After Anna (35 page)

Edna was glowing with pride, and Julia could see she had no idea that what she had done was in any way wrong or crazy or weird. All she could see was how smart she’d been.

‘You’re probably wondering how I took Anna,’ Edna went on. ‘How I took her from under the noses of all those people? It was quite easy, actually. I arrived a few minutes early and sat on a bench – you may have seen it? – about sixty yards up the road from the school. When Anna came out, I stood up and caught her eye and beckoned to her, and she just trotted over to me. The best part of the plan was that, if someone had seen me, I could simply say I had come to pick up Anna; after all, you had called earlier in the day asking for help. They all knew me, so there was no risk. It’s not like I would be caught with someone else’s kid. I would be with my own granddaughter, and what could be wrong with that? All I needed was a bit of luck to ensure Anna was not seen, and then she was mine. Beautiful, no?’

‘Of course, I didn’t know that you would attack Brian, or take the sleeping pills, but even without those incidents –which were
perfect
, by the way, the exact things I needed – I would have found a way to get what I wanted.’ She shook her head. ‘It was all done, Julia, but then, at the last minute, you had to ruin it. Anyway, that’s enough chit-chat. It’s time to close this chapter once and for all.’

She put her thumb and index finger on Julia’s neck and smoothed out her skin. She was wearing surgical gloves, Julia realized, careful to the last. Then Edna leaned forward and looked carefully at the target area, the syringe raised to the level of her cheek. Her face was dispassionate, professional,
medical
.

Julia tried to move away, tried to lift herself into the foot and a half of space above her head, the only place she could go, but Edna pushed her down onto the hard floor of the priest’s hole.

‘Shhh,’ she said, the habits of her bedside manner incongruously surfacing. ‘Relax.’

And then there was a knock on the door.

Edna paused.

The knock came again, louder, the metal door knocker banging on the plate.

Edna flushed with anger. She lowered the syringe. Julia heard the snap of plastic as she pulled off the surgical gloves.

‘Damn,’ she said, then slammed the door shut. ‘Back soon.’

iv.

There are not many moments in life when there is absolute clarity.
Go left, go right? Leave your husband, try to make it work? Sleep / don’t sleep with a married man
? Not clear at all. Even things that
might
be obvious – especially in hindsight – like
don’t be late to pick up your daughter
are not totally clear cut. Events intercede, meetings run over, phones die. The thing is that you never really know what the consequences of your actions or inactions will be. Unless you act on gut instinct – which many of us do, much of the time – you have to weigh things in the balance, try and think your way through the maze of possible outcomes.

Not now.

Now, Julia knew exactly what she had to do.

She had to get out of here or she was going to die.

This was her chance, the only one she would get, and if she didn’t take it, Edna would come back with her needle and Julia would end up at the bottom of the Irish Sea.

She heard a loud, low creak, which she recognized as the front door opening. The top hinge needed oil. It had been like that for a while. Julia thought Edna hadn’t fixed it because she liked the impression it gave; it sounded like the door in a Transylvanian Castle, opened by a humpbacked butler called Igor.

Then Edna’s voice:
Hello. To what do I owe this pleasure? Is everything ok?

Another voice, indistinct, but familiar. A woman’s voice.

Julia had to do something, which meant she had to get her hands free. She arched her back, then pushed one hand under her buttocks. She sat down to trap it, then tried to pull her other hand free.

The rope bit into the flesh of her hand. She pulled harder. The pain worsened and she felt a warm liquid run over her knuckles. Blood. She relaxed, then yanked as hard as she could. The pain was immense; it felt like someone was sawing a knife into her hand, yet her hand had barely moved. The rope was still tied tight around her wrists.

She paused, and listened. The voice came again. Julia recognized it, recognized the Liverpool accent.

It was Gill. Somehow, Gill was here. Julia tried to call out, but the bit in her mouth choked her.

Edna:
She’s not here. She came yesterday, but I haven’t heard from her
since
.

Then a man’s voice. Deep, steady: Mike Sherry. They had come looking for her. Of course; she’d invited Julia to meet her on Sunday night – last night – for Thai food and a glass of wine. Gill had three-month-old twins, Wilfie and Teddie, and leaving her sons was a bit of an operation, so Julia had declined. She didn’t want to be a burden, and she knew Gill was only doing it because she knew Julia would not want to be alone. But Gill insisted, and Julia, if she was honest, was glad to let her. She was grateful that her friend was looking out for her. She knew she would need it.

And now they were here, looking for her. Gill would have known Julia would not miss their meal unless something was wrong; she would have called, and got no answer. On Monday morning she would have tried the office, and found that Julia was not there either, maybe spoken to Mike, who would have told her Julia went to Edna’s on Sunday. And then she would have become really worried, fearful that Julia had maybe done something stupid, alone and depressed after dropping off her daughter. She would have decided to look for her friend, and the first place you always looked was in the last place you knew something or someone had been.

Which was Edna’s house.

Edna:
Oh. That’s a worry. Did you try her house?

Gill’s reply, muffled.

Would you like to come in? Have a drink? Talk through where she might be?

Edna sounded perfectly composed. She was even managing to sound
concerned
. It was amazing. She had her daughter-in-law trussed up in a priest’s hole in her living room, and was planning to sedate her then dump her body in the mouth of the Mersey River, a place from which she’d have to get home without a car, although she’d have a plan for that. A bus to a place with a station. Change of clothes into something smart. Train, then taxi home.

She had all that going on, yet she could chat calmly, as though it was just another day. Wasn’t that what characterized a psychopath, that kind of chilling, emotionless distance from the world around them?

So Edna was a psychopath. Or a sociopath. Or a something or other. Whatever – it just made it all the more imperative she get out of here. She yanked her hand again. No change from last time: agony, and no progress. She could feel that the rope had dug into her hand, tearing the flesh apart, but it could not get over the bones at the widest part. It was stuck. Those tiny, thin bones in her hand were going to be the difference between life and death.

Edna:
Well, if anything comes up, I’ll call you.

A pause.

Let me write it down. I’ll put it by the phone.

Gill talking, staccato. A string of numbers. Her phone number, for Edna to call if she saw Julia. Fat chance of that phone call ever happening.

Then the Transylvanian creak of the door hinge as the front door swung shut. Igor was coming back, syringe at the ready.

Julia pulled her hand back, twisting it from side to side, trying to saw through it with the rope. The blood was all over her hand now, but none of it made any difference. Her hand was stuck, and she was as good as dead. The rope was never going over the damned bone. Who’d have thought that those bones where your wrist thickens out into your hand would be the difference between life and death? She didn’t even know what they were called and they were going to kill her.

Unless.

There was one thing she could try, but it was almost unthinkable. She wasn’t sure she could do it.

And perhaps she wouldn’t have been able to do it, if it was only to save herself.

But she had to save Anna as well, and that made
everything
possible.

v.

Julia arched her back again. She rotated her torso so that the hand she was trying to free was under the hard bone of her hip.

Then she lifted her hip off the ground and slammed herself down onto the hand as hard as she could.

She had once watched a documentary with Brian about a commercial fisherman out alone on his boat who’d got his hand stuck in the winch that hauled in the long lines. It was a slow moving winch, and it gradually sucked in his hand. The man took his knife from his belt and sawed off his own hand. It was that, or die. Afterwards, he said he got the idea from the glue traps used to catch mice. The mice become stuck to the glue and slowly dehydrate. Sometimes, they are so desperate to escape that they gnaw off their own foot and limp away, easy prey for the cruel world they inhabit. Obviously, mice have no concept of death; they operate on pure instinct, and it was like that, he said. He felt like the mice. If you’d asked him beforehand whether he would cut off his own hand to save his life, he would have answered with reference to weighing up the value of his hand versus his life, but in the moment he had not thought that. He had just done it, like an animal would. Like mice do.

He hadn’t thought it would be possible to do if you thought about it too much.

And Julia agreed.

She was no longer acting rationally, or, at least, not only rationally. Yes, the rational part of her was there, observing, but it was not in the driver’s seat. That was occupied by instinct. By the animal part of her, and it lifted her up again, then slammed her down again.

Her hand was perpendicular to her hip, so the force was concentrated on the bone she wanted to break, and break it did, with a loud crack like a twig being snapped underfoot. She slammed herself on it again, and then again. Each time she felt the bones crumble further.

Finally, she positioned her hand under her hip and squeezed it against the floor. She felt the shape of it change, felt it deform, flatten into something new, and not like a hand.

She put the thought from her mind and pulled.

Her hand and the rope were slick with blood. She felt the bones give and move under the compression of the rope. She gasped in pain then she pulled some more and then some more and then her hand was free and limp and dangling and hurting so goddam much.

She was glad it was dark. She did not want to see the mess she had made of her right hand. With her left she reached down and tugged at the rope around her ankles. It was tight, but, typically for Edna, it was a neat knot and when she found the end it came undone easily.

That’ll teach you to be so fucking perfect
, she thought.
Soon you’ll wish you hadn’t got the knot-tying badge in the Girl Guides.

She hunched her shoulders, her hands in her lap. God, they hurt, but the relief was enormous. She could feel the blood flowing back into them, bringing with it the tingling of pins and needles, although pins and needles didn’t really cut it. Knives and daggers, more like.

She heard footsteps approaching the priest’s hole. They stopped, then she heard the snap of surgical gloves being put on. It sounded just like it did on the television.

Julia readied herself. She took deep breaths, tensed her muscles, willed them to work, and readied herself for whatever pain was waiting for her.

She pictured Anna at fourteen, Edna looming over her, telling her she had to make something of herself, that she had to work hard, that movies and boyfriends were for other, lesser girls. That she would be punished if she did not do as her grandmother wanted, that she knew the form the punishment would take and she didn’t want that, did she?

Anna, fifteen, throwing up in the bathroom, thin red lines on the insides of her arm, where no one could see them. Anna, twenty, neurotic, terrified of failure.

No. Anna was going to have fun. She was going to enjoy her childhood, mess around, laugh, take time to explore art and music and watch television and eat junk food. Anna would understand that balance and cheerfulness and kindness were what mattered, not grades and titles and money.

Julia’s way, not Edna’s.

The door to the priest’s hole scraped open. A gap an inch wide appeared to Julia’s left.

She braced herself. She felt good. Strong. Like she could do this, whatever this was.

And then it began.

vi.

You watch her friends – was she fucking that fat man? probably, knowing Julia – get in the car and drive away. You wanted to be sure they were gone. You don’t think they suspected anything. It would be too much of a leap for them to suspect you have their friend locked in a priest’s hole in your living room. They lack the intelligence, the imagination. They think like every other sheep does. To them it is unimaginable you would be planning to murder your daughter-in-law, and so they do not imagine it. You are glad; the inability of the common run to think beyond themselves is part of what keeps you safe.

And it is most of what sets you apart. You would be a superb detective. You would see beyond the evidence. You would not make assumptions about what had happened. You enjoy reading Sherlock Holmes for that very reason, in fact, he reminds you of yourself. The same penetrating intelligence, the same willingness to do whatever is necessary to get what is desired. Was Holmes a pleasant man? Quite the opposite, but he is admired because he brought bad people to justice. This, you think, misses the point. It is not what he did that is admirable, but how he did it. You would admire him equally if his purposes had been nefarious. More, perhaps, for it would have taken even greater strength of character to follow that path, to break the bonds that society puts on us: something you have experienced first-hand.

To choose matricide was not easy. You had to summon all your reserves of character in order to convince yourself that it was the right thing to do; that your mother needed to be released. And as for Jim, well, that took strength of a different kind, for there was a chance you would be caught.