Kill Who You Want

Chapter Sixteen

Plot reminder: Having failed to commit murder, the letter writer has exacted heartbreaking revenge on Nathan Edwardson. (No spoilers: I hope you can recall the previous chapter's twist.) It is now the morning following that tragic, event-filled night...

~~~~~

Friday, February 15th

Heather Gilchrist felt herself swaying, as if floating in water. As if cast adrift in some dark vast ocean...

"Mum! Mum, it's half past eight."

Abigail, as gentle as a hurricane, was pushing at her shoulders. Tomorrow - so unwanted, so put-on-hold - had arrived anyway. She creaked open an eyelid, felt the harsh glare of the world upon her.

"Hello Abigail." There was a flickered attempt at a smile.

"Look mum, whatever the hell's going on, just pull yourself together alright. You're embarrassing." Her daughter sighed, creased her face up that way she did. Such a pretty girl, so lucky to have inherited her father's soft features. Yet with all those tattoos and piercings and scowls, she did everything she could to make herself ugly.

"And your breath absolutely stinks," she added forthrightly.

Heather turned her shoulders away. Inhaled deeply, tried to push the nausea back down. Everything felt so distant, felt so blurred. The thin triangle of sky visible between the curtains was a strange, incongruous blue.

Sophie Markham. The name was burnished like a cattle brand onto her mind.

"I didn't..." - her mouth was so dry she needed to swallow - "didn't think it'd be so soon. Thought they'd get him first."

But Abigail didn't seem to hear. "I'm going to be late for school." Then, matter-if-factly, her voice a couple of metres more distant: "There's a letter for you on the doormat."

*

During the 1950s number 48 Cresswell Road had been the home of Arthur Maddocs, founder of Maddocs Agricultural Machinery. Despite its four bedrooms and rear half-acre of garden, Arthur's wife Mavis had by the turn of the following decade decided that the home was no longer fitting for the town's leading industrialist and his family. The factory's workforce had in the space of only a few years doubled, its production trebled, and Mr Maddoc's personal wealth quadrupled. A mock tudor mansion in the outlying village of Manningham would, Mrs Maddoc had decided, better communicate the family's elevated status.

The house in Cresswell Road had subsequently been sold to a one Mr Randolph Underhill - a beatnik writer by profession, apparently, though no-one had ever heard of any of his plotless philosophical ramblings actually getting published. It was just as well then that as the youngest son of Lord Underhill of the nearby Huntley Hall estate, his inheritance had been sufficiently generous not to have to bother with trifling matters such as gainful employment. It hadn't been so generous though, it seemed, as to stretch to adequate house maintenance - not on top of the day-to-day costs of remaining permanently high, that was.

As the bright optimism of the sixties curdled into the dark cynicism of the seventies and thus into the self-centredness of the eighties, the strains of encroaching old age began show on both owner and house. As Randolph's once lustrous hippy hair thinned into wispy clumps, so the terracotta roof tiles began to crack and slide. As decades of hedonistic living wrinkled his face, so the limestone brickwork crumbled, the paintwork peeled. As his formerly lithe figure began to alarmingly expand, so the wall braces had loosened their grasp. The unwanted sproutings of hair in nosrils and around ears translated as the chest-high weeds which had upended paving stones, suffocated all other plantlife with their sprawling roots. As Randolph increasingly relied on his father's ivory-headed walking stick in order to get around, so too the house became a symphony of irrepairable creaks and groans.