Julia came to on the floor. She had only been unconscious for a few seconds and struggled with the nightmare image. Surely she had imagined it. She pulled herself to her feet, rubbing a bump on the back of her head. The plastic bag was there, on her kitchen table. She hadn’t dreamt it at all. A bilious feeling rose through her throat.
Her first thought was straightforward. The gangsters who had been looking for Destiny must have tracked down Adam as a way of punishing Julia for having the girl stay with her. Even as her mind raced, that stretched credulity. She and Adam had kept their relationship totally secret, at his insistence. Almost nobody knew about it. Stella Heath suspected, but didn’t know who Julia was or her name. Only Rachel knew everything.
Destiny.
Julia had told her quite a lot the other night when they were both drunk. But the girl was not capable of this. Adam was a very strong man and could surely not be overpowered by a girl who weighed a hundred pounds or less. It just wasn’t possible.
But there was the text message. Like the Xmas pressie?
Julia felt the room swimming and lurched off to the bathroom. She knelt down and managed to get her chin over the edge of the lavatory rim before the first dry heave. Then came the rest. Breakfast and more. Before she was finished beads of sweat were standing out on her forehead, and somehow she seemed to be disembodied, looking down upon herself from high above. She could see her arms embracing the toilet bowl, dark hair loose around her shoulders. They would think she had done this. She hated Adam. His disembodied head was sitting on her kitchen table, slowly defrosting, sweating moisture as it did so. Her own gardening gloves, or a very similar pair, were there too. They were covered in blood. If they were hers, they would almost certainly have her DNA inside them.
Her first thought had been to call the police.
But second thoughts crept in. This whole thing was totally incriminating. Her mind was racing. Examining the possibilities, thinking about how this would look from the outside. Her barrister’s brain, looking down soberly from above at her prostrate, terrified self, leaning over the lavatory bowl, examined the evidence laid out in the defendant’s home. The motive was enormous: a broken heart, vengeance, the anguish of an unwanted abortion. The defendant’s story by contrast was utterly implausible. That a feral child who she barely knew, and who didn’t know Adam at all, had committed the crime on her own initiative and dumped the evidence at Julia’s home before disappearing.
Any jury would convict her.
It must’ve been half an hour before Julia felt ready to get vertical. She washed her face and sponged the spattered front of her sweatshirt. The squeaky sound of the street gate and footsteps down to her front door made her panic. Through the dimpled glass of the front door, she could see a dark uniform with yellow hi-vis patches.
Oh God, the police! It must be someone from CSI. The doorbell rang, a long accusatory noise that demanded attention. As quietly as she could, she scrambled into the kitchen. A sweat had already begun to mist the plastic bag in the kitchen warmth, as if Adam himself was sympathising with her predicament. She slipped the gloves back in the plastic bag, and shoved the heavy thing back in the freezer, closing the door.
The doorbell sounded again.
She stood in the middle of the kitchen, realising her feet were exactly on the muddy footprints. She stepped away, and then stared around to see if there was anything else she needed to hide. She couldn’t see anything.
The doorbell went a third time, longer and more insistently. Julia didn’t know what to do. She had been told that CSI might not arrive until late morning, so she could pretend not to be in. But actually, a quarter to eleven was late morning. She took a couple of deep breaths, and walked slowly towards the door but then realised something important she absolutely had to do.
‘Just be a moment,’ she called out. She turned around, scampered back into the kitchen and with a dishcloth scrubbed off the bloodstain from the fridge door, and removed the sticky yellow police evidence tag next to it. She then took off her neoprene gloves and stuffed them in her pocket. She took a quick look around the kitchen for anything else incriminating, then made her way back to the front door which she opened to reveal a smiling female officer.
‘Hello, my name is Kirsty Mockett and I’m a Surrey Police crime scene investigator. I take it you were expecting me?’
‘Yes, I’m sorry. I was just cleaning up in the bathroom.’
‘Never mind. I got away a bit earlier than expected today.’ The woman was in her mid-twenties, strawberry blonde, pretty and friendly. ‘This should only take about half an hour.’
Julia showed her in and pointed out the markers on the kitchen floor where the remains of the mud was.
The woman checked with her own records on the iPad. ‘So it was a burglary? According to this nothing was stolen.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Now they’ve marked out some footprints for me, I can see that.’ She crouched down. ‘These aren’t very clear, actually.’
‘No, it’s quite a warm flat and I think the mud has turned to dust.’
‘That’s a shame.’ She looked up towards the fridge door. ‘I’m supposed to be looking for a bloodstain on here. Can’t quite see it actually—’
‘Ah, no. That’s a bit of a misunderstanding,’ Julia said hurriedly. ‘The PC thought that the burglar might have cut himself, but in fact that mark was from my own hands, some liver I was preparing. No glass was actually broken, as you can see from the windows.’
The CSI technician nodded and stood up. ‘So you wiped it off?’
‘Well, not deliberately. I inadvertently brushed against it when I had wet trousers.’
The look she gave Julia was quite odd. ‘I thought you weren’t staying here? So that the evidence would be preserved.’
‘Well, it was principally to keep me safe, but yes, absolutely. I went to stay with my friend Rachel. But I had to pop back a couple of times for various things. I’m a barrister on the recent gang case from Operation Whirlwind, so things have been a bit hectic.’
‘Yes, of course, madam. There’s never a good time to suffer a break-in, but still.’
Julia was pleased to hear the word ‘madam’, an extra notch of deference from the young technician. ‘Well, if I’m not getting under your feet too much I shall just nip around and see if I can pick up any fingerprints. I’m afraid we will have to get yours for elimination purposes.’
‘That’s perfectly all right,’ Julia said. She placed her fingers on the officer’s iPad when prompted, and then submitted to a cheek swab for DNA.
She then showed the young officer the French windows which had been kicked in, and the presumed route of the burglar through the house. She could feel perspiration on her forehead and her heart was hammering in her chest. She felt her guilt was beaming out like a searchlight, but for the young technician this was clearly a little light relief from the other case she had been working on. Adam’s beheading, perhaps? She wasn’t going to ask about it, and nothing was volunteered. Julia left her to it and retreated to the lounge, praying that the woman didn’t open the freezer door. It was almost forty minutes later when the CSI technician popped her head in and said she was finished.
‘Did you find anything?’
‘Plenty of your fingerprints, I think,’ she said with a smile. ‘However, I’ve got a couple of excellent latent glove prints.’
‘Oh, can you do anything with those?’ Julia asked, her heart starting to thump again.
‘Sometimes. I’ve just been on a case where the gloves look like being really important, and of course we can sometimes pour in the resources to make a difference. But with something like this, well, we’d need to be pretty lucky. If there was a whole string of burglaries, for example, we could tie them together with glove prints.’
‘Ah, right.’
‘Never mind,’ she said brightly. ‘I take it you were insured, for all the damage?’
‘Er, yes. That’s right.’
‘And being a lawyer at least you’ll get a chance to put someone away for this, put the boot in for justice, eh?’ She swung her own leg for emphasis.
‘I’m a defending counsel on this occasion.’
‘Ah. Right. One of the enemy, then!’ she grinned. ‘Just a joke!’
Julia smiled tightly. ‘That’s all right. We’ve each got our job to do.’
What she did next she knew would be pored over in the trial that would surely come at some stage. If she confessed the truth to this friendly officer, then there was at least some possibility that the situation could be retrieved. It looked awful, but it wasn’t impossible. It would be the right thing to do, and in her life Julia had always done the right thing. It had been dinned into her from the youngest age. But as Kirsty Mockett prepared to leave, Julia simply escorted her to the front door, and with some relief closed it behind her. She then sat at the kitchen table, letting her heart rate return to something like normal. She picked up her phone and turned it on.
There had been an email from Destiny. The subject line was simply a question mark, and there was an attachment. It was a video. She hit play. She recognised her own lounge with loud music playing. It was the drunken Saturday night before Christmas. Gloria Gaynor. I will survive. Julia came into shot, dancing, badly but exuberantly, with a glass of white in her hand, the odd slosh of wine going over the rim. She recalled this, which Destiny had tried to show her the morning after. Destiny, holding the phone, was dancing too, and her arm reached for Julia into the image. This embarrassing video selfie went on for a good minute. In it, Julia disappeared for a moment, and reappeared with a glass-framed photograph of Adam Heath. ‘This is him. Himself,’ Julia told the camera.
‘He’s old and ugly,’ Destiny said off-camera.
‘He wasn’t always,’ Julia slurred. ‘I wasted so much of my life with that bastard.’ She took the photograph. ‘Adam Heath, I wish you were dead,’ she said to the picture, before smashing it on the corner of the dining table. Julia had remembered the incident and had cleared up the glass in the morning.
‘Do you know what?’ Julia announced to the camera. ‘Adam Heath is now a headmaster, tasked with the moral guardianship of a whole host of young impressionable people. St John’s Academy. Formerly St John the Baptist. What a fucking hypocrite.’
Julia could hardly look at this image of herself: drunk, vindictive, angry and spiteful. But it was what she said next, her face pressed close to the phone, her voice almost a whisper, that made her blood run cold:
‘Will someone bring me the head of St John the Baptist?’