Dead Lovely (14 page)

When the rock fell to the ground, Sarah almost said, ‘Thank you, Mike,’ like she did when he would unlock the en suite door back then, but she’d changed since being buried alive, and manners would henceforth go out the window, so she didn’t say thanks or even hello. Sarah must have passed out again, but when she awoke Kyle gave her a drink and popped her shoulder back in with a crunch. He went
over her methodically. She could move her arm now, which – amazingly – was otherwise unharmed. She could wriggle her fingers. She could nod that her name was Sarah and that she was in Scotland and that Tony Blair was the Prime Minister of Britain. She could move both legs.

‘Your face is swollen, and I think two ribs are cracked … But you’ll be okay, you’re okay.’

Sarah lay there for about sixty minutes with Kyle while he nourished and medicated her and bandaged her ribs. She couldn’t talk, didn’t want to talk, didn’t know what to say, so she sat quietly, looked at the time on Kyle’s watch, and regained her strength.

Eventually, she was thinking clearly enough to realise she was sitting on something metal and sharp, a tent peg. And seeing clearly enough to realise that Kyle’s bag of goodies included saws and sacks and that he had come to chop her up.

Her fury was so immediate and all-consuming that she pulled the peg from underneath her, sat up, and thrust it through one of Kyle’s clear blue eyes and deep into his brain.

He wriggled. He wasn’t supposed to wriggle. He was supposed to drop down dead as a doornail. Instead his arms flailed about and he stood up. Sarah didn’t have the strength to run after him. So she stood up in her piss and shit-sodden trousers, grabbed another tent peg, and walked after him slowly. He was scrambling pathetically towards the
ridge, trying to yelp for help. She had to walk about ten metres before he had slowed down enough for her to catch up. Then he fell to the ground. She looked him in his good eye, and stabbed the metal tent peg right through it.

Sarah pushed Kyle forward and both pegs pressed further into his head with a wet squelch.

It was still dark, so Sarah had enough time to put Kyle’s body where she’d spent the last twenty-three hours. She wondered why Kyle had thought he needed to chop her up and take her somewhere else. That was completely unnecessary. No-one was ever going to find a body out here. So after yanking out the pegs and stabbing him in the heart a couple of times, and sawing off both arms so that he would fit neatly into the crevice, she felt sure that he was dead enough to make no fuss, and she shoved him in.

For garnish, she looked inside the crevice and found her spider.

‘Hello, Charlotte,’ she said as she plucked it from the web it had woven. She then looked at Kyle’s face, gently pulled down on his soft bottom lip, prised apart his teeth with her fingers, and popped Charlotte into his mouth.

‘This is Kyle, the guy I told you about.’

Sarah set about placing the rocks back. She had overseen the rebuilding of her stone wall in Loch Katrine, so she knew a bit about it, and did a fine job of camouflaging the crevice completely, unlike
Krissie who (characteristically) had done a very sloppy job.

She then took off her soiled pants and put on the change of clothes Kyle had packed for himself and mentally ticked off the first of the unrealistically large-scale plans she had made in the darkness.

Kill Kyle.

What luck, him turning up like that. She had imagined that it would take hours to walk to safety and then days to hunt him down, if she had ever managed to free herself from the crevice.

Not only had he showed up like a gift from heaven, but he had fixed her up so that she was strong enough to do him in immediately.

Killing Krissie wasn’t going to be part of Sarah’s revenge. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t
want
to kill Krissie – indeed she couldn’t believe what her friend had done to her – but a long time ago, Sarah had made a pact with God never to let harm fall upon her friend again.

And anyway, getting Robbie – the child who she felt was rightfully hers – would be vengeance enough.

But how?

When the phone in her pocket rang Sarah was not terrified this time. But she was confused,
forgetting
momentarily that she could reach into her jacket pocket with her hand, retrieve the phone, and press the button. Easy.

So that’s what she did.

‘Hello, this is Claire Smith phoning for Sarah McGibbon,’ a middle-aged voice said to Sarah. ‘I’m a social worker in the Partick area office. I’m ringing about your friend, Krissie Donald.’

I’d said my goodbyes to the perfect life I’d thrown to the wind and was about to head down to the police station when the phone rang, startling me.

It was Mum.

‘Mum! Where are you? They’ve taken Robbie into care and I’ve done something really bad … I’m scared. I’m just about to go to the police station.’

Unable to understand my hysterical attempts to explain what had happened, Mum calmed me down a little, then said, ‘Darlin’, don’t do
anything
yet. Wait till we’re with you. Get a taxi to Kenilworth, Kriss. We’ll be with you as soon as we can.’

Mum was right, I couldn’t do this alone. After she hung up, I longed for her so much it hurt. God, when I thought about all she and Dad had put up with since I’d had Robbie, I felt mortified. They were
amazing, and I was a nightmare. And they didn’t know the half of it yet.

I moved the broken door aside and stepped out into the close.

I almost fell over Chas, who was sitting on the step with red eyes that loved me, I knew that now. He’d stuffed up too, and he felt terrible. I apologised for my fury earlier and sat down beside him.

He didn’t flinch as I told him about Sarah. When I’d finished, he moved his hand gently onto mine and held it there.

After a period of silence, gazing out the window overlooking the drying green, we got a taxi to Kenilworth Avenue together. I found Mum and Dad’s house key in its hiding place in the garage and we went inside. The house was such a happy house. Messy and lived in and happy.

Knowing that in an hour or so I would be removed from this life and from my son, I decided to use the time efficiently, to put things in order so that Robbie would grow up knowing something about his mother that did not involve adultery and murder. I asked Chas to give me some space to do this, so he took himself off to the kitchen to see what he could rustle up. I had not eaten for over twenty-four hours and he was going to force me to, even though it was the last thing I wanted to do.

I took one of Mum’s large floral boxes from her creative room. She’d always had this room, filled
with pretty boxes, stickers, interesting stationery, books and watercolours. She made stunning little books for Robbie, put together gorgeous photo albums, and kept almost everything in sentimental, accessible order.

I grabbed an empty floral box and labelled it ‘Photos for Robbie’ with one of Mum’s sticky labels.

I rummaged through the loose photos on the desk, downloaded some recent ones from Mum’s camera, and put all the shots of me with Robbie inside. On the back of each, I wrote a wee story …

Mummy chopping your nails for the first time. They were teensy!

Mummy learning to feed you. She wasn’t very good at it!

You and Mummy in the park feeding the ducks. You were asleep!

Gran, Grandpa, Mummy and you eating pasta by Lake Como.

Mummy heading out the door when she was wee – probably to climb trees.

Mummy and her dear friend Sarah …

Next I wrote a letter in my best handwriting.

I was crying by the time I finished. The page was sodden when I sealed it in an envelope.

Then I wrote a letter to Mum and Dad.

I got another box and filled it with things that might remind Robbie of me. My deodorant (it was only Nivea roll-on, but it was how I smelt), my favourite Enid Blyton book, the soft bunny I got when I was three, which I took out a moment later as he was actually very scary to look at, with evil glass eyes and re-sewn ears that were tight and too thin.

I remembered another soft toy, Geoff. He was a pink teddy bear who I named controversially because I was an ‘interesting’ child. He wasn’t in the creative room anywhere, so I went up to the attic.

Our attic had a pull-down ladder and was tiny. Dad had put a light up there one rainy weekend and Mum began to use it to store things that ‘should really be thrown out, Anna!’

There were several plastic boxes filled with letters. She’s a great writer, Mum. She loves people – and talks all day about what they do and say and how they end up being the way they are.

Mum’s letters made wonderful reading.

There were love letters to Dad when he was working in Africa: ‘133 days till I see you, Davie boy. How am I going to survive without your hand
massages
and pancakes? Write me with some ways.’

There were letters to me when I was in India. ‘You are my golden girl, Krissie. I remember you and Sarah running off to school in the rain and I thought to myself: there go my golden girls with blue umbrellas, running, laughing in the rain.’ 

And another one from me that Mum had put in a plastic pocket and filed: 

There was a short story that Mum had written and kept hidden away for years – about a bald boy being bullied on a boat. It was brilliant.

I didn’t find Geoff, but I did find two things that really puzzled me. The first was a newspaper
clipping
about a guy who was fined for a sex offence. He’d managed to reduce the charge, but he was – as the paper put it – a beast on the loose.

I had shrugged this off and continued leafing through photos when the second weird thing turned up. Something wrapped in newspaper. I unwrapped the
Observer,
and caught a glimpse of a beautiful jewellery box that was embroidered with pink flowers and encrusted with silver glitter.

Then I threw up all over Mum’s letters.

Looking at the box again, I wondered why I had just thrown up. I opened the box slightly, saw the tutu of a tiny ballerina and heard the ping of a mournful tune. To stop myself from throwing up again, I slammed the lid shut, wrapped the box up in the newspaper, and went downstairs to clean Mum’s letters.

‘What’s wrong?’ Chas asked when I walked into the kitchen.

‘I was looking at a jewellery box in the attic and I threw up.’

Chas’s face went whiter than mine, for some reason.

‘Do you remember where you got the jewellery box?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I told him, wondering what that had to do with anything.

‘Krissie …’ Chas was looking very serious indeed, but he didn’t get to explain himself because at that moment Mum and Dad rushed into the kitchen and hugged me. They’d been crying, both of them, and asked me to sit down and tell them everything.

So I did. Everything.

How do parents react when their ordinary happy lives somersault and then spontaneously combust?

Mine stayed calm, each taking a turn to ask a question.

‘Are you sure it was your fault, Kriss?’

‘I pushed her and she fell.’

‘But did you mean to?’

‘All I know is that I hid her, and that’s bad enough.’

‘Sometimes I wish you’d never met Sarah,’ said Dad.

Mum, Dad and Chas sat quietly while I phoned Kyle again. Still no answer. Then Mum phoned Social Services. First, she discovered she’d phoned the department of old and mad people. She was
transferred
to the bad people section, before a probation officer transferred her again to the young people department, which rang out.

In the end, we drove to the office. Chas and I waited outside nervously for an eternity. When Mum and Dad finally came out, it was to say the social worker was on a child protection investigation. Her mobile wasn’t answering and the investigation could go on all day. The receptionist said she’d left a note for me explaining that they hadn’t managed to
organise
a hearing during the day. ‘It’s at Bell Street, at six pm,’ the receptionist read.

As much as we hated the idea of Robbie being with strangers for the rest of the day, there was nothing we could do.

Dad was silent as he drove us all to Drumgoyne Road. My heart was pounding as we parked at the seventies brick police station. We all sat still, waiting. If I hadn’t moved, I think we all would have stayed there forever.

I walked in first, with Chas and Mum and Dad trailing behind me.

‘Can I speak to a police officer?’ I asked the man on the desk. ‘It’s urgent.’

I was told to take a seat, which I did, sitting down with Mum, Dad and Chas on one side and several car thieves and prostitutes on the other. They seemed quite at home, reading leaflets on walls and entertaining their kids as if they were at the dentist.

We’d been sitting there for ten minutes when Mum started to cry, so I approached the desk again.

‘Excuse me, this is very urgent –’ I looked at his badge – ‘Sergeant Gallagher.’

‘Aye, I’m sure it is!’ said the rude-as-a-bastard police officer. ‘Sit down there and we’ll call you.’

I sat down again and then Dad started to cry, so I approached the desk again.

‘It’s about a murder! I killed someone. So please get an officer to take my confession.’

He looked up at me with a different expression. Suddenly I had been promoted from a middle-class bore with a noisy neighbour to a full-blown murderer.

‘Oh, right then, of course … Um, come in here then, miss.’

I was taken away from Chas’s hand and Mum and Dad’s (now free-flowing) tears into a little room with glass windows, two inspectors and a tape. Declining a lawyer, I gave as much detail as I could – times, dates, places, affairs, pushes, dislocations – and told them that Kyle was only trying to help me by removing her body.

Within minutes of giving the statement, I was put in a police car. I begged them to bring Chas too, and eventually they relented and let him come in the car behind me. We drove off at high speed to Glencoe, leaving Mum and Dad in Glasgow for the Children’s Hearing that evening.

The inspectors were uncharacteristically nice. They didn’t call me scum or handcuff me or punch a more interesting confession out of me. In fact, they stopped at Crianlarich and got me some headache tablets.

We parked at the front of the Kingshouse Hotel and as we walked inside I grabbed Chas’s hand. It made me nauseous, seeing the hotel where it all started. When Kyle, Sarah and I had arrived here, I was already an adulteress. I had already ruined Sarah’s life. But it was in this building that a blowjob mushroomed out of control.

We walked more slowly up the track than I had the last time I was there, and the only strange thing we saw on the way was an abandoned luggage trolley. We arrived at the top of the mountain at about three in the afternoon. The inspectors followed me to the foot of the cliff and then stood with me in front of the crevice. There was blood everywhere. Had she been bleeding at the time? God, I hadn’t even noticed.

The crevice itself was perfectly camouflaged. How had I managed such a good job?

I sat down and looked away while the inspectors photographed the scene and then pulled at the rocks. It seemed to take them forever, and the
scraping
and banging of rocks was so loud that it felt as though it was happening inside my head. Eventually I heard a thump and the sounds of gagging and then Chas prised my hands away from my tear-sodden face and looked at me calmly.

‘Krissie. There’s something you need to see.’