How to Kill Men and Get Away With It(62)

‘Kitty, what have you done?’ she whispers into my left ear as I remain statue-still, like a child determined to win the prize at a demented birthday party. ‘What have you done?’

I saved you, I think in a daze. That’s what I’ve done, I saved you.

She puts her hands either side of my face and turns my head so I’m looking her directly in the eyes. My mother was … is beautiful. Her eyes are that very rare colour of blue so deep they’re almost violet. She was the absolute queen of London before she married my father and became yet another housewife. The life she’d yearned for as a child growing up in the poorer districts of London soon became tainted and hated as she realised what it really meant. A cheating husband; regular beatings and sexual assaults; the pity of the women she was supposed to call friends, despite most of them having slept with her husband. Gifted with an ungrateful daughter who was so painfully a daddy’s girl, despite the fact her mother had been beaten so badly she could never have any more children when she produced a daughter instead of a son and heir. It was hardly any wonder my mother had collapsed in on herself as she had. And by the time I was old enough to notice the gilding sticking to my fingers every time I touched my father, my mother was already too broken to repair.

She was almost robotic that night as she cleaned and commanded, asking for various knives, meat cleavers and hammers until my father was little more than a bruised pile of meat, wrapped in plastic. She took the wheel of Dad’s Range Rover. She drove to one of the abattoirs, this one out in the West Country. She helped me unwrap him and throw the pieces of his body into the mincers. She turned off the CCTV before driving his car to a known suicide spot. Then she took the wheel of another car that had somehow appeared at the slaughterhouse while we were gone, and drove us home.

When we got back, we spent two days in uncomfortable silence, drinking tea, my mother kissing my head and stroking my hair, before she called the police and reported my father missing. I listened in as she lied to them about his depression, about how working in a business that revolved around death had affected him. And she listened in as I told them the same lies. Lies upon lies upon lies and I knew life would never be the same again.

About six months later, my mother announced our house was sold as she was moving to the South of France for a new start. She didn’t directly ask me to go with her. Besides, she told me, I had my life here. I had my friends and my schooling to finish, and my French has never really been very good. Instead, she splashed out on one the most expensive Chelsea apartments she could find. Plus I had Hen’s family so close, they’d always keep an eye on me. I went on holidays with them. James was delighted to have another daughter around who wasn’t ‘surly’ like Hen or ‘high energy’ like Antoinette. He taught me to play tennis when Hen showed no interest. Helped me with my sailing when Hen went through a gothic stage where she did little more than roll her eyes and whine that her own family liked me better. That wasn’t true. I have never gelled with Hen’s mum. I guess you don’t gel with women you catch your dad shagging over a pool table.

Anyway, back to now. I find the omnipresent concierges comforting. Almost more than my family ever was. Mum sends me an overly generous allowance each month, but I tend not to touch it; instead I live from my own income from social media. There’s an unspoken rule between us that we don’t talk about The Thing. Talking could crack the veneer. Could make her remember the look in my eyes as I smashed my father’s skull in with that vase.

‘Kitty, what have you done?’

I’m transported back to the present day and I suddenly feel childish and pathetic for needing my mother.

‘Oh nothing,’ I say. ‘I just wanted to see how you are.’

‘Do you realise the time? Are you drunk? High? Go to bed.’

‘Yes, sorry. I couldn’t sleep. I’ll call you soon.’

‘A more appropriate hour next time.’

‘Yes, sorry.’

There’s a long pause.

‘Kits?’

‘Yeah?’

‘I love you, sweetheart.’

‘I love you too.’

Then the line goes dead and that’s probably all the contact I’ll have with my mother until Christmas, when she’ll invite me skiing or something and I’ll lie to her about having plans here with a boyfriend. Lies upon lies.





53


KITTY’S APARTMENT, CHELSEA

It’s been a week since I killed an innocent man. A week since I snuffed the life out of someone who’d done absolutely nothing wrong, apart from having the misfortune to be related to an absolute piece of scum.

It’s all over the news obviously. I haven’t been able to get away from it so I’ve turned everything off and am hunkering down in my flat. I’ve even disconnected the Wi-Fi just in case I’m tempted to torture myself some more.

I haven’t left my bed in three or four days. Apart to get more wine or drugs. I stink. I can smell myself every time I move, which hasn’t been much.

The first news report I saw about Ruben’s death plays over and over in my mind like a snuff movie I can’t walk out of.

The body of Ruben Reynolds, younger brother of footballer Raphael Reynolds, has been discovered in the soccer star’s home.

According to friends, Ruben had been enjoying a night out at Raffles nightclub in the Southwest London borough, before heading home before midnight. Friends said he seemed in good spirits. The alarm was raised two days later when Ruben, 18, failed to turn up to a second dinner organised with his family. His eldest brother, Rowan, and father found the body in Raphael’s Chelsea apartment where Ruben was staying while his brother was on holiday in Spain.