Mice

35

It was Saturday the twenty-seventh of May. I got up at seven as my revision timetable dictated, put on my dressing gown and slipped out of my room, intending to make a quick coffee before starting work. I paused at Mum’s bedroom door and listened. I could hear her heavy regular breathing and smiled. I knew how precious every second’s sleep was to her.

I was coming downstairs trying not to make any noise and had just, with great difficulty, avoided stepping on the treacherous fourth step, when I saw it.

A white rectangle lay on the mat by the front door.

I knew at once it was something to be afraid of. The postman never came that early. It had been handdelivered.

I picked it up and saw the ugly grease smear (butter?) where a thick thumb had pressed the flap down.

I turned it over. The face was blank. I hurriedly tore it open.

Inside was a small scrap of lined paper ripped out of a secretary’s notepad. Halfway down the page was a message printed in block capitals with a dying biro. It read simply: I KNOW WHAT YOU DID.

I KNOW YOU KILLED HIM.

I WANT £20,000 OR I GO TO THE POLICE.

DON’T LEAVE THE HOUSE.

I WILL CALL TODAY.

I ran straight back upstairs and woke Mum.

Less than five minutes later Mum was sitting at the kitchen table in yesterday’s work blouse, a pair of jeans and the brown boots she wore for walks in the countryside. She gnawed at her bottom lip and stared fixedly at the cheap, translucent piece of paper. The bags under her eyes were starkly etched on her face that morning, like the outward manifestations of a sick soul. She was brooding, sullen, exuding a bruised bitterness, her hair a frazzle of knots. She hadn’t brushed her teeth and I could smell last night’s wine on her breath. She didn’t take her eyes off the letter for a second, not even as she reached for her coffee mug, brought it to her lips and sipped from the sticky rim.

I was still in my pyjamas and dressing gown, too numbed by the shock of the letter to go up and get dressed. I’d long feared that our fragile peace would come to a sudden end one day, but I’d always imagined the authoritative knock at the front door (polite but not going to be denied entry), the uniformed officers with their radios crackling, ‘smiles’ that were merely the faintest twitches of thin, unfriendly lips. I’d never imagined for one minute that it would end like this — a blackmailer’s grubby note stuffed through our letterbox.

While Mum read the letter over and over again, I racked my brains trying to figure out who the blackmailer could be.

I remembered the farmer who’d driven past that morning when we were digging the grave in the oval rose bed and the body of Paul Hannigan was lying face-down in the grass beside us. Mum had always said he couldn’t have seen what we were doing at that distance — but what if she’d been wrong? What if the farmer had seen exactly what we were doing that morning and now, after six weeks of weighing up his options, had decided to try to make some money out of it?

Four-wheel-drive Man was another distinct possibility. He’d looked every bit the soap-opera villain with that bald head and sinister goatee, and we’d definitely aroused his suspicions that night in the car park. Maybe he’d smelled a money-making opportunity and followed our taxi all the way back to Honeysuckle Cottage. If he’d discovered that the car we’d left in the car park belonged to Paul Hannigan and that Paul Hannigan was now missing, maybe he’d been able to piece together everything that had happened?

Or was it someone closer to home? Had I somehow given the game away to Roger the morning after the killing, in spite of my best efforts to behave normally? Had he seen the bloodstain on the back door? He was extraordinarily sharp, and I knew he was short of money; that was why he was giving me home tuition after all. But the cheap paper, the grubby thumb print, the letter shoved through the letterbox in the early hours? None of it seemed to bear any relation to the fastidious academic I knew. Then again, if there really was no such thing as ‘character’ (and Roger had been very excited by that idea), it could just as easily have been him as anyone else.

‘Who do you think it is, Mum?’

‘I don’t know, Shelley,’ she said distractedly, still not taking her eyes off the blackmailer’s note. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you think it could be Roger?’

‘No!’ she snorted with a dismissive shake of her head. ‘It’s not Roger. It’s definitely not Roger. We’re dealing with a criminal here, a habitual criminal.’

‘What about Four-wheel-drive Man then? You thought he looked like a criminal — we both did.’

Mum considered this suggestion more seriously. ‘I suppose so,’ she said without conviction, ‘but I still can’t see how he could have found out. Only you and I know what happened here that night.’

Her attention was drawn back to the letter as if it possessed a magnetism she was powerless to resist.

‘Anyway,’ she said almost as an afterthought, ‘we’ll know soon enough.’

I must have looked blank, because she went on, ‘The letter says I will call today. Whoever it is, they’re coming here — to the house — today.’

I imagined Four-wheel-drive Man swaggering arrogantly around the kitchen in his black leather car coat, lounging in one of the kitchen chairs, chewing gum and grinning at us menacingly, marking each and every demand he made with a boorish slave-drum beat of his fist on the table. I shivered with revulsion as if I’d turned over a brick in the garden and disturbed a squirming knot of earwigs.

‘What are we going to do?’

Mum folded her arms tightly across her chest as if she was suddenly cold.

‘There’s not much we can do, Shelley. If the blackmailer goes to the police, they’ll have to investigate the allegations. They’ll come here looking for a body, they’ll have search warrants, sniffer dogs. I think it’ll all be over for us then. .’

I could see the dogs digging frantically at the loose soil of the rose bed, uncovering a thumb as white as a new bulb.

Mum turned her attention back to the note and suddenly screwed it up in a spasm of anger. ‘I can’t understand it! How could anyone have found out? We’ve been so careful! What’s given us away? And why now — after nearly two months have gone by?’

She grimaced as she drained the dregs of her coffee and ran her hand agitatedly through her ragged hair.

‘Do you want a refill?’

She nodded and held out her cup. As I filled it, I saw how violently it trembled in her hand.

‘Is it really all over then?’ I asked in dazed disbelief.

Mum flattened the note with the palm of her hand on the kitchen table and considered it yet again. ‘I think we’re trapped, Shelley.’

Trapped. I was struck that she’d used that word. We were still mice after all, mice caught in the spring of the metal trap, our little matchstick necks cleanly snapped in two.

‘Isn’t there anything we can do?’

She covered her face with her hands and dragged them down until they were pressed together at the point of her chin as if in prayer. ‘Not that I can see, Shelley. Not that I can see. We’ve got very few options open to us.’

I thought about all we’d been through to avoid detection — burying Paul Hannigan’s body in the oval rose bed, driving to town in the burglar’s battered turquoise car, the terrifying run-in we’d had with Four-wheel-drive Man, Mum’s late-night journey into the national park to dump the bin bags in the abandoned mine shaft. Had all that been for nothing? Were we going to be defeated now, not by brilliant detective work, but by some loathsome money-grubbing blackmailer?

‘What options do we have?’ I asked, the pitch of my voice rising sharply.

Mum turned her elegant, exhausted face towards me. She was so tired that she was hardly able to keep her eyes open when shafts of sunlight managed to break through the morning clouds and fill the kitchen with bright spring sunshine.

‘We can go to the police and confess everything before the blackmailer gets here,’ she said. ‘Whatever else, it’ll be better that the police hear it from us first. A confession — even at this late stage — could still help us in court when it comes to sentencing.’

I saw the ghostly white tent erected over the oval rose bed, the scrum of journalists on the gravel, the back seat of the police car, its black upholstery hot to the touch. And what would come after that? Hours of questioning at the police station, the humiliation of mug shots, fingerprinting. Then, after months of miserable waiting, the trial. Standing in the dock on trembling legs while the prosecuting barrister unleashed the unanswerable question: ‘If you really thought you’d done nothing wrong, Miss Rivers, if you really thought you’d been acting in self-defence at all times, why did you bury Mr Hannigan’s corpse in the garden of Honeysuckle Cottage?’

If prison had been a real possibility the night we’d killed Paul Hannigan, it was surely inevitable now. Medieval horror in the twenty-first century. My brilliant career diverted into a siding to rot neglected for God knows how many years. Forced to share my most intimate space with girls more savage, more vicious than Teresa Watson and Emma Townley knew how to be. I knew I wouldn’t be able to survive it. I wouldn’t be able to bear the brutality, the philistinism, the filth. I knew I’d end up taking my own life. .

‘Isn’t there anything else?’ I asked, struggling for breath as if the noose were already tightening around my neck. ‘Isn’t there anything else we can do?’

Mum shrugged her shoulders helplessly. ‘We can pay the twenty thousand pounds,’ she said, but in a way that made it sound more like a question than a statement.

‘But we don’t have twenty thousand pounds,’ I groaned. ‘That’s more than your salary for a whole year. It would take forever to find that amount of money.’

‘I could get it, Shelley,’ she said quietly.

‘How?’

‘I could borrow against the value of the house. I could take out a mortgage.’

The thought of Mum paying all that money to the blackmailer made me feel physically sick. She worked hard enough and went without enough as it was. The thought of her carrying the extra burden of the blackmailer on her back was just too horrible to countenance. And it was naive to think this would be the blackmailer’s only demand for money. He’d keep coming back for more and more and more. We’d have to live the rest of our lives with this disgusting parasite feeding on us at will. It wouldn’t be any kind of life at all. It would be the most miserable servitude imaginable. There’d never be any closure to the traumatic events of April the eleventh. It was a wound the blackmailer would pick open again every time it began to heal.

‘It’ll never stop, Mum,’ I said. ‘Once we give him money he’ll just keep coming back for more.’

‘I know, Shelley, I know.’

A stupid thought came into my mind and I gave it voice without thinking. ‘What about Dad? Would Dad give us the money?’

Mum turned a face full of bitterness and hurt towards me.

‘I’d never ask him!’ she hissed. It was clear she would tolerate no further discussion.

I felt my skin prickle with anger. She was dismissing Dad with such cold finality that it was as if he were dead. But he wasn’t dead to me. I struggled to swallow the words I wanted to shout at her. It was the wrong time, the wrong place, to have this argument.

There was a long silence between us. Mum eyed the blackmailer’s note obsessively, as though still convinced the answer lay somewhere in those lines of biro block capitals.

‘So is that it?’ I said eventually, unable to believe that our road had run out so suddenly, so hopelessly.

Mum was silent. She chewed at her bottom lip and played with the note, folding it into a thin strip and snaking it between the fingers of her right hand. She studiously avoided my eyes.

I wanted to scream at her at the top of my voice. Is that it? Is that the best that your razor-sharp intellect can come up with? Is that the best that the super-brain, the woman-who-can-solve-any-problem can do?

I glared at her with contempt as she sagged listlessly at the kitchen table, hardly able to keep her eyes open because she’d barely slept, because she’d drunk too much wine again the night before. If she hadn’t been so weak, if she hadn’t started to fall apart after we’d killed Paul Hannigan, she wouldn’t have been such a wreck that morning, she’d have been able to think of a way out of the mess we were in! If she hadn’t been so weak, maybe Dad would still be here to protect us! If she hadn’t been so weak, maybe I wouldn’t have been such a mouse — maybe I would have been able to stand up to the girls concerned and we’d never have found ourselves in this situation!

The flood of anger I felt towards Mum also dragged with it the sour realization that in spite of my sixteen years, I still looked to her to act like a mother and keep me safe; I still looked to her to perform a maternal miracle that would dispel this danger, that would chase away the wolf circling our door. And I felt betrayed when I realized that there was going to be no maternal magic today, no miracle in the kitchen — just the too-bright sunlight and the silence, occasionally broken by a flurry of soft, feathered bodies in the eaves.

After a long, long time Mum spoke again. ‘There is another way, Shelley.’

‘What?’ I grunted sullenly, expecting no more than some pathetic straw to clutch at. ‘What, for God’s sake? What?’

Mum let the blackmailer’s note drop from her fingers onto the table and looked deep into my eyes, her face as ghastly as an alabaster death mask.

‘We kill him, Shelley,’ she said in barely more than a whisper. ‘When he comes here today, we kill him.’