tusk. From an elephant. Or an antler. Something like that.’
Libby thinks of the pop video Phin had showed them. She thinks of the animal heads looming off walls and the stuffed foxes posed as though still alive atop enormous mahogany desks.
‘And it had blood on it, like a streak of blood. And it was in Henry’s hand. And we all stopped breathing. For some seconds. Even you. And it was just completely silent. We were listening for the others. We were listening to Birdie’s breathing. It had been rattly. Now it had stopped. A tiny little dribble of blood ran from her hair, down her temple, into her eye …’ Clemency describes it on her own face with a fingertip. ‘I said, “Is she dead?”
‘Henry said, “Shut up. Just shut up and let me think.”
‘I went to check her heartbeat and Henry pushed me. Pushed me so hard I fell backwards. He yelled, “Leave her, leave her!”
‘Then he went downstairs. He said, “Stay here. Just stay here.” I looked at Phin. He was clammy-looking. I could see he was about to faint. I moved him towards the bed. Then Henry came back. He was ashen. He said, “Something’s happened. Something’s gone wrong. I don’t understand. The others. They’re all dead. All of them.”’
Clemency’s last word comes out as a gasp. Her eyes fill with tears and she brings her hands to her mouth. ‘All of them. My father. Henry’s mum and dad. Dead. And Henry kept saying, “I don’t understand, I don’t understand. I hardly gave them anything. Such a tiny amount, not enough to kill a cat. I don’t understand.”
‘And suddenly this whole thing, this amazing rescue mission, this thing we were going to do that was going to set us free, had totally trapped us. How could we run down the street looking for a friendly policeman now? We had killed four people. Four people.’
Clemency stops for a moment and catches her breath. Libby notices that her hands are trembling. ‘And we had a baby to look after and the whole thing – the whole thing was just … God, do you mind if we go out in the back garden. I need a cigarette.’
‘No. No, of course,’ says Libby.
Clemency’s back garden is all chipped slate beds and rattan sofas. It’s late morning and the sun is moving overhead, but it’s cool and shady at the back of the house. Clemency pulls a packet of cigarettes from a drawer in the coffee table. ‘My secret stash,’ she says.
There’s a photo on the side of the packet of someone with mouth cancer. Libby can hardly bear to look at it. Why, she wonders, why do people smoke? When they know they might die of it? Her mother smokes. ‘Her boys’, she calls them. Where are my boys?
She watches Clemency hold a match to the tip of the cigarette, inhale, blow it out. Her hands immediately stop shaking. She says, ‘Where was I?’
59
CHELSEA, 1994
I know it sounds like it was all just a terrible disaster. Of course it does. Any situation involving four dead bodies is clearly far from ideal.
But what nobody seems to realise is that without me, Christ almighty, we might all still be there, middle-aged skeletons, having missed out on our entire lives. Or dead. Yes, let’s not forget we could all be dead. And yes, absolutely, things did not go exactly according to plan, but we got out of there. We got out of there. And nobody else had a plan, did they? Nobody else was prepared to step up to the line. It’s easy to criticise. It’s not easy to take control.
Not only did I have four dead bodies to deal with, a baby and two teenage girls, I had Phin to deal with, too. But Phin was behaving deliriously and felt like a liability so, just to make things easier, I locked him in his bedroom.
Yes, I know. But I needed to think straight.
We could hear Phin wailing from his room upstairs. The girls wanted to go to him, but I said, ‘No, stay here. We need to work together. Don’t go anywhere.’
The first priority to me seemed to be Birdie. It was bizarre to see her there, so small and broken, this person who had controlled our lives for so long. She was wearing the top that Clemency had made her for her birthday, and a chain that David had given her. Her long hair was twisted up in a bun. Her pale