Chapter 79
FAYE
Claire’s fingers slip into mine as we stare down at the dead man. It’s over. It’s finally over.
My stomach lurches when I bend down to take the keys, phone and wallet out of his pocket. I find a penknife in there too.
“Penny’s tied up in there.” I gesture back towards the building.
“See to Penny first,” Claire says. “Then we’ll have to see to him.”
I nod.
Stumbling back to the house, I see the fog slowly clearing but the sun will set soon. Magnus had a shovel. My skin chills. I know what he was doing. He was digging a grave for my daughter.
The bothy is eerily silent as I use Magnus’s key to enter.
“Penny, it’s me.”
“Mum! Mum you’re okay!”
I speed up. “I’m fine, darling. I’m okay.” It takes a few minutes to work through the thick ropes with the penknife.
Finally free, she folds into my arms and I let out a long sigh of relief, one I’ve been waiting to release since I saw Magnus drop her onto the cold, cellar floor.
Her tears fall against my chest, thick and full of misery. She is so small, so thin and lightweight, like a baby bird fallen out of a tree. But she’s here and she’s alive.
“Mum, what did you do?” she asks, gasping for air. “How—”
“Shh. It doesn’t matter.”
I pull her away from me so that I can examine her. She’s gaunt. They haven’t been feeding her properly. Her eyes are bloodshot and her skin is grey. She’s shaking. The room smells strongly of vomit and there are rope burns on her wrists and ankles. Hot rage floods my veins.
“They drugged me,” she says. “I kept trying to throw up the pills but some of them worked.” She is shivering in my arms.
I touch a patch of blood on her forehead. “He hurt you.”
“I’m okay,” she says.
“You need a hospital.”
Penny clasps my hands. “Mum, what did you do to him?”
I pull in a deep breath. My throat is thick with emotion. The answer to her question is so terrible I can barely admit it, but I have to. She deserves to know. “We killed him.”
Penny closes her eyes and lets out a deep breath. “Then I can’t go to the hospital.”
* * *
I guide Penny over to the campervan and wrap her in blankets.
This is the safest place for her. I can’t trust that Dina won’t reappear.
I give her water and rub her forehead, trying to wipe away the trauma of her experience, but knowing that nothing will take it away.
I leave her lying on the bed and lock the door, before going back out to help my sister finish what we came here to do.
I find Claire further up from where we were, breathless after dragging Magnus’s body several feet. She points to a deep hole in the earth, so black I can’t see the bottom.
“This must be the grave he dug for Penny,” she says.
“Thank God we got here in time,” I say.
The rain soaks our clothes as Claire and I roll him into the hole together. I am solid and cold like ice. I can barely breathe.
Is this what it’s like to have a sister? I’ve wondered for so long, and now we’re here standing over a grave that holds a man we just murdered. I never pictured this kind of sacrifice.
I grab the shovel, and I start filling in that dark abyss, slowly concealing Magnus Blackburn’s cold, black eyes that stare up at us, witnessing his final incarceration.
“Someone might find him, you know,” I tell her. “It could be next week. In a year. In twenty years.”
“I know,” she says.
The fog clears as we’re throwing the last of the soil over the body. We pad it down as best we can and cover it in grass and twigs and stones, trying to blend it in with the natural growth of the terrain.
Next, we head back to the bothy to scrub ourselves, every surface, and every dish, fork or mug that may have been used by Magnus, Dina or Penny.
Once the rain stops, we find a packet of kitchen matches in a drawer, burn our clothes, and pretty much everything Magnus and Dina brought with them, aside from the phones we find in the lounge and Magnus’s penknife.
Those we’ll have to throw away somewhere between here and home.
It takes a long time for the clothes to turn into ashes but once the clean-up is over, we change into items of Dina’s clothing that we kept to wear, and get back in the campervan.
I rush straight to Penny lying on the bed and wrap my arms around her.
“I’m okay, Mum,” she says, over and over again.
I stroke her head until she falls asleep, exhausted.
Claire is waiting in the driver’s seat, when I make my way up front.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “My stepson did all of this. I’m sorry for what he did to Penny.”
“It wasn’t your fault. You helped me save my daughter.”
We stare at one another, the same face looking into the same eyes. Two halves united.
And as we drive away, I can’t stop thinking about the kitchen knife scrubbed and dried and left in the drawer of the small stone building by the loch.