The Killer Inside

‘Yes,’ she continued, ‘he said that you’re the strongest woman he has ever known.’

Irene put the mug onto the table too briskly, so that the tea almost slopped out of the top. She mashed her trembling hands together in her lap. Impossible to hold onto any reserve now.

‘Did he really?’ she managed, emotion coagulating in her voice.

Rowan leaned forward and clasped her own hands together, as though praying. The dog slid off her lap and went into the kitchen, where Irene could hear it lustily slurping from a water bowl.

‘He really did.’ She paused. ‘Look,’ she said and gave a deep, wheezy breath inwards, ‘I know all about … well, Liam going missing.’

‘Oh,’ said Irene. ‘That’s not quite what …’ She picked up the cup again for something to do, even though she no longer wanted the tea. It felt strange to say he was ‘missing’ but wasn’t that word painfully on the money in so many ways? There was a long, strained silence. Then she said, ‘Where is Michael, Rowan? Where has he gone?’

‘Well, that’s the thing,’ said Rowan. ‘I think he’s gone looking for him.’

‘What makes you say that?’ This came out too sharply, but Irene couldn’t help it. It touched on the same painful well of hope that allowed her to get out of bed each morning. ‘Has he heard from him?’

Rowan blushed now, unexpectedly, and stared down at her cup. It was very bizarre. She didn’t seem like a woman easily given to embarrassment. Then she looked up and there was something in her eyes that Irene felt herself drawing away from.

‘What is it?’ she said tightly.

‘It came out wrong just now … about looking for him.’

Irene was beginning to feel exhausted from this visit. It was an emotional rollercoaster. Now she was getting irritated with this woman and her riddles.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean,’ said Rowan with excruciating patience, ‘that I think he’s trying to find out exactly what happened to him all those years ago.’

All those years ago … As if it were a hundred. As if it were a thousand. As if it didn’t matter any more.

‘Mrs Copeland,’ said Rowan. ‘You know Michael believes Liam is dead, don’t you?’

ELLIOTT

I was cycling home when it happened.

I’d naïvely thought, moving from London, that it would be easy to cycle here. I’m not exactly sure what planet I was on, thinking city drivers were the aggressive ones, but the way they hammered round the narrow lanes here at all hours had come as a bit of a shock. Still, we only had one car and Anya needed to drive to the next station along for the better train connection to London, where she worked, so I cycled in every day.

I was on the road that led from the top end of town when I heard the sound of a car behind me. It didn’t overtake as I’d expected it to where the road got wider. I turned to look behind me, but the driver had on a baseball cap and sunglasses; plus, they were sort of hunkered down in their seat. The car was a dark SUV – black or dark blue, I couldn’t really tell.

An uneasy feeling rippled up my neck and I pedalled harder, knowing that the turning to lead me off this road was coming up soon. The car just seemed to purr malevolently along behind me for ages. I thought about that movie Duel, where the guy is terrorized by a never-revealed maniac in a huge truck. The road was coming closer and I pedalled even harder. I was almost there when I heard the roar of the engine behind me – right there. Awash with shock, I wobbled and then toppled sideways, crashing onto the narrow pavement. The car zoomed away with an angry roar around the corner before I got a chance to see the number plate.

‘Shit!’ I said. Pain sliced through my knee, which was caught under the bent frame of the bike. My hands blazed with a burning, stinging pain. Looking down, I saw a constellation of tiny stones and beads of blood on both my palms. The front wheel of my bike was all bent from hitting the pavement, and I’d jarred my back.

‘Bastard, bastard,’ I said with feeling and hobbled towards home, having to hold the front half of the bike off the ground all the way.

I was surprised and grateful to find that Anya was there when I got back. She didn’t normally get in until about seven.

I’d taken the bike down the alley to the backyard and I opened the kitchen door to find her standing at the stove, stirring something in a pan. When she saw me, her face went from pleasure to concern in half a beat.

‘Did something happen?’ she said, wiping her hands and coming over to me.

‘Fell off my bike,’ I said. She made a sympathetic noise and took my backpack from me. ‘Well, I say that, but I was essentially forced off it by some tosser who thought I was Dennis Weaver.’

‘Oh no!’ she said, and it made me smile, despite the fact that most parts of my body were hurting right now. One of the things about being married that had never stopped thrilling me was the near-telepathy over cultural references.

She came over and turned my palms round, then gently kissed the grazes. It hurt but I managed not to wince.

Anya helped me wash the grit out, as I told her all about what happened, and then she gently applied antiseptic. Her brow was sweetly scrunched, as if she was doing highly skilled surgery.

My right knee ended up with a large plaster across it, which was bound to come off straight away, but I let her apply it anyway.

‘So,’ she said, as she put away the first aid kit and washed her hands. ‘Did you get a look at the guy’s face? The one in the car?’

‘No, not really,’ I said wearily. ‘He had on a baseball cap and sunglasses. Anyway, it all happened …’

I paused.

‘What?’ said Anya, turning back to me.

‘It’s probably nothing,’ I said. ‘Just that I had an encounter with a parent today and he was a bit aggressive.’ I filled her in on what had happened.

‘Do you think it was him who knocked you off your bike?’ she said. Her back was to me and she turned on the gas under the pan again, before starting to stir. ‘You really didn’t see him? Can you describe him at all?’

I thought about it for a moment, touched by how seriously she was taking this.

‘No,’ I said after a few moments. ‘I can’t believe he’d do that. I mean, it really was nothing.’ I paused again. ‘It’s just that …’

‘What?’

I blew air out through my mouth. ‘I don’t know, Anya, he just said this really strange thing about knowing me. I swear I’ve never spoken to the man before.’

‘Knowing you?’

‘Yeah … sort of like we’d had a beef before.’

We were both silent for a moment, thinking about this.

‘Do you think he might be confusing you with someone else?’ said Anya, turning to me now.

I shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

As I said it, I thought about the way the man had looked at me when he was standing outside the school. Stock still, staring, his eyes cold. Aggression seeming to radiate off him. I experienced a small chill.

I went over to her and wrapped my arms around her narrow middle, leaning down to rest my chin on her shoulder. She smelled better than any person I’d ever known, and I breathed her in for a moment.

‘You’re feeling better?’

She nodded, looking down at the stove top.

‘I’m …’ I began ‘… I hope I wasn’t a dick the other day.’

She twisted her head and gave me one swift kiss on the lips before turning back to her stirring.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said, which didn’t exactly reassure me.

‘What are you cooking?’ I said.

‘Making a cheese sauce,’ she said. ‘For a mac cheese.’

I smiled into her neck. I was obviously forgiven. Despite all the things that my palate had been introduced to in the last few years – from crocodile steaks to guinea fowl, quinoa to (unforgettably) coffee that came out of a civet’s bum – I still hankered for the comfort foods of my childhood, sometimes. This was one of the few things my mum used to cook from scratch and eating it made me think of being cosy on the sofa and watching telly together on winter evenings.

‘To what do I owe the honour?’

She turned and pecked me on the cheek.

‘I just thought the first day back marshalling the little monsters of Beverley Park might warrant comfort food,’ she said. ‘Especially now I know you’ve had to deal with thuggy dads and stave off maniacs in trucks.’

‘Well,’ I said sheepishly, ‘it wasn’t exactly a truck … but thanks.’

She started to stir more vigorously. I took the hint and moved away, going to the fridge to find some juice.

‘I meant to tell you,’ she said. ‘Managed to lose my phone yesterday.’

I hadn’t clocked that we hadn’t had a text exchange today, what with everything that was going on.

I paused with the juice carton in my hand. ‘That’s a bummer,’ I said. ‘Have you used the finder app?’ We had a program that showed you where your phone or laptop had last been used. It had been very handy when I’d lost my laptop last year, enabling me to track it down to a café on the seafront.

She carried on stirring, her back to me.

‘Yeah but it’s clearly been unlocked and disabled by someone.’ She flashed me a quick, bright smile. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It was a bit knackered anyway. I treated myself to an iPhone 8. I’ll give you the new number, wait …’

She fished the phone from her back pocket and tapped at the screen. My own phone buzzed with her message, but I ignored it, a little distracted by what she’d said.

‘Why did you change the number?’ I said after a moment.

She shrugged. ‘Oh, it was just a security thing … they prefer you to do that when it’s been stolen … or whatever.’

I didn’t reply. I’d never heard that before. Plus, it was unlike her to blithely spend money like that; and then I remembered that she had been with Patrick and Julia yesterday. They would have given her the cash for the new phone.

Those were the kind of things that rankled a bit, much as I loved my parents-in-law. It was the assumption that they could just spare, what, seven hundred pounds like that. As though it meant nothing.

When dinner was ready, we settled in front of the Sky planner with our food on trays.

I got through my portion quickly and was rising for more when I looked over and saw that Anya had basically rearranged hers, barely touching her food.

‘Not hungry?’ I said and she shrugged.

‘Just a bit tired, is all.’

It was a strange evening, overall. I was aching all over from my earlier tumble and took myself off for a hot bath after we’d watched two episodes of a crime drama we’d been following. It was a good one, but watching the murder victim being covered in dead roses by the masked killer who had been hiding in their attic wasn’t exactly a mood-lifter.

Before I went for my bath I looked over and saw Anya staring at the television with the oddest expression on her face.

It was a hard, angry look; quite unlike her, really. She’d turned the telly over to some sort of dating reality thing and it was almost like she was glaring at the contestants currently making idiots of themselves.

‘Hey, you don’t have to watch that, you know,’ I said and for a second she snapped her gaze towards me in a way that made me stop in the doorway. Her face relaxed into a smile then and she gave a big yawn, arms above her head so the baggy sleeves of her favourite cardigan slipped down over her slim, freckled arms.

‘I like enjoying the discomfort of others,’ she said with a grin. ‘Plus, I get to be really judgemental.’

‘Well, I’ll leave you to your schadenfreude,’ I said as I went through to the bathroom.

‘You and your fancy book learnin’,’ she said, in a daft American accent, before throwing a cushion at me.

She went to bed before me and I thought she was asleep when I came in later. I was a natural night owl and Anya was the opposite. I slipped gingerly under the duvet in the dark, wincing as my knee stung and my lower back throbbed.

But she turned to me straight away, bringing her face close. I saw the gleam of her wide eyes and felt her warm breath on my face.

‘I love you,’ she whispered.

‘I love—’ I started to say but then her mouth was on mine, hard, mashing against my lips so that after a moment I tasted blood. Then she was pushing the duvet away and climbing onto me. She was ready and, despite all my aches, I was too. I slid inside her with a groan. She started to rock quickly, fists pressing onto my chest, so I could feel each of her knuckles grinding into my skin. Even though it hurt, it was so exhilarating and unexpected I found myself unable to hold back after a few moments.

‘Ah, sorry,’ I said sheepishly. She stopped moving and leaned down, kissing me tenderly on the bruised place on my lip.

‘No need to be,’ she said. ‘I was almost there before you came into the room. I was having a very hot dream.’ She paused. ‘And then there you were.’

‘I’m glad I was,’ I murmured and, as she turned round, I pulled her in towards me and let my sore, happy body melt into the bed.

The sound of smashing glass woke us at three am.

ELLIOTT

The first thing I did, half asleep, was flail an arm under the bed, still programmed to reach for that baseball bat of my youth. But as I properly woke up, I leaped out of bed so fast I cracked my knee – the other, non-injured one – against the bedpost. Swearing, I stumbled out of the room in the T-shirt and boxers I slept in, then crashed down the stairs, almost falling on the way.

Bursting into the living room, I couldn’t see anything unusual, so I walked into the kitchen, wincing at the cold tiles beneath my bare feet. The cold air, laced with rain, was the first thing I noticed, right before I almost stood on the broken glass.

The brick lay in the middle of the kitchen floor. Standard red house brick. My first, strange, thought, was that would have come from the house a few doors down that was currently having a loft conversion. But who would do this?

‘Oh my God.’ Anya was behind me now, her face ashen.

‘Right?’ I said, my jaw tight. I was suddenly picturing Lee Bennett and his smirking face. As if on cue, my grazed hand throbbed and I discovered I was clenching my fist.

Could it really be him? Surely not?

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’m calling the police.’

‘Wait!’ said Anya, grabbing hold of my arm. Her hand felt hot against my goose-pimpled skin. ‘And tell them what?’ she added, her face creased with disapproval. ‘That a bunch of kids threw something through the window? What do you expect them to do? Send in Special Branch?’

‘What if—’ then I bit off the end of the sentence.

‘What?’

I felt stupid even saying it out loud.

‘What if it’s that Bennett bloke from school?’ I said, with heat. ‘What if he tried to knock me off my bike too?’

She gave me a strange look. Obviously thought I was being ridiculous. I was probably being ridiculous.

‘Ell,’ she said, ‘if it’s him, then I think you’d need more evidence before you start accusing him.’ I was surprised, having expected her to dismiss my paranoia.

She went on, gently placing her hand on my arm. ‘But look, you know how stretched the police are round here. You’ve seen the same reports I have. Let’s just assume it was kids and get the window fixed, yeah?’

I hesitated, knowing she was right. The local paper had been covered in screaming headlines a few weeks back about the low rates of arrest for robberies around here. Apparently, the police had almost stopped investigating minor crimes like that. This wasn’t even that serious. I had no real reason to think Bennett was behind this anyway. I was probably putting two and two together and coming up with a paranoid five.

Anya left the room, coming back in with my trainers in her hand. She had her sandals on now.

‘Well, we can sit here and wait with the wind blowing through the window, or we can clear it up and sort out a glazier.’

We got to work.

The glazier took hours to come. I insisted Anya go back to bed, which she reluctantly agreed to, then set up camp in the living room, with my iPad on my lap and the sound turned low.

It took no time to find Lee Bennett’s Facebook page. It was pretty much exactly what I’d expected. Selfies with his shirt off; posts with such gems of wisdom as ‘Mourinho really has fucking lost it now. Time to go’ and a couple of pictures with Tyler in them, mainly at football matches. He hadn’t made much effort over his settings, so I delved back a bit until I found some with a woman in them.

She was blonde, and delicate-looking with a pointy chin and large eyes. She and Bennett together, clearly on holiday, with tall cocktails, tans, and lots of flesh on show. Only one with her and Tyler, where he was sitting on her lap on a train and clearly reaching for something out of shot.

The thought of anything happening to Anya caused a tight feeling in my throat, not unlike the sensation just before you throw up. What if, for whatever reason, he was going after me and putting my wife in danger? He thought he knew me. Maybe he was incubating some perceived slight based on mistaken identity.

I must have dozed a little because when my phone started to ring from the floor next to me, I leapt from the chair in shock. It was the glazier, telling me he was outside.

It was almost four thirty am when he was finally done. He was a taciturn Eastern European man, who had barely said a word the whole time he was here. I presumed he was usually called out to deal with robberies and the aftermath of fights in bars. I was a bit surprised to discover that all he was prepared to do was board up the thing. Seems you had to pay all over again to have the actual window replaced, at a sensible hour.

He was probably wondering why we didn’t patch the window up ourselves, just for the night. But there was no way we could have gone back to sleep; it wasn’t a huge window, but it was quite big enough to allow someone in who had any kind of malign intent. I had, after all, hoped my days of sleeping with a baseball bat next to the bed were long gone.

Anyway, I didn’t imagine the man was complaining, judging by the eye-watering amount of money he charged before I was wearily able to send him on his way.

In the bedroom, Anya was sleeping deeply and making small, endearing sounds through her nose. I climbed into the bed, desperate to warm my frozen limbs against her body, but I knew it would wake her up. One of us might as well get some sleep on this miserable night. So, I forced myself to keep away from her sleeping form, huddling into the duvet, trying not to think about how soon it would be before I had to get up again.

I reached for sleep, telling myself to clear my mind. I counted down in eights from four hundred, a trick I’d read on some website for insomnia, and got all the way beyond zero, but my mind still buzzed and sparked like a faulty strip light. I kept thinking about Lee Bennett, and Anya’s weird mood lately.

Almost inevitably, however much I tried to yank them back to the present, I found my thoughts drifting back in time.

Mum, sitting in her favourite chair, fags on one arm and a glass of lager on the table next to her, gusts of husky smoker’s laugh at The Vicar of Dibley.

Our windows had got broken a couple of times, on the estate. But we didn’t summon twenty-four-hour glaziers who charged two hundred quid an hour. We boarded it up until a man who knew a man came and sorted it as a special favour to Mum.

When the alarm went off, it felt as though I’d only been asleep for minutes. Parts that hadn’t ached previously now hurt – elbows, the other knee, and, weirdly, my neck. Anya had to leave early to get into London and when I came out of the shower she was almost ready to leave. She was drinking a cup of coffee and staring out of the window.

She was dressed in a silky blouse and black trousers, her glossy red hair in a ponytail and a slash of bright red lipstick standing out against her pale, freckled skin. For about the millionth time I wondered what on earth I did right to end up with someone like her.

It was only after she had gone that I remembered my broken bike. I’d intended to leave with her and get her to drop me at school. I didn’t know anything about buses here. It took a good half an hour to walk and I was meant to be in early today for the weekly staff meeting.

I was sweating profusely by the time I got to school.

The meeting was almost over as I came into the staffroom and I caught Zoe’s eye. She pulled a doomy face and sliced a finger across her neck.

‘Elliott,’ said Jackie Dawson, our head teacher. ‘So glad you could join us.’

I smiled sheepishly. ‘Sorry. I had an accident on my bike.’

I knew it was a mistake the second the words left my lips because I saw Jackie’s eyes sweep over my sweaty, but clean, light blue shirt and grey trousers. I didn’t look remotely like a man who had just taken a tumble onto a road.

‘I mean,’ I added quickly, ‘I came off it last night and, er, it took me longer to get to school this morning.’ I found myself holding up my scratched palms as proof.

Jackie liked me, but for some reason this morning her expression was cooler than I would have expected. She nodded after a moment and said, ‘Okay, well I’m sorry to hear that. But can we have a quick word before you go off to your class?’

‘Sure,’ I said and something uneasy twitched inside me.

Meeting over now, staff scattered to collect belongings and down the dregs of drinks.

I followed Jackie to her office, which was down a corridor in a part of the school. She gestured for me to close the door and my worry increased.

Jackie had been the head here for ever, as far as I could tell. Late fifties with curly brown hair, she had a mumsy softness about her appearance that belied how tough she really was.

‘I won’t keep you, Elliott,’ she said. ‘But I have to tell you that a parent has made a complaint against you.’

I let out a heavy sigh.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I bet I can guess who. Tyler Bennett’s dad, by any chance?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Look,’ I went on, leaning forward in my seat. ‘It really was nothing. This guy just took against me, I think.’ I paused. ‘Didn’t like the cut of my jib.’

Jackie was blank-faced. ‘He said you pushed Tyler and then you were rude to him.’

A hot blast of outrage. ‘That’s ridiculous!’ I said. ‘I didn’t even touch Tyler.’

As I said it, I remembered this wasn’t strictly true. But it was such a gentle push to his shoulder, so it hardly counted.

‘Are you sure?’ said Jackie, her expression now softer. She wasn’t enjoying this any more than I was.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Absolutely. It’s something and nothing.’ Part of me wanted to tell her about the bike incident and the brick. But that just made Bennett’s allegation sound as though it had more merit, so I kept quiet.

She looked relieved. ‘I knew it would be, Elliott, but unfortunately we have to follow procedures, as you know, when this happens. I’ll get you to write up exactly what occurred and I’m going to have to inform LADO too.’ She was referring the Local Authority Designated Officer, appointed to look into any issues to do with safeguarding.

This was such bullshit. What a waste of time for everyone concerned.

Trying to quash the weariness I was feeling from my voice, I said, ‘Of course. I’ll get onto it.’

I had a strong desire to slink out of the office and go straight home but I forced myself to head down to my classroom. My hands were throbbing and my back hurt. Today was not shaping up well so far.

Halfway down the corridor I saw Zoe, who made that face again.

‘You okay?’ she said.

‘Yeah. Tell you about it later.’

I got my class started on their English project, which this term was all tied up with a Viking theme, hence the visit to the museum. They were writing letters to their families at home as Viking settlers.