by Lucy Dawson
‘Yes, I’m listening,’ she whispers.
‘Leave the explanations to me. In fact, the less you know, the better. I shouldn’t have told you about selling his book. That was a mistake.’ I tut aloud, angry with myself. ‘From here on in, you know nothing about any book. You have no idea that I contacted Mia to be my debut. Repeat it back to me, you said nothing about—’
She shakes her head. ‘No. I don’t need to rehearse anything. I get it. But what do I say about tonight? That we didn’t discuss anything other than you not knowing where Tris was? You were pissed off but used to him doing this sort of thing?’
‘That’s perfect. Say exactly that. Now, Mia’s address. Do you have it on your computer?’
‘No. In case it gets stolen. I keep my client records on paper in a box file at home, separate to their session notes. I have their email, GP address, their address and list of meds – if it’s appropriate.’
‘Good.’ I nod, and pause while I think. ‘Then I think you should go home tonight. You look tired and I’m fine here. But can you come back first thing tomorrow morning? It’s just I have a meeting I’ve set up – and no one to look after the kids. I won’t be long. I may not need to go – Tris might be home by then. But in case he’s not, would you be prepared to come and sit with them if I need you to?’ I look at her pointedly and wait.
‘OK, I’ll do it,’ she agrees eventually. ‘I’ll go home now and come back tomorrow morning, but only if need be.’
I reach out and place a steadying hand on her arm. ‘This is all going to be all right – don’t panic.’
FOURTEEN
MIA
My chin is aching and my neck is stiff. I’m juddering violently as I open my eyes and… lying on the hard floor? It’s now very quiet. I move my head and a thousand needles push into the same spot on my forehead. I’m on my tummy, but when I try, I don’t appear to have enough in me to push myself up onto my hands and knees. My muscles are sore, my arms weak. Instead I turn on my side and touch where it hurts. It’s sticky. Why is there something sticky on my head? I wipe my fingers across my chest. My mouth feels lined with tissue paper. I need water.
My eyes begin to readjust in the dark and I start to see him, his outline. A hooded man is crouched down, several feet away from me. I think he’s saying prayers. I hear him whispering to God.
I go very still. I mustn’t move. He keeps muttering, and I try not to breathe, but instinct tells me it’s not working. I am filled with the total certainty that, while he is not looking over at me, he knows I’m here. He senses me. He’s going to move towards me. His legs twitch and I panic. I have to do something! I grope around in the dark for something to throw at him. Get away from me! He flinches and melts back down, but he doesn’t leave completely. Just hunches over, returning to his incantations, waiting like a crow – until I fall asleep and he can bob over and peck at me until he picks down to my very bones – I know it.
I shan’t let him. I can’t let myself become so weak I have no fight left in me at all. I stand up, bravely. I will rush away. I must, but my legs appear too light for the task; I am made of air and can’t control where I go. The direction of the walls changes and somehow I am on the floor again, my hands reaching out to whatever flat surface is under my fingers. It’s not clear what is up, or down. Random objects appear in my field of vision and I try to grab at them to anchor me, but they come free and I lose my grip and footing. It’s too much. I have to stop and rest even though I know he is still there. I hear him whispering my name and it makes my skin crawl.
I take some breaths and when I get up again I’m somehow in a pine forest and I’m cold. There is a door in the side of a tree, I open it and discover it’s bulging full of beautiful dresses; a secret store – just like in the costume shop with its unpromising black front door in the small parade of dingy shops. My father took me there as a child. They also sold jokes. Buzzers my brother would hide in the palm of his hand, sweet cigarettes, fake blood, but I only had eyes for the elaborate Venetian masks hanging on the walls adorned with sequins and multicoloured feathers. I reach out and stroke the silk skirts and I can see the red velvet curtain at the back of the shop as clearly as if it is in front of me: the seamstress room. They made pantomime costumes in the rooms behind that curtain, all year round. Rails and rails of full-length dresses with puffed sleeves, Anne Shirley. Knickerbockers and frock coats lined with sky blue silk, sashes of scarlet. Cinderella’s wedding gown, Snow White’s stiff-collared, jewel-encrusted cape. That will do. I reach up. I will slip it on to keep warm. I pull at it and it falls to me, but I have a job getting it to stay round my shoulders. I need to leave this place now. I try the door again and this time it opens into a much wider, open space. I clutch at my cape, step through and look up, but it seems snowflakes are swirling in the air… drifting down, silently, settling softly on my bare skin and eyelashes. It becomes heavier, weighing down my hair. My feet hurt. This is no good. This door is no good. I need another one. I can’t see anything here. Wasn’t there meant to be the soft steady light of the lamp to guide me? That was the best bit when I watched Narnia with Kirsty at the cinema. The soft stillness of undisturbed snow – like a blanket.
Kirsty. I was trying to call her. Kirsty! Answer me!
The only person listening is him, still in the corner. I don’t like it. I should leave but I am so tired… I must not close my eyes. He will come. He is waiting there, his wings tucked under.
Mum? Dad? Kirsty!
I need you.
FIFTEEN
CHARLOTTE
Driving into Blackheath at 8.30 a.m. the following morning I’m whispering exactly the same assurances I gave Flo, under my breath. Don’t panic. Don’t panic. It’s so cold I am shivering, even though the fan is blasting hot air out over my fingers and the windscreen is misting over. The bright sunlight keeps catching it, rendering me almost completely blind as I hold my hand up in front of my face in a desperate attempt to stay on the road without sharply braking. By the time my phone tells me I have almost reached the ‘destination’ Flo emotionlessly gave me just before I left, my nerves are shot to pieces. I don’t actually know what the hell I’m doing. This was not part of the plan. I honestly thought he’d come home last night, or that I would at least hear from him, but nothing. So now what? Am I going to knock on the door and confront him if he’s there? I have no idea.
I’m even more thrown when I turn into a peaceful, tree-lined street, no more than a few hundred yards from the village itself. This can’t be right – the houses are huge, white-fronted Georgian affairs, set back from the road and approached via wide, gravel drives. A flat in one of these would give little change from three quarters of a million quid, surely? I pull up outside number 6, parking on the pavement, and walk tentatively up the drive, on which – unlike the houses either side – there sit no cars. My heart starts to thump. What am I going to say to Mia if he’s not here? How will I explain turning up like this at half-eight on a Saturday morning when I’m not even meant to know where she lives? And yet my feet continue to propel me towards the two handsome, red doors in front of me. I climb seven stone steps and pause. There are two old-fashioned push bells; the round, marble effect ones – marked A and B. At some point in this gracious house’s history, it has been converted into an upstairs and downstairs flat, each with its own private entrance. I have no clue which of the two belongs to Mia.
I walk back down and try to peer in through the large, sash windows to my left, but not only are they several feet above ground height, the full-length white shutters behind the glass are firmly closed. It’s the same story with the smaller, basement windows below. I return to the door and impulsively press both bells, simultaneously. I can feel my heartbeat squishing in my ears, taking over my chest completely… and nothing happens. Neither door swings open. So I try again. I practically lean on them. They’re definitely working because I can hear them buzzing imperiously behind the doors.
All this, and she’s not ev
en in? I laugh in disbelief – press on the bell again… and suddenly door A swings right open.
Mia stands there in a gloomy hall, bizarrely in an ankle-length sparkly evening dress, like a hostess ready to welcome me to pre-dinner drinks rather than breakfast; only the skirt is ripped – in the manner of a stage costume designed deliberately to denote she has been marooned on a shipwreck island. As she wavers dangerously on the spot, she clutches her wildly tousled long hair to her neck, head on one side, somehow almost coquettishly, like she’s in a shampoo advert. She has black eye make-up smudged down one side of her face and a daub of what looks like dry blood across her white-blue, bare shoulder. There is a large, gooey, open cut on her forehead. She stares at me, confused, as if not really sure what to do with this pose she finds herself in.
Any explanation I might have needed to come up with on the spot dies on my lips. ‘Mia?’ I say, astonished. ‘What’s wrong? You look—’ but before I can finish, she drifts slightly to her left.
I look down the length of the hall and through a doorway that seems to lead into a sitting room. I can see the back of a sofa and a large set of oversized doors, open to the elements, and a garden beyond, the bare trees against the bright clear sky as a cream curtain flaps in the wind. My gaze shifts downward and the breath audibly sucks into my lungs to see a male body lying on the floor facing away from me. The torso is obscured by the sofa, but he is naked from the waist down; his bare arse and legs – trousers bunched around the ankles – are clearly visible. His shoes are bent back awkwardly behind him, as if someone tied his laces together and he’s fallen with his feet bound. They are my husband’s new shoes. I went online and was flabbergasted by how much they cost. We had terse words about these shoes. He is not moving.
My immediate reaction is to step in, but as my foot lifts, I realise, just in time, that this is almost certainly a crime scene. Starting to feel light-headed, I urgently scan the rest of the darker, tastefully white, private entrance lobby, from the doorstep – taking in smears of blood, low down, by the skirting – and another mark higher up on the wall, by the light switch. Other belongings lie on the ground: a photo frame face down, a thin metal lamp still plugged in, but on its side. A knocked-over vase of dead flowers has spilt water and yellowed stems over the floor. I instantly imagine Tris sweeping the items off the sideboard – like they do in the movies – and lifting Mia up to passionately fuck her… but if that was what happened here, something has most definitely gone very wrong. I simply don’t know what to do. There is a quiet ghastliness to the sight of a body in real life that I would never have been able to appreciate without witnessing it for real. I have to do something. I can’t just walk away now. I’ll have been seen driving here by a million CCTV cameras.
Every word of warning that Flo gave me last night whispers through my mind as I stare at my husband and try to think. This is bad. This is really, really bad. THINK, CHARLOTTE! Mia is staggering around on the spot like she’s drunk. I can’t work out if she’s high, in shock, injured – I have no idea. I stare at her wordlessly. What on earth has happened here?
‘Mia!’ I say urgently, beckoning her towards me. ‘I’ve come for our meeting, you remember? The one we set up to talk about the book?’ She turns her head and looks glassily in the direction of my voice, but instead walks to the wall, leans her back against it and slides down to a sitting position, her hands covering her mouth.
‘Mia – what’s happened? Can you tell me?’ I say loudly. I would go in, I think? If I’d just arrived for a meeting and found someone on the floor. I’d go in and look at them. Maybe I only know it’s Tris because I’m expecting it to be. They might ask me why I didn’t go in? How I was so sure it was my husband from the doorway? Was I worried I might be implicating myself by walking in? What did I have to hide? That might actually be what trips me up. I step over the threshold tentatively. ‘Mia? Are you hurt?’ I put my hand on her shoulder and flinch. Her skin is cool marble. The whole place is freezing. ‘Mia, who is that man, on the floor?’ I say loudly. She’s shivering and doesn’t look at me. She still has her hands over her mouth, and I don’t want to touch her. ‘Can you answer me, Mia?’
She blinks and tries to focus, then closes her eyes.
I walk into the living room slowly, my heels tapping on the wooden floor, and round the edge of the sofa – uttering a half scream as I look down. I don’t actually think I fake it – I’m pretty sure it’s real. His face is looking out of the open door, but his head is also partially under the sofa, as if he’s tried to climb beneath it. His skin is bone white and mask-like. His eyes are closed. ‘This is my husband!’ I breathe – then call out to Mia, my voice shaky. ‘What is my husband doing, lying on your floor?’
That would be what I’d say, wouldn’t it?
‘Tris! Can you hear me?’ I kneel down next to him, speaking loudly. Am I meant to move him? Put him in the recovery position? Or not touch him – I can’t remember! ‘Can you hear me, Tris?’
He doesn’t move. He’s dead? He’s dead? My hands are trembling as I reach out and place a finger on his neck. I wait, only registering the sound of birds in the garden. No pulse. I place my fingers under his nose, but the wind blowing in through the open doors makes it impossible for me to tell if he’s breathing or not. I get up quickly and yank the heavy doors shut, closing off all outside sound completely, before rushing back to Tris. I can’t feel a thing!
Jumping up as I start to fumble in my pockets for my phone, I return to Mia in the hallway. She’s still slumped in the gloom in a sitting position against the wall, her eyes rolling in her head. She closes them again while mumbling something unintelligible about flies through her fingers. Have they taken something? Is that what’s happened here?
‘Mia! Listen to me!’ I crouch down beside her as her head lolls forward. ‘I need to phone an ambulance now, so I have to know what’s happened. Concentrate, Mia. Can you tell me?’ I jump up to put the light on, then push her upright again by her shoulders.
She lifts her head and as her hair falls back I gasp at my first proper sight of vivid red marks on her throat.
‘What happened to your neck, Mia?’
She lifts her hands up and places them on her skin, covering the red marks as she mimes being throttled. ‘Attacked.’
‘My husband tried to strangle you?’ I twist back in horror to look at Tris, still lying there.
She shakes her head and tears start to leak from her eyes. ‘Seth. My boyfriend. Says I stole it and…’
My eyes widen with fear. ‘You stole what?’
She turns and we both look down the line of sight at Tris’s half-naked body. She frowns, confused, as if she can’t understand what he’s doing there, before lifting a heavy hand to point him out to me – only to let it drop again uselessly by her side, palm up. It’s covered in blood.
I jerk back away from her in shock: what has she done? What has happened here? But she draws her knees up, rests her elbows on them and lets her head fall into her hands, covering the cut – and her hands, in more blood – as she closes her eyes.
He attacked her. I scramble back over to Tris. He was physically violent towards her and he’s half-naked. I don’t know how to make any sense of this.
I swallow as I dial 999. My voice sounds jagged as I try to keep it even while I focus. ‘Police and ambulance, please. My husband is lying on the floor and he’s not conscious. I don’t think he’s breathing and he doesn’t have a pulse. I don’t know what’s happened but he’s very cold to touch. There’s another girl here who is more alert than him; she’s spoken to me but she’s very cold as well and there are blood smears everywhere. What? Oh yes – where are we? The address is on my phone, hang on.’ I almost drop the phone as I look on maps. ‘Hello? Are you still there?’ I manage eventually to give the call handler the address. ‘Er yes, OK.’ I reach out and put my fingers under his nose again. ‘No, I can’t.’ I fumble for his wrist this time. ‘No. There isn’t. He’s on his side. I’d have to
move him onto his back. Is that OK? Hang on.’ I put the phone down, shove the sofa clear – and see the blood. ‘Oh shit!’ I fumble for the phone again. ‘There’s blood on the floor!’ I look up. Mia is still slumped against the wall. ‘No, I’m not in any danger.’ I look at the back of his head. His dark hair is sticky and clumped. ‘I can’t tell, but he’s got a head injury of some sort. Do I still move him? OK. You’ll stay there, won’t you?’
I roll Tris onto his back, place my fingers on his forehead, my other hand on his chin and tilt his head back. His mouth opens. I watch for any rise and fall of his chest. I can’t see anything. I place my hands over his breastbone and I start compressions. He tried to strangle her? To assault her? The more I push the more frightened and shocked I become. I look down at my husband’s lifeless face and I hear myself cry out loud. I push harder and I know what I’m feeling is pure rage while simultaneously trying to save his life, then somehow I’m hitting his chest. I stop suddenly and sit back, panting with exertion. I stare at him for a second until I realise I can hear sirens and, shocked into action, I start compressions again.
‘Help!’ I shout. ‘Someone help me! We’re in here! Help me! Please!’ Shapes appear in the doorway, people who pull me away and start working on him then and there on the floor, in front of me. I step back, starting to shake violently. More sirens. Police. Blue lights. It seems Flo is right after all – it is just like it is on TV, in fact.
They get Tris into the back of an ambulance as another appears and takes over Mia’s care. She doesn’t appear to be moving either. This is actually happening. I close my eyes briefly and see only Clara and Teddy. My beautiful children.
