What Goes Around: A chilling psychological thriller (34 page)

I hold his eyes, unflinching. Our mother. Always our mother. Back from the dead. Showing up in an Edinburgh kitchen, our eternal ghostly stalker. Should I deny that I took her life? Murdered her? (Because I did murder her, didn’t I?) … I decide not. I won’t deny my actions to David. Because of all the people in the world he should get it. ‘Our walking dead of a mother?’ I say. ‘I didn’t kill her.’ My hand is in an awkward position behind my back but it’s the only way to prevent David from seeing my fingers close round the handle of the knife. ‘I took her life but I didn’t kill her. Our mother was already dead. She died years before she stopped breathing.’

‘You strangled her?’

‘I did.’ I nod. ‘I really did.’

‘Why?’ He pulls at his hair with both his hands, maniacally, desperately, and then knocks his fists on his skull. ‘Why would you do that?’ he shouts. ‘Why?’

‘Because she opted out,’ I say quietly. ‘She should have protected us. She should have stopped him.’

‘You.
You
should have told me.’ He spits the words at me. ‘Gareth knew. Fucking
Gareth
knew.’ He pushes me hard against the counter and I grasp the knife more firmly.

‘So that’s your problem?’ I laugh in his face. ‘Gareth knew before you did?’

He’s much stronger than I would have believed possible but when he grabs hold of my blouse I’m ready for him. It isn’t easy to stab someone through a jacket, and the angle is awkward. The knife goes into his back just below the ribcage, deep enough to make him cry out but, not deep enough to completely disable him.

He has hold of my hair; I twist the knife deeper. He bangs my head on the worktop twice before I land a kick between his legs. I scratch down the side of his face, I bite the edge of his hand, and when my mobile rings, I grab for it, but awkwardly because David has stamped on my fingers and they feel broken. The name on the screen is Mary McNeil. ‘My son.’ That’s all I say. I hope that’s what I say. I can’t be sure because my tongue seems to have doubled in size and is thick and cold in my mouth.

I want to fight him, I will keep fighting him, but there’s an explosion in my head and I groan from deep inside my gut. I drop the phone and put my hand up to my head, where blood is running from my forehead, through my fingers, down my neck, my hands, my arms. I try to apply pressure to the wound but feel a piece of my skull move under my fingers. Fractured. My skull is fractured.

When I hit the floor, I groan again. And then I try to pull my limbs in close because I’m freezing. My insides are turning to ice. I’m back in the cellar and Gareth is standing before me. ‘Stroke his fur, Leila Mae,’ he says, holding a cat out in front of him. ‘Look into his eyes as the heat drains from his body. That’s what death is, Leila Mae. Death is cold.’

I don’t want Gareth in my thoughts. I want Leila Mae with her black eyes and her surety. Her way of coping. Her way of living. She wouldn’t die like this. She would keep fighting to the end, the bitter end.

‘Leila Mae.’ It’s David’s voice. I feel his lips on my cheek. ‘Sweet dreams.’

It’s not you I want.
I’ve been lying on the sofa while Molly entertains me with her singing and Chloe makes some tea and sandwiches that we polish off in a rush of hunger. What Francis said as he left –
It’s not you I want –
has stuck in my head and I have a moment of shock when I work out what it means.

‘I have to warn Leila,’ I say to Chloe, grabbing for my shoes, suddenly panicked. ‘I should have realised sooner.’
Why didn’t I realise sooner?
‘I thought he meant that he didn’t want me for a girlfriend but now I’ve just worked it out – I think he means to hurt Leila.’ I’m upending cushions as I search for my mobile. ‘Call my mobile, Chloe, will you?’

‘Leila? Why on earth would you warn her?’

She still doesn’t know about the Francis Leila connection. All I’ve said up to now is that Francis and I had a falling-out and I felt threatened by him. ‘Francis is Leila’s brother,’ I say.

‘What?
What?
’

‘Please, Chloe, I’ll explain everything later. Just call my mobile. I have to let Leila know that he’s on his way.’ It doesn’t take long to get from here to Maybanks, not if you have long legs and are fit like he is – fifteen minutes tops? ‘He’s probably there by now.’ I swear under my breath.
Shit, shit, shit.
‘Please, Chloe, call me. Quickly! Chloe!’

‘Okay! Okay!’ She presses the screen on her mobile and seconds later I hear my ringtone. I follow the sound, sliding my hand down the side of the sofa to grab hold of my handset.

I call Leila at once and she answers after two rings, saying, ‘My son—’ and then there’s a thumping sound and she groans, loudly, agonisingly, like an animal that’s been shot.

‘Leila? Leila?’ I shout, frantic now. ‘Please speak to me!’

‘Too late.’ It’s Francis’s voice. ‘About five minutes too late.’ The line goes dead.

‘Fuck! Fuck!’

‘Mum!’ Chloe holds her hands over Molly’s ears.

I immediately call 999 and when I’m put through to the police, I say, ‘My friend is in danger.’ I give them the address and they promise to send a car at once.

‘Since when has Leila been your friend?’ Chloe says, shaking her head at me.

‘I’m going round there,’ I tell her. ‘You stay here with Molly.’

‘Mum, you can’t! Not if you really believe he’s dangerous.’

‘I have to do this.’ I grab my car keys and run out the front door. ‘I’ll be okay.’

The short drive to Maybanks seems interminable. I sound my horn at one car and wave my fist at the driver of another, then pull up in front of the house and run up the path. I hear shouting, a man’s voice calling for help. I burst through the front door and run into the kitchen. Leila is on the floor, blood pooling around her head. ‘Please help my mum!’ Alex shouts, leaning over her body, shaking her as if he thinks she’s simply sleeping.

‘Call an ambulance,’ I tell him and I kneel on the floor beside him, feeling for a pulse at Leila’s throat. Nothing. Her face is chalk-white and her eyes are open but unseeing, so that she resembles a lifelike mannequin. I notice that an area of her skull about the size of a satsuma is caved in at one side. ‘I’m going to try to resuscitate her.’ I roll her onto her back and begin breaths and chest compressions. She feels cold, so cold, but I keep going. In between breaths I talk to her, ‘Come on, Leila. Come on! Alex needs you. Please, please, come back to us.’

The police and the paramedics arrive simultaneously. One of the paramedics takes over from me while a policeman leads Alex and me into the living room. Alex is sobbing and I sit beside him on the sofa, holding his hand, while the paramedics try to save Leila and the police begin to question us.

Shock seeps into the very bones of me. I should have called her as soon as Francis left my house. She told me he was unpredictable and potentially violent. She warned me of the danger and if I had only alerted her to the fact that he was on his way then she would have had time to protect herself. There will never be any getting away from that. I had the power to save her life and instead I lay on the sofa drinking tea while I listened to my granddaughter sing.

Within an hour Maybanks is full of police and I’m taken into the annexe to give a statement.

‘Is she dead?’ My arms ache from Francis holding me down and from the chest compressions. I rub the muscles but it doesn’t help. ‘She is dead, isn’t she?’

‘Yes.’ The policeman is about my age with greying hair and apple-green eyes. ‘Can you talk me through what happened?’

I tell him about Francis’s visit to me; I report that he was agitated and aggressive. As I talk, my fingers feel the back of my head where he slammed me against the wall. The bruise is raw and brings tears to my eyes. ‘He’s Leila’s brother but I hadn’t realised how troubled he was until a few days ago when Leila told me they had a difficult relationship. I should have acted sooner and called her but I didn’t,’ I say to the policeman. The act of saying this out loud makes my mistake real and I begin to cry. ‘I’m so, so sorry for that.’

‘Take a moment,’ the policeman says.

‘I could have saved her.’

‘You can’t be sure of that. She may have invited her brother in anyway.’

I give the policeman Francis’s description and he goes off to tell one of his colleagues. Alone with my thoughts, I rewind to the moment I came into the kitchen, the sight of her body, the brutality of her injury, Alex’s distress as he tried to save his mum.

Leila is dead. For the last year she has been the woman I hated and if I’d heard of her death I would have thought ‘Serves her right’ or ‘She probably deserved it’. Now though, I feel like I know her – I knew her. And while she made some bad choices, she wasn’t the ruthless, conniving bitch I believed she was. She was just doing her best. Like we all are.

The parts of the puzzle come together with speed as the police trace Francis’s movements on the day he killed his sister. At eight thirty, he caught the tram to the airport and hired a car then drove to the care home in Dunfermline. CCTV
recorded him entering the premises by the tradesman’s entrance and leaving almost thirty minutes later. During that time his stepfather was stabbed three times in the stomach and left to bleed to death. When the nurse went into Gareth’s room to give him his lunch he had been dead for almost an hour.

Francis’s next stop was his visit to me and I tell the police almost everything I know about him. I confess to the fact of my own deceit – going to Leila for therapy, acting as if I’d never lived in Maybanks and had no connections to the man she was with. But what I don’t tell them is the fact of Alex’s parentage. I don’t tell them about that because I’m worried the information might get back to Alex and he doesn’t need any more confusion or grief in his life. He needs to remember his mother as someone who loved him and always put him first.

Before the day’s end, a dog walker spots Francis’s body on a piece of waste ground close to Crammond beach and calls the police. Francis has bled to death from a knife wound most probably inflicted by his sister as she fought for her life.

With no other relatives, I invite Alex to come and stay with us. He agrees at once because he tells me he can’t stay in Maybanks – ‘not when Mum died there’. Ben and I do our best to make him feel welcome although, understandably, the mood in the house is heavy.

My OCD is growing stronger and it scares me because I have no idea where it will end. Unless I complete thorough and repeated checks to sockets, locks, batteries and the handbrake, I’m fearful and jittery, my heart pounding with incipient dread. And I’ve begun to count. I count the steps I take from my bedroom to my bathroom, from the kitchen to the front door, from the car into the shops. If the number is even I have to repeat those steps, over and over again, until I count an odd number.

Chloe has noticed the counting. She thinks it’s because of Francis and what I witnessed at Maybanks. ‘It’s post-traumatic stress, Mum,’ she tells me. ‘Don’t worry, it’s perfectly normal. None of this is your fault. The feelings will subside and you’ll recover.’ She hugs me. ‘I promise.’

I give her a weak smile as if I believe her. She doesn’t know the half of it and I’m too much of a coward to share the details with her.

I’m trying to take each day at a time and, as far as possible, to focus my attention on Alex who is often quiet, so that I worry he is withdrawing into himself. I speak to Rob Mooney at the Bridge, who assures me he will stay in regular touch, and he is as good as his word, calling every evening to check in on Alex, who takes the phone into another room and pours out his heart to him. He has a lot to say. At first he believed his mum was murdered by one of her clients but a couple of strokes of the keyboard and he’s able to read an approximation of the truth. It took reporters less than twenty-four hours to link David Francis and Leila Mae as brother and sister. The media tells the story of a brother who murders their stepfather then hours later his sister, before dying himself of the wound inflicted by her as she fought to save herself. It’s a ghoulish tale, bloody details relished by some journalists and commentators who speculate about family feuds and bitter arguments. But nowhere is there any suggestion that Alexander Henrikson is Leila and David’s son and for that I’m grateful.

The police seem to share information on a need-to-know basis only, so Tom is none the wiser about my involvement with Francis and Leila, and has made the assumption that I was visiting Mrs Patterson and that’s how I ended up hearing Alex calling for help. ‘The house is yours now,’ he tells me. ‘I signed the papers this morning.’

He looks broken. He’s unshaven and there are black circles under his eyes. I reach across and briefly squeeze his hand. ‘I know you loved her, Tom. I’m sorry.’

‘She was leaving me, you know?’

I stare down at my feet.

‘I don’t know why. I don’t know what I did, or didn’t do.’ His voice cracks. ‘You must think I deserved this.’

‘No.’ I hug him and hold him while he cries. ‘No one deserves this.’ I stroke his hair. ‘No one.’

What price for Maybanks? A woman’s life? Is Maybanks worth that?

No, never. Never that. At no point when I set out to get my petty revenge did I want Leila to actually die. To be ashamed and upset, yes, but never dead.

‘And I’ll pay for anything Alex needs,’ Tom tells me, pulling away. ‘It’s the least I can do.’

‘Thank you.’

‘It’s kind of you to take him in.’ He shakes his head, perplexed. ‘I know you have a good heart, Ellen, but this clearly goes beyond anything that would ever be expected of you.’

‘Well, that, Tom, is the least that
I
can do.’

He doesn’t know what I mean by that and I’m not about to explain it to him. It’s simple really – I blame myself. I’m a grown woman who lost track of what’s important. I shouldn’t have been going to Leila for therapy. If I hadn’t been her client then Francis would have had no reason to target me and so I would never have been involved on the day that Leila died. Perhaps she would have died anyway – we’ll never know – but what I do know is that I had the chance to stop, to think, to talk to Chloe and allow her to make me see sense, but I didn’t take that chance. I was too intent on looking for revenge.