‘Here,’ came a strange, high-low, echoey voice in reply, seemingly from the depths of the empty pool.
That voice, speaking just one word, triggered something in Meredith, some long-suppressed memory. A black-gloved hand snaking through the hole kicked in her bedroom door and grabbing her ankle. Being driven away in the black interior of a Luton van, death reaching for her with cold fingers under its metal door. The shouting, the flash of the knife plunging into the back of her hand … the terror.
It was him.
Meredith made a sound, an involuntary gasp, and felt her knees buckle. Warm urine released from her full bladder and streamed down her legs, filling the chill air with a sweet, straw-like smell, the exact same reaction she’d had when this person had broken into her bedroom. Just for a moment the relief of pressure in her belly, and the warmth on her cold skin, were welcome.
‘Oh God,’ she whispered, on her knees. ‘Help us.’ He’d rescued her before. Now they needed another Mr Martindale…
‘Ugh,’ said Caitlin in disgust, her voice suddenly loud in the darkness. ‘She’s pissed herself. Gross. Where are you?’
‘Checking on the brother. He’s down here, in a right state. Not sure how we’re gonna get him out.’
Meredith’s head shot up. ‘What have you done to him? Pete! Pete? Can you hear me?’
‘Shut up, bitch,’ snapped Caitlin. ‘One more word, one movement, and I’ll shoot you both right now.’
She flicked the torch function back again and shone it into the empty pool. Pain pierced Meredith’s heart as she saw Pete caught in the yellow beam, curled up naked on the blue-tiled floor, not moving. That … person knelt over him.
It was the first time Meredith had seen the man’s face, and with yet another shock she realised it was a face she recognised. She gasped again, but didn’t dare speak, not with the glint of the gun barrel pointing in her direction.
The person – Graeme – worked here, at Minstead. One of the gardeners. Meredith felt a furious pulse throb in her neck. She’d seen him many times, crouching in a flowerbed, pruning, digging, weeding, never meeting Meredith’s eye or returning her ‘morning’ when she passed him on the way to work, or was out walking Ceri’s dog. Meredith had always assumed the man had learning difficulties, or was extremely shy, or just terminally antisocial. He’d even come into the shop once.
Oh God, she thought. No wonder he knew my movements, and Pete’s. He could’ve been watching them for months. Probably had been. It was him who decapitated the flowers in the front garden, who knocked all the stuff off the shelves, probably left the dead rat in the fireplace.
It was starting to make sense. This Graeme was Caitlin’s bitch. Caitlin was the one who ordered the attack on her all those years ago. Maybe Graeme had been inside too, in the intervening years, when things had gone quiet. Now they were both out – and Graeme clearly had been for some time.
Meredith was desperate to get to Pete, to climb into the pool and hug him, but it was as if Caitlin read her mind – or maybe she had unknowingly made a move forwards – because Caitlin snapped again: ‘I told you, don’t move. We’re going in a minute.’
Going? Going where?
‘I’m not going to kill you here,’ Caitlin added. ‘Thought we’d take a little walk first. So while we get him out, you can get your kit off too. Chop, chop.’
Meredith stared at her, stunned. ‘What?’
‘Kit off, cloth ears. I want you both naked.’
‘Why?’
Caitlin chuckled meanly. ‘Why not? You’re an exhibitionist, aren’t you? Prancing round for all those years like a cunt on stages, singing your stupid little songs … You both came into the world at the same time starkers, so you should both leave the same way.’
The woman wasn’t even making sense. This could not be happening, Meredith thought. It was just impossible.
If she stripped, she’d lose the knife. She couldn’t lose the knife; it was all she had. Also – Pete didn’t look like he could go anywhere, let alone climb a ladder.
Graeme seemed to agree. ‘Cath … you’ll have to help me get him out. Maybe we should do it here. Put him out of his misery.’
Caitlin tutted irritably. ‘Not doing it here; they’d be found too soon. Too much evidence. We’ll stick to the plan. He’s probably just faking anyway. You.’ She turned to Meredith. ‘Strip off.’
She tucked the gun into the waistband of her skirt and hauled herself, puffing with exertion, over the edge of the pool, down a rusty iron ladder at what was once the shallow end. Meredith palmed the knife once more then, still clutching it, unhooked the clasps on the bib of her dungarees, and let them slip off to the floor. The darkness was a help – neither Caitlin nor Graeme should be able to see that she was holding anything.
The air was cool, particularly on her piss-wet thighs, but there was too much adrenaline flowing round her body to allow her to feel cold. She stripped off her T-shirt and bra, and hooked off her knickers, so intent on concealing the knife that she didn’t even feel shame at her nakedness. She had to do it fast, before Caitlin got close again.
In the pool, Caitlin laughed. ‘Look at that: what a show-off. Didn’t I say she was an exhibitionist? Nice tits too, what I can see of them. Shame it’s so dark in here.’
As Caitlin and Graeme took hold of Pete and hauled him to his feet, his head hanging like a crucified man’s, Meredith surreptitiously wedged the knife into her armpit. She’d briefly considered concealing it inside her vagina, but that would have been harder to do unnoticed, and harder to deploy fast if an opportunity to use it arose … As long as Caitlin didn’t make her walk with her arms in the air, this was probably the only option.
Pete moaned as the pair shoved him towards the ladder: a long, guttural sound that made Meredith’s skin crawl with sympathy and shared pain. What the fuck had Graeme done to him? It was too dark to see if he had any obvious injuries or was bleeding. But as they reached the steps again, he was able to grasp its rails. They shoved him up, each with a meaty hand on one of his buttocks, but he seemed too far gone to care.
Finally he reached the top of the ladder and flopped over on the tiles at her feet, twisting and gasping like a landed fish. Meredith couldn’t stop herself rushing towards him.
‘Stop,’ barked Caitlin, the gun again trained on her. Then she slowly swung it round to Pete. ‘You touch him and I’ll shoot you both right here.’
‘Pete,’ Meredith said, unable to prevent a strangled sob escaping. ‘I’m so sorry.’
He couldn’t speak, but their eyes met in a silent glint of love and desperation. I love you, Meredith mouthed, and he nodded, once, although it was too dark for him to have seen. He must have just known.
‘Up,’ Caitlin commanded. Graeme had joined her and was staring at the twins with an expression of gleeful fascination on his face.
Pete staggered to his feet, swaying, and it was only the tool wedged in her armpit that held Meredith back from helping him up.
‘Off we go, then,’ said Caitlin cheerfully, pushing them out into the warm night.
We’re not the first to be in this position, thought Meredith numbly. We’re not unique. She thought of killing fields and concentration camps; massacres; people being frogmarched towards open graves they’d been forced to dig themselves first. It’s just death. Comes to us all at some point. What did she have to live for anyway, if Pete was going to die too? Nothing. It was better this way.
Just a month earlier she’d had a twin she adored and three close friends, which was actually more than enough for her, these days. Only one of them was still alive – but once all this shit came out, there was no way Paula would ever still be her friend.
All that hate and revenge, for one kiss on a silo, dressed as a teddy bear, almost thirty-five years ago. Meredith wished again she’d never laid eyes on that toxic Kansan, blithely lying her way through a hedonistic life, knowing that her red hair and green eyes would dazzle any doubts away. She probably never even had any desire for nuclear disarmament – all Greenham was to her was an endless supply of open legs and sleeping bags for her to lick her way into. Then Meredith wished that Caitlin had been honest enough to admit that her precious Sam was a girl.
And that Caitlin wasn’t a lunatic.
But then, she thought, there’s no point in all that, is there? What’s done was done, as her mother used to say. And now she was done, too. If wishes were horses … something else her mother would quote. Meredith never understood what it meant.
It was a tiny bit of comfort knowing she would die in the grounds of the estate, with the person she loved most in the world. At least the last thing she’d see and hear was the sway of dark branches, the reassuring little noises she heard through the open window of her bedroom every night, tiny claws digging, black snouts snuffling.
The grass felt soft and cool under her bare feet. Death opened her arms and smiled a dark, welcoming smile, and for a moment Meredith felt a transcendent calm as she and Pete began to stumble barefoot towards their destiny.