After Anna (34 page)

That is, if she is found at all, which you doubt. What will be found is her car, parked in a remote location near the mouth of the Mersey Estuary, with an empty bottle of whisky and a syringe emptied of the sedative you plan to give her. She will be gone. Disappeared as the tide was flowing out to the Irish Sea. Fish food.

Just like Jim and his floozy. You’ll take her to the same place. Jim, Julia. It’s neat. You like neat.

You know it is all about narrative. Humans like their stories to be neat, to make sense. It gives them the impression the world makes sense, that it is safe and predictable, when the reality is that the opposite is true.
You
know that.
You
know that the world is a brutal, vengeful place and the only way to survive is to take control, which is what you do.

But you are not normal. Which is why you are so successful.

So Julia will disappear, neatly.

And, just like after Jim and Miss-fucking-Wilkinson disappeared, the world will go on as before.

ii.

Julia had figured out quite a lot of things. Amidst the agony, she’d had quite a lot of time to think about them.

She’d figured out that, if she twisted her torso so that her weight was on one shoulder, then moved her hands towards the opposite shoulder, that side of her body would get some relief from the pain caused by the position she had been forced into. After a while she could reverse the movement, relieving the other side. She had no way of gauging time, but she thought that, initially, she had moved every ten minutes or so; now the intervals were much shorter.

She’d figured where she was. She was in a priest’s hole behind the fireplace in the living room. That would explain why she had heard Edna, Brian, and Anna’s voices.

She remembered Edna showing her the priest’s hole some years ago. It was a rectangular box, about four and a half feet in length and four feet in height, and about two feet deep. Just big enough for an adult male priest to squeeze into during the sixteenth century, when Queen Elizabeth outlawed Catholicism and sent her pursuivants up and down the country, searching for priests to torture and kill. The pursuivants were skilled searchers and measured the external dimensions of houses and the internal dimensions of rooms so as to determine whether there were any secret compartments; the priest’s holes had to be built so cleverly that they could not locate them, and they also had to be small.

Edna’s priest’s hole was in the side of a large inglenook fireplace. The fireplace itself was the correct dimensions; the priest’s hole had been built into an area above the fire where the chimney would normally have been, so it was undetectable by measurement.

And undetectable by police searching the house.

Julia could not shake the image of the police here, in the house, mere feet from Anna, with a calm, smiling, helpful Edna standing in the doorway of the living room, watching them fail to find her granddaughter, and congratulating herself on her ingenuity in selecting such an effective hiding place.

It was so
Edna
. If she had only thought it through when Anna was missing, she would have seen it. Where else would Edna hide someone, but in a sixteenth-century priest’s hole? It would have appealed to Edna’s sense that modernity was not all it was cracked up to be, not to mention the air of Gothic that she carried with her. She could almost hear Edna thinking about it.

It’s been hiding people for a long time, no reason why it should stop now. Might as well use what you have in front of you. No point in reinventing the wheel. Keep it simple.

And it had worked. The police had been to Edna’s house twice and found nothing. She might be batshit crazy but she wasn’t stupid.

She’d figured out that her earlier suspicions that Edna had leaked stories to the press in order to discredit her and get custody of Anna were almost certainly correct. Then, she’d thought that Edna was simply taking advantage of Anna’s abduction but now she couldn’t help wondering whether Edna had planned all this from the start.

It was obvious, really; what better way to get custody than to utterly discredit the mother in the public eye? It was an amazing, twisted plan: take Anna, make Julia look bad, and, when she was public enemy number one, return Anna, ready for a custody battle Edna couldn’t lose. If Julia hadn’t been in so much pain she might almost have admired her mother-in-law’s crazy ingenuity.

Although, if that was what it would have taken to keep Anna, she might have done the same herself.

She thought back to the day itself. When Anna was taken, Edna had supposedly been at home, fixing the plumbing. Instead, she had gone to the school and picked up Anna. Julia went over the day in her mind, replayed the phone call when she had asked Edna for help that afternoon, told her that she might be late. Had Edna seen an opportunity and simply acted, or had she formed the plan ahead of time and been looking for a chance to put it into action? Either way, she had done it, had turned up at the school, and, unseen, taken Anna. Maybe she’d beckoned to her from a distance, and Anna, recognizing her grandmother, had gone willingly. Maybe Anna had wandered off and Edna had picked her up. It didn’t matter, and Julia doubted she’d ever find out, because she’d figured out one other thing.

She’d figured out that Edna was going to kill her.

But she could not, for the life of her, figure out what she could do about it.

She switched her weight to her left shoulder. The right side of her body relaxed a little, the relief immense. It wouldn’t last long.

And then she heard footsteps. Quick, decisive footsteps, approaching the priest’s hole.

They stopped. There was the sound of metal moving on metal – bolts, maybe – then the wall in front of her slid back.

It took her eyes some time to adjust to the light. When they did they were not pleased to see what they saw.

It was Edna.

iii.

Edna did not look the same as she usually did. Her hair, normally frozen in an elegant, chin-length arrangement that she modelled on Helen Mirren, was scraped back from her forehead. She was wearing an old, blue wool sweater Julia thought had maybe once belonged to Brian. That was all she could see of her mother-in-law; the priest’s hole was about five feet above the floor, so all that was in the frame of her vision was Edna’s head, neck, and shoulders.

‘You’re awake,’ Edna said. ‘Good.’

Julia shook her head. She tried to speak, but the gag meant that the only noise she could make was a stifled moan. She stared at Edna, opening her eyes wide in supplication.

‘Well,’ Edna said. ‘I have to say it’s a shame it had to come to this.’ She lifted a syringe to eye level. It was gripped between her forefingers, her thumb on the plunger. ‘It needn’t have happened. If only Anna hadn’t remembered the doll’s house.’ She shook her head slowly, regretfully. ‘I didn’t think she would, but even I make mistakes.’

So it
was
her. Even though Julia had held no further doubts about who had taken Anna, it was still a shock to hear her say it.

‘So here we are,’ Edna said, then smiled. ‘The end of the road. It’s probably a mercy for you, in the long run. Your life was shaping up to be pretty miserable, after all.’

Julia shook her head as hard as she could, trying to get a message to Edna.
It doesn’t have to end like this. It doesn’t.

Edna sighed.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I understand your regret. But you can’t change this, Julia. It’s too far gone now. How could I let you go? I have too much to lose. You’d tell the police.’

Julia shook her head again.
I won’t, I promise.

‘You say that now, but when you get out you’ll fill up with thoughts of revenge and bitterness and the next thing I know the constabulary will be here and I’ll be hauled off to the dock. I don’t blame you. I’d do the same thing. And knowing that, I can hardly let you walk away from here, can I? You see that, don’t you Julia? This has to happen. I didn’t intend it, but now it’s inevitable.’

Julia shook her head. It was all she could do, her only hope. And it was patently not working.

Edna’s face took on a thoughtful expression. ‘It was so nearly perfect, wasn’t it? Anna went missing for a while – but she was safe, here with me – then –
pop
– she was home again. Brian and I got custody, Anna’s welfare was assured, and you went off to do whatever you would have done.’

Julia shook her head again. This time it was not assent: she meant
no, Anna’s welfare was not assured. Anna’s welfare was
ruined
.

‘So I suppose I ought to tell you the plan,’ Edna said. ‘It’s a good one.’ She smiled. ‘I’m going to knock you out with this—’ she held up the syringe, ‘and then we’ll drive your car to a place I know, a place Jim used to take me, where the Mersey empties into Liverpool Bay. It’s a fast tide out there, and anything caught in it will go miles out into the Irish Sea. All they’ll ever find of you is your car, an empty whisky bottle with your saliva and fingerprints on it, and an empty jar of sleeping pills. And if your body does show up, it’ll be so damaged by the fish that will have been treating it as a welcome free meal; no one will ever know the difference. A suicide. Open and shut.’

Edna smiled.

‘But your body won’t show up,’ she said. ‘It’s a tried and tested method. Jim and his girlfriend went that way and they were never found.’

Julia’s eyes widened. She’d killed Jim? Any hope that remained ebbed away. Edna was a
serial
killer, and she’d murdered her
husband
. If she would do that, then there was no way she would baulk at doing the same to her.

‘You look surprised,’ Edna said. ‘I wonder that you never guessed. I always thought someone might. It was obvious, really, but then people don’t guess. Same as my mother. Of course, Mum was nearly gone anyway. That was a mercy killing. Euthanasia. Jim, though – he had years left in him – but I let him humiliate me like that. It was a good excuse to get rid of him, as well. He drove me mad, did you know that? He drove me absolutely fucking insane. No ambition. Happy to be a headmaster. He had so much ability; so much charisma and wisdom. He could have gone into politics; become an MP, a minister. Prime Minister, even, but all he wanted to do was run that school. It was his life. I wondered for a while whether he was a pederast, unnaturally attracted to children, that kind of thing, but I don’t think he was. I think he was happy to waste his life on them.’ She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t bear to see it.’

She was, Julia saw, even more insane than she had thought. She killed her husband for
not
becoming Prime Minister? If that was normal then there wouldn’t be too many men left in Britain. There’d be John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and David Cameron. Jesus. Not much of a selection. She’d almost prefer to stay with Brian.

‘I mean, he just needed to show a bit more damned backbone, a bit more spine. See the opportunity and grab it. A bit like I’m doing now. Unfortunately, he passed his lethargy onto Brian. It won’t happen to Anna, though. She’s going to go far, that girl.’

The problem with Edna was that she was utterly convinced of the rightness of her cause, a conviction that put her above the law. That was the root of her madness: she did not think she was a normal person, did not believe the normal rules applied to her. It made her look down on everybody else, made her believe they were worthless, disposable.

As far as Edna was concerned it was ok to euthanize her mother because Edna thought it was ok. Never mind that, if everybody flouted the rules, there would be chaos – Edna would happily admit it. But she’d also claim the problem was that not everyone could be trusted to make good decisions, but she could, and so she would.

As for Julia? No problem. Anna had to be with Edna; Julia was an obstacle; Julia had to be removed. Simple.

And there was nothing Julia could do to stop it. Edna was going to slip the needle under her skin and then darkness would come, and it would all be over.

Not for Anna, though. For her the nightmare would just be getting started.

‘Right,’ Edna said. ‘Let’s get this over with.’ She smiled a lopsided, crazy smile. ‘Although aren’t you going to ask how I did it? Why I did it? You can’t, of course, because of the gag, but I know you’re dying to find out.’ The smile widened. ‘Get that little pun?
Dying
to find out? You will be soon, Julia.’

Edna looked reflectively at the ceiling, then back at her daughter-in-law. ‘I have to say it was a brilliant plan,’ she said. ‘I thought of it on the spur of the moment. It came to me, just like that. I’d been wondering what to do about the divorce since Brian told me what you planned; wondering how to stop you taking my granddaughter from me. I couldn’t let that happen, Julia. Anna has great potential. I couldn’t let you ruin it by allowing her to go to some dismal comprehensive school where second-rate teachers would turn her into a hairdresser or beautician, or, at best, a small-town lawyer like her mother. She can be like
me
, Julia. She can be
great
. But you would not allow that, and I could not stand by while you turned her into a mediocrity. You must see that, even if it is hard to take.’

Julia shook her head violently. She did not see, not at all. Edna just sighed.

‘This is exactly the problem,’ she said. ‘You just don’t
get
it. Anyway, I knew I had to do something, but I had no idea what. And then you called.’ She put on a high-pitched, whining voice. ‘Edna, I’m so busy at work, I can’t pick up my daughter. Can you do it? Can you help me?’ Edna shook her head. ‘And in that moment I had it. The solution. I’d take Anna, then watch, as you took the blame for being a negligent mother; a blame that I would make sure fell squarely on you. You didn’t realize I knew about Twitter, did you? Most of the early tweets about you were from accounts I set up so that I could get the ball rolling. Once it started it had a life of its own, but I gave it the initial push.’