The Flavours of Love (48 page)

‘Why do you have a cockney accent?’ I ask him.

‘Dunno.’ Shrug. ‘Do you want this or not?’

Not
. I think.
Absolutely not
. My hand trembles as I relieve him of his envelope.

‘Do yourself and whoever loves you a favour, don’t talk to strangers any more,’ I say.

‘Yeah, all right,’ he says. He thinks in this scenario that I’m the weirdo. Not the person who paid him to deliver a letter, not himself for doing it and not simply running off with the money. But me, the person who has been targeted.

The letter is heavy in my hands because it contains the weight of my rapidly growing fear; it contains the final message.

My fingers shake as I open it. I’m aware as I do that the house isn’t empty any longer. I am no longer alone. I slip out the single sheet and drop the envelope where I stand to use two hands to unfold the message.

SURPRISE!!

is written large across the page. Large and, indeed, surprising.

I drop the cream sheet too, and walk towards the kitchen. I know what’s going to happen once I’m there. The house no longer feels empty because someone is waiting in the kitchen for me.

I should turn around and run. I have children to think of. What would they do without me? But I keep walking because I have children to think of. If not me then it’ll be them. And as Aunty Betty pointed out, I’d do anything for my children without a second thought.

*

I know her. She’s one of those people you pass in the street, you stand behind in the queue for the pay machine in the car park, you clash trolleys with in the supermarket. She’s one of those people who you sometimes throw a confused half-smile at in case you know her because you vaguely recognise her face but you’re not sure where from.

She is every person you’ve ever not met properly. She’s the person you could see every day for your whole life and never notice.

She is standing in front of my back door. The hood of her black top is pulled up but it doesn’t quite obscure her face. In her right hand, held close beside her leg with the blade pointing down, is a blackhandled chef’s knife. The type that killed my husband.

‘Don’t run,’ she says. Her voice is normal, ordinary, like she is. I expected maybe a witch’s cackle, or a husky, villainous drawl. But she is ordinary.

And I smile. My smile may show on the outside, but it’s there on the inside. What a ridiculous thing for her to say. Running is the last thing I’m going to do.

LXI

In the year I was forty-one, a woman broke into my house to murder me. She murdered my husband and then she decided to kill me. I let her in by leaving the back door unlocked while I went to the front door. I knew she wasn’t the type to knock at the front door, but she was the type to sneak in and wait for me, to try to end me the way she ended my husband.

When she killed him, I think she thought she’d put a full stop onto his life and who he was. She hadn’t, of course, and that’s what drove her insane in the end. He was still alive, in his children, in his wife, in his family, in his friends. He did not end, did not cease to exist because of her, she’d wielded the ultimate power of killing someone and she thought it would make her the most important person in his world. That the world would focus on her when they thought of him, that he would not continue to exist for anyone unless they thought of her as well.

That didn’t happen. His wife continued to go to work, his children continued to go to school, his aunt moved to be near his family, they didn’t take part in the appeal, they didn’t spend all their time at his grave. They carried on as he would have wanted them to, but without her at the centre of it. And that didn’t work for her.

She’d spent a year in hiding, living in France, waiting for the knock on the door, for them to come for her. But no one did. The anniversary came and went and no one came for her. No one questioned her beyond asking why she’d called him that morning. ‘About a recipe from cooking class,’ she’d replied and no one said anything else.

His daughter didn’t tell she’d seen my husband with her that day. And so she said nothing. She waited and waited and waited. And it
never happened. So she moved back to England. Back to her house, back to the life she had before. She even got another job and everything went back to normal. But she wasn’t normal, ordinary. She was
someone
now. She was the woman who had done that thing everyone had talked about for months in the papers. She had held someone’s life in her hands, how could anything be the same again?

It only meant something to her, though. His wife slept with the blinds open like nothing bad had ever happened to her, that she didn’t need to lock up tight at night. His wife went to the supermarket and didn’t break down in the aisles at certain foods – not like she did when she ever saw an ingredient they’d used in class. The wife let her children come home from school by themselves as if they were safe. His wife even looked her right in the face on Brighton seafront and threw her that ‘do I know you from somewhere’ smile you gave to strangers you vaguely noticed. Nothing had changed for his wife, the woman who was meant to love him more than life itself. The Wife was the reason why this had happened in the first place and nothing had changed for her.

It had to.

The Wife had to know who she was. And then she had to be scared. And then she had to be removed. But only when The Wife knew that once she was gone, there was nothing she could do to protect her children. His end had been unplanned, quiet and horrifically sad. The Wife’s had to be slow and as terror-filled as possible. This was all her fault, after all.

In the year I was forty-one, I had two children and a late husband, and a woman several years younger than me stood in my kitchen and tried to kill me.

The first words she said to me were: ‘Don’t run.’

And I smiled at her. I smiled at her because running was the last thing I was going to do.

LXII

‘Don’t run,’ she says.

‘Why would I run?’ I reply. I sound brave, I seem courageous. I am also completely terrified. Completely. My heart cannot beat properly because of this fear. I’m not even shaking. My eyes want to focus on the blackberry stain but I can’t stop looking at her, for even a second, because that’s when she’ll come at me. ‘I don’t even know who you are.’

‘I have to kill you, you know that, right?’

‘Erm, no, I don’t know that, actually. Why would you do that? Who are you?’

‘It should have been you. I should have killed you instead of him. If you were gone, I could have supported him through it and been there for him. He would have fallen in love with me. We would have been together properly, then.’

‘I thought he already did love you. That’s what you said in your letters. You were lovers.’

‘He did love me.’

‘He just had no clue that he loved you or that you were lovers, right?’

Her body jerks forwards, ready to cross the kitchen and use the knife on me, but she restrains herself, holds herself back because she has more to say.

Time is almost up
, I think.
Aunty Betty will be calling Fynn and the police any second now
.

‘This is all your fault. He would be alive if it wasn’t for you.’

‘That’s what his parents think,’ I say. ‘They think if he hadn’t met me he would have gone on to marry some nice woman who would
have made him become a doctor or something and he’d still be alive. I feel sorry for you thinking like his parents.’ I hear Phoebe say in my head, ‘
Do you even know what you sound like when you say things like that?
’

‘You don’t think I’m going to kill you.’ She snarls a smile at me and I know she’s going to do it. I’ve run out of time. This wait is over.

‘You’re not going to,’ I say. ‘I don’t think you killed Joel, and I know you’re not going to kill me.’

‘How did I get his back door key, then?’ My heart jerks to a standstill, my breath snags in my chest.

She takes a small but definite step forwards. ‘How do I know the knife was twisted before it was dragged across his stomach?’

I clamp my painful teeth together as a barricade against her words, I don’t want to hear this.

Another step. ‘How do I know that he was left on Montefiore Road because there is no CCTV on it or any of the surrounding roads?’

‘I don’t want to hear this,’ I state through my gritted teeth, my eyes aflame with dry, outraged tears.

Step. ‘How do I know that he thought he’d lost his phone? But really, when he took his daughter into the school, he left it in my car. So I turned it off and kept it.’

‘I don’t want to hear this.’

Step. ‘You don’t want to hear that I wanted him to come to my house and I even drove us there? But he didn’t want to come in, just wanted to pick up his car.’

‘No. I don’t want to hear it.’ I
cannot
hear this.

Step. ‘You don’t want to hear that I dropped him off to pick up his car but I knew he’d work out where his phone was, so he’d come back to my house to get it?’

‘I … I don’t want to hear this. Please stop talking.’

Step. ‘You don’t want to hear that even though we were alone he still wouldn’t admit there was something between us? He was still saying what you told him to say.’

Step. She is almost at the blackberry stain.

‘Please. Just stop. I don’t want to hear any more.’

Step. ‘You don’t want to hear any more?
You
don’t? What about me? What about how much he hurt me by saying all those things to me because you told him to? We could have been so happy but he had to keep saying those things to me.’

Step. ‘I wanted him to understand how much I hurt. How it felt to be humiliated once in public and then again in my own home. So I showed him. With this.’ A brief wave of the knife.

Step. ‘He understood all right.’

Step. And she is there on the stain; she is where it all started for me. ‘It would have been fine, he’d be alive right now if it wasn’t for
you
. He persuaded me, even when he was bleeding all over the place, to take him to the hospital, saying he wouldn’t tell them what I did.’

Step. She is closer to me now. So very close. ‘And in the car he tried to send you a message. That’s why I stopped and dragged him out. Left him there with his mobile out of reach because he didn’t deserve to live if all he’d want was you. What’s so special about you?’

‘I can’t hear any more of this,’ I tell her. It’s enough. What she has told me is enough. Any more and she will not be able to go for me because I will go for her. I will kill her.

Step. Three more steps and she will be close enough to stab me – and I’ll be close enough to put my hands around her neck. ‘The last thing he did was to type a text to you saying “Love you xxxxx” that he never got to send because the thought of him doing that when I was the one trying to save his life was one insult too far.’

‘You didn’t have to do that to him.’ The words tumble out through my clenched teeth. ‘You didn’t have to kill him.’

‘No, I didn’t. But I do have to kill you.’

Her hand gripping the knife comes up, her face twists with a type of rage I’ve never seen before and the back door explodes as it is kicked open. Suddenly, brutally, the world around us is alive with an unsynchronised chorus of voices shouting, ordering, screaming at the same time: ‘STAY WHERE YOU ARE!’ ‘PUT THE KNIFE DOWN!’ ‘DROP YOUR WEAPON, NOW!’

All at once, Trainee Detective Clive Malone is in front of me, putting
himself between me and the woman who is wide-eyed, shocked and furious at what is happening around her. He wants to be a barrier between us in case she decides to ignore all the warnings and lunges for me.

She won’t, though. This has taken her too much by surprise. ‘PUT THE KNIFE DOWN! NOW!’ someone screams again, and her eyes scowl her hatred at me as she slowly raises her hands above her head like they do in the movies and then drops the black-handled chef’s knife. It clatters as it hits the floor and creates a small nick, not far from the stain, on one of the tiles – another scar on the skin of my life. Another mark to remind me, this time, of where it ended, where this circle came around to meet and complete itself.

We stare at each other as they handcuff her.

‘Did you really think I’d let you get away with what you did to Joel, to me, to Phoebe, to my family?’ I say to her. ‘Did you really think that I’d let you come into my house, my home, to destroy me and not fight back? You really are deluded, aren’t you? Pathetic and deluded.’

She surges forward but is held back by the small male officer to her left and the tall female officer to her right. We continue to glare at each other as the officers inform her of her rights and take her away. Even as she is led out of the door she continues to twist her head to glower at me until her head will not go any further around to finish visually eviscerating me.

‘You did so well,’ Clive Malone says to me, now able to face me because I am safe from her. ‘We’ve got a full confession which, as I said, means Phoebe probably won’t have to testify. If we can get her to plead guilty, it’s unlikely anyone will ever know about Phoebe seeing her that day. That must have been an awful experience for you to go through, but you got us exactly what we needed. You’ve done so well.’

4 days ago (May, 2013)

‘Mrs Mackleroy, can you tell us for the tape in your own words what happened?’ Clive Malone said. He sat beside another, older uniformed police officer who could not look more bored if he tried.

‘Eighteen months ago my husband was murdered,’ I began. ‘Everyone thinks I’ve been coping so well. But they have no idea of the things I have done to keep myself going. And then six weeks ago my fourteen-year-old daughter asked her headmaster to tell me she was pregnant. A boy she knew confessed that he was the father, but I knew it had to be someone older, more worldly wise who had manipulated her to not use contraception. And that week, I got the first letter from my husband’s killer. She’s been writing to me for six weeks now. I know who she is because my daughter saw her with my husband on
that day
. The day my husband was killed.