Open Your Eyes

by Paula Daly

  Then there wasn’t a lot more to say. I’d thought about bringing something, a gift, a thank you for going above and beyond the call of duty, but when I’d stood in the Shell garage earlier, picking up objects – flowers, a bottle of wine, chocolates – nothing seemed particularly appropriate so I’d left empty-handed.

  ‘I should have got her registration plate,’ Rodney said absently.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I replied.

  Then I said, ‘Wait. You saw the driver? I didn’t think you saw who did it.’

  He shook his head to indicate I’d misunderstood. ‘I didn’t see the driver,’ he explained, ‘but I should have got the registration plate of the woman who left her there. It didn’t occur to me at the time. I saw the woman pull up right over there, and I thought she needed something from her boot, or her boot wasn’t shut properly, something like that. Then when she drove away I saw the little cat was on the kerb looking all bewildered. She stayed like that for a good hour. Not knowing what to do, I expect. I only put two and two together later that night – I realized that the woman had left her there on purpose. Dumped her. Anyway, the cat had gone by that time. She came back each day though and I’d look out for her. It was as if she was waiting … I don’t know, maybe waiting to be picked up again?’

  ‘Do you remember what kind of car this was?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You remember the colour?’

  ‘I remember everything that goes on around here,’ he said.

  33

  ‘Rose!’ I yelled through the letterbox. ‘Rose, get out here!’

  I banged on the door with my fist. ‘Get out here right now!’

  Then I held my finger on the bell so that it rang continuously. ‘Rose!’ I took my keys from my bag and rapped on the glass. ‘I know you’re in there! Get out here and see what you’ve done!’

  Bonita was next to me on the floor of Rose and Lawrence’s covered porch. Let her see exactly what she’d done.

  I moved to the front window. Cupping my hands around my eyes I looked through the glass and there was a flash of movement, a wisp of clothing, as someone left the room.

  Quickly, I ran back to the front door and looked through the letterbox again.

  I could see the tips of Rose’s slippers peeking out from the lounge doorway. She was hiding in between the two rooms, hoping she was invisible from my two vantage points.

  ‘I can see you, Rose.’

  She stayed perfectly still so I let the letterbox bang shut with a clatter and sprinted around the side of the house. I vaulted their small gate and ran to their back door. She would not hide from this. She wouldn’t.

  I grabbed the handle but she was already on the other side. Christ, she’d moved fast. She was furiously trying to lock the thing before I came through the glass. Her face was set and her tight grey curls were bobbing madly with the effort.

  ‘Open it, Rose!’

  ‘I’ll call the police,’ she said, eyes locked downwards, her fingers working furiously.

  ‘You’ll call the police?’ I screamed. ‘I’ll call the police, you old witch! Do you know what you’ve done? Do you?’

  ‘You have no proof of anything.’

  ‘I don’t need proof.’

  ‘If you’re going to come here accusing me of something then—’

  ‘You killed her! You went and killed her!’

  Rose flinched at my words but still she wouldn’t make eye contact.

  ‘Look at me!’ I screamed and her head shot up. ‘Is it not enough for you to see me struggling with Leon every day? Is it not enough so you have to go and kill our cat as well? I hope you’re happy. I really hope—’

  ‘I didn’t mean for her to—’

  ‘What? Die? Well, what were you expecting when you trapped her? When you drove twenty miles from her home? When you dumped her by the side of the road? What did you think might happen, Rose?’

  Quite pathetically she said, ‘I thought she’d wander off and go and live with someone else.’

  I closed my eyes briefly at her stupidity. ‘Cats don’t do that, Rose. They try to get home.’

  ‘Some do,’ she said, and then she looked at me, fresh panic in her eyes.

  ‘Oh, God,’ I said, realizing. ‘You’ve done this before. You’ve taken people’s cats before, haven’t you? So, what is this? You’re going around the streets and rounding up all the cats now? That’s your good turn for the gardeners of Liverpool? You CAN’T do that!’

  ‘But we’re part of Liverpool in Bloom!’ she cried. ‘We’re showing our garden as part of the festival.’

  ‘Oh, fuck off, Rose.’

  She took a step back from the glass and fixed me with a defiant stare. Though she was trembling now, in quite a pronounced way. ‘Please leave,’ she said firmly.

  ‘I’m leaving!’

  I only took three steps though before doing a fast about-turn and rapping on the glass again. She was still standing there, shell-shocked.

  ‘I’m leaving, Rose, but you know what? That husband of yours will be dead soon. He’s pretty old, isn’t he? And your weirdo son is no use. And when you need help, when you fall in the night and can’t get up, when you can’t drive that car of yours any longer, and you get totally cut off from life, I will pretend I have no idea who you are. In fact, I might drive you somewhere, Rose. Widnes, let’s say. I’ll drop you by the side of the road and leave you, and you’ll have no idea where the hell you are. Goodbye, Rose. I’m calling the police.’

  Faintly, I could hear her protesting through the glass as I walked away. ‘Don’t! Please don’t call them! Please, Jane … don’t …’

  ‘Rose Williams killed my cat.’

  ‘Jane,’ answered Inspector Ledecky, her voice smooth with deliberate neutrality. ‘How is Jack doing?’

  ‘Rose Williams killed my cat,’ I repeated.

  I heard her exhale.

  ‘I’m on my way,’ she said resignedly.

  Ledecky was with us within the hour and by that time I was no calmer than I had been whilst trying to rattle Rose’s door off its hinges. By now Martha was sobbing quietly on the beanbag, thumb in her mouth, her cheeks pink as though they’d been slapped, and Jack was sitting on Eden’s knee on the sofa, Eden tapping out a rhythm using Jack’s hands that Jack appeared to find soothing.

  They were distraught. They really thought Bonita would come home, full of adventures for them to speculate on, draw pictures about.

  I paced the floor.

  Fucking Rose.

  What sort of person traps cats and releases them miles from home?

  If Leon had been allowed to continue with his voyeurism he might have caught her in the act; we could have named and shamed, shown Rose forcing Bonita into a sack and put it on social media. We could have ruined her life just like that shuddersome Cat Bin Lady.

  ‘Sit down, Auntie Jane,’ said Eden, ‘you’re making me tense.’

  ‘I can’t sit down. I’m too angry to sit down.’

  The doorbell went and I flew out of the room, pulling the front door open, almost panting. I didn’t say hello. Just held the door wide for Inspector Ledecky, who executed a curt nod as she passed by me.

  Ledecky glanced left and on seeing the children and Eden in the lounge, made her way along the hallway to the kitchen. Once there, she didn’t wait for me to start yelling. ‘You’d better sit down,’ she said, as if this was her house.

  ‘I’d rather stand,’ I said defiantly.

  Ledecky raised her eyes to the ceiling wearily. Her eyebags were heavier than usual. ‘Jane, do stop being stubborn and take a seat.’

  I acquiesced. Muttering. I sat down at the head of the table so we were at ninety degrees to one another.

  ‘Where’s Leon today?’ she asked.

  ‘In the bath.’

  ‘How’s he doing?’

  ‘Fine,’ I snapped. ‘Well, aside from the cat, he’s fine.’

  ‘No more visitors to Jack’s school?’

  I
looked at her. ‘Do you really think I would keep something like that to myself?’ I said. ‘No, there have been no more stalkers. No, for now no one has been threatening the children. Or us.’ I shook my head at her in disbelief. ‘Anyway, what are you going to do about Rose?’ I said. ‘She admitted it to me. She’s not going to deny it.’ I sat back in the chair and folded my arms across my chest. ‘Rose is a nasty little bitch of a woman and I know you probably think she’s all sweetness and light, but I can assure you she’s not.’

  Inspector Ledecky shifted in her seat. ‘Of late,’ she began, ‘Lawrence Williams has noticed some changes in his wife.’

  ‘Changes?’ I spat. ‘Killing cats, there’s a change for you.’

  ‘Rose is currently undergoing tests for dementia,’ she said carefully.

  ‘Whoa.’ I held up my palms. ‘You’re not seriously going to try and pass off her behaviour with this excuse, are you? What? She’s losing her mind? She didn’t know what she was doing? I can tell you right now she knew exactly what she was doing. She’s an evil, evil monster of a woman who—’

  ‘Jane. Lawrence has been taking Rose to see their GP for close to eighteen months now. This is not a recent thing. And no, I’m not trying to excuse what she did to your cat.’

  I rolled my eyes.

  ‘They haven’t received a definitive diagnosis as yet,’ she said. ‘Dementia is of course notoriously hard to diagnose without physical changes to the brain, evident on scans and so forth, but Rose has been exhibiting behaviour that Lawrence says is completely out of character for his wife.’ She paused momentarily before adding, ‘She has been exhibiting behaviour that would be classed as … xenophobic.’

  ‘Xenophobic?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Racist?’ I said. She’d completely thrown me. ‘You’re serious?’

  ‘When I spoke to the Williamses, shortly after Leon’s attack,’ she said, ‘this came up. Their son, Glyn, seemed particularly keen to get it off his chest. He was worried I would find out about Rose and jump to conclusions.’

  ‘Did you jump to conclusions?’

  ‘It was a lead that we felt needed pursuing fully, so we questioned Rose a number of times about how she felt about …’ DI Ledecky hesitated.

  ‘A black guy living opposite?’ I offered.

  She nodded.

  It was now that I remembered Glyn’s visit again. Shortly after Leon’s attack, he’d lingered outside the lounge window. He’d appeared tormented, as if he had something he needed to say, something crucial to impart.

  ‘Glyn came here,’ I said to Inspector Ledecky. ‘He came here after Leon’s attack. Do you remember?’

  ‘I do. We were investigating Rose at that point, so I gave him strict instructions to stay away. I ordered all of them not to speak to you but, to be frank, he was in a terrible state. He thought if you found out what Rose had been doing, there would be repercussions, and he wanted to stave off any retaliation.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?’

  ‘Because I didn’t have to.’

  ‘You didn’t think it was relevant? You didn’t think it might have been useful for me to know?’

  ‘What would you have done, Jane? Marched over there?’

  ‘No.’

  Ledecky held my gaze. I probably would have.

  ‘So why didn’t you arrest her?’ I asked.

  ‘Because she didn’t try to murder your husband. Eventually, we tracked down CCTV of Rose driving out of Tesco on Allerton Road, at the exact time Leon was being attacked.’

  I got up and poured myself a glass of water. I offered one to Inspector Ledecky but she declined. Sitting back down again, I said, ‘OK, so what else did she do to Leon? And, really, should she even be driving?’

  ‘She claims not to remember what she did to Leon, but Lawrence is pretty sure she keyed his car.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, remembering. ‘We’d put that down to kids.’

  ‘And Lawrence thinks she might have thrown weedkiller on your camellia.’

  I was nodding. ‘Yes, that did die quite suddenly.’

  ‘And positioned nails near Leon’s wheels so he’d get a slow puncture.’

  I’d forgotten he’d had a puncture. It had seemed like nothing at the time.

  ‘Stupid stuff, really,’ she said. ‘Stuff that goes on between neighbours all the time. But it was the intent behind it that worried Lawrence. According to him, Rose’s father had racist tendencies, and Rose has been peppering her sentences with phrases and terms her father used since the start of her mental decline … particularly when she’s talking about Leon.’

  ‘Leon had been filming them,’ I told her. ‘I found masses of video files, films showing their side of the street. I thought he had some problem with Lawrence, or else he was fearful of being attacked … to be honest at one point I thought he was losing his mind.’

  ‘I found those files too, Jane. Leon wasn’t losing his mind. I think he was fearful of being attacked. Don’t you? Perhaps he started off wanting to document the street because he feared for his own safety, but then caught Rose in her acts of sabotage … accidentally.’

  I closed my eyes. All at once I felt very tired. As if I could fall asleep right there in the chair.

  Then I laughed. ‘You know, there have been moments when I thought Rose could’ve attacked Leon.’ I shook my head. Now I felt like I was losing my mind.

  Ledecky smiled. ‘Have faith, Jane,’ she said. ‘We will get whoever did this.’ And she stood and made to leave.

  At the front door she turned. ‘We’re so close,’ she said. ‘We’re so close I can feel it. I’m going back to Walton Gaol to re-question Ryan Toonen. I plan to put the wind up him a bit more, tell him his uncooperative behaviour won’t go down well when his parole comes around … Let’s see how he reacts to that. Who knows, he might decide to talk after all.’

  34

  Leon and Eden buried Bonita in the garden.

  I instructed them to put her over by the rhubarb patch, a spot she’d liked because it got a lot of warmth in the summer, a spot she’d spend hours sitting in, grooming herself, angling her small face up towards the sun. It being November, the garden was a grim, bleak, unwelcoming place right now, and as they dug, and the children stood in their mackintoshes and wellingtons, sombre-faced, with poems ready to read out loud in memory of their beloved cat, summer seemed like decades away.

  For the next few days Lawrence kept a low profile. Every time I came out of the house he’d shoot back inside. And there had been a noticeable decrease in activity over there. The car washing, pavement sweeping, gutter clearing, soil tilling, had all taken a back seat. He clearly didn’t want to face what had happened to the cat.

  I told both Leon and Eden what Rose had done to Bonita with instructions to spare the kids the details, but it hadn’t been necessary as Leon promptly forgot all about it. He still had moments when he called out to her by the back door, forgetting she’d even gone missing in the first place. And he would call out to Lawrence too, waving enthusiastically whenever he saw him, forgetting he’d ever had a cross word with him as well. If it hadn’t been so tragic, it would have been funny.

  We’d had no more strangers at school.

  No more dark-coloured saloon cars in the street.

  But I didn’t relax and assume that we were safe. That we could get on with the business of living. I kept alert, stayed watchful, whilst trying to get on with shepherding the children to school, making meals, teaching classes, cleaning the house, helping Leon learn how to live in the world once again. Ledecky had got nowhere with Ryan Toonen and the whole thing was taking its toll. I was jumpy and anxious, my body had become thin and angular, and I was now medicating with alcohol just to get a rest. I needed an out. I needed Leon’s attackers to be caught so that I could feel safe, but with every day that passed, the possibility of that seemed more and more remote.

  Eden remained an asset, a good distraction for Leon. I’d come to rely on
him to the point that I couldn’t imagine how we’d get through the week without him. Eden’s natural geniality seemed to be somehow washing off on Leon, and since he’d been with us Leon had not had one violent episode.

  When I’d left them this morning, for instance, Eden had been holding up a series of pictures of people and objects that he’d cut out from the Sunday supplements for Leon to identify.

  ‘Britney Spears?’ ventured Leon.

  ‘Close,’ replied Eden. ‘So close, Uncle Leon. You’re almost there. Try again.’

  Leon had squeezed his eyes tightly shut as he tried to recall the name. ‘Nicole Kidman?’

  Eden snorted. ‘No, man,’ he said. ‘But so close. Let’s try another.’

  Eden thought this would be a good way to work on improving Leon’s short-term memory. Yesterday they’d started with four images: the Alps, a Stilton and broccoli quiche, Cambridge University, and a picture of a performance car from the Motoring section. Today the blonde in the picture that Leon was having trouble recollecting was Ellen DeGeneres.

  I was pretty sure the game was having a negligible effect on Leon’s memory, but I could hear Leon laughing uproariously from time to time, which would make me stop in my tracks and smile. Eden said they would move on to word recall soon, which he thought might be useful for him too as Eden’s spelling was, ‘As we all know, Auntie Jane, absolute shit.’

  Back from my class at Wavertree Library now, I mounted the stairs and called out Eden’s name.

  ‘In the shower!’

  ‘Where’s Leon?’

  ‘Attic,’ Eden said. ‘He asked for privacy.’ When I didn’t respond, wondering what Leon could be doing up there, Eden added, ‘That’s OK, isn’t it, Auntie Jane?’ with worry in his voice. ‘I’m not supposed to be on, like, suicide watch or anything?’

  ‘It’s fine, Eden.’

  I climbed the second set of stairs and found Leon lying on the sofa, his eyes closed. He was too big to fit into the thing comfortably and so lay with his lower legs hanging over the edge. I got the sense he was resting rather than actually sleeping.

  ‘Hey,’ I said softly and he roused, opened his eyes and turned his head my way.