Let Me Lie(27)

He’s serious. ‘I don’t want to move, Mark.’

‘We could buy somewhere together. Something that belongs to us both.’

‘Oak View does belong to us both.’

Mark doesn’t answer, but I know he doesn’t agree. He moved in properly at the end of June, when I was four months pregnant and Mark hadn’t spent a night at his flat in weeks.

‘Make yourself at home,’ I said cheerily, but the very fact that I’d said it reinforced my ownership. It was days before he stopped asking if he could make a cup of tea; weeks before he stopped sitting bolt upright on the sofa, like a visitor.

I wish he loved the house the way I do. With the exception of my three years at uni, I have only ever lived here. All of my life is within these four walls.

‘Just think about it.’

I know he thinks there are too many ghosts here. That sleeping in my parents’ old bedroom is hard for me. Perhaps it’s hard for him, too. ‘Maybe.’

But I mean no. I don’t want to move. Oak View is all I have left of my parents.

Ella wakes at six on the dot. Six a.m. used to be early, but when you’ve been through weeks of night-wakings, and resigned yourself to starting your day at five, 6 a.m. feels like a lie-in. Mark makes tea and I bring Ella into bed with us, and we have an hour as a family before Mark has his shower and Ella and I go down for breakfast.

Half an hour later Mark’s still in the bathroom – I hear the clanging of the pipes and the rhythmic knocking that provide the musical accompaniment to our ensuite shower. Ella is dressed, but I’m still in my pyjamas, dancing around the kitchen to make her laugh.

The crunch of gravel outside makes me think of yesterday evening. As the morning light creeps into the kitchen I’m embarrassed by the way I worked myself into a state. I’m relieved Robert’s phone was switched off, making Mark the only witness to my paranoia. Next time I’m alone at night I’ll play loud music, turn on lights, walk through the house slamming doors. I won’t cower in one room, creating a drama that doesn’t need to exist.

I hear the metallic snap of the letterbox, the soft thud of letters dropping onto the mat beneath, and then the lightest of finger taps that tells me the postman has left something in the porch.

When Ella was five weeks old, and full of colic, the postman delivered a textbook Mark had ordered. It had taken me a full hour to settle her and she had finally dropped off to sleep when the postman banged the door knocker with such force the light fittings rattled. I wrenched open the door in a sleep-deprived, post-natal rage, giving the poor man both barrels, and then some. Afterwards, when my fury had burned itself out and my cries no longer rivalled Ella’s, the postman suggested he might simply leave further packages outside the door, with no danger of disturbing us. It appeared I was not the only house on his round at which this was the preferred modus operandi.

I wait until his footsteps leave our drive, not wanting to greet him in my pyjamas, and still mortified by my tears that day, then I pad into the hall and collect the post. Circulars, more bills, an official-looking letter in a buff envelope for Mark. I take the key from its hook beneath the windowsill and unlock the front door. It sticks a little, and I pull hard to open it.

But it isn’t the force of opening the door that makes me take a step back, or the icy cold sucked instantly into the warm hall. It isn’t the parcel that rests on the pile of logs to one side of the porch.

It’s the blood smeared across the threshold, and the pile of entrails on the top step.





THIRTEEN


They say money is the root of all evil.

The cause of all crime.

There are others like me – other people wandering around in this half-existence – and they’re all here because of money.

They didn’t have any; they had too much.

They wanted someone else’s; someone wanted theirs.

And the result?

A life, taken.

But it won’t end there.





FOURTEEN


ANNA


The rabbit is on the top step, its stomach cut neatly open in one continuous, careful slice. A gelatinous mass of flesh and guts oozes from within. Glassy eyeballs stare out at the street, above a gaping mouth exposing sharp white teeth.

I open my mouth to scream, but there’s no air in my lungs and I take a step back instead, clutching at the coat stand to the side of the front door. I feel the prickle of my milk letting down, the need to feed my baby an instinctive reaction to danger.

I find air.

‘Mark!’ The word explodes from me bullet-fast. ‘Mark! Mark!’ I keep shouting, unable to tear my eyes away from the bloody mess on our threshold. A morning frost has coated the rabbit and its blood in glistening silver, and the effect serves only to make the spectacle more macabre, like a gothic Christmas decoration. ‘Mark!’

He comes downstairs at something between a walk and a run, stubbing his toe on the bottom step and swearing loudly. ‘What the— Jesus …’ He’s wearing nothing but a towel, and he shivers involuntarily as he stands in the open doorway, staring at the step. Droplets of water cling to the sparse hair on his chest.

‘Who would have done such a horrible thing?’ I’m crying now, in that post-shock relief that comes with realising you’re safe.

Mark looks at me, confused. ‘Who? Don’t you mean what? A fox, presumably. Good job it’s so cold or it’d be stinking.’