Watching You (25 page)

T
he Motor Court motel is a hundred meters from the M1 on the edge of a desolate industrial park on the outskirts of a northern town. The rooms are a collection of cinder-block cottages built around an asphalt parking area that circles a yellowing patch of grass and a naked flagpole. The swimming pool is empty, covered, collecting leaves.

Three hours before dawn, traffic hurtles past the motel, desperate to be somewhere else. Marnie has been left in the car with her hands and feet bound. Owen has gone inside to pay for the room; he signs the register and counts out cash. The receptionist gives him a tired smile and glances at the woman in the car, wondering how someone like Owen could pull a bird like her.

Parking outside the most isolated of the cottages, Owen scoops Elijah in his arms and carries his sleeping form inside, depositing him on one of the beds. He goes back to collect Marnie, keeping his hand tucked into the waistband of her skirt as he nudges her inside the room. Bags of shopping are dumped on the bed. The contents spill out: HobNob biscuits, juice boxes, scissors, a bottle of hair dye, toothbrushes, toothpaste…

Elijah stirs, snuffling, settling again.

The masking tape is chafing at Marnie’s wrists.

“I have to go,” she says, motioning her head toward the bathroom.

Owen studies her for a moment and pulls a knife from a worn leather scabbard hitched to his belt. Inserting the tip of the blade between the tape and her pale inner wrist, he flicks his hand upwards. The masking tape falls onto the carpet and curls like a severed snake.

“Don’t lock the door.”

The bathroom smells of matted hair and disinfectant. The only picture on the wall is a foxhunting scene with men in red coats jumping fences on horses with unusually small heads and elongated bodies.

Marnie talks to him through the closed door. “What do you do, Owen?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you do for a living?”

“I don’t want for things.”

“Did you leave the money?”

“I couldn’t see you starve.”

“The photographs?”

“You deserved to know the truth.” He is standing outside the bathroom door. “Are you finished?”

The toilet flushes. The door swings open. “Stay there,” he says, carrying a chair to the sink. “Sit.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to cut and dye your hair.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want you to be recognized.”

He is running a tap, feeling the water.

“I’ll do it myself.”

“I can’t trust you. You should take off your blouse so it doesn’t get stained.”

Marnie shoots him a look, clutching her buttons.

“I don’t have any other clothes for you,” he explains. “You’re wearing a bra and there’s nothing I haven’t seen.”

Undoing the buttons, she slips the blouse off her shoulders and Owen hangs it on a hook behind the door. Marnie sits with her arms folded across her chest. Owen brushes her hair, running the brush backwards from her forehead to the nape of her neck. Picking up the scissors he uses his opposite hand to judge how much to take off, slicing it quickly, letting the cut locks rock to the floor like wood shavings from a lathe. Marnie watches the haircut, feeling nothing, as though gazing at a stranger in the mirror.

Owen opens the box of hair dye and reads the instructions, setting out the contents on the edge of the sink: a plastic bowl, a tube, a bottle, a brush, and gloves.

“You empty the tube into the bowl,” says Marnie. “Then you mix it with the liquid in the bottle. Use the gloves.”

Owen pulls on the plastic gloves and picks up the bowl, smearing the dark paste across Marnie’s scalp.

“Start at the roots,” she says. “Do the front first, then work it in with the brush and then your fingers.” He does as he’s told. “We have to wait now,” says Marnie.

“How long?”

“Twenty minutes.”

Goosebumps dot her arms.

“Are you cold?”

“No.”

He puts a towel around her shoulders. “I remember when you had short hair. It was after your riding accident. They had to shave part of your head and afterwards you had the rest shortened to even out the kinks.”

“How could you know that?”

“You were in hospital for five weeks.”

Marnie looks at him incredulously. “Did you visit me?”

Owen shakes his head.

“I remember how jealous you were of your friend Andrea Heaney because she had long straight hair and had breasts and a boyfriend before anyone else did.”

“She wore skater dresses and wedge heels,” says Marnie.

“She was such a bitch to you when you came back to school with your short hair and scars. She said those cruel things to you. Then she had that accident with the hot oil. She didn’t wear short dresses after that.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I did that for you.”

“What?”

“I made sure she didn’t bully you anymore.”

The information sinks in. Marnie can’t answer.

“It’s time,” he says, motioning her to lean back with her head over the sink. His hand brushes over her eyelids, urging them to close. Scooping water from the sink, he wets her hair. Inky darkness swirls into the porcelain bowl, disappearing down the drain.

When the dye has been rinsed out, he shampoos her hair and uses the special conditioner from the box. She doesn’t flinch anymore when he touches her scalp. When he’s finished, he combs out her wet hair, which is now a dark brown bob. She looks younger by ten years, like a punk, like that girl with the dragon tattoo in the movie, but without the piercings and the attitude.

Marnie looks in the mirror. Owen is standing behind her, waiting for her opinion. She can smell his fleshy heat and the testosterone ironed into his clothes. The hair dye has left a mark on her forehead like a fake hairline, but she doesn’t care. She wraps her head in a towel and puts another around her body then crawls into bed next to Elijah.

“I have to do this,” says Owen, hooking her wrist with a plastic tie and securing it to his own. “I don’t want you getting away.”

T
he sun rises pale and weak beyond the motorway. Headlights sweep across the flyover, heading north. A car door slams. An engine starts up. Marnie sleeps lying on her left side, one arm above her head. Her chest rises and falls, her eyelids flutter, but it’s not the same…not the same.

During the night, before I sank into my own shallow sleep, I saw it over and over, that moment she shattered the glass wall between us. She doesn’t yet understand what I’ve sacrificed for her. How I’ve lived in crawlspaces away from the light; how I’ve subordinated my own desires and mortgaged my past and the present to make us a future. There is no end to what I’ve done.

The dawn has come and gone. The ocher and pinks have succumbed to faded blues and corpulent clouds. Marnie stirs next to me. It’s like we’ve never been apart. I know so much about her: how her mother grew up in Bannock Street, Gorton, which doesn’t exist anymore. It’s where Myra Hindley used to live with her gran before she met Ian Brady and they began kidnapping and killing children. Marnie’s mother regarded herself as one of the lucky ones because Myra had asked to take her out one day, but her parents said no. She moved out of the area when she met her first boyfriend—not the one she married, but the one before that. I can tell Marnie all of these things. I can fill in the gaps.

I have not robbed Marnie of her freedom or spontaneity. I have only ever sought to play the role I was meant to play. The one I was denied.

She’s frightened, but time will make her see me differently. I have seen her change for others. She has become what they wanted her to be. She watched football, drank beer, and ate
cheap curries. She gave blow-jobs and worked as an escort. I hated seeing her alter herself to satisfy the desires of others. Why couldn’t she stand up to them? Why couldn’t she be herself? I will teach her the lessons that she should have learned earlier. A man has to be worthy of her love, not the other way around.

I didn’t have a role model in my life, anyone to teach me lessons or pick me up when I stumbled. My mother, dead now, drowned in her own bile, or whatever toxic fluid filled her lungs until they bubbled and gurgled into silence. She had been sick for a long while. I nursed her. Fed her. Bathed her. Wiped her arse. It’s more than she did for me. When she died they asked me if I wanted to have her cremated. “Yeah, I’ll watch her burn,” I said.

I once worked out how many years I spent with her in my childhood. I counted six of sixteen before I joined the army, which means I spent ten years in foster care, being raised by other people. Strangers.

My aunt Pat came to the funeral, but left straight afterwards. She was my mother’s older sister and I hadn’t seen her since I was a child. My mother was her family’s black sheep, which is not surprising given her addictions and arrest record—and me, of course, her bastard son.

I have never discovered why my mother was so ostracized by her family, although my cousin Jenny once told me (when we were kids, in a quarrel) that my mother ran away from school with a foreigner who took her to France and introduced her to drugs and sex. I went straight to Aunt Pat and asked if it were true. She told me I had a filthy mouth and threatened to wash it out with Fairy Liquid. Cousin Jenny smirked from the doorway.

After that I didn’t believe anything Jenny told me. I liked being with Aunt Pat and Uncle Hank and my cousins. I used to go on fishing holidays to the Lake District until Uncle Hank had a stroke. Nobody could understand a word he said after that.

All I ever wanted was a proper family. Once or twice more I got a taste of what it might be like. I went to foster homes where people sat around a dinner table, eating and talking, saying please and thank you, would you like some more potatoes, how about another sausage? Mum. Dad. Kids. It was like being in a TV commercial for Bisto gravy.

Mid-morning, the birds are singing, telling me the world goes on as normal, even though it’s different now. My feet are cold. I wish I’d worn thicker socks. I wish I could put them against Marnie, but I don’t want to wake her. Instead, I use the knife to slice the plastic that tethers us. I go to the bathroom and try not to make a sound as I urinate. Shave. Then I fill the kettle and plug it into the socket.

Her eyes open.

“I’ve made you a cup of tea.”

I put it next to the bed, along with a sandwich. I take a chair and sit down.

“You should eat something.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You will be later.”

“The police are going to be looking. You should just let us go.”

“Why would I do that?”

Z
oe is sitting at the kitchen table, sipping on a can of high-energy drink. Caffeine. Sugar. She’s wearing the same clothes as yesterday but has washed her hair and pinned it differently. Ruiz, already dressed for the day, is beating eggs in a bowl.

Joe is the last to arrive. His buttons are done up unevenly. “What have you given her to drink?” he asks.

“It’s what she wanted,” says Ruiz.

“And if she’d asked for tequila?”

“Bit early in the day.”

Ruiz tips the eggs into a heated pan, adding salt and pepper. Bread pops out of the toaster.

Zoe looks at Joe hopefully. “Have you heard any news?” For a moment her eyes seem to shiver, but she’s not going to cry. She’s holding all her emotions in her fists, which are squeezed tightly shut.

Joe shakes his head. Zoe looks at her hands, feeling somewhat cheated. She had prayed last night. She knew this wasn’t a guarantee, but given all that has happened in the past eighteen hours and the thirteen months before that, she thought God might have owed her some good news.

Ruiz offers her scrambled eggs. She declines. He gives her some anyway. Joe takes a seat opposite. “Can I ask you a few questions?”

Zoe nods.

“Does your mum ever suffer blackouts or absences?”

“What sort of absences?”

“Does she wake up and forget where she’s been?”

“She can be forgetful, but that’s just little stuff.”

“Does she ever go out without telling you?”

“No.”

“What about at night?”

“She stopped working nights,” says Zoe, wanting to change the subject.

“I know what she used to do,” says Joe.

Zoe’s shoulders rise and fall in an exaggerated shrug.

“Have you ever noticed anyone hanging around her? Someone who’s always in the background—a neighbor or a friend.”

“Penny.”

“Anyone else?”

“Not really.”

“The police think your mother killed Trevor.”

Her eyes swivel from face to face. “That’s crazy!”

“That’s why they think she ran away.”

Zoe rocks backwards and forwards, staring at the uneaten eggs. She has fought so hard not to cry, but now her fists open and big childish tears slide down her cheeks, dropping off her chin and landing on her jeans where the denim is most faded. She wipes her eyes and sniffles. “I didn’t kiss her and say the words.”

“What words?”

“Even to the post office—that’s what we say. We always kiss each other goodbye and say, ‘Even to the post office,’ just in case we don’t come back.”

“From where?”

“From anywhere! That’s the point. Mum says you should always say goodbye as though it’s the last time.”

“That’s macabre,” says Ruiz.

Joe shoots him a look. “I think it’s touching.” He hands Zoe a tissue. “Do you still have your key to the flat?”

“I gave them to the police, but there’s a spare set in the meter box.”

Ruiz interrupts. “Hey, you’re not thinking of going back there. Gennia will go bat-shit crazy if you contaminate the crime scene.”

“Forensics will have finished by now.”

“And I need my laptop,” says Zoe, “and some clothes.”

Ruiz grunts in disgust. “So that makes me the getaway driver.”

A police caravan is parked opposite the mansion block with a sign asking for public help. Ruiz drives slowly along Elgin Avenue beneath trees in full leaf but beginning to turn.

“Is there a rear entrance?”

Zoe nods. “We can go along the back lane and through the garden.”

He parks the Range Rover opposite a row of lock-up garages with padlocked shutter doors. Joe walks along the alley and into the garden where he spends a few moments, turning slowly and gazing up at the surrounding windows which seem to look down on him like indifferent witnesses.

“Which is your flat?”

Zoe points to the top floor. “That’s the kitchen window.”

Joe studies the buildings opposite, seeing if any overlook or provide a vantage point to watch Marnie. Meanwhile, Ruiz has walked along the lane and stopped in front of an open lock-up containing tools and boxes. A patch of oil stains the concrete where a car must have been parked. Somebody forgot to close the roller door. Maybe they left in a hurry.

“The keys are this way,” says Zoe. They follow her along a rear path to a heavy wooden door set several feet below the level of the lawn. The electricity meters are housed in metal boxes bolted to the wall. Zoe runs her fingertips along the top of a box until she finds the spare keys. One of them opens the outside door.

On the top floor, Ruiz pulls away the crime-scene tape, which flutters like a busted piñata. Zoe enters first, searching the rooms as though possessing some vague absurd hope that Marnie and Elijah might have come home. But the flat is unchanged except for a dusting of fingerprint powder on the polished surfaces and a sense that everything has been slightly disturbed by the search.

Joe moves more slowly through the rooms, looking for something that Zoe wouldn’t comprehend—the psychological “mind traces” left behind at the scene, the indicators of human behavior that is out of character, or unexpected or inexplicable.

Zoe has gone to her bedroom and retrieved a laptop from beneath her bed.

“Is this how you found the flat?” asks Joe, standing at the door.

“Yes.”

“You didn’t move anything?”

“No.”

“Or touch anything?”

She thinks about this.

Ruiz is standing in the living room, gazing at the street below. “Are any of your mother’s clothes missing?”

Zoe shakes her head. “The police asked me to check.”

Joe wanders into Marnie’s bedroom. The bed is untouched. Bottles are lined up neatly on her dresser. Towels are folded on the towel rails. The wardrobe door is open. Clothes have been pushed to the far ends of the railing. Shoes have fallen from a rack. A blanket lies on the floor, along with Elijah’s matchbox cars and trucks.

He goes to the window. “Did your mother sleep naked?”

“No.”

“Did she ever wander around the house naked?”

“No.”

“Did she draw the curtains before she undressed?”

“She always told me to.”

The bedroom overlooks part of the garden and the adjoining building. Someone with a telescope could look into the room, particularly at night if the curtains were open and the lights were on.

“It doesn’t smell right,” says Ruiz. “She didn’t take anything with her.”

Joe sits next to Zoe on the bed. “When you came in yesterday, what did you notice?”

“What do you mean?”

“I want you to picture coming into the flat. Lie down on the bed. Close your eyes if it makes it easier. Relax. Think back.”

Zoe does as he asks. She listens to Joe’s voice. He asks her about meeting Ryan at the pizza parlor and then walking home…up the stairs…opening the door.

“What can you see?”

“The hallway.”

“What lights were on?”

“The kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom…”

“This one?”

“Yes.”

“What else did you notice?”

“Mum left a saucepan on the stove. She was making lasagna. It’s still there.”

“So you turned off the stove?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then what?”

“I tried to call her.”

“Where were you?”

“Sitting on the sofa in the living room.”

“So you walked from the kitchen along the hallway to the living room?”

Zoe nods.

“Were the lights on?”

“In the hallway, yes.”

“What about the living room?”

Zoe frowns.

“What?”

“I was about to turn on a lamp when I noticed the ceiling.”

“What about it?”

“The star.”

“Star?”

“There was a pinprick of light on the ceiling. It looked like a star, but when I turned on the lamp it disappeared.”

“And you’d never seen that before?”

“No.”

“Show me.”

Zoe takes Joe’s hand as he pulls her up from the bed. In the living room she points to the high ceiling with its ornate cornicing and a plaster rosette around the light fitting. “It was just there—a tiny white light.”

“What’s above us?” asks Joe.

“Nothing. We’re on the top floor.”

Wrestling an armchair to the center of the room, Joe stands and reaches above his head, still shy of being able to touch the light fitting.

“Is there any way to get into the ceiling? A manhole or hatch?”

Zoe shakes her head.

Joe looks at Ruiz. “We need a ladder and a hammer.”

“You’re not thinking of…”

“Renovating.”