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I’m still trying to get my head around this when, under this envelope, I find a photo album of Paul as a child. He was a cute lad, with an apple-cheek smile and a shock of white-blond hair. In some pictures he is riding a bike, in others he digs a moat around a sandcastle on the beach. There are two older children with him and a man I assume to be his dad, although they don’t share many familiar features. A younger version of Sue is often either by Paul’sside or hovering in the background. At least I assume it’s her, as she looks quite like the framed photograph downstairs. In later images, Paul is older, perhaps seven or eight, and it’s just him and her. He isn’t looking into the lens in any of the shots and neither is he smiling. The album ends with a series of blank pages.
I close the book and bite down on my middle finger as I make sense of it. So I was wrong about two things. Firstly, Sue was, no,isPaul’s mother after all. And secondly, she is still very much alive.
CHAPTER 41
CONNIE
I know I shouldn’t have taken it, but sometimes I don’t listen to common sense. Spread across the lounge carpet is all the evidence against Paul I stole from his house, arranged like the arc of a peacock’s plumage. I have his phones, his passports and other ID, a dozen of the letters he wrote to his victims and their replies, copies of deed-poll name changes, the medication I suspect he fed them, and a picture of him and his mum from his photo album.
Everything else, I carefully replaced exactly as I found it, back in the boxes. I don’t want him to have any idea someone has been there until he starts rooting around for something in particular. I’m also counting on him failing to notice I replaced the padlock on his back gate into the garden with a near-identical one until he can’t unlock it with his key.
Walter texts to check I’m okay. He knows I was going to take a look at Paul’s house but has no idea I actually broke into it or what I took. He’ll only have a go at me and tell me again to go to the police. Sorry Walter, but not yet. When the next stage of my plan is over, then I’ll do the right thing. Until then, I have to thinkof myself. So I reply, telling him I’ll bring him up to speed when I clean his house tomorrow. I only started doing it on Monday. He’d been thinking about hiring a cleaner for a while, he said, and because I have more time on my hands since Gwen’s death, he offered me first refusal. I’m not convinced he really does need the help as his place is always spotless. But I think he pities me, and because I have no pride, I agreed.
I was so tired on the bus rides home from Paul’s place that I struggled to keep my conscience in check. I spent ages arguing the pros and cons of anonymously sending that detective Krisha Ahuja everything I’d just stolen. Even if it’s enough evidence for her to look into Paul’s behaviour, the best-case scenario would be an investigation, charges and a trial. But that would take more than a year. If he’s found guilty, the police can seize the earnings a criminal has made from the crime they’ve been proven to commit. But that might take another twelve months. Can I really wait two more years to inherit Gwen’s estate? No. And what if he’s cleared? It’ll all have been for nothing.
And that’s not taking into account the many variables. I’ve researched them all, from Paul selling Gwen’s house between now and then, to him spending the rest of her money or burying it in an obscure offshore account. It’s not impossible that I could be waiting three, four or five years for forensic financial investigators to locate what’s left, or I might get nothing at all.
So that leaves me with one other option, the one I’ve decided to take. It’s a risk and I’m sweating just thinking about it. I need to calm myself down, so I make myself a roll-up. I should quit again, I think as I stand at the back door lighting it up. During my stay at HMP Bronzefield, I’d alternate between e-cigarette pens and roll-ups. We were allowed to vape in our cells but we could use tobacco when we were out exercising in the grounds. I combined the two.
When I look back on my time there, I can’t complain. I made a few acquaintances, but mostly I kept myself to myself. The sentence didn’t come as a great surprise. My brief had warned me that because I already had a criminal record for a similar crime a year earlier, I should expect anything up to four months. In the end, the magistrate met the guidelines in the middle. Mine was a stupid scam, I know that now, especially as I’d already inserted myself into Gwen’s life by then. But it was early days in our relationship, money was tight and there was no guarantee of a pay-off.
I’d like to say my crime was complex and highly intelligent. It wasn’t. It happened when I was on a date with a man I swiped left for on the app Married-But-Flirty. I’ve made dozens of fake profiles on morally dubious dating sites like that and met men searching for a little disingenuous fun behind the backs of their wives and girlfriends. On impulse, I stole this particular mark’s credit card while he was in the pub toilets. It’s never been easier to commit credit card fraud since tapping replaced chip-and-PIN as the norm. The maximum spent in any one transaction might only be £100, but that card can go a long way in a short space of time. So I used it in separate post offices to withdraw cash, netting £500 that afternoon. But when I discovered it hadn’t been cancelled by morning, I got greedy and went on a mini spending spree, buying anything from groceries to toiletries and a handful of new outfits.
Usually, when these men realise they’ve been conned, they cancel the card and take the financial hit rather than admit to a wife or girlfriend exactly who might’ve stolen their card and the circumstances in which we met. But this arsehole had no choice but to confess. He and his wife ran their own company and I stupidly didn’t realise that it was a business card I was spending on. She discovered the card’s activity, looked through his phone, put two and two together, and once I was identified by CCTV, they insisted on pressing charges against me. The last time I was caught, I got awaywith a fine and a suspended sentence. This time I wasn’t so lucky. And by leaving Gwen alone to serve my time, neither was she.
Fuck her.
My mum’s gravelly voice comes quick and loud and out of nowhere.
Fuck Gwen.And fuck everyone but yourself.
I can hear Caz saying it so clearly, she could be standing behind me. She said it so often that apparently by the time I’d reached my second birthday, I was saying it as frequently as her. She’d even tattooed those four words along her rib cage. There were no exceptions to her mantra, not even me. But I wouldn’t appreciate just what lengths she’d go to to ‘fuck everyone but yourself’ until I reached my early twenties and the day she had me arrested.
‘No, fuckyou,’ I say. I don’t want to think about her now, as there are more pressing matters than a ghost. And I wonder if she can hear me down there amidst the crackling flames of hell.
CHAPTER 42
CONNIE
Well, whoever named this place Sunny Meadows must have had a good sense of humour, because it’s about as far from sunshine or a meadow as you can physically get. From the other side of the dual carriageway, I regard this nursing home from roof to road. It’s a three-storey concrete eyesore, surrounded by three tower blocks that cast it in perpetual shade. Trustpilot reviewers have given it a paltry one and half stars out of five. From appearances alone, that’s generous. It’d be a struggle to find a cheaper home to dump an elderly relative in than this. So it makes me wonder why Paul chose it for his mum, Sue. Surely after four murders and I assume four inheritances, he can’t be short of cash?
It’s my second visit to Oxfordshire in recent weeks. The last time was to visit the cemetery where Paul had Gwen buried in an unmarked plot not far from here, I think. I make a mental note to borrow flowers from someone else’s grave and lay them on hers before I return home. I pat the creases out of my skirt and top before I make my way down a set of steps, along a graffiti-strewn underpass, and up another set before finally reaching double doors.
It takes a good minute after pressing the buzzer before the doors open. I head for an unmanned reception desk and push a silver bell, the kind you’d find on the concierge desk of an old hotel, then I wait again. It’s only marginally more pleasant inside than it is outside. The air is stale, as if it’s been trapped and recycled forever.
It takes me back to the care homes I worked at in my twenties, although none looked quite this desperate. Only now, when I look back at that period of my life, do I feel guilt. I was a horrible, selfish bitch back then. I’d use cleaning jobs at hospices and places like this to pocket the occasional ring or necklace to sell at a pawnbroker’s for cash. It wouldn’t be a regular occurrence, maybe once every couple of weeks, so as not to alert the managers that they had a theft problem. And when I did get caught, which happened twice, they quietly let me go, as the owners were afraid of the bad publicity a court case would give them.
I didn’t question who I was robbing. I’d never met my maternal or paternal grandparents and was raised by Caz and her friends to believe elderly people were fair game. As a kid, they were a means to an end in distraction burglaries. As an adult, they weren’t real people. They were unconscious, non-communicative bodies in beds, most only kept alive by ventilators. They wouldn’t miss what I stole. I’m ashamed to admit that it wasn’t until I reached my forties and met Gwen that my opinion changed. Once I pushed through the hazy detachment of her dementia, I discovered a human being, a woman who had lived and loved, hurt and healed, laughed and cried and who deserved my respect. I could only have dreamed of being a gifted parent like her. The more I learned about myself by being around her, the less I liked. I’m surprised I don’t walk about with a stoop with the amount of shame I now carry.
I shake my head until the memories of old me disperse like dandelion heads in the breeze. I need to remain focused so I glance around the reception area. With no sign of anyone responding tothe bell, I’m tempted to go behind the desk and find Sue’s room number myself. Then a woman’s voice sounds from behind me. ‘Can I help you?’ she says around a yawn.
‘Hello,’ I say as I turn. ‘I’ve come to visit my aunt, Sue Fernsby.’
As the woman clocks me, she frowns, the lines across her forehead pointing down like an arrowhead. There are burst red capillary veins creeping across her cheeks. There’s a ring on her wedding finger, a plain, silver band. There’s something familiar about her, or at least a different version of her.
‘Rachel,’ she says, as if she has no doubt about who I am. Her use of my birth name takes me by surprise. The last person to use it was Paul.
‘Yes?’ I reply.
