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She can see her through the trees now. The twisted changeling child she’s allowed to warp her whole existence. Not Sabrina, though. Never that, ever again. She’s taking back her dead daughter’s name. She should never have given it away in the first place. She thought Daisy could replace her, fill the impossiblechasm her death had left behind, and all those years she thought she had. Not any longer. ‘Daisy’ is no more than the nasty, self-obsessed, shit daughter of nasty, self-obsessed, shit people. How could she have not seen it? All the signs were there, right from the start. She forces herself to stop thinking, stop remembering, to go back to her repetitions. She needs a cool head. A cool head and an ice heart. But hasn’t everyone always underestimated her? Her family, her colleagues, the police. And Daisy most of all. But not any more.
And there she is now, up ahead, sitting against the tree, breathing heavily. Her face looks weird in the light and her hands are still shaking. But she’s worked hard, the hole is deep. It’ll be enough.
Kate drops the backpack by her side. ‘Here. I brought this for you. There’s some water I found in the fridge as well.’
Daisy seizes the pack and scrambles through it. Kate knows what she’s looking for, of course – she must have realized she left it in the house. But she’s not going to find it. Not now. Not ever.
She turns and goes over to the body, crouching down quickly to slip the strand of hair she found caught in the strap of Daisy’s backpack under the sticky folds of tape.
‘What are you doing?’ says Daisy.
‘Just making sure,’ says Kate, straightening up. ‘And look what I found.’ She holds out her hand for the girl to see.
Daisy comes closer, almost despite herself.
‘What the hell isthat?’
Kate smiles. ‘It’s a shelf bracket. It was in the shed, where I found the spade. I was thinking – if we really want the police to think it was some sort of satanic psycho who did this, why not go the whole hog?’ She smiles again. ‘It’s not quite a scold’s bridle, but it’ll do the job.’
And then she wants to tear out her own tongue because she’s given herself away – how could she know about that unless she’d read the journal?
She sees a shadow flicker across Daisy’s face and her mouth open to speak and all she can do is plough on.
‘So, are you going to help me or what?’
She pulls something out of her pocket. Crinkled, plasticky, bright blue even in the low light. ‘I found a box of these in the cupboard with the cleaning stuff. Mustn’t leave any prints, remember. I’ll need to wipe down that spade too.’
Daisy hesitates, then reaches for the gloves.
Kate had no idea rigor mortis could set in so quickly and it’s all the two of them can do to force open the jaw and wedge the metal inside. She feels light-headed, like it’s an out-of-body experience and she’s watching herself from above like a drone, unable to believe where she is or what she’s doing.
But between them, finally, it’s done and they half lift, half roll the body into the pit.
‘What’s the time?’ asks Daisy.
‘Just gone eight,’ says Kate. ‘We need to get a move on, my darling.’
The words are like poison in her mouth and she looks away, frightened she might gag, but when she turns back again she sees the girl, the spade suddenly high in her hands, and in deadly reflex her own fingers tighten around the handle of the long, thin blade she brought from the house.
She knows what the girl is going to do. Knows, and as a certainty, because the same rage, the same cold determination she can read in Daisy’s eyes is mirrored in her own. There’s a shadow in both of them, she realizes that now, and the thought comes as both a jolt and a peculiar kind of relief. Maybe that’s what drew them together, all those years ago – not love or loss, but something dark and ruthless and unforgiving. Two peas in a pod, just like Siobhan said.
She swallows. The girl breathes.
Time loops, not moving.
***
Daily Express, 17th November 2024
***
Adam Fawley
16 December 2024
17.25
I’m done and gone by five, for the first time in months. It was my last day in Counterterrorism so it had a bit of an end-of-term putting-things-in-boxes feel to it anyway, but the main reason for leaving on time is because it’s Alex’s birthday, and on that day, pretty much alone in the whole year, it is an article of faith that I Get Home Early.