“And despite everything that’s going on with us, you still gave it to him.” Tom stands, and the chair squeaks against the floor. “Don’t you have the energy to fight for us?”
“I fight for us all the time. I fought for us at that abandoned farm—”
“I seem to remember I did the fighting.” Tom’s eyes are like marbles. Dark, emotionless marbles. Cold and small. “Why didn’t you kill her, Leah? Why didn’t you kill her when she was unconscious in the farmhouse?”
There it is. There’s the resentment.
I’ve thought since that night that the wedge between me and Tom is down to the fact that I’ve never told him I gave birth to him, but as he asks me that question, I realise the truth. That’s what has been pulling us apart.
“You know why.” My voice is soft and cool, ignoring the hot storm beneath my skin.
“No. I don’t.”
“I’m a nurse, Tom. Not a murderer.”
“I killed her father,” he says. His voice is emotionless. Terrifying.
“To save me,” I say. “He was trying to murder me. When Isabel was unconscious on the ground, she was helpless. It would have been her murder. I would have been just like her.” My stomach twists, and for a terrifying moment, I think I’m going to be sick. But then I pull myself together and run my fingers through my hair to steady myself. “You seem to forget me pushing her off a cliff. You keep forgetting that. I fought her, and I won. I pushed her, and she shouldn’t have survived.”
“Alison Finlay is dead because of you. Because you couldn’t finish it.”
My scars itch. The coffee swirls in my stomach. Tom stares at me with the dead eyes of a magpie.
“It wasn’t that hard, you know.” He takes a step towards me and lifts a knife from the block on the counter. “It went in much easier than I thought it would. All those bullies at school called me fat. A blob. Bad at sports, un-athletic, stupid. But I proved them all wrong when I drove that knife into David Fielding’s back. Didn’t I?”
I take a step back. “You did it in self-defence. It was brave, Tom, but the act itself isn’t something to be proud of. You should be proud that you defended us, saved us, but the actual act… Tom, you know better than that. Don’t you? You know that?”
Tom places the knife back down. “Of course.”
He stands there with his hands by his sides, staring down at his feet. I take a tentative step towards him. “Tom, is there something you need to tell me?”
He shakes his head.
“I’m here to help you. I’m your friend… I…” Everything sounds lame. Cliched. “I won’t judge you. I know we don’t talk about that night, and I can see now that I made a mistake in not talking to you about what happened. You’re traumatised by having to kill David Fielding, and perhaps we should address all of that. Do you want to sit down and talk about it?”
How has today ended up going horribly wrong? We were sat together working on a task, joking a little. Even a few laughs. And yet… all of this was bubbling under the surface, waiting to be released. Why didn’t I see it coming?
“I want to talk about Mum,” Tom says eventually.
“Okay. What about her?” Alarm bells are ringing in my head. What does he know?
“You didn’t know I was in that day, did you? But I was. I heard you talking to Murphy. I heard you discussing how Isabel dug our mother up and stole her ring. How could you not tell me?”
He seems tall, broad, almost terrifying in the small kitchen. No one tells you that about teenage boys, do they? They’re terrifying. “I wanted to spare you that. God, Tom, when I was told, I wanted to be sick. I felt disgusted, violated. What she did to Mum was abhorrent. I… I couldn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to feel the same way I felt.”
“Lies, Leah. All lies. You want to keep it all to yourself. The drama. The horror. The violence. You love it, don’t you? Remember how you researched all those serial killers? You can’t get enough of it.” He places his hands on my shoulders. “You let Isabel go because you love her. Don’t you see that?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
ISABEL
I do wish I could send you these letters, Leah. No, I wish I could see you, touch your skin, smell your scent. Was it your shampoo that smelled like lavender? Or do you use some sort of old-fashioned perfume? Since I’ve been free, I’ve noticed that only women in their eighties smell as strongly of lavender as you, but it doesn’t surprise me that you’re old-fashioned.
How I’d love to tell you this story in person and see your expression. I remember the glint of fascination in your eyes as I lured you into my room with promises of depraved tales about my childhood.
You’re as dark as I am, Leah, and don’t you ever forget it.
Here’s a little depraved tale for you.
Once upon a time, a girl was born. Her family were strange and eccentric. They didn’t watch movies together on the sofa or have perfect family dinners on a Sunday. They hunted and killed together. The girl learned that destruction was the greatest of all arts, but society didn’t care for her kind of art. She was locked away and told she’d never leave, so the girl learned to play a new game, one that needed the right prey in order to work. The girl chose her prey and played the game to her best ability until one day she decided that she would die happy by creating one perfect piece of art, even if it meant giving up her newfound freedom. The girl’s family helped her, and she almost completed it, except for one problem. The prey turned on her.
The girl escaped from the prey’s clutches and managed to run away. She hid in the dirt and shadows, hungry and alone but free, and then she made a friend. The friend showed the girl a new world. She showed her where to eat and how to get high. But it turns out that the new world was boring to the girl. She wanted destruction.
She wanted to create.
The friend was slowing her down. She was a burden. The friend didn’t have two brain cells to rub together, but eventually she figured out that the girl was infamous and that there was a reward for turning in the girl.
I caught her with her ear to a mobile phone the next day. I think she thought I was still asleep, but I wasn’t.
“Who are you calling?” I asked.
When she turned to me, her skin was waxy and yellow, like a candle with condensation on the surface. There were deep purple bruises beneath her eyes, and her hair was greasy and disgusting. When I first met Chloe, I thought she was pretty, in a rough kind of way. But now she was hollow and jaundiced, unhealthy and grubby. I wanted to get away from her.
“Just a friend.”
“I didn’t know you had any friends.” I sat up in bed and reached over to her, then gently pulled the phone away from her ear. “I thought I was your friend.”
“You are,” she said. Her words came quick. Desperate little utterances. The voice of the cowardly. The begging. The pathetic.
“Let’s go and get breakfast, shall we?” I suggested.
“I think I need to go—”
“No, you don’t.” At this point, she needed a little persuasion, so I took her wrist in my hand and held her tight.
“Okay.”
We dined on fried chicken, because it was the nearest restaurant. Chloe barely touched her food. I think it was at this point in the day when Chloe resigned herself to her fate. She stared down at her fried chicken and decided that she didn’t have much of a life, anyway. Sometimes a little fighting spirit won out and she raised her head and regarded the people in the restaurant with wide eyes, which was when I jabbed a knife into her thigh under the table, just enough to let her know it was there. Chloe, poor dim-witted, drug-addled Chloe, was the kind of person who just needed to be scared a bit. She didn’t take much persuasion at all. She didn’t have your streak of self-preservation. Maybe that’s why you’re much more interesting prey.
We went back to the car after our greasy breakfast, and Chloe begged me to let her go. She was crying. She promised many things: that she wouldn’t tell the poli
ce, that she wouldn’t tell anyone. She asked me what I wanted. Did I want money? Drugs? Sex? I didn’t want any of those things, and I believed her when she told me she wouldn’t tell anyone. Well, I believed she wouldn’t tell anyone for a while. But one day the fear would ebb away and she would believe herself to be safe, and it would be on that day that she would blab all about her experiences with me.
That isn’t why I did what I did. I want you to know that. I did it because I was bored.
I drove. It was the first time I’d driven the car, because I don’t have a license, of course. I’m not a good driver, Leah. I barely made it out of Crowmont with your car. That was always the part of the plan that I was frightened of. Would I make it out of the carpark, even?
I digress. Anyway, I drove us away from the chicken restaurant and away from the main roads. I drove all day, in fact, with a full tank of petrol dutifully paid for the night before. I drove and I drove as Chloe cried quietly in the seat next to me. I avoided roads with too many traffic lights, but when I did stop, I held on to her to stop her leaping out of the car door. Eventually, I allowed her to take enough drugs to calm herself down.
She was passive then, and she made barely a sound when I stopped on a country road by what appeared to be a forest of thickset trees. It was night by this point. I don’t know how long we’d been driving. But finally we stopped at this isolated place, and I pulled her from the car.
Chloe wasn’t prey. Prey needs to put up a fight, and the fight had been knocked from this girl many years ago. But she was about to serve a purpose. Her life wouldn’t be a waste, after all. I was going to transform her into something greater, something far more beautiful than she’d ever been in her life.
I led her by the hand into the trees, keeping my knife in the other hand. A different knife from the one I held beneath your chin, Leah. This one I bought from a department store, wearing a disguise. A black wig and a beret hat. Nothing too conspicuous. Not a balaclava or anything like that. I bought it with money Chloe had earned from her drug deals, as she was slumped, high, half-conscious in the backseat of the car.
Poor girl. If only she’d noticed more, she might have prevented her own death. Well, never mind. Now she would get to transform, as I said, into beauty.
I was lucky enough to find a stream. Chloe was dirty and greasy from her drugs and from the terrible food we’d been eating. I stripped her like a mother does her baby before a bath. Then I bathed her in the stream. She shivered and made little gasping sounds, but she didn’t try to run away. I gave her another hit of her favourite narcotic, bound her hands and feet, and then I got to work.
Do you think about our time together in the farmhouse, Leah? I do. Often. One of my deepest regrets is not completing my work. Chloe provided a new canvas for me to work on, but it wasn’t quite the same as you. When I was finished, I felt… underwhelmed. At least when I untied her and pushed her into the stream, her arms and hair spread out in an attractive way. It was then that I realised her hair was almost the same colour as your hair, Leah, and that made me a little happier. Until it made me sad.
I won’t be satisfied until you, my most worthy prey, have been transformed into my best creation.
I need you, Leah, and I will find you.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Rita Blackthorn finally accepts my friend request. I’ve been checking Facebook all day, but it isn’t until the evening that I receive the notification. As soon as we’re friends, I view every photo, status and comment that I can, greedy for more information. The more I read, the more I believe she is a descendant of Simon Blackthorn. Some of her relatives even live nearby. I cross-reference members of her family with people’s names I saw in groups about Clifton, and everything seems to check out.
Now, I sit in front of the laptop with my hands hovering over the keyboard. I need to message her if I’m going to find out anything more about Simon Blackthorn and his relationship to George’s mother, but I’m nervous. She could become incredibly offended if I suggest that her grandfather, or great-grandfather, was a man capable of murder and kidnapping. Or even of domestic abuse. And what if I have the wrong person, anyway? Or, what if I reveal my identity in some way? What if I slip up?
This is for George. I decide to compose a quick message pretending to be Evelyn’s granddaughter, who is trying to learn more information about Simon Blackthorn. There, it’s done. Back to waiting.
Against my better judgement, I can’t help checking the hashtag that makes my skin turn cold. I check both Facebook and Twitter, relieved to see it isn’t quite as active as before. Maybe the fuss has died down. Or maybe they’ve moved to some other social media or website arena to discuss ways to kill me slowly. They don’t see the scars I wear. They don’t know me.
They don’t know what’s in my nightmares.
Some days, I’m not sure I even know myself. Some days, the secrets I keep inside myself threaten to overflow. Sometimes I worry about myself and what I’m capable of, what I’ve been capable of in the past.
I log out of Facebook and then remember that I wanted to check out another one of Rita Blackthorn’s friends. But this time, when I go to log back into Facebook, I discover that there’s another email address linked to a Facebook account. Tom’s email address.
My stomach drops. Tom knows he shouldn’t have a Facebook account, certainly not with the email address that contains his real name. I consider shutting down the laptop and talking to him later, but I don’t. I log in under his email address.
I know I shouldn’t be doing this. The way my palms begin to sweat suggests I’m all too aware that I shouldn’t be doing it. But Tom is at the pub with his friends, and I’m alone in the house with a mind that cannot stop looping back to the moment he picked up that knife from the kitchen table and held it towards me. Those black magpie eyes had been staring at me… My mind is stuck in that moment, asking me what I actually know about my son. Perhaps this is an opportunity to find out.
I log in without a hitch—the password is saved on this device; that’s sloppy by Tom—and his page appears. There’s no profile picture. No status. Perhaps this is just an empty account he left active by accident. I’m about to log back out with a sigh of relief, but before I do, I can’t help clicking on the inbox icon.
And there I see them. My first assessment was wrong; this account isn’t empty at all. It’s used for communication. I screw my eyes tightly shut and place my face in my palms, shaking my head. How could he do this? How could he put us in danger like this?
There are six messages in total, and they span over a period of three or four months. Every single message is to and from the same person: Isabel’s mother. I lean back in my chair, reeling from this new revelation.
Hi Anna,
This is a hard message to write. I don’t know if you know who I am. I’m Tom Smith, Leah’s brother. I think you know Leah, because she is the nurse who let your daughter escape. She even went to your house once, didn’t she? She came back shaken, afraid of your husband.
We are protected now, because your daughter is still obsessed with my sister. We’re protected, but we don’t feel safe. I wondered if you feel the same way? I guess I needed someone to talk to. Leah doesn’t talk about what happened much.
There’s another reason why I messaged you. I am the person who killed your husband, and I’m very sorry about that. I wake up at night and feel like I’ve done it again. Like I’ve murdered someone. I feel like a killer.
I’m sorry.
Tom
There are tears in my eyes as I read his first message to Anna Fielding. I hadn’t realised how much pain Tom was in after the night on the moors. We’re both traumatised. We’re both damaged. And we both seem to be moving in different directions rather than healing together. I wipe the tears away and read Anna’s reply.
Dear Tom,
I’m sorry for my late reply. I stopped checking my Facebook account after my family were outed as murderers. It has been a very painful time
for me, and though I get messages of support, some are not so kind. People expect me to have seen what was going on, but… Well, I was never truly there. I’m an addict. Alcohol and prescription drugs. The last few decades have been a hazy mess, but now I’m receiving help.
You see, I never realised how David encouraged my addiction. He poured me wine, recommended doctors to treat my anxiety. Tucked me into bed after I passed out, and then did what? Murdered innocent people. I was the perfect wife for him.
To everyone outside the family, we had the perfect life.
Until Maisie was killed.
I do not blame you for killing my husband. He did not deserve to live. But I still grieve for him. I grieve for them all.
I am sorry for what my family did to your family. Keep in touch if you would like to.
Best Wishes,
Anna Fielding
The loneliest woman in the world. I thought that the night I spent eating dinner with the Fieldings. She was alone all that time, lost in her haze of booze and drugs. I wonder if she will ever be able to live a normal life ever again. Tom was the one to reach out, and I understand why. She is the only person who can relate to our lives. Why didn’t I see it before? We’ve been through the exact same circumstances. My father took away my family, my mother. Her husband destroyed her family. We both had violence in our lives. We are survivors of abuse and addicts, and we’re riddled with the guilt and shame of not being able to stop the violence.
There is no way I can be angry with Tom for reaching out to Anna. It’s dangerous to do so, of course it is, but I understand what he needs. I need it too.
I’m about to close the laptop when Tom’s most recent message catches my eye.
Hey Anna,
How is AA going? You must be proud of your progress. My sister is also doing well with sobriety. But she is on medication for her psychological problems, and I don’t know if it’s working. She thinks I haven’t noticed, but I see her sleepwalk in the night and wake up elsewhere. Once, I remember her leaving the house and coming back with blood on her hands. That was when we lived in Scotland.
Two For Joy (Isabel Fielding Book 2) Page 11
