‘He smiled and beamed and did everything short of jumping up and down with joy, as if Marianne’s arrival in our lives was a wonderful treat for both of us. Just … so, so oblivious and deluded!’
I knew I’d be whacked by guilt for saying that, and that’s how it feels – like a deserved blow – but I’m still glad I said it out loud. Why didn’t Dad flinch at the wrongness of what Marianne was asking me to do? And there was more wrongness to come, none of which he raised so much as the slightest objection to: the ragged gasps Marianne made sure to producewhenever I mentioned Mum – and each time the air would stiffen around me, so that I soon learned not to do it; the three photos I had of me and Mum together that disappeared from my bedroom. I’d pushed them into three of the four corners of my mirror frame. Later that same day, I came back from school and they weren’t there. Dad shushed me when I told him, and jerked his head towards the door as if to say,Not now. Too risky.Except later never came. He didn’t return to the subject and neither did I. I understood, somehow, that something frightening might happen if I did, something that could cause a lot of problems for Dad.
Then a week before the second anniversary of Mum’s death, he asked me if I’d mind if we didn’t make what he called ‘a big song and dance’ about it. According to Marianne, that was what we’d done for the first anniversary, and it had made her feel unappreciated, insulted, unloved and a range of other painful emotions she had no wish to experience again. It was clear Dad needed me to cooperate, so I did, because I was eight years old, he was the only parent I had left, and I could feel his desperation for a happy ending pressing down on me like one of those machines they use to crush old cars.
The most painful thought in the world, the one I’m so used to pushing away, fills my mind before I can stop it:Once a child has lost her mother, happy endings aren’t possible. That’s why Lottie can’t lose me, ever. I need to get this over with, quickly, so that I can get back to her. What will Paddy have told her? All I said in the text I sent him was that I was going to the police station and I’d be back as soon as I could. Nothing else, no explanation. Should I have added, ‘Don’t tell Lottie where I am’? It didn’t feel necessary at the time; I assumed it would be obvious to Paddy that he shouldn’t tell our thirteen-year-old I’d gone to the police without knowing the full story.I have to stop doing this: taking for granted that he’ll behave like a responsible adult.
‘Shouldn’t you be taking notes?’ I ask Waterhouse.
‘I’m not.’
Right.I could have told him that. I did, except in the form of a question.
I’d expected him to start with the formalities – taking down my full name and address – but he didn’t produce a pen and paper or any sort of recording device when we came in here. That part must come later. Maybe he’s going to listen first, then make me go over it all again while he writes it down. That’s how the police know you’re telling the truth, if none of the details of your story change when you repeat it.
‘Foolproof,’ he murmurs.
‘That’s how it felt at first, yes. It landed kind of fully formed in my mind a few hours after I’d been to see my ex-boyfriend Ollie in July. It felt like a gift from something outside of me. Like it was meant to be, you know? Decreed by fate – and yes, I know how crazy that sounds. I think that’s partly why I’ve got this deep-down dread that there’s nothing I can do to stop it happening. But that’s not true,’ I add quickly. ‘What I’m doing now – telling you – will stop me.’
Waterhouse looks no more curious than he did a minute ago. There’s something oddly soothing about his unresponsiveness.
‘Ollie and Marianne had been – have been – keeping something from me, ever since he and I broke up in 2006. In July when I went to see him, I asked him to tell me what that thing was. He wouldn’t. Though he did admit eventually that he was withholding something, which at least proved to me that I wasn’t going mad.’
A different kind of confession is pushing to come out, one that has nothing to do with murder. ‘For a long time, I thoughtOllie was the one,’ I tell Waterhouse. ‘You know, the one I’m meant to be with, if you believe in that kind of thing. In a way, I still think that, even though he won’t tell me the truth. He’s also not the one I have a child with, which matters. Paddy – that’s my husband – might not be perfect, but he loves Lottie, and she adores him. I’m not going to deprive her of her dad if I don’t have to. And I don’t, which suits Marianne down to the ground. She’s determined to keep me and Paddy together. God knows why.’
‘That why you want to kill her?’
Finally, a question. ‘I don’t. I want the opposite,’ I say. He can’t be listening properly. ‘To stop myself from doing a terrible thing that can never be undone. She’s my daughter’s grandmother. I think Lottie probably loves her.’
All the things that have made me loathe and fear Marianne are things she’s said and done to me. As far as I’m aware, she’s only ever been kind and generous to Lottie.
Waterhouse amends his question: ‘Why did you want to kill her enough to make a plan to do it? Can’t just be because there’s something she and your ex aren’t telling you.’
I see the stripped-bare study as clearly as if I were still inside it: walls like wrecked human skin, the top layer peeled off; grey fuzz underfoot.
‘She orchestrated a nice little torture scene, with me as the victim. It wasn’t physical, the torture. She put on a sequinned evening dress to do it, not plastic overalls, Dexter-style – but that’s still what it was. That’s what pushed me to the point where I just … snapped.’
Stepping things up a level. Letting me know I was in danger.Which meant Lottie was in danger of losing her mother. I say none of this, because I can’t prove it. I’m here because I want to make it impossible for me to kill Marianne – that’s theofficial line, and it’s part of the truth, for sure. A big part. No one needs to know that I’m equally afraid she might kill me, or arrange for someone else to do it, or that I’m certain the little scene she orchestrated on 7 July – her sequinned dress, the stripped study, the mention of N.P. Pelphrey – was a death threat.
How can Waterhouse want to ask nothing at this point? He’s not even looking at me.
‘You know who Dexter is, right?’ I say, mainly in the hope of keeping the conversation going. ‘Fictional serial killer on telly?’
‘You’re talking as if you’ve killed Marianne Upton already.’ Waterhouse sounds bored. ‘You say you snapped, but you haven’t. If you had, she’d be dead.’
‘Maybe that’s the wrong metaphor, then,’ I say. ‘But something changed in me after her little psychological torture experiment. I wasn’t an ordinary person any more. I was a murderer. On the inside, I mean. I was just … completely different from how I’d been before. From that point on, I knew I was going to do it. I could feel it bulging in my brain, the reality of it, as if it had happened already. It was like …’ It’s almost impossible to explain to a person who has never experienced it. ‘Like it already existed in the future, as a … a done thing. It was never going to leave me alone unless … Theonlything that was going to stop me was this: coming here, telling you my carefully worked out, foolproof plan, so that I could never get away with it. Even then, I thought, “Don’t be ridiculous, there’s no need to do something so extreme. Just don’t kill her. Decide you’re not going to do it and then don’t do it.” But telling myself that didn’t work, didn’t make it go away, and I started to panic, especially when I noticed I’d attached a time and a date to the plan in my mind. I knew when exactly it was going to happen. Can you guess?’
‘Guess what?’ Waterhouse asks.
‘It was going to be today. This afternoon.’ I glance down at my watch and feel a tiny detonation of relief in my chest. The moment I chose for Marianne’s murder is now well and truly in the past; safely gone, never to return. ‘I put it in my diary weeks ago: 30 October, 5.15 p.m.’ A harsh laugh escapes from me. ‘How self-sabotaging can you get? But it’s the diary-writer mentality: once you’re hooked, you need to get it all down, all the important things. It’s Marianne’s fault I became a diary addict. She started laying into me one day when I was about Lottie’s age, as if I was a moron who’d really screwed up: how could I be a teenage girl, with all the complicated emotions that entailed, and not keep a diary? She was going to buy me one, and I was going toloveit, and write in it every day, and one day I’d thank her for it … blah blah blah, on and on she went. Did I have no life of the mind that I felt was worth recording? What was I, a human being with a soul, or was I soulless? She actually asked me that.’
Happily, I’ve forgotten most of the specifics of Marianne’s viciousness from my childhood, but a few incidents have embedded themselves like thorns – mostly the ones witnessed by Dad, who never questioned or objected. The funny thing was, I didn’t expect him to. I knew he had no more power in our home than I did, and of course he wouldn’t want to risk his ‘Special Subordinate’ status.
‘It took me ages to realise all Marianne wanted was to be able to spy on me,’ I say. ‘The diary thing wasn’t about soulfulness, it was about surveillance. She was right, though: I quickly got hooked. Wrote down nearly every thought I had between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. The state I must have been in, emotionally? Suzanne says it’s hardly surprising my diary was my best friend until she came along.’
‘Thirtieth of October, 5.15 p.m.,’ Waterhouse repeats in a dull voice.
‘Right.’ I feel dizzy suddenly, and squeeze the back of my neck with my left hand, hoping it might send more blood to my brain. ‘There was something about seeing my murder plan in black-and-white on my laptop screen, the date and time all neatly laid out in 12-point Times New Roman—’
