It could be the stress, I thought to myself. It could be the stress of this whole charade that had just affected my menstrual cycle badly. That could mean that when this had all blown over, a baby was still on the cards. Even if it wasn’t the traditional way, IVF was still an option, right? But I couldn’t get that stupid doctor’s face out of my head. I bet Gareth’s swimmers were all little Michael Phelpses. I was the problem. I was the one who couldn’t get pregnant. My body was unable to do the one thing that it had evolved to do. It all felt just a little bit shameful, really.
It then began to dawn on me that I had absolutely no one to talk to. Gareth wasn’t answering his texts. I couldn’t get through to Angus. I didn’t really want to bother any of my friends, most of whom I hadn’t properly spoken to since the move. I was quite simply on my own. It was at times like this, I wished I had parents I could talk to about this kind of thing.
I didn’t want to stay in the surgery parking space any longer, so I began to drive. I drove out of the surgery car park, through the city, and onto the motorway. I decided I would keep driving until my tank hit half, and then I would turn around and come back. Thoughts kept stumbling through my head. Was this fate punishing me? I’d taken a life – well, two lives – and now God wasn’t giving me one in return. If I had just done nothing, would I be pregnant? Would we be starting our family?
Suddenly, Gareth finding out about me murdering someone didn’t seem so bad. It was the moment when he found out I couldn’t have children that I was terrified of.
I’d gone to church with Gareth once, when we were newly engaged. Classic Gareth, of course, he’d wanted to get married in a church like the good Christian boy he is, so we’d had to go every other Sunday to show our faces, and all the changewe had scraped together for saving would go straight into the collection tin. The vicar had adored the sound of his own voice. Maybe he should have considered a career as a podcast host. I couldn’t remember many of the sermons, but I did remember one in which he’d told us how, in those Old Testament times, when a woman was barren, she could be compelled to share her husband with a fertile rival. Often, it turned out that their infertility was associated with sin. When Rachel had pled with Jacob, ‘Give me children or else I die,’ her husband had only responded with, ‘Am I in the place of God who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?’
An omnibenevolent God, indeed.
A car blared its horn at me as I got lost deeper and deeper into my thoughts and began to drift onto the right-most lane. I yanked the wheel to the left, and an elderly man cursed at me as he drove past.
I clocked that the small needle on my dashboard had hit halfway, and I glanced up from the road to look at the signs. My subconscious had known where I was driving before I had even realised.
I left the motorway, drove down the pothole riddled A-road and parked up around a few other cars. It was a classic rural car park with no real lines or rules, and a Land Rover which had blocked in a number of cars already. I saw a young couple opposite me also just pull up. A broad and bearded man opened the door for his partner. The woman hopped out, laughing at some joke he made. They exchanged a few words to one another before she pecked him on the cheek and laid a hand on his chest. Then, grabbing a pink harness, the woman reached into the backseat of the car to pull a small creature out.
Had it been a baby, I may have just gone and offed myself right there and then. But it was just a Chihuahua, one that the man hoisted up and then slid into the front carrier on thewoman’s chest. The Chihuahua’s line of sight met mine for a minute, and I could almost hear his croaky, gravelly voice calling out to me.
‘End meeeee.’
I started walking across the field. It was abandoned now, of course. Moss and ivy had only just begun to slither their way across the walls, and a long, thick line of red graffiti which simply readBallswas spraypainted onto one wall of the building. I’d thought it would have been turned into something by now, but maybe it was beyond repair. There was no door, no windows. Not even the flooring had survived. I smoothed my hands over the dull beige brick as I tried to forget what my home had looked like twenty years ago.
I wasn’t sure why I’d chosen to subject myself to this, feeling the worst I’d felt in years and then opting to only deepen that pain by coming here. Maybe it was because I’d realised that I couldn’t feel any worse than I did now. I remembered just how hungry I would feel in the evenings as a child, hoping that the clawing in my stomach would subside for long enough that I could go to sleep and have my one hot meal at school. Edith and her annoying pal, Angus, were always bothering and pestering me with their questions when all I really wanted to do was go to sleep so the hunger wouldn’t feel quite so ravenous.
And of course, I remember the fire. I remember the smoke, so thick you could barely make out your hand in front of your face, and Clive bursting into our room in the middle of the night, shouting to get us out. The air so hot it burned the passageways of your throat just to breathe, and despite that, still trying to scream Edith’s name at the top of my lungs. I remember being eleven years old and learning that they made coffins children-sized. How old would she be now? Twenty-seven? Christ, would she be married now? Would she have children?
I traced my fingers along the faded, burnt lettering –St Nicholas’s Children’s Home– that lingered on the scorched brick. How ironic. St Nicholas: the patron saint of protecting children.
I decided to drive back, and the thoughts of my useless womb began to subside. Instead, something else was beginning to take over: Clark. I just needed to find him and drive a knife across his throat, or maybe through his scalp. I think the scalp has more nerve endings.
Again, just to reiterate: not a psychopath.
I was getting hungry, so I decided to stop by a small gimmicky American-style diner a few miles off the motorway. I hopped in one of the booths in the corner and ordered a steak sandwich and a cup of tea. I flicked through the pamphlet Dr Patel had given me as the waitress delivered my order, drawing small moustaches and glasses on the faces of happy families to make myself feel better.
Using the steak knife, I rehearsed my grip on the blade’s handle a few times. I hoped no other customers would look over in my general direction, watching as I repeatedly stabbed my knife into the sandwich again and again without even taking a single bite.
This was perhaps quite an effective coping strategy for thinking about Clark. It did take my mind off everything. But I knew I had to be smarter about this one, less impulsive, and more strategic. I doubted I would get away with the same approach for the third. But after going back to St Nicholas’s and the memories of the fire coming back so vividly, for the first time in my life, I realised I could actually be the one to kill all three of them – the trifecta. It was ironic, really. Three kills would officially make me a serial killer.
FIFTEEN
GARETH
‘So, it’s my first day on the beat, I’m helping out as a community support officer – you know, the usual – when I see a man, drunk like a fish, passed out in a wheelie bin,’ I said, trying not to notice the vacant expressions barely looking in my direction. ‘And I asked him where he lived and if I could walk him home and the guy was absolutely passed out, right? So, I tried to get him to his feet. I’d grab him, pin him against the wall, but then he’d slide right back down onto the ground again. So, the officer I was with, Linda I think her name was, we both hoisted him up and dragged him home, one arm each over our shoulders. He would mumble and groan instructions every so often about where his house was. It was this lovely cottage. We thought we’d just leave him there, let him walk in, but when we tried to unhoist him from our shoulders he collapsed right back down again. So, we literally dragged him to the door, rang the doorbell. Both of us wondering, how can you get so pissed that you can’t even walk? But then his wife opens the door, and she says, “Well, where’s his wheelchair?”’
I waited for anyone to laugh but they just continued to glare at me, dumbfounded. Normally, that story absolutely killed whenever I told it. I confess it wasn’t actually true; it wasadapted from a joke I had heard somewhere, but it made for a good icebreaker when people asked if I had any funny police stories.
I suppose they were only nine. But not even any of the other officers in the classroom laughed; their looks, too, were treacherously vacant.
‘Tough crowd,’ I heard one of the others say at the back of the classroom.
Lord above. I hated Schools Outreach Day.
‘Okay, well, thank you so much for that interesting story, Detective Donoghue. Class 4B, let’s give him a big round of applause,’ the teacher said, laden with fake zest.
I wandered ruefully to the back of the classroom as the pupils gave me very scattered and broken applause.
‘Nice job,’ Cis whispered patronisingly, as we both leaned against an iridescent wall display of how photosynthesis happens.
