Trevor and Johnny had been lovely, but having tolerated them fussing over her for most of a day, Meredith realised she just wanted to be at home. Their cloying concern and empty exhortations of optimism – ‘he’ll be FINE, I promise’ – were making her feel very stabby and irritable. How could they make groundless promises like that?
In the end, she begged Trevor to drive her back to the cottage, saying she was exhausted and needed to try and have a nap, in her own bed. And reminding him that not only would Gemma be back with her later that night, there was also a police presence on the estate already, guarding the ice house, now that it was officially a crime scene, so she’d be perfectly safe.
He acquiesced, albeit reluctantly, making her promise to keep the doors locked and her phone on her at all times.
Once home, Meredith couldn’t settle to anything. She wandered from room to room. It felt all wrong to be in her house; she should be out there searching for Pete – but where? How? The world outside her four walls felt vast and threatening.
Do something. Do something practical, she thought, remembering how her mum used to say that, if you were in a state, or feeling miserable, just ‘clean out a cupboard’. Do something mundane and dull to take your mind off it.
How the fuck was cleaning out a cupboard going to help find Pete?
Her hands were shaking and her thoughts whirling round in circles. Gemma would be staying again tonight. Meredith realised she wanted her to come back. Gemma was taking it seriously. Gemma knew, like she did, that Pete was in serious danger.
Perhaps she should call her now; ask her to come. She should let her know that she was back at the cottage anyway; Gemma thought she was at Johnny and Trevor’s.
But her phone was in her bag by the front door, and Meredith was so distracted, her thoughts flitting around like butterflies, that she didn’t bother to get it. As she cast her eyes around the kitchen, trying to think of something to occupy her, she spotted the faulty secateurs on the windowsill. She’d brought them home from the gardening section of the shop the other day, to try and fix them. The manufacturers had erroneously bolted the blades of this pair to the canvas fabric of the case, so it looked as if the only way to remove the secateurs was by using pliers to dismantle them completely. If she could get them out of the case, she could probably put them in the bargain bucket and sell them half price.
Meredith found a pair of pliers in a drawer and took the secateurs out into the cottage’s tiny back garden, forgetting not only to text Gemma but also her promise to Trevor to keep the doors locked. Sitting on the step to fiddle with the task at hand in the still evening air, silent bar the distant drumming of a woodpecker, she couldn’t say it took her mind off anything, but at least it gave her something to do. In the pocket of the case she found a separate sharp little gardening tool, which she slid into the bib pocket of her dungarees so as not to lose it.
The bolt on the secateurs was stiff and it took all her strength to turn it, Pete’s face in her mind the whole time, until she had a terror that he was being tortured like this: clamped, turned, pincered, stabbed … The two blades of the secateurs were lying separated and she thought how menacing they looked, like the claws of a monster – but the bolt was still stubbornly attached to the case. Meredith sighed and gave up, bolting them plus the case back together. She’d stick them in the bargain bucket anyway and hope nobody spotted the major flaw.
She went to check her phone for any news, and was just crouching in the entrance hall, fishing it out of her handbag, when there was a heavy knock at the front door right next to her, making her jump. It would be Gemma, she thought, or even – hope flashed, a silver-minnow twist in her chest – Pete? No, that would be too much to hope for. It must be Gemma, or Leonard. Nobody else would come to the cottage at this time. She glanced at the phone in her hand and noticed that there were notifications from Gemma on the screen: a missed call and a voicemail.
‘Did you just ring me?’ she was starting to say as she opened the door, but it wasn’t Gemma. A short, heavy woman loomed in the narrow porch, like a troll under a bridge. Her hair was thin and lank and her skin pasty, with black circles beneath her eyes, as if she hadn’t seen daylight for years. Disconcertingly, her nose seemed to be plastered across her face, like a boxer’s. A roll-up burned perilously close to her fingers, which made Meredith – somewhat irrationally – wonder if she was a friend of Pete’s. The woman looked at her expectantly, unsmiling, so Meredith didn’t smile either. Belatedly, she remembered her promise to keep the doors locked.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked cautiously. Then: ‘Is this about Pete?’
The woman stared for a moment longer, with a glassy attentiveness. ‘More about you, really.’ Her voice was low and nasal.
For a moment Meredith’s heart leaped with hope. ‘Have you seen him? Where is he? Is he safe?’
The woman leaned against the door frame, her massive shoulder seeming to envelope it. ‘First things first. You don’t recognise me, do you? And why would you? Last time you saw me, I was seven stone. You don’t look so different though. A fair bit more weight yourself, but then that’s middle age for you, isn’t it? The dreaded spread.’
Why was she making small talk? ‘Just tell me what you know about Pete. Are you an old college friend of his?’
The woman laughed, a deep rattling sound coming from her chest. ‘I don’t think he’d consider himself my friend at the moment, no.’
Even then, Meredith didn’t get it. ‘Please. I’m sorry I don’t recognise you. Unless you’ve got something to tell me about Pete – my brother, he’s missing, you see – you’ll have to forgive me, this is a very stressful time for me.’
‘I’ll come in,’ the woman announced, flicking her roll-up into the flowerbed and pushing past Meredith into the house, crushing her back into the coat rack so that she almost fell against the wall. The entrance hall was too small for them both.
Meredith felt bewildered, invaded, the beginnings of fear, even though this was clearly not an attacker. Just some fat, annoying old woman. She followed her into her living room – a room where almost nobody aside from Pete, Ralph, Paula and Andrea had ever been – and found the woman lowering herself with difficulty onto the worn velvet sofa, her large arse sending up a little cloud of dust on impact.
‘Do I know you?’ Meredith demanded. She didn’t feel like being polite any longer. ‘Like I said, this is really not a good time for me. Please just tell me what you want.’
‘Cuppa tea would be nice.’
The woman leaned her elbows on her legs and rested her chins in her hand. She was dressed in a shapeless tube skirt, a cross-body ethnic sort of bag with little mirrors embroidered on it, a long, cheap-looking sweatshirt and sandals that cut into the flesh of her puffy feet, which swelled over the straps.
‘I must say I’m disappointed you don’t remember me, Meredith,’ she said. Her toenails were thick and yellowed.
‘I know it’s been a long time, but I suppose it figures that I was just completely … disposable to you. Someone you could use and abuse and then forget about.’
Meredith had been fiddling with a magazine on the table, but this made her head jerk up in alarm. Who the hell was this? Someone from a rival band to Cohen’s? Someone she’d known in the squat, or at the record company? For a minute she wondered if this was Iain’s doing.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please get to the point, otherwise you’re going to have to leave, now.’
The woman smiled meanly, displaying small brown teeth. ‘Sarum Discs, 1983?’
Meredith stared at her, the penny still not dropping. ‘The record shop in Salisbury? Yeah, I worked there for a while. For Alaric. Did you know him?’
‘Meredith, I worked there too. All week, and you came in on Saturdays.’
Meredith frowned. The only person she remembered working there too was little hippie Caitlin. She studied the woman’s doughy face more carefully. This woman surely had nothing to do with her brother and the murders. ‘Caitlin?’
She laughed. ‘Well done. Throw that girl a biscuit – we got there in the end. Except I’m not Caitlin anymore. I prefer Catherine these days. Cait. However you want to spell it. Catherine sounds classier, don’t you think? My old bitch of a mum was an Irish tinker. Oh, sorry, you can’t call them that anymore can you. Traveller. Whatever. She turned her back on me when I first got put away. Twenty-six, I was! Imagine your mum turning her back on you just because you weren’t right in the head! And whose fault was that in the first place, I ask you? Bloody right: hers! She smokes skunk all through her pregnancy and then blames me for having a screw loose? Unbelievable. So naturally I didn’t want to be called the name she gave me, not after that.’
Meredith was still finding it difficult to reconcile the Caitlin she remembered with the bloated, red-faced, ruined-looking woman in front of her. She remembered admiring Caitlin’s neat little nose, back then, but this Caitlin’s nose was an aberration – squashed and flattened and almost bulbous. And yet … perhaps the resemblance was there. The dimple in the chin, the way her lip curled slightly when she spoke. It could be her, Meredith thought. Just about.
The woman placed her hands on her thighs and heaved herself heavily to her feet. ‘There we have it.’ She had a trace of a West County accent.
‘I don’t understand why you’re here, or how you found me,’ Meredith said warily. She wanted to add, And I don’t give a shit about your relationship with your mother, but thought she’d better not.
This woman had the weirdest air of loose cannon Meredith had ever seen, as if at any moment she would grow three-inch fangs and launch herself at her throat. She’d never witnessed anything like it. She tried to remember if she had ever had an inkling back when they worked together, but was pretty sure she hadn’t. The only thing linking young Caitlin with this one was the roll-up that had been a constant between her fingers back then too.
Caitlin/Catherine narrowed her eyes at her, a mean grin squinching them up further still. ‘Ah now, this is where it gets interesting,’ she said. ‘Make me a cuppa first, would you? I’d better come with you to supervise, I suppose.’ Her tone was grumbling, as if she’d been badly inconvenienced.
‘Supervise me?’ Meredith said, half bemused, half furious. ‘In my own house?’
The woman just nodded, heaving herself back up again and gesturing Meredith to accompany her to the kitchen, where she flicked on the kettle and proprietorially unhooked two mugs from the mug tree on the counter. ‘I’ll let you take it from here,’ she said.
Meredith glared at her. It felt like a weird dream.
‘You left the back door open. That’s not wise – anybody could come in. Let me fix that for you,’ Caitlin/Catherine said, waddling over to it, locking the door and pocketing the key. Meredith was about to shout at her when she turned, and the expression of sheer malevolence on her face made Meredith pause: ‘I have something of yours,’ Caitlin said. ‘Or should I say someone? I have someone of yours.’
The breath stopped in Meredith’s throat. ‘Pete. You’ve got Pete. Why? Is he OK? What happened? Where is he?’
She couldn’t stop herself grabbing at Caitlin’s arm. Caitlin looked down at her hand with utter disdain, peeling her fingers away.
That was the moment Meredith lost it. All the stress and tension of Pete’s disappearance crammed itself into her head until she felt as if it was about to explode. She got so close to the other woman’s face that she could see all her disgusting blackheads and open pores and smell her rancid breath.
She screamed at her, any sense of reality slipping away, as if she was in a film or a weird nightmare. ‘Stop playing with me, you mad bitch. Where is he? Tell me right now or I’m calling the police and you’ll get carted back off to whatever loony asylum you’ve been mouldering in for the last thirty fucking years.’
Caitlin pushed strong hands into Meredith’s chest, palms landing hard on her breasts – whether accidentally or purposefully Meredith didn’t know; all she could see was the rage in her eyes as Caitlin shoved her away, hard, then shook her head.
‘Oh, dear, dear, dear, Meredith, that won’t do at all. You don’t speak to me like that. Ever. Not if you want to see your brother alive again. Do you understand? I wouldn’t have thought you could afford to risk losing someone else, after Ralph and Andrea. I mean, apart from Ralph’s pathetic little wifey, you don’t actually seem to have anybody else. Bit weird, isn’t it, to get to fifty-two years of age and have so few friends? I was almost running out of people to choose! But Pete’s obviously the prize.’
Meredith realised she was hyperventilating, fear rising off her in waves.
‘Why? Why would you do this to me? To Paula, and Pete? I haven’t even set eyes on you for decades!’
Caitlin barked out a laugh. ‘And that, Meredith, is your answer. You haven’t seen me in FUCKING DECADES because YOU fucking got me locked up in 1983 and I haven’t been out since. Not till NOW! How do you THINK that makes me feel about you, you cheating slut?’
Even through the terror, Meredith felt an outraged sense of injustice. What the hell was this madwoman talking about?
‘How could that possibly have been my fault?’
Caitlin rolled her eyes and shook her head, as if Meredith was a particularly stupid child.
‘Because you just take whatever you want, even when it doesn’t belong to you, without giving a shit about anybody else’s feelings, don’t you?’
It was Meredith’s turn to shake her head. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know…’
She felt in her back pocket for her phone, to see if there was some discreet way she could call 999, or Gemma, yell at her to get back here with help, then barricade herself in the bathroom. But what if Caitlin then went straight off and killed Pete?
What if she’d already killed Pete?
‘Greenham Common,’ Caitlin spat. ‘I saw you.’
Meredith frowned. She didn’t recall seeing her. ‘I remember you telling me about it, that you were going, in a camper van with a load of others. That was why I went, because I had a teddy-bear costume. We all got arrested. Next thing I heard was that you’d been charged with assault. But what did that have to do with me?’
In her head she was whispering, Hold on Pete, I’ll get you out. I’ll get you back. Just hold on a bit longer. Please don’t be dead.
‘God, you really haven’t a clue, have you?’
Caitlin advanced towards her, suddenly snaking out an arm and grabbing Meredith’s throat in her fingers. It felt like an iron pincer. Meredith couldn’t breathe.
With her free hand, Caitlin delved behind Meredith, into the back pocket of her dungarees, and whipped out the phone, stuffing it deep about her own person – Meredith couldn’t see where, because so many white spots were dancing jigs in front of her eyes.
Caitlin frisked her one-handed, hard and efficient, slapping rather than patting her down: hips, crotch, front and back pockets. She slapped harder and harder, until the slaps turned to punches; kidney, belly, side, breast…
She spoke fast and low, the words seeming to run together: ‘You stole the love of my life. You ruined my life, you left me with nothing. You took Sam. You just fucking took her. It’s your fault they locked me up. Seeing you with her, seeing you kissing each other in your stupid fucking teddy-bear costumes, it’s your fault I went mental. You’re lucky it wasn’t you. If I’d been close enough it’d have been your fucking eye I poked out.’
Sam.
Samantha.
Caitlin was still on her hitting spree. Finding nothing else in Meredith’s pockets, she punched her hard in the eye, and Meredith would have fallen backwards if Caitlin’s hand hadn’t still been around her throat. Through the agonising crimson haze, she had a flash of memory: being in the shop with Caitlin wittering on and out about Sam, how wonderful Sam was, how much she loved Sam.
She’d thought Sam was a boy. They all had. Caitlin never said she was gay. She hadn’t wanted us to know Sam was a girl!
Fucking Samantha. That bitch had been nothing but trouble in her life. If it wasn’t for her, Meredith thought frantically, she’d never have dropped out of school, broken her promise to look after Mum, abandoned Pete … and for what? To have this maniac stalk and kill everyone she loved?
Caitlin dropped her hand, and Meredith fell to the floor, gagging and clutching her throat, holding her palm tight over her eye because it felt as if it was about to pop out.
Caitlin crouched down next to her, her knees cracking like dry twigs. ‘But hey, you were worth waiting for. This has been worth waiting for. And the fun’s only just starting. All we need to do now is one more tiny bit of waiting. We’ll just wait till it starts getting dark. Anything good on the telly?’
When Meredith opened the one eye that still would, there was a gun pointing right at the end of her nose, and beyond it, Caitlin’s sickly smile.
Get back here, Gemma. I need you. Don’t leave me with this crazy person.
The only possible consolation was that if Crazy Caitlin was here with her, Meredith, then at least she couldn’t be anywhere torturing Pete…
Caitlin sat down on the sofa first, jerking the gun to indicate Meredith should join her. Meredith sat cautiously, terrified, but at the same time with a slow, dawning understanding. All the years of threats, memories of the slow swoosh of green paint, abusive letters, mean-spirited snipes and intimidation. The person responsible for all of this, for her near-death experience in the van that night, for her ruined hand. For Ralph’s death, and Andrea’s. That person was sitting right next to her on a sofa. If it wasn’t for Pete’s life being under threat, Meredith would have launched herself at her then and there.
In a tiny way, it was almost – almost – a relief, to put a face to the tormentor, to know that there was a reason; and there was someone to be held accountable for it.
But as she had that thought, another simultaneous one occurred: so it was her own fault that Ralph and Andrea had been killed.
She couldn’t let it happen to Pete as well. She wouldn’t let it.