Dead Lovely (17 page)

After Anna had told Chas about Mike Tetherton, she begged him to let it lie. There was no evidence, and Krissie had been through enough. She was happy, not remembering, so it was best left alone. Anna had been over and over it in her head, and had spent most of her life trying to stop her husband from killing the bastard.

Chas promised he would say nothing. He
promised
he would give Krissie time, so he left Scotland before he changed his mind.

When Chas arrived back home six years later, he spent two weeks setting up his flat and his studio before going to see Krissie. He’d wanted to impress her, blow her away with his paintings and his new hairdo and his anecdotes.

Chas now knew he was desirable because women had been chasing him over the previous
three years; every place he went there was a woman who wanted him. He didn’t often resist, because he liked sex just about more than anything, but he never took it further than a week or two. He was in love, he told them, one after another, and their faces fell with disappointment when he admitted it was not them he was in love with, but an amazing woman back home in Glasgow called Krissie.

After cleaning his new flat, ironing his new sheets and hanging the portrait of Krissie that had made him cry when he painted it in Pokhara, Chas arrived at Krissie’s flat in his best smart-casual
Firetrap
jeans and grey-green Billabong T-shirt, with flowers and chocolates and a speech.

‘Krissie Donald, I am in love with you and have been since you ate with your hands in Goa. You are wonderful and clever and funny and beautiful and enchanting and I want to spend the rest of the day with you.’

He hoped she would then say: ‘Day?’

And that he would then say: ‘Okay, then, life. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.’

He rang the bell again and began to rewrite his speech. Too many adjectives. He took out wonderful and changed clever to intelligent and beautiful to gorgeous and then put wonderful back in and took out gorgeous. He also started to sweat through the grey bit of his grey-green T-shirt and wondered if he should wipe his underarms with some of the tissue from around the lilies.

He was tearing off some of the tissue paper when the door opened at long last.

He breathed in.

But it wasn’t Krissie. It was a huge, hairy,
half-naked,
brown-eyed Adonis.

‘Fuck.’

Yes, he had said this out loud.

‘Fuck to you too,’ said Adonis.

‘Sorry.’

‘Are those for me?’ Shit, as well as being a Greek god, Adonis was funny.

‘No.’

There was a pause as the guy looked at the tears welling in Chas’s pathetic eyes.

‘You’re after Krissie.’

‘I was.’

‘Listen,’ Adonis whispered. ‘Don’t be upset. It’s nothing serious. I’m married. So if you want her, she’s yours, but leave it a bit, till I’ve told her.’

Before Chas could regret the pain of breaking his hand on the brick-like chest of Adonis, Krissie appeared behind him.

‘Chas!’ She grabbed him and hugged him and looked at the flowers and chocolates.

‘These are for you – a hello present,’ he said.

‘Thanks!’ she said, taking them without even thinking for a moment that they were supposed to signal the beginning of true happiness for both of them.

‘Come in! How have you been? Tell me
everything!
Why didn’t you write?’

Chas insisted that he would not come in, and they talked at the door awkwardly while Adonis waggled his fantastic bum into the bathroom.

‘He’s the love of my life,’ said Krissie. ‘I have never ever felt this way before. Did you see that bum?’

‘I’ve got to go,’ said Chas.

‘Oy, ya stroppy git,’ Krissie protested as he walked away. ‘Come back and have a cup of coffee. Chas! Get back here.’

‘Some other time.’

Chas would have avoided jail had he not babysat for his nephew that evening. The wee one, Joey, wouldn’t sleep, so they lay on the sofa together and watched endless amounts of mind-numbingly boring children’s television. One of the shows was
The Book Worm,
which featured a travelling library, a large talking/driving worm, and dozens of singing kids in various locations around the UK. Chas and his nephew were almost asleep when the credits rolled, and the producer’s name – Mike Tetherton – filled the screen.

Chas rang Anna, and they rang the police and waited days and days until they were told that nothing could be done. Mr Tetherton was not working with children anymore as the show had not been recommissioned, and he was not a
registered
sex offender.

The following night Chas was fast-forwarding and rewinding
The Book Worm
angrily, watching the faces of the little girls in the show – happy? scared? sore? – when Krissie knocked on his door crying.

‘He’s married!’ she said.

They drank two bottles of wine between them. Chas finally had his arm around her on the sofa and it felt so very comfortable. This was it, this was the moment he had been waiting for, when Krissie would allow herself to be loved by someone who actually liked her.

‘Krissie …’

‘Yep?’

A pause.

‘Krissie Donald …’

Krissie looked puzzled as she waited for Chas to get another word out; then her mobile rang.

She listened, then hung up, and then it rang again and she listened and did not hang up, and her arm withdrew from Chas’s and she went all gooey and soft, and then put her coat on, giggling, and – while still on the phone – mouthed the crushing words: ‘Got to go.’

After the second bottle of vodka was squeezed of its last drip, Chas boarded the train to London. He didn’t really know what he was going to do. Yell at him? Talk some sense into him? Catch him at it?

He rang the BBC the next day and said he was the father of one of the girls in
The Book Worm
who
was hoping for more work. The BBC receptionist said she’d pass on the message.

Mike called the mobile number as soon as he got the message, and agreed to meet father and
daughter
at his flat to discuss. By the time Chas got to the flat, he was hungover and exhausted. Mike opened the door with a smile.

‘Mr Worthington?’

‘Yes, hello,’ said Chas, and then explained
nervously
that his daughter was at school, but that she would love to do some more acting work.

Chas sat down as Mike made a coffee and said he would have to see her again, audition her. Chas checked the place out with his eyes – trendy, neat, bedroom door shut.

‘You live alone?’ Chas asked.

‘Recently dumped! So describe your daughter to me, I can’t recall her.’

‘Okay, let me think, she has … brown hair, she’s funny, with a wonderful smile. She’s beautiful looking, has a great Scottish accent.’

‘From Scotland?’

‘Glasgow. Southside.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

Mike walked in with the coffees and sat down.

‘Tell me more.’

‘Let me think, she’s clever, and she’s … scared, doesn’t let anyone love her. Her name is Krissie Donald, and she is the best friend of your former stepdaughter, Sarah. Do you remember her now?’

The honey-gravel turned to pure granite. ‘Who are you?’

Chas stood up and walked towards the bedroom. He’d read about paedophiles, knew what to look out for in their houses – kiddy traps like toys and sweets, premeditated practicalities like doors that would not usually require a lock.

‘Why do you have a lock on the bedroom door?’

‘Get out or I will call the police.’

Chas moved inside the bedroom.

‘Okay, ring them, and put me on when you’re done.’

Chas lifted up one of the many teddy bears on the bed. ‘Why do you have all these teddies? This bed?’

Mike had turned bright red. ‘What do you want?’

‘What I really want is to kill you, but that would fuck up my life, and I don’t want to do that, so instead I’ll settle for a full confession.’

Chas pressed record on the dictaphone he’d purchased that day in Kensington.

Mike left the bedroom, grabbed his keys, and walked out of the flat.

Chas followed him out the front door and onto the street.

‘He’s a paedophile!’

Chas stayed one step behind him. People turned and looked, and one woman, who had just smiled at her ever-helpful neighbour, seemed puzzled and annoyed when Chas yelled at her: ‘He’s a beast.’

Mike’s pace picked up and he was almost running when he reached the Tesco car park, which was full of shoppers.

‘Admit what you’ve done, here, in front of these people. Say it!’

People stopped in their tracks as Mike stopped walking, turned around and looked Chas in the eye. He stood still for a moment and looked as though he was ready to talk, the dictaphone
recording
with a hiss. He then whispered, ‘So that was her name.’

Mike grabbed a shopping trolley and pushed it against Chas to stop him from reacting. He stood
triumphant
as the crowd dissipated, then walked away and disappeared into an underground station.

Chas grabbed the trolley to get it out of the way. The trolley was broken, and a metal bar came loose in his hand. He looked at the jagged bar, gripped it tight, and then ran down the stairs of the
underground
to commit an act that would lose him the next four years of his life.

If only Chas’s solution had worked. Kill the bastard.

But unfortunately it didn’t.

Instead, Chas turned an angry child rapist into an angrier child rapist.

At the Old Bailey, Chas kept his mouth shut. He knew Krissie wasn’t ready to deal with it, and so, as far as anyone but Krissie’s parents knew, Mike Tetherton was the unfortunate victim of a
dope-smoking
dropout.

Mike moved north and disappeared for a while into a sea of skipping ropes.

Sarah had no idea that if she drove fast enough she could be the heroine, the woman who might save the victims from the madman just in the nick of time. As she drove with earplugs in to stop the noise of the kid, who seemed possibly the most difficult kid on the planet, she had no idea that a girl was crying as she lay on a pink and mauve patchwork quilt.

But she was not going to be the heroine of this story and she did not get there just in the nick of time because she was crawling past traffic cones ten miles north of Drymlee when Jane said, ‘Thank you very much, Mr Tetherton,’ and got into her mum’s car with a sweetie necklace that would leave a strange taste in her mouth for the rest of her life.

When Sarah arrived in Drymlee, the little boy in the back of her car sat quietly, no longer trying to get attention by crying. He was burning hot and so
exhausted that he just stared vacantly ahead through glassy eyes.

Sarah expected to find Mike straight away. The village was tiny, and very pretty, but she couldn’t at first find Wilkinson Court, where he was renting an attic conversion.

She stopped the car opposite a lovely play park to check her map. A huge unlit bonfire, topped with a man made of wood and paper, sat in the corner of the park. The map told her she was right in front of Mike’s building. It was gorgeous, made of stone, and on three levels, with at least six flats.

Sarah looked at the building for some time, taking it in, and then started the car and hunted for two hours for the equipment that she needed.

Sarah’s revenge was an all-consuming and passionate affair, which she had nurtured for years and polished in the cave. It was within reach now. Her words and actions were rehearsed to award-winning standards. So close.

Yet when Mike answered the door with his warm, welcoming smile, she felt none of the elation she’d imagined she’d feel. She felt flat and confused, and the script and stage directions she had memorised went completely to pot.

What she was supposed to do after he answered with a welcoming smile was say: ‘Mike Tetherton,
you have ruined my life and you do not deserve to live.’

She would then hit him over the head with the large rock she had found for this purpose in the park near the fishing shop and, while he was
unconscious,
she would drag him to the bed and tie him to it. She would search the flat for the images he’d downloaded, and the tapes he’d made of the little girls over the years, and carefully line them up beside the bed.

When Mike woke, Sarah would stand over him and continue her speech.

‘Mike Tetherton, you have also ruined Krissie Donald’s life, Marie Johnston’s life, and –’ pointing to the videos – ‘the lives of all these girls, and you do not deserve to die peacefully.’

She would then bring out the kitchen knife she’d cherished since Perth, and make a one-inch incision into his thigh. He would wince and cry like a baby but she would be undeterred.

She would slowly bring out the bag of maggots she had bought at the fishing shop and hold one between her fingers. It would wriggle madly and she would continue: ‘This little fella is just like you. He likes to feed on flesh. He wriggles into you and begins to eat. He burrows and grows, burrows and grows, and stays in there for a long, long time. Eventually, he turns into something else, something too big, something that needs to fly.’

She would then hold up one of the pornographic images from his collection, of a little girl called Miranda or Julie or (insert name as appropriate), and place the maggot into the incision in his thigh.

‘This one’s for Miranda.’

Sarah would make at least fifty incisions, all around his body, and watch him wriggle and scream as he was colonised.

It was a very satisfying plan, one that worked on every level.

But when Mike answered the door, Sarah went numb and then began to get it all wrong: ‘Hello, Mike,’ she said, with no speech, no rock and no fall to the ground. ‘Do you remember me? I’m Sarah, Sarah McGibbon – I mean Morgan.’

‘Sarah? Of course. Are you all right?’

‘No, I’m not all right actually. I’ve had a very bad week.’

‘Come in. Who’s this?’

‘This is Krissie’s little boy, Robbie. I’ve taken him. I suppose I shouldn’t have, really.’

‘He’s boiling!’ Mike said. ‘He needs Calpol!’

Not surprisingly, Mike had every child-calming remedy and treat on the market, including Calpol, which he gave to Robbie carefully. He then put Robbie on the sofa, looked through Sarah’s bag and got some formula, which he mixed and warmed and then gave to Sarah to feed him.

Next he began to warm some milk in a small pot
on the cooker. After Robbie fell asleep, Sarah put him down on the bed and walked over to the
breakfast
bar to watch Mike. She felt warm as he put some cocoa into a small cup, boiled the kettle and then added a drop of water to the cocoa.  

‘Why are you here, Sarah?’ he asked as he stirred the cocoa into a sticky mixture, and then added it to the small pot of milk.  

She was so confused now. He was lovely. Her stepdad, Mike.  

‘I’m here to kill you. I’m going to tie you to the bed and put maggots in your body and then I’m going to give all your photos and downloads and videos to the police.’  

Mike poured the milk into a large white mug and put in front of her and laughed. ‘That’s very dramatic!’  

Sarah held up the bag of maggots weakly and placed them on the breakfast bar. She then placed the large knife beside it. She had lost all her strength, was practically dead with the exhaustion of it all, and knew what she was saying sounded
completely
ridiculous.  

Mike walked out of the kitchen and into his bedroom. Sarah could hear a drawer open and close.  

‘Wouldn’t it be easier to use something like this?’ Mike asked when he reappeared a moment later with a SIG .45 handgun. He put the gun on the bench in front of Sarah. ‘It’s loaded.’

Sarah looked at the gun. Mike was standing opposite her at the breakfast bar.

Sarah touched the gun. It was icy cold and her trembling fingers left patches of condensation on it. Mike had not moved. There was no noise, just the trickling of a tap that needed a washer, the distant hum of a crowd gathering in the park outside, and the breathing of two people.

She picked it up and held it. It was heavier than she anticipated.

Mike’s eyes froze. He hadn’t expected her to pick it up.

Sarah then stood suddenly and extended her arm, the gun firm in her hand, mere inches from Mike’s face.

She placed her finger on the trigger, watched herself press on it. But her hand began to shake. Slight shakes at first, and then large involuntary ones, like a seizure. She closed her eyes to focus, and felt skin. Warm, tender skin. Opening her eyes she saw that Mike’s hand was on hers. He was looking at her.

She looked back into eyes that were wet,
compassionate;
eyes that loved her.

Mike helped her put the gun back down. His hand rested on hers for a moment on the bench, both of them clasped over the gun, and then,
nonchalantly,
he removed his hand, took three plump pink marshmallows from a jar, and plopped them into the steaming milk.

Sarah looked at the marshmallows as they melted, then looked up at his rugged handsome face and his relaxed pose. He had his honey-gravel voice on now, and she loved it.

‘Why didn’t you want me anymore?’ she asked.

‘Sorry?’

‘Why didn’t you want
me
? What did I do wrong?’

‘I’m a sick man, Sarah. I hate what I do. I want so badly to change,’ said Mike, touching the gun on the bench. ‘Sometimes I think I should kill myself. End it. Wouldn’t that be a good idea? To end the pain? To be free of all the worries and all the guilt? But I’m not brave enough.’

Mike touched Sarah’s hand tenderly.

Sarah looked up at him, needy, desperate, and said: ‘I didn’t help my friend, I didn’t help Krissie.’

‘Sarah, you were five …’

‘Six.’

‘You were six-years-old. A child. You were locked in a room, and you couldn’t have done anything. I think you were very brave, actually, a very brave girl. I’m not brave like that.’ Mike indicated the gun again.

Sarah started to sob and Mike sat beside her at the breakfast bar and held her in his arms.

‘It’s all right, it’s going to be all right. You’ve always been brave, Sarah, that’s what I love about you.’

She wet his shirt with her tears, and took in the warmth of his body, the kindness of his arms.

After she’d finished crying, he took her chin in his hands and whispered: ‘Sarah, darling, I’m going to make sure Robbie’s safe in the bedroom, and then I’m going to leave. Okay? In an hour I’ll make a call to social services to let them know he’s here, to make sure he’s all right, then everyone will be okay.’

‘Okay,’ said Sarah.

Mike handed her the gun. ‘Why don’t you take this into the en suite, like a good girl?’

Sarah did as she was told. She went into the en suite and sat on the cold tiled floor. Mike didn’t lock the door from the outside like he used to, and she wondered why. She could hear Mike packing a few things from the kitchen. She toyed with the gun, her future, and then heard Mike come into the bedroom. She opened the door slightly and peeked through the crack.

Robbie was sleeping at last, with just his nappy on.

Mike was packing his tapes into a suitcase, keeping them in order. He shut down his computer, thought for a moment, looked at the nine-month-old baby on the bed before him, and it came to him.

Currency.

It was disgusting, but perverts would do anything for pictures of this one, give him anything. One or two shots and he’d be set up with enough material in his demographic to do him for months.

He sat beside Robbie on the bed and moved him into the middle of the patchwork quilt.

Turning the lights on, he switched on the video camera that was still set up on its bracket in the corner. Then he took his small silver digital camera out of its black leather case and checked it over, smoothed the quilt, and positioned himself near Robbie.

There was a noise at the en suite door. A click, and breathing. Mike turned around and saw her there, standing in the doorway with her pathetic thin shaky fingers on the trigger again.

He smiled. She wouldn’t do it; he knew her well enough.

‘Move away from him!’ she said.

He did not move away. He looked into her eyes again with his camera in his hand. ‘Sarah, come on – this is pathetic,’ he said.

But this time Sarah did not tremble.

And this time, when Sarah looked into Mike’s eyes, she did not see compassion or love. She saw the opposite.

With a firm, determined arm, Sarah checked her positioning and pulled the trigger.

The force of it made her lose her balance, and she fell back against the wall of the en suite and onto the floor.

The force of the bullet sent Mike staggering backwards too, and he smashed his way though the bedroom window and fell twenty metres onto the street below.