I push through the back door and hear the frame fracture as he swings the poker sideways into it, missing me by a hair. The coolness of the outside wakes me immediately, and I run into the curtain of mist without looking back, hoping he can hear my footsteps. He mustn’t lose me. If he does, then he will just go back to the house and wait for the mist to clear. I will collapse on the clifftop if I’m lucky, maybe ten, fifteen minutes from now. He will drag me back before nightfall. So he has to be able to see me. He has to be close.
I turn around, see him struggling with the poker, which is embedded in the plaster. He finally jerks it free and turns, squinting into the gloom. I move, and he spots me, lurching forward, face twisted into a sneer.
‘Marco!’ I call him and he walks forward, slashing at the fog with the poker, the whicking sound it makes flat and horrible. His breathing is ragged, focused. I call him again, a little ahead of him, and to my shock and surprise he runs, almost grabs me, appearing out of the grey like a phantom. I pitch at the last minute, turning sharply, the glass grinding into my palm, my throat tight. All the sounds are like underwater, seven minutes, maybe less, and I will be so unsteady I will need to hide. I stumble along the cliff path, trying to be careful, trying to be fast. I hear him behind me, clumsy, spitting, and the whick, whick, whick of the poker as though he might get lucky.
‘Marco!’
I have moved a little to the right, a little too far from the path, and now I realise I am dangerously close to the edge. I try to move further along and I see him, shadowy and bent over, coming towards me when I have nowhere to back in to. Behind me, the drop and the Atlantic. I can hear the deep booming of the waves in the caves below. For a moment my world balloons horribly, throwing me off balance.
‘Marco!’
He spins on his heel, listening. That was not my voice. Was it? It was another woman.
‘Marco!’
Now it is slightly behind us, back the way we have come. Someone with a thin, lonely voice calling to him.
‘Marco! Over here!’
He staggers off and slowly, I follow. We are both responding to her words, but I know something he doesn’t. The direction of her voice is where the cliff ends. I wonder if Marco knows that. I hope not. Whick. Whick.
‘High-handed little bitch,’ he growls.
Whick, whick.
Then, again, ‘Marco!’
Laughing, merry. It infuriates him. He moves faster, heading down the slope where the wild grass and gorse grow thickest. I can just see him there in the gloom but I daren’t go any further. I know how deep that drop is.
‘Marc-oh.’ He has become a thin sketch, a shadow figure. I cup my hands together and blow on them. It is very cold up here and the light is bad. Marco has stopped moving, seems suddenly unsure of himself. Perhaps he can hear the sea just below him, sense that vast emptiness. If the fall doesn’t kill you the cold will. Good. I hope it is miserable and lingering. There is someone else there too, moving towards him. Another figure in the dark. She is very close to him now, and he sees her. I hear his voice just barely. I think he is saying, ‘Not you, not you’, and then he moves as if to run, pinwheels his arms as the ground gives way, crumbling. I am glad I do not see his face as he falls.
Epilogue
The sky is overcast, threatening rain. Although it is not yet late afternoon the day is darkening, and many of the cars already have their headlights on. I am walking towards Abney Park Cemetery near Stoke Newington. It’s where Carmel grew up and where we used to come when we were teenage Goths, drinking snakebite and black and smoking Embassy down to the filters. She was cremated, but we planted a tree here, her mother and I. It’s a rowan tree, said to protect against evil.
I pass someone, and they do a double take. It happens a lot, even now, although it’s nothing to do with Marigold! anymore. It’s the story they printed in the papers. Afterwards.
It is nearly two years since Marco went missing. A patch of his blood was found very close to the cliff edge and less than a foot away they found one of his shoes. Italian, hand-stitched leather. What a waste.
By the time I got back to the cottage that day I could barely stand. My dress was trailing on the ground behind me, my wig lost, my nails split and torn. As I pushed open the back door I saw a figure in the kitchen and staggered, sure it was somehow Marco, with those pills and a cigarette and that poker in his hand, whick, whick.
But it wasn’t. It was Frankie. He was leaning on the table, his face grey. When he saw me his jaw fell open and his hands moved as if to catch me.
‘I thought you were dead,’ I told him.
‘Stella. Oh my God. Come here.’
I started to walk towards him, but I didn’t make it. I went down, down.
A list of my injuries as reported in the papers: broken nose, dislocated collarbone, soft tissue damage, various abrasions. The level of barbiturates in my system was exaggerated, but not by much. Attempted suicide, the papers said, just like her mother. Tragic.
Carmel’s death was recorded as blunt force trauma. Marco had felled her like a tree, denting the smooth bone of her skull in the process. My wonderful friend, who had lain in a pool of tacky blood as I’d placed her hand in my lap and waited for the police to arrive. They’d found his fingerprints on the doorstop along with traces of Carmel’s blood and strands of her hair.
I spent nine days in hospital and several hours under police interrogation. It was only Alice giving evidence against Marco which means I am no longer under suspicion for murder. Alice calls me now and then. Tells me she thinks of me often. Sometimes we meet for coffee. It is good to have a friend again.
Frankie had a punctured lung and at least two broken ribs, a fractured jaw and elbow as well as scrapes and injuries to the side which bore the brunt of the impact. Later he would tell me that Marco accelerated almost immediately after he got in the car, before he could put on his seatbelt. He still walks with a limp, leaning heavily on his left side. The car almost overturned up the bank before hitting the tree. In the boot of the car police found a hunting knife, cable ties and rope, a bottle of ether and wads of gauze. The knife had an eight-inch blade and, I was told later, was used for gutting deer. Any idea why Marco would have these in the car, they asked me. No, I said. No idea.
Except, of course, I did. I’d been so sure he was going to keep me prisoner, that he wanted to preserve me like a little doll, that it hadn’t occurred to me that he was going to kill me. High-handed bitch, he’d called me, and I still thought he’d wanted me to live. A man who, as a boy, had sent those strange little packages to a ten-year-old girl: crushed-out cigarettes, nail clippings, tissues still gummy with semen. All that time. All that time. Talk about a life sentence.
Doctor Wilson was arrested only days later at his home for three counts of practising medicine without a licence; two counts of practice of gynaecological examination without a licence; three counts of forgery; two counts of theft; and three counts of fraudulent use of personal identification information. ‘I deal with a lot of addicts, Stella,’ he’d told me, and in a way I suppose that was true, wasn’t it? He’d been a dealer of sorts. In the cupboard beneath his desk was found a large quantity of opioids and stimulants, mainly morphine. He liked to dabble, and he’s known to have spiked a number of his patients, mostly young women. I’m hoping they too will testify.