She’d waited for Marianne at Vicarage Road all that day, listening to the busybody tick of her father’s fussy carriage clock and the bulletins on Fox FM. She’d watched the local news on TV, too, but she hadn’t needed it to tell her what had happened. Just after eleven o’clock the previous night, down in the dark in the scrubland beyond the allotments, she’d heard the explosion for herself. Minutes later, as she’d let herself back into the house, the sirens had come screaming down Abingdon Road followed by the dull beat of the helicopter overhead. From her father’s bedroom window, she’d seen the spotlight angling down over Donnington Bridge.
Rowan had expected her sooner but it was five o’clock by the time Marianne came. She’d beaten on the front door as if she were going out of her mind, pounding with her fists, leaning on the bell. In the few seconds it took Rowan to get there, Marianne started shouting her name. She’d opened it and pulled her inside as quickly as possible. ‘For God’s sake, are you mad? What are you doing?’
Marianne’s face had stopped the words in her mouth. She’d never seen her look like that before, not when she’d had a bout of real flu in the Lower Sixth, not even the afternoon of Seb’s party. She’d been feverish, wild-eyed. White.
‘What have you done, Rowan?’ she said. ‘What have you done?’ She was trembling. Shaking.
‘Mazz, come and sit down. You’re going to give yourself a heart attack.’
‘Get your hands off me!’
A shadow shivered across the patterned glass behind her: someone on the pavement, only feet away. They must have seen her frenzied knocking – what had they heard?
‘Tell me it wasn’t you, Rowan. Please,’ she begged. ‘Tell me it was an accident – that it’s all just an outlandish coincidence. Say it wasn’t you.’
Rowan looked at her, confused. She seemed really to be asking. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said slowly.
‘Tell me,’ her voice was rising, ‘that you didn’t go to that boat and . . .’
‘Quiet! The neighbours.’ She glanced to left and right as if they might even then be listening. ‘I thought it was what you wanted.’
Marianne’s eyes widened and she shrank away, pressing back against the wall. ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘No.’
‘But it was. I was with you – we went there together, remember? You made me go with you.’ She lowered her voice again. ‘The gas tank, the stove. Your drawing – I . . .’
‘It was a fantasy, Rowan. A way of . . . expressing the anger, getting some of it out. A vent, not a . . . a plan.’
‘But it was a plan. A good one: it worked. It’s early days, obviously, we’re not out of the woods, but everything they’ve said on the radio makes it sound like they think it was an accident, just like you thought.’
Marianne stared.
‘Mazz, look: all I did was go there and turn on the gas on the cooker. One knob. It was so simple – that’s why it worked. She came home, turned the light on . . . I did it for you because it was better like that, safer: I don’t have a motive. Who would suspect me? It’s perfect.’
Marianne started to cry and Rowan felt the stirrings of impatience. ‘Come on, I know it feels bad at the moment but it’ll pass. Lorna’s gone and it’s all going to get easier. Your dad will get over it and forget about her like he always does and everything will be fine again. He and your mother will be happy and . . .’
‘You’re insane.’
‘What?’
‘You’ve gone mad,’ Marianne said. ‘You’ve lost your mind.’
‘Oh, just stop it. Pull yourself together.’ Her voice was stern and decisive, calm in the face of Mazz’s unexpected inability to deal with the situation. Rowan had thought she was tougher than that. ‘You can’t pretend this was nothing to do with you.’
‘But it wasn’t. It wasn’t,’ she sobbed.
For the first time ever, Rowan felt a stab of contempt. Contempt, for Marianne – even in the moment, it was shocking. ‘Don’t be a coward,’ she said. ‘She was going to destroy your family so you made a plan to get rid of her and it worked. You should be pleased.’
When Mazz spoke again, her voice had changed. The panic and disbelief were gone and in their place – ridiculous – was fear. ‘You’re a monster,’ she said.
‘I only did it for you.’
Marianne shook her head. ‘This is nothing to do with me – nothing. It’s about you. What would you do without my family, Rowan? Without my mum and dad pandering to you, saving articles for you out of the paper, taking you out, feeding you? Is that why you stayed in Oxford to do your degree? I can’t think of any other reason – there was nothing else to keep you here.’
The words had cut her. ‘I love them.’
‘No, you don’t, you’re not capable of it,’ Marianne had thrown at her. ‘You’re . . . damaged. Fucked up. You’re a murderer, Rowan.’ Her voice was rising again. ‘Do you even understand what you’ve done? You’ve killed someone – killed.’
‘For fuck’s sake, keep your voice down,’ she’d hissed. She took a breath, tried to think. One of them had to keep a clear head if they were going to make this work.
‘Do you think my family would want anything to do with you if they knew what you’d done? Do you? Do you?’