Mags laughed. "You're telling me you can eat more?"
"My doctor would tell me not to, my ex-wife would disapprove, but hell, yeah. When it tastes this good, it seems wrong not to."
He only managed one more piece and looked ruefully at what remained. "It's a crime. Still, I guess I should eat less, exercise more. I could stand to lose a few pounds."
"You wear it well." She said it without thinking and looked away. Patrice pretended not to notice. He put his coffee cup to one side. "Can I take another look at the pictures? If you'll let me photograph them, I can send them to a friend. She specialises in investigative pieces about technology, and she's written some exposés of criminals using the dark web. If anyone can help trace where Tam might have seen the crime scenes, it'll be her."
Mags watched as Patrice unfolded the pictures and spread them out on the table. "It's the angles that interest me," he said, squeezing the bridge of his nose. Mags had noticed him do this a few times when thinking. "The angles are strange. I checked the press images online last night, and none of them match Tam's pictures. That's why you lay down outside the house yesterday, right?"
"Yes."
"Interesting. The only possibility I can think of is that someone has accessed the police database. If the killer had the house under surveillance for a day or two, and the cops found evidence of that, they would have taken photographs from his hiding place. That's my best guess. May I share these photographs with my friend? No one else."
Mags agreed and watched him photograph the two pictures. She shared the Guide camp picture from her phone. As Patrice refolded the drawing of the Hinesville house, he frowned, took out his notebook, and wrote something down.
He looked at his watch. "What time is your flight?"
"Four-thirty."
"You'll be there a little early."
Patrice was quiet in the car, and his fingers regularly came up to the bridge of his nose. Mags glanced across a few times, wondering what he was thinking. Finally, he spoke.
"The date on the Hinesville picture. It's wrong."
"Wrong?" Mags opened her bag and took out the picture. She had written the date on the back. Thursday, May 14th. She opened the calendar on her phone. She had noted the day there. Not because of the picture, but because it was the day of her daughter's first period. "It's the right date," she said.
Patrice had driven up to the back of a truck doing about forty-five miles-per-hour. Instead of overtaking, he hung back, matching its speed, pinching the bridge of his nose harder. "It can't be."
"I just checked. It's right."
Patrice flicked the indicator, pulled over to the side and brought the car to a stop.
"If you're right, maybe it's time we went to the cops."
"Why? What's changed?"
Patrice answered with questions of his own. "The Atlanta picture. The trailer park. When did Tam draw it? What time?"
That was also easy to remember. It had been the day Mags was up early after her nightmare, the day she had walked in as Tam was drawing. "Friday," she said. "Friday before last."
"What time?"
"Early. About six-thirty. Why? What you mean, the date's wrong?"
Patrice took his hat off and put it on the dashboard. "Six-thirty your time. Atlanta is five hours behind. It was one-thirty here. Middle of the night."
Mags thought of the trailer park drawing, its suggestion of darkness.
"The bodies were found mid-morning." he said. "About ten hours after she drew it. And the Hinesville house—if your date is right—well…"
"What?"
"She drew that picture a day and a half before that family died."
"Before?" It sounded strange, as if it was a word she had never used. The air in the car was hot and dry. Mags licked her lips and stared at him.
"Mags, this is more serious than I thought. If your daughter has found somewhere online where this psycho is posting photographs before he commits the murders, we have to go to the cops."
A sensation of coldness radiated through Mags' body. It started in the centre of her chest, a kind of tight numbness. From there, it spread outwards. Her body belonged to someone else, the blood in her veins replaced by a freezing, viscous liquid, pumped relentlessly through her circulatory system. She looked at Patrice but didn't see him. She saw a stranger, in a hostile country thousands of miles from where she needed to be. What if Tam's mental state when she was drawing wasn't down to epilepsy, or some other illness? It had been as if Tam had been looking at something Mags couldn't see, drawing something she saw through someone else's eyes. A horrible, impossible idea began to take on definition, its terrifying implications crystallising even as Mags tried to reject it.
"Impossible. That's impossible."
"What is?" She must have spoken out loud. Patrice's voice was distant, and his side of the car seemed to recede as she looked at him.
"I need to make a call," she said.
It took almost a minute at the side of the freeway in Georgia, in the heat and the humidity, for Mags to regain enough control of her body to call Kit. Her hand shook so much as she tapped the screen, it took five attempts to press the right number. Everything she had learned from Ria, every breathing exercise, every technique, had deserted her now she needed them most. The only thing she could remember was to breathe deeply, but it was next to impossible. She tried. As her phone signal bounced off a satellite in orbit and found a tiny piece of metal, glass, and plastic in London, she forced air into her nostrils, held it, then released it raggedly through her mouth.
She pressed the phone hard against her head. There was a click. Laughter.
"Mags." Her brother's voice. Tam and David in the background, disputing how many houses Tam was allowed to put on Vine Street. They were playing Monopoly.
Tam was fine. They were all fine. Of course they were. It was a moment of madness on her part, nothing more. Her mental health had been taken a knock because of the idea that had struck her in the car. The idea had threatened to overwhelm her, push everything else out of her mind. She wouldn't be any good to anyone if she let that happen. No good for Tam, Bradley, or herself.
She held the phone against her chest, and leaned forward, hunching, bending her legs, taking bigger lungfuls of oxygen. The tingling of her skin lessened, and she focused on regaining control.
A tiny muffled sound came from the phone. She held it back against her ear.
"Can you hear me, Mags? Terrible line. Maybe it's the weather." Mags looked up into a cloudless blue sky. "It's sunny here," she managed.
"Lucky you. We've had a thunderstorm this morning. Our trip to Hampton Court maze was a wash out. Which means Tam gets to thrash us both at Monopoly, so she's not too disappointed. Do you want to speak to her?"
Mags could hold it together with her twin, but she wasn't convinced she could stop the tears if she heard her daughter's voice. "No, don't drag her away from the game. I'll be flying to Boston in a few hours. I'll call later."
"Well, good to hear your voice, Sis. Everything here is—as your precocious daughter would say—tickety boo. Although I'm jealous of you getting all the good weather. Hold on a sec."
After a few seconds of silence, Kit spoke again. "Just wanted to go somewhere Tam couldn't hear me. She was weird about it. Don't know why. I think she should be proud, having such an amazing talent. But it seemed to upset her."
"What did?" The prickling sensation on her skin came back. "What upset her?"
"She's fine now. It was over an hour ago. We distracted her with some rampant capitalism in the form of a board game."
"Kit! What upset her?"
"All right, all right. It was the picture she drew this morning."
Mags teetered on the edge of losing control. She would not let that happen. With a monumental effort of will, she forced all her attention on Kit and what she needed to say to him. "Listen Kit. Do something for me. It's important."
Kit, always the joker in the family, heard the change in his sister's voice. "Tell
me."
Mags hissed out a breath through clenched teeth. "The picture. Take a photograph. Text it. Do it now. I'll call you back when I have it."
There was a pause, longer than she could attribute to the delay on an international call. Then Kit chuckled, the relief obvious in the sound.
"No need, Sis."
"What do you mean, no need? Kit, I am deadly fucking serious here. Send it to me."
Kit's tone was conciliatory. "No, no, don't get me wrong, I am taking you seriously, Sis. I promise you. It's just that I don't need to send it. Tam's picture—which is brilliant by the way, we might even get it framed—is of number two hundred and seventy-three, Aubrey Terrace."
Mags stopped breathing.
She knew that address.
It was in London. Camden Lock. Kit's address.
Tam had drawn Kit's house.
Chapter Twenty-One
When Kit and Mags were ten years old, they had asked their parents for BMX bikes. They had seen kids their age at the park, and their jumps made it look like they were flying. It looked effortless, graceful, exciting. The twins nagged for months, and on Christmas Day, two easily identifiable shapes waited under sheets on either side of the tree.
On the days when the snow and ice didn't stop them, they took their new bikes to the patch of green space behind the school and practised. Neither of them mastered the tricks they'd seen the other kids perform, but talent wasn't necessary for Evel Knievel-style jumps. Or so they told themselves. They borrowed a wooden plank from Dad's shed and loaded a rucksack with old bricks. The first attempt was undramatic. The ramp was only two bricks high, and neither of them quite had the nerve to attack the jump at speed, instead freewheeling towards it. As they were packing up, Mags noticed a small group of other riders passing, sniggering.
The twins returned the next day with an extra plank. They built one ramp five bricks high, left a gap of six feet, and placed the landing ramp there. They had constructed their jump at the bottom of a slope behind the terraced houses. Mags won the coin toss and pushed her bike to the top of the hill. When she turned round, her hands tight on the brakes, the slope seemed much steeper, the plank impossibly narrow. She had been about to give it up, when she noticed the same group of kids watching from the road.
"Evel Knievel," she whispered. She looked at the chasm between the two makeshift ramps. "Grand Canyon."
She released the brakes, and the bike began to move. Her momentum built quickly, and she focussed on the ramp. She would hit it dead centre. She knew her speed was sufficient to launch her impressively into the air. And she knew they had placed the ramps too far apart.
The bike dropped towards the far ramp. The front wheel hit it hard, and her right wrist snapped. Mags twisted as she fell, and her cheek scraped across the edge of the bricks, later blossoming into a purple, green, and black bruise that lasted a week. She landed on top of her right arm. A roar of noise was followed by silence, and she blacked out for a few seconds.
When Mags opened her eyes, Kit was bending over her, his face white. She tried to breathe, and couldn't. Kit was wheezing too, with that weird twin connection everyone but them made so much of. She panicked. She had never been winded before, and even the agony of her shattered arm wasn't as bad as the terror of not be able to suck enough air into her lungs.
Mags remembered that moment now. This panic attack approached with the inevitability of that badly placed ramp. Her anxiety always followed a pattern. She would worry about one thing, then remember something else she needed to take care of. Once two or three subjects were circling, her attention inevitably lurched back to the horror of Clara's death. The memory of this would bring the loss of her daughter to the front of her mind and her thoughts, no longer under her control, would gain critical mass. That was when the symptoms became physical. The clench and burn of being winded, unable to find sufficient air to sustain life. The hundreds of thoughts jabbing at her consciousness coagulated into a cloud of terror and misery; enveloping her, squeezing every happy thought out of her mind as easily as wringing soapy water out of a flannel.
Tam had drawn a picture of Kit and David's house. Her daughter was—somehow—connected to the mind of a killer. Whether this was true didn't matter because Mags was convinced it was, and that knowledge tipped her into a full-blown attack. Eleven years ago, she hadn't been able to help Clara. Mags had thought nothing could be worse than that feeling of helplessness, but she had been wrong. Her conviction that a murderer had travelled to London, and was planning to kill her daughter, combined with her being—at best—a twelve-hour journey away, smothered her, drove her to her knees.
The phone slipped from her fingers. Her vision darkened. Sounds receded like they did after a swim, ears clogged with water. She took tiny gasps of air, never getting enough.
This must not happen. She had to warn Kit, tell them all to get out of the house. Now. But the pressure and the urgency added fuel to her attack.
Mags fainted.
When she opened her eyes, she was still kneeling. Patrice had grabbed her shoulders. He was sitting beside her on the dirt edge of the highway, his arm around her, drawing her towards him to lean on his shoulder. She couldn't turn to look at him, could do nothing other than stare at the ground. A faded Hershey bar wrapper skittered a few inches every time a car passed. She gulped, taking tiny yelps of air like a dreaming dog.
She had to warn them, had to tell Patrice. When she tried to speak, the words wouldn't form. "I-I-I-"
Patrice rubbed her arm. "Panic attack?"
Mags nodded.
"My mother used to get them," said Patrice. "She was addicted to Valium. When she stopped taking them, she had panic attacks. I learned how to help her. I'm going to talk. Your job is to listen."
Mags shook her head. She had to tell him. Had to save her daughter, her brother and David. Had to find a way of getting the words out. Forgetting every coping mechanism she knew, she tried to impose control over what was happening. It didn't work. Her yelping breaths became more frequent, and more painful. The darkness threatened to return.
"I'm serious, Mags. I know something just happened that brought on an attack. Something you need to deal with. I understand." He squeezed her shoulder. "But, however hard it seems, you need to let go of that for now. I want you to pay attention to what I'm saying. We'll talk about everything else soon. First, we need to get you better, okay?"
Patrice's voice was calm and quiet. Mags latched onto it like a drowning woman grabbing a rope.
"Let me tell you about my favourite book. It might surprise you. Graham Greene. The End Of The Affair. I read it first in my late teens. I read every book he had written, and that was one of the few that didn't impress me. Years later, after my divorce—older, and maybe a tad wiser—I picked it up again. That second read was a revelation, Mags. That's the thing about great novels, isn't it? It only takes two people to make it great: the writer and the reader. The writer has done their part, but we have to bring something to it too. It was a different book the second time. About a third of the way in, I slowed down, drinking in every word, every phrase. It's not a long book, and I didn't want it to finish. It's about a guy who has an affair with a friend's wife during the Blitz. When the story begins, the love affair is over, but he's never been able to get past it. He hires a private detective to find out why she left him. Like many Graham Greene stories, it involves God, and religion. I don't think God comes out of it too well. I'm not even sure love comes out of it too well. It's the kind of story that keeps you awake at night, asking questions. Does life have meaning, or is that a concept humans mistakenly apply in the hope that their existence has value? Does God exist? If he does, what kind of God? It didn't change my mind. I'm an atheist. But a much better writer than I'll ever be believed in God, and that made me less dismissive of those who make the same choice. It also taught me that love—whatever that is—is not always a force for good. It can be unhealthy. That makes it sound like a depressing read, but somehow it i
sn't. It's as bleak a book as Greene ever wrote, but I always come away from it uplifted. I couldn't tell you why, Mags. Maybe, by writing beautifully about darkness, he brought some light into it. I don't know."
Mags listened to him speak. Her breathing was returning to normal.
"I've never talked about that book to anybody. Too private. I should have talked about The Princess Bride instead. Now that's a story where the movie was as good as the book, probably because the same guy wrote it. Oh well, too late now. How ya feeling?"
The worst was over. Mags knew what she was supposed to do now. She was supposed to ease her thoughts away from what had brought on the attack and mindfully perform a simple task. If she had been at home, she would have mopped the floor or done the washing up. Find something to focus her attention on. The thoughts would come back—there was no stopping them—but she would be better prepared. The problem was, she had no time. She had to do something about Tam, and it had to be now. Even as she decided, darkness reappeared at the edges of her vision.
One step at a time.
"My phone."
Patrice handed it to her. She thumbed it on and went to recent calls. Only allowing herself to think one step ahead of what she was doing, she pressed call. The battery was at three percent. Shit.
Kit picked up after the first ring.
"Mags? Are you okay? We lost you."
One step at a time.
"Kit, you need to get out of the house. All of you. Do it now."
One advantage of being a twin was that there was no need to explain. Kit knew she meant it, and he knew it was urgent. "Okay, Mags. Where should we go?"
"It doesn't matter. I'm coming home. I'll call as soon as I land. Don't go back to the house. Do it now. Please."
"Okay, Mags. I'll call you back when we're out."
"Wait!"
"I'm still here."
"The picture. Which side of the house did Tam draw?"
The briefest of hesitations. "The front. Why?"
"Leave by the back door. Don't go round the front. Get a few streets away, then call a cab."
The Picture On The Fridge: The debut psychological thriller with the twist of the year Page 10