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Marina

Marina looked through the peephole to see who was at the front door, hoping for a delivery person or a run-of-the-mill scam artist selling dishcloths. For a nightmarish split second, she expected to see a corpse standing there, the remains of its head dripping down its shoulders.

It was her mother.

When Marina reached for the lock, she realized she was holding the spent dueling pistol. She must have taken it from Lilah and unconsciously carried it upstairs for safety. Quickly, she took one of Nana Sylvia’s more roomy hats off the hat tree and stuffed the pistol inside, hanging the hat up out of harm’s way and little hands’ reach. “Mom!” she said, opening the door. The view through the peephole hadn’t been very wide and now she could see that her mother was accompanied by her father, who was holding Ewan. Archie and Lucy Rose stood beside him.

“Mommy!” cried Archie, embracing her leg. Ewan held his arms out to her.

“Mommy wearing underwear!” cried Lucy Rose.

“Why are you answering the door in your underwear?” said her mother.

“I was asleep. Getting a nap in. Before the contractors come.” She took Ewan and breathed in the scent of his sweet baby head. “I thought the children were spending the weekend with you?”

Her mother stepped forward, expecting to come in and no doubt have a nose around. Marina, mindful of the open cellar door and the pistol box on the kitchen table, stood in her way.

“I can’t come in,” her mother said, stymied. “We’ve got to get on our way.”

“On your way where?” Marina smiled down at Archie. “Sweetie, why don’t you take Lucy Rose and play in the back garden for a few minutes? Give Nanny and Granddad a kiss first.”

“I hate kissing,” said Lucy Rose, but she went obediently along with her older brother along the side of the house to the back garden.

“We’re going to the steam rally,” her father told her, ostentatiously averting his eyes. “In Hungerford. It’s been in the calendar for months.”

“And you can’t take the children?”

“Steam rally’s no place for children.”

Marina remembered multiple steam rallies from her childhood, with gaggles of children screaming in delight at the tractors.

“We decided to make a weekend of it,” said her mother. “We found a sweet little hotel. A little staycation.”

“But Mom, you said you could look after the children all weekend, until Sunday evening.”

“Oh, well, you know that plans change darling. You really should invest in a nightgown.”

Marina gritted her teeth. She had to consciously relax her hold on Ewan so she wouldn’t squeeze him too tight.

There were boundaries, and then there were boundaries that you had to set when you had a corpse in your basement. If Lilah could shoot a man, then Marina could stand up to her own mother.

“It’s not okay, Mum,” she said. “You agreed to do this, and I can’t just drop everything so that you can spontaneously go on a staycation. Why can’t you have a staycation at home, with your grandchildren? Or rearrange it for a weekend when you don’t have your grandchildren?”

“Steam rally,” said her dad. He deposited the diaper bag on the step and then wandered back down the path, towards the car.

“We have the twins for the next three weekends, and then the soccer season starts, and you know what your father is like. So it’s this weekend or nothing. Anyway, you’ll cope. Neil and Sally deserve some time to themselves.”

That was it.

“Neil deserves some time? What about me? I’m raising these children on my own. Don’t I deserve any time?

“It was your own choice to get divorced.”

“Why are you always so easy on him and so hard on me?”

“Neil is still dealing with the disappointment of”—her mother sank her voice to a whisper—“his Nana’s will.”

“Maybe so, but I’m talking about our whole lives. You’ve always bent over backwards to accommodate Neil, to praise Neil, to make Neil’s life easier. Whereas me—you’re always poking holes.”

“Oh, I expect more from girls. Have you thought about using some cream on those stretch marks?”

She glanced down and moved Ewan over onto her hip, to display her stretch marks to better effect. Then she braced for a fight.

“Don’t you think it might have been hard on me, being constantly criticized by you my entire life?”

“I’d never criticize Neil. Boys are so fragile. Anyway, you turned out much better than he did.”

Marina blinked. Had she just broken the pattern of a lifetime and stood up to her mother, and in return her mother said something nice about her?

“Oh. I um...well, thank you, Mom.”

Her mother shrugged. “Anyway, my own mother must have loved you more than she loved me since she left everything to you, so you’ll be all right.”

Having thus ruined the moment, her mother pecked Ewan on the cheek and then turned and went down the path, closing the gate behind her.

Marina craned her neck to see over the hedge to check whether any police cars were converging. There was no sign, so she went inside and straight up to her bedroom, where Ewan entertained her by trying to hide while she got dressed as fast as she could. Fortunately, her phone was still on her bedside table from the night before, so she messaged Lilah and Opal down in the basement:

It was my mum unexpectedly dropping off the kids. Hold on, I’ll be back soon.

She tried not to think about how any message she sent could be used as evidence in a future murder enquiry.

In the back garden, Archie was happily building a miniature shelter with small sticks. “Where’s your sister?” Marina asked, and he shrugged. “Lucy Rose!” she called, thinking about police, about people hiring murderers, about scattered brains in the cellar, about how she should really set up some security cameras, about how she was a terrible, terrible mother.

Her daughter emerged from a shrubbery, chewing on something. Marina ran across the lawn to her in relief. “There you are! What are you eating?”

Lucy Rose held up a half-eaten Oreo.

“Where did you get that?” She knew the answer before Lucy Rose pointed to the horse chestnut tree.

“Sweetheart, you shouldn’t eat things that you find on the ground.”

“It’s our garden,” said Lucy Rose, disgruntled, but she handed over the remains of the biscuit. It seemed to be reasonably fresh and still crunchy. Marina went over to the tree and peered upwards, but didn’t see anyone. A careful check of the ground underneath revealed nothing more than a few black crumbs, eagerly beset upon by ants.

She took a deep, possibly calming breath. Best-case outcome: Lucy Rose had eaten an ant or two.

Worst-case: there was someone lurking in her tree watching them and dropping poisoned biscuits. Someone who had possibly heard a gunshot.

* * *

Ninety minutes and two bus journeys of carefully watching the perfectly healthy Lucy Rose later, Marina arrived at Jake’s new flat, which was apparently also Freya’s old flat, in Neasden.

In between rounds of singing “The Wheels on the Bus” and providing her children with snacks, Marina had examined her feelings about the morning’s events, and come to a surprising conclusion. She was anxious, yes. She was scared that the police were going to discover what they’d done, yes. She was terrified that her children would be taken from her. She was daunted by the enormous task ahead of her of cleaning up and disposing of a body.

But, to her surprise, now that Xavier was actually dead, her primary emotion wasn’t guilt or regret. She didn’t feel worse than she’d felt before his death. In fact, she felt better.

As she rang the bell, she decided she would worry about this later, when she had more time.

Freya answered the door, looking both very pregnant and very surprised to see her boyfriend’s ex and his three children. “Oh sh-shoot. Is it our weekend?”

“Can I speak with Jake please?”

They waited in the lounge while Freya went to fetch Jake. It took long enough that Marina knew that she’d had to wake him up. He emerged wearing his usual dressing gown open over boxers and a T-shirt. “Hey, kiddos. What are you doing here?”

“I need you to look after the children for the weekend.”

Jake yawned and scratched himself through his boxers. “Love to, but I can’t. I’ve got plans this weekend.”

The new improved Marina, the badass Marina with a body in her basement, was ready for this.

“You’ll have to rearrange your plans. Your children are more important.”

“Hey, hang on a minute. I love spending time with the kids, you know that, but—”

“No buts. In our divorce, the agreed custody was every other weekend and half the holidays. You have a lot of missed weekends to catch up on.” She passed Ewan to him, in the same way that her father had passed Ewan to her. Ewan grinned and gave his father a slobbery kiss on his unshaven cheek.

“But Freya and I—”

“I know you’ll sort it out. You love your children. Plus, I’d hate to have to go to court, wouldn’t you?” She handed him the heavy diaper bag and kissed Lucy Rose and Archie. “You can bring them back on Sunday evening, not too late because Archie has school the next day. If Lucy Rose gets a tummy ache, please ring me immediately, okay? And I think Ewan needs a change, pretty urgently. Have a wonderful time!”

She left her children safely with their father, her heart hammering, but not having apologized once.

Being an accessory to murder wasn’t such a bad thing, after all.