44. Wren
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
WREN
“He killed that girl,” Cassandra says, when she has finished telling us the true horror of Hugo Fletcher. “And now he has done it again.”
We all remember the girl that went missing while we were at school.
A police detective had come in to do a talk with us about safety walking around alone.
All that was ever found of her was a battered handbag, her phone and purse inside, as well as a packet of tissues, a sanitary pad, and sweet wrappers.
It was Starling who told us this extra detail; she had been quite fixated on the whole thing.
I can recall her getting irate with the detective when it was written off as an accidental drowning, her body probably in the harbor.
Such a common cause for people in Bristol it was easy to attribute it to her too.
She spoke about her for weeks afterward until Crow and Goldie told her to shut up about it, that it was too depressing, but I wonder how long she carried on her own research, convinced she was going to spot something the police hadn’t.
Well, now she knows. Starling is stricken, but there’s a flush to her cheeks that betrays interest, maybe even a tiny spark of excitement. It should disgust me, but we have done far worse. And my disgust is firmly placed at Hugo Fletcher and his wife.
“He was so controlling.” Cassandra wipes a tear from her eye without smudging her mascara. “I know people would call it abuse, but I never wanted to think that. When he killed her, I was trapped. I thought he would kill me too.”
So that’s her excuse; this is how she’s going to play it.
I was fooled by her before, but I won’t be again.
“He could come back at any time,” she says. “I’m so sorry. I felt I had to protect him.”
“How can you possibly try to justify this?” Crow says. “After everything he’s done.”
“He’s a bad man, I know. He has killed two girls. I’m not justifying it.”
“He’s killed more than that,” Cuckoo says.
Cassandra frowns. “No. There is no one else.”
“Yes, there is,” Cuckoo says. “You’ve missed someone very important.”
Cuckoo has always been the fastest of us to lose her temper.
In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever lost my temper in my life.
I’m not sure I have a temper in that way, like a pot being brought to boil and left too long; my pot is always tepid.
It never boils, never so much as simmers.
However much heat is applied to it, it will never overflow.
What I lack in temper I make up for in fear—dizzying, overwhelming anxiety that gripped me throughout my childhood until our wonderful and dreadful summer rescued me from its clutches.
Since then, there are occasions when it spikes—my first day of teaching comes easily to mind, the sarcastic child with his smug grin happily telling me he was going to make my life a misery a highlight of that first lesson—but I am mostly able to control it.
Thinking in kitchen metaphors, if a temper is a boiling pot, my anxiety is the last few seconds on a microwave, a countdown to something that in my mind will destroy my entire being, and I always have to rush to press pause before the time reaches zero.
Now, I can let that time count down, breathe through the moment that is never as bad as I have built up and move on.
I credit that to the others, to sneaking out, to holding a knife in my quivering hand and driving it into another person’s body. In, out, just like my breath.
Cuckoo and anxiety are an oxymoron, an impossible equation.
But her temper has always been there—every emotion under the sun apart from fear, but especially anger.
She’s the only one of us who ever came close to being told off at school—that’s enough now, turn the volume down, wonderful point but let’s put our hand up to make it—and she was nearly always the one to start an argument between the five of us, normally with Crow.
If Cuckoo is passionate about something, she will make that known.
If she thinks you’re passionate about something, she will challenge and dissect you and make you consider and defend your opinions in ways you would never have thought of.
She is combative, irrational, frustrating; she’s also the most exciting of us, the most daring, the reason we are in this predicament in the first place.
I realize I have included the latter in the list of positives about her, and perhaps that says something about me.
She takes up so much space I never think about her as the last member of our group, that there were years when it was simply me, Crow, Starling, and Goldie.
When I remember moments from primary school, she fits into the memories as if they have been physically doctored, and I can imagine what her reaction might have been.
As the years pass and early childhood fades from vivid memory, it becomes easier and easier to believe she has always been with us and there was never a time without her.
All of this to say, I know Cuckoo so well I can see the signs of her about to lose her temper.
She starts off quietly: fingers flexing, then plucking at the bottom of her coat, her mother’s coat; shifting her weight back and forth; pressing her lips firmly together.
All of this an attempt to control herself, but she never wins the battle. She will always spring forth.
Cassandra does not recognize these signs in Cuckoo because they are almost strangers. Cassandra does not know that Cuckoo has kept an eye on her for years, that she knows her when she is at home alone and thinks no one is watching. She doesn’t see the clench of Cuckoo’s square jaw.
“My mother,” Cuckoo tells her. “The woman Hugo murdered when he decided to get behind the wheel intoxicated and drive into her.”
Cassandra’s eyes widen. “That woman was your mother?”
“That woman was everything to me,” Cuckoo snaps. Here is her temper again, the water in her pot is rising and rising. Soon she will boil. “And he killed her. She would have survived if he had stopped. If he had called an ambulance. She’d be here right now.”
When Cuckoo’s mother died, Cuckoo stayed at home for a while.
It was the longest we’d gone without seeing her.
We figured when she came back she’d be devastated, crying all the time, wanting to talk about her mother, but she came back in full Cuckoo style, laughing and joking and being the center of attention.
It was only after the trial verdict, the pathetic sentence Hugo Fletcher got, the way everyone seemed focused on him and not the victim, that I saw her veneer crack.
Just slightly. She seemed to wobble, in entirety.
Her hands shook, her mouth trembled, her voice wavered.
Everything was too high-pitched, too much, too over the top, and if she stopped for a second, her eyes had this look as though she was falling.
And then she went off from school again—and when she returned, it was business as usual.
Cuckoo the comedian, Cuckoo the crazy. A group of cuckoos is, after all, an asylum.
“But Hugo did his time for that,” Cassandra says. “He paid his dues.”
“He got drunk and murdered someone,” Crow says quietly, coming to Cuckoo’s defense. She is surprisingly menacing in her tone, and I am reminded of Crow’s black-and-white thinking, her strong sense of justice. “There is no paying your dues when it comes to something like that.”
“So what if he was drunk?” Cassandra shrugs. “She should have been more careful. From what I remember, she wasn’t wearing any reflective gear. No wonder he didn’t see her.”
The words are so vicious even I gasp from them, but they have a far greater effect on Cuckoo: She charges forward, hand raised, ready to slap Cassandra in the face, and Starling and Crow have to grab her and hold her back.
This doesn’t stop Cuckoo, who rages and struggles against them.
Here is her temper at full force: She is boiling now.
Cassandra watches this reaction with an amused smile, though she backs away to the doorframe, and I cast my gaze across the various items in the room and imagine each of them as my weapon of choice.
I picture myself taking one calmly, stepping forward, and dashing her head in until her brains spill across the floor.
It’s so violent an image I place a hand on my chest to steady my rapidly beating heart.
Guilty, guilty, guilty.
“You think you know it all, don’t you?” Cuckoo yells, still struggling in Crow’s and Starling’s grip.
They have an arm each now, standing slightly in front of her to prevent her moving forward.
“You think we’re Goldie’s innocent little friends who just want her bracelet back and you can control the narrative. Well, you’re wrong.”
No! She’s going to—
“Cuckoo,” I say, desperately, but I am too late.
“Your precious Hugo isn’t swanning around somewhere laying low,” Cuckoo says. “He’s dead. We killed him.”