42
42
‘Emma! Rose!’
The place was a labyrinth. Dark, confusing, the rain and wind drowning everything out. Where had the scream come from? I ran through what had been the reception area, almost choking on the smell of bird shit, and into a corridor. There was a shower room and what looked like it had once been a gymnasium. A vast, empty space. I went back into the corridor and listened, my ears humming in the silence.
At the end of the corridor were stairs leading down to a basement and another staircase leading up. Which way would they have gone? I was drawn to the basement. It seemed the more likely place. Switching on the torch on my phone I ventured down the steps but found a locked door at the bottom. I rattled it and pressed my ear against it, hearing nothing. Surely Fiona wouldn’t have keys to lock this door behind her?
I went back up, continuing up the rickety stairs to the first floor and into another corridor which had rooms all along it on both sides. In the shaking, flattened, too-white light of my phone’s torch, it was a place ripped straight from a nightmare: the former asylum, obscene graffiti scrawled on the walls, the stench of decay. Echoes of cruelty and madness and despair, the energy of human suffering imprinted in every brick and tile. I could hardly breathe as I ran down the corridor.
All the doors were open, revealing empty rooms, except one.
I pushed it, hard, and it struck and bounced back off something. I pushed again, shouldering my way into the room.
It took a moment for me to take it all in as I passed the torch over it.
The light settled on Emma, sitting with her back to the wall to my right, her legs stretched out before her, arms slumped, head fallen forward. A knife lay next to her, just beyond her lifeless fingers. Rose was crouched beside her saying, ‘Mummy. Mummy.’
And lying on her front close by me in the doorway, with blood soaking the back of her T-shirt, was Fiona.
I ignored her and rushed over to Emma, throwing myself on to my knees beside her. The front of her T-shirt was drenched in blood, slick with it, and it pooled around her on the floor, soaking my jeans where I knelt. I could smell it, the sharp, meaty tang of it.
Nothing seemed real, especially when I touched Emma and she was cold, unmoving. That slumped head, her chin on her collarbone.
On the other side of her, Rose was frozen, silent now, staring at me. In the gloom, she looked like she’d sprouted hundreds of new freckles that had clustered together and also spread to her hair. It took me a moment to realise it was blood.
I put my hand on Emma’s chin and, in a grotesque imitation of a romantic gesture, lifted her face towards mine. It lifted too freely. I saw the slashed throat, the gaping wound oozing blood that glistened black in the bleached light of my phone.
She was dead. Indisputably dead.
‘No, Emma!’
I pulled her against me, began instantly to sob, crying out her name. ‘Emma. Emma! ’ Her blood stained the front of my shirt; I could feel the cold, inert weight of her, but I couldn’t believe she was dead, couldn’t comprehend what was happening.
Struggling to breathe, I gently lowered her to the ground and found Rose still staring.
‘What happened?’ I said it quietly first, through my tears, then shouted it. ‘ What happened? ’
Rose sucked in a breath before she spoke. ‘Fiona ... Fiona went crazy. She and Mum started fighting because Fiona told her the two of you were in love, and then Fiona had a knife and she attacked Mum with it but Mum fought her and managed to get the knife and stabbed Fiona in the back but then she collapsed.’
It all came out in a rush. I couldn’t take it in, not properly. The pieces refused to fit. Emma had stabbed Fiona even after her throat had been cut? I looked at Rose’s hands. Like her face, they were covered with blood, except this wasn’t spatter. It looked like she’d dipped her fingers in it and rubbed her palms together.
She saw me looking. Hid her hands behind her back.
Still not speaking, I went over to Fiona and nudged her with my foot. She was a heavy, motionless lump. I crouched and felt for a pulse. There was no doubt. She was dead too.
I went back towards Emma, and Rose flung herself at me, wrapping her arms around me, sobbing against my shoulder.
‘Mummy’s dead,’ she said. ‘Mummy’s dead.’
I heard footsteps, then a voice calling, ‘Dad?’
Dylan’s voice brought me back to life. He was close by, in the corridor. I started to tell him to stay where he was, but Rose spoke first.
‘We’re in here.’
Before I could do anything, Dylan’s head appeared around the door. He took in the scene. His mum, dead. Fiona, dead. Rose, stained with blood which was all over my clothes now too. He started to tremble, his breath quickening.
He changed in that instant. I knew, with a stab of despair, that he would never be the same happy boy he had always been.
But he didn’t cry, not yet. Instead, he pointed at Rose.
‘What did you do ?’ he screamed.
‘It wasn’t me,’ Rose said, and I was thrown back to when she was a pre-schooler, caught red-handed in our living room with a box of felt-tip pens, green and red scribbles all over the freshly painted walls. She’d said ‘Not me’ then too, eyes wide and innocent, my little girl, so sweet, so guilty, and Emma and I had laughed, even though we knew she had done it.
‘Dad, she’s lying,’ Dylan said, desperation making his voice crack. ‘She did this. I told you, she’s ... she’s dark triad. She’s a psychopath.’
‘How can you say that?’ Rose began to cry and her tears seemed so real, her upset so genuine.
‘Liar,’ Dylan yelled. ‘You’re a liar!’
‘It was Fiona!’ Rose said.
‘Then why is there blood all over your hands and your face?’
‘Because I tried to help her.’
‘Quiet!’ I snapped at both of them. My ears were buzzing like they were full of flies; all I could smell was blood, and I had to get out of this room.
I ushered both my children out into the corridor, shutting the door behind me so I could no longer see the scene. Not that I would ever manage that, I knew.
My dead wife. Oh God, my dead wife. The knowledge hit me and I staggered, slamming against the wall, almost sliding into the same position I’d found Emma in. Somehow, I managed to stay upright. The steady drone of rain hitting the roof above my head. The light from the phone I was still holding bouncing around me, adding to the nausea. I felt like I was trapped in some nightmarish funfair attraction, a house of horrors, everything spinning and crooked and warped.
‘Dad? Dad? ’
I lifted my head to find Dylan shaking my shoulder, his face inches from mine. He looked stricken, too shocked to cry, and clearly asking for help. From me. His dad. Beside him, Rose stood motionless, except I could see she was breathing heavily, her eyes ablaze.
I looked down at the phone in my hand. There was something I needed to do. My brain wouldn’t work. I don’t know how many seconds passed before I figured it out.
‘Did you call the police already?’
My voice was shaking so much I had to say it twice before Dylan understood.
‘No. Not yet. But I couldn’t wait at the car. I was scared, Dad. Scared they’d done something to you.’ And that was when it really hit him, the grief taking over from his anger at Rose, and his face crumpled. He sobbed, covering his face with his hands.
I pulled him into a hug and held him for a moment. Over his shoulder, I saw Rose watching us with what looked like curiosity. Was she smiling? Whatever Dylan had said about her, it still wouldn’t cut through. I still couldn’t believe it of her. My little girl.
I let go of Dylan and handed him my phone. ‘Can you call the police while I talk to Rose?’
He managed to get hold of himself, though his words came out strangled. ‘Why do you want to talk to her?’
‘Dylan, please.’
Hand shaking, he made the call while I crouched in front of Rose.
‘I need you to promise me that you’re telling the truth,’ I said to her.
‘I am.’
‘What about Iris? Did Fiona kill her?’
She hesitated a moment too long before saying, ‘No, we just went to say goodbye. To wish her a happy trip.’
I nodded, but that was it; my heart was shattered. Because I knew she was lying.
Standing up was like fighting against gravity. I could feel it trying to pull me down – make me lie there on the floor and give in. But then I looked at Dylan, holding the phone out to me, and I knew I couldn’t do that. I had to stay strong enough to act, for him.
‘You have to tell them,’ Dylan said. ‘Tell them it was her.’
‘Dylan—’ I took the phone. Disconnected the call.
‘Why did you do that? She’s a psychopath. She killed Mum!’
‘Daddy, don’t let him say those things about me.’
She never called me Daddy. Hadn’t for years. I looked at her and her bloody hands, recalled the lie she’d just told me about Iris, and any final doubts I might have had were obliterated.
She was lying about all of it.
She was what Dylan said she was.
Oh God.
I didn’t know what to do. It was too much. But when I blinked, all I could see was a series of images:
Emma’s body slumped on the ground.
The blood on Rose’s hands.
And then, absolutely as clear as the others, images of things that hadn’t happened yet:
Dylan, a knife sticking out of his chest.
Rose, coming for me, eyes bright and wide, the glint of a blade as she slashed at the air between us.
Then back to Dylan, dead eyes open, staring at me, accusing, blaming: I tried to warn you. I tried to tell you.
My already-broken heart shattered further. I knew what I had to do.
‘Go back to the car,’ I said to Dylan. ‘Wait for the police.’
‘What?’
I shouted, ‘Go. Now! ’ I could hear how close I was to the edge of sanity.
The way my son flinched, I knew he could hear me losing my mind too. But he hurried to the stairs. Rose tried to follow him. I grabbed her wrist.
‘Not you,’ I said.
Dylan hesitated at the top of the stairwell and I shouted at him again. ‘ Go. ’
He went, leaving me with Rose, who looked up at me, hurt and confused. ‘Daddy? What are you doing?’
‘I’m sorry, sweetheart,’ I said, taking her arm. ‘But I don’t believe you. Maybe you didn’t kill your mum, maybe that was Fiona, but I know you had something to do with Iris. I don’t know what else you’ve done. But I can’t let you come home with us. I have to put Dylan first.’
And with that, she changed.
The mask slipped away.
It was a terrifying sight. One second she was gazing at me imploringly, an upset little girl. The next – well, one word came into my head as her features twisted and she bared her teeth, and all the warmth left her eyes.
Devil .
‘Let me go,’ she demanded.
‘No, Rose . . .’
I didn’t see it coming. She scratched my face with her free hand, slashing at my eye. It hurt like hell and I let go of her. Immediately, she vanished into the room where the bodies lay. Covering the eye she’d just savaged with my palm, I followed. She stood there, holding the flick-knife that had killed Emma in her small fist.
‘Rose,’ I said. ‘Put it down.’
‘Get back!’ She screamed it, jabbing at the air. ‘I’ll kill you too.’ Her expression changed as she realised what she’d said, as though she was drawing back from the words. But then her features settled, hardened.
‘I can’t let you go, Rose,’ I said. ‘I can’t let you hurt Dylan.’
She sneered. ‘You always liked him best.’
‘No I didn’t. I’ve always loved you both the same.’
‘Not now, though. Now I’m not your little girl anymore.’
‘You’ll always be my little girl,’ I said, and I stepped towards her, into the range of the knife, and she slashed at me, cutting my palm, slicing my chest, withdrawing it and trying to aim it at my belly, but I hardly felt a thing. I grabbed her wrist again and squeezed as hard as I could, so she cried out, dropping the knife, which I kicked away.
I grabbed hold of her, pulling her against my bloody body and carrying her, wriggling, from the room.
‘You’ll have to kill me,’ she shouted into my chest.
I ignored her words. Getting out of the building seemed to take forever, but then I could hear sirens, close now. I realised the rain had stopped.
Rose struggled, tried to scratch me again, but I held both her wrists. She kicked at me but I ignored the pain.
‘You can’t stop me,’ she said as I carried her towards the fence.
She was my daughter. My flesh and blood. My little girl. I had been protecting her my whole life. I could continue to protect her, get her help. A psychologist, a professional, someone like Angela who could assess her and talk to her and maybe there was some treatment, some medication she could take. Something that would stop her turning out like Fiona and Lucy and Maisie.
But for that to happen, surely she needed to face up to what she’d done. To admit it. I was in so much pain, racked by such disorientating anguish, but I could still see it. All that she’d done. She couldn’t get away with it.
‘Rose, I’ve got evidence now. The knife wounds. They’re evidence that you tried to kill me.’
She screamed, thrashed against me anew and cried out, and then all of a sudden she went very still. Stopped struggling and grew limp. My whole body throbbed with pain and I could only see out of one eye. We reached the fence and I staggered and dropped her, and then there were torches, police coming under the fence, running towards us, shouting, telling us to get down, but we were both already down.
I lay on my back and looked over at Rose with my one good eye. She was on her back in the dirt too, her head close to mine, and she was smiling. Laughing as footsteps approached and the police torches lit us up, and she turned her face towards me and whispered, ‘You should have killed me, Dad.’
She laughed again as the first police officer to reach us pulled her up, two more kneeling by me, asking me if I was hurt before catching sight of my wounds. He shouted for a medic and I grabbed hold of his wrists, told him I needed him to listen.
‘My daughter,’ I said. ‘She did this.’ I pointed at her. ‘She did it.’
Rose stood there, covered in Emma’s blood and my blood and probably Fiona’s too. She didn’t try to run. She ignored the cops who were looking from me to her, trying to take it all in. The mocking smile she’d worn was gone, nothing in her eyes but darkness.
A female police officer appeared and laid her hand on Rose’s shoulder. My daughter didn’t flinch or try to resist.
‘You should have killed me,’ she said to me again, as the medic arrived and knelt beside me, partially obscuring my view as the policewoman led Rose away, out of my sight, leaving me wondering if I’d done the right thing.
I would never, ever stop wondering.