Page 25

24

It was the day after her encounter with Tommy, and Fiona wondered what Rose was doing now. She could text her, of course, but she didn’t know if her parents monitored her phone, and she was unsure if Rose would know how important it was to be discreet in her replies. That was one of the things she needed to teach her: that in order to survive and keep their freedom, people like them needed to know how to hide, how to operate in darkness. It was something Maisie had taught Fiona shortly after she’d come to the UK.

The importance of hiding. And the importance of teaming up to help each other.

Fiona had only been twenty-three when she fled Australia, leaving behind the mess and chaos of her early adulthood, the years when she’d struggled to control her desires. She had only survived because she had stumbled into an underground scene where she’d found people who wanted to be hurt – people who threw themselves into victimhood, their lives even messier and less controlled than Fiona’s. Emotional masochists. Willing participants. The problem was, the initial thrill didn’t last. There was little satisfaction in hurting those who wanted to be hurt. Fiona had taken risks, been reckless. After a bad scene that led to a woman almost suffocating to death, she’d bought a one-way ticket to London.

She spent her first year in the city feeling even more lost than she had in Perth, and she almost went back several times. She had come to London dreaming of getting rich. Wasn’t this still the city where the pavements gleamed with gold? She got involved with a guy who worked in the City and was ten years older than her – a hedge fund manager called Gareth. He was loaded, generous, wild. They spent their weekends doing lines of cocaine and having the kind of sex that left them both covered with bruises and scratches, the expensive lingerie he’d bought her ripped and stained with blood; deep wounds in his flesh. During the week, when he was working, she would cruise lesbian bars, looking for soft, gentle women who would fall in love with her on Monday before she broke their hearts on Thursday.

A few months into their ‘relationship’, Gareth got coked up and bragged to her about how he was about to make millions. A ‘risk-free’ insider trading scheme that he and some of his posh friends had dreamed up. By this point, she was sick of him. She no longer enjoyed sleeping with him; was genuinely scared that one day he would really hurt her. Maybe even kill her. Or perhaps she would kill him. Mulling over the best way to dump him, she saw an opportunity.

Pretending all his talk about insider trading turned her on – in reality, she found it pitiful, pathetic – she asked him to explain it all to her again, and secretly videoed the whole thing. She also had access to his home computer – she’d watched him type in the password many times – and she found some messages between Gareth and his co-conspirators, which she took photos of.

The next day, hiding in a hotel room so he wouldn’t find her, she messaged him. If he didn’t pay up, she would send the video and other evidence to his bosses and the police.

He threatened her. He begged. But in the end he knew he was beaten. He paid up and she lived off that money for a year.

At the end of that glorious year, during which she travelled, stayed in luxury resorts, broken more hearts and helped herself to expensive jewellery and watches her victims left lying around, she reconnected with Maisie. Fiona hadn’t seen her since Maisie left Perth and returned to the UK, back before Fiona’s dangerous spell. They hadn’t fallen out; the parting had been purely geographical. That, and Maisie telling Fiona she needed to spend some time on her own, finding her feet.

‘Look me up when you’re ready,’ Maisie had said when she’d left Australia.

In the aftermath of the Gareth situation, Fiona reached out.

Maisie immediately told her how risky Fiona’s actions had been. Gareth might have murdered her. Fiona was a young Aussie girl with no friends or family to look after her. If she’d gone missing, no one would even have noticed.

‘Alone, we’re vulnerable,’ Maisie said. ‘But together, as a little pack, we’re strong, and not least because together we can hide in plain sight.’

Rose needed to learn that too. But Fiona knew that if Tommy found out who she was, she wouldn’t be around to pass on any more lessons.

Standing in that field yesterday afternoon, she had remembered Gareth. And she had suddenly known what to do.

She thought back to the events of yesterday afternoon, after she had invited Tommy back to her house. It had been dangerous, just as it had been with Gareth. But she hadn’t had any choice.

Besides, she liked danger.

It was one of the few things that made her feel anything.

Tommy had dropped his dogs at home, letting them in through the back door. It was the middle of the afternoon, and Tommy said something about how his wife had taken Albie to the hospital for a check-up. Eric, the younger boy, was with his grandparents.

Fiona heard Tommy order the German shepherds to lie down, then he followed her over to her house. It was peaceful. Birds were singing. There was a delivery driver dropping off a parcel further down the street, and music drifted out of an open window several houses down. Apart from that, none of the other neighbours were around.

‘This had better be good,’ Tommy said as they entered her house.

‘It will be. Can I get you a drink? A beer?’

‘Let’s just get on with it.’ They stood in the hallway and he looked around very briefly. Lola stood by his feet and he glanced down at her.

‘Does Emma next door know about you and her husband?’

‘I know what it looked like, but I was seriously only comforting him, that’s all. Giving him a hug because he’d had some bad news.’

‘Oh yeah? What bad news?’

She shook her head to indicate it was none of his business. ‘ I’m going to have a beer. Sure you don’t want one?’

He raised his eyebrows. A woman having a beer in the afternoon? Well , she could hear him thinking, she is Australian.

‘Go on then.’

‘Why don’t you go into the living room?’ she said with the warmest smile she could fake. ‘Make yourself comfortable.’

When she came back, holding two bottles of lager, he was on the sofa, knees spread, scrolling through his phone.

‘News from the hospital?’ Fiona asked, handing him a bottle. ‘About your son?’

‘Yeah. We got the results from the latest scan. Looks like it might not be as bad as they first feared.’

Shame .

‘Wow, that’s great.’

‘Yeah.’ His eyes filled with tears and he swiped at his face with one of his massive paws, then appeared to remember who he was talking to. ‘It’s still gonna be a long process, though, they say. And someone did it. Someone put nails or glass on the path.’

He really was tedious. She watched him, keeping her face neutral to disguise her loathing, while he took a long swig from the beer bottle.

‘I’m really sorry we got off on the wrong foot,’ Fiona said.

‘We’re still on the wrong foot, and will be until you tell me what you saw.’

She switched on her most obsequious smile, mixed with an apologetic head-bow. ‘I will. I just want to explain why I acted so aggressively. You see, I haven’t been sleeping very well recently, and the doctor gave me these tablets to knock me out, but I think they have side effects because I wake up feeling like a bear who hibernated too long ...’

She talked for a while, giving him an entire invented history of her insomnia and her attempts to cure it naturally before resorting to drugs, not pausing for breath or giving him any room to interrupt, killing time but also deliberately speaking slowly, monotonously, making her voice as close to a drone as possible. She enjoyed watching him squirm impatiently, although she noticed his movements slow as she went on. She used the same words over and over: tired, pillow, bed, dream, sleep . He bit down on a yawn.

‘Oh, sorry, am I boring you?’

‘Yeah. Actually ...’ He trailed off, looked confused, shook his head. Looked into his beer bottle and realised it was empty.

‘Would you like another?’

‘No. I’m . . . good.’

He yawned again and his eyelids fluttered, looked heavy, like there were tiny weights attached to his lashes.

‘It’s the weather,’ she said, in a slow, dreary tone. ‘It makes you feel drowsy , doesn’t it? Sleepy .’

‘Huh? Yeah, I guess.’ His eyes closed for a couple of seconds.

‘Maybe I should make you a coffee?’ she said. ‘Do you take milk? Sugar?’

She didn’t give him a chance to respond. She went into the kitchen and filled the kettle, then stood next to it, letting it boil. She checked the time on her phone. Waited until five minutes had passed.

When she went back in, Tommy was asleep.

The sedative she had put in his beer had done its job. She’d procured it a while back, from a woman she’d met in prison, knowing it would come in handy at some point. She’d discovered it years ago, during her year of travelling and sleeping around. Had regularly slipped it into the post-coital drinks of her partners so she could make an exit with whatever belongings took her fancy. Then she’d move on to the next place, the next bed.

Tommy was passed out on the sofa, his head resting on the back, his mouth open. He wasn’t quite snoring but his breathing was wet and heavy. Why had she thought he was brutishly attractive? Close up, he truly was a disgusting specimen of a man. If she could slit his throat right now – put a blade through that bulging Adam’s apple – and get away with it, she wouldn’t hesitate. All that blood and DNA, though, and that was before she even considered the practicalities of removing his heavy body.

She had a much better idea.

Unfortunately, it involved taking his underpants off.

She crouched on the carpet by his feet and undid his shoelaces, then tugged at his trainers, recoiling at the smell of his socks and struggling not to gag. Muttering to herself, a steady stream of insults and curse words, she hooked her fingers into the waistband of his jogging bottoms and dragged them down to his knees, exposing his underpants. He was wearing tight little briefs, navy blue. She took a deep breath then pulled them down too. Finally, she pulled his T-shirt up to his chest so it wasn’t anywhere near his naked groin.

It was, she supposed, unfortunate that he was flaccid, because it made the story she was concocting slightly less plausible. He was still quite big, though. Circumcised. She went out to the hallway and fetched some gloves so she wouldn’t have to touch him with her bare hands. It was still gross, but she manoeuvred him so it looked like he at least had a semi. Then she picked up Tommy’s phone, which was lying beside him on the sofa, and held it in front of his face to unlock it before taking several dick pics.

Then she sent them from his phone to hers, along with a string of messages.

Fiona. I want you to imagine how big I’m going to be when I’m naked with you. So big you’re going to gasp with shock. I’m going to ruin you.

Too much? No, it was the kind of vile message she’d received in the past from men on social media.

She typed out some more – a load of crap about all the things he wanted to do to her. My wife doesn’t turn me on anymore. I have to think about you to get hard with her. You’re so much hotter than her.

She thought about adding some more. Making up a confession that it was his fault that the bike’s tyre had burst and that he knew Fiona wasn’t to blame. But she decided to keep it simple. A bloke lusting after his neighbour. What could be simpler and easier to believe than that?

She messaged back from her own phone: Leave me alone. You’re married. Come near me again and I’ll show this to Nicola. I can’t believe you could be thinking about cheating when your poor son is still getting better.

Then she fetched a knife from the kitchen and sat in the armchair across from him, waiting for him to wake up.

It took thirty minutes. Going mad with boredom, she considered chucking a glass of water in his face. But finally, he stirred. It took him a minute to figure out that he was sitting there with his underpants and joggers pulled down; another few seconds to see Fiona with the knife.

‘Do what I say or I’ll cut your cock off,’ she said flatly, once she had his attention. ‘Now, pick up your phone – it’s right there – and look at your WhatsApp.’

Eyes wide, he wiped drool off his chin with the back of his hand, then opened the phone, all fingers and thumbs, taking a long time to navigate to WhatsApp. But when he did, it woke him up properly.

‘What the hell?’

He tried to stand up, but she pointed the knife at him. ‘Stay there and listen to me. I didn’t have anything to do with your brat’s accident, even though I might wish I had.’ She spoke the lie with conviction. ‘You’re going to leave me alone. You’re going to stop asking questions about me. Otherwise I’m going to show the pictures and messages you sent me to your wife. Got it?’

‘You bitch. You drugged me!’

‘Shut up. Tell me you understand. Or I’ll go over there the moment she gets home and tell her how you’ve been harassing me. I’ll tell the whole neighbourhood about what a disgusting pervert you are. Everyone will also know that you’re so pathetic you can’t even get a proper hard-on when you send a dick pic.’

He seemed even more concerned about that than he did about the prospect of his wife finding out.

‘One more thing: you don’t say anything to Emma about seeing me with Ethan, all right?’

‘So are you shagging him?’

‘Shut up, and tell me you understand.’

‘I understand.’

‘Good. Now pull your undies up and get out.’

He did exactly as she asked, glancing at the knife one more time before getting up and rearranging himself.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said. ‘You’re wondering how you can get my phone, delete the photos and messages. Well, they’re already backed up and I’ve sent everything to a friend. If anything happens to me, she’ll send everything to the police – and to Nicola.’

So that was it. Tommy’s threat had been eliminated – for now at least. She didn’t think he would let this go forever, especially if he didn’t believe her denials about her involvement in the accident. She might still have to do something about that.

For now, though, she had given herself breathing room.

‘We’re almost there,’ she said, as if Maisie were there in the room with her. ‘Just one to go.’

This was it. The final stages of the plan. And the person she needed to complete her plan – and move into the next stage of her life – would arrive home tomorrow.