Chapter 38
She shuffles from room to room, impatiently following the flow of people, mirroring the steps of their polite dance.
Move to the side to allow another person to pass in the opposite direction.
Press your back against the wall to make a space.
Pause to let someone step out of the doorway you’re about to go through.
She’ll have to choose very carefully.
For all their sakes.
The transformation over the last nine months has been remarkable.
The living-room walls are the colour of milky coffee now, the alcove shelves and fireplace have been painted white, and the space warmed with an L-shaped leather sofa, new rattan carpet and clusters of leafy plants.
The hall tiles have been deep-cleaned and the toilet under the stairs only smells of floral soap.
A new, sleek kitchen has been fitted, along with a shiny tiled floor and a pair of black-framed French doors.
The house feels different, too.
Warm. Inviting. Safe.
It’s an amazing job, especially considering the constraints of Hannah’s budget and how much of the work she had to do herself.
She told Annalise there’s an instructional video on the internet for basically everything now, and about how, underneath the DIY ones, there are dozens of comments from women – newly divorced, widowed or just fed up of waiting – thanking the person who posted the video for their help.
Annalise stands at the open French doors and takes in the yard, which, according to the little spiel she saw on the Harrington Properties website, must now be referred to as a yarden.
She won’t go out there, but she admires the newly paved patio, freshly painted wall, new metal gate, wrought-iron table and chairs, and sand-coloured paving stones.
No more weeds.
No more crumbling cement slabs, resting on uneven earth.
No chance now, surely, that whatever’s left of Billy, her first husband, will ever be found.
A new archway leads off the kitchen and into a space that Hannah has referred to as a snug.
It apparently means a cosy corner with a couch and TV.
The window is still there and so is the brick wall too close to the other side of it, but with the newly fitted wooden shutter blinds, you wouldn’t notice.
The house’s original bedroom is, effectively, gone.
And with it, Annalise’s crime scene.
Steve’s, too.
Annalise was only eighteen when she married Billy Creen, ten years her senior.
When they moved into 1 Delaney Row the morning after the wedding, the time they’d spent in each other’s company only added up to days.
He was as good as a stranger and, as she’d soon learn, only wearing a human suit.
When he took it off, he was a wild animal.
She had never seen such aggression in a person, let alone borne the brunt of it.
She was always falling down the stairs or walking into doors, forever in long sleeves and scarves no matter the weather.
She thought things would change when the child was born, but it only made everything worse.
Her skin split. She lost teeth and broke bones.
For two weeks – while she was breastfeeding – there was blood in the toilet bowl.
Billy was never going to stop drinking or start listening, and there was no one to turn to for help.
Her parents had washed their hands of her once the bump started to show, knowing that the child must have been on the altar with them.
She’d lost contact with her schoolfriends.
She’d heard about a local woman who’d managed to escape – a bag packed and hidden, a few siphoned coins, running down the street with the child on her hip – only to be delivered back to her door in a squad car like a runaway teen.
Death started to look like the only way out, but she refused to go first.
Early one morning, while Billy was still snoring off the previous night’s pints, she straddled his chest and held a pillow over his face.
But she’d greatly underestimated how long it would take, and once Billy started struggling, thrashing, tearing strips of skin off her arms and face with his dirty fingernails, she knew she wouldn’t be able to hold on.
So she used a knife.
That night, she closed the door to their bedroom, put her son to bed and sat at the kitchen table, smoking Billy’s hand-rolled cigarettes and drinking his whiskey until she made herself sick. The night after, under cover of darkness, she buried him and the blade out the back.
A couple of weeks later, once she’d got everything cleaned up, Annalise started telling people – the neighbours, the woman at the corner shop, the parish priest – that her husband had gone out one night and never came home.
The guards seemed content to believe he had slipped into a river somewhere.
‘God works in mysterious ways,’ Father Quinn said meaningfully, before sending his housekeeper round with some food.
The only person who caused any trouble was Billy’s mother, who insisted that her son was well able for the drink and that he’d never leave her.
But everyone else knew one of those statements wasn’t true, so they took no notice of the other.
The only problem, really, was the house.
Annalise hadn’t even realized they were only tenants until the landlord called round, demanding the late rent; she’d assumed Billy had owned the place. Leaving was a huge risk, but she had no choice. She moved back in with her parents and tried to keep an eye on the house from afar.
A succession of tenants moved in and out.
Then the landlord sold it to a couple who almost immediately commenced building work, adding an upstairs.
Annalise didn’t sleep for six months, convinced that Billy would be found.
She met another man, a good man. One Delaney Row changed hands again and a family moved in – the O’Learys – with their four young boys.
Annalise had two more children. By the time 3 Delaney Row came up for sale a few years later, she and her husband were in a position to buy it.
It was too small, really, for their family, but that’s why they could afford it.
She pushed the great location, the proximity to good schools.
But she couldn’t vocalize its biggest selling point: that it would be far easier to keep an eye on the house where she’d killed and buried her first husband from just two doors away.
The O’Learys had nothing but bad luck after they moved into 1 Delaney Row.
First, their father got hurt – a workplace accident, up at the Pye factory.
After that he couldn’t work and drink was the only thing that worked on the pain.
When the youngest boy, Steve, was only ten, the mother, not even forty, dropped dead in the street while holding his hand.
An aneurysm, they said. That left the boys to fend for themselves and defend themselves from their father.
They managed it, but only for a while.
Memories of that night were burned in Annalise’s brain: the sirens, the flashing lights, the abject terror that this, now, surely, would lead to Billy’s bones.
After all, she’d killed him in the very same room where Steve O’Leary had apparently beaten his father to death.
Mr O’Leary had covered for his son before he’d lost consciousness, claiming his head injury had been an accident.
A family incident, the guards called it.
Everyone knew the truth but everyone also knew that those boys were better off now.
They found something new to fight about, amongst themselves: what to do with the house.
When they eventually put it on the market, a man with a string of restaurants bought it, supposedly to gut the place.
This is it, Annalise thought again. Billy was about to be found, her awful deed exposed.
She’d got away with it for so long but now, finally, her day of reckoning had come.
She didn’t care what would happen to her.
It was more the thought of her children, grown now with children of their own, finding out what she’d done.
But then, an unexpected reprieve. A scandal involving a mistress, a car accident and a change of plan.
The restaurateur and his wife went to Australia, keeping the house but leaving it empty.
It was the best possible scenario for Annalise, who started to let herself relax a bit.
Until, early one morning, she was putting out her bins when she happened to see the wife, Erin, out in her yard, covered in blood and standing in the spot where Billy was buried.
Annalise ran to her, thinking the woman was injured – but the blood was dried, days old, and not hers.
It was hard to get any sense out of her, so she steered the woman inside and checked the house herself.
She found him upstairs, on the floor in the bedroom, missing half his face.
Another wife, another dead husband. In the same house, fifty years apart. Annalise felt she had no choice: she helped Erin dispose of the evidence.
To keep her own secret, she’d started keeping this other woman’s secret, too.
Sometimes, it was up to her to do all the keeping, for both of them.
Because Erin wasn’t like her. She was emotional, unpredictable, impulsive.
Careless. Erin visited the house regularly to – she’d tell Annalise – talk to him.
She often regretted what she’d done and would sometimes start talking about owning up to it.
Then, suddenly, the mistress was getting out of prison.
Erin decided she wanted to be as far away from her and him and the house as she could.
She put the house on the market. Annalise was relieved; better the devil you don’t know, in this case.
The house changing hands might create more problems, but at least it would definitely solve one.