Page 27

FOURTEEN

FRAN

This was all very bad.

It had been going remarkably well to begin with – no evidence, no body, no investigation, but now everything was spiralling out of control, and fast. The calculated, methodical part of my brain was rapidly being overtaken by the side that was screaming pure, utter panic.

And the smile – I know, I know, it was so unbelievably stupid.

But it was completely involuntary. Surely, it had happened to other innocent people before.

It was like when you start laughing when you’re being scolded by some kind of superior; it’s precisely because you know it’s the worst thing you can possibly do under the circumstances.

Angus hadn’t returned any of my calls; I had set an alarm on my phone every hour and twelve minutes to remind me to ring him, leave a message, and repeat until he answered, but there had been no such luck so far.

The same boring generic answerphone greeted me every time, so I’d put the phone down, set the timer, and waited.

The additional twelve minutes were more so that he wouldn’t catch on that it wasn’t being done on an hourly basis; I’d hoped he’d feel a little more urgency if I seemed to be more sporadic in my communications.

Mind you, I didn’t think Angus had felt much urgency at all for the last twenty-odd years.

I thought he spent most of his days masturbating, watching TV, and collecting newspapers.

Not exactly strenuous, I imagined. But nevertheless, although I knew his phone had probably run out of charge or had been lost down the side of the sofa, that wasn’t going to stop me from trying everything I could before I’d finally just drive to his shitty apartment and break the door down.

God, I had a lot of questions to ask that bastard.

But what had been more curious for me this morning was that I had realised I was late.

In all the pandemonium, I hadn’t been tracking my periods as stringently as normal.

It was now I realised that it had been a week and a half since I was due.

I knew that high levels of stress could impact your cycle – I remembered that revising for my A levels in a foster home had disrupted my usual pattern.

But it did seem a little peculiar that the doctor had rung me, only a few moments after I’d realised, to ask if I had a spare hour for Gareth and I to come in and see him.

There was something important he needed to discuss, he told me.

I didn’t want to get excited or even to do a pregnancy test. One step at a time, I had to keep telling myself.

I pushed any optimism out of my head before it could even take root.

At the same time, part of me was wondering if I even really wanted a baby.

I had to remind myself that that was just the nerves talking and that I didn’t even know for a fact I was pregnant yet.

This could all just be for Dr Patel to inform me that Gareth had spunked in the wrong petri dish.

A small, anxious part of my brain started to simmer and hint at the idea that maybe Gareth already knew, consciously or subconsciously, that I was the suspect the police were looking for.

I shook it off. This was Gareth. He wouldn’t be able to keep that from me.

The only thing that had really made me question what he thought about me was the red pen.

Okay, should I have looked through his diary while he was sleeping?

No. That was a big breach of trust and privacy, which are important things in a relationship, but I just couldn’t help myself.

He must have been adjacent to the O’Neill case, as there were a few words I could make out that alluded to it:

Knife, Beryl, Doorbell – but the main one being Fran – all scribed in red writing.

I know that sounds strange, but Gareth’s notes were usually just scribbled with black biro, words running into each other, overlapping, smaller words underlining other, bolder words.

It was an absolute mess of a diary. Occasionally, a small doodle of Batman would also make an appearance, but never in red pen. Why had he written my name in red ink?

I checked over the house, and we didn’t have any red pens, so he must have done it at the office.

Had he reached for it in a eureka moment?

Maybe he’d simply borrowed it when one of his pens had run out of ink?

Or maybe he’d gone to Staples to get a red pen just to write in his diary as a moment of significance?

That would be silly, right? But there was something to me about that glaring red ink that made me want to crawl inside Gareth’s head and find out what he was thinking about me.

I knew I probably should have told Gareth, but he clearly wasn’t checking his phone and I really couldn’t wait any longer.

But when I got to the clinic, I quickly realised it wasn’t nearly as fun being in the waiting room without my husband thinking out loud about the state of the wank rooms, or what kind of porn there would be.

Dr Patel gave me his lovely smile and then led me into his office.

He sat me down, and we exchanged the classic small talk.

‘Could your husband not make it?’ he asked as he wheeled himself on his chair from one end of the room to the other.

‘He’s working, I’m afraid.’

‘Ah, okay, busy man,’ he said with his signature warm smile, which suddenly began to deflate as if someone had just popped a pin in his cheek and squeezed out all of the joy from the man’s face.

He pushed himself forward on the chair, a loud squeak echoing around the room as he waddled towards me.

He furrowed his eyebrows and interlocked his hands.

‘I’m just going to come out with it. I’ve been looking at your ultrasound results and spoken to some of the embryologists, and I’m afraid that with this particular case, I think it is going to be very hard for you to conceive naturally with your husband.’

Oh.

‘I know this may seem shocking, but it’s important for you to know?—’

‘Whose fault is it?’ was all I could manage to say in a half-whisper, half-croak.

‘Well, it’s no one’s fault. No one is to blame here.’

I didn’t really listen to the rest of what he said, his voice kind of faded out after a while and was replaced by the loud thumping of my heartbeat and a shrieking, high-pitched ringing thundering in my ears.

Dr Patel kept talking and I tried my best to acknowledge his suggestion for us to try IVF.

He told us our local council was very good at paying for it, and that if that didn’t work, our journey to have children didn’t have to end here.

Adoption was always on the cards, and several other factors, such as stress and anxiety, were also variables in trying for a baby.

He also said that he would need to do a lot more tests.

He gave me a booklet, told me he’d be in touch, and tried to give my arm a comforting touch. It didn’t work.

I walked out of the clinic and somehow managed to stumble across the tarmac and make it to my car. I yanked open the door, slid into the seat, locked the doors, and sat there for a little bit with my forehead pushed against the top of the steering wheel.

It could be the stress, I thought to myself.

It could be the stress of this whole charade that had just affected my menstrual cycle badly.

That could mean that when this had all blown over, a baby was still on the cards.

Even if it wasn’t the traditional way, IVF was still an option, right?

But I couldn’t get that stupid doctor’s face out of my head.

I bet Gareth’s swimmers were all little Michael Phelpses.

I was the problem. I was the one who couldn’t get pregnant.

My body was unable to do the one thing that it had evolved to do.

It all felt just a little bit shameful, really.

It then began to dawn on me that I had absolutely no one to talk to.

Gareth wasn’t answering his texts. I couldn’t get through to Angus.

I didn’t really want to bother any of my friends, most of whom I hadn’t properly spoken to since the move.

I was quite simply on my own. It was at times like this, I wished I had parents I could talk to about this kind of thing.

I didn’t want to stay in the surgery parking space any longer, so I began to drive.

I drove out of the surgery car park, through the city, and onto the motorway.

I decided I would keep driving until my tank hit half, and then I would turn around and come back.

Thoughts kept stumbling through my head.

Was this fate punishing me? I’d taken a life – well, two lives – and now God wasn’t giving me one in return.

If I had just done nothing, would I be pregnant? Would we be starting our family?

Suddenly, Gareth finding out about me murdering someone didn’t seem so bad. It was the moment when he found out I couldn’t have children that I was terrified of.

I’d gone to church with Gareth once, when we were newly engaged.

Classic Gareth, of course, he’d wanted to get married in a church like the good Christian boy he is, so we’d had to go every other Sunday to show our faces, and all the change we had scraped together for saving would go straight into the collection tin.

The vicar had adored the sound of his own voice.

Maybe he should have considered a career as a podcast host. I couldn’t remember many of the sermons, but I did remember one in which he’d told us how, in those Old Testament times, when a woman was barren, she could be compelled to share her husband with a fertile rival.

Often, it turned out that their infertility was associated with sin.

When Rachel had pled with Jacob, ‘Give me children or else I die,’ her husband had only responded with, ‘Am I in the place of God who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?’

An omnibenevolent God, indeed.

A car blared its horn at me as I got lost deeper and deeper into my thoughts and began to drift onto the right-most lane. I yanked the wheel to the left, and an elderly man cursed at me as he drove past.

I clocked that the small needle on my dashboard had hit halfway, and I glanced up from the road to look at the signs. My subconscious had known where I was driving before I had even realised.

I left the motorway, drove down the pothole riddled A-road and parked up around a few other cars.

It was a classic rural car park with no real lines or rules, and a Land Rover which had blocked in a number of cars already.

I saw a young couple opposite me also just pull up.

A broad and bearded man opened the door for his partner.

The woman hopped out, laughing at some joke he made.

They exchanged a few words to one another before she pecked him on the cheek and laid a hand on his chest. Then, grabbing a pink harness, the woman reached into the backseat of the car to pull a small creature out.

Had it been a baby, I may have just gone and offed myself right there and then.

But it was just a Chihuahua, one that the man hoisted up and then slid into the front carrier on the woman’s chest. The Chihuahua’s line of sight met mine for a minute, and I could almost hear his croaky, gravelly voice calling out to me.

‘End meeeee.’

I started walking across the field. It was abandoned now, of course.

Moss and ivy had only just begun to slither their way across the walls, and a long, thick line of red graffiti which simply read Balls was spraypainted onto one wall of the building.

I’d thought it would have been turned into something by now, but maybe it was beyond repair.

There was no door, no windows. Not even the flooring had survived.

I smoothed my hands over the dull beige brick as I tried to forget what my home had looked like twenty years ago.

I wasn’t sure why I’d chosen to subject myself to this, feeling the worst I’d felt in years and then opting to only deepen that pain by coming here.

Maybe it was because I’d realised that I couldn’t feel any worse than I did now.

I remembered just how hungry I would feel in the evenings as a child, hoping that the clawing in my stomach would subside for long enough that I could go to sleep and have my one hot meal at school.

Edith and her annoying pal, Angus, were always bothering and pestering me with their questions when all I really wanted to do was go to sleep so the hunger wouldn’t feel quite so ravenous.

And of course, I remember the fire. I remember the smoke, so thick you could barely make out your hand in front of your face, and Clive bursting into our room in the middle of the night, shouting to get us out.

The air so hot it burned the passageways of your throat just to breathe, and despite that, still trying to scream Edith’s name at the top of my lungs.

I remember being eleven years old and learning that they made coffins children-sized.

How old would she be now? Twenty-seven? Christ, would she be married now? Would she have children?

I traced my fingers along the faded, burnt lettering – St Nicholas’s Children’s Home – that lingered on the scorched brick. How ironic. St Nicholas: the patron saint of protecting children.

I decided to drive back, and the thoughts of my useless womb began to subside. Instead, something else was beginning to take over: Clark. I just needed to find him and drive a knife across his throat, or maybe through his scalp. I think the scalp has more nerve endings.

Again, just to reiterate: not a psychopath.

I was getting hungry, so I decided to stop by a small gimmicky American-style diner a few miles off the motorway.

I hopped in one of the booths in the corner and ordered a steak sandwich and a cup of tea.

I flicked through the pamphlet Dr Patel had given me as the waitress delivered my order, drawing small moustaches and glasses on the faces of happy families to make myself feel better.

Using the steak knife, I rehearsed my grip on the blade’s handle a few times. I hoped no other customers would look over in my general direction, watching as I repeatedly stabbed my knife into the sandwich again and again without even taking a single bite.

This was perhaps quite an effective coping strategy for thinking about Clark.

It did take my mind off everything. But I knew I had to be smarter about this one, less impulsive, and more strategic.

I doubted I would get away with the same approach for the third.

But after going back to St Nicholas’s and the memories of the fire coming back so vividly, for the first time in my life, I realised I could actually be the one to kill all three of them – the trifecta.

It was ironic, really. Three kills would officially make me a serial killer.