The Doll's House

by Tania Carver

  The night before. She shuddered.

  She checked the phone’s display. It was neither of those. It was a number she didn’t recognise. She answered.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Good morning.’ The voice overly cheerful, a redcoat at a holiday camp chivvying up the late sleepers.

  Oh God, thought Marina, a sales call, and made to hang up.

  ‘Not up and about yet, Marina? Shame on you. Glorious day, you’re missing it.’

  She stopped, finger poised above the button. She knew that voice. It took her a few seconds but she placed it. Hugo Gwilym.

  ‘Hugo?’

  ‘Who else would it be?’ He gave a chuckle. That was the only way she could categorise the sound – a chuckle.

  She looked round the room, confused. It somehow felt wrong hearing his voice in here. This was her and Phil’s room. Private. She felt stupid and a little ashamed for thinking it, but it was almost like an invasion.

  ‘How… What are you calling for?’

  ‘Just wanted to say thank you. For last night.’

  She said nothing. Waited for her memory to come back.

  ‘You can’t remember last night?’ Another chuckle, deeper this time, heavy with meaning. ‘I can.’

  ‘Course…’ Could she? Her memory flashed back. What was he talking about? What had happened? She tried to order events. The details were cloudy. She was sure she hadn’t drunk that much. She tried to think. The dinner. Everyone talking, laughing. Then Hugo arrived. Smarming all over her. She could remember glances and looks from the rest of the table, not all of them approving. Had she done something wrong? She didn’t think so. They had chatted. Well, argued was a better word. He had explained his theories, she had rebutted them. Then… nothing. It all became hazy from there on.

  She looked round the room once more. Her clothes were piled on the chair in the corner where she had taken them off before getting into bed. She could barely remember that. Or how she got home.

  Her face reddened, her heart tripped. How much had she had to drink? Not much. A gin and tonic before the dinner, a couple of glasses of red during. Nothing after. Her colleagues were still pretty new – she didn’t want to make a fool of herself in front of them so she had been moderating her intake. And then… nothing. Until she woke up.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t want to think you’d forgotten me.’

  She had no idea what he was talking about or what had happened, so she said nothing.

  ‘Speechless? Not like you. You are still there, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m still here.’

  ‘Good. Thought for a minute you’d nodded off. No chance of that last night, though, was there?’

  She had to say something. ‘What… what d’you mean?’

  ‘Last night,’ he said, an irritable edge to his voice, as if it was beneath him to explain. ‘I mean about what happened last night.’

  ‘What did happen last night?’

  Another laugh, more like an explosion this time. ‘Well that’s an insult, I must say.’

  Marina’s head was spinning from more than just the alcohol residue. ‘Just… tell me what happened.’

  ‘You know what happened. You were there.’

  ‘Humour me. Pretend I wasn’t.’

  Another noise – an intake of breath, a snort, she couldn’t be sure – then a sentence started and quickly halted before she could make out what he was saying. ‘We… had fun.’

  Her stomach flipped over. She thought she was going to be sick. ‘What kind of fun?’

  ‘What kind d’you think?’

  Suddenly Marina’s skin was too hot for her body and she felt like she wanted to claw it off. Her head spun again, her breathing fast and irregular. It was how what she imagined one of Phil’s old panic attacks felt like.

  ‘I… I…’

  Another chuckle. ‘Two I’s. Very egotistical. But I like that in a woman.’

  ‘I… don’t know what you’re talking about…’

  ‘Oh come on, don’t be bashful. Don’t try and pretend it never happened. We’re all grown-ups here. Deal with it and move on.’

  Marina said nothing.

  ‘Until the next time.’

  ‘What? What are you… I can’t even remember the last time. There’s not… there’s not going to be a next time.’

  ‘Would you like to meet for lunch? I’ll pay.’

  ‘Aren’t you listening to what I’m saying?’

  ‘I am. And I’m asking you to lunch today. And you’re going to say yes.’

  ‘Oh, am I?’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘Why?’

  Another chuckle. ‘Because I’m a much better psychologist, and a better reader of people for that matter, than you give me credit for. And because you won’t let this go without seeing me. For whatever reasons you think you may have.’

  Marina said nothing. She could hear her breathing, the blood pumping round her body, hot and fast.

  ‘All right. When and where?’

  He told her. ‘And don’t be late. I can’t abide that.’ The words carried an undertow of threat. He hung up.

  Marina flung the phone on the bed. Looked around the room, taking in the walls like a zoo animal trapped in its cage.

  She took a mouthful of coffee. It was still hot. It tasted cold.

  Then she ran to the bathroom and threw up.

  13

  M

  addy could feel it. Knew it was there without even looking. Still. It hadn’t stopped coming, wouldn’t stop. No matter what she put there to stem it, absorb it. Every time she moved her body she could feel that it hadn’t stopped, that it was only waiting. A reminder of what she had done. An admonishment.

  In blood.

  The tears had stopped long ago. She had cried so much, let so much hurt and pain come screaming out of her body that it left her feeling physically tired. Once the tears and snot had dried on her face she could have just curled up and slept. And she would have done, if she hadn’t been feeling so depressed, so bereft. So empty inside.

  That was almost a joke. The kind he would find amusing.

  Acid curdled in her stomach at the thought. Of the joke. Of him. Of what she had done to herself. Of what she had let him do to her.

  She sat in her bedroom, afraid to leave, afraid to talk to the rest of the house. They would want to know what was wrong with her and she wouldn’t be able to tell them. She had sworn not to, one of the first things they had agreed. That he made her agree to. And she had kept her word, not told a single soul. Not even Ami, her best friend. Ami might have suspected, guessed something was going on when Maddy was being secretive about where she was and who she saw, but she had managed to get round it. And Ami wasn’t the kind to go prowling and prying. So Maddy sat in her room, surrounded by her own things, her tokens and talismans brought from home, her photos and fetishes picked up along the way. Her attempts to accumulate her few possessions into a lodestone she could navigate her future life from. Instead she found herself clinging on to them, like the survivor of a shipwreck grasping any flotsam and jetsam, desperate not to be swept away.

  She sighed, looked down at her legs, her groin once more. The slight bulge in the front of her jogging bottoms. She knew she shouldn’t look, but she couldn’t help it. Like picking at a scab and not letting it heal properly. Slowly she pulled her jogging bottoms out, away from her body. Looked down. Her underpants held the slight bulge of the damp pad against her skin. She pulled them away from her body too. Checked the pad.

  Blood. Fresh.

  She took her hands away quickly, letting her clothes snap back. She was still bleeding.

  She felt her body shake, convulse, as another wave of tears threatened to overtake her, sweep her away from the makeshift raft, cast her adrift into nothingness.

  ‘I can’t… can’t do this…’ The words a whispered invocation between sobs.

  It had all started so well. Too well. He was handsome, dashing. Char
ming. All the clichés her old self would have hated to hear her new self using. But he was different from all the others she had been out with, the clueless boys who strived too hard and missed the mark, just children playing at being men. He had swept her away from them, away from her friends. He had given her a glimpse into a world she knew about but had never been admitted to. Sophisticated, grown up. He had welcomed her into that world, told her she belonged, that he would guide her, shape her, make it hers. And she had let him. Because he had done something else for her too. Something none of the previous fumbling boys had even managed to do. Made her feel like she was the most important person in the universe. In his universe.

  How could she not fall for him?

  And now this. Her insides scraped out, an unending stream of blood between her legs. Like her life was running out of her. And a broken heart. No phone calls. No texts. No DMs on Twitter. Nothing. Like she’d been put back in her own world. Dumped. Hurt.

  Alone.

  She wasn’t naïve enough to think that the baby would have bound them together, made them a family. He didn’t want that and she was in complete agreement with him. She didn’t want a baby, not even with him. Or at least, not yet. She wanted him. To herself. Just him. And now she didn’t even have that.

  Another wave of despair built up, threatened to crash against her. She couldn’t stand for that to happen, couldn’t bear it. She looked round the room, once her sanctuary, now her prison, where everything she saw, touched, smelled reminded her of him. Her muscles, tired, aching, flexed, spasmed. Her body convulsed as the tears hit, started again. She threw herself to the floor, jamming her fist in her mouth, eyes screwed tight closed.

  ‘Stop… make it stop… make it stop…’

  Her feet hammering lightly on the floor, wanting to get it all out of her but not wanting the rest of the house to know what was happening.

  The rest of the house. Maybe she should call Ami. Tell her what had happened. Give her the whole story. The secret affair. The mad lovemaking. The baby. The abortion. All of it. Tell her. She’s a friend, a best friend, let her be a friend.

  Maddy’s hand snaked out to grab her mobile, fingers ready to call. She pulled herself to a sitting position, held the phone in front of her. Saw the photo. Him. And her. Smiling, happy, laughing. Looking into each other’s eyes, sharing a joke. The best joke in the world, from the way her eyes were shining, her head thrown back. Taken by a student at a party who probably never guessed, didn’t realise what was happening, what they actually meant to each other.

  She stared at the photo. And put the phone down beside her. Carefully cradling it, as if the image might fade and along with it the memory.

  She gazed at the image until the phone switched itself off, the screen going black. She sighed, felt another wave of tears about to hit.

  No. Not this time. She couldn’t bear another bout, the bleeding, the pain. She had to do something. Make the pain stop. End it. Take it away. For ever.

  She got slowly to her feet, her stomach twisting and cramping as she did so, reminding her of what she had done, and started looking around the room, rummaging through drawers, boxes. She knew they must be there somewhere. She knew she hadn’t loaned them out. She found them. Something her mother had made her take to university. Encouraging her to make her own clothes rather than waste money on buying them.

  Dressmaking scissors. The blades razor-sharp.

  She sat back on the floor, opened out the blades, held one of them along her wrist. The bigger one. It would cut deeper, quicker. That was all it would take, just a quick swipe of the blade along her wrist, a few seconds of pain as the metal dug deep into her flesh, as she pressed it down to the bone and moved it backwards and forwards. Then the same with the other wrist. Then… nothing. No pain any more. Ever again. Just peace. Rest. Nothing.

  Blood began to well underneath the blade as she held it down. She felt the metal burn as it went in. Tears were rolling down her cheeks, mingling with snot. She heard herself blubbering, crying, made out words of apology, prayers for herself and her mother.

  ‘Sorry… sorry…’

  She tried to push the blade in further. That was all it needed, just one more push…

  Maddy threw the blade across the floor. It skidded under the wardrobe, lay still. She put her injured wrist up to her mouth, kissed the blood away, looked at the wound. There was barely anything to see; it had hardly broken the skin.

  She sat with her back against the wall, feeling the blood trickling between her legs, along her wrist. The bleeding girl. That’s who I am. And a coward. Who couldn’t even kill herself.

  She thought again of that word. Coward. No. That wasn’t what she was. She had stopped her suicide attempt not because she was afraid of dying, even though that was probably true. She had stopped because in that moment, just as the blade was about to slide through her flesh, she had thought of something else.

  Make him pay. Make him sorry.

  She stood up, wiping the back of her hand along her face. Heading for the shower.

  Maddy was going out. She had someone to see.

  14

  W

  hen Phil Brennan showed his warrant card, the receptionist tried on several expressions before she settled for surprised – yet totally innocent – interest. And in those few seconds he knew exactly what kind of company he was calling on.

  City Lets was based in an old office building on the fringes of Chinatown and the ungentrified portion of Digbeth. The area had been officially rebranded as Southside in an attempt to make it hip, urban and edgy. But this part of it had resolutely refused to play along. Part of Birmingham’s once ubiquitous square poured-concrete architectural heritage, it looked like what they had imagined the future to be sixty years ago. Now, squatting in the shadow of the undulating metal curve of the new Selfridges building and the rejuvenated Bullring, the building looked old and crumbling, a monolith to a lost religion.

  ‘I’d like to see Ron Parsons,’ said Phil, putting his warrant card back in his jacket. The waiting room was old and shabby, dotted with several chairs nearing the end of their lives and two large wilting pot plants at opposite corners. A large man, bearded, wearing a plaid shirt and reading a paper, sat in one of the chairs. He put the paper down as Phil approached, became interested. The receptionist was old, large and tired and looked like she had come with the building.

  ‘He’s —’

  Phil didn’t give her the chance to come up with an excuse. ‘It’s to do with a murder inquiry.’

  Her eyes widened. The bearded man picked up his paper again, pretended to look at it.

  ‘In one of your properties.’

  He was ushered straight through.

  At first glance Ron Parsons seemed as anachronistic to his trade as the office block was to the rest of Birmingham. An overcoat and trilby hung on an old square wooden coat stand. The desk he sat behind was of a similar vintage; so too were the shelving, box files and filing cabinets. The walls were nicotine yellow, showing either a disregard for the smoking ban of the last decade or a disinclination to give the room a coat of paint. From the smell in the air, Phil knew which one it was.

  The only piece of modernity in the room was a sleek, shiny black laptop on the desk. Parsons looked up from it, gestured.

  ‘Please, take a seat, Detective…?’

  ‘Detective Inspector Brennan.’ Phil sat. The chair creaked.

  Parsons nodded. ‘We had a call from one of your lot yesterday. Woman, I think. Hard to tell these days.’ His voice was working-class West Midlands marinated in years of unfiltered cigarettes and whisky. Quiet but authoritative. A boss’s voice. ‘Said there’d been a murder at one of our properties.’

  ‘That’s right. Falcon Close, just off the Pershore Road. You probably saw it on the news.’

  Parsons’s eyes were flat glass. Opaque, not transparent. ‘I don’t watch much telly. Apart from the football. And the boxing. I’m not a news person. But your young woman said as m
uch. So I expected a call today.’

  ‘And here I am.’

  ‘Here you are.’ He slowly closed his laptop screen, gave Phil his full attention. ‘What is it you want to know, Inspector Brennan?’

  ‘Just a bit of background about your tenant.’

  ‘What d’you need?’

  ‘Whatever you’ve got. Where he’s from, what he does for a living, who his referees were, his family, anything at all.’

  Parsons raised his eyebrows. ‘Anything to oblige.’ He leaned back in his chair as if making to stand up, then thought better of it. Instead he pressed a button on his desk intercom. ‘Cheryl, can you come in a minute, please, love.’

  The heavy, tired receptionist made her way inside. Stood in the middle of the floor, waiting. The look she gave Parsons told him she had been called away from some vital UN business so it had better be important.

  ‘Can you get everything on the Falcon Close property, please. Last tenant.’ He turned to Phil. ‘You just want the last one? Any more?’

  Phil was about to say no, but something stopped him. That wasn’t the question he’d been expecting Parsons to ask him. And because of that, he changed his answer.

  ‘Just the last six months, please. That ought to do it.’

  A look passed between Parsons and Cheryl. It was gone almost as quickly as it appeared, but Phil caught it. Unfortunately he couldn’t read it well enough to know what it meant.

  ‘Six months?’ said Cheryl.

  Phil smiled. ‘Please. Printouts would be good.’

  Cheryl went to work. But not before, Phil noticed, Parsons gave her the nod to do so.

  ‘So,’ said Parsons, once the receptionist had gone, ‘what brings you here, Detective Brennan?’

  ‘Murder, Mr Parsons.’

  Parsons smiled, slowly shook his head. ‘I mean, you’re not from round here. That’s not a Brummie accent I can hear.’ He frowned. ‘What is it, London? Essex?’

  ‘Colchester,’ said Phil. ‘Just moved here.’

  Parsons spread his arms expansively. ‘Welcome to our humble city.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Phil leaned forward, hoped the chair wouldn’t collapse completely. ‘Did you know Mr McGowan, Mr Parsons? Have you met him?’