Chapter Four
Haze
Life is busy.
We’re trying to have it all.
Our baby son, Reggie, is a smiley beautiful bundle of fun who thinks sleep is for losers. Our four-year-old daughter, Bibi, loves penguins, our dog, Sausage, and testing our patience.
If you’d asked me last year how we made it work, I’d have told you that, like any successful partnership, my husband and I divided the labor: we took it in turns and did whatever we could to make it work.
He took out the bins, I cleaned. He cooked, I washed up. He did playground, I did homework.
We were a couple that shared everything. From home, to kids, to work—we were a team.
We did bathtime together.
And we killed together.
Yes, killed.
Slice, dice, cut, stab, bash, slit, hit, bury, burn. Whatever it took to get the job done.
Our marriage wasn’t like other people’s marriages.
And our little work sideline wasn’t either.
We made the world a better place by ending the lives of bad men.
We were not your garden-variety, run-of-the-mill serial killers. We were killers with consciences and a strict moral code. A self-appointed vigilante power couple.
We were good people enacting a service no one else was willing or able to provide. If we were ever caught, we shouldn’t be prosecuted; we should be celebrated. We were doing everything right, and nothing wrong. Not really.
Some might consider it a crime how much we enjoyed the act itself. But that could just be down to the fact that vengeance gave us a wholesome thrill, rather than the actual watching-someone-bleed-out part. Give us the benefit of the doubt.
A year ago, I would’ve said that we were doing great.
Recently, it hadn’t being going so well.
It had been going pretty fucking terribly, actually.
Overworked, overwhelmed, and over it.
Clark Dixon was my first foray back into killing after a self-imposed maternity leave, and I had let myself down.
We were not in the habit of having our children join us on body-dump missions.
Any exposure—even as an oblivious four-month-old—to that side of our life was something we worked hard to avoid.
Tonight was an exception—I normally wouldn’t have crumbled, but Reggie was teething and being a particularly clingy nightmare.
I couldn’t put Jenny through that while she was also trying to get her son Felix and our Bibi settled in for their sleepover.
I should’ve foreseen the poonami. I should’ve had nappies with me.
Now Fox was going to have to work his magic on making sure our presence at that petrol station was scrubbed from their CCTV.
We had learned from our mistakes. We would always err on the side of overcaution rather than risk being caught.
The dead man in the boot was not going to be the one that finally got us put away. He was in no way a big enough deal, a big enough prize, to warrant our downfall.
There was, however, no doubt that Clark Dixon deserved to die.
A wife-beater and rapist, he’d been on our radar for a while.
Jenny, my best friend and a serving police detective, had found him for us.
A woman from her gym had the misfortune of being married to him.
Jenny had tried to get him through the courts, but he had slithered out of their reach, so she’d marked him as one of ours.
Jenny had become an invaluable part of our little operation.
Like most mum friends, we’d met at a toddler group.
Unlike most mum friends, we’d had a little deviation from the normal route, by way of me killing her deadbeat ex, framing him for the European killing sprees Fox and I had enjoyed, and agreeing to Jenny joining us in our wholesome mission of tracking down and killing bad guys. But that was a whole other story.
Jenny might have only been in my life a couple of years but I couldn’t imagine existing without her.
The word “soulmate” had always made me want to hurl.
But I did believe I had found my perfect man in Fox, and my perfect woman in Jenny.
Having been so profoundly let down by all the people in my life in childhood, it felt only right that I now had not one, but two people who were everything to me.
Stepping in with childcare help was never meant to be part of Jenny’s remit, but at present we had no other options.
Our children had no loving grandparents to lend a hand.
Fox’s parents were poisonous fuckwits who lived in New York.
My mother was dead—and she was as much use to me like that as she had been when she was alive.
My father was dead to me, due to the whole issue of me having no idea who he even was.
We used to have a nanny. Helga had brought order and peace and ironed sheets to our lives.
It was beautiful while it lasted—right up until she fell in love with a butcher named Tibor and followed her heart all the way back to Hungary.
In bleaker moments, Fox had entertained the idea of us doing a deep dive into Tibor’s background in the hope of finding some tenuous reason to justify killing him.
If it wasn’t for the risk that her heartbreak at his untimely demise might ruin her nannying skills, we might have pulled the trigger off the back of nothing more than an unpaid speeding fine.
When it came to raising kids, I knew the familiar phrase: “It takes a village.” These days, our village was comprised of Jenny and her parents, Sandy and Frank.
We’d looked for a suitable replacement for Helga, but it was hard finding someone we could trust with the safety of our children, especially when we were so well versed with just how depraved human beings could be.
Reggie was still so small that we both struggled with the idea of trusting a stranger to look after him, let alone trusting that they’d also be capable of protecting him from hardened criminals out for blood.
Luckily for us, Sandy had been a midwife, and while Frank might be hitting seventy, he was still a retired police detective who knew his way around a gun.
Even the size of him would make someone think twice.
Part of the reason we were stretched so thin was that killing wasn’t our only work.
It might make the world a better place, but it didn’t pay our bills—our day jobs had to do that.
Fox had started his own investment management company a couple of years ago, and while it was never going to be a passion for him, the big money helped ease the pain.
I was an artist. A London gallery exhibited my large, heartfelt canvases, and sold them to people who would never truly know what had inspired them.
Our spare bedroom was a makeshift studio.
I was always trying to paint, but recently I’d been so tired my mind zoned out the minute I sat down.
I’d found myself spending more time staring out of the window than putting brush to canvas.
I had a good view of our street. It was helping me really get to know our neighbors.
I had fought Fox on moving to an affluent neighborhood in Berkshire, but he had been adamant.
If we were going to be parents, we needed to go all in on the proper suburban dream.
I still missed London—its bright lights, glut of designer shops, and beloved anonymity—but being here was gradually becoming tolerable.
I had realized there were benefits to the slower pace of life.
I didn’t feel guilty for staying home. Without the lure of the capital’s newest and hottest restaurants, I didn’t see the point in shoehorning myself into a beautiful dress.
I could kick back in my dressing gown, watch Netflix, and be in bed by 10 p.m. Rock and fucking roll.
I’d also learned that, when it came down to it, when you stripped everything back, we were not that different from the nice middle-class families surrounding us. All of us sitting pretty in our big, detached houses. All of us with our secrets.
It hadn’t escaped my attention that the Thompsons at number nine had a strapping twenty-two-year-old gardener who every Monday spent more time inside, with the lady of the house, than outside in the garden.
Or that the Hudsons, three doors down, never recycled.
The blank space where their bin should have been on recycling days was a big middle finger to the status quo.
It was quite something to ignore the guilt of not doing your bit to save the planet—I couldn’t work out if it was admirable or despicable.
I was, however, a little more clear cut in my view on Cynthia from number thirteen.
Last week, she drove away without leaving a note when her car scraped a badly parked Range Rover: a crime to which she thought there were no witnesses.
Na?ve, really, for someone who lived in a neighborhood where everyone was watching each other. Judging. Competing. Hiding.
Walking up and down our street, saying hello to our neighbors, it had become clear to me: we all played nice, we smiled, we presented as good people. But no one really knew anyone. No one really knew what we were all capable of.
Fox and I really were no different to those upstanding members of the public we lived right alongside.
Killing bad men was a public service, but it was one we were forced to keep as a dirty secret. People were so squeamish, so narrow-minded.
Why couldn’t everyone see that killing a Mr. Wrong was totally right?
After what happened last year in Italy, lesser killers would’ve stopped, just hung up their knives and retired. But not us. We were trying to get back into some kind of routine. Work, kids, kills. Doing the best we could to pretend it was business as usual.
I knew better than most that life was unpredictable.
I braced for the bad, brushed it off, and kept going.
I’d had a childhood of coping, of adapting to whatever was thrown at me.
Fox, coming from his sheltered, privileged, Upper East Side bubble, found it harder.
I didn’t think any less of him for it. He was tougher than most and if he was struggling after what had happened, it was understandable.
I was understanding, but also impatient.
I needed the old Fox back.