AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Who are you talking to?Katie had asked me.
I don’t know,I thought. I don’t know.
It only struck me later that if Katie could curb her disgust enough to pick up my bloody tissues, then she could easily have disposed of them without comment. That if she or Mark had seen them days or even weeks ago, then either of them could have done that without a fuss, the way I’d cleared away countless things for them, not to mention flushing the loo, which both Kieron and Katie seemed allergic to doing even when the contents were fit for the bomb-disposal unit. But no, she’d had to score petty revenge for all the times I’d told her that her room stank or was a tip, asked her how she could live like an animal.
Later still, when I heard her go out, presumably to Liam’s, I ran downstairs, dug the tissues out of the kitchen bin and flushed them down the loo myself. I washed the knife with hot soapy water, dried it on loo roll and flushed that away too. I put the knife back in the cutlery drawer, in its leather case. If I’d taken it out with me for protection, now I was putting it back for the same reason. I needed protection from myself.
Lisa texted:Drink this week?
I texted back:I’ll call you later.
Later came. I didn’t call.
That night I went walkabout again. I had to; it was the only way I could breathe. I called at the Spar and nicked a large bag of Jelly Babies, literally walked out with them while the assistant was serving a group of kids without anyone even glancing in my direction. A chap called Simon was walking his dog, a blonde Cockapoo called Carl. He was getting out of the house – Simon, not Carl – to escape his fifteen-year-old daughter and her friends. He was going to kill an hour in the pub was what he didn’t say. Tuesday night was the same: young woman called Karen, all dressed up nice and in a rush. She asked me if I knew where the Red Admiral pub was, so I directed her to it before telling her she looked great, to boost her confidence. She was obviously meeting someone for the first time, possibly a colleague or perhaps one of those Tinder arrangements, and she was feeling a bit nervous about it. I didn’t persuade either of them into any dark corners. Didn’t feel anything even near a murderous or violent tendency. The knife was at home. It was in the cutlery drawer, where I had put it.
Mark went to the pub both nights, no surprise there. To meet his mate Roy, he said, although Roy doesn’t smoke so far as I know, and yet again I smelled tobacco on him when he got into bed. Wednesday, I don’t know what he did because I was out again, walking, walking, walking. It was a habit I didn’t seem to be able to break. I limited myself to the odd greeting, a polite two minutes passing the time of day: the weather, the unreliability of public transport, the country going down the pan.
But on the Thursday, nearly two weeks after Jo had been attacked, came the worst possible news.
Parents’ grief as knife-crime girl dies.
I scanned the iPad screen with frantic eyes.
Complications… did everything they could… Joanne Weatherall lost her fight for life in the early hours of this morning.
Two lines further down, my blood slowed in my veins.
The police are still keen to speak to the woman who was seen talking to Joanna Weatherall earlier that evening. She is believed to be in her fifties and was walking a small black dog.
‘Oh God in heaven,’ I whispered.
I sent the article to the printer, carried it back to the kitchen as carefully as if it were a pot of funeral ashes. I read it again and again, hands shaking. I slipped her into her plastic sleeve. I clipped the file shut, trapped my finger in the ring binders and drew blood. Sucking the blood so it wouldn’t go all over, I closed my eyes. Closed my mind to my own terror.
‘I did not hurt that girl,’ I whispered to no one. ‘I did not hurt her.’
She never asked for my name. I never gave it.
The witness had remembered almost nothing about my appearance, but someone must have come forward and told them about the dog. I tried to slow my breathing, which was coming quick and shallow. There was no mention of my height, my weight, the colour of my eyes, not even the colour of my hair. A raincoat wouldn’t give me away, not when half the population had a nondescript cagoule that could be black or navy or dark grey in the night. If no one can see you, you can get away with murder. But someone had remembered the colour of the dog. Black.
All morning I was a robot. At lunchtime, I was polishing wine glasses because there were only two punters in when the bar phone rang.
‘Barley Mow, Church Street, Runcorn, can I help you?’
‘Rachel?’
It was Mark. My chest filled with heat. ‘Mark? Everything all right?’
‘I’ve been ringing you all morning. Have you left your phone at home?’
‘I might have. It might be off, why?’
He sighed. I heard exasperation with a dash of weariness. ‘Have you seen the article in theWeekly News, that lass that was stabbed?’
‘No. Why?’ Phone hooked in the crook of my neck, I dug around in my bag.
He gave another sigh, longer. Disbelief this time, with an undercurrent of depression. He knew I was lying. Knew I would have read it, printed it off. I made myself wait out the pause he was trying to get me to fill. My mobile wasn’t in my bag.
‘She’s died,’ he said eventually. ‘They’re saying they want to speak to a woman with a small black dog,’
