Chapter 109
THE PAST
I hated them. Both of them. My mother, Denise Tormey, and Alice Quigley.
The evil bitches. What Alice and my mother had done to Poppy was downright loathsome.
Father bore some of the blame, but he was a useless drunk.
How else could he turn out after living with Denise?
Once he’d been kicked out of the house, he found freedom at the bottom of another bottle while leaving me with Poppy in that house of neglect and sordidness. I had to save my little sister.
I told all this to Dermot as we sat on a wall down the lane sharing a bottle of cider.
Of course I didn’t tell him everything. Just a selection of the horror to get him incensed enough to help me.
As would Caroline. I’d bonded with Caroline in Oak House, that juvie place we were sent to after we’d been lifted for delivering drugs.
Another of Denise and Alice’s ventures. Caroline helped by stealing the sleeping pills from Alice.
If everything went belly-up, at least I had some of the photos my mother had forgotten to keep secure.
My stomach turned just looking at them. Painful.
Poor Poppy. In my heightened state of awareness, I knew I had to eliminate Denise so that Alice would no longer have her puppet to support her in continuing the abuse.
One sociopath was less dangerous than two.
It wasn’t a perfect plan, but it was all I could think of.
‘What about Poppy?’ Dermot asked me the night before I planned to execute the plan. ‘She might scream her head off.’
‘I’ll give her some of the sleeping pills. She won’t know what’s happening.’
‘You need to be careful,’ he said. ‘She’s a tiny little thing. You don’t want her to OD.’
‘I’m not stupid,’ I said. But of course I was.
Once I had both Denise and Poppy sedated, I went into my mother’s room, looped the bathrobe belt around her neck and pulled as tight as I could.
There was some resistance, but she was so heavily drugged, it was impossible for her to halt her own execution.
The guilty deserved the ultimate punishment.
I pulled tighter. ‘That’s for what you did to Poppy.’
I cried then for my little sister. I hadn’t meant to kill her, but the sedatives were too strong.
I had to pretend to strangle her to make it look the same as Mother.
Hopefully the guards would think it was murder-suicide.
That Denise had somehow done all this. And Alice would keep quiet, because I intended to let her know I had the photos that could send her to prison.
I met Caroline outside the house. Dermot had got us a burner phone and Caroline made the 999 call. I knew I hadn’t thought it all out, but it was what it was. I had enough evidence to land Alice in the shit if I needed to shift the blame.
As it turned out, it took another twenty years for my plan to come undone.
the present
‘So Alice was your alibi?’
‘And Dermot was backup if that fell through. As it was, the detectives at the time were stumped. They felt it was murder-suicide, but the 999 call, well they couldn’t make sense of that.’
‘Why even bother with the call?’
‘It seemed like a good idea to my teenage self.’
‘And all this time, Alice knew you were to blame for the murders?’
‘Yes, and she knew I had the incriminating photos. Then when Caroline crossed a line stealing from her, she decided to replicate the murders and lead you to me.’
‘But you still had the photos. She must have known you’d use them.’
Sadie shrugged a shoulder. ‘I reckon she no longer feared me. Maybe she thought I’d got rid of the photos.
Who knows what that murdering, abusive bitch thought.
When she attacked Caroline last week, kicking and threatening her, and shouting abuse, we knew she was spiralling.
We had to act. But we were too late. She was one step ahead of us. ’
‘Why keep this belt?’
‘As a reminder of the mistake I made with Poppy. And to use on Alice if I needed to. If I had, then Caroline and Freya would still be alive.’