32 April 2019
32
April 2019
‘We need to go. Now.’
The tip-off had come in from a civilian member of staff at the nearest police station, a woman called Kia who Fiona had picked up in a bar several months before, stringing her along ever since. Kia had sent a text from the phone she used to arrange their occasional liaisons.
They’re going to arrest you both this morning. Sorry. Good luck! Xxxx
Fiona had stared at the text for too long, hardly able to believe it. She hadn’t seen this coming.
But she knew what they needed to do.
‘Maisie.’ She shook her shoulder. ‘Maisie. We need to get going. Right now.’
She showed her the text from Kia and Maisie sat up like a toy whose power button had been pressed. Wide awake. Ready. It was one of the things Fiona liked about her – this ability to shake off sleep in an instant, so different to the sloth-like masses. If she’d known this would be the last hour they’d ever spend together, she might have taken more time to mull over Maisie’s finest attributes. Her ambition and single-mindedness. Her wonderful, creative cruelty. Fiona wondered if the emotion she experienced when she and Maisie were alone was similar to what the herd called love, or if it was only recognition. Her own reflection in the dark glass of Maisie’s regard.
‘What time is it?’ Maisie asked. She was already out of bed, combing her fingers through her hair as she headed to the en-suite to pee.
‘Quarter past eight.’
Above the trickle, Maisie called out through the open door. ‘How long have we got?’
‘I don’t know. But we have to assume they could be here any second.’
As she spoke, she took down a suitcase from on top of the wardrobe and began to throw clothes into it. Underwear. Chargers. The spare phones they kept for emergencies. She marched into the bathroom, where Maisie was now cleaning her teeth in front of the mirror, and swept a load of toiletries into a bag. ‘Please, hurry up and get dressed.’
‘Fiona? Just relax, okay? We’re going to be fine. We’re smarter than them.’
‘Different, special, better?’
‘Exactly.’
Most of the time, Maisie’s sense of superiority, her confidence, gave Fiona goosebumps. The cold glow of her arrogance; Fiona loved to bask in it. But it was also a flaw, and Fiona had warned her it could one day be a fatal one.
She snatched the toothbrush from Maisie’s hand. ‘We have to run. Now.’
Fiona strode back into the bedroom and dropped the toiletries into the now-full suitcase, then grabbed some clothes and threw them to Maisie as she appeared in the bathroom doorway. ‘Get dressed.’ She hefted the suitcase. ‘I’ll see you downstairs.’
She carried the case to the ground floor and grabbed the car keys, then opened the large food cupboard. On the second shelf down there were a dozen tins of peaches. She moved them aside, reached in, and pushed at the wood at the rear of the shelf, revealing the secret space behind. She pulled out six bundles of cash, secured with rubber bands. Enough to see them through for a while, while they were hiding out. But still a long way from the life-changing sum they’d set their sights on. The sum they were so close to. Or had been.
She stuffed the money in the suitcase, then took it out on to the street where the car was parked. She felt sick with anger and disappointment. Who had discovered what they were up to? It couldn’t have been Dinah herself. The niece, Verity? She had to be the prime suspect. The nausea was replaced by the urge to scream. The house of her dreams had been so close. Now they were going to have to start all over again.
Where the hell was Maisie?
She went back inside and found her in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Fiona said.
‘I’m not leaving here without a cup of tea.’
‘For God’s sake.’
She tried to grab Maisie’s arm but Maisie was surprisingly quick, slipping out of reach. She picked up the kettle, wielding it like a weapon.
‘I can’t be locked up.’
‘Maisie, please, make your tea and let’s go.’
‘I have to be free. I wasn’t born to be kept in a cage.’
Fiona wanted to grab hold of her and drag her out the door. She could be maddening. ‘It’s not going to happen. We’re faster and cleverer, remember? But we need to prove it by getting in the car and getting out of here right now .’
‘Okay. But I mean it. I’m not going to prison.’
There wasn’t time for a last look around. She got behind the wheel and Maisie sat in the passenger seat, clutching her travel mug. Since she’d come out here to deposit the suitcase, it had started raining. Fiona cursed, because she knew that meant the roads would be busier, all the school-run parents jumping in their Chelsea tractors instead of walking.
And she was right.
The traffic started at the end of their road. This was another issue with living out here in the suburbs, in an area with several ‘outstanding’ schools. The road was gridlocked, cars and buses and the dreaded four-by-fours. Ubers and black cabs. The rain was heavier now, beating against the windscreen, the wipers hardly able to cope.
Maisie reached over and pressed the horn.
‘What are you doing?’ Fiona said. ‘You’re going to draw attention to us.’
But she wanted to hit the horn herself. She wanted to scream. She pictured herself dragging whoever was at the front of this queue out of their vehicle and slitting their throat, then taking their car. She imagined herself with a rocket launcher, blasting away that bus full of schoolchildren, clearing a path before driving through the smoking wreckage.
She forced herself to breathe. In. Out. In. Out.
It almost worked.
Finally, the lights up ahead changed and they began to move forward. A couple of buses turned the corner, freeing space ahead, and then there was only one car between them and the traffic lights. A white Land Rover, almost as old as this car. The lights turned amber and Fiona expected the Land Rover to sail through – no one around here ever stopped on amber – but to her horror the driver’s brake lights came on, then the lights turned red and they were stuck.
‘Morons!’ she shouted.
She breathed in and out again. And then she saw it, in the rear-view mirror. Flashing blue lights. A police car. No – two police cars. One of them was a marked car but the other was plain, with the blue light strapped to its roof. They were about seven cars back, and on this tightly packed street there was no room for other vehicles to move to let them through. A small blessing. She glanced at Maisie, who was staring ahead, in a trance. It seemed she hadn’t seen the lights. Better to let her remain ignorant of them.
Fiona’s knuckles were white on the wheel. Why weren’t the traffic lights changing? Come on. Come on . Maybe they could still get out of this even if they were caught. Find a good lawyer. Impress a jury. They looked good. They knew how to charm people. It might all be okay.
But she didn’t want to risk it. She wanted these lights to turn green before the cops behind spotted them. There was a quieter road over to the left, just beyond this crossroads. Her plan, as soon as the lights changed and the traffic parted, was to head there, get off the main street, take the back roads out of town and on to the motorway.
The cars flowing left and right stopped and Fiona readied herself. She hoped the driver of the Land Rover was ready too. With the rain bouncing off the glass, it was too hard to see them.
The lights turned amber, then green. Fiona put the car into first gear, prepared to ease away.
The Land Rover didn’t move.
What the hell?
‘They’ve stalled it,’ she said aloud. ‘They’ve bloody stalled it!’
Of all the stupid drivers in south London, why did Fiona and Maisie have to get stuck behind this one? Why wasn’t the Land Rover moving? What the hell was the driver doing? The lights were about to change again. Fiona tried to pull out to the left, to manoeuvre her way past the bloody Chelsea tractor, squeeze through, but there was no room. A bus had pulled up beside them now, just two feet away, and a teenage boy stared at her through the window, so close she could see his zits.
She leaned on the horn, even though she knew this would only put more pressure on the person ahead, fluster them further and render them less likely to get the car started. The cars behind were hitting their horns too, and the police lights were still flashing, turning the raindrops on the windscreen blue, and then she saw it. As the traffic light turned red, she watched both front doors of each of the police cars open behind her, and a mix of uniformed and plainclothes police started making their way through the stationary traffic towards them.
She opened her door, ready to run, but Maisie didn’t move.
‘Let’s be dignified,’ Maisie said, and then a cop, a man with a patchy beard, was tapping on her window.
It was too late.
As they were arrested, standing in the street with the rain beating down on them, drivers rolling down their windows to stare, Fiona concentrated on the licence plate of the Land Rover. She still couldn’t see the driver properly, rain obscuring the reflection in the wing mirrors and making it too difficult to see clearly through the rear windscreen.
She memorised the number plate, repeating it over and over so it would be there the moment she got access to a pen and piece of paper.
She watched the traffic lights change as the cop read her rights. This time the Land Rover’s driver didn’t stall. This time they sailed through the lights and across the junction.
It made her even more enraged.
Even more determined to get revenge.
It wasn’t until three years later, when Maisie had been dead for a long time, and Fiona was on probation after being let out of Franklin Grange, that she was able to find out the name and address of the person who had owned the Land Rover, though it had changed hands since.
The owner in 2019 was Ethan Dove.
She got the information from the same friendly civilian member of staff at the police station who had tipped her off before they got arrested, Kia. Ethan Dove didn’t even know what he had done, might not have even followed the news story about these two women who had attempted to defraud and murder an elderly lady. But that didn’t make Fiona hate him any less.
Once she had the name and address, it was easy to keep track of Ethan Dove. She found his social media accounts, which led her to his shop. She went in a couple of times, browsing through the vinyl, the appeal of which she would never understand – well, apart from the monetary value. Through his social media accounts she learned the names of Ethan’s wife and kids. And she bided her time. She couldn’t afford to risk getting into any kind of trouble while she was on probation, and she kept having to check in with her probation officer, which restricted her movements.
By the time Fiona’s probationary period ended, the Doves had moved house; and, after trawling back through Ethan’s Twitter and Instagram accounts, she had found out some interesting, surprising stuff – one or two facts that made a significant difference to her plan, in fact. Then something else happened: Fiona had followed Ethan home one day – he always left the record shop at the same time – and there, next to the new-build semi they had moved into, was another brand-new home with a ‘For Sale’ sign outside.
Fiona didn’t hesitate. She had the money Maisie had left her, enough to buy this house outright with some left over to keep her going for a couple of years. She had already come up with a new backstory. She was a single woman who had worked in banking and who was going to return to that industry soon. She was going to befriend the Dove family and figure out the best form of vengeance – something that would scratch the itch that had tormented her for years. Because the loathing she felt for the driver of that Land Rover was even greater than her hatred of Patrick and Max. It was the stupid randomness of it, the sheer incompetence which had led to Fiona’s arrest and Maisie’s death. They would have got away, she was sure of it.
There was something else, too, that made her decide to put more energy into this act of vengeance than the others. When she looked at them – Ethan and Emma and Dylan and Rose, plus their dog – she saw this happy, normal family, like the one she’d never been part of. They were the epitome of normal. And when she looked at their perfection, she wanted to destroy it.
It would be a fun, deeply satisfying project.
But what Fiona didn’t expect was Rose. The first time Fiona met the girl, it confused and excited her in equal measure. She didn’t believe in fate or destiny. It was luck, that was all. Great luck, for both Fiona and Rose. And bad luck for Ethan and Emma.
Now, she had tested Rose. She had educated her, trained her, made her understand what she was. She had seen how Rose reacted to pressure.
Rose had already smashed her way out of her chrysalis.
Now it was time for her to prove she could fly.