Mice

by Gordon Reece

  While I’d gone back to playing my flute almost immediately after that night, Mum wouldn’t touch the piano. When I asked her to play a duet with me now, she always had an excuse – she was too tired or she had too much work to do. But I knew full well what the truth was. I knew she avoided going near the piano for exactly the same reason that I avoided going near the oval rose bed. (Was The Gypsy Wedding still playing in her head when Paul Hannigan marched us down the stairs?)

  Mum became obsessed with security, and regularly came home with new locks that she’d bought in the hardware shop in town. She installed two new heavyduty chains on the front door and two on the back, and put sturdy locks on her bedroom door and mine. She bought a decoy alarm system (the packet boasted that a burglar won’t be able to tell the difference), since the real thing was prohibitively expensive, and fitted it in a prominent position at the front of the house. She bought clever clip-on locks for every window, as she’d concluded that Paul Hannigan had probably got in by forcing the one in the downstairs toilet.

  I watched her going up and down the stairs with her screwdriver, climbing up and down the stepladder outside the front door, and managed not to say what I was thinking: The lock hasn’t been invented that can keep our own fears out.

  But the most worrying change I noticed in Mum was in her relationship with Graham Blakely. When she talked about her run-ins with him now, she appeared less the victim and more an equal and willing belligerent in their office wars. She backed down less readily when he lost his temper with her, and – to Brenda and Sally’s amazement – often gave as good as she got in their exchanges. If this had been all, I wouldn’t have been concerned. I was sick and tired of hearing about how this office Hitler intimidated her. But it was more than just standing up for herself. Ever since she’d had that first row with him on my birthday, it was as if Mum had actually begun to relish her confrontations with Blakely. Sometimes it seemed to me that she actually went out of her way to provoke them. And if she got the better of him in an altercation, she would recount it with breathless enthusiasm over dinner, her hands swooping wildly around her as if they had a life of their own, brushing blindly against her glass and threatening to knock it to the floor.

  One night during dinner we were playing highs and lows when Mum, with an anticipatory giggle, announced that her high that day had been slapping Blakely’s face.

  ‘You did what?’ I asked incredulously.

  ‘I slapped Blakely’s face!’ she repeated with a selfsatisfied grin, like a child who’s proud of a naughty prank.

  ‘What – what happened?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, matter-of-factly, as if it were just another piece of office gossip, ‘he came into my office when he saw that I was on my own and started to talk to me about holiday dates for August. As we were talking he came round behind my chair and I thought he was going to touch my breast. I didn’t even think about it, I just hit him hard across his cheek!’

  ‘Mum! Did anyone see?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘Nothing! Nothing at all. He just walked out holding his cheek. You should have seen the look on his face!’

  I didn’t know what to say. The recollection clearly exhilarated her. She couldn’t stop talking about it, bursting into laughter every time she remembered the look on Blakely’s face.

  ‘He didn’t say a word!’ she cried. ‘He couldn’t believe it! He was in total shock! It was the last thing he expected me to do!’

  I laughed along with her as best I could, but there was something about the whole thing that I found deeply disturbing; it left me feeling unsettled for days afterwards. Mum had always been the calm hand on the tiller and I didn’t want her to change. This new recklessness of hers scared me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to follow her into the uncharted waters she seemed set on exploring. I was worried that in this mood she’d say something in front of Sally and Brenda that could be our undoing. And it irked me that after everything that had happened I’d managed to find some balance, some equilibrium – so why the hell couldn’t she?

  34

  On Monday, May the twenty-second, with just three weeks before my exams started, I began my intensive revision programme, long marked off on my bedroom wall calendar in a frenzy of red biro crosshatching.

  This programme involved getting up at seven in the morning and putting in at least two good hours before Roger came at ten. In the evenings, instead of stopping when Mum got home, I worked from about five through to nine, when I’d finally stop and have a late dinner with her. I’d planned to work over the weekends too, but Mum insisted I have at least one complete day off a week. So I worked all day Saturday and left Sunday free.

  Since the majority of the work I had to do was memorizing – dry labour that would require my very best concentration – I decided to move all my books and papers from the dining room and revise upstairs in my bedroom. I figured there’d be fewer distractions – no telephone ringing, no Mum going backwards and forwards looking for the scissors she’d misplaced for the millionth time or click-clicking her biro as she read through her papers in the lounge, no temptation to slip into the kitchen and make myself a coffee or a sandwich.

  So I sat upstairs in my bedroom, sweltering in the heatwave that showed no sign of abating, forcing myself to memorize long quotes from Macbeth and page after page of irregular French verbs. Repeating them out loud over and over again with my eyes tightly shut, I learned the exact wording of Boyle’s law and Charles’s law, Ohm’s law and Archimedes’ principle. Working my way through box after box of tissues and gulping down the antihistamines Dr Lyle had given me, I memorized the day, month and year of the Reichstag fire, the invasion of the Ruhr, the Kellogg – Briand pact, the Munich putsch and the march on Rome. While the swallows darted around their nests in the eaves outside my window, I learned lists of statistics on Brazilian coffee production and annual rates of rain forest depletion until I could repeat them without even glancing at my notes.

  It was only six weeks – six short weeks – since Mum and I had killed Paul Hannigan, and already I was back to thinking almost exclusively about my exams. It was only occasionally now that my mind strayed from my textbooks and I found myself thinking about the body rotting beneath the rose bushes.

  I suppose I’d slowly come round to Mum’s way of thinking in spite of all my doubts, in spite of having seen too many movies where something always happens to trip the guilty up. I suppose I’d finally come to accept that she’d been right all along: we’d got away with it.

  If the police hadn’t come to the house by now, then surely they were never going to. After all, they must have found Paul Hannigan’s car – it couldn’t have just sat in the Farmer’s Harvest’s car park week after week without being noticed. And Paul Hannigan must have been reported missing to the police after nearly two months. Somebody must have become concerned about his disappearance in that time. Hadn’t someone been trying to contact him that very first morning? They must have alerted the police by now . . .

  The only possible conclusion I could come to was that Mum had got it right – the police hadn’t made any link between the disappearance of Paul Hannigan and us, and in all probability they never were going to make any link between the disappearance of Paul Hannigan and us.

  Besides, even if the police did come to the house now, they wouldn’t find anything. The kitchen had been scrubbed and disinfected so many times they wouldn’t find the tiniest speck of Paul Hannigan’s blood, not the faintest shadow of a fingerprint; the eight bin bags had gone from the spare room and the place Mum had hidden them was so perfect, so ingenious, that the police would never discover them.

  We’d been lucky. We’d been very lucky. We’d killed a man. We’d hacked and beaten him to death on the tiled floor of our kitchen. And we’d got away with it.

  35

  It was Saturday the twenty-seventh of May. I got up at seven as my revision timetable dictated, put on my dress
ing gown and slipped out of my room, intending to make a quick coffee before starting work. I paused at Mum’s bedroom door and listened. I could hear her heavy regular breathing and smiled. I knew how precious every second’s sleep was to her.

  I was coming downstairs trying not to make any noise and had just, with great difficulty, avoided stepping on the treacherous fourth step, when I saw it.

  A white rectangle lay on the mat by the front door.

  I knew at once it was something to be afraid of. The postman never came that early. It had been handdelivered .

  I picked it up and saw the ugly grease smear (butter?) where a thick thumb had pressed the flap down.

  I turned it over. The face was blank. I hurriedly tore it open.

  Inside was a small scrap of lined paper ripped out of a secretary’s notepad. Halfway down the page was a message printed in block capitals with a dying biro. It read simply:

  I KNOW WHAT YOU DID.

  I KNOW YOU KILLED HIM.

  I WANT £20,000 OR I GO TO THE POLICE.

  DON’T LEAVE THE HOUSE.

  I WILL CALL TODAY.

  I ran straight back upstairs and woke Mum.

  Less than five minutes later Mum was sitting at the kitchen table in yesterday’s work blouse, a pair of jeans and the brown boots she wore for walks in the countryside. She gnawed at her bottom lip and stared fixedly at the cheap, translucent piece of paper. The bags under her eyes were starkly etched on her face that morning, like the outward manifestations of a sick soul. She was brooding, sullen, exuding a bruised bitterness, her hair a frazzle of knots. She hadn’t brushed her teeth and I could smell last night’s wine on her breath. She didn’t take her eyes off the letter for a second, not even as she reached for her coffee mug, brought it to her lips and sipped from the sticky rim.

  I was still in my pyjamas and dressing gown, too numbed by the shock of the letter to go up and get dressed. I’d long feared that our fragile peace would come to a sudden end one day, but I’d always imagined the authoritative knock at the front door (polite but not going to be denied entry), the uniformed officers with their radios crackling, ‘smiles’ that were merely the faintest twitches of thin, unfriendly lips. I’d never imagined for one minute that it would end like this – a blackmailer’s grubby note stuffed through our letterbox.

  While Mum read the letter over and over again, I racked my brains trying to figure out who the blackmailer could be.

  I remembered the farmer who’d driven past that morning when we were digging the grave in the oval rose bed and the body of Paul Hannigan was lying face-down in the grass beside us. Mum had always said he couldn’t have seen what we were doing at that distance – but what if she’d been wrong? What if the farmer had seen exactly what we were doing that morning and now, after six weeks of weighing up his options, had decided to try to make some money out of it?

  Four-wheel-drive Man was another distinct possibility. He’d looked every bit the soap-opera villain with that bald head and sinister goatee, and we’d definitely aroused his suspicions that night in the car park. Maybe he’d smelled a money-making opportunity and followed our taxi all the way back to Honeysuckle Cottage. If he’d discovered that the car we’d left in the car park belonged to Paul Hannigan and that Paul Hannigan was now missing, maybe he’d been able to piece together everything that had happened?

  Or was it someone closer to home? Had I somehow given the game away to Roger the morning after the killing, in spite of my best efforts to behave normally? Had he seen the bloodstain on the back door? He was extraordinarily sharp, and I knew he was short of money; that was why he was giving me home tuition after all. But the cheap paper, the grubby thumb print, the letter shoved through the letterbox in the early hours? None of it seemed to bear any relation to the fastidious academic I knew. Then again, if there really was no such thing as ‘character’ (and Roger had been very excited by that idea), it could just as easily have been him as anyone else.

  ‘Who do you think it is, Mum?’

  ‘I don’t know, Shelley,’ she said distractedly, still not taking her eyes off the blackmailer’s note. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you think it could be Roger?’

  ‘No!’ she snorted with a dismissive shake of her head. ‘It’s not Roger. It’s definitely not Roger. We’re dealing with a criminal here, a habitual criminal.’

  ‘What about Four-wheel-drive Man then? You thought he looked like a criminal – we both did.’

  Mum considered this suggestion more seriously. ‘I suppose so,’ she said without conviction, ‘but I still can’t see how he could have found out. Only you and I know what happened here that night.’

  Her attention was drawn back to the letter as if it possessed a magnetism she was powerless to resist.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said almost as an afterthought, ‘we’ll know soon enough.’

  I must have looked blank, because she went on, ‘The letter says I will call today. Whoever it is, they’re coming here – to the house – today.’

  I imagined Four-wheel-drive Man swaggering arrogantly around the kitchen in his black leather car coat, lounging in one of the kitchen chairs, chewing gum and grinning at us menacingly, marking each and every demand he made with a boorish slave-drum beat of his fist on the table. I shivered with revulsion as if I’d turned over a brick in the garden and disturbed a squirming knot of earwigs.

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  Mum folded her arms tightly across her chest as if she was suddenly cold.

  ‘There’s not much we can do, Shelley. If the blackmailer goes to the police, they’ll have to investigate the allegations. They’ll come here looking for a body, they’ll have search warrants, sniffer dogs. I think it’ll all be over for us then . . .’

  I could see the dogs digging frantically at the loose soil of the rose bed, uncovering a thumb as white as a new bulb.

  Mum turned her attention back to the note and suddenly screwed it up in a spasm of anger. ‘I can’t understand it! How could anyone have found out? We’ve been so careful! What’s given us away? And why now – after nearly two months have gone by?’

  She grimaced as she drained the dregs of her coffee and ran her hand agitatedly through her ragged hair.

  ‘Do you want a refill?’

  She nodded and held out her cup. As I filled it, I saw how violently it trembled in her hand.

  ‘Is it really all over then?’ I asked in dazed disbelief.

  Mum flattened the note with the palm of her hand on the kitchen table and considered it yet again. ‘I think we’re trapped, Shelley.’

  Trapped. I was struck that she’d used that word. We were still mice after all, mice caught in the spring of the metal trap, our little matchstick necks cleanly snapped in two.

  ‘Isn’t there anything we can do?’

  She covered her face with her hands and dragged them down until they were pressed together at the point of her chin as if in prayer. ‘Not that I can see, Shelley. Not that I can see. We’ve got very few options open to us.’

  I thought about all we’d been through to avoid detection – burying Paul Hannigan’s body in the oval rose bed, driving to town in the burglar’s battered turquoise car, the terrifying run-in we’d had with Four-wheel-drive Man, Mum’s late-night journey into the national park to dump the bin bags in the abandoned mine shaft. Had all that been for nothing? Were we going to be defeated now, not by brilliant detective work, but by some loathsome money-grubbing blackmailer?

  ‘What options do we have?’ I asked, the pitch of my voice rising sharply.

  Mum turned her elegant, exhausted face towards me. She was so tired that she was hardly able to keep her eyes open when shafts of sunlight managed to break through the morning clouds and fill the kitchen with bright spring sunshine.

  ‘We can go to the police and confess everything before the blackmailer gets here,’ she said. ‘Whatever else, it’ll be better that the police hear it from us first. A confession – even at this la
te stage – could still help us in court when it comes to sentencing.’

  I saw the ghostly white tent erected over the oval rose bed, the scrum of journalists on the gravel, the back seat of the police car, its black upholstery hot to the touch. And what would come after that? Hours of questioning at the police station, the humiliation of mug shots, fingerprinting. Then, after months of miserable waiting, the trial. Standing in the dock on trembling legs while the prosecuting barrister unleashed the unanswerable question: ‘If you really thought you’d done nothing wrong, Miss Rivers, if you really thought you’d been acting in self-defence at all times, why did you bury Mr Hannigan’s corpse in the garden of Honeysuckle Cottage?’

  If prison had been a real possibility the night we’d killed Paul Hannigan, it was surely inevitable now. Medieval horror in the twenty-first century. My brilliant career diverted into a siding to rot neglected for God knows how many years. Forced to share my most intimate space with girls more savage, more vicious than Teresa Watson and Emma Townley knew how to be. I knew I wouldn’t be able to survive it. I wouldn’t be able to bear the brutality, the philistinism, the filth. I knew I’d end up taking my own life . . .

  ‘Isn’t there anything else?’ I asked, struggling for breath as if the noose were already tightening around my neck. ‘Isn’t there anything else we can do?’

  Mum shrugged her shoulders helplessly. ‘We can pay the twenty thousand pounds,’ she said, but in a way that made it sound more like a question than a statement.

  ‘But we don’t have twenty thousand pounds,’ I groaned. ‘That’s more than your salary for a whole year. It would take forever to find that amount of money.’