The Couple on Cedar Close

by Anna-Lou Weatherley

  ‘You look like a blonde Audrey Hepburn,’ he’d told her as he kissed her lips.

  ‘Don’t!’ she’d berated him. ‘You’ll ruin my lipstick for the photographs.’

  But there hadn’t been any of those. Robert wouldn’t allow any to be taken. ‘You know why, Kiki,’ he’d said. And as always she hadn’t challenged him.

  He had led her to believe, following the wedding, that they would start a life together as man and wife, move away to a place where no one knew them or who they really were. But it had always been ‘soon’. Only ‘soon’ never came. Robert wanted their relationship to remain nothing more than a dirty secret. And then, just a couple of years after they’d tied the knot in secret, he had dropped the bombshell that he wanted them both to marry other people, live behind a facade of respectability to please Stan and Agnes.

  ‘If they see that we’re leading normal lives, I’ll inherit their estate, the house, the cars, the jewellery… then we’ll be set up for life, Kiki. We’ll just have to bide our time. You know they’ll fight us as long as they’re alive—’

  ‘If they’re alive,’ she’d said. ‘We could always just kill them. They’re over halfway dead already. Besides, they’re always banging on about being closer to God.’

  He had laughed at her. ‘My bad, bad, Kiki…’

  But she’d been serious.

  * * *

  Watching him marry Laurie had been one of the hardest things she’d ever had to endure in her life – her husband betrothing himself to another woman, albeit a woman she had chosen for him. Robert marrying her best friend meant that she could keep a very close eye on them both. She had never viewed Laurie as a threat. Nice, normal, unassuming Laurie who had followed her like a lamb, forever in her shadow and easy to manipulate. Soon after, she’d married Dougie and she’d been secretly pleased to witness the jealousy Robert had displayed on their wedding day.

  ‘You’ll always be mine, Kiki,’ he’d whispered in her ear after she had said her vows. ‘No matter who comes and goes… when you fuck him you’ll be thinking of me. You know it and so do I.’

  He’d been right of course, though largely she had starved Dougie of attention and intimacy throughout their marriage, tortured him mentally, slowly, until the poor thing had gone and had a heart attack.

  By then, Laurie had become something of an issue. She had blossomed into a striking, successful young woman who was turning heads and earning well. Luckily, she remained as insipid and prissy as ever and Robert had soon grown tired and irritated by her. So, over the years, Monica had learned to wait. She recalls the lazy stolen afternoons together, when Dougie was working, or Laurie was away. They would make love in their respective houses, sometimes hotels, wherever they could.

  ‘When the time is right, we’ll abandon them both, Dougie and Laurie, and we’ll have a child of our own, Kiki,’ he’d told her. ‘We’ll go somewhere far away, somewhere no one will ever find us. Just you and I and our baby. You know that’s what I want, Kiki, what I’ve always wanted. We just need to be patient…’

  But patience wasn’t one of her strongest attributes. If it was money they needed then she had a better plan. The life-insurance policy she’d taken out on Dougie and the equity in the house would set them up for a life together, screw Agnes and Stanley and their money. That just left Laurie to deal with, and those bastard twins she had growing inside of her. And fate had sorted that out too. Only Laurie had gone and survived the crash – she had been stronger than Monica had given her credit for, and she had fought hard.

  Initially, she had believed Claire to be simply another mistress, a plaything to taunt Laurie with and send her plummeting further into psychosis, a favourite pastime of Robert’s and one she understood. She knew he didn’t love Claire, fat, dopey, dumpy Claire with her lack of intellect.

  But she hadn’t known about the baby. The baby had been a complete shock. She’d only discovered it on the day of the barbecue, when Laurie had gone into public meltdown in front of the neighbours.

  The baby had changed everything… it had changed Robert. Something had happened inside him, something human and real. He had felt love for the child, had wanted to see her, be with her, watch her grow. Perhaps, she wondered, he wasn’t really like her at all. Robert had been planning to leave and start a new life with his daughter and that ignorant fat slut for months behind her back. He had betrayed her, after everything she had done for him, every sacrifice she had made for him, for them. She had done everything he had ever asked of her. And she had waited so long. All he had promised her, the dream he had sold her of marriage and a family together, of a life in Cannes, it had all been a lie that he’d strung out for years. There could be no forgiveness for what Robert had done, robbing her of the chance of a normal life, of a family, to hold her own flesh and blood in her arms; he had sold her a fantasy, a dream of somewhere over the rainbow without the crock of gold at the end of it. Robert didn’t really love her: he never had. He simply saw her as his possession. And the eventual and brutal realisation of this had caused her to mete out her own justice. She had righted the wrongs, evened the score. Now she could be whole again.

  Only now that her rage and anger have waned she feels a terrible sense of loss. Not for Claire, not for Dougie or Laurie or that slut Leanna George, but for Bertie. She would spend the rest of her days missing him, the cruel, selfish bastard that he was. He had made her kill him. Loving him had made her do all of it.

  * * *

  The plane is filling up now and the seat next to her has been taken. Suddenly she’s aware of the man next to her, a man wearing a straw trilby hat and sunglasses who smells good. She likes men who smell good.

  A steward in an unflattering brown and orange uniform struts down the aisle towards her and she calls him over with a wave of her hand.

  ‘Is it too early for a gin and tonic?’

  Seventy-One

  She shifts naturally in her seat as I take mine, tucking her elbow in politely. She smells of perfume, expensive and strong, and she’s wearing a white 1950s dress and a headscarf. It’s difficult, when I look at her, to believe that this woman has killed two people, and attempted to murder a third in such brutal and callous cold blood. She looks like she’s just stepped off a film set.

  ‘Beautiful day for flying,’ I remark without turning my head fully to look at her. I see the small lizard tattoo on her right foot in my peripheral vision.

  ‘I guess it is, yes,’ she concedes. ‘I hope they hurry up. I’m not the best flier. I get terribly nervous before take-off.’

  ‘I’m the same,’ I say, as Davis takes the seat next to me. ‘Get the jitters. I find a little livener helps.’ I take a small flask out of my inside pocket and offer it to her. She briefly looks at me and takes it, manages a swig of the Jack Daniels it contains.

  ‘You’re a whisky man?’

  ‘Bourbon,’ I correct her.

  She smiles provocatively. ‘What takes you to Cannes?’

  ‘The promise of fame and fortune,’ I say, careful not to face her full on. She laughs. ‘And you?’

  She clears her throat a little then, as though buying herself some time to think. ‘I’m going to meet my husband,’ she says, ‘Robert. We’re emigrating. He’s set us up in a beautiful chateau on the Côte d’Azur. He’s been waiting for me to come but I had some business to attend to before I could manage to get away.’

  ‘Business?’ The murderous kind.

  ‘Family business,’ she explains. ‘You know how it is.’ She smiles but it doesn’t reach her eyes.

  ‘Your family, will they be visiting you and… Robert you say? Your husband.’

  She looks a little nervous now, uncomfortable. ‘I doubt it – they never really approved of our relationship.’

  I chuckle. ‘Really. Bit of a bad boy, is he?’

  She gives a wry smile. ‘Something like that, although actually, it was his parents who disapproved of me.’

  ‘Why? Are you a bad girl?’


  She looks directly at me. ‘Are you flirting with me?’ she asks, delighted. ‘I’m a married woman!’

  ‘All the best ones are,’ I say.

  She laughs, enjoying herself. ‘Are you married?’

  ‘No,’ I reply. ‘I’m holding out for someone.’

  ‘Really?’ she says, intrigued. ‘Someone unobtainable?

  ‘Something like that. Her name is Rachel. She’s very beautiful.’

  ‘Lucky Rachel,’ she says.

  ‘I was the lucky one,’ I say. ‘Sadly, she’s already been taken.’

  Her smile fades a little. ‘Well, that is sad.’ She pauses for a moment. ‘You know, there’s plenty more fish in the sea. You never know who you’re going to meet.’ She’s blatantly flirting with me now, taken the bait hook, line and sinker. ‘Or sit next to on a plane.’

  ‘You’re so right.’ I grin at her, tap my nose with my finger and she grins back.

  ‘It’s nice to meet you… er…’ Monica extends her hand, the hand of a killer.

  ‘Daniel,’ I say, taking my hat and glasses off. ‘Daniel Riley. I think we’ve met before.’

  Seventy-Two

  Laurie looks at the prison guard and then across the white Formica table at Monica. ‘Thank you for agreeing to see me,’ she says.

  ‘I’m glad you came,’ Monica replies, ‘but then I always knew you would.’

  Laurie fights with her conflicting emotions, battling between sadness and revulsion. Even behind the make-up, she observes how terrible her friend looks. Her face is bloated and her skin is pasty and grey, her once lustrous hair now shorter and darker. She wants to feel some satisfaction at her obvious demise but strangely all she can feel is pity.

  ‘So, did you come here to gloat? To tell me what an evil, sick person I am and how much I’ve betrayed you, how much you hate me and how you’re glad I’ll have to spend the rest of my life in here?’

  Laurie tries not to react, not to show any emotion. She had expected this, been told to. Monica had pleaded not guilty at trial, and her brief had gone for the defence of diminished responsibility, painting Robert as a twisted, evil sexual predator who had groomed her from a young age and manipulated her into becoming a murderer, a psychological abuser who had systematically broken her down so that she was no longer sound of mind. The most tragic part of it all was that Laurie knew that some of it was probably true. Robert had done the same to her, the same to everyone. Only she hadn’t become a killer, and that was the difference.

  Despite her protestations, the evidence presented in court was overwhelming. Monica’s DNA found on Robert’s body, the eyewitnesses, Leanna George’s statement, the phone records, the CCTV footage and the tattoo… and then of course there was the revelation that Monica and Robert were brother and sister, and how their incestuous relationship had begun when Monica had been just thirteen years old… It had drawn gasps in court, but not from Laurie. Somehow it all made disturbing sense. All those years she had simply been a pawn in a game. Used and abused, betrayed and blamed. It was difficult to put into words how she felt. Even now, all these months later, she struggled to comprehend how two people she’d thought she’d known so well, and had loved and trusted, could have kept such twisted secrets and deceived her on such an abhorrent level. Robert, the man she had spent her life loving, her husband, had been nothing but a stranger, a Jekyll and Hyde character, a perverse bigamist who had stolen and violated her life, along with his diabolical lover and adoptive sister: a psychopathic killer who had masqueraded as her friend so convincingly for so many years. How could it all have been a lie? It was almost impossible to reconcile the Monica she had known for so many years with the stranger sitting in front of her now, and Laurie wonders if she will ever be able to trust another living soul again. Despite everything that’s happened, it is perhaps this that hurts her most of all.

  ‘Yes, I received your letters,’ she says measuredly. ‘And no, that’s not why I came.’

  ‘Then why are you here, Laurie?’ Monica blinks at her.

  ‘I came to ask you a question.’

  ‘A question?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘One you couldn’t ask in a letter?’

  ‘I needed to see your face, look into your eyes.’

  Monica holds her gaze.

  ‘The twins,’ she says, ‘the day of the accident. The reason I was in the car in the first place was because you alerted me about Robert’s affair with Claire. You knew I would be shocked and hysterical, that I would be devastated. I was almost eight months pregnant. You convinced me to have it out with him, told me to get in my car and go and confront him… Was it deliberate, Mon? Did you intend for me to crash, for me and the twins to die in a car crash?’ Laurie isn’t sure but she thinks she can detect the faintest hint of a smile on Monica’s bloated face.

  ‘You always were so trusting, Lolly.’

  ‘You wanted me to die, me and the twins – you wanted us eliminated. We were in the way of what you wanted. What you’d always wanted.’ Laurie struggles to remain calm; the horror and the pain are still too raw. She’d thought she was ready for this but now she realises that she isn’t, that perhaps she never will be. ‘You helped nurse me back to health, you pretended to care when really… And when I survived, you found another use for me, didn’t you?’

  ‘We all had our uses, Laurie, every one of us. We were all Bertie’s puppets in one way or another.’

  ‘Tell me one thing, Monica.’ Laurie moves closer towards her across the table, looks her dead in the eyes. ‘Did Robert know? Did he know about the accident – that you planned to kill me and our babies?’

  She knows it’s a gamble, her coming here today. Detective Riley and her therapist had both told her that they doubted Monica would be forthcoming with answers. They said that she would relish leaving them unanswered in a bid to keep some form of control over her, leave her wanting. It’s all she has left now that she’s rotting away in a 10 x 12 cell.

  Monica sits back, affording Laurie a brief glimpse of her burgeoning stomach – fat, bloated Monica who had always taken such care of her figure. She’s silent for a long moment as she looks at Laurie with her cold, dead eyes. Had they always been like that and Laurie had never noticed before? She vows always, from now on, to look more closely at people’s eyes.

  ‘We’re all victims, Laurie. Loving Bertie, loving Robert, it destroyed us all—’

  ‘You led me to him, like a lamb to the slaughter. You let me marry him, your brother, your lover… why, Mon? Why? What did I do to you? What did I ever do?’

  Monica tucks a piece of her hair behind her ear in that typical way of hers. ‘It was never personal, Lolly,’ she says. ‘It was never about you.’

  Laurie shakes her head. Nothing personal. ‘I shouldn’t have come,’ she says, standing.

  ‘I’m glad you did.’ Monica looks up at her and for a second she sees her as she always had, like she’s leaving after a coffee and a chat together, like they always used to do.

  ‘All those years, Mon. All those memories – a lifetime of them. All that love and trust, all that friendship, all those firsts… Tell me – tell me you weren’t faking all of it, that it meant something, that it was real…’ Laurie hears the urgency in her voice, feels the tears coming, tears she had promised herself she wouldn’t cry, not another single one.

  Monica’s face is expressionless, void of any emotion, and she knows – in that moment she knows the answer to the question.

  ‘We’ll always be sisters,’ Monica says after a long pause, her voice almost a whisper, ‘forever.’

  Laurie shakes her head, stands to leave. The exchange has drained her; she feels exhausted. ‘Goodbye, Monica.’

  ‘Monsters are real, Laurie,’ Monica calls out to her as she walks away. ‘And ghosts too. Sometimes they live inside of us. And sometimes they win.’

  Epilogue

  The trial lasted three weeks. Despite the mountain of evidence, the DNA, the phone records, the CCTV footage
and the tattoo, Miss Foster’s eyewitness testimony plus Leanna George’s statement, Monica Atkins pleaded not guilty. But psychopaths usually do. They relish their moment in the spotlight; it’s their opportunity to continue causing hurt and pain by putting their victims and their relatives through more agony.

  It all came out in court: the incest, the secret marriage between brother and sister, the abortions and the false promises made. It takes a fair bit to shock me nowadays, after the things I’ve seen, but the web of deceit and betrayal in this sordid story managed to. Robert and Monica Atkins had been leading double lives and keeping a dreadful secret that took the lives of two people and damaged countless others.

  Leanna George survived but Douglas Lewis didn’t. She couldn’t be tried for his murder because there was no evidence left to convict her, but I think it’s pretty safe to say she was behind her husband’s untimely demise. It was challenging having to listen to the evidence of how she murdered Claire Wright and left baby Matilda to fight for her life, a life that was fortunately saved, thanks to the doctors.

  There were tears and gasps of horror from the gallery, from the family and friends who had come to see justice done. Leanna George had to give evidence through a vocoder. Her larynx was all but destroyed by the lethal cocktail administered by Monica, who sat, for the most part, expressionless, as the evidence was presented in court. When the judge sentenced her to two concurrent life sentences, the gallery erupted and I think I fist-pumped the air. I’d told Claire Wright’s distraught mother that I wouldn’t rest until the culprit was behind bars and I’d meant it. But most of all, I had promised Laurie Mills that I would try in some small way to make right the many wrongs that had been done to her.

  Laurie suspected that Monica was behind the car accident that had killed her unborn twins and subsequently sent her spiralling into alcoholism and depression but she couldn’t prove it. The evil inflicted upon one woman by Robert and Monica Atkins was, at times, almost unbearable to hear. I had gone to see Laurie after the trial to talk to her and offer my support, and I discovered that she was planning to visit Monica in prison to try to find out if she and Robert had planned to murder her and their babies. I tried to talk her out of it, advised her not to. Monica would never be released and I didn’t want Laurie to put herself through the pain of having to face that woman ever again. But she was adamant. I guess we all have our own ways of needing closure.