34
34
Fiona’s place was the kind of neat and clean you could only achieve if you didn’t have children. A house where you could leave a room tidy knowing that next time you walked back in that room it wasn’t going to have been trashed.
Dylan and I had let ourselves in through the front door, and the kitten had immediately come running up to us, meowing and rubbing around our ankles. The cat’s presence gave me some comfort. Surely Fiona wouldn’t leave it on its own for too long? She genuinely seemed to like animals, which was one of the reasons I found it hard to believe she was a psychotic killer. Didn’t most serial killers start off by torturing animals? Maybe that was just a pop-cultural belief.
Or perhaps she had only acquired Karma the kitten to lure Rose into her house. Maybe when there was no one around, she mistreated this poor animal.
‘Rose genuinely loves cats and dogs,’ I said.
‘And that means she can’t be a bad person?’ said Dylan. Again, I hadn’t realised I’d spoken aloud. ‘Keira told me it’s a myth that dark triad people can’t like animals. Harold Shipman used to cry over dogs that were being used for medical experiments. Dennis Nilsen loved his border collie. Even Ian Brady liked pets, and asked for the proceeds of his memoir to be split between several animal charities if it was ever published.’
‘How do you know all this stuff?’
‘Keira.’ Of course. ‘She wants to be a psychologist like her mum, but specialising in the criminally insane.’
‘Why would she want to do that?’
He shrugged. ‘It’s interesting. Even you find that stuff fascinating. I remember you going on about how Charles Manson was influenced by the Beatles.’
‘Yeah, but that’s music history. If my specialist subject was serial killers, I’d be extremely worried about myself.’
He frowned, and I realised I needed to leave off criticising Keira. He liked her. And I was certain this was one relationship I didn’t need to be worried about.
We went into the kitchen, which was the only room I’d ever spent any time in. There was no sign of a laptop or tablet, and the drawers contained nothing but the things you would expect to find in a kitchen. She didn’t have a ‘man drawer’ like in our house, full of old batteries and takeaway leaflets. The contents of her cupboards and fridge told me she liked plain food: pasta, mild cheddar, chicken, tomato soup. There was a rack full of decent wine, though.
No photographs.
We went into the living room, where there were no photos on display, not of Fiona or anyone else. That was unusual. She had a bookcase which didn’t contain a single novel or interesting non-fiction book, just a medical encyclopedia, a book about interior design and a very dry-looking tome called The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition .
‘She’s got the DSM-5,’ Dylan said, taking it down off the shelf.
I stared at him.
‘Keira has a PDF of this. It’s used to diagnose people with psychological issues. I bet Fiona has it so she can read up on herself.’ He opened it and read out the handwritten dedication at the front: ‘ To Fiona, from Maisie. Interesting bedtime reading! ’ He turned to me. ‘Who’s Maisie?’
‘I think that might be her former partner,’ I said.
He had got out his phone and was taking photos of the book, presumably to send to his new girlfriend. I looked over his shoulder at the text on the page. ‘Does this book talk about this “dark triad” you keep mentioning? You never really explained what it means.’
He looked up from his phone, then put the book back. ‘It probably covers it. But I can tell you: it’s psychopathy, narcissism and ... How do you say it? Machiavellianism. Is that right?’
‘Yeah, I think so. Enjoying manipulating others?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Narcissism’ had become one of those words, like ‘genius’ or ‘tragedy’, that was so overused that it was now almost meaningless. Everyone in the world thought their ex was a narcissist. Did it describe Fiona? Was she overly obsessed with herself?
‘I can’t see Fiona as a narcissist,’ I said. ‘She seems way too interested in other people, namely our family. Would a narcissist spend so much time teaching the girl next door how to play chess, or taking her on day trips?’
‘That’s her being manipulative. Making us think she’s not self-obsessed. Plus, she must be getting something from it. Something that’s helpful to her.’
‘Like what?’
‘I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s a pervy thing ...’
‘Oh God.’
‘But maybe she just likes having someone who looks up to her. Rose hangs off Fiona’s every word. That’s going to appeal to Fiona’s narcissism. And maybe, I don’t know, she’s training her up.’
I stared at him.
‘If she thinks Rose is a dark triad person too, then maybe she’s treating her like an apprentice. Showing her the ropes.’
‘Dylan, that’s mad.’
‘Is it? It makes sense to me. It’s like a mother animal teaching her offspring how to behave.’
‘Fiona isn’t Rose’s mum.’
He shrugged. ‘Maybe she sees Rose as the daughter she never had.’
Could any of this be true? Despite all my worries about Rose’s recent behaviour, I couldn’t accept it.
‘What’s the definition of a psychopath?’ I asked. ‘According to Keira and her extensive knowledge.’
He scowled at me.
‘Sorry. I’m finding all of this hard to take. The idea that your mum and sister might be with someone like that.’ Not to mention the accusation that Rose was like that too.
‘The DSM doesn’t have a diagnosis for psychopathy,’ Dylan said. ‘But Keira – yes, Keira – told me that the closest thing is called something like “conduct disorder”.’ I could almost hear his brain whirring as he recalled what she’d told him. ‘Traits include a lack of remorse and feelings of guilt, callousness, a lack of empathy ...’
‘But they learn to mimic emotions, right?’ This was the kind of pop psychology I’d heard before. A staple of true crime documentaries and movies in which cops discussed the behaviour patterns of vicious serial killers.
‘Yeah, exactly.’
I shook my head. None of this was helping us find my wife and daughter, and it definitely wasn’t making me feel any better.
There was little else in the living room. A TV and a generous pile of magazines on a coffee table. Country Life and Tatler . Various others that focused on posh houses and luxury travel. I flicked through them and saw that they were well thumbed. Fiona had torn some pages out too, and made notes on others, circling items in lists of expensive furniture and fittings. Was this how she spent her evenings? Flicking through magazines dreaming of a five-star existence?
We went back into the hallway. Again, there were no pictures on the walls. No photos. Nothing personal at all, apart from a couple of coats hanging from hooks. It was like wandering through a show home, or a place someone had just moved into the day before. Dylan, who was texting Keira as he walked up the stairs behind me, didn’t seem to be impacted in the same way, but I found it deeply unsettling. Outside her home she seemed so normal. Friendly and full of opinions and interests. But if a person’s home reflects their personality, she was less than vanilla. She was blank.
Upstairs, we encountered more blankness. The landing also had plain walls. There were two rooms, the mirrored equivalent of Rose and Dylan’s rooms, that were completely empty apart from a few packing boxes that proved to have nothing in them. There had been part of me that had wondered if we might find possessions taken from Iris’s, but there was nothing here. No smoking gun that told me Fiona was a killer.
‘Not exactly a serial killer’s lair, is it?’ I said. ‘No photographs of victims pinned to the walls. No scrapbooks full of crazy scrawlings. No heads in the fridge.’
Dylan side-eyed me.
‘Sorry. It’s the tension. I can promise you I’m not actually finding any of this funny.’
‘I get it, Dad.’ He’d put his phone away. ‘I just want to know where Mum and Rose are, though.’
We were both silent for a minute, looking around the empty room we were in. There was a hollow, cold sensation in my stomach, and I kept thinking this must be a dream I was going to wake up from. The kind that makes you laugh with relief when you re-enter the real world. I had the weirdest dream ...
‘Come on, let’s check the other rooms, and then I’m going to go and talk to the police.’
I poked my head into the bathroom, which actually looked used, with numerous bottles of shower gel and shampoo and creams. It was the only room that wasn’t spotlessly clean. The mirror was smeared, like someone had been writing on the glass with their fingertip, but I couldn’t make any sense of it.
Finally, we went into Fiona’s bedroom. I couldn’t help but feel guilty, invasive. If she was completely innocent, this was not cool of us. But the bedroom was as devoid of personality as the rest of the house. A double bed, plain white sheets; a bedside table with nothing on it except a lamp and a box of tissues. No books, no photos. I opened the drawer beside her bed, flushed with shame, aware that Dylan was watching me – a child, my son, being set this example. But the drawer had nothing in it except some mysterious tablets in a plain brown bottle, some lip salve, and some of the pages that had been ripped out of the magazines. I unfolded them, hoping they might tell me something useful, but they were just glossy photoshoots of expensive houses. The kind of places you see on Grand Designs , with glass walls and gleaming surfaces. An underground swimming pool and a garden full of bonsai.
There were no photos here. Nothing that would tell me who Fiona really was. I still didn’t even know for certain if Fiona Smith was a made-up name. This had been a wasted intrusion into her life and, although we hadn’t found anything embarrassing or private, I still felt dirty.
‘Let’s get out of—’
I froze. A phone was ringing.
‘That’s not your phone, is it?’ I asked, although I already knew the answer.
Dylan shook his head. ‘No.’
It was a noise that had once been omnipresent, but one I hadn’t heard in a long time: the old Nokia ringtone. It was faint, but the high-pitched beeps were still distinct. It kept ringing.
‘I think it’s coming from downstairs,’ Dylan said.
He was right. We both left Fiona’s bedroom – having refolded the magazine pages and put them back where I’d found them – and went back to the ground floor. I stood still for a moment, trying to figure out where the ringing was coming from.
‘The kitchen,’ I said.
We went in. The ringtone was muffled, indicating the phone was inside something or behind a door. I opened all the cupboards, including the ones I’d looked in earlier, and peered in. Same with the drawers.
Dylan looked up and said, ‘I think it’s coming from above our heads.’
There was a smoke alarm attached to the ceiling. I squinted up at it, confused. Was this smoke alarm ringing like a phone instead of emitting the usual shrill beeps that came out of them? I grabbed a chair, positioned it beneath the alarm and stood on it, reaching up to remove the cover.
Something dropped out. I tried to catch it but my reactions were too slow. Fortunately, Dylan had more time to see it and his reflexes were better. He caught it before it could hit the ground.
It was a tiny mobile phone that fitted in the palm of his hand. It did indeed look like an old Nokia, the kind everyone had once had, though I didn’t remember them being this small. And it was still ringing.
Dylan and I looked at each other, then I grabbed the phone and – carefully, because the buttons were so miniscule – answered it and put it to my ear.
‘At last,’ said a woman’s harsh voice. ‘Where the hell were you?’