The Magpies A Psychological Thriller

Epilogue

Jamie sat down on the bed and looked around at his new room. The walls were plain white, except for a couple of posters: an aerial view of London and a picture of an urban fox, the kind that had caused a tabloid panic recently when a baby was dragged from its bed. The posters had belonged to the previous occupant of the room, and he had been told he could take them down if he wanted to, but he quite liked them. He wasn’t scared of foxes.

The furniture in the room was basic: a single wardrobe, a bedside cabinet, a small chest of drawers. The mattress creaked beneath him. The room smelled stale, of dust and disinfectant, but he had opened the little window to let in some air. The room was fine, he told himself. It was a good place to get his life back on track.

He had been waiting a while for this room, slowly inching his way towards the top of the allocation list after a long time moving between B&Bs and a spell on the streets. There were dark holes in his memory, holes burnt into his brain by alcohol. But now he was on the wagon. That was part of the deal when they offered him a room in this hostel. He would stop drinking. He was even going to quit smoking.

He looked around again. Yes, it was fine. This would be a good base for his relaunch into society.

He went downstairs and saw Carol, one of the women who ran the hostel.

‘Hi Jamie. What do you think?’

‘Of the room? I like it.’

‘Good, good.’ She smiled. ‘We’ve got another couple of people moving in today. One will be moving in to the room next to yours.’

He nodded. ‘I’m going to go out for a walk. Check out my surroundings.’

‘Sure.’

He went out and walked into the wind. It was cold and he was relieved that he wasn’t still out on the streets. He saw a man sitting in the doorway of an abandoned shop. The man nodded at him, recognising a fellow spirit; another person who had fallen on hard times. But Jamie was on his way up. He felt a stab of guilt, knowing that soon he would again be part of the world that walked past the homeless without a glance. He told himself he would never forget what it was like to have nothing, but secretly hoped he would forget.

He walked down to the river and found an empty bench, then sat looking at the choppy water. He didn’t want to cross the river; he didn’t like crossing to the north of the Thames any more. That way lay the past, and a flat that had been gutted by fire. Two flats. The Newtons’, and his and Kirsty’s.

It had been in all the papers. There was a delay in the fire brigade coming to Mount Pleasant Street because the address was on a blacklist of hoaxers. Even though it had been Brian who called 999, the address had triggered an alert. A few minutes passed as the firemen checked that this wasn’t another hoax. Five vital minutes. An anonymous fire fighter was quoted as saying that if it wasn’t for that five minute delay, they might have arrived in time to save Chris. As it was, they were only able to stop the fire spreading further than the ground floor flat, saving Mary’s flat.

After he was well enough to leave hospital, Jamie was arrested and charged with murder. He was refused bail and spent months in prison awaiting trial. He pleaded not guilty, on the grounds that he had been driven to his actions by his neighbours. The trial became known as the ‘Magpies’ trial, after Jamie’s lawyer described Chris and Lucy as a pair of magpies, birds renowned for destroying the nests of other birds. This phrase caught the imagination of the press and the jury, who were also impressed by the evidence given by Letitia and David, who were persuaded to travel down from their Scottish retreat and speak up on Jamie’s behalf. Kirsty gave evidence too. And in the burnt-out remains of the flat, the police forensics team found a tiny charred spy camera concealed in the picture rail. They also found a microphone, hidden beneath the carpet in the bedroom.

Jamie was found not guilty and released.

He looked at the water now. After the trial, he had come down to the river and thought about ending it. He had nothing left. Among the papers that perished in the fire was a letter from the house insurance company telling him his last direct debit had failed. When the flat burnt down, it was uninsured. He had stood beside the river and wondered what it would feel like to throw himself in, for the waters to close over him – but he couldn’t do it.

He was glad he hadn’t. Because after a long time on the edge, he was finally regaining control of his life. He had been given a second chance and he wasn’t going to waste it.

For a long time, he had wrestled with his conscience. Because although he had pleaded not guilty, he felt guilty. With the evidence he had found in the flat, he could have gone to the police and shown them that Lucy and Chris had been making their lives a living hell. But because he had lost it at that moment, a man had died. He was responsible for the death of another human being, even if it was Chris, one of the two people he hated more than anyone else in the world. He wondered what had happened to the other one: Lucy. She had sat on her own during the trial, staring at Jamie, making him feel cold and vulnerable. Jamie’s lawyer had urged Jamie to ask the police to prosecute Lucy for harassment. Jamie said no. He just wanted to forget about it. He imagined she was living with someone else now, in a flat somewhere, making somebody else’s life miserable.

Last week, he had been sitting in a small cafe in Brixton when Heather walked in. She did a double take, then came over and sat down.

‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Your eyebrows.’

‘I know. Apparently, they’ll never grow back.’

‘God.’

She bought him a coffee and they talked. Jamie told her what he had been doing since the trial. She tutted a lot and looked sympathetic. She was now working at a hospital nearby. It was no fun working at St Thomas’s since Kirsty left.

‘Have you heard from her at all?’ she asked.

‘No. The last time I saw her was at the trial. I tried to talk to her afterwards but she hurried off with her mum and dad.’ He paused. ‘Are you in touch with her?’

Heather nodded. ‘Yes, although I don’t see her very often. She lives in Reading now.’

‘Is she married?’

‘No, but she has got a new boyfriend. Andrew. I feel awkward telling you.’

‘It’s OK. I didn’t expect her to spend the rest of her life on her own.’

‘I know – but they’ve got a little girl as well. Six months old. Her name’s Isabel.’

Jamie stirred his coffee slowly. He smiled. ‘That’s good. I’m pleased.’ But he felt a hard lump in his throat and he was unable to speak again for a few minutes.

‘Have you heard from Paul?’ he asked.

She laughed. ‘That bastard. I can’t believe how cut up I was over him.’

‘You were a nightmare.’

‘God, don’t remind me. But I’ve got a new boyfriend now, and he’s twice the man Paul was. Or is. I haven’t heard from him at all.’

‘He must still be out there, wandering the world.’

Heather looked out at the rain. ‘Yeah, and I bet he’s somewhere a lot sunnier than this. I’ll never understand why he became so friendly with Lucy and Chris. Did you ever contact him, tell him what they did?’

‘No.’ Thinking about Paul was painful. Something had happened to him when he’d had his accident, something that still didn’t make sense. If Jamie had been a religious or superstitious person he might believe that something supernatural had happened to Paul while he was in that coma, that he had lost part of his soul. But there had to be a rational explanation for it. Had the accident done something to the wiring inside Paul’s brain? Maybe it had made his brain more like Lucy and Chris’s: the mind of a psychopath, self-centred, cold, acting without conscience. If that was the case, then Paul would have had more in common with his new friends than he did with Jamie and Kirsty.

He kissed Heather goodbye and she gave him her number, told him to call. On the way back to his digs, he screwed it up and threw it in a bin. Heather was a link to the past. If he was going to make a fresh start, all such links had to be severed.

Now, he stood up and decided to head back to his room. Tomorrow, he would go to the job club, get his CV updated, check out the job sites. He had a lot of experience, even if his knowledge of computers was no longer completely up to date. It wasn’t going to be easy finding a new job, but he knew he could do it. And once he had one he could rent a flat. Sooner or later he would meet someone new. Maybe they would buy somewhere together.

A house, this time. A detached house.

He reached the hostel and went inside. Carol was in the hallway, talking to someone on the phone. She gestured for Jamie to wait. While he waited he looked around. Yes, this was a nice place. He was going to like it here. He knew they would support him, look after him while he regained his balance. He felt a rush of optimism. He would never be able to sort himself out if he was still in a B&B. God, if this place hadn’t taken him in, he might have ended up on the streets again, begging, drinking, starving. Dying. But here he was. He felt like giving Carol a kiss. He had been saved.

She put the phone down and said, ‘Your new neighbour’s moved in, in room D. I thought you might want to say hello, introduce yourself.’

‘Good idea.’

He climbed the stairs and knocked on the door of Room D. From within, a woman said, ‘It’s open.’

Jamie wondered what she would be like. Maybe they could be friends. A small voice in his head wondered if they could be something more. He hadn’t been with a woman for a long time. Smiling to himself, he pushed open the door. A blonde-haired woman was facing the window, looking out at the city beyond. She was very tall.

It was Lucy. She had found him. His heart yo-yoed into his stomach.

But when the woman turned around he saw, with a whoosh of relief, that it wasn’t her.

‘Are you alright?’ she said. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

He muttered something and backed out of the room, going into his own. Great, now she thought he was a weirdo. He decided to distract himself by unpacking his backpack, pulling his clothes out and folding them up, putting them in piles. He didn’t have many. He took out the framed photo of himself and Kirsty that had survived the fire. As he lifted the backpack towards the top of the wardrobe, it tipped upside down and something fell out.

He crouched and picked it up. A USB stick. Where had that come from?

Curious, he took it with him and went downstairs, where Carol was watching TV.

‘Is there a computer here that I could use.’

She smiled sympathetically. ‘I’m sorry, we don’t have a public computer.’ But seeing his disappointed expression, she said, ‘But you can borrow my laptop for a few minutes if it’s important.’

‘Yes, thank you.’

He took the laptop upstairs and sat down on the bed, inserting the USB stick into the slot. There was one folder on the device, named ‘Lucy - Collection’. He opened it. There were eighteen image files. Jamie clicked on the first, which was entitled ‘Jane’.

It was a scan of a death notice from a newspaper.

Jane Wilkins (nee Fry) peacefully in her sleep, aged 83, at Orchard House. Beloved mother of Simon and Margaret, grandmother to…

He clicked on the next file. Again it was a death notice, this time for a man.

Cedric John Jenkins, aged 85, died peacefully at Orchard House. Will be much missed…

He clicked through the others, faster and faster. Not all of the death notices mentioned Orchard House, but most of them did. Orchard House was the nursing home that Lucy worked at. And he remembered now where the USB stick had come from. It had been in the carrier bag he’d found in the Newtons’ desk, the bag full of spectacles and hearing aids.

A chill ran through Jamie’s entire body.

They were souvenirs.

The treasures of an angel of death.

Hand shaking, he ejected the USB stick and slipped it into his pocket. He took the laptop downstairs and gave it back to Carol.

‘Find what you were looking for?’ she asked.

‘More than I bargained for, actually. Is there a police station near here?’

She gave him directions, and he thanked her and set off. The bag of glasses had been destroyed in the fire, and the pictures on the USB stick were not evidence, on their own, of any wrong-doing. To Jamie, they told a story of murder, of a serial killer preying on the elderly people she was supposed to be caring for. How did she do it? A pillow over the face? An ‘accidental’ wrong dosage? Perhaps the scanned death notices were more innocent; maybe Lucy simply liked to keep a record of the deaths of people in her care. That would be sick, but not criminal.

He walked along the road towards the police station. A fantasy ran through his head: the police taking him seriously as he explained what he’d found; the launch of an investigation into the deaths; the eventual conclusion that Lucy had murdered all of those old people. Then came her arrest, the tabloid headlines, the scathing words of the judge and finally, imprisonment.

Jamie smiled to himself as he pictured Lucy in a cell.

He hoped she’d have nice neighbours.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to:

Sara Baugh, who not only makes it possible for me to pursue my dreams but is also an insightful and honest reader;

Louise Voss, for pointing out all the bits that could be better;

Jennifer Vince, who yet again created a great cover;

Sarah Ann Loreth, for giving me permission to use her wonderful photograph;

Sam Copeland, for being a great agent.

This book was inspired by real experiences. Although my own real-life magpies weren’t as evil as the ones in this novel, I would like to thank them for giving me the idea – you know who you are.





ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Edwards is the co-author, with Louise Voss, of All Fall Down, Killing Cupid and Catch Your Death, which was the first novel by 100% ‘indie’ authors to hit No.1 on Amazon UK.

He lives in Wolverhampton, UK, with his young family.

Contact Mark

Twitter: @mredwards

Facebook: www.facebook.com/vossandedwards

Web: www.vossandedwards.com and www.indieiq.com