Pop Goes the Weasel

89

It was hopeless. The police had moved the press pack back, reminded them of their responsibilities, but as soon as they departed, it started up again. The hammering on the door, the questions through the letterbox. A few had tried their hand round the back, clambering over the garden fence and rattling the back door. Peering in through the conservatory window like ghouls.

Robert and his parents now lived in perpetual darkness on the first floor. At first they thought they would be out of sight up here, but then they saw a photographer hanging out of a first-floor window across the road and they’d pulled the curtains firmly shut. Now they behaved like creatures of the night, huddling in the dark, eating food from tins and packets – existing rather than living.

At first, Robert had steered clear of the internet, didn’t want to go there. But when it’s your only window on the world, it’s hard to hold out. And once on it, he couldn’t resist. The national papers had gone to town, bringing Marianne the bogey woman back to life in all her glory. He didn’t want his parents to see, knew it would hurt them, so locked away in his bedroom he read and read. Climbing inside his mother. He was surprised to feel a modicum of sympathy for her – she had clearly suffered terrible abuse and neglect – but her crimes made for grim reading. She had obviously been intelligent – more intelligent than him? – but not intelligent enough to pull herself back from the brink. Her life had ended in disgusting and depressing fashion. According to the National Enquirer website, the bullet had penetrated her heart and she had bled to death in her sister’s arms. In the aftermath, Helen’s life had been exposed and now it was his turn. Every failed exam, every minor indiscretion, every brush with the law had been seized on by the press. They wanted to portray him as a loser, a drifter, violent, a chip off the old block. A bad seed. He had been so enraged by the character assassination visited on himself and his parents that when Helen Grace texted him with a message of support, he’d replied tersely and unpleasantly. Maybe the journalists could intercept their messages or maybe not. He didn’t care.

Something had to be done. That much was clear. His parents were suffering terribly, unable to talk to or see their friends, tainted by association with him. Robert knew he had to draw the pack off, give them something else to think about. He owed that to the couple who had raised him since birth.

He toyed with the bandage that had recently swathed his injured arm, wrapping it over and over in his hands. A plan was forming in his mind. It was desperate and it meant the end of everything, but what else could he do? He was backed into a corner and now there was nowhere to run.