Chapter 49
Lucy’s emotions are in complete flux. She’s been obsessed with Edgar for years.
She knows he needs her, but when she looks at him now, he seems shrunken, pathetic.
In comparison to him, Rachel is vibrant, beautiful.
It’s not just that she’s so much younger than him.
It’s her whole demeanour. She’s so much more alive.
Lucy feels a wave of shame for ever going near him.
Rachel is looking at him with an expression of pity.
Love. Edgar’s staring back at her intently, too, as if he’s trying to read her face, memorise it.
If Lucy didn’t know better, she’d say it looked like a long farewell.
She bows her head. She’s been messing with something she can’t understand, she sees that now.
He’s all withered, hunched – bleached, as if someone has washed all the colour out of him.
‘I thought I was doing the right thing,’ he says.
‘What have you done, Edgar?’
It feels like a purposefully vague question. Lucy’s breath catches in her throat at the thought of how he might answer it.
‘I got funding for a research project,’ Edgar says.
‘It was about prisoners on life sentences. Whether there was a way for them to be reintegrated safely into the community, whether living off the land would work for their rehabilitation.’ He has sobered up a lot, but he’s still slurring his words as he speaks and Lucy needs to concentrate hard on what he’s saying.
‘There was this woman I’d talked to a lot through my work.
She killed her kids – the lowest of the low in terms of public opinion.
She was due to be let out, but there was nowhere for her to go.
She was going to be hounded wherever she went – you know what people are like about killer mothers. ’
‘What does this have to do with Marie?’ Rachel says, her voice measured.
‘I’m getting to it,’ he says, the anger of earlier resurfacing.
He pauses, drinks some more water. ‘Let me just finish. I thought this could be a way of looking after that woman. Seeing if it might have broader applicability for other lifers. Much cheaper overall than keeping them inside. If I could get it to work. I put together a research project, putting her in a house that was effectively a prison, but without any of the restrictions you’d expect. ’
‘What was it?’ Lucy says. She can’t help bursting in.
‘A home,’ Edgar says. ‘A quiet place that she could live almost normally, without the intrusion she’d get anywhere else.
She wasn’t eligible for an anonymity order, though her solicitor tried.
Tom, actually. You know, there are very few anonymity orders granted.
They only go to people like Maxine Carr and Shannon Matthews’ mother.
The Bulger killers, too, of course—’ He’s veering off course, describing the minutiae of the scheme.
Lucy can see it’s annoying Rachel, though she would love to hear more about it.
‘Please, stick to the point, Edgar. You can explain the details later. Where was this house?’ Rachel says impatiently.
‘In the far north of Scotland,’ Edgar says. ‘Really remote. Wilderness. I got funding from the Ministry of Justice. Told them it was a research experiment. We sent a regular supply of food. The basics. Essentially off-grid living, so she could live in peace.’
‘You’ve always loved killers more than anything else. You’re obsessed with them.’ Rachel takes a deep breath. ‘You still haven’t explained how Marie fits into this.’
‘I thought she’d be able to help. Plus I felt responsible for her.’
‘She murdered your wife,’ Rachel says, her lips almost white with tension.
‘We know about the notebook,’ Lucy adds.
Edgar doesn’t react to either of them. ‘I shouldn’t have encouraged her. I knew she had feelings for me. I didn’t have the heart to tell her to leave me alone. It was my fault. I didn’t think about the consequences.’
‘Nothing’s changed there, then,’ Rachel says, as if she can’t help herself.
Lucy feels the words like a whip crack across her face, so strong she nearly flinches. She takes a deep breath. ‘I told them about the notebook, Edgar. Rachel knows.’
‘Just leave it tonight, will you?’ Edgar says. He sounds so weary now, tiredness seeping out of his voice. He slumps again. The brief spark of life he’d showed when he was describing the house has disappeared. He turns back to Rachel. ‘I got Marie out early, so that she could look after the woman.’
‘You did what?’ Rachel spits out the words. She stands, pushing her chair over, slamming her hands on the table, full now of furious energy. ‘Why, Edgar?’
‘You heard me. I got Marie out to look after the woman. She’s elderly. And it had been so long since she’d lived in the outside world. She’d never have coped on her own.’
‘But why Marie? There are hundreds of other women who could have done the job just as well.’
‘This will sound mad, but I felt sorry for her. She lost control that night. And yet, at the same time, I wanted to keep her away from us. I didn’t want you to be at risk.
’ He reaches out his hand to Rachel and after a moment, she takes it.
‘I thought it would be a way of helping her while keeping her away. I thought it was the right thing to do.’
Thought. Past tense. Lucy can’t help but pick up on the word. Does he still think so? Surely not, looking at the mess around them.
‘I don’t think you were thinking at all,’ Rachel says. ‘I can’t believe you’d be so stupid. Did anyone know about it?’
‘I couldn’t tell anyone what I was doing. I can’t now,’ Edgar says, and his voice is so full of pain. ‘I’ll lose everything.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I stretched the truth to get the funding. I created the impression that this was a fully staffed project. I couldn’t tell anyone the whole point was that I was letting these women out without direct supervision.
I overrode probation, filed false reports with them for years about what the women were doing.
If it comes out that I was gaming the system to favour two murderers .
. . You know how much criticism I get as it is.
The university is full of people who want to destroy me. ’
Confirming what Soraya said to her at that Formal Hall.
It feels like a lifetime ago. Lucy isn’t surprised to hear he’s made enemies.
Anyone that prominent would be bound to have antagonised people.
But she can’t begin to get her head round the idea that he’d have manufactured a research project in order to benefit a child-killer and the woman who murdered his wife.
Rachel seems to think the same.
‘You are the most arrogant bastard I’ve ever met,’ she says. ‘This is fucking unbelievable.’
‘I was trying to do the right thing,’ he said, piteously. ‘I was trying to keep you safe.’
‘Don’t even start,’ Rachel says. ‘You wouldn’t know the right thing if it bit you in the arse. You weren’t trying to look after me. You were trying to show how superior you are to everyone else. How above them you are. Ooh, look at my superior ability to forgive and rationalise evil, ooh.’
Lucy almost laughs, the mockery so skewering of the academic ego. But the savagery behind it takes any humour out of it. Rachel is glaring at Edgar like she wants to kill him.
‘Also, how is treating people like that “doing the right thing”? Forcing them to go and live off-grid goodness knows where, totally dependent on you? That’s just playing God.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ Edgar says.
‘It was exactly like that. What did Victor have to say about it?’
There’s a very long silence. Edgar looks fixedly in front of him.
‘Edgar, did you talk to Victor about it?’ Rachel says. ‘Is that what you and he were arguing about in Cambridge? Lucy said that you were arguing.’
Edgar goes brick red. He gets up and strides over to where Lucy is sitting. She’s nearly knocked out by the reek of alcohol that comes from him.
‘Did you try and kill Victor, Edgar?’ Lucy says, her voice steady.
‘Of course I fucking didn’t. Keep your nose out of my business,’ he says to her with a snarl. ‘You know nothing about me and Victor. Nothing at all.’
She’s never seen him like this. It’s given her a completely different view of him, the wolf emerging from the academic, left-leaning sheep she thought he was. It’s a thought that makes her blood run cold.
Edgar keeps ranting. ‘He couldn’t just leave it to me. He wouldn’t trust me when I told him to leave it alone. He thought that Marie needed to be kept in prison for longer, to be punished more. Like I didn’t know that already. What does he think I was doing?’
Rachel explodes at this point. ‘What the fuck were you doing, Edgar? I saw the fucking list. Flowers, whisky. Chocolate. That doesn’t look like you were spoiling her. That looks like you were putting her up in a fucking hotel.’
Edgar looks astonished for a moment, before he starts to laugh, peals of cackling that ring through Lucy’s head. Any minute, it’s going to explode. Then he stops, stands with his hands outstretched in front of them. ‘You want to know what I was doing? I’ll show you what I was doing. Wait here.’
The women freeze. Edgar stamps out of the room, up the stairs, up the metal ladder to the loft. A few moments later, the stamps happen in reverse.
‘Had a good look around in there, did you?’ he says.
‘What did you expect me to do?’ Rachel says.
‘It’s exactly what I’d expect you to do. You missed these, though.’
Lucy looks down at the handwritten notes, squinting to read them spread out on the kitchen table where Edgar’s thrown them.
Effects of starvation. In order to explore this, no food was delivered for a period of three weeks . . .
Scylla is distressed by drunkenness – plan to deliver alcohol to Charybdis to see what effect this has . . .
Lights on and off all night, extreme discomfort observed. . .
Charybdis in a state of deterioration due to excess alcohol. Further supplies to be delivered to see what effect this has.
Lucy looks up again, blinking. Confused. ‘What the fuck? Who the fuck are Scylla and Charybdis?’
Edgar’s mouth twists. ‘Homer’s mythical monsters. Don’t you think they’re good names for two real-life monsters?’
‘A classical allusion,’ Rachel says, her voice withering. ‘How cute.’
‘Give that here,’ Anna says, taking the papers from Lucy. She skims through them, disgust showing on her face. ‘What is this, the Stanford Prison Experiment?’
Lucy breaks in. ‘You weren’t looking after those women. You were fucking with them. Those notes are observations.’ She frowns. ‘All those screens upstairs. You were watching them. The whole place must be wired up with CCTV.’
Edgar starts to clap his hands. ‘Now you’re catching on,’ he says. ‘This was no holiday camp.’
‘That’s appalling,’ Lucy says. ‘You’ve betrayed everything you said you believed in.’
He starts to laugh again, stops, the sound breaking into a sob.
‘If it’s any consolation, the idea was pure to begin with.
There was something about the power of it, though.
After my mother died . . . I told you it changed everything.
I said that to you in the car. I don’t know.
The idea of what she meant to me, how good a mother she was – I couldn’t stop thinking about it, comparing.
Marie killed an expectant mother. Janice killed all three of her own children.
You talk about betrayal, but what about what they betrayed? ’
‘So you took it on yourself to punish them?’ Lucy says.
He reaches into his inside pocket and pulls out a notebook, its black cover mottled and torn.
He waves it at the women. ‘Yes, and I’d do it again,’ he says.
‘Look at this. I’ve read it now, cover to cover.
’ His voice has a strange emphasis to it, though Anna can’t work out why.
‘Cover to cover. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. You read this, then tell me what you think.’ He pauses.
‘She’s going to come for me,’ he says. ‘For all of us. It’s only a matter of time. ’
‘What do you mean?’ Rachel says. ‘How is she going to do that? Don’t you have cameras trained on them, watching every move they make?’
‘All the cameras are down. I’ve no idea what’s happening. Or where Marie is.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Deadly serious. The experiment has collapsed. I’ve got no way of finding out now what’s going on. For all I know, she’s on her way here right now. She might even have arrived already. I have no idea where she is.’
With that, he leaves the room, slamming the door behind him.