William is standing very still, his expression barely changed. I lift my hand to my jaw and it comes away smeared with blood.
‘Next time it’ll be the hammer,’ he says.
I wipe my blood-smeared palm on my jeans as William nods for me to follow him. After only a second’s thought I do so. I don’t know what else to do.
Samantha – Now
The pain begins at the crown of my head and travels sluggishly down my neck and the rack of my spine, bloody and feverish. My head is filled with a high-pitched note, the long, singular tone of tinnitus. Alex walks through the doorway, looking oddly incongruous wheeling an old-fashioned hostess trolley. On it is the little olive teapot, a cup, a saucer and a bowl of sparkling white sugar lumps. He doesn’t look up at me and he speaks only one word to his mother: ‘Tea?’
She nods briskly, and then, horribly, reaches out and strokes her fingers down the side of his face. ‘I forgive you, Alex,’ she says mildly. ‘For all your dirty little sins. You can’t hide anything from your mother.’
‘Mum, I never – I would never—’
‘Ah-ah,’ she says softly, and slaps him gently on the face. It’s a tap, a reprimand for a child. It’s sickening. ‘No more lying. You know what you did. You know what you are.’
He leans over and kisses her softly on her temple, the good side of her head, the one without the ugly snarling wound stitched across it.
She takes the tea from him with a slow, careful smile and says, ‘You always were the apple of my eye, Alex Thorn.’
She looks over at me, smiling that same gentle smile, telling me about the tea Alex makes especially for her, using the flowers from the garden. Rosebud and chamomile, dandelion, jasmine and chrysanthemum. I let her voice fade into the background. I try not to think about Frances, about where she is and what may happen to her. I wish I could speak to her, or warn her. She’s with a killer. If only I could reach my phone. Or my knife.
Alex says something and Mimi laughs. It’s a nice sound, like the scales on a flute. I close my eyes dreamily. An old friend of mine, Theresa, once hand-stitched me a sampler, which I’d framed and hung over my bed. One word, beautifully cross-stitched in brightly coloured threads: FUCK. When I close my eyes I can see it imprinted over and over on my eyelids in glorious technicolour and shimmering neon. It’s a clarion call. FUCK. It’s an urgency I feel running through the marrow of my bones like a voltage with a high-pitched hum. It’s an intensity that demands to be felt through the agony of my poor, throbbing head.
My eyes snap open.
‘You’ve gone very pale, Samantha. I do hope you’re not going to pass out.’
‘I think she’s fractured her skull, Mum.’
‘Nonsense. You’ve no idea how hard it is to break bone with a hammer. Edward used to do it all the time for his bonemeal. He once struck a pork knuckle seven times and the bloody thing barely dented the surface. Took a mallet to it in the end. Talk about using a sledgehammer to crack a nut!’ Again she laughs, but her face doesn’t look right. It’s her eyes, maybe. She takes another sip of tea, lifting her hand to point at me. ‘Take the scarf out of her mouth, Alex, would you? She looks like she’s got something to say.’
He does so gingerly.
I let the words fall from my mouth with a snap. ‘Rosebud.’
‘I’m sorry?’
That voice I heard on the phone, the call I got the other day where I heard Edie saying ‘nosebleed’. Just because you recognised the voice, that sane, reasonable person in my head speaks up, doesn’t mean it was Edie.
Nosebleed.
‘On the phone. That was the word. Not nosebleed. Rosebud. It’s what’s in your tea.’ I look from Alex to Mimi and realise I am smiling. ‘It was Frances’s voice I recognised. Not Edie. God. I was so sure.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t quite—’
‘The phone calls to my house. This is where they’ve been coming from, isn’t it? It was Frances I heard talking, not Edie. Only the phone wasn’t hung up quite quickly enough, was it? I heard her. I heard her saying “rosebud”.’ I nod towards the phone beside the bed. ‘I barely use my landline any more. I keep it because it was the only phone number Edie had for me. Other than sales calls, hers were the only ones I got. But it wasn’t her, was it?’ I look right at Mimi. ‘Your son is a killer.’
She looks at me and to my surprise she yawns, pressing the back of her hand against her mouth. Still, her eyes settle on me, avaricious. ‘Oh, really? Which one? A moment ago you thought my Edward had killed Edie. It must be very tiring to be inside your head. So go on then. Whodunnit? Poor old Steady Eddie? Alex, my plump little black sheep? We all know he’s got it in him. Look at what he did to his own mother.’
‘You know who I mean.’
‘William? You can’t prove that.’
‘He got her pregnant and he got scared.’ I’m thinking more clearly now, the pain a distant drum. Some part of me notices the way Mimi’s head seems to loll on her neck, but I don’t grasp it, not then. ‘And you, your marriage was in trouble, wasn’t it? You were having counselling. Edward told me about it.’
She laughs, but the edges of the sound are blurry. Something’s wrong. ‘Edward and I? Counselling? You’ll believe any old rubbish, won’t you? I’m afraid that was a lie, Samantha. The car wasn’t there because we were having marriage counselling. The car was there because I’d driven William to the bloody youth club where he met your slut daughter. But my wonderful husband, my clever, honest Edward, he couldn’t live with it. With the guilt. Especially after you showed up on Halloween. Another death on your conscience. How does that feel?’ Mimi yawns again, her hand covering her mouth.
Slowly, a realisation is building in me. ‘Edward drove off the bridge because he knew his son had killed Edie and he couldn’t live with it.’
‘Oh, please. My boy isn’t capable of such violence. Believe me, I know. I raised him right.’ She gives me an arch look, as if to say You wouldn’t know about that, but I’m already gone, the impact of it hitting me with a jolt, a fiery obliteration that turns my insides liquid.
‘Edie isn’t gone. She isn’t missing. She isn’t unaccounted for. She’s dead. And William killed her.’
Mimi suddenly yawns again, this time so long it seems her mouth is coming unhinged at the jaw. When she looks back at me her eyes are heavy-looking, doleful. I lift my chin defiantly and stare right back at her.
The teacup she is holding rattles against the saucer. ‘You think a seventeen-year-old boy was able to murder your wilfully violent daughter in the dark and the cold, just feet away from a group of other people, leave no evidence and dispose of the body by himself? Is that the conclusion you’ve come to? I must say, I’m disappointed.’
She laughs uncomfortably but I notice something strange. Her face is growing slack: mouth lifted in a half-smile, eyelids drooping sadly. The hand holding the tea cup falls on to her chest and the empty cup rolls down the slope of her body into her lap.
‘You,’ I say, flooded with a cold and horrifying knowledge. ‘You helped him. Not Edward, not Peter Liverly. You. Why?’