On the morning of D-Day, as Maggie was thinking of it, they ate a late breakfast together, during which Duncan sat gazing across the table at Nick like a big numpty. Hopefully Nick was putting Duncan’s strange behaviour down to his new, conflicted feelings about his son after the little bastard had tried to kill Isla.
But Nick was putting on the charm, jumping up helpfully to get milk from the fridge or cereal from the cupboard, smiling at Maggie, acting like nothing had happened.
Or not quite. He was acting like he was turning over a new leaf.
It was almost like he knew.
It was almost like he was showing Duncan there was no reason to leave. That Nick had seen the error of his ways and was reformable, like all those kids at The Phoenix Centre. Like Maggie herself.
Maggie was washing the breakfast dishes at the sink with Marigolds on her hands. She planned to leave all the clean dishes from yesterday in the dishwasher, so it would look like no one had had a chance to unload it before disaster struck.
As Nick finished his cornflakes and brought his bowl and mug to the sink, he gave Duncan a sad smile. ‘Can I just say again how sorry I am? I know what I did was really, really silly and dangerous. I know I need to address some . . . some troubling behaviour.’ He gave Maggie a wee grimace. Oh aye, he was good. ‘I was thinking. You know you use that horse therapy thing, Dad, with some of the kids in the programme?’
This was a new initiative where the yob was given responsibility for a horse at a local stable and had to clean out its stall, look after its tack, groom it and feed it. The results had been promising, apparently, with one of them even talking about becoming a stable lad.
‘Maybe I could do that,’ went Nick. ‘I think you’re right and I’m not dealing with Mum’s death too well. I think it could help me.’
‘Okay,’ said Duncan heavily, not meeting Nick’s eye.
‘We can talk about it tonight,’ said Maggie, sneaking Nick’s unwashed mug into the empty sink along with hers and Duncan’s. ‘We don’t have time for this now. Carol will be here in ten minutes to pick you up, Nick.’ Fifteen, actually, but she needed Nick out of here, and not just because of the effect he was having on Duncan. It was important that Carol didn’t set eyes on Maggie, Duncan or Isla. ‘She’s picking you up from the bottom of the drive, aye?’
She was, because Maggie had made sure of it. She’d called Carol last night to tell her Nick would be waiting there as usual.
Nick turned to her. ‘Are you worried I’ll go psycho with the horses, Mags? Like those sickos who go round at night maiming animals in fields?’
Ha!
He just couldn’t help himself.
‘Naw,’ went Maggie, looking right at Duncan. ‘You’d have to be a right mental bastard to even think about it.’
When Nick had gone, Maggie told Duncan to go upstairs with Isla while she made sure everything was ‘shipshape’ down here.
‘We don’t want to leave the place in a mess,’ she said, wiping a cloth along the worktop. ‘Yvonne’s doing enough for us as it is.’
Duncan got up from the table like his limbs were made of lead.
Maggie grabbed him with one yellow-gloved hand. ‘We have to do this. I know it’s fucking hard, but we have to do this for Isla.’
He nodded and turned away to the door.
Right.
Now to stage the scene.
She dried and put away the breakfast stuff, apart from the three mugs. She took some chicken from the freezer and left it defrosting in the pantry, like she’d taken it out last night or very early this morning, so it would be ready to cook up today. She filled a pan with water and opened a bag of oatmeal next to it, like they’d been in the middle of making porridge for breakfast when it had happened. She put three bowls and spoons on the table and poured a wee bit more tea and milk into the three mugs and set them on the table as well, like they’d all been drinking tea.
Then she took off the gloves, got a knife from the block and went through to the drawing room. She pulled the blade across her thumb. She would tell Duncan she’d cut it while emptying the dishwasher. But she wasn’t going to empty the dishwasher.
Squatting on the floor, she squeezed drops of blood out and watched them drip onto the cream pile of the carpet. Nick maybe first attacked her in here. She ran outside, but he caught her. Maybe there’d be more blood in the hall? She squeezed some more onto the tiles, thinking suddenly of Kathleen. That poor woman.
She looked down at the wee spots of blood on the tiles, then up at the landing.
There were benefits, right enough, to being a delinquent.
She smiled to herself as she opened the kitchen cupboard where she’d hidden Bunny last night.
‘Sorry, Bunny,’ she went as she chucked him down on the kitchen floor.
They maybe hadn’t left voluntarily. That was what she was hoping it would look like. The cops already knew Nick was a psycho, even if they couldn’t prove it. Hopefully, all this would plant a wee suspicion that Nick could have had something to do with their disappearance. Maybe he’d killed the lot of them very early this morning, at a pre-dawn breakfast, giving him time to dispose of their bodies under cover of darkness – Nick was a bright lad, he’d have thought this through – before turning up at the foot of the drive for his day out as if nothing had happened, like the callous wee bastard he was.
It would have been tight, to be there for Carol to pick him up as arranged, so he didn’t have time to clear up in the kitchen, to clear away the evidence of breakfast having been interrupted. Or maybe incriminating housework details just hadn’t crossed his mind.
Of course, circumstantial evidence like this wouldn’t even be enough to arrest him on, let alone charge or convict him, but he’d be questioned, and, given what had been going on, the business with the pram and Dean’s murder, she was hoping at least some of the cops would maybe be thinking the wee fucker had done this, even if nothing could be proved.
And that would be Nick on their radar.
He needed watching, they’d maybe be thinking.
And maybe next time he killed someone, or tried to – because there would be a next time – he wouldn’t walk free.