the shining suds, my knuckles stung. The rage still coursed around my system. I felt the hot power of it. Perhaps that was what was giving me these bursts of strength. They made up for the sudden attacks of tiredness that made me think I must have been hit round the head by a tree. I didn’t know much, but I knew something – if Katie and Mark had seen me half an hour ago, they wouldn’t be talking to me like I was nothing. There’d be at least a bit of recognition.
I pushed my head under the water. I missed Kieron.
23
Rachel
They hadn’t set a place for me, obviously. They hadn’t cleared their plates into the dishwasher or wiped away the crumbs from the bread and butter. The washing was still in the drum, starting to smell. A hot thumb of irritation burned somewhere around my sternum. But it was an ember of an hour ago.
‘Mark?’ I called out.
No answer. I can remember thinking he must be back in front of the idiot box, but actually it turned out later that he’d gone to the pub. I was so preoccupied that I didn’t even realise until he crawled into bed around midnight, stinking of beer and cigarettes.
‘Have you been smoking?’ I asked him, but he was already snoring, one hand on my boob. I knew he wasn’t making a pass so much as passing out; that if I reciprocated, he wouldn’t respond. Like an overtired toddler, he was clutching a comforter to help him get to sleep.
But that hadn’t happened yet, and when it did, it was the least of my worries, to be honest. As it was, as I ate my cod, chips and mushy peas (peas a bit crusty on the top), what floated to the top of my mind wasn’t Mark, Katie, Kieron or even poor Jo, but the chap in the cemetery. I don’t know if it was a delayed reaction or what, but it was only then, after I’d had my bath and got warm to my bones and got some dinner down my neck, that I started to remember in vivid detail how I’d pulled on that jump lead with the strength of a lion, enough to make my own knuckles bleed. And how I had woken as if from a dream, on my knees, with a pain in my head and no clue as to what had just gone on, or why.
Thinking about it there in the kitchen was like coming up from under anaesthetic. It was the same feeling as when I’d read about Jo a few days earlier, found out she’d been stabbed and left for dead moments after we’d gone our separate ways. The knife in my bag… I must have put it in there for self-protection, but I couldn’t remember doing it. And now the jump leads in my hands, my skinned knuckles. He had run away, seemingly unharmed, but still, an unsettled, preoccupied feeling persisted in my guts. Maybe Mark was right when he said that collecting violent crimes in a file was making me paranoid. But the clip file was something I had to do. I had to build a body of evidence. I couldn’t talk to him or anyone about that and I couldn’t talk about the memory losses either. Maybe I should confide in Lisa. But I’d have to leave out the part about worrying whether or not I was attacking people. There’s a limit to how many sandwiches short of a picnic you can admit to being before you’re no longer welcome on the day out, if you know what I mean.
But I hadn’t murdered young Jo and I hadn’t attacked that chap, of that I was almost certain. And I certainly hadn’t had violence or the intention to commit violence on my mind. To commit murder, to attack someone, you have to really want to, don’t you? You have to be so full of anger, rage, hate that you get to a point of not caring. And whether a victim dies or not only depends on how good you are at the murdering, doesn’t it? What your skill set is, whether your luck is in that night, whether you get the right weather conditions, privacy, lighting, tools, protective clothing, what have you. Whether you wanted to do it badly enough.
I hadn’t wanted to kill Jo and I hadn’t wanted to kill or harm that man. I had been disgusted by him, that was