Let Me Lie(28)

‘You think an animal did this?’

‘A whole park across the road, and it chooses our doorstep. I’ll get some clothes on, then I’ll get rid of it.’

Something doesn’t make sense. I try to work out what, but it slips away from me. ‘Why didn’t the fox eat it? Look at all that meat and,’ I swallow the nausea that threatens my gullet, ‘the guts. Why kill it then not eat it?’

‘That’s what they do, isn’t it? Urban foxes feed from the bins. They kill for fun. If they get into a hen coop they’ll slaughter the whole flock, but they won’t eat a damned one.’

I know he’s right. Years ago my father decided to keep geese, penned in a run at the bottom of the garden. I can’t have been older than five or six, but I remember pulling on my wellies and running to collect the eggs and throw grain onto the muddy grass. Despite the geese’s Christmas fate, my mother named them all, calling them individually as she rounded them up at nightfall. Her favourite – and by default, therefore, mine – was a sprightly bird with grey-tipped feathers she called Piper. While the others would hiss and flap their wings if you got too close, Piper would let my mother feed her by hand. Her docility was her undoing. The fox – so bold he didn’t wait for darkness – was deterred by the bad-tempered siblings, but clamped his jaws around poor Piper’s neck, leaving her decapitated body for my mother and me to find that evening.

‘Filthy animals,’ Mark says. ‘You can see where the fox hunt brigade’s coming from, can’t you?’

I can’t. I’ve never seen a fox in the countryside, but I’ve seen plenty in town, trotting down the centre of the street, as bold as you like. They’re so beautiful I can’t imagine terrorising them in punishment for their own instincts as hunters.

As I stare at the mutilated rabbit, I pinpoint what’s been troubling me. I speak slowly, the thoughts solidifying along with the words.

‘There’s too much blood.’

There’s a pool of it beneath the lifeless rabbit, and more on the three steps down to the drive. Gentle amusement shows on Mark’s face as he takes in my announcement.

‘I remember dissecting frogs in fourth-form biology, but we never did a rabbit. How much blood should there be?’

The sarcasm irritates me. Why isn’t he seeing what I’m seeing?

I try to stay calm. ‘Let’s suppose a fox did it. And let’s suppose there’s enough blood in a tiny wild rabbit to produce this mess in front of us. Did it wipe its paws on the other steps?’

Mark laughs, but I’m not joking.

‘Did it use its tail to paint smears of blood?’

Because that’s what it looks like; like someone has taken a paintbrush, dipped it into the rabbit and covered our steps with irregular daubs of blood. It looks, I realise with sudden clarity, like a crime scene.

Mark becomes serious. He puts a strong arm around me and uses his free hand to close the door, then he turns me to face him. ‘Tell me. Tell me who did this.’

‘I don’t know who did it. But they did it because I went to the police. They did it because they know something about Mum’s death, and they want to stop me finding out about it.’ Voicing my theory does nothing to make it sound less fantastical.

Mark is impassive, although I detect a hint of concern. ‘Sweetheart, this doesn’t make sense.’

‘You think this is normal? An anonymous card yesterday, and now this?’

‘Okay, let’s think this through. Suppose the card wasn’t someone being spiteful—’

‘It wasn’t.’

‘What did they want to achieve by questioning your mother’s death?’ He doesn’t wait for me to answer. ‘And what do they want to achieve by scaring you with dead animals on the doorstep?’

I can see his point. It feels disjointed. Why push me towards the police, then warn me off?

He takes my silence as defeat.

‘It was a fox, sweetheart.’ Mark moves forward and kisses my forehead. ‘I promise. Why don’t I take Ella while you have a nice bath? I haven’t got a client till eleven today.’

I let Mark lead me upstairs and run me a bath, putting in some of the ludicrously expensive bath salts he bought me when Ella was born, which I’ve never had time to use. I soak beneath the bubbles, thinking about foxes, rabbits, blood. Wondering if I’m paranoid.

I picture the anonymous card; imagine the sender’s hand sliding it into the envelope, putting it in the postbox. Did that same person cut open a rabbit with surgical precision? Smear blood across the steps of my house?

My pulse won’t slow down. It beats a staccato rhythm in my temple and I sink lower in the bath, letting the hum of the water fill my ears instead. Someone wants to frighten me.

I wonder if the two acts are really that disjointed after all? I saw the anonymous card as a call to action, a direction to look into my mother’s death. But what if it wasn’t an instruction, but a warning?

Think again.

A warning that Mum’s death wasn’t as it seemed; that someone out there meant my family harm. Still does.

I close my eyes and see blood, so much blood. Already my memory is playing tricks on me. How big was the rabbit? Was there really that much blood?

Photographs.

The thought occurs suddenly, and I sit up, sloshing water over the side of the bath. I’ll take pictures and then I can take them to Murray Mackenzie at the police station and see if he thinks it could have been a fox.