‘Oh yeah? Going out for a drink with the girls?’
‘Takeaway night at Jenny’s,’ I lie. He doesn’t know about my row with her yet.
He nods with approval. ‘Good. You haven’t seen much of the girls recently.’
‘Do you think you’ll be all right on your own? Shall I get Michelle to pop in and check on you?’
‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ he says. ‘I’m fine. The only thing I can’t do is take a piss, and Michelle isn’t going to want to help with that!’
I shrug. ‘Maybe she’s into that kind of thing.’
Charles laughs. Then he reaches out and grasps my hand in a casual but loving gesture. The shock of it is a dull pain to my core, similar to the ache I feel when I miss Grace.
‘When we were talking the other day in the hospital, I never got to finish what I was saying,’ he says.
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’
But he shakes his head. ‘No, it matters. When you first accused me of hurting Grace, I told you that you were a bad mother, that you tended to lose interest in her. Look, I exaggerated all of that. I saw you holding it together day after day, and I saw you hiding your issues from her. Grace did want to go to therapy, that’s true, and she was worried about the way she handled emotion. But what I didn’t tell you was that Grace was worried about letting you down. That’s why she didn’t tell you about it. I knew a bit about the bullying, and there were some drugs involved at the time. She thought you always knew how to be a good person, and she didn’t want to disappoint you.’
‘God, she was wrong.’ My skin burns.
‘Kat, I know what you did. I know you lied to me when you told me you were on the pill. I know that you fell pregnant on purpose. And I know you did it to get away from your mother and out of that horrible flat. You still think you’re a bad person because of that, but you’re not. You walk around with this weight on your shoulders. You’re not a bad person, Kat. You’re a good person. I never cared about what you did, because it gave me Grace. Perhaps I should’ve been angry about it – most men would be, obviously – but I understood why you did it, and I forgave you. Maybe now you should forgive yourself.’
I snatch my hand away from him. ‘You don’t know… You’re wrong. You just… You have no idea who I am.’ I find myself on my feet, pacing the length of the family room. He doesn’t know what I did all those years ago.
‘I didn’t want to upset you,’ he says. ‘Hey, come on. Sit back down with me. Chill out for a few hours before you have to go.’
I sit back down next to my sick husband and I think about what I’m about to do to the person who killed our daughter. And as I sit there waiting for time to tick away, I realise that I know who did it.
* * *
Since Grace died, I’ve learned a few things. She wasn’t as perfect as I thought she was, and that’s okay, because she was real, and now I understand why she did those things. I’ve learned that I wasn’t a terrible mother, but I was a flawed mother, and I could have done more to steer her well. I’ve learned that I married a good man, even though the circumstances around that marriage were less than ideal, and I’ve learned that my life isn’t everything that I hoped it would be.
I gather my things and go to the car. It’s still hours before midnight, but I can’t leave any later or Charles will be suspicious. Instead, I decide to drive around for a while to clear my head and work out what I’m going to do. On the way out of the house, I picked up Charles’s hunting knife, and now I slip it into the glovebox.
There are things that don’t add up. I’m sure about who’s behind everything, but there are loose ends I’m eager to tie, and I don’t think I’ll be able to until I go to the quarry and get some answers.
As I loop Ash Dale village, I call Grace’s phone one last time.
Hey, this is Grace, leave a message!
‘Since you sent me your text message, I’ve thought a great deal about why you want to meet me. You’ve done what is almost impossible to achieve – you have managed to get away with murder – and yet you’re risking it all because you want to see me. You want to tell me your side of the story. Do you feel guilty about what you’ve done? No, I don’t think you do. Do you understand who I am and what I’m capable of? Yes, I think you do. This need to tell me why is strong for you, isn’t it? Tread carefully, because that kind of arrogance can be problematic. Pride, fall – you know the saying. I can’t wait to meet you for real. Shall we take our masks off and be ourselves? I want to see you.’
This time, the message comes from Grace’s phone.
I’ll be home soon, Mum. Love you xoxo
They’re playing a good game, I have to hand it to them, but they’ve surely underestimated my love for Grace. Now my rage is as cold as ice as it traverses through my body.
I have one more hour to wait. I fill up the car with petrol, drive around some more, watch a group of drunk people spill out of one of the few pubs in the village.
Grace should be with a group like this. She should be on her way to university, celebrating her A-level results. No one will ever send me a text message like that ever again: I’ll be home soon, Mum. Love you xoxo.
Part of me wants to stop at that pub to buy an enormous bottle of whisky, to chug it down and pass out and pretend Grace is still alive.
I turn the car around and I drive out of the village, away from the street lights and the pavements, onto the isolated country roads, like the one where Daniel Hawthorne followed me. Out here I’m alone, with no private detective to save me. A shiver runs down my spine, so I pull over and call Matthew. Adrenaline rushes through me and the reality of what I’m about to do finally hits. Matthew’s phone goes to voicemail and I leave him a rushed message telling him where I’m going, leaving out the why, but suggesting that I need his help. After hanging up the phone, I find myself glancing at the glovebox, where Charles’s knife is waiting, forcing my fear back into resolve.
You won’t get away with murdering my daughter. There’s no way I’m backing down now, even if doing this alone is incredibly dangerous.
The darkness swallows the car. I press the accelerator, eagerly leaning forward as though willing the car to go faster. And then I reach the sign for Stonecliffe Quarry, graffitied with the word ‘DIE’. My tyres crunch against the gravel as I pull the Land Rover off the road and onto the long path that runs up to the quarry. When my lights touch the figure standing ahead of me, a little gasp leaves my body. I brake, reach into the glovebox and take out the knife.
She stands with her back to the car, staring out into the cavernous black hole of the old limestone quarry. There is still yellow police tape ahead, flapping in the wind, dusty and tangled because no one bothered to collect it. She’s slightly hunched, as though gazing into the abyss. Her black hair swirls around her, beautiful under the yellow glow of the lights. Then she slowly turns around and smiles.
Lily.
Thirty-Six
Behind Lily the suicide spot basks in light. When I cut the engine, I leave the headlights on. I want to see what she’s doing, and I can’t do that in the dark. She waves to me, wiggling her fingers in coquettish delight. Well, we did agree to remove our masks.
It was the missing notebook in the end. When I failed to find the notebook in Grace’s room, it finally hit me: they didn’t buy two at the same time; Lily stole Grace’s notebook and then kept taunting me with it. I would do the same thing if I wanted to mess with someone’s head. Her act in the café was a good one, but it didn’t take much effort to peel away the layers.
Lily sent lilies to our house and wrote the nasty message about Grace. She was the one who gave me a flower at Grace’s memorial. She found out about my past and she sent me the messages calling me Katie, and the ones that focused on Grace as a bad person. She never forgave Grace for bullying her.
She became Grace’s friend in order to get close enough to kill her.
And now I hate her, and I’m angry, and I want to end this. I slip the knife int
o my jacket pocket and climb out of my vehicle, heading closer to the quarry, my hair gently lifted by the cool night-time breeze. She steps slightly to the side, and lifts a small object into the air. Grace’s phone.
‘Those voicemails were very sweet.’ She taps the screen and I hear my voice: Hi, Grace. It’s Mum. I wanted to call yesterday, because I wanted to talk you through everything…
I almost don’t recognise myself. Who have I been kidding about my grief? The pain is clear in my trembling voice. I’d thought myself detached and emotionless. I was wrong.
‘Poor Katie.’ Lily sticks out her bottom lip as she stops the voicemail.
I can’t stomach the way she’s standing there with her head tilted to the left, a broad grin on her face, exuding arrogance. Without warning, I charge her, grabbing the knife from my pocket. Lily’s expression changes to one of shock, but she reacts quickly, ducking away from me. I take a swing at her with the knife, barely a centimetre away from her arm as she arches back, catlike in the way she moves her body. I ready myself to take another swing, but she rushes forward and shoves me into the dirt, climbing on top of me to grab the wrist holding the knife.
‘You can’t win, old woman. I’m younger and fitter than you.’ Then she lowers her head and bites down hard on my arm, forcing me to open my hand and drop my weapon. I cry out in pain as her teeth chomp down on my skin, almost drawing blood.
Lily is on her feet in an instant, eyes on the sharp object. While I scramble to recover the knife, she kicks it and it goes flying into the quarry.
‘No!’
She faces me, nodding her head. ‘It’s just you and me now, Katie.’
‘Why do you keep calling me that?’ I say. ‘What has my past got to do with you? You weren’t even born then.’
But Lily doesn’t say a word. She walks nonchalantly over to where I lie on the ground, cradling my damaged arm. I assess whether I have the strength to push her into the quarry, but I’m not sure I do, and it’s not a risk I’m willing to take. She could too easily dodge me or throw me down there herself.
‘I decided to learn everything I could about you,’ she says. ‘And I learned that you came from a dingy council house, that you had a boringly regular name, that you were arrested quite a few times before the age of sixteen – and that you killed someone.’ She says the last part in dramatic fashion, like Poirot with his big reveal.
‘Then you know what you’re doing right now is dangerous,’ I say, lifting myself from the ground into a crouch.
She laughs. ‘Please stop kidding yourself, Katie. You make all these dramatic threats but you have no follow-through. I’m not even armed, yet you gave up trying to kill me with barely a fight.’
Pathetically, I take the bait and rush at her again. She kicks me straight in the mouth and my lip splits. Both blood and hot pain blossom from my lips and teeth, and I fall onto my backside.
‘Why did you want me to come here?’ I ask, holding my face with my hand, watching the blood trickle through my fingers.
‘It wasn’t fun anymore. No one knew how clever I’d been.’ As she speaks, she glances off to the side, as though searching through the shadows.
‘Did you just want to boast? Are you going to kill me? This is the Suicide Spot, after all. You might get away with it. Have you got a taste for blood now? It never ends well for serial killers, you know. You could murder me, but you’d then want to do it again and again. You’ll get sloppy and mess up.’
As I sit there, injured and pitiful, she stands over me with her feet splayed wide and her shoulders back. She leans down, like an adult does with a child. ‘I don’t know why you keep assuming that I killed your daughter. She wanted to die.’ She crouches and places a hand on my cheek, keeping it there even when I flinch away from her. A sense of shame washes over me when it becomes obvious that I’m afraid of her. ‘Just like you.’ She strokes my face once, and then reaches back into her pocket for Grace’s phone. ‘Here, let me show you.’ She sits cross-legged on the ground next to me and unlocks the phone with Grace’s passcode. Then she opens her messages app and scrolls down.
There on the screen, I see the exact same messages that Lily showed me in the café, except that they are reversed. Now I understand. Lily cleverly photoshopped the messages to make it appear as though Grace was the one urging her to die, when in actual fact it was Lily trying to convince Grace to commit suicide. When she held out her phone to me, she was showing me a screenshot. I didn’t touch the phone. I didn’t scroll up or down. Now that the proof is here in front of me, it all seems so obvious.
Grace: Sometimes I think things will get better. But then I get so lost and things keep getting worse and worse. Should I talk to my mum?
Lily: You think she’ll understand? You’re pregnant with a teacher’s baby! She’ll be so disappointed in you.
Grace: I know. I let her down and I hate myself.
Lily: I know what it’s like to let someone down. Remember what I said at the quarry? I understand what you’re going through. I want to die, too. I hate it here.
Grace: ((hugs))
Grace: Death is so final though.
Lily: It makes the suffering stop.
Lily: We could do it together.
Grace: I want to see you. We should talk about this. It’s crazy. I have the baby to think about.
Lily: It solves all your problems in one go.
I shake my head. ‘She didn’t want to die. You found her at her most vulnerable and you twisted every emotion she was going through until it was ugly and desperate. You killed her.’
‘I made her wake up to what she wanted to do.’
‘No. You manipulated her and you lied to her. You isolated her, taking her away from her friends and her parents, making her believe you were the only one who understood what she was going through. Why did you do it, Lily? Was it because Grace bullied you? Was this all some sort of sick revenge?’
Lily’s throat bobs as she swallows. ‘Yes. But it wasn’t revenge for that.’ She reaches into her coat pocket and pulls out the notebook I’ve seen several times in her rucksack. ‘I think you need to read this before I tell you everything else.’ She holds it out to me, then snatches it away at the last moment. ‘But first you need to give me your phone, and any other weapons you might have concealed in your clothing.’
She has the upper hand and we both know it. I hand over my phone and then take the notebook from Lily’s hands. Finally, I get to read Grace’s own words.
‘The last entry is her suicide note,’ Lily says. ‘The real one.’
Thirty-Seven
Lily licks her lips as I open the notebook and begin to read.
Dear Mum and Dad,
I think I’ve let you both down. Especially you, Mum.
‘Read it aloud,’ Lily demands. ‘I want to hear your voice.’
‘No.’ Her arrogance is beginning to get on my nerves. I can’t stand her smirk, or the dark eyes I’d once considered so wounded.
When she snatches the book from me, I throw my weight towards her to get it back, but she brings her knee up, knocking me down. And then she begins to read.
‘At least I’ll never have to see the expressions on your faces when you read this. I’ll never see the disappointment in your eyes when you find out how awful I’ve been. It started a long time ago, when I told a lie and everyone at school listened to me for a change. And then I discovered that I couldn’t stop lying, because I wanted them to go on listening. But keeping up with my lies proved to be harder than I thought, and the more I lied, the more mistakes I made. Now I’m drowning in them and I can’t keep my head above the water—’
‘Give it to me.’ I reach out for the book. ‘I’ll read it to you.’ I can’t stand hearing Grace’s words coming out of her mouth.
Lily tosses the book down in the dirt where I collect it with bloodied fingers, attempting, and failing, to keep the blood from the pages.
Lily plops down beside me and gestures for me to read.
‘Alicia is a bitch.’ Lily places her chin in her hands and gazes at me.
‘I can’t blame Alicia for everything. She was mean, but she didn’t make me bully Lily. She didn’t force me to tell lies or start my vlog or do any of the stupid, attention-seeking shit I did.’
‘Also true,’ Lily says. ‘Get to the good bit, will you?’
I hate this. I hate that Lily is forcing me to read this out loud. The cool night, the dark sky, the quarry stretching out beyond – this is where Grace suffered, and I cannot stop thinking about her body, about the identification in the morgue.
I owe it to my daughter to find out what she went through. ‘Dad, you suggested that I try therapy. And that was when we both started lying to you, Mum. You always do the right thing and I didn’t want you to find out how horrible I am inside.
‘I thought it was going to be like taking a magic pill – that I’d talk to someone in a room and we’d figure out what’s wrong with me and then fix it. After a few weeks, I didn’t understand why I was still doing things to get Alicia’s attention, like dieting. I’m a different person at school than I am at home, and I don’t know which version is real anymore.
Only Daughter: An gripping and emotional psychological thriller with a jaw-dropping twist Page 23