She still had the spare set of car keys in her bag.
By the time she got to the garage, she was soaked through, water running from her scalp into her eyes. She got the key from the safe and let herself in, unlocked the car and got inside, pushing her hands through her hair and then rubbing them on the upholstery of the passenger seat to dry them.
She started the engine.
Inching slowly out of the garage and along to the fork in the drive, wipers going madly in an attempt to clear the windscreen, it occurred to her that she was safe – that it didn’t matter, now, if he heard the car. Something defiant in her made her gun the engine, roar down the drive and onto the road.
She would go straight to the police. Was there a police station in Langholm?
She was halfway there, splashing through flooded areas of the road, having to keep her speed down because visibility was so bad, when it occurred to her.
What proof did she have that Nick had done anything wrong? The police weren’t going to arrest him because his wife thought he might have put sleeping tablets in her hot chocolate. She had no proof of that. The zolpidem would probably be out of her system by the time they could get round to testing her, if they even bothered.
And she didn’t have the burner phone. She could tell them that Nick’s phone had no calls in the crucial period, when he’d said he was calling clients, and they could check the phone records and confirm that, but Nick would explain that away. She had no proof of anything.
So not the police. Not yet.
London.
She could get her passport and then fly home to Leonora and decide what to do when she was safely away from him. She supposed that Yvonne’s suggestion, that he could have disposed of the family’s bodies using the digger, was possible. But it would still have been very risky, if he’d done it in broad daylight. Michael or Yvonne could have appeared at any moment. Unless he killed them either the night before they supposedly disappeared or very early that morning and disposed of the bodies under cover of darkness? It had been November, so the nights would have been long. Carol had said she hadn’t seen Duncan or Maggie or Isla on the morning of their disappearance. She’d picked Nick up from the end of the drive, as usual.
Yes.
For someone as clever as Nick, it would have been possible.
Maybe she and Michael and Andy, together, could persuade the police to take radar machinery to those fields, like archaeologists used, that told you what was under the ground. If the bodies were found, the police would have to launch a murder investigation. They’d have to seriously consider the possibility that Nick had killed not only Duncan, Maggie and Isla but Yvonne too. Nick’s sleight of hand with the phones would be exposed, maybe, if people who were experts in that kind of thing got onto it. Maybe they could determine that a phone active at Craibstone Wood that afternoon had also been active at Sunnyside, even if Nick had now disposed of it.
What was Nick thinking, now? He had probably realised that she’d gone. Would he try to come after her, to London? To intercept her? Or was part of him, maybe a tiny little part, glad that she’d got away?
Her hands were shaking so much she was having difficulty steering, veering wildly round a sharp corner, almost over onto the other side of the road.
She slowed the car.
No.
All that angst Nick had shown, all that emotion when Lulu had been taking him through the events of that night, the night his family had disappeared . . . he’d been play-acting. The whole Nick persona was an act, designed specifically to appeal to Lulu.
Why?
If he really was a psychopath, why did he want her at all? Why, in London, had he been so obsessed with her safety? Psychopaths were controlling, but only in as far as other people were pawns, to be moved dispassionately about the board. They didn’t care about anyone but themselves. Yes, they often had partners, but only to service their needs, not because they believed in any such thing as a soulmate. Psychopaths didn’t have souls.
‘People don’t fit neatly into boxes,’ Karla used to say. ‘No two people with the same condition will present in the same way.’
She’d been talking about people with conditions like PTSD, anxiety disorders, depression . . . but maybe that also applied to psychopathy? Maybe some psychopaths could feel things for other people, become attached to them, obsessed with them?
She pressed her shaking foot to the accelerator.
He’d been obsessed with his father. And killed him.
The third mug, the third bowl and spoon on the table had been there because Nick had been there.
Because Nick had killed them all.
26
Maggie - November 1997
Maggie was scared shitless that Duncan was going to give the game away. So when Nick got back from school, after he’d disappeared up to his room, she suggested that Duncan have a nice long bath while she made dinner.
‘But I want to spend time with Nick. This could be . . . could be the last time . . .’ Tears filled his eyes.
‘Course it’s not!’ Maggie puffed, jiggling Isla in her carrier. ‘Once we’re settled, you’ll be back to sort him out.’ Would he ever! ‘We need to act like everything’s normal. If you go mooning around after him, he’s going to suspect something’s up. Go and have a bath.’
When Duncan was safely shut away in the en suite, Maggie picked Bunny up from Isla’s cot, took him downstairs and pushed him to the back of one of the kitchen cupboards, the one with cleaning products which neither Duncan nor Nick was ever likely to open.