If I walk around the edge. Walk. Around the edge. It’s only by repeating it to myself that I’m able to do it.
When I see who it is that’s lying there, I have to press both my hands over my mouth so hard that it hurts. My arms are shaking – all of me is shaking. It’s Jackie, Jackie Napier. She’s dead. Eyes staring, full of fear. Marks around her throat. Strangled. Oh, my God, please let this not be happening.
Her face is twisted, especially her mouth. The tip of her tongue is visible between her lips. I hear myself saying no, over and over.
Jackie Napier. The only other person who saw what you saw.
I drag myself towards her, as close as I can bear to go. Bending down, I touch her leg. Warm.
Shuddering, I back out of the room. The phone. Ring the police. That’s it. That’s what I do next: ring the police. I focus on my destination, start to make my way across the hall. As I get closer to the table with the phone on it, I see something that makes me seize up: my husband’s handwriting, on one of the blood-splattered pieces of paper on the floor.
I sink to my knees, unable to stay upright. What I’m looking at makes no sense to me. It’s a poem by someone called Tilly Gilpatrick, about a volcano. There’s a comment beneath it, praising the poem. Underneath the praise, Kit has written that the poem is appalling, even for a five-year-old, and added a poem that he thinks is better: three rhyming verses. I try to read them, but can’t concentrate.
One by one, I pick up the other scattered pieces of paper. All of them are dotted with red. There’s a shopping list – someone calling themselves ‘E’ asking ‘D’ to buy, among other things, chargrilled artichokes, not a tin of artichokes. The ‘not’ is in capital letters. What else is here? A car insurance certificate. I notice the name Gilpatrick again; the named drivers are Elise and Donal Gilpatrick.
E and D.
A letter thanking Elise, Donal, Riordan and Tilly for a lovely weekend; an ancient-looking and angry letter from Elise to someone called Caroline, dated 1993; a poem by Riordan Gilpatrick about conkers; the same Riordan’s school report; a description of some kittens by Tilly. I push all these to one side, and find myself staring at a small blue note from Selina Gane to Elise, dated 24 July. Today. Did she write it just after I left? There’s no blood on this one. As I read it, I’m aware of a numbness behind my eyes. I have to stop looking.
Who are these people, the Gilpatricks? What do they have to do with Kit?
Somehow, I manage to get myself upright again. I pick up the phone, then notice another piece of paper beside it, on the table. Kit’s handwriting again, but just one line this time, repeated over and over. The ink is blurred where drops of water appear to have landed on it, as if it’s been left out in the rain.
As if the writer was crying when he wrote it.
The words look familiar. Is it a line from the poem, the one Kit wrote beneath five-year-old Tilly’s volcano poem? I bend down, look for the relevant piece of paper. Here it is. Yes. But why did Kit choose to write this particular line thirteen times? What does it mean? And who wrote the poem? Not Kit; he doesn’t write poems, though he often quotes them – always ones that rhyme, by people I haven’t heard of who have been dead for years.
I pick up the phone again, try to put it to my ear, and find I can’t move my arm. There’s a hand around my wrist, pulling it back. I drop the phone as metal flashes in front of my face, glinting in the sunlight flooding in through the hall window. A knife. ‘Don’t kill me,’ I say automatically.
‘You say it like I want to. I don’t want to.’ A voice I used to love; my husband’s voice. The blade is flat against my throat, crushing my windpipe.
‘Why?’ I manage to say. ‘Why are you going to kill me?’
‘Because you know me,’ Kit says.
*
POLICE EXHIBIT REF: CB13345/432/26IG
24 July 2010
Hi Elise
Just realised I haven’t seen you, even in passing, for weeks. Or Donal and the kids, for that matter. And (at the risk of sounding like a nosy neighbour!) your curtains seem to have been closed