by Alex Lake
She reached the corner of the house. This was it: fifty yards of driveway and there it was. She could see it: the main road. Salvation. She ran into the driveway. She’d made it.
Or maybe not.
To her left she heard the bang of a door slamming open. Edna shot out of the front door like a ball from a cannon. She paused, legs wide, fists raised in a boxer’s stance, and looked down the drive. Realizing that Julia had not made it that far, she slowly turned to her right.
‘You,’ she said. ‘You have to stop this. This is not acceptable, Julia.’
‘Who are you?’ Julia asked. ‘The fucking governess?’
Edna smiled. ‘I like that. The governess. It’s nice. But no. I’m not the governess. I’m the executioner.’ She held up her right hand. She was holding an eight inch carving knife.
Julia knew it well. It was Japanese, very expensive, very heavy, and very, very sharp. She remembered Edna demonstrating just how sharp the day she had bought it. She took a tomato, placed it on the chopping board, and rested the knife on it:
No pressure, she said. I just keep the blade upright, and watch.
The knife sank through the flesh of the tomato, slicing it in two with just the weight of the blade. It was sharp, all right.
‘No hammer,’ Edna said. ‘Too hit and miss. But this … ’; she glanced at the blade ‘one slash with this and you’ll bleed to death in no time.’
Julia knew she could not outrun Edna, not with the way her hip was damaged. She hadn’t even managed to get to the front of the house before her. She had no chance in a straight race. Perhaps – and she knew it was a long shot – she could talk Edna out of it.
‘You’ll leave blood everywhere. The police will find it.’
‘I’ll clean up,’ Edna said. She looked up at the sky. ‘And anyway, I think it’s going to rain. I love British weather.’
Straight and hard, Julia thought. Run straight and hard. She won’t expect that.
She looked at the knife in Edna’s hand.
Except, I have to keep away from that thing. I can’t get anywhere near it. I can’t get anywhere near her.
So she took the only option that remained. She ran – limped, hobbled – towards the main road. Each step was a torment, but worse, on her right side, the side of her crushed hip, each step was about half the length and a quarter of the speed she wanted, and, in honesty, she needed.
Because behind her she could hear Edna’s footsteps crunching on the gravel driveway.
And they were getting closer.
ix.
Julia glanced over her shoulder. Edna was no more than five or six yards behind her. She was the product of a generation that had played netball and tennis in their youth and taken vigorous walks throughout their lives. So, although she was in her late sixties, she was still able to run faster than a wounded thirty-something. Not much faster, but enough.
Plus, she was crazy. If she hadn’t fully realized the extent of her mother-in-law’s craziness before, Julia understood it now. She was prepared to hack Julia to death in her driveway. Maybe, she had no other choice, maybe she could not let her daughter-in-law escape with the knowledge of what she had done, but for fuck’s sake, couldn’t she just give up?
The grim set of her jaw and the focus in her eyes suggested that giving up was not in her plan.
Julia glanced at her hand. It was a raw, bloody mess. It was hard to believe this was happening, here, in England, in middle class rural Cheshire, to her, Julia Crowne, a lawyer and an honest citizen, the extent of whose wrongdoing was limited to six points for speeding and a couple of parking tickets. This kind of thing just didn’t happen.
Except, of course, it did. You only had to open the newspapers, or click onto a news website, to see that. Some husband had stabbed his wife to death and then killed the kids. A woman had murdered her married lover. Two teenagers had gang-raped a twelve year-old girl then uploaded the footage to the internet. There was craziness everywhere, and it could turn up anywhere.
It was like talent. Unpredictable. You could train your kid from the age of two on the violin, just to see some prodigy, aged nine, from a broken home, who had been handed a violin by a social worker, take their place at a music academy and turn out to be a virtuoso. Why did some kids emerge at fifteen, fully fledged Premiership footballers, the ball seemingly attached to their feet by a string? Or some sing opera with effortless, perfect pitch, without having had a notes-worth of musical training? You could do your ten thousand hours, or whatever it was, but some people were just born with it, born with ability to do whatever it was you had slavishly trained yourself for. They had talent, they could kick a ball or hit a note or paint a picture.
And some people were crazy. Some people, like Edna, were batshit crazy, and somehow they learned to hide it, found a way to express it in a manner which was socially acceptable. Edna was known to be ‘formidable’: perhaps that was just the way she managed to hide her craziness.
‘You stupid bitch,’ Edna said, her voice close now. ‘You stupid fucking bitch. Why are you running? What good will it do? You’re just making it harder for me, and that means I’ll make it harder for you.’
As if to make her point for her, as Julia planted her right foot, her hip betrayed her, and she stumbled. Only slightly, but enough to cost her a precious few feet, and the next thing she knew there was a searing pain from her right shoulder blade to the bottom of the ribcage on her left side.
Edna had slashed her. The Japanese knife had sliced through her clothes and skin as though they weren’t there. She felt the warmth of her blood leaking down her back.
She dived to her right and rolled onto her back. Perhaps she could fend off Edna with her legs, maybe kick her hard enough to dislodge the knife or knock her over or something. Anything.
She realized it was a mistake immediately. Her right leg was useless, the hip totally frozen in place, and, if she raised her left it would be easy enough for Edna to grab it and use it to lever her onto her front, so that she could apply the executioner’s stroke.
The gravel dug into the wound on her back. Her hand throbbed. She’d tried, she really had, but it hadn’t been enough.
Edna loomed over her. Her knuckles whitened as she gripped the handle of the knife even harder.
And then there was the sound of tyres on gravel. Edna’s eyes widened and she looked towards the main road.
A blue Ford Fiesta, old, 1998, 1.3 litre engine, 117,000 miles on the clock and recently valued at five hundred pounds, which made it not worth selling until it gave up the ghost and died once and for all, at which point its owner would treat themselves to the new (well, maybe one or two-years-old) Volkswagen Polo that they had long coveted.
Julia knew all this because she had been with the owner when the decision was made. She had visited the Volkswagen dealership and listened to the sales rep shrug and say the Fiesta was worthless, more or less, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it, but do come back when it dies, and here’s my card.
He was a pleasant guy. Half Chinese, early twenties. Handsome. Julia had thought she might pay him a visit when she needed a new car, which would be sometime in the future, sometime after she and Brian had divorced. And who knew? Maybe he had a thing for (slightly) older women. On the way out she’d mentioned it to her friend, who had laughed, and said she couldn’t believe Julia was saying that.
I know what you mean, though, she’d added. He was kind of cute.
And then they’d gone, her and Gill, for a quick coffee, before Gill had to get home to the kids and make dinner for Trevor and then sort out the laundry and get the house in order for the week ahead.
‘Gill!’ Julia shouted. ‘Oh my God, Gill!’
The blue Fiesta pulled into the driveway, and stopped. Gill opened the door and stepped out, pale and shaking but with her phone in her hand, lifted so that the camera pointed at Edna.
‘I’m filming,’ she said. ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’
The
passenger side door opened and Mike got out of the car.
Julia didn’t wait to see if Edna was listening. She scrabbled backwards across the gravel, leaving a trail of vivid red blood on the grey stones.
Gill walked towards her and stood between her and Edna.
‘Jesus,’ she said, glancing at the trail Julia had left, then fixing her eyes back on Edna. ‘Are you ok?’
‘For now,’ Julia said. ‘I think so.’
Edna started backing towards the house. Mike grabbed his mobile phone and jabbed it three times.
‘Police,’ he said. ‘Emergency. And an ambulance.’
He moved towards Edna, who was nearing the house, the knife held out in front of her.
‘Leave her,’ Julia said. ‘It’s not worth it. She’s crazy. She’ll use that knife.’
‘She’ll get away,’ he said.
‘She won’t,’ said Julia. ‘Not any more she won’t.’
x.
Julia had never been in an ambulance. It was the kind of experience that, if you were lucky, you never had, although, like funerals and divorces, the frequency and likelihood of it occurring increased as you got older. Oddly, although it was her first time, she found it very familiar, and very reassuring.
Which was a good and necessary thing, as Julia was in need of reassurance. After Edna disappeared, the chemical tide of adrenaline flooding her body had receded, and with its disappearance had come both the realization of how fucked-up this situation was and the pain she was in. She didn’t dare look at her hand, her hip was locked, and when she felt it with her good fingers it seemed to be at least three times the size she expected, and her back was a stinging, blazing fire.
She’d lain on the gravel, not moving until the paramedics scooped her onto a stretcher, lifted her into their marvellous vehicle, and filled her with morphine.
Gill – blessed, heroic Gill – followed with Mike in her blue Ford Fiesta, 1998, 1.3 litre engine, 117,000 miles on the clock and recently valued at five hundred pounds. As she’d lain on the gravel Gill had held her hand and told her how she had picked up the call she’d made, only to lose it before she heard anything – that was Edna cutting the line, Julia said, just before she attacked me with a hammer – and how she had wondered why Edna was calling, as it was Edna’s number that had showed up on her phone. She nearly ignored it, but with all that had been going on – with Anna’s disappearance and the separation and the Julia vanishing – with all that, it didn’t feel right, somehow, so she had turned her car around and headed back to Edna’s house.
I couldn’t believe it, she said, when I turned into the driveway. I mean, I knew Edna was intense, and intimidating, but when I saw her standing there with a knife and you lying on the ground, I just couldn’t understand it.
So Julia had filled her in, her words coming with difficulty through the pain, the memories bleeding into one another as she struggled to concentrate.
She took Anna. She wanted to discredit me, so she could get custody.
That’s crazy, Gill said. No one does that.
She’s crazy. Totally insane.
Do you think Brian knows what she did?
Julia didn’t think he did. She didn’t think that Edna would have told him, didn’t think Edna considered him strong enough to live with the secret. He would not have gone to the cops – Brian did not have the guts to do that to his mother – but it was likely he would have done something. Started drinking. Taken Anna away from Edna; moved to his own place, stopped her seeing her granddaughter. He would have been unable to live with it, but unable to resolve it, and it would have torn him to pieces. Edna would have known all that, and as a result she would not have shared the secret with him. He was not worthy. That was the whole problem, the reason why she had wanted to take Anna. If Brian had been up to her standards none of this would have been necessary.
So she doubted Brian knew. Which meant someone would have to tell him, and it wasn’t going to be her. She didn’t feel strong enough.
Because he wasn’t going to take it well.
The paramedics waltzed her through a set of green double doors. She thought she was in the Princess Hospital in Chester – it was the only one she knew of that was within striking distance of Edna’s house – but as far as she knew she could be anywhere. The journey had passed in a morphine-induced blur and she could not have said with any confidence whether it had lasted thirty minutes or three hours. She was pretty sure that it was not three days, but beyond that she would not have ventured an opinion with any certainty. And, if she was totally honest, she didn’t care. She didn’t care because all she wanted was to be in the hands of the doctors – funny how you assumed they would make things better – and she didn’t care because the morphine made everything seem ok. She could see why people became so addicted to it. It wasn’t that it produced a sensation of bliss – although she had no doubt enough of it would do exactly that – but it just made everything ok. Nothing really mattered. Pain, concerns, worries; they all melted away. The world became benign and welcoming; a warm, friendly place that you wanted to hang around in, like a nice hot tub on the edge of a white sandy beach.
‘Mrs Crowne,’ a voice said. ‘I’m glad you’re safe.’
Julia turned her head. ‘DI Wynne,’ she said. ‘Good to see you.’
Wynne smiled. ‘I wish it was in better circumstances. I hear you’ve had quite the time of it.’
‘Well,’ Julia said. ‘You know how it is. Good days, bad days. This one wasn’t that great, but here I am. Safe and sound.’
She was aware she was babbling and it was the drug that was really talking, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything, except maybe Anna, and she’d be ok. Everything would be ok.
‘Yes,’ Wynne said. ‘Safe and sound. Anyway, Mrs Crowne, I think the doctors are ready to take you. They have some work to do, I understand. As do I, but we can talk later, when you’re more – more relaxed. I just wanted to let you know that I’m here.’
‘Ok,’ Julia said. ‘We’ll talk later.’
Then the trolley began to move again and she was in a large, clean room. A nurse adjusted the needle in her arm, then she was moved onto a table, for some X-rays, then back to her trolley and into another large, clean room. And then a smiling, mid-fifties woman (she looks a bit like Edna, Julia thought) told her she would be ok and they were going to take a look at her hand and her hip, and then another face appeared above her and a voice somewhere else said this is the anaesthetist and then she was slipping away, slipping away, slipping away …
xi.
When she woke the first thing she thought was that her mouth was dry and she would love a tall, cold glass of chocolate milk, which was an odd thing to want since she hadn’t had chocolate milk since she was a child, if she had even had it then.
But that was what she wanted, and she wanted it a lot.
The next thing she thought was what the hell happened to my body? She throbbed from a point somewhere at the top of her back all the way down to her right leg and her hand felt like someone was digging knives into it from all sides. And then she remembered how she had smashed her own hand to get out of the priest’s hole and how Edna – Edna, that evil, evil bitch – had hit her with a hammer and slashed her with a knife, a Japanese kitchen knife that was very sharp, before Gill had come and saved her and Edna had disappeared.
She heard the door open and then there were rapid footsteps and a girl’s voice.
‘Mummy!’ Anna said. ‘I brought you these flowers!’
She thrust a handful of carnations at Julia, then started to climb onto the bed.
‘Careful,’ Brian warned. ‘Mummy’s a little delicate at the moment.’ He picked her up and settled her on his knee. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘The nurses said you were awake.’ He was grey, his skin slack and pallid, and his eyes were nervous with shock. ‘I heard about … ’ he paused and Julia realized he was about to say Mum but couldn’t bring himself to pronounce the word, ‘Edna.’ He
looked at the floor. His shoulders were slumped, his back bent, his stomach pressed against his shirt. He was broken, Julia saw, badly broken. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ Julia said. ‘Could I have a kiss from my little girl?’
Anna hopped off Brian’s lap and leaned over the bed. The sensation of her warm, soft lips on Julia’s cheek was the most intense, most restoring thing she had ever felt.
‘Give me a minute with her,’ she asked him.
‘Of course.’ Brian stood up. His tone was wheedling and high, begging forgiveness. ‘Is there anything I can get you?’
Julia was about to say no, there wasn’t, when she realized there was something he could get for her.
‘If you could find some chocolate milk,’ she said. ‘That would be great.’
He was back half an hour later with Gill and a Tesco carrier bag. He took out a gallon of chocolate milk.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘I’ll pour you a glass. Then we need to talk. Anna can go with Gill, if that’s ok.’
‘It’s fine.’ Julia kissed Anna then took a long drink from the glass of chocolate milk. It was everything she had hoped it would be.
‘So,’ she said, when Anna and Gill had left the room. ‘It’s been a busy few days.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Brian said. ‘I want you to know that I’ll never forgive myself for this.’
‘You didn’t do it.’
‘I was there, Julia, in the house while she had you locked up in the same place she’d kept Anna … ’ he held his head in his hands, shaking it from side to side, ‘my own mother. She kidnapped Anna. I … I just can’t believe it.’
Was this the moment to tell him she had also killed her mother and her husband? Julia decided not to. It would come out eventually, but she didn’t think now was the right time for Brian to find out that his mother had murdered his father.
‘Brian,’ Julia said. ‘I can’t imagine how difficult this is for you. But I want you to know that I don’t blame you. You couldn’t have done anything to stop it, no one could. Edna’s … she’s insane, Brian.’
