‘I’m fine. I’m just tired, but I’m fine. Might go and read for a bit.’ Avoiding her eye, grabbing the worktop for support, I struggled out of the kitchen one handhold, one foothold at a time.
‘Me and Thea are going into Liverpool tomorrow,’ she called after me as I headed upstairs. ‘We’re going to get some stage make-up for a shoot.’
‘OK, love!’ I closed my bedroom door behind me. Sat on my bed, quivering, crying, trying to shake off the way she’d looked at me. Holding up tissues like a Medusa’s head, turning me to stone. My tissues. Covered in blood. Been there for… how long? Days, presumably. The knife had been clean. I had seen it in my bag and I had had that thought. I had had that thought then wondered why, why notice the blade being clean? Why wouldn’t it be?
Who are you talking to? Katie had asked me.
I don’t know, I thought. I don’t know.
It only struck me later that if Katie could curb her disgust enough to pick up my bloody tissues, then she could easily have disposed of them without comment. That if she or Mark had seen them days or even weeks ago, then either of them could have done that without a fuss, the way I’d cleared away countless things for them, not to mention flushing the loo, which both Kieron and Katie seemed allergic to doing even when the contents were fit for the bomb-disposal unit. But no, she’d had to score petty revenge for all the times I’d told her that her room stank or was a tip, asked her how she could live like an animal.
Later still, when I heard her go out, presumably to Liam’s, I ran downstairs, dug the tissues out of the kitchen bin and flushed them down the loo myself. I washed the knife with hot soapy water, dried it on loo roll and flushed that away too. I put the knife back in the cutlery drawer, in its leather case. If I’d taken it out with me for protection, now I was putting it back for the same reason. I needed protection from myself.
Lisa texted: Drink this week?
I texted back: I’ll call you later.
Later came. I didn’t call.
That night I went walkabout again. I had to; it was the only way I could breathe. I called at the Spar and nicked a large bag of Jelly Babies, literally walked out with them while the assistant was serving a group of kids without anyone even glancing in my direction. A chap called Simon was walking his dog, a blonde Cockapoo called Carl. He was getting out of the house – Simon, not Carl – to escape his fifteen-year-old daughter and her friends. He was going to kill an hour in the pub was what he didn’t say. Tuesday night was the same: young woman called Karen, all dressed up nice and in a rush. She asked me if I knew where the Red Admiral pub was, so I directed her to it before telling her she looked great, to boost her confidence. She was obviously meeting someone for the first time, possibly a colleague or perhaps one of those Tinder arrangements, and she was feeling a bit nervous about it. I didn’t persuade either of them into any dark corners. Didn’t feel anything even near a murderous or violent tendency. The knife was at home. It was in the cutlery drawer, where I had put it.
Mark went to the pub both nights, no surprise there. To meet his mate Roy, he said, although Roy doesn’t smoke so far as I know, and yet again I smelled tobacco on him when he got into bed. Wednesday, I don’t know what he did because I was out again, walking, walking, walking. It was a habit I didn’t seem to be able to break. I limited myself to the odd greeting, a polite two minutes passing the time of day: the weather, the unreliability of public transport, the country going down the pan.
But on the Thursday, nearly two weeks after Jo had been attacked, came the worst possible news.
Parents’ grief as knife-crime girl dies.
I scanned the iPad screen with frantic eyes.
Complications… did everything they could… Joanne Weatherall lost her fight for life in the early hours of this morning.
Two lines further down, my blood slowed in my veins.
The police are still keen to speak to the woman who was seen talking