Ha!
He just couldn’t help himself.
‘Naw,’ went Maggie, looking right at Duncan. ‘You’d have to be a right mental bastard to even think about it.’
When Nick had gone, Maggie told Duncan to go upstairs with Isla while she made sure everything was ‘shipshape’ down here.
‘We don’t want to leave the place in a mess,’ she said, wiping a cloth along the worktop. ‘Yvonne’s doing enough for us as it is.’
Duncan got up from the table like his limbs were made of lead.
Maggie grabbed him with one yellow-gloved hand. ‘We have to do this. I know it’s fucking hard, but we have to do this for Isla.’
He nodded and turned away to the door.
Right.
Now to stage the scene.
She dried and put away the breakfast stuff, apart from the three mugs. She took some chicken from the freezer and left it defrosting in the pantry, like she’d taken it out last night or very early this morning, so it would be ready to cook up today. She filled a pan with water and opened a bag of oatmeal next to it, like they’d been in the middle of making porridge for breakfast when it had happened. She put three bowls and spoons on the table and poured a wee bit more tea and milk into the three mugs and set them on the table as well, like they’d all been drinking tea.
Then she took off the gloves, got a knife from the block and went through to the drawing room. She pulled the blade across her thumb. She would tell Duncan she’d cut it while emptying the dishwasher. But she wasn’t going to empty the dishwasher.
Squatting on the floor, she squeezed drops of blood out and watched them drip onto the cream pile of the carpet. Nick maybe first attacked her in here. She ran outside, but he caught her. Maybe there’d be more blood in the hall? She squeezed some more onto the tiles, thinking suddenly of Kathleen. That poor woman.
She looked down at the wee spots of blood on the tiles, then up at the landing.
There were benefits, right enough, to being a delinquent.
She smiled to herself as she opened the kitchen cupboard where she’d hidden Bunny last night.
‘Sorry, Bunny,’ she went as she chucked him down on the kitchen floor.
They maybe hadn’t left voluntarily. That was what she was hoping it would look like. The cops already knew Nick was a psycho, even if they couldn’t prove it. Hopefully, all this would plant a wee suspicion that Nick could have had something to do with their disappearance. Maybe he’d killed the lot of them very early this morning, at a pre-dawn breakfast, giving him time to dispose of their bodies under cover of darkness – Nick was a bright lad, he’d have thought this through – before turning up at the foot of the drive for his day out as if nothing had happened, like the callous wee bastard he was.
It would have been tight, to be there for Carol to pick him up as arranged, so he didn’t have time to clear up in the kitchen, to clear away the evidence of breakfast having been interrupted. Or maybe incriminating housework details just hadn’t crossed his mind.
Of course, circumstantial evidence like this wouldn’t even be enough to arrest him on, let alone charge or convict him, but he’d be questioned, and, given what had been going on, the business with the pram and Dean’s murder, she was hoping at least some of the cops would maybe be thinking the wee fucker had done this, even if nothing could be proved.
And that would be Nick on their radar.
He needed watching, they’d maybe be thinking.
And maybe next time he killed someone, or tried to – because there would be a next time – he wouldn’t walk free.
Well, she’d done all she could.
There had always been the possibility that Duncan or Yvonne or Michael would scupper it all by querying why, for example, they needed to leave the car at the house. She’d gone on about why this was necessary, saying that the police might trace it and find them, but she’d just been waiting for someone to go, ‘Maggie, you’re talking shite.’ Because there were plenty ways round that one – keeping to the back roads that wouldn’t have cameras. Changing the number plate. Dumping it somewhere and buying a new second-hand car with cash.
But none of them had the criminal mindset. They hadn’t stopped to think that maybe Maggie was setting it up to look like they hadn’t left at all – or at least, not of their own accord.
And they hadn’t stopped to think why it should be a no-no to withdraw money from their accounts before they left. The idea that the bank would have recorded the numbers on the banknotes was mental. But they’d bought that as well. None of them had rumbled Maggie’s real motivation – that there should be nothing to suggest that their vanishing was premeditated.