The First Cut

by Knight, Ali

  Gemma felt her nostril throb as a weak sun was cut off by a cloud. She needed to be more forthright, say what she really believed and not be steamrollered by Jezza. She would start today. She was going to put her own needs first for a change; it was her money that had printed the T-shirts, after all. Gemma was thinking that Jezza sitting up and taking notice was as likely as seeing pigs fly, when over the wall of the motorway came a bright awkward shape that tumbled across the hard shoulder and into the slow lane. Gemma’s first thought was that it must be a piece of costume that had caught on the wind and separated itself from the carnival somewhere on the streets below her. She didn’t brake because she thought it might float away again, like a plastic bag in wind, but then she realized the shape was very, very solid and – oh my God, it was a woman. Gemma Woodhead slammed on the brakes of lazy Jezza’s Polo and the car began a vicious skid on the slippery road.

  Nicky’s first thought on feeling the hard road beneath her was how much it hurt to survive. She was winded and could only lie motionless, staring at the white sky. The screech of brakes came to her slowly and as she turned her head she saw wheels bearing down on her.

  Gemma tried to swerve into the middle lane but she clipped the front of an Ocado delivery truck and began to spin down the road. The truck came to a screeching halt on the tarmac as Gemma pulled up in a spray of brakes and noise a few inches from the central reservation.

  Nicky tried to stand as a woman with red hair and a long gypsy skirt got out of a yellow hatchback and began running towards her. Euphoria flooded her as she realized she’d survived a death leap and got away from crash man.

  ‘My God, oh my God, oh my God,’ was all the woman could say. ‘Oh my God, you’re bleeding.’

  The Ocado delivery man was walking over, on the phone. ‘I’m calling an ambulance,’ he shouted.

  Cars were beginning to stack up behind them, a queue lengthening away down the motorway as people gathered.

  The woman had nearly reached Nicky and was gawping at her. Nicky started walking towards the woman’s car.

  ‘Oh my God, are you OK?’

  Nicky stared at the yellow car. Then she turned to face the redhead. ‘I need your car.’

  ‘My car?’ the woman repeated, the words meaningless.

  Gemma felt the woman grab her elbows. She looked panicked and wild, her hair was wet and her arm was a scraped-up mess, but her deep blue eyes seemed filled with determination.

  ‘I’m really, really sorry, but I need your car.’ Gemma felt the woman’s warm hands on her skin ‘Please forgive me, but I’m going to take it.’ The woman seemed so intent that Gemma nodded, shock still reeling through her veins. She watched speechless as the wet woman ran to her car, got in and took off in a wobbly squeal of brakes down the Westway. As she watched Jezza’s wheels and all of Jezza’s T-shirts fade into the distance, all Gemma could think was that the woman had been so polite, so forceful yet so polite. Oh my God, so unlike Jezza.

  Gemma stood in the middle of a stationary Westway, realizing she still had a lot of work to do on her new dedication to assertiveness.

  47

  Troy experienced with a shock an emotion he had never felt for a woman before: admiration. As he melted into the crowd and pushed his way away from Ladbroke Grove, keeping his head down to avoid the security cameras, he felt stunned. What a jump! That didn’t mean she was okay; there was a good chance she was badly injured or even dead, but the problem was he had no idea what was happening up there on the Westway and no way of finding out – for now. Nicky Peterson was one ballsy girl: he wouldn’t have done it.

  His mind flashed back to consoling her in the country lane outside that big pile, his hands expertly massaging her shoulders, feeling the muscles in her neck, reaching under her long blonde hair and across her wide shoulders, fingertips passing over the bump in her clavicle to unclip the necklace and fold it in his large hands: an insurance policy. He had spent a long time later holding that necklace, weighing it in his palm. It was attention-seeking, bold, a bit trashy. It reminded him of her. She was strong, someone who could fight back: a worthy opponent.

  He almost laughed as he began to jog east, clearing the worst of the crowds. Boy, did she pick the wrong men! A husband who had taken out a contract on her, and a toy-boy lover who had tied her up – and he could imagine the rest. But she was still standing, taking the blows. That appealed to Troy. He would have liked to have been with a woman like that.

  He heard the impatient whop-whoop of a police car and three uniforms ran past him. His temporary good mood evaporated as he realized he had made a mistake: he should have shot her at her house when he had the chance. He had given her just the tiniest opening and she had taken it. He had underestimated her. Women. They were meaner and harder than men. Desperate women were the most dangerous of all. He picked Nicky’s phone out of his pocket. She had made a grave error dropping that, but he needed to tie this all up – find and kill the bitch. And he knew where he had to go for that. He began to head back to Maida Vale.

  When Troy was less than five minutes’ walk from Greg’s house Nicky’s phone began to ring so he pressed the answer button.

  ‘Nicky? Nicky, can you hear me? Thank God. Where are you?’

  It was the husband. ‘Surprise, surprise.’

  ‘Where’s Nicky?’ Greg’s voice was a whisper.

  ‘She dropped her phone and I kindly picked it up.’

  ‘Is she with you?’

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘Where the fuck is my wife?’ Greg shouted down the phone.

  Troy smiled. ‘You’re going to take me to her.’

  ‘Who are you, what do you want?’

  ‘What do I want? Money.’

  ‘I’m not paying you a fucking penny—’

  ‘Francesca and your wife . . . you’re going to hand over plenty for both of them.’

  Greg made a noise that Troy couldn’t catch. ‘I don’t understand—’

  ‘Oh shut up! You fucking hired me!’

  ‘I hired you?’

  ‘She your new bit on the side, the woman who called me? You can give me a bell in a few years when you need her doing too, eh!’ There was a long pause and Troy thought the connection had gone. ‘You still there?’

  ‘I want to be with you.’

  His tone had changed. The high-pitched, desperate denials had gone; his voice was now low and flat. This was better, the pretence was over and they could simply get down to business.

  ‘That’s not how I work.’

  ‘I want to be there when you—’

  ‘No.’

  There was another long pause. ‘I hired you, I paid you, and you owe me. You punched me in the bloody face.’

  Troy thought for a moment. It was unconventional, but he reasoned it meant more money or safety. If the husband was having second thoughts, he’d have to kill both of them in the end anyway. He’d already lost Struan on this job; if he kept him close he could make it look like Greg had killed Nicky and then himself. He could tie up all the loose ends. ‘What car do you drive?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me, what car?’

  ‘A BMW. Why?’

  ‘Open your door.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Open the front door.’

  A few moments later the door of the white stucco house swung open and Troy saw Greg, phone still to his ear, standing on his doorstep, craning up and down the street. He leaned back against the warm metal of the BMW convertible parked in the road outside.

  ‘Nice wheels. I hope you’ve got the key in your pocket – we’re going for a drive.’ Troy saw Greg open his mouth as if to say something into the phone, but no sound emerged. ‘Fuck with me and I’ll blow your head off.’

  ‘No fucking,’ he heard Greg reply.

  Troy grinned his five-grand smile.

  48

  Nicky stopped the car on the rise looking down at Hayersleigh House. There were no cars in view, the shutters were drawn and t
he windows she could see were closed. Ripples ran across the surface of the lake, which looked cold and deadly, and the brown scar of newly turned earth on the lawn was now a black slash in the rain. She thought about the last time she was here, running for her life, scared out of her wits. She wasn’t that Nicky now; that woman had died with every new revelation about Greg’s past, with the danger she’d only just escaped at the carnival. She drove on to the house and parked the Polo near the back door. She got out and stood for a moment, listening. She walked to the barn, the only noise her feet crunching on the gravel. The tractor had been put away, its job done, and the bicycle that she’d used for her final escape was propped up in its original place. The barn door creaked in the wind.

  The rain began to fall again, the scorching summer already a distant memory. She skirted the back of the house, peering in windows, steeling herself for what she was about to do. The police must have come and gone in their search for the shotgun used to kill Louise. The kitchen door was locked but the key was in the flower pot as before. A moment later she was standing in the kitchen, inside the lion’s jaw.

  The house looked different under cloud: its colours muted, the atmosphere stiller – and deadlier. She knew that she was alone, yet the house gave her the creeps nonetheless. She went and stood in the hall, right on the spot where Struan had died. Doorways into gloomy rooms with their windows shuttered surrounded her. She looked at the brooding outline of the gun cabinet and saw an image of her terrified self chained to the radiator. Not again, never again. She picked the key out from behind the photo on the bureau and opened the door, took one of the guns out and cocked it. There were no bullets. She opened the drawer underneath and found a box containing cartridges. Their golden metal ends glinted up at her before she loaded the gun and shut it with a snap. It sounded horribly loud in the country silence. She closed and locked the cabinet and put the key in her pocket.

  She turned to the large cupboards outside the kitchen and dug around in several drawers until she found a torch, then she began a slow ascent up the stairs, listening all the time. The wind was getting up and the house was groaning and creaking like a yacht tossed on the high seas. She paused on the top landing and headed on silent feet down the corridor to Connie’s bedroom. The room was shuttered and she needed the torch for extra light. She left the door open and pulled out the suitcase containing Catherine’s diaries. She sat down in the corner under the window facing the open door, propped the gun next to her against the wall, and began to read.

  The entries covered a fifteen-month period from June 1988 to September 1989. Nicky had seen Catherine’s dabbling in the artistic life in the paintings downstairs, but what she now realized was that Catherine was a much better writer. The notes here began when Adam was a tiny baby, presumably her one great creative act spurring her on to record her life as well. She wrote quite movingly about her love for her son and the small triumphs, irritations and tiredness of early motherhood. She didn’t write every day and there were whole weeks that passed without an entry, but an idea of the life of a typical upper-middle class woman with a large house to look after came through. There were dogs and a horse, a part-time housekeeper and a gardener who argued with Lawrence. Connie was often staying and helping with childcare while she took flying lessons.

  After half an hour Nicky started to get frustrated. These red books were not offering any revelation of anything. She put them down for a moment. What were diaries for? Nicky didn’t keep one, had never had any urge to. She didn’t know anyone who did keep one. Was it generational? A class thing? What Nicky did know was that if she did write one it wouldn’t be like this: lacking hatred and malice and family squabbles. This was a portrait cleansed of life’s battles and frustrations. It wasn’t real. These were books for public consumption – or books Catherine knew were being read.

  Nicky picked up the last notebook and raced past a large dinner they’d held at the house; after that there was a week of no entries and then the tone changed.

  I know you’re reading this, Connie, though you’ll never admit it. You never liked me, and you’ve tormented me ever since I came here. I know what you want – but you can’t have it. You like playing games? Well, here’s one. I’ve put something of his under the lawn. Now you’re desperate to discover what it is. You know you want it. It’ll tell you so much: the depths of what I know and what you don’t, what I’ve got that you’ll never have. And if you ever find it you’ll never dare tell, because this family likes to bury things so deep that they’re never dug up. Go on, you think you’re so clever . . . try to find it.

  The yellowing pages were blank from here. The entry was 9 September 1989: her last. She must have died soon after this, Nicky realized. Under the lawn. Adam had taken this note literally, and from this small piece of text he had literally dug up his own lawn. So Connie and Catherine hated each other, that much was clear. A plane roared over the house. What was Adam expecting to find? Had he already discovered it? Whether he had or hadn’t found what he wanted, she was as much in the dark as before.

  She stood and put the diaries away in the suitcase and pushed it back under the bed. Then she went along the landing, the gun in her hand, past Catherine’s row of sludgy pictures. Under the lawn, under the lawn . . . What now? A banging noise from the billiard room froze her to the spot. There it was again. She crept down the stairs, eyes locked on the door, which stood lightly ajar. She crossed the entrance hall and steeled herself to push at the door with the barrel of the gun in one hand, torch in the other. She heard three bangs in quick succession as the door opened and she turned on the torch. The beam of light bounced off armchairs and the huge table and she saw that one of the shutters hadn’t been closed properly and was moving back and forth in the wind.

  She clicked off the torch as daylight flooded the room with the shutter swinging open, and dropped the heavy gun to her side. She should leave – drive away in the Polo and take her experiences and her terror at the carnival to the police; she could get no further information from this cursed house. She looked at the huge picture of the willow that Cathy had painted, a shaft of grey light falling across it, and she thought back to that blistering day when she had first become alarmed at Adam’s behaviour and had gone and sheltered under that canopy for real. If only she had walked away then and there, had stridden across that lawn in the burning heat—

  The lawn. Nicky took a step forward. The willow dominated the painting, but the foreground was a pale green strip of lawn. Hadn’t Adam said this was the last picture she’d painted? She went across the room and touched the painting in its heavy and ornate frame. The room darkened as the shutter swung closed. Lawrence had said today that Adam was looking for ‘something that isn’t there’. Had Adam taken his mother’s words too literally? She felt round the edges in the gloom, knowing that what she was doing was ridiculous, but doing it anyway. She tried to lift the painting away from the wall but it was stuck fast; it must have been attached halfway up each side with screws to carry its great weight. She couldn’t get even a little finger behind it. Maybe she could poke something behind the frame. With an increasing sense of urgency she turned on the torch and rooted around in an old bookcase filled with vases and hardbacks for a ruler-shaped object but found nothing suitable. She went into the hallway, wondering where to look next, when her eyes came to rest on the photo of Catherine. She flipped the picture out of its frame and with the cardboard back that had held Catherine in place for twenty years she started poking up behind the painting. Towards one end she stopped as the cardboard hit an obstruction. She pushed harder, could hear Sellotape ripping . . . and the corner of a piece of brown paper poked out below the frame. She pulled.

  The afternoon was grey and silent and Greg was cold, still in a T-shirt that no longer fitted the mood. Autumn had swept over the land in six hours, pulling the temperature down ten degrees. The unnamed man sat behind him on the back seat, a silent and deadly passenger. Greg hadn’t seen a gun but he didn’t have to;
it was there, somewhere, the fatal force that could end his life. Greg thought of himself as an actor – he’d played a part for so much of his life – but today was his hardest role of all. As soon as he’d opened the door and seen the guy leaning so nonchalantly on his BMW he knew he was out of his depth. Show the guy a moment’s doubt about what he was doing, any hint of indecision, and this guy would kill him and Nicky. So he’d walked down his steps like a condemned man and got in the car. When he’d been passed Nicky’s phone to unlock it and get rid of the photo, he’d done it without complaint.

  Greg had tried conversation, had offered inane icebreakers in an attempt to ease his tension, had tried to engage him in conversation, hoping he would reveal things that could be useful later, but he didn’t respond. Now he drove on autopilot, following the man’s instructions, wondering how many people Troy had killed – and in what way.

  He headed south, eventually leaving the motorway for a succession of A roads and then a series of smaller roads until finally he turned onto the winding country lane that led to their destination. Greg felt sicker and sicker the closer he got.

  He pulled slowly into the drive that led to Hayersleigh House, drinking in every change. The sign was gone but he knew where he was going. He had driven here in his dreams, or nightmares, that summer that changed the course of his life – and that of others – for ever. The road was pitted and overgrown, the bracken that carpeted the forest yellow and drooping. It had been hot that summer too. The images in his memory were jumpy and the colours bleached, like in a nineteen seventies cine film.

  They reached the open gate as the rain began to fall again. Greg heard a plane overhead but couldn’t see it through the low cloud. Had they been that loud back then? His twenty-year-old self wouldn’t have noticed, or cared, yet now he shrank like an old man, loud noises ringing in his worn eardrums.