I went running after it, calling over my shoulder that she was playing really well – better than I’d ever seen her play before. The croquet ball raced on and on and came to rest in the oval rose bed. I stopped running. I stopped smiling. I didn’t want to go any closer. I knew that the burglar’s body was buried there. I looked round for Mum, hoping she’d say that I could leave it where it was, but she was suddenly an immense distance away, at the far end of a ga
rden that was now enormous. I called out to her, but I knew she wouldn’t be able to hear me. I made up my mind to make a quick grab for the ball, then turn on my heels and run as fast as I could back to her. But when I looked back at the oval rose bed, I saw that right next to the croquet ball, actually touching it, the burglar’s green decomposing hand protruded through the soil.

  I knew I had to cover the hand up or someone would see it and call the police and all would be lost. I was now my real age and wearing my dressing gown and nightie. I took off my dressing gown and threw it over the hand. I realized it was only a temporary solution, but it would do until I could tell Mum. I knelt down in the grass and reached for the croquet ball, but the instant I touched it, my wrist was seized by the burglar’s other hand, which suddenly came snaking up out of the shallow grave.

  This hand was immensely strong. It dragged me down into the thick mud until my face was pressed right up against Paul Hannigan’s and I could smell his nauseating corpse breath.

  ‘I’ve been trying to ring you,’ he said, ‘but you won’t answer the phone.’ A sudden jump-cut transported us to the bottom of a real grave. Paul Hannigan was on top of me, with both his hands clamped around my throat – hands that sometimes changed into snakes or the roots of trees, but with the weird logic of dreams somehow always remained hands as well. Above me, the sky was just as it had been on the night we’d moved the car: the clouds’ dirty thumbprints grubbily obscuring the stars, the moon a thin silver scimitar in the blackness. I struggled ferociously, but he pinned me down with ease.

  ‘I’m gonna do it right this time,’ he leered, and tightened his grip around my throat. I couldn’t breathe. I started to lose consciousness. I made one final maniacal effort to free myself but it was useless. The grotesque Halloween-mask face above me was grinning triumphantly. And then I saw Mum loom over his left shoulder, holding the chopping board in her hands. She wasn’t her young self any more; her face was now exaggeratedly haggard and drawn and the white wedding dress had been replaced by her blood-soaked dressing gown. I knew what she was going to do. I was willing her to do it: Hit him! Hit him! But instead of raising the chopping board high above her head as I expected, she drew away, saying, I don’t want to go to prison, over and over again, until I couldn’t see her any more . . .

  I’d wake up soaked in sweat, my heart thumping so violently in my chest that I could scarcely draw breath, the quilt kicked into a lump at the bottom of the bed, its empty cover twisted in knots around my body.

  29

  We put the gun and everything else we’d taken out of Paul Hannigan’s car into bin bags and stored them upstairs with all the others. If the police had come to the house then, they’d have found the entire case against us piled up neatly in the corner of the spare room just waiting to be tagged as exhibits for our trial. In spite of this, it was six days before we finally got rid of them.

  This wasn’t because Mum was somehow ignorant of the danger – it was the very opposite. She was so aware of the need to make all the evidence disappear forever – so acutely aware that this was the most important move we would make in our deadly game with the police, that she was terrified of getting it wrong. She knew that if the police ever found the bin bags – if they ever discovered the bloodstained nightclothes, the tea towels, the bloody knife – it would unleash an investigative frenzy. The police would come bearing down on us like a pack of hunting dogs that had picked up the scent of their quarry. If they ever found the bin bags, they’d have an abundance of clues, any one of which could lead them back to Honeysuckle Cottage and the body buried in the oval rose bed. And while she agonized over her decision, the bin bags festered away in the spare room, the smell of stale blood growing stronger every day.

  Mum’s first idea was to dump them one at a time in municipal refuse bins – miles away from Honeysuckle Cottage and miles apart from each other. This way, she said, the police would be unlikely to link the eight bags together or trace them back to us.

  But on reflection, she decided this plan was too risky. It all seemed too public for her. Someone might see her getting rid of one of the bags and be able to describe her to the police later. And even if there weren’t any eyewitnesses, she might be picked up on one of those CCTV cameras, which she said were everywhere nowadays – if it didn’t get a clear image of her face, it might record the Escort’s number plate and the police would be able to trace her easily enough from that.

  On top of this, neither of us really knew what happened to rubbish after it was collected – it wasn’t something we’d ever needed to think about before. It was possible that it was crushed and buried or dumped at sea straight away, but Mum was haunted by the possibility that the bags would end up on a council tip, where they’d lie around in the open air, possibly for months. It only needed one of the bags to split open and a refuse worker to notice the bloody rags spilling out – bloody rags full of invisible traces of DNA – and the police would have the piece of thread that could eventually unravel all the way back to us.

  I suggested we have a big bonfire in the back garden and burn everything. The bloody nighties, the dressing gowns, the kitchen curtains and trench coat would all be reduced to an innocent pile of ash. But Mum wasn’t keen on this idea at all. There were too many things that wouldn’t burn down to ash – the wellington boots, the mobile phone, the tools, and of course the gun, the hideous gun. So at best it only half solved the problem. Besides, she said, she’d never made a bonfire before – a bonfire was a man’s thing – and she was worried it might get out of control. If the fire service had to be called, they’d discover everything. And even if the bonfire didn’t get out of control, the neighbouring farmer, seeing the smoke so near to his crops, might come down to see what was going on. He might start asking questions, interfering, trying to show us how it should be done . . .

  My other suggestion was to seal everything up in the metal trunk we had in the attic, tie weights to it and then sink it in the huge reservoir in the Morsely National Park about eighty miles to the north. To my surprise, this idea didn’t excite any interest in Mum either. I said that if she was unhappy with the reservoir, we could always drive to the coast and dump the trunk at sea. ‘It’s not that,’ she said. ‘I just don’t trust the water. The water always gives up its secrets in the end.’

  Mum said it with such conviction that I thought she might have been referring to some experience of her own, but then I remembered she had borrowed my copy of Rebecca when she couldn’t sleep one night. So much of what Mum was was made up of what she’d read. Is that what our middle-class culture created? People formed more by the books they’d read than the lives they’d lived? But maybe that had all changed for Mum after Paul Hannigan had pushed open her bedroom door. Maybe we’d both begun to live real lives after the chopping board had fallen.

  Mum toyed with the idea of using acid, but like the bonfire it would only half solve the problem, as it was unlikely that even the strongest acid would be able to dissolve the metal tools or the marble chopping board. Moreover, acid was highly dangerous, and just purchasing it and the protective gloves and aprons we’d need would be enough to arouse suspicions.

  Eventually, she decided to bury everything in the vegetable patch in the back garden, in the extension we’d dug ourselves in happier times. She wasn’t entirely satisfied with this solution, but at least it would get the bags out of the house, and compared to the other schemes it carried much less risk of detection. It would be a lot of work – we’d have to dig quite a substantial hole to fit the contents of the eight bin bags – but it could certainly be done.

  Mum thought she could make some of the more awkwardly shaped objects easier to bury if she sawed them into smaller pieces. So one night, as soon as she got home from work, we took the mop and the bucket and the plastic bowl to the bigger of the two sheds, which Mr Jenkins had equipped with buzzing fluorescent strip lights and where Mum kept her small collection of tools. We sawed the mop handle into several sausage-sized sti
cks, and after an hour of slapstick bumbling worthy of Laurel and Hardy – it was a miracle we didn’t lose any of our fingers – we finally succeeded in sawing the hard moulded-plastic bucket in half. After that, neither of us could face making an attempt on the plastic bowl.

  My heart started racing when Mum took Paul Hannigan’s mobile out of her pocket; I knew it had been in the same bin bag as his wallet. But I quickly reasoned my guilty panic away: She’d never looked inside the wallet, she had no way of knowing that the driver’s licence was missing.

  Sure enough, she didn’t even glance over at me as she put the mobile down on the work bench and began rummaging through the tool box until she found the hammer. She said she was worried the police might still be able to trace the mobile phone even if it was turned off, and insisted on smashing it to smithereens before we buried it, ‘just to be on the safe side’. She put the mobile on the concrete floor, knelt down beside it, and with a strange grimace on her sweating face, somewhere between destructive glee and pained disgust, she beat it into a masticated pulp. Remembering other blows I’d seen her strike, I looked away uncomfortably into the cobwebby corners of the shed.

  But we never did bury the bin bags in the vegetable patch. On the night we’d set aside to do it, Mum came home from work ready to put a completely new plan into action.

  30

  Mum had seen a client that day whose twelve-year-old son had been injured while his class photograph was being taken. The stack of benches he’d been standing on had collapsed and although he’d only fallen four feet or so, he’d landed awkwardly and suffered a serious fracture of the left ankle.