Page 14 of The Serial Killer’s Sister (The Serial Killer’s Daughter #3)

FINLEY HALL CHILDREN’S HOME

The second Anna’s eyes open she knows Henry’s been in their room.

It’s as though over the past three and a half years at the home she’s developed a sixth sense.

She peeps over the edge of the bed and sighs.

It’s what she’s been dreading. There’s a piece of paper folded neatly in half on top of her slippers.

She groans, her tummy already beginning to bubble with anxiety.

‘Kirsty,’ she says, looking over to her friend. ‘Hey, Kirst.’ Anna swings her legs out and reaches across the gap to give Kirsty a shake. ‘Wake up.’

‘Whaaaat? Shit, Anna, it’s still night.’

‘It’s almost seven.’

‘But it’s a weekend.’

‘Sorry. But I need you to wake up.’

There must be something in Anna’s tone, because with a sudden jolt, Kirsty sits up, palming any sleepiness away from her eyes. Her hair is wild, a mass of brown tangles that mirror Anna’s own.

‘What’s the matter?’

Anna points to the floor.

‘Oh, great.’ Kirsty stares at the paper and puffs her cheeks out, air releasing like a deflating balloon. ‘It’s been a while.’

It’s been six months since the last one, but that one left its mark.

It also almost broke the girls’ friendship.

The Hunt was a staple game for the first year Anna and Henry were at Finley Hall.

Anna did it as a way to try and help Henry overcome some of his problems – his challenges with making friends, with fitting in.

He’d come to rely on them – on Anna – just as he had when he was little.

But as Anna matured, she slowly felt suffocated and tried to wean him off.

She initiated fewer hunts, left Henry to his own devices more, and ultimately cut down the time they spent together.

She began putting her friendship with Kirsty first, relishing finally having a strong bond with another girl.

In Henry’s eyes, Kirsty was taking his sister away from him and so he began instigating the hunts himself, clawing back time with Anna – he wanted things the way they were.

Henry’s eleventh birthday saw a change in him – in the games.

They became more spiteful. Manipulative.

He used them as a way to force her into spending time with him.

The Hunt began to invoke dread – the fun they once had was totally stripped away.

The treasure hunts became a tool purely to torment Anna; nothing more.

No longer were the items personal, belonging to Anna.

All she found were horrible things: a rusty mousetrap, the decaying mouse carcass still caught; huge spiders in matchboxes; gone-off apples crawling with maggots.

And the last time, he’d set a trap, a brick narrowly missing her head when she walked into the clue room.

When Anna refused to report it to the home manager, she and Kirsty had fallen out.

It was getting dangerous, she’d said: someone would get seriously hurt if Anna didn’t do something about it.

But Henry was her brother – she couldn’t tell on him.

‘What are you going to do?’ Kirsty asks, her eyes glued to the paper as if it might scurry towards her, harm her in some way.

Anna inhales deeply. ‘Nothing.’

Kirsty raises her eyebrows. ‘What? Like … ignore it?’ She seems shocked, even though she’s been begging Anna to do just that.

‘Exactly. I’m fed up with his immaturity.

’ Anna grabs the paper, and without unfolding it rips it down the middle.

She bites her lip, her mind teetering between relief and regret.

Should she just do this last hunt, then speak with Henry and tell him she’s not doing any more?

No. He’d talk her out of it; threaten her in some way.

She gets up, strides to the wire waste bin under the desk and shoves the torn paper in.

‘Screw him. I’m not playing this stupid game any more.

’ She crosses her arms and gives Kirsty a confident smile. ‘I’m not giving him the satisfaction.’

‘Halleluiah. At last.’ Kirsty leaps off the bed and launches herself at Anna, flinging her arms around her. ‘I don’t get why you did them anyway. I’ve told you. You have to ignore him. His nasty games. It’s jealousy, that’s all. He has to get on with his own life, Anna.’

‘I know. Well, today is the first day I’m standing up to my brother. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen?’

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She’s motionless when Anna finally spots her after searching for her for the past two hours, lying in a heap at the edge of the lake.

‘Kirsty! Shit, Kirsty!’ Anna runs towards the bridge and is across the other side within seconds.

Anna drops to her knees beside her friend, lays a hand on her. Her clothes are damp; she’s been there a while. Anna’s heartbeat stutters as she puts her head on Kirsty’s chest to check if she’s breathing. She cries with relief when she feels her chest rise and fall.

‘Thank God. Kirsty, it’s me. Please open your eyes.’

Kirsty’s face looks pale and waxy, and as Anna touches it a coldness tingles through her fingertips.

She’d do anything now for this to be one of Kirsty’s pranks – it’s almost Halloween; it would be typical of her to try and scare Anna by pretending she was unconscious.

Last year, she’d bunked off school and at four o’clock had hidden in their shared wardrobe, waiting for Anna to return.

When Anna went to change out of her uniform and opened the wardrobe, Kirsty screamed and leapt out at her.

Of course, while Kirsty had collapsed in a fit of giggles at jump-scaring her friend, Anna had merely collapsed from fright, taking half an hour to calm down.

This now seems serious, though. Real. Anna shakes Kirsty’s shoulders and her eyelids flutter and open. Her eyes roll and she lets out a groan.

‘It’s okay, Kirst. You’re okay.’

‘What? Why am I …’ Kirsty pushes herself up into a sitting position and looks around, confusion crinkling her forehead.

‘Did you fall from the bridge?’ Anna asks, grasping at the most obvious reason for her friend’s current state. If she’d been sitting on the end post and had lost her balance and fallen backwards, it would explain her position.

‘I don’t … I—’

‘Here,’ Anna says, offering her hand to help Kirsty stand. ‘We should get you to the office. Marnie will check you out.’

‘I’m not seeing her. Just ’cause she’s got some fancy certificate on the wall, doesn’t make her a nurse. The woman didn’t even tell us about periods until we’d been having them for a year.’

‘But you were unconscious, Kirsty. You must’ve hit your head.’

Kirsty runs a hand over her scalp. ‘No cuts.’ She shrugs. ‘Bit of a bump, mind,’ she says, wincing as she touches the back of her head.

‘You don’t remember what happened?’

‘One minute I was walking over the bridge; next, your face is looming over me. I guess I tripped.’ This puts paid to Anna’s first theory, and instead the possibility of Kirsty taking a knock to the head before collapsing takes its place.

With concern creeping through her, Anna looks around to see if anyone else is loitering.

It’s getting dark, so she can’t be sure, but there’s no movement, so she turns back to Kirsty.

As she does, she spots something lying in the long grass and bends to pick it up.

‘Yours?’ She holds up a vodka bottle, giving Kirsty a judgemental glance.

‘Ahh, there you go. That’s what I was doing,’ Kirsty says, flippantly. ‘I’d only had a few swigs, though.’

‘Where’d you get it from?’ Anna cocks one eyebrow.

‘You know my fake Aunt Linda? She snuck it in on her last visit.’ Kirsty huffs. ‘At least she’s good for something, eh? And look, promise not to mention this to anyone, right? I’m in enough trouble without adding alcohol smuggling to the list.’

Anna’s skin prickles with unease; she has a niggling feeling something’s not quite right, but brushes it away. It was an accident, like Kirsty said. Anna reluctantly agrees not to tell anyone, but her worry for her friend lingers.

‘What if you’ve got concussion?’ she asks. ‘Or a blood clot?’

‘Oh, Anna. Don’t be so melodramatic. I’ll be fine. Look into my eyes.’

To Kirsty’s annoyance, Anna does just that, and then runs a finger in front of Kirsty’s face, getting her to follow its path forward and back a few times.

‘Yeah, okay. If you’re sure,’ Anna says, giving in.

It takes them fifteen minutes to get back to their room, Anna adamant they should walk slowly.

In that time, she makes Kirsty say the alphabet forwards and backwards and do all the times tables, just to convince herself that Kirsty isn’t suffering from concussion, to feel better about not reporting the fall to the first-aider.

She’d feel terrible if something happened to Kirsty because of her.

Anna’s brow creases as she pushes the door open.

‘Did you leave that there?’

‘No.’ Kirsty says. The girls stand just inside the room, both rooted to the spot. ‘But it is mine,’ Kirsty says, pointing to the object in the centre of the floor. ‘And isn’t that the paper you tore up this morning with it?’

Anna gently nudges Kirsty further in so she can close the door. She casts her gaze around to see if anything else has been disturbed, then takes a few tentative steps to the middle of the room. Anna picks up the paper.

‘It’s Henry’s riddle. But it’s been sellotaped back together,’ she says. She picks up the toy. ‘Here.’ Anna hands Kirsty’s Tamagotchi back to her.

‘What a dick,’ Kirsty says, turning it over in her hands.

‘He’s taken the battery out. He’s killed my cat.

’ She hangs her head, and for a moment, Anna doesn’t know what to do.

Guilt that it’s her brother who has caused her friend’s sadness crushes her.

If she’d just done The Hunt as usual, he wouldn’t have destroyed it.

‘I’m sorry, Kirst.’ Anna puts her arm around her friend.

‘I know you’ve had it for the longest time.

’ And this fact suddenly hits Anna. She’d assumed Henry had chosen the Tamagotchi because he thought it was hers, but everyone knew it was Kirsty’s – she was always checking it, making sure her cat was fed and played with.

Henry was well aware it didn’t belong to Anna.

‘Your brother clearly doesn’t like being ignored.’

‘No, I don’t think he does.’ Anna swallows down bile as an awful thought occurs to her. ‘Did you see him earlier? When you were walking to the lake?’

Kirsty’s forehead crinkles, then she gives a small gasp.

‘I passed by him. He was standing by the cedar.’ The girls look at each other, eyes wide with shared understanding.

Anna strides to the window overlooking the grounds and scans the area.

She doesn’t have to look far. Henry is leaning up against a tree, arms crossed, staring up at the girls’ window, and if Anna isn’t very much mistaken, he has a smug look on his face.

She keeps eye contact for as long as she can bear, then just as she’s about to break it, she sees Henry cross his chest with his finger, then put it to his eye. She backs away with a shiver.

Placing something of Kirsty’s by the discarded clue is more than a sign he’s displeased. It’s a warning.

Henry was angry with Anna for not playing. She hurt his feelings.

So, in turn, Henry hurt Kirsty on the bridge. It was his revenge. And leaving Kirsty’s Tamagotchi here is to show Anna he means business. It’s his way of telling her that if she doesn’t play, someone she loves gets hurt.