Last of the Magpies

by Mark Edwards

  There were spiders in glass cases. That was fine. They couldn’t get her. She found herself bending low to examine them, something she wouldn’t have been able to do before. And then Jim had asked who wanted to enter the ‘In with the Spiders’ exhibit, and she was amazed to find herself volunteering. She took a deep breath as she went in, expecting to feel that familiar wobble in her legs, the ice in her belly. There, hanging above her head, were several large spiders – golden orbs, according to Jim – and she found herself regarding them without fear. She took a couple of photos on her phone and experienced a surge of elation. She had done it. She had conquered her fear! With new confidence, she strode to the next room, where a number of tarantulas squatted in glass cases.

  ‘So, who wants to hold one?’ Jim asked, and Kirsty again volunteered.

  It sat motionless on her palm, heavier than she’d imagined, the fur on its legs tickling her skin. She grinned at the woman beside her, who was also holding a tarantula.

  ‘Maybe I’ll get one as a pet,’ the woman said.

  ‘Or perhaps not.’ They both laughed.

  She put the tarantula down and entered the final space, feeling great about herself.

  But then came the final task. Jim stood behind a table and told them he was going to release a house spider and wanted them to catch it beneath a container. Kirsty stood back and watched a middle-aged man take a turn. Jim released a small brown spider, it skittered across the table top . . . and Kirsty felt the familiar lurch in her stomach.

  The spider was too much like the one Lucy had dropped on her. It was too familiar. Seeing it run, she was able to feel it crawling on her flesh. For a long moment, she was back in that room. Helpless. Terrified. The courage she had built up over the last few hours deserted her and she could hardly breathe.

  She fled the room, pushing past the people who tried to stop her. She needed to get out, away from the spiders, away from all those lucky bastards who hadn’t been through what she had.

  Now here she was, going home to her flat, praying she wouldn’t see a spider. Hating herself and Lucy and, yes, hating Jamie for causing the whole thing to happen.

  And then something strange happened, a coincidence that wasn’t so odd really – she knew he lived around here – but as the bus stopped in traffic on Upper Street she looked down from the top deck and saw him, Jamie, just moments after thinking about him.

  He was talking to a woman with flame-red hair. Who was she? Did Jamie finally have a new girlfriend? That would be good. It would mean he’d finally got the message. Although she would be happier if his new girlfriend weren’t quite so attractive.

  But then, just as she was wondering where that thought had come from, she realised she recognised the redhead. It was that cop, the one from Shropshire. DI Evans.

  What the hell was Jamie doing with her?

  Kirsty was about to run down to the lower deck and ask the driver to let her out, when the traffic shifted and the bus moved on. By the time they reached the next stop she had calmed down. And it was obvious what he was doing with DI Evans, wasn’t it?

  He was talking to her about bloody Lucy.

  And in that moment, she made a decision. She still saw Jamie occasionally, but now, she realised with sadness, it was going to have to stop. Jamie was the link between her and Lucy, and while that link existed she would never be free of the pain of the past.

  If she was going to get over her fears, if she was ever going to be strong enough to get through the rest of her life, she needed to say goodbye to him again.

  And this time, she vowed, there would be no turning back.

  3

  Extract from An Innocent Woman, unseen first draft, by Lucy Newton

  My mother loved me with all her heart, and died before I had a chance to break it.

  In an early memory I am standing in front of the big mirror in her bedroom, wearing a pretty frock and a bonnet, with Mum standing behind me telling me how beautiful I am. In the memory she puts her arms around me and pulls me tight against her, kissing my cheek. She smells of Chanel No. 5 (Dad always bought her a small bottle for Christmas and she would eke it out over the whole year) and her skin is soft against mine. But I squirm away, which makes her frown. She doesn’t tell me off or try to grab hold of me again. She only looks sad, disappointed.

  That makes me smile, though I imagine she thinks my smile is directed at our cat, Purity, who has just entered the room. Purity is midnight black, like a starless sky. My parents allowed me to name her, seeming surprised when their four-year-old came up with such a poetic moniker. The memory ends with Purity squeaking as I hug her as tight as I can.

  That cat was my only friend. She didn’t mind me carrying her all around the house, dressing her up, brushing her long fur. I would feed her contraband ham and chicken from the fridge. In return, she would bring me gifts: dead mice and birds, the occasional small rat. Sometimes she brought me dead frogs, and once she even dropped what I thought was a snake on my bedroom carpet, though I later learned it was a slowworm. I kept all her gifts. I put them in little transparent Ziploc bags and stored them in a trunk beneath my bed. I will never forget how my mother screamed when she found them, this rotting collection of animal corpses, and the hysterical overreaction that followed. The trunk was burned. The room fumigated. My father forbade my mother from telling anyone.

  ‘She’s only five,’ he said. ‘She’ll grow out of it.’

  From that point on, when Purity brought me a gift I would bury it in the garden.

  I suppose it was what normal people would call a happy childhood. I was pleased to be an only child, relieved when my mother wept each month in my father’s arms. Dad said we should be pleased that we had me and I agreed with him. Wasn’t I enough? In the end, when my parents gave up trying – although I would still hear the headboard banging against the wall sometimes – Mum did what was right and proper and gave all her maternal love to me. She was generous with that love too. I would leaf through her catalogues and choose whichever toys I wanted and she would buy them for me. It was fun and easy to manipulate her, to bend her to my will. For example, I would insist on only eating white food for a week: rice and mashed potato, bread and cauliflower, served with a glass of milk. If she put anything colourful in front of me, I would scream the house down.

  Dad was harder to manipulate, partly because he was hardly ever there. He worked long hours and came home after dark. He was not particularly affectionate, which suited me. Sometimes I would catch him staring at me, as if he wasn’t quite sure who or what I was. He would tell me off for ‘mauling’ the cat. One day I found a stash of magazines containing pictures of naked women in his shed and told him that next time he scolded me I would inform Mum about the magazines. I knew Mum suffered from insecurity and could be horribly jealous. These pictures of women with their legs spread, which fascinated me, would have sent her off the deep end. Dad told me to go to my room, but he never snapped at me about manhandling Purity again.

  I didn’t like school. It seemed pointless. My teachers were endlessly frustrated with me, unable to understand how a ‘bright girl’ could produce such lousy work. At parents’ evening, a teacher called Miss Marriott said something like, ‘Lucy doesn’t seem to have any desire to please.’

  And she was right. While I saw the class swots’ eyes shine with joy when they received praise and merits, it did nothing for me. I found reading boring, maths easy but dull, and the only subject that brought me to life in any way was biology. I was fascinated by how bodies worked and liked to picture the blood and organs rushing and pumping beneath my and other people’s flesh. I enjoyed watching the other girls squirm and fuss when we were made to dissect a frog. They were so pathetic, and my opinion of the female half of the species hasn’t changed much since, though most men are just as weak, to be fair.

  I rarely completed my homework. In desperation, not wanting me to be expelled, Mum did it for me, imitating my handwriting rather skilfully. I preferred to spend my w
eekends and evenings in front of the TV, and I loved old films. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? All About Eve. These movies were filled with fascinating, strong women, doing whatever they had to. Sometimes my weekends would be interrupted by tedious family outings to awful events like Disney on Ice, or, worst of all, the zoo. I liked the big cats and could have spent all day watching the lions and leopards, but I despised the other animals. (Penguins, with their comical walk and devotion to their young, still make me want to vomit.) I fantasised about the lions escaping and devouring the snotty, chocolate-smeared children who gawped at them.

  We would often be accompanied on these trips by Mum’s sister and her daughter, Sharon. Cousin Sharon was a few years younger than me, and when I was a young teenager my parents would leave me to ‘look after’ her. At first I was horrified. She would ask endless stupid questions and try to get me to join in with these clod-hopping dance routines she devised herself. She was convinced she was going to be a famous pop star, despite having no talent and a face that only the most desperate paedophile would admire. I was only able to endure her company by making her cry. Telling her things that her friends and other members of the family had supposedly said about her. Mocking her ambitions and doing whatever I could to chip away at her confidence. I’m not sure if I can take full credit but she killed herself when she was thirteen. Everybody made a terrible fuss and my mum and aunt wept like war widows. (My aunt never recovered and, a decade later, drank herself into an early grave.)

  There was only one person in my family and immediate circle who understood me. My Great-Aunt Nessa. She was in her seventies when I was born. She lived on the top floor of a mansion house in Dulwich, a short journey from our house in Bromley. Sometimes my parents would leave me with her when they wanted to go into town without a child bothering them. I enjoyed these visits very much. Great-Aunt Nessa and I would watch Bette Davis films. Her favourite was Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte. I loved it too, especially the part where Charlotte crushes the doctor and his girlfriend with a large stone urn.

  Nessa would feed me Jaffa Cakes and Battenberg and allow me to suck the sugar lumps she kept in a china bowl. She also had a parrot called Enoch that lived in a cage in her living room. Although the bird repulsed me, with its beady eyes and habit of walking around in its own shit, it was fun teaching it lines of Bette Davis dialogue. I’m Mama’s little devil. Aunt Nessa had already taught the parrot to yell ‘Rape! Rape!’ whenever he heard the postman. It was funny.

  One rainy afternoon when Mum and Dad were shopping and I was about twelve, Great-Aunt Nessa sat me down and said, ‘Lucy, I won’t be around for much longer. The cigarettes have finally got me.’ She had a terrible hacking cough by this point, and I would hear her spitting into the sink in her little bathroom with its sign that said IF YOU SPRINKLE WHEN YOU TINKLE / BE A SWEETIE, WIPE THE SEATIE.

  I blinked up at her.

  ‘You’ll be a woman soon,’ Nessa said, glancing at my chest. ‘You’re pretty and boys will start to show an interest.’

  ‘I don’t like boys,’ I said, hurriedly adding, ‘I’m not gay though.’

  Nessa’s laugh crackled. ‘I wouldn’t be so quick to restrict yourself, Lucy. The world is full of delights and one shouldn’t close off any avenues. As far as I’m concerned there are only two things that make life sufferable, and one of them is physical pleasure.’

  She went on before I could ask what the other thing was. ‘Before I snuff it, I want to leave you with a word or two of advice. Have fun, play the field, but be sure to keep an eye out for somebody like-minded. Somebody who enjoys the things you enjoy.’ She glanced over at a photo on the mantelpiece, showing her and my Great-Uncle Howard, who had died before I was born. He had magnificent eyebrows and a cold black stare. ‘You’re like me, Lucy. You’re different, and that means most people won’t understand you.’

  I nodded and felt myself grow hot. This was something I had come to realise already, of course, but it still felt good to hear it.

  ‘It’s safer for special people like us to team up with someone of a like mind. And remember, never show your true self until you are absolutely sure the other person is the same as you. Do you understand?’

  ‘I’m Mama’s little devil,’ squawked Enoch.

  We laughed, and I basked in the golden echo of her words.

  You’re special, Lucy.

  And I recalled her advice clearly when, years later, I met a young man called Christopher Newton.

  4

  Jamie had only been home ten minutes when there was a light knock at his door. He knew who it would be but still peered through the peephole, just in case. It was important to remain vigilant, even if, sometimes, there seemed to be a fine line between vigilance and paranoia.

  Jamie opened the door to find Anthony with an expectant look on his face. It was dark in the hallway behind him and, as ever, the smell of carpet freshener and damp drifted in. There were cobwebs on the ceiling and the lights were always cutting out. Jamie missed his clean, bright apartment in Fremantle, which he had decided not to return to until Lucy had been found and dealt with. And not until – though he was embarrassed to admit it, even to himself – he knew there was not even a one per cent chance that he and Kirsty would get back together.

  ‘So?’ Anthony asked, following Jamie into the flat and accepting a beer. ‘How did it go? What did the detective say?’

  They took a seat at the little table in the kitchen and Jamie filled him in.

  ‘She agrees with me that Lucy is probably still in the country. But she doesn’t think anyone from the forum helped her.’

  ‘But someone must be helping her,’ Anthony said, rubbing the blond stubble on his chin.

  ‘Yes. But we have no way of finding out who.’

  They fell into silence, and Jamie, not for the first time, was pleased to have someone to talk to about all this stuff, someone who wasn’t emotionally invested. Anthony reminded Jamie a little of his old friend Mike, who he’d worked with at ETN, though Anthony was sweeter and more naive. He lived two doors down from Jamie, and they had met when there was a power cut in the building one night and all the residents had gathered in the hallways, swapping candles and torches and bitching about the landlord. When the lights came back on, Anthony – who looked like he ought to be surfing in Cornwall not working as a Deliveroo driver in North London – had tilted his head and studied Jamie.

  ‘I’m sure I know you from somewhere,’ Anthony had said.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  But then it had turned out that Anthony was slightly obsessed with true crime and he recognised Jamie from all the press coverage that had accompanied last year’s events. There had even been a documentary about it on TV back in January. Jamie had refused to take part but his photo was still broadcast to the nation, just as it had been when he stood trial for Chris’s murder.

  The next night, Anthony had showed up on Jamie’s doorstep with a six-pack of craft beer, ostensibly because he wanted to say thanks to Jamie for lending him a torch. But really, Jamie soon discovered, Anthony wanted to talk about Lucy and to share his insights. At first, after what had happened with Anita, Jamie had been deeply suspicious. Was Anthony a spy for Lucy? A Newtonite who was trying to get information out of him? But soon he had learned to trust his new neighbour and found he enjoyed the way Anthony would listen to him with rapt attention.

  ‘The police are bloody useless,’ Anthony said now.

  ‘No. I just think Lucy’s too clever for them,’ Jamie replied. ‘And they don’t have the resources to keep searching for her.’

  He got up and went into the living room, with Anthony following. Jamie opened his laptop and went on to the Crimestoppers website, immediately navigating to the ‘Most Wanted’ page. There was Lucy, one of the few women in this rogue’s gallery.

  ‘They’re going to leave her here on the most wanted list and hope somebody spots her,’ he said.

  ‘That’s shit.’

  ‘Tell me a
bout it.’

  Anthony took a seat on the sofa. ‘It must be possible to find her. It must be. You know . . .’

  He trailed off and Jamie said, ‘Know what?’

  ‘Well . . . I went to that event last weekend. Remember the one I was telling you about?’

  ‘The Real Crime Con?’ Jamie tried not to roll his eyes. Anthony had attempted to get him to go along, telling him that they would jump at the chance of having him there as a ‘celebrity’ guest. Jamie couldn’t think of anything worse. What kind of people would think of him as a celebrity? He knew the answer: those who spent all their free time listening to true crime podcasts, and reading books and online articles about so-called miscarriages of justice and grisly murder cases. People who had taken their interest in Serial and Making a Murderer to the next level. Some of them, no doubt, were members of the Dark Angel forum.

  Anthony was right. These people would go crazy for the chance to hear him talk about his experiences with one of the UK’s most prolific serial killers. A month after Lucy’s escape, a literary agent had approached Jamie and Kirsty and asked them if they wanted to write a book, to give their side of the story. It was the same agent, in fact, who had sold the rights to Lucy’s memoir. Jamie and Kirsty had both told him to piss off.

  Jamie realised he hadn’t been listening to Anthony, who was saying something about a podcaster he’d met at the conference.

  ‘Her eyes lit up when I told her I know you,’ Anthony said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry . . . I didn’t give her any details or tell her anything you’ve said to me in private.’ He cleared his throat.

  ‘Wait. Who is this woman?’ Jamie asked.

  ‘Her name’s Emma Fox. She has this podcast called Silent Voices. It’s huge, one of the biggest in Britain.’ Anthony explained that, in each series, Emma concentrated on a single case. The last one had focused on the murder of a university student for which her boyfriend had been imprisoned, but thanks to Emma’s investigation the case was being looked at again.