Mice

34

On Monday, May the twenty-second, with just three weeks before my exams started, I began my intensive revision programme, long marked off on my bedroom wall calendar in a frenzy of red biro crosshatching.

This programme involved getting up at seven in the morning and putting in at least two good hours before Roger came at ten. In the evenings, instead of stopping when Mum got home, I worked from about five through to nine, when I’d finally stop and have a late dinner with her. I’d planned to work over the weekends too, but Mum insisted I have at least one complete day off a week. So I worked all day Saturday and left Sunday free.

Since the majority of the work I had to do was memorizing — dry labour that would require my very best concentration — I decided to move all my books and papers from the dining room and revise upstairs in my bedroom. I figured there’d be fewer distractions — no telephone ringing, no Mum going backwards and forwards looking for the scissors she’d misplaced for the millionth time or click-clicking her biro as she read through her papers in the lounge, no temptation to slip into the kitchen and make myself a coffee or a sandwich.

So I sat upstairs in my bedroom, sweltering in the heatwave that showed no sign of abating, forcing myself to memorize long quotes from Macbeth and page after page of irregular French verbs. Repeating them out loud over and over again with my eyes tightly shut, I learned the exact wording of Boyle’s law and Charles’s law, Ohm’s law and Archimedes’ principle. Working my way through box after box of tissues and gulping down the antihistamines Dr Lyle had given me, I memorized the day, month and year of the Reichstag fire, the invasion of the Ruhr, the Kellogg — Briand pact, the Munich putsch and the march on Rome. While the swallows darted around their nests in the eaves outside my window, I learned lists of statistics on Brazilian coffee production and annual rates of rain forest depletion until I could repeat them without even glancing at my notes.

It was only six weeks — six short weeks — since Mum and I had killed Paul Hannigan, and already I was back to thinking almost exclusively about my exams. It was only occasionally now that my mind strayed from my textbooks and I found myself thinking about the body rotting beneath the rose bushes.

I suppose I’d slowly come round to Mum’s way of thinking in spite of all my doubts, in spite of having seen too many movies where something always happens to trip the guilty up. I suppose I’d finally come to accept that she’d been right all along: we’d got away with it.

If the police hadn’t come to the house by now, then surely they were never going to. After all, they must have found Paul Hannigan’s car — it couldn’t have just sat in the Farmer’s Harvest’s car park week after week without being noticed. And Paul Hannigan must have been reported missing to the police after nearly two months. Somebody must have become concerned about his disappearance in that time. Hadn’t someone been trying to contact him that very first morning? They must have alerted the police by now. .

The only possible conclusion I could come to was that Mum had got it right — the police hadn’t made any link between the disappearance of Paul Hannigan and us, and in all probability they never were going to make any link between the disappearance of Paul Hannigan and us.

Besides, even if the police did come to the house now, they wouldn’t find anything. The kitchen had been scrubbed and disinfected so many times they wouldn’t find the tiniest speck of Paul Hannigan’s blood, not the faintest shadow of a fingerprint; the eight bin bags had gone from the spare room and the place Mum had hidden them was so perfect, so ingenious, that the police would never discover them.

We’d been lucky. We’d been very lucky. We’d killed a man. We’d hacked and beaten him to death on the tiled floor of our kitchen. And we’d got away with it.