Her Final Victim

by NJ Moss

  I need to call the police. I need help. I wish Jamie was here.

  I don’t know how long I run for before I finally stop.

  Minutes, hours, both very long and too short. She could be right behind me.

  I stop outside a kebab takeaway, leaning gratefully against the lit window. There are a few people inside, loud and drunk.

  I look down at my phone to find Millie has sent me an email: many emails. She’s still sending them as I watch, new notifications coming in one after another.

  Jamie is not the man you think he is, the subject heading reads.

  Jamie never loved you.

  Your marriage is a lie.

  She wasn’t following me. She stayed behind to send these emails, these pathetic tricks to try to stop me ringing the police. Or maybe she was – is – following me and she sent them from her mobile. But she can’t have been running fast if she was busy with her phone at the same time, as well as being drunk.

  And there are people in the kebab shop. She won’t attack me in front of them. Will she?

  I don’t know anything about her. I met her two fucking weeks ago.

  I move to click Emergency Services, but then another email comes in. I can’t ignore the subject heading.

  I’m posting this video if you do anything stupid.

  I laugh, and it hurts. The laughter hurts.

  She’s a lunatic. She has nothing.

  I open the email and I watch the video, and I think about what my followers would think if they saw it, and I think about how Mum would nod matter-of-factly like of course I got cheated on, of course her stupid daughter got cheated on, and I think about the humiliation I’d suffer, every day of my life, the looks of pity I’d get if this video was released.

  And I know Millicent fucking Maidstone has got me right where she wants me.

  48

  Jamie

  I sit with my head in my hands, thinking of the first time I saw Hazel.

  There was an employment event at university and she was walking ahead of me, swaying her hips, and there was something so… Dammit, I have to be honest with myself, especially after everything I’ve learned.

  There was something Mum-like about her.

  She was far younger than the women who usually captivate me, but it was in the way she moved, the way she held herself. I remember when I was very young, following Mum through a crowded high street, her hand slipping from mine as she disappeared into the fray. I remember the way she walked: the way she held herself, almost as though she was glad she’d let me go and she wouldn’t have to deal with me anymore.

  Fear like that never leaves a person.

  I ran through the crowd, bumping into strangers’ legs, panting in my desperation to get back to her. But she just kept walking. I never found out if she was trying to ditch me. Maybe she was toying with the idea and then thought better of it, but that’s the impression it left on my young mind.

  When I saw Hazel, it was like I could take back that piece of my life, that fear, and make it mine. I didn’t have to be the scared little boy anymore.

  I didn’t think like this at the time. Maybe I’ve never thought like this. But I see it now.

  I watched her from afar before I ever worked up the courage to introduce myself into her life. And when I did, the way it happened… I never expected it to go down like that. I thought she’d hate me. She will hate me if she ever finds out the truth, all of it, not just the pieces she knows.

  I can’t believe my love for Hazel is that simple. It can’t be, can it? I saw a shade of my mother in a crowd, I followed… I claimed. Can our whole marriage really be reduced to something so weird and pathetic?

  I’ve never shared this with Hazel, with anybody. I can’t even imagine telling her.

  Hey, H, do you know what first attracted me to you? You reminded me of my mum when I thought she was going to abandon me outside Poundland.

  No, I have to keep this buried deep, the same way I keep so much of my messed-up psyche stifled.

  It doesn’t matter now. None of it does. I’m going to take Hazel far away, someplace Millicent and the past can never hurt us.

  It’s going to be a fresh start.

  I bolt to my feet when the door bursts open, forcing a smile to my face. “Finally, you’re home… Woah, H, what the fuck?”

  She springs across the hallway, throwing her handbag at me. I duck and then she’s on me, scratching, screaming, slapping me across the face. The door swings on its hinges behind her and the lights of the taxi disappear, leaving us in semi-darkness.

  “Hazel, stop, stop.”

  She’s goddamn hysterical, raking her nails down my cheek when I try to grab her wrist. “How could you? How fucking could you?”

  Oh, no. Please no. Not this, not tonight, not when I was going to convince her to leave with me. “Calm—”

  I roar when she scratches my neck again, gouging her fingernails into my skin. I’ve got no choice but to spread my arms and bear-hug her, squeezing her arms against her body. She struggles, spitting in my face as she calls me every name under the sun, a prick and an arsehole and a monster and a liar.

  “I hate you!” she screams, bringing her knee up in a vicious slam against my balls.

  I grunt and fall backward, the air sucking out of my belly. Women’ll never know how painful this is. I don’t give a shit about childbirth.

  “H, wait,” I gasp.

  She runs past me and up the stairs, slamming the bedroom door with a shudder that moves through the house.

  I chase after her, panting. It can’t end like this. Why did Millicent tell her? I didn’t break any rules. I was playing her sick game.

  I run down the hallway and push the bedroom door, trying to turn the handle. It rattles in the frame, locked. “Hazel.” I slam my fist against it. “Open the door. We need to talk about this. What did she tell you?”

  I can hear her opening and closing drawers. “She showed me photos, Jamie!”

  The wardrobe creaks in a way I’m familiar with, something I keep promising to get fixed. Creak, and that means she’s gone, the love of my life.

  I’ve ruined it. I’ve ruined everything.

  “What photos?”

  “Of your little dates. In the cinema. At bars.”

  “They were client meet—”

  Something smashes against the door, the reverberation moving up my arm. “Don’t fucking lie to me! She showed me the video. Silky, silky, silky! You’re pathetic!”

  No, no, no. Please no. Please, Hazel. It’s me and you. I love you. Please don’t let it end like this. “I’m sorry.” My words crack with a sob.

  She throws the door open and folds her arms, glaring at me, her eyes red from crying. But her lips are razor-straight and there’s no pity behind the tears. She looks like she hates me. “Are you seriously going to try waterworks, you cheating fuck? Do you actually think that’s going to change anything?”

  “Millicent isn’t what you think—”

  “She’s a killer and you’re a cheater. I don’t want anything to do with either of you. Clearly this is your mess. Clearly I don’t know what’s going on in my own marriage. I’m going to stay with Trish.”

  “Hazel, please.”

  I follow her when she paces away. The sight of our bedroom causes more tears to stream hotly down my cheeks. The lamps are lit, a soft yellow glow, and it’s late. I should be holding her in bed, stroking her hair to help her fall asleep. Or making her a snack to soak up the alcohol. Or something, anything other than what’s happening.

  She shoves clothes into her suitcase. “Stop crying, Jamie.”

  “Let me come with you.”

  “To Trish’s?” She laughs bitterly. “I don’t think you’ll be welcome when I tell her what you’ve done, when I show her.”

  “Somewhere else, anywhere else. You don’t understand. You don’t know who she is. She’s been blackmailing me. She’s killed people. She’s—”

  “I. Don’t. Care.” Haze
l glares at me for a moment before shoving another handful into the suitcase. “What we have – what we had – I thought it was pure, perfect. I didn’t think anything could touch it. The way we met, what we’ve been through, what we agreed… It was never this. It was never supposed to be this.”

  “I can be better. I promise. I can change.”

  “Change? Change? I didn’t know you needed to change. You’ve had your dick inside another woman. There’s no coming back from that. You were never meant to fuck them, Jamie. Never. That was the deal. They were never supposed to know you existed.”

  “Julia wasn’t one of them,” I rush to say. “She was just a whore.”

  “Oh, charming. Okay, if she was a whore, I suppose it’s all right. God, you’re such a pig. I can’t believe I ever loved you. We’re getting a divorce. I want you to know that.”

  “She knows, H.”

  “I know. She showed me the photos.”

  “No… about me, about what I do. She knows. That’s how she’s been blackmailing me. That’s how this started.”

  “Why would you think I care now? This is none of my business. You’re both sick. Whatever this is between you, I want nothing to do with it. I bet you’ve been fucking her too, haven’t you?”

  “No.” My belly churns in disgust. I hate that I was ever attracted to her. “Never. I wouldn’t.”

  “Why, she doesn’t look enough like your mother, hmm?”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Fair would be pushing you off the fucking Clifton Suspension Bridge, so shut up about fair.”

  “Give me a minute to explain—”

  Sudden darkness.

  The lamps have switched off. The hallway light has gone dead. The house seems quieter.

  “What the hell?” I can barely make Hazel out by the light from the window, pale through the curtains, the faint outline of her frown and the glint of her hateful eyes. “Power cut? I wonder if any of the other houses—”

  “This is her, H.”

  “What?”

  “This is Millie. I’m sure of it. That bitch. That psycho bitch.”

  “Jamie, don’t overreact—”

  “Did you shut the door?”

  “I don’t know. No, I don’t think so. I was a little distracted by you being a cheating piece of shit.” Her silhouette trembles. “Do you really think it’s her?”

  “Lock yourself in the en suite and call the police. I’ll go and check.”

  “I can’t call the police. She’ll release the video. I’ll be humiliated.”

  “Would you rather be humiliated or fucking dead?”

  “You’ll be humiliated too. The whole world will learn your twisted little secret. I won’t be the only one to suffer.”

  “Just hide,” I say, hardly recognising my own wife. She’s never spoken to me like this before. “I’ll keep us safe.”

  “Sure. Because you’ve done such a great job so far.”

  49

  Before

  Diana – Comrade Philip’s wife – was weeping, and it was because her son was dead.

  “Umberto!”

  She was inconsolable as she gripped onto the railing of her porch, unable to stand, unable to believe life would ever get better, because her son was dead and life would always be tinged with darkness. Her son had fallen off the cliffs and broken his little sprite’s bones and his head had exploded and he was dead. He had fallen off the cliffs, the silly boy: the silly beautiful little sprite.

  Millicent watched from the top window, with precious William in her arms, so cute with his glistening green eyes, the brightest eyes she’d ever seen, emerald-green: they shone and they stared up at Millicent with such adoration she sometimes wept. William agreed it was right, what had happened, what Umberto the little sprite had received: the punishment.

  “You shouldn’t smile,” Charles said, pacing into the room, with his tangled beard and his tangled soul and his eyes hazy from the pipe, from both pipes: the wooden and the glass.

  “I wasn’t smiling, Charles,” Millicent told him. “It’s very sad. I feel awful for her. I hate the sound of crying. That’s why I hold William so often. You know how he gets otherwise.”

  Charles scowled, but it was true. William cried far less when he was in his older sister’s arms. That was a problem for him, like the death of the little sprite Umberto was a problem. Comrade Philip was just as torn up about Bertie’s death as his wife. And Charles was just as torn up about this troubling relationship Millicent and William had formed, almost a sibling relationship, which was wrong, which disproved – which tried to disprove – what he had created here.

  There were no brothers. There were no sisters. There were cattle and non-cattle. Why then did he feel sorrow for Philip and Diana? They should not have doted on the little sprite, for he belonged to all of them and none of them.

  Charles was a hypocrite. It was as simple as that. But he would never think of himself in those terms.

  He would fix this, and he would fix it in a way that would cure both his problems at the same time: he would use his vast funds to arrange for Diana and Philip to be given new names, complete with believable histories, and these identities would sustain them in their new life. If they refused he would set the Comrades on them for daring to question him, for he was not only Comrade Charles. He was Master.

  William would go missing and it would be a tragedy, but it was only a tragedy by conventional standards. Charles would do a good thing. He would give his only son as a gift.

  What nobody but Charles and a select few of his loyal Comrades understood was how right this was, on a fundamental level, because he knew, and some of the others knew, that Millicent was broken. It was Millicent who had pushed the boy off the cliffs. They couldn’t prove it and the little demon was too shrewd to give anything away, but everybody knew it.

  This was how this wicked man thought about his own daughter, designing ways to steal the only gleaming moments of happiness she had ever experienced.

  So it came to pass one evening, when the cul-de-sac was quiet and stroked by moonlight – and the moonlight was very blue and very real and it cast shadows across the moment – Diana and Philip transferred their belongings to a second-hand Nissan Micra.

  Charles carried William to the car and handed him over to Diana, and Diana flinched, but she knew better than to question Master’s decision, even if this decision was questionable and this bundle of pink-cheeked flesh could never replace her little sprite, not her Bertie, but Master said it, so it must be so, and it was so.

  Her name was Penny now, and Philip was called Frederick, and the child would become Jamie.

  Millicent watched from the porch, something shattering and burning in her chest, and it scorched and it went deep inside of her, to a place that would never be remade.

  The shape of his back, the broadness of his shoulders, the back of his head… his footsteps.

  Clip-clip-clip, her father’s footsteps were so loud on the concrete as he carried her brother, her sweet William, her green-eyed angel to the second-hand car.

  Millicent waited for him to cry, he with the glistening green eyes, because surely he’d cry: he had to. He only fell silent and content when she was cradling him.

  Why wasn’t he crying?

  It wasn’t fair. If he cried – like she was crying, with tears burning down her cheeks – they’d know it wasn’t right and he had to stay with his sister.

  But he refused. Millicent hated him.

  “We’re dead to you.” Charles stared at Comrade Philip – at Frederick – with intense eyes above his scraggly beard. “Do you understand? Forget we exist. You know what happens otherwise.”

  Frederick glared at Charles, and Frederick was old and his wife was young and he was half the terror in the Rainbow Room, and he glared at Master before lowering his eyes like cowed cattle. “I understand.”

  “What do you understand?”

  “You have recordings of me, Master.” His young wife s
tared at him in disgust, as she held the unwanted child and hated this man she’d tethered herself to, and who she was desperate to get away from. “Confessions. And you’ll release them.”

  “That’s right.” Charles smiled kindly, maliciously. “Now go on your way.”

  The family climbed into the Micra and they drove from the cul-de-sac and down the street, and by the time they reached the motorway, maybe they could pretend they were a family and not three unconnected people in a second-hand car with rust creeping up the doors and rust creeping into their thoughts when they considered the future laid out before them: laid out like a road, the road over which they glided, a road they did not want to travel.

  “I loved him,” Millicent whispered when her father walked up the porch steps.

  “There is no love.” Charles lit his pipe and his eyes glowed in the tobacco flame. “There is no hate. When will you understand, little lamb?”

  “But I loved him.”

  “Pathetic.” Charles grunted, walking inside.

  Millicent watched him go, fists clenched, and she knew what she had to do.

  She’d wait. And then she’d make him pay. She’d make them all pay.

  This date would forever be scarred into her memory, and when she was old enough to act upon her genius, she would scar it into her flesh. She would never allow herself to forget.

  Why didn’t he cry?

  She closed her eyes and she saw it again. She heard it again.

  The shape of his back, the broadness of his shoulders, the back of his head… his footsteps.

  Clip-clip-clip, so loud on the concrete.

  50

  Millicent

  Once upon a time I believed I could find the light, that ungraspable quality which has danced beyond my reach all my life. I believed with every ounce of my predator’s being somewhere, somehow, I could step into the golden glow and close my eyes and allow the lighted power to illume my eyelids like a blazing blood-red firework.