I turn away, my hand to my mouth, stifling the urge to scream. A fleeting thought begs the question: is this what he did to my sister? It fills me with utter despair, until I reassure myself that there was no sign of physical abuse from the autopsy.
I force myself to take another look. A light has been switched on.
I fight the urge to scream. It’s not Justin’s hands wrapped around Phoebe’s neck.
It’s Beth’s.
58
BETH
I take successive deep breaths, trying to gather myself. It’ll be over soon, I tell myself as I squeeze harder and harder. Phoebe fights back, but her strength is less than mine. She gives me an unnerving, brief look of surprise before her body turns limp and her vacant eyes stare back at me. That’s when I know I can let her go. I rotate my hands over, examining them. A ritual I’ve established over the years.
I can barely believe it. He’s made me do it again. My shoulders shake. This has been the toughest. I’ve lost so much strength since the last time, and I evidently hadn’t used the correct amount of sedation. The girl struggled. There was a moment when I panicked. It was terrifying. I didn’t think I was going to have the power. And yet, here we are again. He made me kill another innocent young woman. My shoulders slump. I need to get away from here. I stand up. It’s usually a relief when it’s all over. He always treats me like a princess the days that follow. A chance to resume normality. But what is normal? I don’t know any more.
Movement from the next stall alerts me there’s someone in there. I step to the side of the door and look inside. ‘Oh no, Justin. No. No. No,’ I mumble. ‘How could you?’
I leave the stables and return to the house, my hands in front of me, like a surgeon preparing to commence an operation. I’m shuffling, barely able to place one foot in front of another. I catch my reflection in the glass of the kitchen door. My numbness has turned to anger. Loathing for him. Loathing for myself.
As I enter the kitchen, I kick off my shoes and make for the sink. Pulling out a scrubbing brush from the drawer, I continue the ritual. I scrub my hands with liquid soap. The bristles buckle under the force. Faster and faster, trying to cleanse away the evil in me, until my hands are as red raw as my arms I’ve scratched to pieces.
Justin appears from the shadows, startling me. ‘Is it done, darling?’
‘Don’t you dare darling me. You said never again.’
Scrub. Scrub. Scrub.
The brush tears off a layer of skin.
‘Let me tell you. I’m finished. You will never coerce me into carrying out your dirty work ever again.’
‘You know I haven’t got the stomach for the end.’ Even with all his experience, at his conferences, with his clients, he still can’t read the room. The loathing, the disgust, just doesn’t resonate with him. Surely he can’t be that arrogant. But he is. I should know. I have been married to the man for almost twenty years.
The blade of the knife on the draining board shines in the light. I reach for it but stop as he raises his voice.
‘Let’s not forget you’re the murderer, darling. It runs through your veins. Ever since you were a kid.’ He laughs, mocking me. ‘I even find myself sleeping with one eye open some nights.’
He steps towards me. ‘Love, you’re upset. I understand. Come and sit down.’
‘I will not do as you say!’ My voice is loaded. Loaded with years of regret and self-loathing. ‘I won’t. I won’t. No more. I told you no more.’ I throw the scrubbing brush at him. It misses, hitting the wall instead.
I leave him and head upstairs, each step a struggle. Behind me, I hear him pick up the scrubbing brush and turn on the tap. He always tidies up after me.
Blue follows. I collapse on the bed, closing my eyes, recalling that time he first hypnotised me.
He orders me to lie on this bed, our marital bed, and he’s telling me he wants to try a new technique on me. It’ll help my anxiety, he says, softly in my ear. His voice is in the background, like a police siren you can hear in the distance. I still know where I am, here in our bedroom, and I know I can get up and walk away at any moment, but the powerful thing is, I don’t want to. It’s warm and cosy and I feel so safe with him. And then I’m laughing because he says something stupid, childish. He carries on, and then my mouth stops mid-laugh and he quietly asks me if I’ve ever done anything I regret. And I want to tell him so much. I have never wanted to tell anyone in my whole life as much as I want to tell him, in this moment, on our floral duvet, with the late evening sun filtering through the blinds, that I once killed a girl and pushed her in a river and that I have been carrying her ghost with me ever since. ‘Carry on, darling. It’s OK, you’re safe with me,’ he says. So with tears running down my face, I tell him that girl, Mandy Malone, was no stranger. She was my best friend. But she betrayed me with my boyfriend, Dylan, my childhood sweetheart, the love of my life.
He broke me. They broke me.
A tear slips down my face. I let it fall. And the ones that follow. I pull up the sleeves of my cardigan and start scratching my arms, drawing blood. The itching is worse than ever tonight. Blood encrusts my nails.
Never again. It’s over.
I sit up. Blood smears the duvet. I don’t know what to do with myself. I can’t bear to lie in this bed another night.
I wobble into the ensuite and grab the side of the sink. Justin’s razor and shaving foam sit on the shelf. I let out a loud, frustrated moan. He’s always everywhere.
I wash the blood from my hands. He locked away what he gained from me during those hypnosis sessions, acutely aware of what I was capable of. His obsession with his work grew. Then came the onset of cancer, the hair loss, the loss of my breasts and the vulnerability that he wrapped around his little finger. I can see it so clearly now. It was only a matter of time before he was going to use that information to his own ends.
