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PROLOGUE
Droplets of brilliant red blood speckle the white tiled floor. Jenna’s purple school blazer sits in a heap at her feet and she looks at me with hazy eyes as she sways slightly in the bright light. Then she staggers, falls. The droplets smear into garish crimson streaks.
This is what happens, I think. This is what you get.
By her limp hand, Jenna’s backpack gapes open, her books, headphones, sparkly pencil case and doodle-covered journal spewed out around her as her life leaks away.
Her hand twitches and I think, Maybe this is why you aren’t meant to have favourites. They do tell you that in teacher training. But something stabs in my gut and I reach for her?—
And then I’m sitting up, gasping for air, swiping away the freezing sweat clinging to my chest, in the dark, alone.
Every night it’s the same.
My eyes adjust to the gloom: grey blanket, chipped sink, a miserly window slit.
There comes a scratching, scrabbling sound like a long-nailed wraith is trying to claw through the wall. I reach down for one of my shoes and wait.
I’ve never seen one, but I know it’s a rat because the bottom of my mattress has been chewed through and, hungry though I am, I didn’t do it.
There!
I throw my shoe at the scurrying blob and it disappears as mysteriously as it appeared. Poooof!
Magic rats. This prison has magic rats.
I wish for a second I could share my observation with Neil, and then I tuck the thought away. The chances of my seeing him again are slim to none.
But I can honestly say, sitting here, hand on pounding heart, that I have no regrets.
The thing is, some people deserve to die.
Yes, yawn, not a fashionable opinion.
But it’s true.
And, believing this, you have to allow for the odd smidgen of collateral damage.
I like to think of evil as a disease, both hereditary and highly contagious: airborne, corrupting everything that steps within its invisible cloud.
The only answer is to tape up the door, mark it with an X and set the whole family burning.
Some people deserve to die.
And, sometimes, justice requires sacrifice.
1
NOW
Tinted BB cream, rose-pink lipstick, a flick of mascara. Maybe a dab of blusher. There. I tuck my golden hair behind my ears and smile at myself in the mirror, take a tissue to blot my lips and smile again, wider, showing my teeth.
Mina, my brother’s wife, got veneers last year – she looks amazing. Mine aren’t quite as white as they once were.
But smiling releases neuropeptides that help reduce stress and there’s nothing really wrong with mine, so smile, smile, smile, Frances.
Not that I’m stressed – just, it’s good to remember that life is ten per cent what happens to you and ninety per cent how you react to it.
‘You ready?’ my husband calls from the bedroom.
