‘Angus, no, come on. Don’t do that.’
‘If I came forward and assumed all responsibility, do you think that would give Fran a better chance?’
I ground my teeth, unsure of the right thing to do or say. What would Jesus do? But Jesus would never have gotten himself into this situation. Instead, I thought about what Fran would want me to do. Here Angus was waiting on me as some kind of arbiter, to tell him if he should take the fall for his sister.
‘That’s a loaded question, bro,’ I said. I don’t know why I used ‘bro’, but the context seemed right. ‘Is it going to help her chances? Yes. Would it mean imprisonment for you? Also, yes. But you have to remember that even if you took the fall, it’s not a dead guarantee that Fran would walk away. She could still be seen as an accessory to the case, CPS may not believe you, and you could maybe both end up going to prison.’
‘Well, then. I’d need your help to get my story straight, I suppose. You know the case – every detail, every alibi. We could find a way to explain it. I mean, you must know that I visited O’Neill, right? A few weeks before Fran decided to off him.’
‘I do. Although the officers interrogating you had a hard time getting that out of you.’
‘Yeah, because I didn’t want to incriminate Fran,’ Angus said plainly, like it was obvious information. ‘But I told O’Neill to stay away from her, and that if he tried anything, I’d kill him.’
A missing gear slid and then clicked perfectly into place.
‘The note. You wrote O’Neill a note after you went to visit him, didn’t you? The one that threatened to kill him.’
‘Yeah. So, being honest, I never actually spoke to him. I chickened out in the end, so I put the note under his door instead.’
I mean, that was noble, but stupid. Really, really stupid.
I slumped my face into my hands, still jarred by what Angus was telling me, and gave an extended groan.
‘I think I can prove I wrote it, too. I have a bunch of different drafts I did. I was trying to get my handwriting as unfamiliar as possible,’ Angus stated. Through my fingers, I could see him yanking out various versions of the warning note from a cabinet to show to me. ‘That must be a motive, right?’
It remained insanely jarring to me that Angus, a man poised to sacrifice his freedom for his sister, was now driven by an inexplicable surge of giddy excitement, a newfound burst of energy propelling him forwards.
‘What the hell is going on?’ I moaned through my fingers.
There was a beat between us as I went through each revelation in my mind. I had wondered for weeks what enemies O’Neill had had at the start of this case, when there had been two of them right in front of me the whole time.
‘You know, though, that Clark will try and make a run for it, and that my sister is going to try and kill him before he vanishes?’ added Angus, stacking the pieces of paper neatly on the oak surface of the cabinet.
It pained me to hear him say that. That Angus could take the fall and go to prison, only for Fran to be thrown in there again a few days later. It gave me a queasy feeling to realise I knew very well how my wife’s brain worked. She couldn’t leave a job unfinished. She had to complete the set.
‘Surely, he could just disappear, and she’d never find him? The world is a big place,’ I theorised.
‘Let’s not fool ourselves, Gareth.’
I let another loud, defeated groan reverberate out of me as I tried to process everything.
‘Angus, before we go any further with this conversation, I need you to really carefully consider your actions. Like, really think about it. Both the best and worst-case scenarios of this end up with you going to prison.’
‘But would it help Fran?’
‘It’s not certain, Angus…’
‘Would it help Fran?’ he interrupted, clearly irritated by my attempts to get him to evaluate how drastically his life would change if he went through with this.
‘To be completely honest, it wouldn’t exactly harm her case. Given our current situation, it’s hard to imagine things getting much worse for her.’
I didn’t need to say any more than that for him to stay the course. But if we were going to do this, we’d need a detailed story for Angus to stick to from his confession, all the way up to his trial. We’d have to make notes on any discrepancy, any slight inconsistency that could incriminate all three of us, and Angus would have to stick to it like gospel. He would need to paint himself as a villain – that was for sure – while Fran would have to have been blackmailed or threatened to cover up the murders and dispose of all the various evidence. Sadly, I thought a jury would buy that part of the story. Two kids raised by the system would make easy targets.
‘Before we do anything,’ I said calmly, ‘let me make a few calls and see the lay of the land.’
‘What do you mean?’ Angus asked, clearly frustrated by the lack of a straightforward solution and obviously unaware of how low my morals had stooped.
‘If you’re set on going to prison, then let me check if a psychiatric unit or something similar is an option. You’d have more protection and better treatment there, because’ – I felt likeI didn’t need to mince my words around him, either – ‘I don’t know if you’d last a day in a Category A prison, Angus.’
