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SIX

FRAN

Gareth, with his favourite Mr Men mug full to the brim with coffee in one hand and a bag of frozen peas in the other, quietly creaked open the bedroom door and tiptoed in.

I watched him place the coffee down as he perched himself on the edge of the bed and softly pulled the bag of frozen crinkle-cut chips from under my head.

He unwrapped the tea towel they were placed in, substituted them with the peas, and tenderly put the package back under my bruised temple.

Shower sex – in hindsight – had not been the best idea.

‘How are you feeling?’ Gareth asked, smoothing his hand along my shoulders whilst taking a small sip of coffee.

‘Fine, I think,’ I groaned.

I propped myself up in bed on my elbow, slipped my hand around the handle of Gareth’s cup of coffee, pulled it over and took a sip.

‘Not feeling sick? No dizziness? No headache?’

‘None of the above, my love. Although I can’t seem to remember my name. Is that a problem?’

He scoffed softly and pushed himself off the bed. Through my sleepy glaze, I watched him fastening his belt and smoothing any rogue pieces of fluff off his suit trousers as I rummaged the peas around to create a small indentation for my head.

‘I can’t believe they wanted to check your bag last night. Ridiculous,’ Gareth murmured, mostly to himself, as he double-checked that the taps in the en suite were off. ‘What did they even think they were going to find?’

‘I know, nuts, right?’ I grumbled as I tried to make myself comfy in bed.

Last night had been a too-close-for-comfort near-miss.

I had to be more careful – this was how serial killers got caught: stupid slip-ups.

While I had hoped, when stashing the knife, that I could retrieve it at some point, I thought that was an impossibility now.

I just had to pray the restaurant wouldn’t do a toilet cistern inspection any time soon.

‘I’ll ring you at lunchtime, okay? Have a good day,’ Gareth whispered and gently kissed me on the forehead.

While the pick-up and drop-off sessions with Tony must have been how divorced parents felt picking up their progeny, it was also a good time to receive my daily dose of neighbourhood gossip.

Beryl was a reliable, if not exactly discreet, supplier, always giving me the details and filling me in on the politics behind planning permissions and the complex cutthroat machinations of the local Neighbourhood Watch that she was chairwoman of.

Whether the people down at Number 28 had finally resolved their feud with Number 7, and the continuing events of the garden-related civil war between Numbers 14 and 16 with the long hornbeam hedge that stretched between their respective gardens acting as their very own DMZ.

Beryl pulled open the door and gave her usual upbeat ‘Morning!’ as she handed me Tony, who excitedly jumped up on my leg and began whining affectionately. I gave him a small stroke and passed him a treat. Maybe he was growing on me – a small, fractional, almost imperceptible amount.

‘So, tell me, Fran, I have a question for you,’ Beryl said, leaning against the door frame and crossing her arms as if she was about to drop another juicy load of neighbourhood gossip. ‘Have you heard anything from Mr O’Neill recently?’

I raised an eyebrow and jutted my bottom lip out, my fake-thinking face.

I gave a long ‘Hmm,’ as I nodded my head, creasing my forehead and glancing casually upwards to the sky as I did so.

‘No,’ I said, resolutely. ‘No, I don’t think so.

Last time I saw him must have been Saturday afternoon, when I helped him with his shopping. Why do you ask?’

‘Well, have you not seen it?’ Beryl asked, pointing her finger across the road.

I couldn’t believe I had missed it this morning.

There was a long line of thin blue police tape wrapped around the perimeter of O’Neill’s house, along with a few orange cones for good measure.

The police tape was intimidating enough to ward off any potential crime scene intruders, but those bright orange cones sent a terrifying tingle down my spine.

‘Oh,’ I said, genuinely surprised. My heart had executed a small hop in my chest, and I felt the slightest quiver in my hands as I pretended to process the information like an innocent person. ‘Have the police been here?’

‘I saw them out there last night when you and your husband went out for dinner. Two police detectives went in at about nine o’clock, came out half an hour later, and then cordoned the whole thing off.’

God, Beryl really didn’t need that video doorbell. She was already the Big Brother of the neighbourhood.

‘Oh gosh,’ I said, still trying to feign surprise as best I could. ‘You didn’t see them bring a body out?’

‘Hmm, well, if the police were going to get involved with anyone on this street, of course, it would be Mr O’Neill. A very peculiar man. Trevor and I tried to invite him round for dinner, but he would only ever grunt when we tried to reach out.’

Beryl gave a long exhale, as if she’d remembered not to speak ill of the dead. ‘Well, I reckon everyone will be asked a few questions by investigators at some point or another.’

‘Well, what a way to introduce ourselves to the neighbourhood,’ I said with a fake titter. My mind was racing again, and I could feel my pulse start to quicken. I gave Tony another stroke as he nuzzled up to me between my legs. I had decided to now commandeer him as my own personal therapy dog.

I had been ultra-careful about everything inside O’Neill’s house.

I knew I had been. Everything had been triple-checked before I’d left, but a little voice had begun to whisper in my head now that the police were beginning to investigate.

Could I have potentially missed something?

Like when you check the taps and the oven are off before going out, only to later realise that you didn’t lock the door.

Why did I feel like I’d missed something?

Like I was some fiendish murderer who had left some huge great clue right in the middle of the scene of the crime.

A great big manifestation of ‘Fran did this’, right in the centre of O’Neill’s blood-stained bedroom.

On one of mine and Gareth’s first dates as a couple, in a seedy little bar that did a whopping twenty-five per cent student discount that financially challenged student Gareth had found, he had gushed to me about his criminology course.

Most of it had sounded extraordinarily boring, but there was one thing that had always stuck with me.

‘It’s pretty well accepted,’ Gareth had said with some gusto, ‘that there are four types of serial killers.’

There were Visionaries, the sick puppies who believed that there was some kind of power or entity commanding them to kill their victims. Most likely, they were suffering from some form of psychosis.

Then there were the Mission-Oriented, the sick puppies who thought they were doing society a favour by getting rid of a particular certain group.

Then there were the Hedonists, the sick puppies who got off on the thrill of what they were doing.

Finally, there were Power/Control Freaks: those sick puppies for whom it was all about being able to enact their despicable little power fantasises; those who enjoyed dominating and controlling their victims.

So, the question remained: which kind of sick puppy was I?

The problem was, I didn’t think I was any one of the four, but also maybe I was a mix of all of them.

I did think I was doing society a favour, I had got a bit of a kick out of it, and I had enjoyed the power I’d wielded on O’Neill before – you know – killing him.

The look in his eyes when he’d finally realised who I was.

I wasn’t quite sure how the Visionary part factored in yet, considering I was a dirty little atheist who thought that God and heaven were just elements of a kid’s fairy tale that had got out of hand (don’t tell my husband that).

But, admittedly, the fact that we’d moved in next door to O’Neill had seemed to be just like fate.

The universe seemed to have crafted the perfect situation to kill him, just for me.

But despite the initial euphoria I had felt, the almost paralytic anxiety which had been festering in my chest since O’Neill’s death was beginning to pulsate and grow.

‘Do what?!’ O’Neill had said, as he’d realised he may only have a few more words left to utter in his life. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘You can tell the world what you did twenty years ago or I’m going to kill you.’

The look on his face – it had been almost the same as Macleod’s, but O’Neill had slightly more integrity. I had seen the small tremor of fear in his eye, yet I’d known it wasn’t me he was most afraid of. We both knew who the boss was.

‘No,’ he’d said with quiet determination, as we both stood there taking in the moment.

Then, of course, I’d killed him.

I swiped my finger through the notes on my phone whilst power walking through the field.

It wasn’t until I was halfway across that I realised I had been practically dragging poor Tony’s body through the grass as I marched, unaware he was being slightly throttled as his tiny legs weren’t able to keep up with my aggressive strides.

As I forced my feet to slow down to avoid explaining to Beryl how I had choked her beloved Shih Tzu, I kept thinking of any possible way I could be linked to the crime scene, or any kind of evidence of foul play that could be discovered by the police.

I wanted to ring Gareth and ask him a million questions.

Maybe I could say I was asking for a friend of a friend’s cousin’s auntie who had just murdered his next-door neighbour and wanted a few small tips and tricks on evading arrest? That would be plausible, right?