The Good Samaritan

by John Marrs

  Only then did I understand what a wonderful gift my father had given me. He’d loved me with such intensity that he wanted our family to live on inside me, the strongest member of our unit. No matter where I was or what I did with the rest of my life, his act had allowed me to hold them all inside me where they would never have to suffer loss or pain.

  I padded around the house for days, waiting patiently in case I was wrong and they reappeared from Dad’s bedroom. Sometimes I made the most of having the television to myself, and sat watching dramas and Children’s BBC. But it all came to an abrupt end when my English teacher appeared at the front door to ask why I’d been absent from school for the best part of a week.

  Later, when the police cars and ambulances arrived, I was kept behind a closed living room door as a policewoman in uniform held my hand and told me everything would be all right. She was lying. She couldn’t have known that.

  I glanced out of the window at the neighbours huddling together on their driveways, puzzled as to what terrible thing had happened in their street that required so many flashing blue lights. Some held each other tightly when black plastic bags containing my family were stretchered out.

  ‘That poor little lass!’ I heard one exclaim as I was led out, too. The only person not to feel sorry for me was me.

  In the following weeks and months, people in authority kept asking me how I was feeling, if I understood what had happened, whether I wanted to talk about it or if I needed anything. I didn’t tell anyone about capturing my family’s last breaths because they wouldn’t understand, nor would they comprehend that thanks to my dad it would become my purpose to help and carry other lost souls inside me when and wherever I came across them.

  Six years of foster homes then group homes – some good and some not so good – didn’t do any lasting damage to me in the end. Sylvia taught me how to hide in plain sight, and Nate showed me the value of finding an anchor that keeps you in place despite the storms engulfing you.

  The sharpness of the wind around the hotel roof made my eyes water, but I was feeling empowered and leaned further over the railings, balancing on my tiptoes. It might only take a rogue gust to tip me over the edge. But fate hadn’t intervened and it wasn’t my time. I still had work to do. Steven needed me, as would others.

  Early this evening he would call me for the last time and we’d run through my plan. There might not be anyone to hear me when I breathed my last, but I’d ensure there was somebody who cared enough to be there for his.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  SEVEN MONTHS, ONE WEEK AFTER DAVID

  The interior of my Mini was almost silent but for the hum of the engine and the vehicles I passed. I maintained a speed a little below the legal limit of 30 mph so that a road camera wouldn’t catch me.

  Occasionally the clipped accent voicing my satnav broke the quiet, but I was anxious that nothing else would remove me from the calm, collected headspace I needed to maintain on the approach to Steven’s house.

  Before I left home, I’d texted the girls to tell them I was going to be at the office a little later than planned, but they must have run out of phone credit as I hadn’t heard back from them. I picked a coat to wear with deep pockets on the inside and outside. These I stuffed with gloves, a battery-operated torch, a packet of wet wipes and a steak knife, just to be on the safe side. And as each half-mile counted down to my arrival, my heart pounded faster and faster.

  I’d called Steven’s recently purchased disposable phone from the office at six o’clock, as agreed, to get his address, and immediately I’d typed the postcode into an app that offered me an aerial view of the road and another taken from street level. It was as he described. Then I’d visited a property website to view photos posted online the last time the house was up for sale. It was a potentially attractive house but quite shabby. However, Steven had warned me that since purchasing it, his worsening depression meant his interest in keeping it maintained had waned. I looked at the floor plan and his bedroom was where he’d told me.

  I’d spent the week preparing myself for the moment I was to meet with him in person for the first and last time. It would be nerve-wracking and thrilling to watch as he slipped a rope around his neck using the method I’d suggested, then stepped off the chair and let gravity and nature take its course. His death would be better than anything I had ever imagined I’d get out of joining End of the Line.

  I’d prepared myself for what to expect during and after Steven’s death by surfing Internet images of the lifeless, contorted bodies of people who’d chosen the same route. Each one differed from the next. I looked closely at grooves made by ligatures around throats; bloody, crimson-frothed nostrils and mouths; elongated necks; prominent eyes with dilated pupils; swollen tongues and clenched hands. I watched videos that foreign terrorists had uploaded of public hangings, slow suffocations and strangulations. But no pictures, footage or descriptive text could prepare me for the final expression on Steven’s face. And, of course, his last breath.

  It felt like an age, but I’d only been behind the wheel for twenty minutes when I arrived on the outskirts of a village. KENTON – PLEASE DRIVE CAREFULLY, a sign read. I followed the satnav’s directions towards clumps of houses set back from the road.

  ‘You have reached your destination,’ the satnav voice said, so I pulled over, turned off the engine and remained for a moment, staring at house number 11 just a little further ahead and to the right of me. My fingers involuntarily wrapped around the arc of the steering wheel to prevent me from sinking so deeply into my seat that I could never climb out.

  I looked closely at Steven’s house. Some of the slate roof tiles were askew or needed replacing and the white paint on the window frames was flaking. The garden was overgrown and a wooden gate had fallen from its hinges and was propped up against an unkempt hedge. A porch on the right-hand side had a pitched roof and a front door you couldn’t see from the road.

  I glanced at my watch: it was 7.50 p.m. and I was due inside in ten minutes. Now that I was here and the place was in view, my fear rose, causing my legs to tremble like they were trying to keep up with the ever-increasing beat of my heart. Try as I might, I couldn’t keep them still. Dusk was enveloping the village and it gave my mission a more sinister feel.

  ‘Calm yourself, Laura,’ I spoke out loud. ‘Remain in control and think of your anchor.’

  But not even Henry could help me now.

  I remained where I was for the time being until I was sure I hadn’t been seen. I wasn’t naive to the risks of what I was doing. A tiny, rational portion of my brain held on to my initial suspicions about Steven’s motives in having me there. And that part urged me to sit outside his house a little bit longer to confirm this wasn’t some kind of sick joke. If it was, Steven’s storytelling put mine to shame.

  I craved a cigarette and began to nibble the skin around my fingernails as I questioned what I was doing there. Nobody was twisting my arm to go inside; if I just turned over the ignition and drove away, I’d be safe at home within minutes. That’s what a sensible, cautious person would do. That’s what Mary would have done. But she was weak, and I was not like her and would never be. And the lure of what was going to happen under that roof was all too powerful for me to ignore. I had to go inside.

  I slipped on my brown leather gloves so as not to leave fingerprints on anything I touched, and walked cautiously up a gravel path, passing windows with drawn curtains. I looked up at the only illuminated window, on the first floor, where Steven had said he’d be waiting.

  The door was ajar and I pushed it open, then took a deep breath and stepped over the threshold. I fished out my torch and directed the beam towards various closed doors. The only pieces of furniture in the porch and hallway were a small table with some dried flowers in a vase and a wooden chair. Propping the front door open with the chair, in case I needed to beat a hasty retreat, I slid my hand into my pocket and gripped the handle of the knife.

  As agreed, Steven would meet
me in his bedroom. I climbed the stairs, one at a time, each of them creaking as if to announce my arrival. On the landing, I paused to take another breath, then made my way towards the only door with a faint light shining under it.

  ‘Steven?’ I whispered from beneath the architrave. I scoured the dimly lit room but he was nowhere to be seen. In fact, the room was empty – there was no bed, no wardrobe, no chest of drawers. Just a wallpapered, almost bare room with a lamp on the floor. I looked up and the vaulted ceiling had beams like Steven had described, and I saw the rope attached. It moved ever so slightly from the draught of the open door. Alarm bells sounded in my head.

  This is all wrong. Where is he? This wasn’t what we agreed. Get out of here!

  Fear crawled from the small of my back, up my spine and towards my shoulders, wrapping itself around my neck like a snake and squeezing my throat. I wanted to run away so badly but I was too frightened to move. Suddenly something caught my eye. I paused to squint at it until it came into focus, and my stomach fell.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ I whispered, and clasped the knife even more tightly. Instead of finding a man I’d promised to help in the last moments of his life, I was confronted by something shocking in the patterns of the wallpaper. I realised I wasn’t looking at wallpaper at all. It was hundreds of photographs of me.

  Me walking up the steps and into the office. Me in my street. Me driving. Me on a spin bike at the gym. Me pushing a trolley around the supermarket. Me through the kitchen window. Me sitting in the coffee shop in town. Me entering the Hartley Hotel car park. From what I could see, every picture appeared to be different; Steven must have been following me for weeks.

  It got worse, because I wasn’t the only focus of the lens. Tony had been caught boxing at the gym and going to his office. There were also my children on their way to school. Me watching Alice in the playground with her friends. Effie in the passenger seat of a boy’s car. Henry in the residential home’s community lounge as I combed his hair. To take some of the photographs, Steven must have been standing just a couple of feet behind me and I hadn’t known.

  Instinct and fear made me grab at them, yanking them down by the fistful, cramming them into my pockets or throwing them to the floor as if doing that would be enough to wake me from the nightmare. But there were too many to dispose of. And if Steven had gone to all this trouble to scare me, what else might he be capable of?

  ‘Don’t you like your picture being taken?’

  I spun around quickly in the direction of Steven’s voice, which seemed to come out of nowhere. A figure was standing in the doorway, the darkness of the hall masking his face. He stepped forward two paces so I could see him more clearly, and I moved backwards. His hands were by his side and I now could make out the intensity of his stare.

  ‘I’ve gone to a lot of effort,’ he continued, his speech firm and confident, much more so than I’d ever heard him by phone. ‘I spent weeks following you and your family around. The least you can do is appreciate them.’

  I took another step back into the bedroom, but realised that in doing so, he was cornering me. I struggled to breathe. It was like someone was choking me.

  ‘What . . . what do you want from me?’ I eventually stammered.

  ‘I want you to tell me why you manipulate vulnerable people and what you get out of it,’ he responded. ‘And none of that wanting to “help people who’ve fallen by the road” bullshit.’

  He moved towards me, so I tugged the knife from my pocket and held it in front of me. The dim light in the room kept catching the silver blade as my hand shook. I could see Steven’s face more clearly now. It wasn’t as menacing as he sounded, but his body language terrified me.

  He laughed mockingly as he looked at the knife. ‘You are many things, Laura Morris, but you don’t have the guts to actually kill anyone with your own bare hands. You do it from behind a telephone or a keyboard. Me, however . . . well, I’m an unknown quantity, aren’t I? You don’t know what I’m capable of.’

  ‘Don’t come any closer,’ I said. My groin suddenly felt warm and I realised I was wetting myself, but I couldn’t stop. ‘Let me go. Please.’

  ‘You think saying please is going to help you out of this? You aren’t going anywhere, Laura. You see that rope? It’s not me who’s going to be hanging from the beams tonight. It’s you.’

  I stretched my arm out further, waving the knife at him. Only he edged closer to me, so he was just a couple of feet away. I stepped backwards again until I reached the wall.

  ‘Go on then, Laura, do your best. I’ve got nothing to lose because you have taken everything I had away from me already.’

  It felt like someone had pressed pause on the moment; neither of us showing our hand or making the next move. Then suddenly Steven went to grab my wrist, his fingers digging in until they felt like they were going to break the bone. I yelled as he pulled me around and twisted my other arm behind my back and pushed me towards the rope. I struggled to break free, but he held me tighter and my fingers began to lose their grip on the knife until it fell to the floor.

  ‘Don’t worry, Laura. It’s not going to take long. The noose has been tied in exactly the way you told me to do it, at exactly the right height for a swift death.’

  ‘Please, Steven,’ I begged. ‘Whatever I’ve done to you, I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s too late for that.’

  ‘I have children . . . I’m a mother . . .’

  ‘And they’d be better off without you.’

  He grabbed the rope with his other hand and started to put it over my head. So I seized the opportunity to elbow him in the groin and kick his shin hard. The shock made him loosen his grip on my arm, just enough for me to shake completely free. I bent down, grabbed the knife, turned in his direction and thrust it blindly in front of me. It only stopped when I felt his hand grasp my wrist again and the knife went no further. But as I went to hit him with my free hand, he suddenly dropped to his knees. He looked up at me and then down at his stomach. My knife was embedded in him.

  I froze – I had just stabbed the man I’d come to watch die. And while none of it had played out like it was supposed to, I had no desire to remain there any longer or even hear his last breath. Because what if he wasn’t alone? What if there were others waiting in the house? I needed to protect myself.

  While Steven remained kneeling on the floor, groaning and clearly in pain, I bent over and, before he could prevent me, yanked the knife from his stomach. He screamed and fell to his side, shouting something but I couldn’t make out the words.

  Then with all the strength I could muster, I ran from the room and along the landing. But without the torch lighting my way, in my panic I misjudged the first step on the staircase and hit the ridge of the second. I fell forward, head and body first, and my cheekbone smacked the base of the banister. Then I tumbled in a sideways motion, catching my forehead against the handrail as my body crumpled in a U-shape and came to a halt close to the bottom. Lying still, dazed and confused as to what had just happened, I only pulled myself together when I heard groaning and Steven dragging himself across the floorboards upstairs.

  With all my remaining strength, I pulled myself to my feet with both hands gripping the handrail, and moved as quickly as I could towards the front door. Stumbling back into my car, I locked the doors and forced my key into the ignition. The wheels spun as I pulled away as fast as the Mini would allow.

  RYAN

  CHAPTER ONE

  Drumming my fingers against the steering wheel in time with the beat of a song playing on the radio and singing at the top of my voice, I was pretty pleased I could still remember all the words to Justin Timberlake’s ‘SexyBack’ more than a decade after it played the night I met Charlotte at the student union bar.

  She’d been dancing to it with a group of her friends when I saw her, then sparked up a drunken conversation. Lately, when she was going through one of her funks, I could still make her smile by dancing around the bedroom naked, miming
along to the song, the irony being that bringing sexy back was pretty much the exact opposite of what I was doing.

  I remembered her admitting on one of our first dates that she had a crush on Justin from his *NSYNC days. And after a few Jägerbombs, she confessed how, when she was a girl, she’d scribble out the face of his then-girlfriend Britney Spears in her mum’s gossip mags and pretend that she was dating him. I hoped her teenage self wouldn’t be too disappointed she was now Mrs Ryan Smith and not Mrs Timberlake.

  I stopped the car at a red light and my eyes wandered uphill to Northampton’s skyline of new-build offices and high-rise flats. I’d been born and raised here and remembered how once, when it had felt so small and claustrophobic, I couldn’t wait to break out on my own. It only took a couple of terms at the University of Sunderland before I understood that once you strip away a town’s facade, they’re all the same underneath.

  Charlotte’s willingness to laugh at the less cool aspects of herself was rare among the type of girls I’d hung out with back then. So was the way she looked. With her delicate features, chestnut curls, sky-blue stare and the androgynous clothes she wore, I knew early on that she was something special. Eleven years later and I was still right.

  It was in our final year at uni when we decided to try to make it in London after graduation. We were fresh-faced, bursting with enthusiasm, and nothing could stop us from conquering the capital. Once we got there, the reality was that we were two anonymous little fish in a ginormous polluted pond. We shared a ridiculously overpriced flat above a Chinese takeaway, lived an hour’s commute from all the cool places we wanted to hang out at and barely had any spare cash to live the city life we’d imagined. But it served its purpose, and after a year of training it got me on the career ladder and we sucked it up without complaint.

  Once we were married and had decided the time was right to start a family, I was adamant I didn’t want to do it in London. I landed a job back home before Charlotte did – she wasn’t so convinced it was the right place for us to be. However, she gave it a chance and started work as a graphic designer at an agency not far from the flat we bought together.