by John Marrs
‘No, no, no, no!’ Laura said, and fell to her knees. I pointed at a still-shrieking Henry.
‘I know there was some humanity in you once, because what you did to him fucked you up. They carted you off in an ambulance and kept you in a psychiatric unit before you eventually discharged yourself. But while you were gone, Tony moved him here and the girls out. Even then, you lied to yourself about why you’d been hospitalised. Effie told me that you claimed your mum’s cancer as your own, didn’t you?’
Laura clambered to her feet and began to pace in a circular motion, like a dog trying to find a comfortable position to curl up and sleep.
‘No, that’s not what happened. You’re wrong,’ she muttered. Her fingers pinched at her thighs. She was falling apart before me.
‘Your daughters didn’t want their dad to tell the police you started the fire, so Tony promised them he wouldn’t give you up if they stayed away from you. You thought in time Tony would come round and return, but he didn’t, did he? Instead he changed Effie’s school to one nearer their new home and he kept the girls away from you. They were all enjoying their new life without you until my naive brother interfered and included you on the email for Effie’s school report.’
‘Please, be quiet,’ Laura begged, her spirit overwhelmed and tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘I need you to stop now.’
Then her expression blanked, as if she were reliving the moment she learned Tony had taken her family away from her. Her shoulders hunched like she wanted to fold into herself and vanish. Henry bounced back and forth in his chair and Laura reached towards him as if to offer him comfort. But once again, I took my hand off his chair until she retracted it.
‘You know what horrifies me the most about you?’ I asked. ‘It’s that after what you did to this kid, you didn’t learn your lesson, because you’re still putting yourself before anyone else. In trying to destroy Ryan, you threw Effie under the bus. Your own daughter. At least my brother regretted the part he had to play in all this.’
‘He only regretted it because he lost,’ she replied. Only there was no pride in her victory.
‘And what exactly have you won, Laura? Because it sure as hell isn’t your husband or your children. You have nothing. Ryan said you rattle around that house on your own. You spend hours locked inside waiting for someone to walk through the door, and I bet nobody ever does. And you know what? They never will. You’ve lost everyone, even Nate.’
‘Why are you bringing him into it?’ she sobbed.
‘Why not? You brought Charlotte into it when Nate wanted to kill himself.’
‘That didn’t happen, it was an accident. He slipped into the river and drowned.’
‘And you’re rewriting the truth again. Nate had tried to die several times over the years, according to the coroner’s report. He messed up an overdose and a hanging. I’m putting two and two together and assuming you, the expert in suicide, stepped in to help him get it right, didn’t you?’
‘I don’t know what you mean . . .’ She shook her head again, as if old memories she wanted to forget were coming back to life inside her.
‘You do, Laura – just tell me the truth.’
‘Nate wanted me to be with him when he died, but I couldn’t do it, because I couldn’t leave Henry,’ she wept. ‘So I found someone else.’
‘Charlotte?’
‘Yes.’
‘Because she was a vulnerable woman with prenatal depression, and you saw her as ripe for manipulation.’
‘Please, Johnny,’ Laura begged, clasping her hands together like she was praying. ‘Just leave now and I won’t tell anyone any of this happened.’
‘And then what? You’ll have a change of heart and come after me?’
‘No, I promise I won’t.’ She wiped snot from her nose with the back of her hand.
‘There’s just one thing I need you to do for me before I leave.’ I removed my phone from my pocket and switched it to video mode and began recording.
‘Because you are so keen on publicly shaming people, and because the Dictaphone my brother gave Janine has disappeared, you are going to look into the lens and admit that you encouraged Charlotte to die. Then you’ll confess to what you did to Janine and admit that Ryan was not a child molester and that he is dead because of you.’
Her eyes momentarily left mine and glanced to the distance.
‘Hey!’ I snapped, and she looked back at me. ‘I’m not giving you a choice here. This isn’t something you can mull over. Admit it, everything you’ve done, then I will leave.’
I watched her on the phone’s screen as she wiped her eyes and cleared her throat.
‘Never,’ she replied and, just for a second, she couldn’t stop her lips from curling upwards. Then she opened her mouth wide and let out a piercing scream.
I heard hurried footsteps pounding close behind me, and as I turned, something solid hit the side of my head so hard that it pushed me to the ground.
CHAPTER FOUR
LAURA
‘Tony, help us!’ I pleaded as my husband appeared behind Johnny. ‘It’s Ryan!’
I could tell from Tony’s expression that he thought he was seeing things – that the supposedly dead pervert teacher who’d tried to abuse his daughter was now tormenting his wife and their disabled son. So I didn’t give him time to think rationally, only to tap into the instinct he’d learned in the boxing ring – react to a threat by stamping it out quickly.
‘He’s hurting Henry!’
Tony charged towards us, and before Johnny could defend himself, Tony caught him on the side of the head with a hard punch. It knocked Johnny off balance, sending him sprawling face down onto the path.
Johnny lost grip of his mobile phone and it slid across the gravel, but his grasp also slipped from Henry’s wheelchair. I sprinted towards it, grabbing hold of the handles and digging my heels into the ground. Then, using all my strength, I leaned backwards to prevent it from slipping any further down the slope and into the lake. I pulled it towards me until Henry was safe and I could calm his hysteria.
Meanwhile, Tony squatted over Johnny and punched the back of his head and ribs with a ferocity I’d only seen on display in the boxing ring. Crack, crack, crack, knuckle against cheekbone, fist against skull . . . A composer couldn’t have come up with a musical arrangement that sounded any sweeter to my ears.
‘I will kill you for what you’ve done!’ Tony shouted, and I had no reason to doubt him. Johnny’s plan to confuse me by mimicking his brother’s appearance had backfired spectacularly. But I wasn’t going to admit to Tony he’d got the wrong man.
I pulled my son closer to me so he couldn’t witness what was happening, not that he’d have been able to make any sense of it.
‘Shh, shh, it’s okay,’ I whispered into his ear, running my hand through his hair, but still he wailed.
However, instead of focusing all my attention on Henry, I couldn’t draw my eyes away from the chaos before me. Johnny’s arms and hands flailed by his side, making occasional contact with Tony’s body, but they were no match for my husband’s fury, strength and training. Pinkish-red spit bubbles seeped from Johnny’s mouth as he choked on the blood trickling down his throat from his nose and gums. His voice was distorted and unrecognisable.
‘I’m not . . .’ he croaked, but Tony had no intention of listening to him.
‘You lied to me to get to my daughter, you sick fuck! You terrorised my wife and you murdered Janine!’
He called me his wife! A euphoric rush of warmth spread throughout my body.
I could have pleaded with Tony to stop, told him he’d got the wrong man and that we’d let the police deal with it. But I didn’t. If Johnny was as tenacious as his brother, this would only continue, and I longed to get my life and my family back. Hatred like his would not disappear any time soon.
Meanwhile, the passion and the energy spilling from my husband’s rage was infectious and arousing. An unceasing tingling began around my pelvis, and t
he more animalistic Tony became, the more primal I felt. I craved him, I lusted after him, I wanted him inside me.
‘He told me he was going to drown Henry,’ I said, clutching our son tighter.
‘I wouldn’t . . .’ Johnny began, but again, he didn’t get to finish. Tony had hold of the back of Johnny’s hair, yanked his head upwards and slammed it back onto the path. Despite the dimming light, I could still make out his irises as they fluttered towards the back of his head, leaving milky white orbs in their place.
My stomach felt as if it was riding a rollercoaster, rising quickly and anxiously anticipating the descent. Tony had someone’s life in his hands and he was about to make the single most important decision that could alter everything. I clenched my fists into tight balls and with all my might I willed him to take that next, crucial step.
I’d never felt closer to – or more in love with – my husband as I was in the moment when he killed Johnny.
CHAPTER FIVE
LAURA – TWO MONTHS AFTER JOHNNY
I sat in my office hunched over a keyboard, glaring at a spreadsheet on the monitor, trying to make sense of next month’s work rota. With ninety-four volunteers all requesting hours that didn’t include the middle of the night, it was no mean feat trying to accommodate everyone’s wishes.
I glanced out from the open door of my office and across the room at the afternoon team. Kevin, Sanjay, Zoe and Joella sat in their booths, half of them on calls and the rest filling their downtime reading Kindles and magazines.
It had been more than a week since I’d last found time to join them in the trenches, and I was badly missing the anticipation of the next call. I’d been so busy and much more cautious since the whole Ryan and Johnny debacles, but now I was itching to find a new candidate. However, since the powers that be in our head office had offered me Janine’s job as branch manager, much of my time was taken up by tiresome administrative tasks.
My lips curled into a smile as I sat in Janine’s former seat, my elbows on her desk, distracting myself from rotas by picking out stubborn crumbs of gluten-free biscuits from her keyboard with eyebrow tweezers. If she could see me now, she’d be turning in the grave I’d sent her to.
The spotlight had been shining upon my branch brighter than it ever had before, and none of it for positive reasons. First came Janine’s murder on the premises, and then head office’s humiliation at discovering she’d shifted money from the charity’s accounts into her own and to an account she held for a gambling website. When the internal investigation began, the theft became public knowledge thanks to an ‘anonymous’ whistleblower. And soon, the eponymous plaque erected in her name was quietly unscrewed from the wall outside. With her reputation tarnished, I’d disposed of it myself.
End of the Line had lost the public’s trust and so calls to it fell sharply, along with local donations. So it was the sensible decision to ask me to take charge. I was the brave volunteer who’d survived two attacks from unhinged brothers who’d also targeted my daughter and disabled son. And in publicly forgiving them, my selflessness had made me the face of the charity and garnered it positive press.
The rest of the team were elated by my promotion, including Mary, our oldest volunteer and my former mentor. I’d informed her by phone, as she’d yet to return to the office following the shock of finding Janine’s body. She still blamed herself for failing to prevent the murder and for not monitoring Ryan’s fateful visit from the video room, even though it was me who’d told her he was Janine’s friend. I was quite happy to let her carry the burden of guilt for as long as she required.
The alarm sounded on my phone to remind me that my day there was coming to an end. An hour and a half later and I was walking up the street towards the house, recycling bags crammed with groceries and the handles digging into the palms of my hands.
Sometimes I’d catch myself absent-mindedly looking around the street, hoping to see Nate. He’d always felt intimidated by Tony, so rather than ring the doorbell, he’d hover for hours, waiting for me to enter or leave the house. I missed him, but Johnny’s words continued to haunt me.
I had been so sure that Nate and David were two completely different people – until now, because when I gave it more thought, their voices were the same and their circumstances similar. David had lost all hope when his wife had been killed by three men who broke into their house; Nate’s mum had died at his hands while three men she’d sold our bodies to hovered at the doorway. Or was that a lie, too? Had I remembered my life under Sylvia’s roof as different to the way it had actually been?
Perhaps my memory had been playing tricks on me lately again, creating mixed-up images and snapshots of what I thought to be true. I suddenly recalled a buried memory from a year and a half earlier, of a conversation I’d had with Nate. He’d had enough, he told me, he had no fight left in him, and while he’d said the same thing many times before, I knew this time he meant it. He wanted my help to die but he was afraid and didn’t want to go alone, which is when Charlotte came into the picture.
Then I remembered the last day I ever saw him, when Nate came to the house to bathe and I helped to clean him up. I’d put him in an old suit and shirt of Tony’s, handed him a pay-as-you-go mobile phone and gave him enough cash to get a train ticket to East Sussex and a taxi. He looked so handsome.
Then I saw myself standing alone by a bus stop outside Chantelle’s funeral and then outside a hospital ward arguing with a doctor about a patient who hadn’t been admitted. That was why I hadn’t been to David’s funeral. It wasn’t because I was too sad to face it, it was because he had never existed.
A moped’s horn brought me back to reality and I found myself standing still in the middle of the road. A cold sweat rushed across my body and I hurried to the safety of my house.
‘Hello?’ I shouted, taking deep, calming breaths as I pushed open the front door and pulled the key from the lock. ‘Is anyone around to give me a hand unpacking the shopping?’
The mention of shopping bags wasn’t the best way to lure two children and a husband into the porch. Nevertheless, Alice appeared, carrying that bloody cat under her arm like a furry clutch bag. The anticipation of being reunited with Bieber had been one of the reasons why she couldn’t wait to move back in. Neither of Tony’s two rental houses had allowed pets and she’d missed him.
‘Where’s your sister?’ I asked as we carried the bags to the kitchen.
‘She’s still upstairs with Mrs Hopkinson. I won’t have to be home-schooled when I’m her age, will I?’ She dropped the cat to the floor and it hissed at me before strutting out of the room. One day, a canal and a bag of bricks would wipe that entitled look from its face.
‘I don’t think so, darling. If you don’t make stupid decisions like Effie then there’ll be no reason for us to take you out of school and hire a private tutor.’
Reassured by my answer, she began stacking the shelves with cans of vegetables and soups with military precision.
‘Labels showing,’ I reminded her. ‘Is your dad home yet?’
‘Uh-huh.’ She pointed towards the garden. ‘Why does he look so sad all the time?’
I spotted Tony, his arms outstretched and his palms flat upon the waist-high garden fence posts. He was staring into the distance across the playing fields. It was a common sight since my family had returned, as if he were wishing himself a million miles away from where he was now. I told myself he wouldn’t be like this forever, but as time marched on, my doubts began.
I’d hoped that ending another person’s life might have given us a common thread to bind us together, but we’d yet to reconnect. He remained repulsed by killing Johnny, while I’d never been prouder of him for protecting Henry and me. He’d shown me that, deep down, he would do anything for the people he loved.
I called to mind an image of Tony, two months earlier, standing over Johnny’s lifeless body and rolling him over so he was face up. I remembered how Tony’s expression had changed from pure rage to con
fusion when he realised the cut, bleeding, battered man wasn’t who he’d thought it was. Panic spread through him and he looked to me for an explanation.
‘You said it was Ryan,’ he began, eyebrows arched and forehead wrinkled.
‘It doesn’t matter who it is,’ I replied bluntly. ‘He was threatening to hurt us.’
‘But I’ve killed him! What did you let me do?’
‘It was self-defence. You were saving your family.’
Tony’s adrenaline was dissolving, leaving his arms weak and unsteady. I held them firm in my hands. His shirtsleeves and cuffs were smeared with Johnny’s blood.
‘Look at me, Tony. I will tell the police what Ryan’s brother was trying to do before you came. I’ll stand up for you. I’m your wife. I won’t let anything happen to you for trying to protect us.’
I helped him to a nearby bench, where he sat and held his head in his shaking hands as I called the police. Soon after, Johnny’s body was driven away in an ambulance and Tony was arrested on suspicion of murder and taken to the police station to be questioned. After being treated for shock, which I feigned, I accompanied a still-terrified Henry back to his room where he was calmed by staff and put to bed.
Then it was my turn to face a police grilling. Twice I left the interview to be sick as I recounted the horrors of the evening. By the time I was allowed to leave, there could be little doubt in their minds that Johnny had been threatening me and Henry in revenge for the death of his brother. It was Tony’s and my word against the actions of a dead man.
Alone in the interview room, I thanked God that I’d sent my husband an email before I’d left the house saying that I couldn’t wait to see him with Henry. The message, plus the others I’d sent that week claiming Henry was ill, had concerned and confused him enough to turn up at the care home. If he hadn’t found me, I hate to think what evidence Johnny might have recorded to use against me. I made a mental note to take flowers to his funeral like I had to Ryan’s, only this time the card would read I won again.
