I take a different route home, a slight detour with Digby in tow. It’s cold and I walk a little faster when I hear the fire engines. I think about Edward, perhaps because of the sound of sirens; the police never did catch him. I remember the afternoon when Detective Handley came to the house to tell me what they had found. He sat down on our sofa, with such gentle consideration, as though not wishing to disturb the air in the room or dent the cushions. He refused my offer of tea with a polite shake of his head, then paused for a long time, visibly searching for the right words and deliberating the order in which they should be spoken. His skin turned a whiter shade of pale as he began to describe the traces of blood and burned skin that had been found inside the sunbed at Edward’s flat. Claire didn’t have an alibi for the night the neighbours said they heard a man screaming. Neither did I, but it didn’t matter, nobody ever asked where either of us were. A possible accident, the detective thought, and suggested that something might have short-circuited. I remember nodding as he spoke. Something or someone most likely did. There was no body. No neat conclusion. Sometimes things have to get messy in order to be cleaned up.
My thoughts shift to Madeline as I turn a corner onto the main road. I think of her often since I woke up. I pass the petrol station where I bought the petrol over two months ago. The CCTV of that day will have been deleted now, but their records will show that it was paid for with a credit card belonging to Madeline Frost. She was always giving me her credit card to buy her lunches or pay for her dry-cleaning, but I used it for a lot of other things too, including an extra set of her house keys when she asked me to get a spare cut for her new cleaner. Taking a job that was clearly beneath me was useful for things like that, but the best part about it was knowing Madeline’s diary, because as her PA, I created it. I knew where she was every minute of the day, weeks in advance and I knew when she didn’t have an alibi.
The final blackmail note I delivered before the Christmas party had Claire’s name on it, so there could be no misunderstandings about who was responsible. Madeline was toast after her epic fail on the lunchtime news, which went far better than planned and exceeded my expectations. The face of Crisis Child said so many awful things live on television, that the small matter of her abandoning her orphaned goddaughter and stealing her inheritance seemed trivial in comparison. But I hadn’t finished with Madeline yet. I’d always thought of blackmail as something ugly, but this was something else, this was beautiful. This was justice. People think that good and bad are opposites but they’re wrong, they’re just a mirror image of one another in broken glass.
I’ve rehearsed my lines for the police. I’ve written a letter from Madeline to Claire where she threatens to deal with her in the same way she dealt with her parents. I’m well practised at writing letters from Madeline as her PA, so I’m confident the handwriting will be a perfect match. Claire never read it, of course, but, when the time comes, I’ll explain how she gave it to me for safe keeping, just in case the unthinkable ever happened. Everyone thought Madeline would lose the plot if she stopped working, that job was all she had. They’ll all think they were right when the police find the empty petrol cans securely locked inside her shed. They’ll find the pen used to write the letter to Claire on the oak desk in her front room. They’ll find everything they need to.
I arrive back home, let myself in quietly and take off my coat. 04.36. I’m slightly earlier than I expected, but I can’t go back to sleep, not now. I feel dirty, contaminated, so I head upstairs to take a shower. I lock the bathroom door and turn to face myself in the mirror. I don’t like what I see, so I close my eyes. I unzip the body of who I used to be and step outside of myself; a newborn Russian doll, a little smaller than I was before, wondering how many other versions of me are still hidden inside. I turn on the shower and step beneath it too quickly. The water is freezing cold but I don’t flinch, I let the temperature rise slowly so that I almost don’t feel the water burn my skin when it gets too hot. I don’t know how long I stand like that, I don’t remember. I don’t remember drying myself or wrapping my robe around my body. I don’t remember leaving the bathroom or coming back downstairs. I only remember being back in the lounge, looking in the big mirror above the fireplace and liking the look of the woman who stared back at me. I pick up Digby and sit with him on my lap, stroking his soft black fur in the dark. All that’s left to do now is wait.
One of the twins starts crying. I pop Digby down on the carpet and rush up the stairs to comfort them. Earlier when I was trying to record the sound of them screaming they were all smiles, but we got there in the end. It’s light in their room now. I pull the curtains back and look out at the new dawn spreading itself over the streets and houses below. Paul is still sleeping, so I take the twins downstairs and make them some breakfast. I sit them in their high chairs and worry about them being too cold in our old house. I have another idea and decide it’s a good one, don’t know why I didn’t think of it before really.
The flames dance in the fireplace, throwing their light and warmth around the room. The twins look on transfixed as though they’ve never seen a fire before and I realise that maybe they haven’t. I pick up the diaries one at a time, looking through a few pages before I throw each one onto the flames. I pause briefly over the final one, run my index finger over the 1992 written on the front, then turn to the last few pages at the back. I can’t read the words at first, they stick in my throat, but I make myself do it. Just one last time I let my eyes translate Claire’s words from that night, the night that changed everything.
Taylor told me to do it.
I tear out the page and screw the paper into a ball before throwing it in the fire. After I have watched it burn to nothing, I throw on the last of Claire’s diaries. The twins and I sit and watch until everything their mother wrote is nothing but smoke and ash.
Later
Spring 2017