18. Starling
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
STARLING
There are some serial killers who take their time selecting a victim.
They stake a property out, learn the movements of the people inside, carefully note the comings and goings, the routine their poor victim has no idea is being mapped inside a murderer’s mind.
Routines are so easy to fall into. Even us, heading out almost every night.
We think this is new and scary, and it is—but it’s also become our pattern.
I wear the same scuffed black boots, the same washed-out jeans and hoodie.
If we weren’t so secretive, someone could be tracking our every move, calculating the perfect time to strike.
Hugo is our unwitting victim. His house is one of those posh, modern buildings, more glass than brick, even more than the one we trashed the garden of.
Look at me, these kinds of places shout.
So, we are looking. We’re here in the dark, nestled behind a row of manicured garden plants, while he is lit up in his sparkling white kitchen.
I had an unhealthy interest in what happened to Cuckoo’s mum, I’ll admit.
She was the first person I’d ever met who’d died.
Not a murder victim in the true crime sense, but killed nonetheless.
Cuckoo changed permanently too, the effects less obvious yet still there if you look closely enough.
She’s dialed her comedy routine up, rather than down, as someone might expect a person grieving to do.
Everything is maximum effort, and sometimes I think she must be exhausted, but then I figure it’s been two years; if this wasn’t who she wanted to be, she’d have stopped.
Maybe her mum dying gave her the freedom to not give a damn.
She watches Hugo intently now, a knuckle pressed to her mouth. He is none the wiser, in the kitchen alone, opening a bottle of wine. As he pours himself a glass, her knuckle turns white, pressing firmer and firmer against her mouth until Goldie gently takes her hand away and rests it in her own.
“Look at him,” Cuckoo says. “He killed my mum. And he still drinks like it’s nothing.”
“Bastard,” I say.
Hugo downs the glass in two large gulps, then pours himself another. He disappears from view, heading into the hallway and across into another room.
“He’ll be putting his running gear on now,” Cuckoo says. “He’ll be back in a minute.”
How often has she done this? Watched him and carefully tracked his movements?
Sure enough, five minutes later he returns with an empty wine glass that he discards on the kitchen counter, dressed in an expensive-looking tracksuit and trainers.
He bends down to touch his toes, though doesn’t quite reach, then stretches his arms up in the air, grabbing one wrist and bending to the side, and then replicating the action on the other side.
For a second he stares out of the glass right at us, and I almost forget we’re in darkness, hidden behind a hedge.
He looks at something on his phone, taps the screen a few times, then leaves that on the kitchen counter too.
At last, he turns and heads down the hall.
“He doesn’t bring his phone with him?” I say.
“Maybe he’s afraid of getting caught too,” Goldie says. She crouches lower than us, conscious of her height.
“But he’s not breaking any rules.” I frown. “He can say this is his daily exercise.”
“He’s probably just playing it safe,” Crow says. With her dark hair, she blends in the most in these shadows, and it occurs to me that she’d make a good spy, especially with how obsessed she is over every detail. “He’s certainly been in enough trouble before.”
I glance at Cuckoo, but she is scrambling to her feet, brushing dirt from her jeans.
“Come on,” she says. “He’ll be leaving now. Are we following him or what?”
At first his run is difficult to shadow because he keeps to the streets, feet pounding as he warms himself up.
He stops every fifteen minutes or so to stretch or pose or generally look about himself, so it’s easy enough to keep up, and his pace is quite slow to begin with.
He seems to be running more for the sake of saying he runs rather than really enjoying it.
I’m half expecting him to meet up with someone illicit, but I guess that kind of thing only happens in films. Or true crime documentaries.
Finally, he breaks off into a nearby park, surrounding himself with trees and bushes as he heads up a hill and into a wooded area. This is better, it means we can follow closer, and at one point we jostle each other too fervently for a good position and he hears the rustling and turns around.
“Who’s there?” he calls, his voice low.
“Why is he instantly suspicious?” Goldie whispers. “We could be a squirrel. Or a rat.”
“Because he’s a rat,” Cuckoo hisses.
I spot a stone on the ground, pick it up, and throw it far away from us. It lands with a light thud, but it’s enough for Hugo to hear. He whips round to the source of the noise, and I have to hold my hand in front of my mouth to stop from giggling.
Hugo shakes his head and starts running again.
“Starling!” Wren says when he is out of earshot. “I can’t believe you did that.”
“Oh, why not?” I say. “Let’s mess with him a bit.”
“That,” Cuckoo says, “is a brilliant idea.”
It turns out Cuckoo is surprisingly skilled at making bird noises, something she admits she learned when she thought we were bird-watching fans and wanted to impress us.
She follows Hugo’s run with these calls, which he occasionally stops and looks around for but mostly presses forward.
So we up the ante, throwing things and rustling bushes, and then Goldie even screams at the top of her lungs and ducks into a hiding space.
“Foxes,” Hugo mutters to himself, which makes us bite the inside of our cheeks to stop ourselves laughing.
He shakes his head again, no doubt convincing himself it’s all in his mind. And in any case, he’s big, he’s strong, he’s a man. He can handle it. He heads down the back roads toward the harborside, jogging along the waterfront before stopping to rest on one of the bridges above the river.
We watch him catching his breath, hands gripping the railing. We are across the other side, behind a line of trees, and there is no way he can see us.
“We should tie his shoelaces together so he falls flat on his face,” Wren says.
“Wren!” I giggle, surprised that she, of all people, is saying this. But the image is brilliant. I picture him flailing forward, arms in a panic, dirt and gravel on his palms. “We should make even more noise as he runs, really scare him into thinking there’s someone following him.”
We’re all joining in then.
“We should throw eggs at his house, bang on all the windows and doors.”
“We should post threatening letters through the door.”
“We should mug him,” Cuckoo whispers. “Take his fancy headphones and throw them into the river below.”
Darker, darker. It’s not right yet. I look over at him, so utterly unaware of our presence.
“Strangle him,” I say. “Get a rope and tie it around his neck until he can’t breathe.”
Have I gone too far? I want to backpedal, take the words back, but as I open my mouth to apologize, I catch the hunger in each of their eyes.
They aren’t offended. They’re ecstatic.
Goldie joins in: “Push him off the bridge and watch him fall.”
“Drown him.” This is Wren, timid Wren, who said she could never hurt anyone. Her cheeks are flushed. “Hold his head down in that dirty river until he tastes mud and death.”
“Perfect,” Cuckoo says, awed. “He doesn’t get to have Bishop’s House. It’s ours, and he can’t take it.”
“So we’ll disappear him,” I say. “Goodbye, bastard.”
“And we can live in Bishop’s House ourselves,” she whispers.
“And when we’re done, cut off his fingertips and smash out his teeth,” I say. “Make him unidentifiable. Make him lost to the world.”
“Yes. Yes.”
This is what girls do, isn’t it? Sit around and plot mayhem and destruction and death?
Here we are—instruments of darkness.