Chapter 36
THIRTY-SIX
LIANE
PRESENT – VALERIE’S HOUSE
No self-respecting killer should return to the scene of the crime. But that’s what I do every time I come back to my mother’s house.
As I re-enter the home where I pushed Mum down the stairs, I don’t linger in the specific place where she died.
Instead, I walk right past it and get on with what I came here to do.
The sooner I have sorted, tidied and packed all the things in here, the sooner this house can be sold and then I’ll never have to set foot in it again.
The sooner I’ll have the money from the sale sitting in my bank account.
The sooner mine and Frederik’s lives will become far better than they were when Valerie was alive.
As I get to work in the dining room, where I am sorting through the lifetime of paperwork that my mother amassed and stored in the large cupboard in here, I know this is merely a means to an end.
It might seem like a very boring task, and it is, but it’s still a far simpler task than the one that led me to having to be here today to do this.
The hardest part of this whole plan was always going to be the part where I had to become a murderer.
As I sift through decades of documents that my mother had no need to hang on to, from bank statements to junk mail, I can’t help but think about the day I came to this house and ended my mother’s life.
It was a day that had started like so many others, in that it had started with my husband’s alarm clock waking me up early because we had to go to work.
I’d never been a fan of Frederik and his early starts, his requirement to rise at dawn so he could get to his workplace for another day and avoid being fired by his boss.
Then again, I was hardly a fan of my workplace either.
I’d grown bitter and resentful over the years at hearing the sound of that damn alarm cutting through my dreams, stirring me from my sleep, especially after decades of bad sleep due to raising our two children.
Scott and Joel had grown and moved out, yet still I was forced into awakening at sunrise and drudging through every day in a sleepy fog of fatigue, and it was all because my husband and I had jobs to go to.
I’d long grown weary of working, but with a mortgage still to pay, one son in Australia who often called for extra funds and another son who had a mechanic business that was struggling to keep going, there was no end in sight.
That was even before any potential grandchildren arrived on the scene and squeezed our finances further.
Despite loving the idea of grandchildren one day, and the possibility of taking them out for fun days that involved lots of ice cream and trips to the toy store, I knew it would all be tainted if I was still worrying about money in those golden years.
But how could it not? Both Frederik and I were begrudgingly forced to face the fact that we’d both likely be working into our late sixties before we reached the age for a state pension in the UK, if not beyond.
That meant no time for ourselves other than on weekends, no spontaneous trips or getting to see the world we had missed out on seeing in our youth and, worst of all, many more years of being woken up by alarm clocks.
Neither of us liked it, but what choice did we have?
Frederik accepted our situation with his usual humour.
But I didn’t accept it. I hated it, and I hated it more and more every day.
But perhaps the main reason I hated it was because I knew there was one person who could help us get out of this situation.
It was a person who had already escaped the drudgery of work and was spending her time doing whatever she wanted.
A person who had more money than she needed but was keeping tight control over it until the day that she died.
My mother.
As I throw away more useless pieces of paperwork, I still resent how Mum had so much money yet didn’t share it with her family while she was alive.
Sure, she helped out occasionally, giving cash to her grandkids on their birthdays or at Christmas, or treating Frederik and me to a meal out every now and again.
There was that one time she paid to take us all on holiday too, which was a nice getaway, but only reinforced all my other problems when I came back home to them and returned to work.
Despite the occasional lavish gifts, none of it made an inherently tangible difference to our lives, and it would have been so much better if Mum could have passed on some of her wealth much sooner in a more meaningful way.
Instead of taking us on a simple holiday and giving us an all-too-brief respite from our stresses and strains, she could have gifted me and Frederik all that money to make our day-to-day lives easier permanently.
What my mother failed to see was that beneficiaries don’t always need their inheritance when we’re older because by that time we’ve already been working for decades, raised our families and paid off our mortgages.
We need it earlier, when the kids are young, when the bills are still high and when the pressure of work is weighing us down every day.
Gifting us a sum of money then would have made it all so much easier, not gifting it when we’re old and grey, by which point we don’t have as much time to spend it or many things left to spend it on.
I dropped this hint to my mother on several occasions throughout my thirties and forties, explaining to her how difficult life was for Frederik and me and how we were being squeezed financially from every direction. But all she would do was say the same damn thing.
‘Don’t worry about money. You’ll have plenty of it when I’m gone.’
Yes, I knew that Mum would leave me and my family hundreds of thousands of pounds in her will and yes, I was very grateful for that.
But she just couldn’t see that it would have been far less useful to me at seventy than it would be at fifty.
If my mother ended up living into her nineties, I would already have spent my entire life working, so what good is a bundle of cash then when my best years are behind me?
How about sharing some of it when me and my husband still had each other, our relative youth and our health to enjoy it with?
Mum never saw it that way. ‘You and Frederik will live to a grand old age and there will be plenty of time for you to do all the things you want to do in retirement, just like there is for me now,’ she would say whenever I was moaning to her about my soulless, time-sucking job.
Such a sentiment only made me grow more frustrated as more and more time slipped away, and it overshadowed all the time I was around her.
Visiting her at home, something that felt more like an obligation and a sense of duty to my late father than anything I wanted to do, became more difficult.
It felt like Mum was either totally oblivious to my daily drudgery and desire to escape it or she was fully aware of it and taking some sort of pleasure in it, as if she felt the next generation had to work just as hard as she had for her money.
I told her more than once that the world had changed a lot since she was my age.
Things were a lot more expensive these days, from mortgages to childcare costs to simply filling up your basket at the grocery store, and wages hadn’t risen in line with those costs.
Some of these discussions led to arguments and some of them took place in front of our other family members, which was regrettable, but arguments aren’t always avoidable, are they?
But most of the time, Mum either brushed over my concerns or ignored them completely, sparing us another argument but not helping my predicament in the slightest.
While Mum could ignore it, I couldn’t ignore the growing sense of frustration that was burning in my belly.
It got bigger and bigger, but I didn’t know what to do with it.
Until I woke up in the middle of the night with an idea.
What if I sped up the process of getting my inheritance?
What if my husband and I didn’t have to work for another twenty years before we got to enjoy life?
What if I hastened my mother’s demise?
Once the terrible idea was in my head, it was impossible to shake.
It stayed there, burrowing its way deeper into my brain.
Every time I yawned, or my husband yawned.
Every time our direct debits left our bank account.
Every time one of us had our holiday request denied by our employer.
Every time I got another day older and longed for the alternative life I could be living.
Every alarm clock. Every commute. Every cleaning job. Every sink I scrubbed and every floor I mopped. Every lunch break that went too fast. Every Monday morning that went too slow.
Until it all became too much and I decided the time for thinking about it was over.
The time for action had arrived.
I knew I would have to make it look like an accident. But I also knew that was possible because my mother lived alone and she was in her mid-seventies. Would anybody really think it was strange if she fell down the stairs?
I doubted it.
So I just had to do it.
On the day I did, I arrived at my mother’s house with a simple knock on the door.
The nerves I carried inside myself were concealed by my false smile when Mum answered and said she was surprised to see me.
I was supposed to be at work. I told her I was on my lunch hour.
A simple lie to get closer. Mum believed it.
Why wouldn’t she? She invited me in. Again, why wouldn’t she?
I glanced at the staircase as I entered.
All I had to do was get her to the top of it.
Such a dark thought was offset by reminding myself that my mother had ignored all my pleas or hints for financial help over the years and seemed to take some perverse pleasure in my struggles.
But very soon, the perverse pleasure would be all mine.
‘Sorry, can I just use the bathroom?’ I asked as nonchalantly as I could.
‘Of course, dear,’ Mum said. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’
I went up the stairs and lingered at the top for a moment, composing myself, knowing the time was almost here. But there was still time to change my mind. To back out. To not try and kill my mother.
It would have been easy to alter my plan.
To go back downstairs, have a cup of tea with Mum and then leave as if it was just another day.
But then I thought of all the early mornings I still had ahead of me if I didn’t do this.
All the alarm clocks. All the cleaning. All the bills to be paid.
All the overdraft reminders from my bank whenever my funds dipped slightly too low.
And most importantly, all the life I was missing out on living if everything stayed the same.
Then I called out to my mother.
‘Mum, what’s this smell up here?’
‘What?’ she called back.
‘There’s a strange smell.’
‘Is there?’
I heard Mum leaving the kitchen and approaching the stairs.
‘I’m not sure where it’s coming from,’ I said, knowing that would only entice her to come up here and join in my investigation.
I was proven right, and as Mum came up the stairs, I took a deep breath.
When Mum reached the top of the stairs, I rushed towards her with my arms outstretched and despite her locking eyes with me, I didn’t stop what I was doing.
When Mum fell back down the stairs, I already knew it was too late. I already knew the deed was done and there was no saving her then. The only thing I didn’t know was whether my mother would die in this fall or if I would have to finish her off after it.
As she tumbled down the stairs and let out several cries of pain, I wished I could block the noises out. But it was all over within seconds and, when it was, all was quiet in the house, barring my heavy breathing.
I waited a couple of minutes to make sure she wasn’t moving before I went down to check on her. Her body was twisted and her eyes were closed. There was no pulse. There was no life.
There was nothing standing in my way of inheriting all of her wealth.
I knew I had done it.
What I hadn’t known was that my eldest son had arranged to visit his grandmother that lunchtime too.
It was as I was standing over my mother’s body, feeling a mixture of relief and dread, as well as excitement about my financial future, that Scott knocked on the door.
I saw his shape through the frosted glass and knew it was him.
I also knew he would have seen my car parked outside and I realised I couldn’t just hide in here in the hope that he would go away.
I was going to have to let him in and that meant I was going to have to lie to him.
So that’s what I did.
Luckily for me, a son will always trust their mother.