The Other Half Lives

25

‘Wait here,’ I tell the driver, halfway out of the cab as it draws to a slow halt outside Garstead Cottage. ‘Keep the engine on.’ I run past the cardboard cow with the yellow earring and pound on the cottage’s back door. Mary’s ‘Survivor’ song is playing. She opens the door and squints at me, as if I’m a bright light and she’s been in the dark for a long time. She wasn’t expecting me back. ‘You’ve got to get out of here,’ I tell her. ‘No time to explain. The taxi’s outside. Go somewhere, anywhere. Go to Martha’s mother’s house.’

‘Cecily?’ She looks down at her bare feet, doesn’t move. She’s wearing torn jeans and a black shirt with paint on it. I want to grab her, pull her outside and out of the way. ‘What’s going on?’ she asks.

I’m going to have to tell her something. ‘I rang the police in Lincoln. Two of the gardens I designed have been vandalised-turf torn up, plants pulled out of the earth. One last summer and one in the early hours of Tuesday morning.’ Not more than six hours after Gemma Crowther was murdered.

Mary’s eyes widen. ‘Cherub Cottage?’

‘No. Two of the three I won awards for.’ I can’t understand it, not really, and I don’t want to try. For someone to attack something as beautiful and natural as a garden, something so irreplaceable-it’s beyond my comprehension. The owners will replant and reseed, but it won’t be the same. No two gardens are ever the same.

I can’t let the sadness in, not now, when I need to stay alert.

Mary grips the door frame. ‘He did it to you as well.’

‘Look, there’s no time. He’s coming here. Go.’

‘I’m not leaving you to-’

‘You have to! I can’t explain now. You have to trust me, like I trusted you. Give me your mobile number-I’ll ring you as soon as I can.’

‘I need a few minutes,’ Mary says, disappearing inside.

The seconds drag. The taxi-driver turns off his engine and I gesture at him to switch it back on.

When Mary comes outside she’s got shoes on, a jacket and a khaki hold-all. ‘Mobile number’s on the kitchen table, with the phone. Here are the keys.’ She puts them in my hand. ‘Ring me.’ She’s fumbling in her bag, moving too slowly. I want to scream at her to hurry. ‘Why don’t you come with me?’ she says. We could both-’

‘I can’t. Go to your parents’ house and-’

‘My parents?’ She blinks at me in the darkness.

‘Go to my house.’ I pull my keys out of my bag and throw them at her. ‘Ring the police, ask them to wait with you.’

At last she gets into the taxi. ‘Ring me,’ she says before closing the door. ‘Take care of yourself.’

I watch as the cab turns and drives down the long path, over the discreet speed bumps that look like small hillocks in the concrete, and out through the school gates. Once it’s gone, I run back to the cottage. Mary left the door open. The music’s still playing. I run to the dining room and turn the door handle, but nothing happens. I turn it the other way. Nothing. Locked. I reach above the door frame for the key, but there’s nothing there. Frantically, I sweep my fingers all the way along the tiny ledge. The key’s gone.

I run back to the kitchen, where I’ve seen other keys hanging from small hooks on the underside of a wooden cabinet. Yes-five metal hooks, screwed into the wood. More than five keys. I try them one by one, sprinting between the two rooms, but none of them’s the right one. I’m going to have to smash the window.

I run past the kitchen table, where Mary has painted her mobile number in blue on the wood; there’s a thin blue-tipped brush next to the cordless phone. Outside, there’s no one around. I can see lights in some of the windows of the main school building in the distance, the one with the square tower, but they seem a million miles away.

At the back of Garstead Cottage it’s darker than at the front, without the lights on either side of the path. There’s a window that must belong to the dining room-it’s the only one that’s the right size. I bend to pick up a large stone from the ground and find myself rearing back. I can’t pick up a stone and throw it. I can’t. What else can I use? My shoes aren’t heavy enough, nor is anything in my bag.

The bikes at the front. I sprint round the side of the house and find, near the bikes, something even better: a metal tyre pump. I grab it and run back to the dining room window.

I’m about to smash the glass when the music stops. I hesitate, listening to the intense silence all around me. Less than five seconds later, the noise starts up again: the same song, endlessly repeating. ‘Help!’ I scream into the empty, muffling air around me. ‘Somebody help me!’ Nothing.

I drive the bicycle pump into the windowpane, putting all my weight behind it. The glass smashes. Most of it falls into the room. I use the pump to scrape away the jagged pieces still sticking out of the frame. Then I climb in through the window and push the heavy floor-length curtains aside. The air in the room is full of what I think at first are small, coloured feathers, floating, but they’re not. They’re pieces of canvas, lifted from the top of the pile by the gust of wind that’s blown in through the smashed window. There it is in front of me, an enormous, flaking, shedding growth that looks as if it’s sprouted from the floor: the mountain of destroyed paintings. And the paint that’s been thrown over it, pooled on the floor… I bend, touch a puddle of blue with my fingers: it’s still wet. More paint, even since I left. I bring my fingers to my nose and sniff.

This isn’t the sort of paint anyone would use for pictures; the smell’s too strong, too chemical. I look over at the dining table. The tins of paint, the same ones I saw last time I was in here, with Mary, are round and wide. Dulux. For painting walls, not pictures. For disguising a worse smell underneath. It didn’t occur to me before. None of the walls in Garstead Cottage are this shade of blue. Or yellow, or green. Or red.

My heart pounding, I bend to touch a pool of red. The texture is different. I smell my fingers and cry out. Blood.

I dive into the pile and start to tear at it, pushing its mass to one side, shovelling fragments aside with my arms, tunnelling my way in. I burrow down, spitting pieces of canvas out of my mouth as I go. Every few seconds I lift my face to breathe. I keep delving and pushing until I hit something hard and cold, something I know can’t be a painting, or part of a frame.

I close my hand around it and pull it out: a hammer. On its silver-coloured head, I can see where the blood has dried in smears. I throw it across the room, hating the feel of it against my skin, and carry on digging, combing with my fingers. I’ve got to be right. I’ve got to be…

I’m touching a hand.

A painted smile, a fingernail, a patch of grey-blue sky.

I saw a fingernail when Mary first brought me in here. I thought it was a cutting from a painting, but it wasn’t. It was real.

I sweep wildly with my arms, attacking what’s left of the canvas mountain until it breaks up, falls away to one side or the other, and I see him. ‘Aidan!’ I sob. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

His eyes are half closed. There’s a square of shiny brown tape over his mouth. I yank it off, hoping he’ll move or make a sound. Nothing. I’m terrified to look at his still, white face, in case it stays still for too long. He was alive last night, earlier today. The cows, mooing in the fields outside… I thought one of them sounded as if it was in pain. The low groan I thought came from Mary… It was Aidan I heard, Aidan moaning in agony, his life spilling away in blood that I mistook for red paint on the cream carpet. Why didn’t I see? Why didn’t I know?

Beneath his right shoulder there’s a dark hole in his shirt. Its edge is black, as if the fabric’s been burned. Shot-he’s been shot. His mouth is slack, open, and I can see something inside it, something flesh-coloured, too big to be his tongue. I touch it, then, as gently as I can, I pull it out. It’s a peach-coloured bath sponge, similar to the one Gemma used to gag me. She also used parcel tape to keep my mouth closed and the sponge in place. The exactness of the recreation paralyses me for a moment as ice-cold terror floods my body. I thought that once I had the truth, the fear would end, but it hasn’t. It’s worse.

Aidan didn’t destroy my gardens, or Mary’s pictures. She lied. She told me there were eighteen paintings in her exhibition that never was, the one Aidan invented. Did she forget she’d said that, when she showed me the sales list from Aidan’s TiqTaq show? It wasn’t the real list, it was one she’d written out herself. I recognised her ‘M’ from her signature on Abberton. Eighteen pictures in Aidan’s exhibition, eighteen empty frames on his walls, each one a tribute to a painting that had been viciously dismembered.

She switched places with him in her story, reversed their roles. Made him the destroyer, herself the victim.

I lied too. Did Mary believe me, that I wanted her to leave Garstead Cottage for her own safety? Was I convincing?

Panting hard, I drop the sponge and wipe my hand on my trousers until the skin smarts.

I must call an ambulance. Not the police-the police are for when it’s too late and it isn’t, it can’t be. I run to the door, forgetting it’s locked and I have no key. When it won’t open, I head for the window instead, skidding on the feathery mess that’s all over the floor, ready to throw myself out onto the grass.

‘Hello, Ruth,’ says a tremulous, distorted voice from outside, and I scream, as if the night itself has spoken to me.

A form appears from the blackness, moving closer. A thin, lined face that sags under the weight of its triumphant smile, like someone trying to hold aloft a trophy that’s too heavy. Mary. Wearing an expression of such manic, barely controlled elation that it makes me scream again, even before I see the gun that’s in her hand.