‘A cold-blooded killer,’ finished Yvonne.
Duncan nodded, almost calmly. ‘Who’s to say he wouldn’t track you and Isla down, despite the fake IDs, and try to hurt you, or worse?’ He turned to face Maggie. ‘There’s no way I’m having you going off on your own. You and Isla need me. I’m not going to let you down again. No way.’
Thank Christ for that.
‘But what are we going to do, then?’ she whispered.
Come on, come on.
She could almost see the cogs turning in Duncan’s brain. This couldn’t come from Maggie herself.
‘You all have to go,’ said Yvonne at last.
Maggie shook her head, like she was all confused. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You all have to disappear, and fast.’ Yvonne sat up straight. ‘You need to get a fake identity for Duncan too, and then the three of you can take off, set up new lives for yourselves far away. As completely different people.’
‘But if we disappear, we’ll be all over the news as missing persons,’ Maggie protested. ‘We’d be recognised.’
‘If the police think you’ve just taken off because you want to get away from Nick – and they will assume that’s what’s happened, after everything that’s gone on – they’re not going to launch an appeal. And you could change your appearances easily enough. Maggie, you could cut your hair short. You’d suit it better like that anyway. Duncan, you could shave your head. You could lie low for a few months in a rental somewhere, an isolated cottage in Cumbria or Wales or wherever.’
Thank God for Yvonne, whose mind seemed to run along the same lines as Maggie’s.
‘I suppose that would work,’ went Maggie slowly. ‘But what about Nick?’
Yvonne snorted. ‘What about him? We can pack him off to boarding school, let someone who’s being paid for it deal with him. Then he’s off to uni. He’ll probably end up a professor of psychology or something, with a spot of serial killing on the side.’
‘Yvonne!’ groaned Duncan.
‘Sorry, but really. Nick should be the least of your concerns.’
‘He’s my son.’ Duncan was staring at Maggie. ‘I suppose, once we’ve got our new lives established, I could come back and try to sort him out. Get him the help he needs.’
The only help Nick needed was a bullet to the head, but Maggie nodded. ‘Aye, you could, right enough. But you’d have to be careful not to let on to him where we were.’
‘Of course.’
No way was that happening. No way was Duncan coming back here once they’d left. She could talk him out of it, if and when the time came. Maggie looked across the table at Yvonne, who raised her eyebrows, just a wee bit, to telegraph that the two women were on the same page here.
Once they were gone, they were gone.
23
Lulu - June 2019
Lulu had the crowbar in her hand. Dad was standing in front of her saying something, but she wasn’t listening, she was too angry, she needed to stop him, she needed to shut him up, and now she was doing it, she was hitting him over the head and he was grimacing.
‘Ow,’ he was saying, his mouth twisting. ‘That hurts. That really hurts, love.’
And now he was falling, there was blood everywhere and Lulu was holding the crowbar and staring down at him and wailing, screaming –
She opened her eyes.
Her mouth was sticky. She had to push her tongue between her lips to unseal them. When she sat up the room spun, and she felt woozy, a bit like she did when she woke after taking zolpidem, but much, much worse. The light filtering through the curtain, dim as it was, was too bright.
So it was morning?
There was no sound in the room apart from the pattering of rain on the window.
So she was alone?
Fractured images began chasing themselves across her memory.
Drinking the hot chocolate Nick made for her in the kitchen, trying to act normal. Waiting for her opportunity to escape.
She had to escape.
From Nick.
Nick, who was a killer.
A completely different person from the man she thought he was.
She pushed aside the covers and forced herself upright, but she swayed and overbalanced and sat back down heavily on the bed. A suspicion began to form in her mind, and she reached out to pull open the bedside drawer.
Her pack of zolpidem was there. She hadn’t taken any since she’d arrived at Sunnyside, so there should be what – twenty-three tablets left? With shaking hands, she opened the packet and pulled out the blister strips.