The Hit List

by Holly Seddon

  There is a dead man in here. Preserved by the cold, a gruesome scar on one eye and his face contorted in fear. Her brain flashes with images of gargoyles, of terrified victims preserved at Pompeii. Of Greg, and how she sometimes dreams of him as the unknown vehicle hit him then sped off; nightmare visions of how he might have looked at the life-splitting second. She scrunches her eyes as hard as she can but the vision of this man remains. His features sparkle with ice crystals. It’s David Ross, no question. She recognises him from the Facebook photo she found. Older. Colder. Stuck in here all by himself. Another ‘accident’?

  So if David Ross is in here with me, who has just walked into the kitchen?

  Marianne’s heart beats so loudly she imagines it ringing out across the room. I’m in here, I’m in here, come and get me. She tries to control her breathing but it’s jagged, coughing in and out of her like she’s drowning.

  Through the tiny crack in the door, the one she’d hoped would bring her fresh oxygen, Marianne watches as a black shape moves around the kitchen as precisely as a puma.

  Behind her, David Ross remains frozen while Marianne can hardly stay still. Shaking violently and fighting the need to collapse. To just give in and let death bite her to pieces.

  The black shape moves closer. It seems to slink, a controlled slide across the kitchen floor. No rush. In the grey gloom of the kitchen, through the haze of stench and dust, Marianne grips the corkscrew tightly and tries to piece the image together.

  It wears black boots fringed with mud.

  It’s tall, broad and strong-looking. Black jeans strain around muscular calves.

  Its black wax jacket has rough rope spilling from the pockets.

  One gloved hand hangs relaxed.

  The other holds a small knife.

  And above it all, smiling with amusement, under a close-cropped hairstyle, is the face of a middle-aged woman.

  PART TWO:

  Before

  Samantha

  Friday, 14 June 2019

  I’ve been ready to run for twenty years but I never thought it would happen like this.

  I’m forty-one years old, a besotted mother of one. We live very comfortably, in a detached house in a prim and proper Surrey town. I drive a shiny and safe car, have a collection of beautiful handbags, each sitting in their own protective satin bags. We have a weekly cleaner.

  Besides being there for my son, Joe, I spend my days looking nice and volunteering at a local charity. A housewife, I suppose the term is. I put a lot of effort into looking the part. My long hair, once naturally black and now naturally grey, is dyed with slices of auburn and chestnut. My forehead is unnaturally smooth. I am always made-up.

  When I was younger, I was mistaken for a model. Or was I? No, I was propositioned with lines about being a model, but at this distance, it’s about the same thing.

  It was during those ‘model’ days that I first met Steve. Both of us desperate in different ways. Despite being the son of meticulous accountants, he had never shown any aptitude at school, could barely scrape through his A levels. When his slightly older brother, Jonathan, had graduated impressively and started to scramble up the corporate ladder, Steve opted to learn butchery. Food was his passion, but he’d nursed it like a guilty secret. And he was right to be wary. Though it was never said – because that was the way with his family – the decision to follow that passion came at the cost of their parents’ respect. It’s unfair, in so many ways, but not least that it showed just how smart he actually is, how analytical. He spotted a gap in the market that has led to five food stores and London-based chefs giving him more nods in their books and TV shows than any other independent food supplier. Steve calls himself an epicure. Sometimes, when Jonathan is being spiky, he calls his younger brother a grocer.

  I still remember the first time Steve cooked for me. Trying to hide his nerves, the tips of his ears growing pink as he waited for my reaction. Steak Diane and potato rösti, which dates us far more than the clothes we might have been wearing.

  I wolfed it down, the first proper cooked meal I’d had in weeks. And watching me appreciate it, especially the meat he’d hand-cut, was the greatest gift to him. Anything less than marked appreciation still seems to hurt him. He’s far more tender than he looks, especially when it comes to me. I still catch him looking shy in his own home. Still so in need of approval and reassurance. His parents have a lot to answer for. All parents do.

  Steve’s spoken only occasionally about the moment he realised he was never going to follow his brother into the world of shiny corner offices and computers. That his heart, and his abilities, lay elsewhere. Signing the lease on his first shop is right up there alongside Joe’s birth.

  I’m lucky. Our son, Joe, is healthy and safe. He’s training to be a doctor, he rows for the university team. He has had one or two girlfriends and treated them kindly. He’s a homebody who still, secretly, tucks his teddy bear under his arm at night. I love him more than anything in the world and he loves me.

  We are every inch the middle-class dream.

  And it’s all a lie.

  *

  ‘Mum, are you OK in there?’

  Joe’s knock is gentle at first, soft on the wood of the door. I open my mouth to reply but I just cough out dust. Am I OK?

  ‘Mum?’

  He knocks again, a crisper rap, panic drumming the beat.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I manage. ‘I’ll be down in a minute, darling.’

  He says nothing but I can tell he doesn’t move away. He’s been like this since he was a little boy, always preferring to be near me than not. Clinging to my legs every morning when I dropped him at school, long after the other kids had run in. And at secondary school, he would prefer to be driven and dropped just around the corner, hugging me at every single goodbye when the rest of his friends caught the bus without looking back. He even chose to live at home through university.

  Even now, six foot four and twenty years old, the invisible string between us is just as taut. The thought of severing it is more painful than any other grief.

  I would die.

  I stare down at the phone screen again.

  ‘Uncle Jonathan is here,’ Joe adds, his voice quieter now. ‘And I think Dad’s getting a bit stressed.’

  Poor Steve. He’s cooking all the food and furnishing everyone with drinks by himself. He’s never been good when he’s alone. I imagine going down there and trying to tell him about the email I’ve just received. The look on his face, the food burning as the fear takes hold. No. I can’t begin to tell him what I’ve been sent, especially in front of his brother. Steve’s business, his reputation, his family. It would all be torched to the ground if anyone knew. When it comes to my past, he made a conscious decision to lock it away so deeply, it’s like it never happened.

  ‘Can you go and help Dad?’ I say, trying to keep my voice light. ‘I’ll just be a sec.’

  ‘OK.’

  I hear him leave reluctantly, his solid weight testing each of the steps leading down to our kitchen, the belly of our home.

  I take a deep breath, more a gulp than anything. My heart quickens, my temples greasy with sweat. I read the words again, unbelieving, unseeing. I had almost forgotten this feeling. Almost.

  ‘We know who you really are,’ the message starts.

  I read it again one more time. And then I delete it.

  *

  Steve gives me a grateful smile as I join the small party gathering around the big island unit at the centre of the kitchen. Jonathan – never John – has his arm draped around his wife, Paula. I squeeze Steve’s arm just briefly and see his shoulders relax.

  ‘Sorry to keep you all waiting,’ I say. ‘I felt a little queasy.’ I’m looking at our guests but I’m saying it to Steve. He’s wearing his leather butcher’s apron and pouring batter into a Yorkshire-pudding tray so hot it’s smoking.

  ‘Just glad you’re here now,’ Steve says, without looking up again. Jonathan flashes me a smile and Paula
catches my eye, gives me a look asking if I’m OK. I smile at her, nod to show I’m fine.

  I need to get it together and act normally for the rest of the evening or she’ll ask me about this when we next get together by ourselves. We tend to meet for coffee or brunch once a month, a chance to chat away from ‘the boys’. We’re hardly best friends, we’re so different after all, but we get along. And it’s not easy being in relationships with men whose lives are so entwined, so it’s nice to have an ally.

  Paula is several years older than Jonathan. She’s a safe port in a storm, a capable ‘head girl’ type of woman who gets stuff done. If she still worked, I’ve no doubt she’d be a CEO somewhere by now. But I don’t think she’s worked since she had her daughter and certainly hasn’t worked since she lost her child. A fate I hate hearing her talk about, not that she often does, because it feels too contagious, too terrifying. As a result I hardly talk about Joe to her, lest it feel like insensitive bragging.

  What would Paula think about the message I’ve just received? She, with no reason to fear the machinery of her country and the lens of officialdom, would probably march me briskly to the nearest police station to ask for help.

  I shudder, catching Paula’s eye and rubbing my arms as if I’m chilly. She tilts her head, asking another question with her frown, but I just smile again. I have no other answer.

  And what about Jonathan? They know elements of my past: that I wasn’t born here, that I arrived by unconventional means. They may even know that I’m still not supposed to be here, that years later I continue to fly under the radar, terrified of being sent back to the country I was born in. Perhaps this message would cause them to fear me, to see me as an interloper, an anomaly in Steve’s life. Perhaps they have always seen me this way, if they’re honest, and this would confirm their suspicions.

  I just hope Steve kept the worst of it from them; he promised he would, but these brothers are so close.

  I see Jonathan gamely refilling everyone else’s drinks while Steve chops kale. The bottle hovers over Joe’s glass but he slides his hand over and shakes his head at his uncle. ‘No thanks, I have training tomorrow.’

  Jonathan is far slighter than Joe but he steps closer to him, energy crackling through his wiry frame. ‘Come on,’ he says, smiling like a wolf. ‘Don’t be a sissy.’

  Steve and I look at each other but say nothing. Jonathan has no kids of his own, he’s never known how to talk to younger people. I can hardly be cross about that, not with the struggles they’ve had.

  And besides, Joe has to learn some assertiveness without us fighting his battles, but my heart sinks as he gives in, accepting another slug of wine that he’ll no doubt sip cautiously. What would he do without me here? What would he allow to happen to him? Who might come creeping out from their hiding place? The thought is too much to bear.

  I turn down wine and sip sparkling water instead. My brain is imprinted with the words I’ve just read. I can see them, hear them, taste them. Whichever way I try, I can’t make sense of it. It’s all true, and yet, I don’t understand how anyone could know my history. Or who these anonymous people are who have contacted me. Or why they would care about a former life so long ago, so hidden, that it feels like a storybook. A really fucked-up fairy tale.

  Greg

  Thursday, 13 June 2019

  Greg can feel his wife’s gaze on the back of his neck. He swats at it as if it’s a fly. She can’t see the screen, can she? No, of course she can’t. He shifts in his seat a little to be sure. Crowds closer to the laptop to block it.

  The screen is sparse. It flickers slowly like a candle. Behind him, Marianne is draped on the sofa in her dressing gown, towel turbaned on her head. The lamp nearby casts an oval glow around her and in the corner of his screen the reflected scene hangs like a painting.

  ‘Wife Marking, 2019, oil on canvas.’

  He studies her briefly, relieved to see she’s not looking at him after all but staring down at the sheaf of papers in her lap. He smiles at her but she doesn’t notice, frowning intently over her work. Those kids are lucky to have her. He lowers his screen a little – almost a habitual tic now – and looks at her again. Her dark eyebrows drawing a line across her face as she frowns, her wild hair bundled up and hidden from view. The kids at school will never see her wildness; all they get is buttoned-up and dedicated Ms Heywood. Some things are just for him.

  Meeting Marianne on that night bus all those years ago, it was like an old memory came back to him. Just in that moment, a tiny little jigsaw piece – so small he hadn’t noticed it was missing – settled back in its place and his heart was whole. He had to see her again. To lose that little piece, to have it gouged back out of his heart so soon, would have killed him even then.

  How fast it had happened, from meeting to spending their first night together. But it didn’t feel fast, it felt like coming home. And that first night she stayed over, they didn’t make love. Barely touched. They listened to music all night, Marianne lying next to Greg in his old Lou Reed T-shirt and her knickers.

  If he could have captured them in a Polaroid right then, he would have been happy never to look at any other photo again. It would be the album cover for his whole life.

  Throughout that first evening, all those years ago, Greg was simultaneously frozen with fear and buzzing with adrenaline. He had brought people back to his shared house before, a slow dribble of nice enough girls with forgettable faces, but this was something else. Marianne was something else. He wanted to play her every song he’d ever loved. To find that Venn diagram of her favourites and his: their music. And he didn’t want to put a foot wrong, couldn’t bear to play the wrong song and extinguish a flame before it really caught light. Still feels like that sometimes. A look in her eye, like she’s appraising him.

  Of course they were just babies back then. He pulls at his beard; a dusting of grey has started to bloom out from its centre and gobble up all the dark hairs. And Marianne, that frown line that never fully fades now, and her hips with their solidity, a new heft. They’re proper adults now. But back then, they were happy little idiots, full of lust and love.

  Greg toggles away from what he had been staring at, rubs his eyes and heads back to the usual place.

  A lot of them don’t work day jobs like he does. And they’re not married. He’s always the last to log on after work, first to log off. A beat of guilt pulsing as he shifts in his chair again, re-blocking Marianne’s view.

  There’s just so much. He stares down at its darkness like a Fibonacci spiral, an endless loop. A man could get lost down here.

  *

  Friday, 14 June 2019

  Slapping himself awake, Greg watches from the bed as Marianne gets ready for work.

  ‘I’ll be back late tonight,’ she says, without turning around. ‘I’m doing a revision club for the Year Elevens.’

  ‘Oh, OK.’

  ‘It’s their second exam on Monday, Greg,’ she snaps, pushing earrings through each ear like little knives.

  ‘I know,’ he says, confused by her tone. ‘I just like our Fridays.’

  ‘Sorry, I like our Fridays too. I’d rather be here with you than with them, undoing their bloody YouTuber conspiracy theories about …’

  He pats the bed next to him to cut off this rant and she sits down. He shuffles over and puts his head in her lap, pretending to purr. ‘You’re so weird,’ she laughs, but she strokes his face, his hair, bends over awkwardly to give him a quick kiss then gestures for him to move.

  ‘I love you,’ he says as she stands up with a sigh.

  ‘Always,’ she says, the door clicking behind her as she goes.

  Greg lies back down. He can see track marks of her mascara on the pillow and thinks about stripping the bed, washing it all. When did they last change it? Neither one of them would win awards for housekeeping but sometimes it borders on the embarrassing. ‘Our little secret,’ they sometimes joke. ‘Your kids would be shocked to see what a slatternly wife you are,’
he likes to joke.

  ‘Lucky for me no one under the age of ninety knows what “slatternly” means,’ she always replies.

  He should get up and at least make the bed but he doesn’t move, exhausted from another fitful night. ‘Maybe don’t shine that screen into your eyes right before bed,’ Marianne shrugged, half joking when he last complained about insomnia. Then in a softer voice: ‘We’ll catch up at the weekend.’ And they always do, every weekend. Sleeping in until at least eleven on both days. How do people with kids manage if they can’t catch up then?

  They both work at the weekend too, trying to get ahead of the week. He always watches in awe as she marks and files and clicks and uploads and then forgets all about it for the rest of the day while he paws at his guilt and chases his tail. There’s never enough time, always too much to do. There are no doors to shut on his thoughts, they’re there every moment of the day and piercing through his sleep.

  ‘You can only do so much,’ his boss, Eloise, tells him. A repeated mantra in their one-to-ones or when she catches him in the kitchen pulling at his eyebrow or beard distractedly. ‘You have to put on your own oxygen mask first.’

  He gets up and leaves the bed unmade, makes a coffee and sits down by his laptop. Just a little bit of time before work. The very opposite of an oxygen mask, more like being strung with a drip of poison.

  He opens up his computer and climbs back down the black hole.

  Samantha

  Friday, 14 June 2019

  Steve keeps his apron on while he slices the Chateaubriand. The slim slices of beef quiver as his knife coaxes them away from the tenderloin. The middle is pink, dripping with flavour, and my stomach lurches.

  I close my eyes and move a hand towards my belly to quell the nausea. It brushes the phone in my pocket and I feel a mask of sweat prickle over my face.