by John Marrs
Neither the crunching of her bones under the van’s wheels nor the screeching of its brakes persuaded me to stop walking and to turn around.
Northampton, today
2.40 p.m.
Catherine remained motionless as she processed the horror of his confession. Her husband was a killer.
She didn’t want to believe it, because what he’d just admitted made no sense at all. She had never met anyone who had murdered another human being. Certainly not someone who she’d allowed into her home. And not one she had loved. She had no idea how to respond.
What seemed to him like an age passed by, while neither of them spoke. He focused his eyes on the rug; hers burrowed right through him. He didn’t think it fitting to interrupt.
‘You . . . you killed Paula?’ she stuttered slowly.
‘Yes, Catherine, I did,’ came his reply, reticent but showing little remorse.
‘She was pregnant,’ she said quietly.
He inhaled deeply. ‘I did not know that.’
The colour drained from her face and she felt sick. Actually, she more than just felt sick: she knew she was going to vomit. She leaped up from her chair and winced as her weight took her weak ankle by surprise. She faltered upstairs to the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. She didn’t have time to lift the toilet seat before the first wave struck and she made a mess on the floor. But the second time, she was prepared and it reached the pan.
He remained downstairs, saddened to hear two lives had been lost that day, and not just one like he’d assumed. But he had done what was necessary at the time.
He stood up, paced around the room and heard her retching upstairs. He’d always known that if he was going to be completely honest with her – and that was, after all, why he was here – it was going to be unpleasant. And it was going to get worse. Much, much worse. Because Paula wasn’t the first person he’d killed, and she hadn’t been the last. But Catherine didn’t need to know that yet.
Upstairs, her sickness eventually passed, but she remained on the floor, her arm still clutching the cistern, her back square against the radiator.
Suddenly she became frightened of the monster below, now he’d revealed what he was capable of. Her body swivelled around and she stretched her arm to turn the lock on the handle. The doors were old and heavy but not impossible to break. A few kicks were all it might take.
She asked herself how someone she’d known so deeply – built a life and family with – could’ve hurt a beautiful soul like Paula. Although it had been a while since she’d thought about her old friend, she remembered the horror of first hearing she’d been knocked down and killed in a random, apparently utterly senseless attack abroad. Despite a lengthy investigation, no one had ever been arrested or charged.
She’d been devastated, of course. Just before Paula and Roger had left for their holiday, Paula had confided in her, like best friends do, that she was pregnant. Catherine was over the moon for her and bashed out three Babygros and a jumpsuit to give her when they got back. She cried into them when Paula’s mother told her the news.
She recalled the day of the funeral, when the whole village turned out without exception to pay their last respects. Then, afterwards, she spent much time consoling Roger, who blamed himself for leaving Paula alone for those few crucial, fatal minutes. He’d never discovered where she’d been going when she was murdered.
Without warning, the door handle turned and she jumped.
‘Leave me alone!’ she croaked, her throat acidic and sore. But he had no intention of leaving yet.
‘Catherine,’ he said calmly. ‘Please come out.’
‘Why are you telling me all this? Are you going to kill me next? Is that why you’ve come back?’
He might have laughed under different circumstances. ‘No, of course not.’
‘How can I be sure? I have no idea who you are. You’re a stranger.’
‘As are you, but we all change, Catherine. All of us change.’
‘But we don’t all change into murderers and kill our friends!’
He couldn’t disagree. ‘Come back downstairs and let’s talk.’
‘About what? There’s nothing you can say that can justify what you did.’
‘And I’m not going to try to. What’s done is done and I won’t take anything back. I’ve come a long way to see you, Catherine. Please.’
She paused and heard him walk slowly down the stairs. She took a few deep breaths and then splashed cold water across her face. She patted herself dry with a hand towel and was surprised by her reflection in the mirror. An old woman stared at her. In the time he’d been in her house, she’d been thirty-three again. Now she was every inch her fifty-eight years.
She cleaned up the mess on the bathroom floor, then disregarded common sense and unlocked the door. As she made her way to the landing, she resolved that, if she was going to die at his hands, she was going to put up a bloody good fight first.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SIMON
Colorado, USA, twenty-three years earlier
2 May
The faces of the others I’d killed hadn’t haunted me like Paula’s.
Again and again, I recalled the warmth of her soft cheeks and her hair as it brushed against the back of my fingers. I remembered thinking how surprisingly light she felt when I threw her body into the road.
I could still hear the bursting of her skin and bones as the van crushed her. I still felt the adrenaline soaring through my blood as I ran back to my hotel to grab my backpack and then vanished into the night.
But when my foot pressed hard on Betty’s accelerator and Key West faded behind me, all I saw was my imaginary passenger Paula’s face in the rear-view mirror.
Over the next three months, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado all flashed past like a wheel of photos in a red plastic View-Master. The majority of my time was spent on the road manipulating fellow runaways into helping fill my hours – new groups of friends for the days and women for the nights. And when female volunteers were sparse, I’d seek out those who required payment by the hour.
Bony or Rubenesque, dark-chocolate complexions or as pale as death – appearances never mattered when I knelt behind them as they balanced on their hands and knees. And if they could provide the chemical stimulants I’d grown to enjoy since my first time with the two girls in Miami, then even better.
I offered transportation to anyone who needed to be somewhere else, even to a state hundreds of miles from the route I’d intended. I did anything to avoid being ensnared by myself, because that’s when I dissected my actions.
I didn’t doubt for a moment that killing Paula had been the right thing to do. In fact, I was still galled by her for backing me into a corner. Paula had had a choice; I hadn’t. By following me, she’d made the wrong one. I had made the correct one.
I’d gone to great pains to keep my past and present separate. And when she’d demanded reasons, I could predict the chain of events that would’ve followed my allowing her to walk away. She’d have hurried back to the hotel to inform Roger his departed friend was actually thriving under the Floridian sun. Then, on their return to England, he’d have felt duty-bound to tell Catherine that she’d been abandoned, not widowed. While I was missing, there was doubt and an assumption of death. With confirmation came certainty and I did not want to be thought of in either a negative or positive light.
Paula had paid the price of interfering with what was meant to be. And I was not responsible for that.
Utah, USA
20 July
I removed my belongings from my backpack and spread them out in a semicircle across the saline terrain. I built two heaps – the ‘keep’ pile and the ‘toss’ pile. The first contained essentials such as clothing, maps, Darren’s passport, and money.
The second pile was for items I wouldn’t need or use again, such as the telephone numbers of people I’d already forgotten. Souvenirs only served to remind me of expe
riences I’d already had. It was what was to come that interested me. And if I wanted to travel light, sentiment would only weigh me down.
I placed a faded denim shirt between the piles, repacked my backpack and stored it behind a nearby boulder. My discarded items were consigned to Betty’s trunk. I cut through the denim shirtsleeve, then unscrewed the petrol cap and carefully fed it inch by inch into the hole.
Betty had been the perfect travelling companion for six thousand miles, but her time had reached an end. Her rear axle throbbed over the feeblest of bumps. She required a thirty-minute rest after every three hours of travel, or steam would burst from her radiator like Old Faithful.
I chose the Bonneville Salt Flats as her final resting place. Its fifty square miles of empty, horizontal earth was so flat and brilliantly white, it was like God had run out of time when creating the world and thrown his paint pots down in frustration. Betty could make her mark there.
I pulled a cigarette lighter from my jeans, and after several flicks of its flint, the shirt’s cuff caught light. I stepped back and stared hard into her windows, desperate to find the memories of those I’d been forced to sacrifice, slowly cremating in the flames inside the car. But the only thing to burn was my reflection.
I lit a cigarette, walked away from Betty and awaited a climactic explosion. Instead of a giant fireball came a belly rumble. Flames slowly lapped from under her doors and scorched her windows. One by one, her tyres burst, then her windows popped and shattered.
‘You okay there, sir?’ a man shouted from inside his truck as he pulled over to the side of the road. ‘What happened to your wagon?’
‘She overheated and caught fire.’
‘Shit, man. You’re lucky you got clear, I guess. Can I give you a ride?’
‘That would be great.’
‘Where to? The nearest town?’
‘Anywhere you’re headed, actually. There’s nothing to salvage here and I can’t afford to pay to deal with it.’
The man considered Betty’s blazing remains, then looked me up and down, as if asking what kind of person wasn’t more bothered that their only mode of transport had just gone up in flames. Then he shrugged. ‘I’m heading to Nevada. That okay?’
I accepted his offer, and as we drove off into the distance, I watched through the wing mirror as my girl smouldered, then bid farewell by finally exploding into the sky like a comet.
CATHERINE
Northampton, twenty-three years earlier
17 July
‘I’m retiring, Catherine,’ began Margaret. I nearly spat my tea across the kitchen table.
‘Jim and I are moving to Spain,’ she continued, oblivious to my dismay. ‘We’ve bought a nice little villa on the coast in Andalusia. I plan to start scaling down next summer, and all being well, we should be there by New Year.’
‘Oh,’ I replied. She might as well have slapped me across the face.
I’d thrown myself into making clothes for Fabien’s and had even given up ironing for others so I’d have the time to plough through well over a hundred outfits in a year and a half. It was also a therapeutic way of keeping my mind off poor Paula. Baishali and I missed her so much. It was almost too much to bear, and we took comfort in each other and tried our best to help Paula’s parents cope with their loss.
Now, with Margaret’s news, all I saw was my future behind checkout number seven at the supermarket again.
‘Do you have a buyer?’ I enquired, hoping my new boss would be just as keen on my work.
‘That depends on you, darling,’ she replied, screwing a cigarette into a plastic holder. ‘I’m giving you the first option to buy me out.’
I laughed out loud. Clearly the prospect of spending the rest of her life under the Spanish sun, drunk on sangrias served by hunky waiters, had sent her a little doolally.
‘You know I don’t have that kind of money!’ I answered. ‘Look around you. Everything in this house is second- or third-hand, or broken and held together with Blu-Tack. How on earth could I afford to buy your shop?’
‘Oh, you should never let money get in the way of a good idea,’ she tutted. ‘As far as I can see, you have three options – either get yourself a bank loan, remortgage your house, or you and I can come to a financial agreement until the balance is paid off.’
‘But I know nothing about business!’
‘You’re full of excuses, aren’t you? I didn’t have a bloody clue about it either when I started, but did that stop me? Did it hell. So what’s stopping you?’
‘Margaret, I’m not like you,’ I sighed, reminding her of the obvious. ‘You have the confidence to do anything you put your mind to – and the money. I’ve got the kids and keeping a roof over our heads to worry about. It’s impossible.’
She took a long drag from her cigarette and poured herself a third cup of tea from the pot.
‘Do you remember when you told me about your mother, and what a bitch she was to you?’
‘I didn’t call her a bitch,’ I interrupted, a little surprised.
‘Well, she was, so learn to live with it. You took everything negative she ever threw at you and turned it into something positive. What did you do after Billy? You picked yourself up and got on with life. And what about when Simon disappeared? I bet you felt sorry for yourself, licked your wounds then put your children first, didn’t you?’
I nodded.
‘See? You’re a survivor, darling. You always find a way, that’s what you do. You’re a much stronger person than I am. An opportunity like this doesn’t come knocking at your door every day, so I implore you to grab it with both hands.’
I kept quiet for a moment and mulled over her suggestion. On the surface, pole-vaulting across the Grand Canyon looked easier.
‘Be honest, do you really think I can do it?’
‘When have I ever been anything but honest with you, Catherine? If I didn’t think you were capable, I’d have never put the offer on the table. Now, what do you say?’
26 November
The months went by like a whirlwind.
Since Margaret had made her offer, it’d been all I could think about. The old me would have dismissed it as a pretty ridiculous suggestion. But times had changed, and so had I. Now I owed it to myself to at least think about it.
I’d calculated I had enough savings to pay the mortgage for five months, and I could show my bank manager my accounts to prove I was now loan-worthy. But that wouldn’t cover all of Margaret’s asking price. And it wasn’t my only problem.
‘The college has a night school,’ she’d explained back in the summer, pre-empting another excuse. ‘Two evenings a week in business, bookkeeping and accounts.’
‘But what about my clothes? I won’t have time to make them and run a shop.’
‘That’s what staff are for, dear. Ask some of the girls at the local fashion college to help – they’ll bite your hand off for the experience. And while Selena’s reluctant to accept my offer of employment, I’m sure she’d be more than willing to step up for you.’
For every argument I had to oppose her, Margaret found reasons why I could do it. And it lit a fire in my belly that I’d never felt before. I was like Dorothy caught up in a cyclone; only no matter how many times I clicked my ruby-red slippers, I was still in Oz. I had to give it a shot.
But in doing so, I needed to lead two separate lives. At home I’d have to continue being Mum to my brood, while at the boutique I’d be a budding businesswoman learning the ropes.
Over the following months, I followed Margaret to meetings in London with designers and manufacturers, and she even paid for my flights to Paris, Milan and Madrid for catwalk shows. It was a different world, one that scared and fascinated me. It was like jumping into the pages of the fashion magazines I read. And, if I’m honest, at times I didn’t think I deserved to be in places like the third row of the runway as Thierry Mugler launched his spring collection.
My mother’s voice told me I was a fraud and Marg
aret’s charity case. So to spite her, I stuck with it to see how far I could go.
I doubted whether I’d have had the courage or confidence to do it if Simon had still been alive. I’d got all the fulfilment I’d needed in being his wife and the mother to his children. But I’d been a different woman two years ago. With each new challenge, I discovered I had passions, ambitions and a desire to be my own person.
And I was about to find something else I’d never expected to see again.
Northampton, today
3.30 p.m.
She’d listened intently to every word he’d said, hanging on to a glimmer of hope that he might show some regret over killing Paula. But when he blamed Paula for her own death, it merely revealed the true character of the man. In fact, he was no man, she thought.
He was a shade: a lifeless, colourless shade.
Try as she might, she couldn’t understand why he’d come back after all this time to confess to something he knew would disgust her. He could have taken his secret to the grave and she’d have been none the wiser. So why did he want to hurt her? And surely only someone who realises he has nothing to lose would so readily admit to such evil deeds? What had he already lost that had made him so unafraid?
His mind was elsewhere. To hear how far she’d come bolstered his belief that leaving had been the best thing for her. But for the children? He was still undecided and his head hurt the more he thought about it.
‘Is that what you do when something stops being useful to you or gets in your way?’ she asked.
‘I’m not sure what you mean.’
‘Paula. The car you set fire to. The hotel you burned down. Me. The children. If it becomes an inconvenience or interferes with your plans, you destroy it.’
‘No, no,’ he replied, unsure how she’d failed to grasp the significance of incinerating Betty or the hotel. He’d thought she’d understand they had been selfless acts, and the closing of chapters. But it wasn’t an argument worth pursuing. Maybe later she might realise it was just those who’d sought to ruin him who’d fallen foul of his sourness.
‘If you’re not here to hurt me, then give me one good reason why I shouldn’t call the police and tell them what you did to Paula?’
