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He was surprised when she arrived home not long after she’d left. It made him fearful.

‘I can’t believe what you did,’ she snarled. ‘You practically laid a trail to our front door. What were you thinking? It’s all over the news. You fucking eejit. I told you to bury her body miles away from here. You couldn’t follow a simple instruction, you moron. What will I do now?’

A shrug of his shoulder elicited a smack on the back of his head. It actually felt better to be physically attacked than the verbal abuse she expelled in his direction.

‘Answer me!’

‘I messed up. But the truth is, she’s dead. She can’t talk. There’s nothing for you to worry about.’ He cowered then, because he rarely stood up for himself.

‘Nothing to worry about? How can you be so stupid? There could be DNA or a fibre or something on the body. What if they link her back to here? To us? They’ll find out who she is and when she disappeared, and… and then what?’

‘I don’t know.’ He wondered why she was so flustered. He’d never seen her like this.

‘When they identify her, and they will, they’ll discover where she was last seen and who she was seen with. Ring any bells in that skull of yours now?’ Her face flared red, her hands curled into fists and he continued to cower like a poor dog about to be struck.

‘Oh, I see.’ And he did. He straightened up a little. Shit. She was right. Again. He had totally fucked up this time. He watched as she extracted the knife from its sheath and wondered if he would survive the day.

Instead of lashing out, though, she marched around slapping the flat side of the blade against her thigh, working herself into a frenzy. ‘I’ll have to spend ages figuring this out because of you. It’s all right for you. You can sit on your arse in that fucking shed all day, doing sweet fuck-all, leaving me to sort out the messes you make. I don’t know why I bother with you, you useless sack of shit.’

Her words wounded him. He knew he wasn’t any great shakes, but he did have a job. He was a driver and a gardener. He usually did his work before she left and after she came home. It meant there was always one of them in the house to make sure nothing went wrong there. A thought struck him as she banged the front door behind her: how come she trusted that he would not run? Maybe because he had nothing, and nowhere else to go.

She took deep breaths in the car. She had to calm herself. Driving helped her to decompress. It wouldn’t do to draw suspicion her way. Not that she could be linked to anything that had happened. She was clever. She kept her hands clean. And she had an escape plan along with her fall guy if everything went pear-shaped. Which was looking more than likely.

How could he be so stupid? Then she realised that was the reason she’d kept him. He bowed to her every whim and rarely asked questions. She had such a hold over him, and the thought of this filled her with a power so great she almost had an orgasm in the front seat of her car.

As she pulled away, she looked up. Magenta was staring at her from the top window. She gave the child a chilling smile. As if things weren’t complicated enough, she knew she’d have to keep a close eye on her.

She’d spent her life looking over her shoulder, and it seemed that she now had to look at those she’d surrounded herself with too.