Mice (20 page)

This nightmare tortured me for days, and not only because the image of Dad face-down in all that blood was so graphic. It was more than that. It gnawed at me like an accusation. Was that what the killing of Paul Hannigan had really been about? I refused to believe it – I couldn’t even kill my feelings for my dad, so how could I possibly want to kill him?

Gradually, instead of countless confused and disjointed nightmares, I started to have the same one night after night, as if my brain had finally distilled all the horrors I’d lived through into a perfect script that wasn’t to be altered in even the tiniest detail.

It always began with Mum and me playing croquet in the front garden on an idyllic summer’s day. I was about eight years old, wearing the blue-and-white striped dress that had been my favourite when I was a little girl (there was a period, Mum told me, when I wouldn’t wear anything else). Mum was different too. She looked as if she’d just stepped out of the framed wedding photograph that used to stand on the mantelpiece in the
matrimonial home
; she wore a flowing white wedding dress and was still young and fresh-faced – the streaks of grey in her hair and the crow’s feet around her eyes were yet to arrive.

Mum croqueted me and sent my ball racing away across the short grass. I went running after it, calling over my shoulder that she was playing really well – better than I’d ever seen her play before. The croquet ball raced on and on and came to rest in the oval rose bed. I stopped running. I stopped smiling. I didn’t want to go any closer. I knew that the burglar’s body was buried there. I looked round for Mum, hoping she’d say that I could leave it where it was, but she was suddenly an immense distance away, at the far end of a garden that was now enormous. I called out to her, but I knew she wouldn’t be able to hear me. I made up my mind to make a quick grab for the ball, then turn on my heels and run as fast as I could back to her. But when I looked back at the oval rose bed, I saw that right next to the croquet ball, actually touching it, the burglar’s green decomposing hand protruded through the soil.

I knew I had to cover the hand up or someone would see it and call the police and all would be lost. I was now my real age and wearing my dressing gown and nightie. I took off my dressing gown and threw it over the hand. I realized it was only a temporary solution, but it would do until I could tell Mum. I knelt down in the grass and reached for the croquet ball, but the instant I touched it, my wrist was seized by the burglar’s other hand, which suddenly came snaking up out of the shallow grave.

This hand was immensely strong. It dragged me down into the thick mud until my face was pressed right up against Paul Hannigan’s and I could smell his nauseating corpse breath.

‘I’ve been trying to ring you,’ he said, ‘but you won’t answer the phone.’ A sudden jump-cut transported us to the bottom of a real grave. Paul Hannigan was on top of me, with both his hands clamped around my throat – hands that sometimes changed into snakes or the roots of trees, but with the weird logic of dreams somehow always remained hands as well. Above me, the sky was just as it had been on the night we’d moved the car: the clouds’ dirty thumbprints grubbily obscuring the stars, the moon a thin silver scimitar in the blackness. I struggled ferociously, but he pinned me down with ease.

‘I’m gonna do it
right
this time,’ he leered, and tightened his grip around my throat. I couldn’t breathe. I started to lose consciousness. I made one final maniacal effort to free myself but it was useless. The grotesque Halloween-mask face above me was grinning triumphantly. And then I saw Mum loom over his left shoulder, holding the chopping board in her hands. She wasn’t her young self any more; her face was now exaggeratedly haggard and drawn and the white wedding dress had been replaced by her blood-soaked dressing gown. I knew what she was going to do. I was willing her to do it:
Hit him! Hit him!
But instead of raising the chopping board high above her head as I expected, she drew away, saying,
I don’t want to go to prison
, over and over again, until I couldn’t see her any more . . .

I’d wake up soaked in sweat, my heart thumping so violently in my chest that I could scarcely draw breath, the quilt kicked into a lump at the bottom of the bed, its empty cover twisted in knots around my body.

We put the gun and everything else we’d taken out of Paul Hannigan’s car into bin bags and stored them upstairs with all the others. If the police had come to the house then, they’d have found the entire case against us piled up neatly in the corner of the spare room just waiting to be tagged as exhibits for our trial. In spite of this, it was six days before we finally got rid of them.

This wasn’t because Mum was somehow ignorant of the danger – it was the very opposite. She was so aware of the need to make all the evidence disappear
forever
– so acutely aware that this was the most important move we would make in our deadly game with the police, that she was terrified of getting it wrong. She knew that if the police ever found the bin bags – if they ever discovered the bloodstained nightclothes, the tea towels, the bloody knife – it would unleash an investigative frenzy. The police would come bearing down on us like a pack of hunting dogs that had picked up the scent of their quarry. If they ever found the bin bags, they’d have an abundance of clues, any one of which could lead them back to Honeysuckle Cottage and the body buried in the oval rose bed. And while she agonized over her decision, the bin bags festered away in the spare room, the smell of stale blood growing stronger every day.

Mum’s first idea was to dump them one at a time in municipal refuse bins – miles away from Honeysuckle Cottage and miles apart from each other. This way, she said, the police would be unlikely to link the eight bags together or trace them back to us.

But on reflection, she decided this plan was too risky. It all seemed too public for her. Someone might see her getting rid of one of the bags and be able to describe her to the police later. And even if there weren’t any eyewitnesses, she might be picked up on one of those CCTV cameras, which she said were everywhere nowadays – if it didn’t get a clear image of her face, it might record the Escort’s number plate and the police would be able to trace her easily enough from that.

On top of this, neither of us really knew what happened to rubbish after it was collected – it wasn’t something we’d ever needed to think about before. It was possible that it was crushed and buried or dumped at sea straight away, but Mum was haunted by the possibility that the bags would end up on a council tip, where they’d lie around in the open air, possibly for months. It only needed one of the bags to split open and a refuse worker to notice the bloody rags spilling out – bloody rags full of invisible traces of DNA – and the police would have the piece of thread that could eventually unravel all the way back to us.

I suggested we have a big bonfire in the back garden and burn everything. The bloody nighties, the dressing gowns, the kitchen curtains and trench coat would all be reduced to an innocent pile of ash. But Mum wasn’t keen on this idea at all. There were too many things that wouldn’t burn down to ash – the wellington boots, the mobile phone, the tools, and of course the gun, the hideous gun. So at best it only half solved the problem. Besides, she said, she’d never made a bonfire before – a bonfire was a man’s thing – and she was worried it might get out of control. If the fire service had to be called, they’d discover everything. And even if the bonfire didn’t get out of control, the neighbouring farmer, seeing the smoke so near to his crops, might come down to see what was going on. He might start asking questions, interfering, trying to show us how it should be done . . .

My other suggestion was to seal everything up in the metal trunk we had in the attic, tie weights to it and then sink it in the huge reservoir in the Morsely National Park about eighty miles to the north. To my surprise, this idea didn’t excite any interest in Mum either. I said that if she was unhappy with the reservoir, we could always drive to the coast and dump the trunk at sea. ‘It’s not that,’ she said. ‘I just don’t trust the water. The water always gives up its secrets in the end.’

Mum said it with such conviction that I thought she might have been referring to some experience of her own, but then I remembered she had borrowed my copy of
Rebecca
when she couldn’t sleep one night. So much of what Mum was was made up of what she’d read. Is that what our middle-class culture created? People formed more by the books they’d read than the lives they’d lived? But maybe that had all changed for Mum after Paul Hannigan had pushed open her bedroom door. Maybe we’d both begun to live real lives after the chopping board had fallen.

Mum toyed with the idea of using acid, but like the bonfire it would only half solve the problem, as it was unlikely that even the strongest acid would be able to dissolve the metal tools or the marble chopping board. Moreover, acid was highly dangerous, and just purchasing it and the protective gloves and aprons we’d need would be enough to arouse suspicions.

Eventually, she decided to bury everything in the vegetable patch in the back garden, in the extension we’d dug ourselves in happier times. She wasn’t entirely satisfied with this solution, but at least it would get the bags out of the house, and compared to the other schemes it carried much less risk of detection. It would be a lot of work – we’d have to dig quite a substantial hole to fit the contents of the eight bin bags – but it could certainly be done.

Mum thought she could make some of the more awkwardly shaped objects easier to bury if she sawed them into smaller pieces. So one night, as soon as she got home from work, we took the mop and the bucket and the plastic bowl to the bigger of the two sheds, which Mr Jenkins had equipped with buzzing fluorescent strip lights and where Mum kept her small collection of tools. We sawed the mop handle into several sausage-sized sticks, and after an hour of slapstick bumbling worthy of Laurel and Hardy – it was a miracle we didn’t lose any of our fingers – we finally succeeded in sawing the hard moulded-plastic bucket in half. After that, neither of us could face making an attempt on the plastic bowl.

My heart started racing when Mum took Paul Hannigan’s mobile out of her pocket; I knew it had been in the same bin bag as his wallet. But I quickly reasoned my guilty panic away:
She’d never looked inside the wallet, she had no way of knowing that the driver’s licence was missing.

Sure enough, she didn’t even glance over at me as she put the mobile down on the work bench and began rummaging through the tool box until she found the hammer. She said she was worried the police might still be able to trace the mobile phone even if it was turned off, and insisted on smashing it to smithereens before we buried it, ‘just to be on the safe side’. She put the mobile on the concrete floor, knelt down beside it, and with a strange grimace on her sweating face, somewhere between destructive glee and pained disgust, she beat it into a masticated pulp. Remembering other blows I’d seen her strike, I looked away uncomfortably into the cobwebby corners of the shed.

But we never did bury the bin bags in the vegetable patch. On the night we’d set aside to do it, Mum came home from work ready to put a completely new plan into action.

Mum had seen a client that day whose twelve-year-old son had been injured while his class photograph was being taken. The stack of benches he’d been standing on had collapsed and although he’d only fallen four feet or so, he’d landed awkwardly and suffered a serious fracture of the left ankle.

As Mum flicked through the medical reports that lunchtime, she’d been reminded of another case she’d had not long after she joined Everson’s. Another twelve-year-old boy had badly fractured his left ankle in a fall, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember the boy’s name or the circumstances of the accident. She would have liked to check through the old file to compare the doctor’s prognosis and see how much the case had settled for, but she knew Everson’s would have destroyed it years ago.

It was only later that day, while she was taking instructions from a new client in the interview room, that it suddenly all came back to her. Pugh. Thomas Pugh. A smiling, tubby little boy with a butter-blond fringe. He’d been on a camping holiday with his family in the Morsely National Park and had decided to go exploring early one morning with his younger brother while their parents were still asleep. They’d come across some wooden structures in the forest that they’d taken to be an assault course and they’d been racing each other to them when Thomas had suddenly disappeared into thin air. His little brother’s first thought was that Thomas had been zapped by an alien death ray. In fact, he’d fallen into one of the abandoned copper mines that honeycomb the national park’s mountains. The wooden structures were all that was left of the old pithead.

And that’s when Mum had the inspiration: the abandoned mines were the perfect place to get rid of the pile of incriminating evidence in the spare room.

She made an excuse to slip out of the office and went across town to the public records office, deep in the basement of the grandiose council building that dominated the town square. There she requested copies of the National Park Authority’s plans of all the old copper mines in the Morsely National Park. Half an hour later five A3 sheets were handed over to her.

 

‘It’s absolutely perfect!’ Mum exclaimed excitedly that night as we sat in the lounge after dinner. ‘The mine shafts are deep inside the national park and they’re fenced off to the general public now. The authority was forced to do that after the Pugh case. Some of the shafts are extremely deep – the one I’ve got in mind is over
one thousand feet
. Tommy Pugh only fell into an eight-foot service shaft – if he’d fallen into one of the main shafts he’d never have been seen again.’

‘But how will you find it, Mum?’ I asked. ‘The national park’s vast.’