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TWENTY-FOUR

GARETH

Twenty-Four Hours Earlier

I had been to a few hoarders’ houses in my years of police work.

Each one had a different smell, depending on that individual’s particularities.

Some would have the pungency of days-old rubbish, festering in the bin, while others would carry a delicate aroma of rot and mould.

So when it came to Angus’s apartment, I was somewhat surprised.

Fran had told me that he wasn’t the most fastidious of individuals, but did have a tidy streak.

I braced myself for the eau de accapareur , but as Angus cautiously opened the door, I found that he had actually invested in a few different electronic heavy duty air fresheners that had been strategically placed around the flat.

‘Angus,’ I said, greeting him. ‘You called?’

‘Gareth,’ he replied. We had never really acknowledged each other before, so two words in, we were already breaking new ground.

‘So, ummm, have you been well?’ I asked as Angus led me into his apartment, guiding me through the sacred columns of newspaper I had heard so much about.

I sat down precariously on the sofa, having placed some stacks of broadsheets – as neatly as I could – onto the light grey cord carpet.

Fran had complained to me about Angus and his obsessions, but I almost felt she’d undersold it.

While I’d imagined these glorious word pictures of newspaper skyscrapers that stretched up to the ceiling, she really hadn’t been joking: the whole place felt like the bunker of a post-apocalyptic kleptomaniac.

I could feel Angus’s glare, watching every movement of every one of my fingers that touched his papers.

I sat softly against the sofa, being very careful not to move a muscle out of place, for fear of accidently knocking a tower over.

His face didn’t seem to shift into panic or rage, so I presumed that this particular spot was acceptable.

‘You just came from the trial?’

‘I have,’ I responded.

‘How was Fran?’

‘Well, only an hour ago, I did see her get sort of thrown into a police van and dragged away, so that wasn’t a particularly lovely image.’

‘Okay. Let’s cut the crap. You know my sister killed Macleod and O’Neill, right?’ Angus said.

I was blindsided by his bluntness. It took me a second to find the right words to respond.

‘I had a medium-to-strong assumption that Fran did kill Macleod and O’Neill, yes,’ I said, followed by a deep sigh. Angus looked somewhat impressed by my answer. His eyebrows leapt up, as if taken aback by how not-in-denial I was.

I could’ve asked him if he had known about Fran’s penchant for murdering old guys all this time, but I had a feeling that the answer wouldn’t do much for my mental state.

‘I have O’Neill and Macleod’s rings in my drawer. Do you want to see them?’ he asked brusquely.

‘Why the hell would I want to see that?’ I said slowly, exasperated.

‘As proof that she did it. More for her than me, I think. She wanted to have little mementos to remind her.’

These past few days would never cease to amaze me. Angus, the mysterious brother-but-not-really-a-brother, was an accomplice to my wife, the serial killer. Fantastic. This would make Christmas so exciting this year. If there was a Christmas…

‘Why even did they wear the rings?’ I asked.

‘Do you really believe they weren’t still in contact? You should know, Detective, those who think they’re in high society need some way to recognise each other,’

‘That’s true, I guess,’ I remarked. I supposed what they did wasn’t shameful to them: it was smart, it was clever.

‘Why haven’t you seen her at the prison yet?’ Angus asked just as bluntly as he’d admitted that my wife had a predilection for death.

‘I’ve been a coward,’ I said, matching his abruptness in fear that if I waited a second longer to respond, he’d offer another brain-breaking revelation.

Angus nodded, somewhat assured by the answer and further impressed by my no-bullshit attitude.

‘I went to see her. She told me that if you tried to call, I should pick up. So, I just thought I’d ring you instead. I was fed up with waiting around and thought you might be being a pussy.’

He really didn’t mince words, did he?

‘Have you spoken to her lawyer?’ asked Angus.

‘Yeah.’

‘How’s her chances?’

‘Bad.’

Angus didn’t even seem to react, replying only with a sharp snort.

He took a second to process, and then got up to intricately reorganise one of the countless newspaper stacks.

These few words we had exchanged were more than we had spoken in the entirety of Fran’s and my marriage.

Having only ever said ‘hi’ to each other in brief moments of passing, here we were shattering records – it was just that, unfortunately, I wished it had been under better circumstances.

‘How was Fran, when you went to see her?’ I asked.

‘She was okay. Scared, I think, which is new for her. She was pretending to be all brave, but it wasn’t hard to see through it.’ Angus scratched his scraggly facial hair as if pondering some big philosophical problem. ‘Do you think there’s anything else we could do for her?’

‘No. I’ve tried to bend some rules.’ I played down my descent into police corruption to Angus. ‘But I think the prosecution have a pretty damning case against her.’

‘Nothing that could be done to get her out of this? Nothing at all?’

‘No,’ I said, sedately. ‘Not unless O’Neill suddenly returns from the dead and decides to absolve Fran of all wrongdoing or – I don’t know – someone stepped up and magically took all responsibility for the crime,’ I murmured forlornly, thinking of what Andrew had said to me a few days ago.

Even putting my career on the line hadn’t done much to change the tide of Fran’s trial now it was underway.

I had just noticed Angus’s eyes shift. Up to this point, they had been wandering all across the room, but they had now suddenly focused and narrowed. I caught his gaze as he took one of his famous trademark inhales that I had heard about.

‘Could I?’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, not sure what Angus was asking.

‘Could I say I did it? I killed O’Neill and Macleod?’

My brain went into hyperdrive. The selfish part of me realised that Angus taking the fall for this murder could be a literal ‘get out of jail card’ for Fran.

But he hadn’t even committed these crimes.

He was barely an accessory, but if he said he’d killed them, he’d get a life sentence at the very least. What was left of my moral conscience fought against the words coming out of my mouth.

‘Angus, no, come on. Don’t do that.’

‘If I came forward and assumed all responsibility, do you think that would give Fran a better chance?’

I ground my teeth, unsure of the right thing to do or say.

What would Jesus do? But Jesus would never have gotten himself into this situation.

Instead, I thought about what Fran would want me to do.

Here Angus was waiting on me as some kind of arbiter, to tell him if he should take the fall for his sister.

‘That’s a loaded question, bro,’ I said.

I don’t know why I used ‘bro’, but the context seemed right.

‘Is it going to help her chances? Yes. Would it mean imprisonment for you? Also, yes. But you have to remember that even if you took the fall, it’s not a dead guarantee that Fran would walk away.

She could still be seen as an accessory to the case, CPS may not believe you, and you could maybe both end up going to prison. ’

‘Well, then. I’d need your help to get my story straight, I suppose. You know the case – every detail, every alibi. We could find a way to explain it. I mean, you must know that I visited O’Neill, right? A few weeks before Fran decided to off him.’

‘I do. Although the officers interrogating you had a hard time getting that out of you.’

‘Yeah, because I didn’t want to incriminate Fran,’ Angus said plainly, like it was obvious information. ‘But I told O’Neill to stay away from her, and that if he tried anything, I’d kill him.’

A missing gear slid and then clicked perfectly into place.

‘The note. You wrote O’Neill a note after you went to visit him, didn’t you? The one that threatened to kill him.’

‘Yeah. So, being honest, I never actually spoke to him. I chickened out in the end, so I put the note under his door instead.’

I mean, that was noble, but stupid. Really, really stupid.

I slumped my face into my hands, still jarred by what Angus was telling me, and gave an extended groan.

‘I think I can prove I wrote it, too. I have a bunch of different drafts I did. I was trying to get my handwriting as unfamiliar as possible,’ Angus stated.

Through my fingers, I could see him yanking out various versions of the warning note from a cabinet to show to me. ‘That must be a motive, right?’

It remained insanely jarring to me that Angus, a man poised to sacrifice his freedom for his sister, was now driven by an inexplicable surge of giddy excitement, a newfound burst of energy propelling him forwards.

‘What the hell is going on?’ I moaned through my fingers.

There was a beat between us as I went through each revelation in my mind. I had wondered for weeks what enemies O’Neill had had at the start of this case, when there had been two of them right in front of me the whole time.

‘You know, though, that Clark will try and make a run for it, and that my sister is going to try and kill him before he vanishes?’ added Angus, stacking the pieces of paper neatly on the oak surface of the cabinet.

It pained me to hear him say that. That Angus could take the fall and go to prison, only for Fran to be thrown in there again a few days later. It gave me a queasy feeling to realise I knew very well how my wife’s brain worked. She couldn’t leave a job unfinished. She had to complete the set.

‘Surely, he could just disappear, and she’d never find him? The world is a big place,’ I theorised.

‘Let’s not fool ourselves, Gareth.’