The Mammoth Book Of Best British Crime, Volume 8

The Same as She Always Was Keith McCarthy

I am the same that I always was.

I am the same that I always was.

Acts do not change us. Acts spring from what we are, and what we believe, and perhaps most important of all, what we desire. I am still the Gilly I was on the first day I met Greg, as I was on the day that he left me, as I was on the day that the police came to call.

It was Greg that changed not me, Greg who altered the bargain, who changed the rules, who ripped up the contract. Greg who stole my life from me without even realizing it.

I still love Greg and I always will, until the day I die.

The rain comes suddenly but not unexpectedly. When Greg and Gilly set out on their walk from the pub in the Forest of Dean where they are staying for the weekend, the wind was blustering and clouds, fluffy and bright, moved briskly before it, casting huge, travelling shadows on the land around them. He said to her then that he thought it would rain and she said, “Maybe, but let’s go anyway.”

Gilly loves walking. When Greg first met her, eleven years ago, it was on a walk, one for a breast cancer charity, because her mother had died of the disease and because his mother had had a cancerous lump but was cured. She has vividly red hair and freckles and Greg has loved her from the first moment he saw her.

“We should take waterproofs.”

“Why?” she asks. “If there’s a shower, we’ll find some shelter somewhere; wait for it to stop.”

“If it does stop.”

She laughs. “So what if it doesn’t? We’ve nowhere else to go, nothing to be late for.”

And so they set out, walking through the lush green valley, beside dry stonewalls, past pretty cottages and copses and fields of potatoes, corn and grass. They have not been here since their honeymoon and the smells, the sights, the tastes bring back that time, reminding them of just how much they need the relaxation and respite from the stresses of their oh-so-busy lives.

Especially now.

A marriage is a pact. Everyone knows that, don’t they? And a pact involves sharing and pooling, giving and taking, so that something is created, something that exists that had no existence before. Gestalt. A third entity that is part man, part woman, but most important of all, part neither of them. A creation that is every bit as real as a work of art, or an invention...

Or a child.

They have come because they need to escape their troubles. They know that a week in the Forest of Dean will be only a temporary respite but they also hope that it will allow them to see each other anew, to regain something that they both know (without saying as much) they have lost and, more importantly, that their relationship has lost.

Recent times have been hard.

Greg’s IT consultancy has been going through a difficult phase and he has had to lay off all but one of the eight people he once employed; he has hopes to gain a new contract from a national retail distribution company but fears that he is too close to the event horizon of financial breakdown, the point beyond which no business returns.

And Gilly...

Poor Gilly has just terminated a pregnancy. She is thirty-eight now and she fears that she has made the wrong decision.

Who can blame her?

Three miscarriages preceded this pregnancy, one of which was at eighteen weeks and therefore the worst; she had dared then to hope that she might gain her prize.

The only prize that she has ever really wanted.

When did I realize that a child was all I ever desired?

How odd it feels, to have longed for something for so long, yet not to have known it, not until recently. When I was young, I played with my dolls and teddies, yet I did not consciously appreciate that this was all that I wanted; when I was a teenager, I had boyfriends but not, I am sure, because I saw them as a means to motherhood. Yet now I know that that was precisely my reasoning.

It frightens me, this recognition that I am driven, that I always have been driven, that perhaps all my decisions in life were guided by an imperative over which I have had no control, that was wired into me, whether by fate, or blind chance.

Or God.

After forty-five minutes, when they have just stopped to admire two ponies in a field, he asks her, “Are you all right?”

She looks up at him and smiles. “Oh, yes.”

This starts off fine but ends with a catch in her throat. She looks quickly away, back to the ponies.

“Hey,” he says gently, tapping her on the shoulder.

A nod. Shoulders hunched and a nod that is tensely sprung. She does not look at him.

“Gilly.”

He puts his arm around her shoulders, grasps the soft blue cashmere, squeezes them gently, lowers his face to be level with hers. Another quick nod but this time with a sniff; still no words.

The ponies are skittish, kicking and suddenly galloping in short spurts. Perhaps they sense the coming rain.

Greg says quietly, in her ear, “You did the right thing.”

For a moment, she continues to stare fixedly at the ponies but the sniffs come more and more quickly until she suddenly begins to cry continuously. Another squeeze of her shoulders and she turns to him and buries her face in his thick, woollen jumper; she smells his eau de cologne, the one that she gave him for their first Christmas and that he still says that he likes.

“We couldn’t have coped.” He is so calm, so reassuring, so certain.

“But...”

“We both agreed, didn’t we? Do you remember, Gilly? How we agreed?”

Face still buried in his sweater, still trying to burrow into him, to hide from her grief, she nods slowly and only after hesitation. He is holding her tightly but she likes this, draws comfort from it. He says, “You’re not strong enough on your own. You would have needed me, and at this moment, with things so difficult, I couldn’t have given you the support and got the business going again.”

There is no nod this time. She withdraws slightly, looks up into his face where she has always found so much security. “I didn’t realize that it would be so horrible.”

He holds her face in his hands, smears tears with his thumbs. “I know, I know,” he whispers although she wonders just how he can know. “In a few years, when we can more easily afford it, when we’re more established.”

“But I’m getting old. What if I can’t have any more?”

A laugh, one that tells her she is being silly, that of course she will have more.

“You will,” he says. There is something of a command about this but it is couched in the softest, most gentle of tones. “These days, no one is too old.”

It is flippant, almost insulting. The easy response to the unimportant fears of a subordinate.

“I knew that it wouldn’t be easy, but I didn’t think it would be this hard...”

For a moment he does not speak, then, “You’re too close to it, Gilly. It was only a month and a half ago. By the time Christmas comes, you’ll be able to think logically. You’ll see then that it was all for the best.”

And this makes her realize that he does not understand at all, that he had thought it was easy, that he still thinks it is. A light anaesthetic, a short sleep and — hey presto! — no more problem.

Yet six weeks on, she still feels dirty, filled with sin, tainted by guilt.

She says, “I hope so.” But she is thinking through his words, his tone, the thoughts that must lie behind them.

A smile and what he presumably believes is a warm laugh as he replies, “You’ll get over it, Gilly. This will help. You’ll see.”

And then he kisses her and holds her again for a long, long time.

“Okay?” he asks.

She says that, yes, she is, because she can see that this is what he wants her to say.

They continue on their walk.

Greg rescued me.

That sounds like an overstatement — hyperbole, I believe they call it — but that is what I always believed.

My mother had died after a long illness and I thought that I was coping by being busy and by helping Dad come to terms with the situation, and by jumping into charity. Except that I wasn’t. I was fading, day by day, good deed by good deed, and I was completely ignorant of it all.

Greg gave me back a skyline, something to aim for, a concept that there was an outside world as well as the place where I lived.

I just wish that I thought that he knew what he was doing.

I’m afraid, you see, that he did not perform any of his chivalrous acts consciously, that he had always been blithely unaware — if not uncaring — of what he did.

Which is fine, I thought at first.

After all, most good in this world is done unconsciously, as an unintended byproduct of acts performed for different, perhaps selfish, reasons.

Oh, dear.

I wish I hadn’t said that.

They are staying in an old coaching inn. The bed is fairly comfortable although Greg complains that the mattress is too soft and giving him backache.

They have not made love for six months.

The meals are hearty, with far too much on the plate; the puddings are straight out of Gilly’s childhood, gorgeous, fat-filled sweetnesses that steam and beckon the diner with siren sighs.

Gilly is not really hungry.

It is a friendly pub, with a husky, deep-voiced landlady and low beams and the scents of scenes still remembered.

Gilly suspects that Greg is having an affair.

The first drops come after two hours. They are large drops, cold but not startlingly so. Greg looks up into the sky, his prominent nose and Adam’s apple silhouetted against the sky in which the clouds are now grey but still bright. He looks at Gilly. She has fully recovered, is back to a young, professional woman on a short break.

“I think it’s going to be heavy,” he says. There have been occasional, mild flurries of rain, but this is different; the wind has got up and there is a slight chilled dampness around them.

They are in the middle of a small hump-backed bridge that crosses a fast-running stream that cuts deeply into a gully. Greg is leading because Greg always leads and Gilly is happy with that. She loves him, after all.

She looks around, points. “There’s an old cottage over there. Why don’t we shelter there?” It is some distance away, through some overgrown woods; it looks deserted, almost a ruin, but the roof appears to be intact.

He nods, holds out his hand for her, then they run together over the bridge and to their right, off the single-track road and into the woods. The rain becomes harder, the noise of its attack louder. By the time they reach the cottage, it is surprisingly torrential and they are very, very wet.

How did I know that he no longer loved me?

This question torments me.

If I could answer it, I would be so much happier, so much more contented, but contentment is a rare commodity, worth killing for perhaps. I would be happy because then I would be certain in my mind, and uncertainty is killing me.

But it is not to be. Certainty is second only to contentment in scarcity.

Yet, without a doubt, I knew that he had a lover.

It was like something seen out of the corner of my eye, a dancing spectre that teased me by leaping away as I turned my head to catch it.

But that did not mean that it does not exist.

The knowledge was there in his smile, his kiss, his kindnesses.

All I lacked was proof.

But I still loved him. I will always love him. He had his faults but so do I. I thought to learn to live with it.

Because I love him.

The cottage had once been whitewashed, was now flaking. The faded blue front door is half off its hinges, the windows without glass. There are the remains of a garden with a path in front of it.

There is even a well.

Breathless from the exertion, Greg says, “The gingerbread’s fallen off.”

Gilly laughs. “I hope the witch has gone, too.”

Greg looks around. There is no hallway and they are standing in the sitting room. There is no furniture and leaves are piled in the corners. The ceiling is low and beams cross it.

“It would have been a nice house, once.”

“I guess.”

He is taking every detail in, examining it, almost as an architect might, seeing possibilities in the decay. “We could live here,” he says but he does not say it loudly, although she hears it.

“I couldn’t.”

He looks around and the thing that she sees is a good-humoured smile. “It’s wonderful! What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s small and pokey and probably subsiding and almost certainly damp. And it’s nowhere near anywhere.”

He laughs. “But it’s charming, too.”

“I don’t want to live in charming, Greg. I want to live in convenient, warm, spacious and cheap.”

A shrug of the shoulders. “You can’t have everything.”

“And what about work, Greg? We’re in the middle of nowhere here.”

“You know that I can do most things remotely. If I arranged matters properly, I would only need to be in the office one day a week.”

“Does that send the right message? I mean, does that tell your clients that you’re completely committed?”

He becomes angry. “My clients understand that commitment is nothing at all to do with sitting in a box in a city.”

Wondering why he is so defensive she backs away, changes the subject. “What about children? I’m not sure that this would be a particularly suitable place to raise a family.”

At once he says, “Maybe not.”

And she is puzzled. Such acquiescence is unusual for Greg. He likes to win arguments.

“I didn’t know that you wanted to move.”

“I was just thinking.”

“If you’re not happy where we are, we can start to look around.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“If you’d said something...”

“I said, it doesn’t matter.” His tone is abrupt, annoyed and she is forced into timid silence.

Gilly thinks that she has come to terms with Greg’s infidelity. She believes that love will overcome everything and that whatever his reasons for the affair, love is not one of them. She fears that she has failed him in some way, that this is a message to her to improve. Her logic starts from the premise that he loves her; if he loves her, then he must need something more, or something different, from a relationship than he gets from her. All she needs to do is find what that thing is and supply it.

She has gone through in her mind everything that seems to her to be likely, but cannot think of anything. She is certain that he enjoys the sex, that her cooking and housekeeping are a reasonable standard. The only thing that she wonders about is the number of rows that they have had in recent months and she has made a conscious decision to be less confrontational. This is hard for her, for she is by nature combative, but she calculates that it is worth trying.

“I wonder why this is deserted,” he says.

“It’s probably unsafe,” says Gilly.

Greg has begun to explore, examining recesses and alcoves; when he moves out of the sitting room into the darkness beyond she says, “Be careful, Greg.”

“I will.” He says this with marked irritation chiselled into the words and she bites down on her own annoyance at his retort because she thinks that perhaps she is being too maternal towards him.

She waits nervously, glancing around her and then back to the corridor down which he has disappeared.

“Greg?”

His voice comes back from the dimness, replete now with a hinted reverberation, “I’m fine.” The reverberation does not disguise the tone.

She looks around again.

There is something pink on the dirty floorboards. It seems hard and out of place and she succumbs to her curiosity.

It is the leg of a doll.

A child.

My God! A child.

“Gilly! Gilly!”

At once, she is so scared that she drops it. Her breath is caught, her eyes are wide. She turns back to the darkness of the corridor down which Greg had walked.

Gilly does not know it, but she has had a nervous breakdown.

“Greg? Greg? What is it?” She walks forward but stops at the threshold to the darkness beyond. “Are you all right?” she calls into the heart of the house.

“Come and look at this. Out the back.” His voice is some way off, a slight echo its handmaiden.

“Is it safe?”

“If you’re careful.”

How typical of a man, she thinks as she gingerly picks her way down the corridor.

The plaster has fallen in patches, exposing rotten wooden battens; the floorboards are a landscape of dirt, leaves, rubble and shapes that she cannot recognize but fears are rat droppings.

“Which way?” she calls tentatively.

“The hall turns right and leads into the kitchen. I’m out the back.”

As she moves forward, she makes out light coming from the right and she can also hear a rushing sound. As she turns the corner, she sees the light is coming through a doorway from grimy windows.

The kitchen is as laden with melancholy and decay as the rest of the house. A range cooker stands resolutely to her left and a butler sink accompanies it. The only other occupant of this space is a single half-glazed cupboard, bowed by age and oblivion, staring blearily at its companions from the opposite wall.

Ahead of her are the windows, some of them broken, and a door to the outside. The rushing sound is louder now.

“Greg?”

But the rushing sound is too loud and she has to repeat herself.

“Outside.”

She barely hears this word.

What is that noise?

When she moves outside, her question is answered.

The stream over which they had crossed now passed below her into a narrow, man-made gully. She steps out on to a rickety wooden balcony about fifteen feet above the crashing water and to her left is a huge waterwheel. Greg is on the balcony by the wheel; he is beckoning her excitedly. Rain falls steadily but the balcony is overhung by a sloping roof; bright sparkling drops of water hang and then fall from its edge.

“Isn’t this fantastic?” he calls.

She certainly finds it exhilarating — the sound is loud, her position is high and the woodland around her is dense and green and beautiful — but she also finds it unsettling. The balcony on which she is standing seems to be dangerously fragile. Below her, the water moves from rain-specked flow to turbulent chaos as it passes through and under the wheel.

“Is it safe?” She has to raise her voice because of the white noise from below.

“I think so. Take it carefully, though.”

“You are joking...”

“You’ll be fine.”

She moves forward gingerly, feels some give but is reassured that it seems to hold. Just to be safe she clings to the wooden railing that runs along the length of the walkway.

“It’s incredible. Who’d have thought it?”

The wheel is about fifteen feet in diameter and reaches to about the level of their knees. It is in need of much repair and does not move despite the water rushing past it.

“I wonder what it’s for,” she says.

Greg leans over the balcony, scares Gilly. “The axle goes into the side of the house beneath us. There must be some milling equipment down in the basement.”

“Be careful.”

He straightens up, looks across at her and smiles. “It’s perfectly safe,” he says. To demonstrate this he wobbles the railing, making her gasp slightly, eyes widening. This is typical of him, playing the macho man, trying to scare her.

“Don’t,” she pleads, making him laugh.

Turning back to the wheel he says, “I can’t work out why it isn’t turning. It must be stuck. Probably silted up or something.”

This is amazing!

Gilly is for the moment transported. The idea that she does not want to live here is suddenly absurd; this place is a paradise. Greg is right; of course, they must live here, deep in nowhere, surrounded by memories of things that perhaps never happened, enchanted and entranced.

Greg’s phone rings. Although the noise is almost swamped by the water’s rush, Gilly hears it.

She watches him reach into the breast pocket of his shirt, hardly look at the phone as he presses with his thumb, raise it to his ear.

She walks towards him, feeling the balcony giving slightly beneath her feet despite the fact that she is petite and light-footed.

Who’s ringing?

Greg answers the call.

“Hello?”

A brief pause.

“Oh, hi...”

He glances up at her as he turns slightly away, takes a step back...

But then there is a crack for he has not noticed that the wood where he stands has rotted because when the wheel worked the water splashed for decades against the underside of the balcony. He falls through with a scream of shock. His knee is struck as he falls and he is aware of a shaft of pain that skewers into his leg...

His head strikes the side of the house.

Gilly screams.

Gilly’s head has made perfection of her life, yet her life is far from perfect and the foundations of what she has made are already cracking. She watches Greg disappear through the wooden flooring, sees the phone flip upwards out of his grasp and fall in front of her.

Please, no. Please, God, don’t do this to me.

She rushes forward, now even more aware of the fragility of the balcony on which she treads, made fearful by the knowledge of how precarious her own position might be.

The phone is lying between two planks of the balcony, saved from falling into the water by an underlying strut but this is barely registered.

“Greg? Greg?” She half asks this, half screams it as she approaches as close to the splintered hole as she dares, leaning forward to look down through it. What she sees makes her almost hysterical.

He is half submerged in rushing water and she can clearly see that his legs are being pulled away by the strength of the current; but the upper half of his body is caught. He has fallen on to the wheel — fallen partly through it — and is now wedged, splintered beams sticking into his abdomen just below his ribs, between the wheel and the house. The water falls and splashes around him and past him, only just missing his face.

“Greg?” she calls again.

She sees that he is dazed. He has hit his head and there is blood over the left of his face. When he looks up, she can see that he is having trouble focusing on her.

And then the wheel moves.

I remember a curious incident.

It was the good time, the time when I was pregnant and full of joy and expectation — and I mean, “full”, as in replete, filled to bursting, completely consumed by them. This time things had gone without a hitch and we were just awaiting the result of the chromosome analysis...

I had lost my keys to the house and had looked everywhere. Greg’s car was a last resort — I had driven it briefly the day before to pick him up from the station when my car was at the garage — and I came across a savings statement from a foreign bank, one I’d never heard of. It was in the glove box, under some travel sweets.

It said that Greg had saved twenty-six thousand pounds.

I asked him, of course. What wife (or husband) wouldn’t?

He said that it was a tax avoidance scheme, a bolt-hole for money from the business. Not strictly legal, he said, but everyone did it.

He was perfectly natural, perfectly convincing.

I believed him.

“Gilly?” She hears the terror in his voice as he comes to full realization of where he is.

“Greg! Are you all right?”

It is a stupid question.

“It hurts, Gilly.”

He is only two metres from her, but they are metres that stretch to infinity. His voice echoes and the noise of the water is loud and insistent and menacing. Above all this, she can still hear his panic, his pain, his terror.

Gilly can see that he has fallen on to the wheel, partly broken it and then come to rest in the narrow gap beside the sheer drop of the house wall. She sees also that his fall has loosened the wheel, that it is creaking faintly against the rush of the water, that it will soon start to turn and drag him under the water.

The creaking is getting louder.

Turning away from the wheel she looks around, searching for something to stop the wheel beginning to turn, without any ideas as to how she might achieve this. She sees a splintered plank, grabs it, but it is caught by nails at one end.

The wheel moves and she hears Greg scream.

Spurred by terror she finally wrenches it free, then thrusts it down into the hole that Greg has fallen through. It is just long enough — but only just — to reach down between the spokes of the wheel and stop it turning.

The day that they were given the results of the chromosome analysis has not faded into the past but lives with Gilly and always will. The events of the day — the emotions, the things seen and glimpses, the sounds heard and the places visited — revolve around a single discovery like dancers around a maypole, are tied to it for all of her eternity.

The obstetrician was very kind and very calm, the nurse with him even more so, but that counted as nothing when the implications of what he said burst into molten pain within her.

The baby had Down’s Syndrome, probably severely so.

Greg had been with her, had held her hand, but all human contact was detached from her existence at that moment.

The clock on the wall behind the obstetrician’s wiry grey hair had said that it was seventeen minutes past eleven; the calendar on his desk had said that it was the 6th of June.

“Gilly?”

The rain has begun again, adding to the noise. She peers down at him, now on her hands and knees.

“Help me, Gilly.”

But the futility of this request is obvious. He is beyond her reach.

“I’ll have to get help.”

“It hurts when I breathe. And my leg... I think it’s broken.”

“Don’t worry... I’ll run and get someone.”

But this only induces panic in him. “No! No! Don’t leave me, Gilly.”

“I’ve got to, Greg...”

“What if the wheel turns again? It’ll pull me under.”

“But I can’t do anything on my own...”

It is then that the mobile phone rings. At once she thinks, “Of course! I’ll phone for help.” At the same time she wonders who is calling him, who called him not five minutes before.

She looks at the screen.

Nikki.

She does not know anyone called “Nikki”: she does not know that Greg knows anyone called “Nikki”.

It is a curiously intimate name, full of suggestion.

She knows then that it is the name of his lover.

She presses the red button, the one that cuts off the connection, sees a movement out of the corner of her eye, and looks around to see a small girl standing just behind her. She jumps in shock.

Greg sees Gilly’s head disappear from his view above.

“Gilly?”

The child has Down’s Syndrome — severely so. She does not speak, does not even react beyond a smile on her face that is part beatific, part eerie; the look in her eyes is unfocused, as if she does not see Gilly but far beyond her.

Gilly tries a smile; a friendly one, a gentle one. “Hello. What’s your name?”

No reaction; neither response nor movement.

Greg’s voice comes from below a second time, this time more urgent, more panicked and almost angry.

Gilly turns back to him and calls down, “It’s all right, Greg. There’s...”

But as she turns back to the girl, she sees nothing there. There is no child, no sign that there ever was.

“What is it?” Greg is demanding, like a child himself.

Gilly has stood up, is looking all around her — through the windows of the mill, over on the other side of the fast-flowing stream. Nothing.

“Gilly, for God’s sake...”

At last she turns back to him but she is still confused, wondering.

He calls, “Will you get me out of here?”

She remembers the phone, bends to pick it up, but this time her head is filled with thoughts beyond Greg’s predicament.

Would my child have looked like that?

I was going to call her Belle...

She wasn’t ugly, not ugly at all...

I could have loved her...

Gilly has suppressed from her memory the fact that she was sexually assaulted as a seven-year-old girl by an uncle, a brother of her now dead mother. She has suppressed this but it lurks there, not dead, not even dormant, just stealthy.

It has poisoned her, turned her.

She believes that she is still essentially innocent.

But she is not.

Virginity, both sexual and moral, went long ago, stolen from her, and the only thing between Gilly and depravity is the construct she has made of her life, the one that she has built on a foundation of a lie.

Gilly does not carry a mobile phone, does not want the leash that it represents.

She called him.

Now, this week of all weeks, she called him. Couldn’t she let me have him to myself for just a week?

She looks at the phone. She is familiar enough with it to work her way through the menus.

She hears Greg call again. “Gilly? What’s happening?”

Without looking down at him she replies, “I’m phoning, Greg.”

She comes across the call log, is about to call back the last number received (although she does not know why), but then she hears, quite distinctly, a child’s voice in her head; although she never heard the little girl speak, it carries with it certainty that it is hers. Nor does it come in words, only knowledge.

Gilly opts to look at the messages received.

The rain is falling hard now. The stream is rushing and there is a single but deeply menacing creak as the plank of wood that juts through the hole moves slightly.

“Gilly?”

Some are from her, some are from strangers, but most are from “Nikki”.

The ones from Nikki are graphic, sexual, illuminating. As Gilly reads them, moving backwards in time through the past few days, then weeks, she comes to appreciate just how little she has known about Greg’s life, about his thoughts, about his wishes for the future. She sees that Greg has gone elsewhere not just to complement something in his life that she is not supplying, that he has gone there for a completely different experience.

She is stunned.

The man with whom she has shared her pleasures and pains has been an actor. There is a facet to him that he has hidden from her, one that, now exposed, casts him as a liar, as contemptuous of her gullibility, as mocking of her sexual timidity.

This epiphany is a light in her head, but one that burns as bright as laser-light, one that destroys as it enlightens. It cracks the entire edifice of her life, the beliefs that she has been in the possession of “truth”. It allows the evil that she went through as a child, that has adulterated her, to rise up and embrace her completely. It floods into the cracks in her mind and splinters it, making razor sharp shards with which to wound.

It spreads through her and throws shadows in places that once were lit, lights crevices and thereby allows her to see the monsters that lurk within.

She reassesses his actions and words of the past weeks and months, but there is worse to come...

“Where are you, Gilly?”

Gilly’s head appears in the hole above him. “Here I am, dear.”

“What’s happening?”

She smiles. He is very, very cold; this helps the pain but dulls his thoughts. He can see that her attitude is somehow wrong, but he cannot bring his sluggish thoughts to wonder why. She says, “I’m sorting things out.”

“Hurry up... please.”

“It won’t be long.”

Another creak from the wheel.

He said, “We could live here.”

He wasn’t talking to me, but to himself.

Was he also talking to his girlfriend...?

And the money...

How far have your plans gone, Greg? How close are you to leaving me?

Gilly is starting to feel strange. Her head is filling with all sorts of ideas and possibilities that have sprung into febrile activity, that scurry from corner to corner, feeding on all that has been done to her. She makes a last effort to control them, to counter the dizzying revolution in her mind.

She glances back at the phone, sees for the first time a time and date.

It is from Nikki and it is full of anticipation, apparently agreeing to meet him that afternoon.

It is dated the 6th of June and it was sent at five minutes to two in the afternoon.

It would all have been different if we could have had children. Perhaps that is what the problem was, the reason for his infidelity; I have not been able to give him children, could only promise him a handicapped baby...

This attempt is futile; worse it is the fuel that causes the smouldering to erupt into conflagration.

No!

I’m being so stupid, so trusting, so blind.

He never wanted children. Not really. He was lukewarm about the idea, at best. He saw it as something to give to me, to shut me up. It probably would have suited him to give me a baby to look after; it would have been a distraction for me, while he bedded “Nikki”, pleasured her as she desired...

No, no, no!

God, how could I be so stupid?

He doesn’t want me to have children! They would only complicate matters for him, make leaving me more problematic... most expensive. His twenty-six thousand pounds wouldn’t go too far then...

This serpent of thought is now alive and feeding hungrily. Within seconds it is all that there is in her soul.

He made me abort Belle. He said that it was for the best, but whose best?

He made me murder her.

She might have been beautiful, like that little girl. Sweet and passive and somehow luminous in her innocence.

All so that his life would be easier, so that he could screw around.

He will say that he is leaving me because he wants children and I haven’t given him any.

Gilly looks down at the phone, decides that it is time to call for help.

There is yet another creak from the wheel.

Gilly looks down at Greg. He is only half conscious.

“Greg?” she calls.

He responds slowly, first of all looking around, only raising his eyes after a while. His face contains pain, his voice is husky as if he has phlegm in his throat.

“Yes?”

“I’ve rung for help.”

“Thank God...”

“She may take some time to get here.”

He does not realize what she has said for a few seconds.

“She? Who do you mean?”

Gilly smiles.

“Nikki.”

She enjoys the look on his face, savours it for a moment, then in a single movement grasps the plank of wood that is jamming the wheel.

“I hope she’s in time,” she says.

She pulls the plank free and the wheel at once begins to turn. Greg screams but it is a very short scream, ended abruptly as he is taken beneath the water and then wedged against the bed of the stream.

As Gilly walks out of the cottage she sees the little girl again. She is sitting on the wall of the bridge talking to a woman. The woman is laughing and joking with her, clearly her mother.

Gilly walks across to them to experience their shared pleasure.

I will have a child one day. I will be free of this curse.

I am the same as I always was.

I am the same as I always was.