Gordon Reece - Mice

I was still in my pyjamas and dressing gown, too numbed by the shock of the letter to go up and get dressed. I’d long feared that our fragile peace would come to a sudden end one day, but I’d always imagined the authoritative knock at the front door (polite but not going to be denied entry), the uniformed officers with their radios crackling, ‘smiles’ that were merely the faintest twitches of thin, unfriendly lips. I’d never imagined for one minute that it would end like this — a blackmailer’s grubby note stuffed through our letterbox.

While Mum read the letter over and over again, I racked my brains trying to figure out who the blackmailer could be.

I remembered the farmer who’d driven past that morning when we were digging the grave in the oval rose bed and the body of Paul Hannigan was lying face-down in the grass beside us. Mum had always said he couldn’t have seen what we were doing at that distance — but what if she’d been wrong? What if the farmer had seen exactly what we were doing that morning and now, after six weeks of weighing up his options, had decided to try to make some money out of it?

Four-wheel-drive Man was another distinct possibility. He’d looked every bit the soap-opera villain with that bald head and sinister goatee, and we’d definitely aroused his suspicions that night in the car park. Maybe he’d smelled a money-making opportunity and followed our taxi all the way back to Honeysuckle Cottage. If he’d discovered that the car we’d left in the car park belonged to Paul Hannigan and that Paul Hannigan was now missing, maybe he’d been able to piece together everything that had happened?

Or was it someone closer to home? Had I somehow given the game away to Roger the morning after the killing, in spite of my best efforts to behave normally? Had he seen the bloodstain on the back door? He was extraordinarily sharp, and I knew he was short of money; that was why he was giving me home tuition after all. But the cheap paper, the grubby thumb print, the letter shoved through the letterbox in the early hours? None of it seemed to bear any relation to the fastidious academic I knew. Then again, if there really was no such thing as ‘character’ (and Roger had been very excited by that idea), it could just as easily have been him as anyone else.

‘Who do you think it is, Mum?’

‘I don’t know, Shelley,’ she said distractedly, still not taking her eyes off the blackmailer’s note. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you think it could be Roger?’

‘No!’ she snorted with a dismissive shake of her head. ‘It’s not Roger. It’s definitely not Roger. We’re dealing with a criminal here, a habitual criminal.’

‘What about Four-wheel-drive Man then? You thought he looked like a criminal — we both did.’

Mum considered this suggestion more seriously. ‘I suppose so,’ she said without conviction, ‘but I still can’t see how he could have found out. Only you and I know what happened here that night.’

Her attention was drawn back to the letter as if it possessed a magnetism she was powerless to resist.

‘Anyway,’ she said almost as an afterthought, ‘we’ll know soon enough.’

I must have looked blank, because she went on, ‘The letter says I will call today . Whoever it is, they’re coming here — to the house — today.’

I imagined Four-wheel-drive Man swaggering arrogantly around the kitchen in his black leather car coat, lounging in one of the kitchen chairs, chewing gum and grinning at us menacingly, marking each and every demand he made with a boorish slave-drum beat of his fist on the table. I shivered with revulsion as if I’d turned over a brick in the garden and disturbed a squirming knot of earwigs.

‘What are we going to do?’

Mum folded her arms tightly across her chest as if she was suddenly cold.

‘There’s not much we can do, Shelley. If the blackmailer goes to the police, they’ll have to investigate the allegations. They’ll come here looking for a body, they’ll have search warrants, sniffer dogs. I think it’ll all be over for us then. .’

I could see the dogs digging frantically at the loose soil of the rose bed, uncovering a thumb as white as a new bulb.

Mum turned her attention back to the note and suddenly screwed it up in a spasm of anger. ‘I can’t understand it! How could anyone have found out? We’ve been so careful! What’s given us away? And why now — after nearly two months have gone by?’

She grimaced as she drained the dregs of her coffee and ran her hand agitatedly through her ragged hair.

‘Do you want a refill?’

She nodded and held out her cup. As I filled it, I saw how violently it trembled in her hand.

‘Is it really all over then?’ I asked in dazed disbelief.

Mum flattened the note with the palm of her hand on the kitchen table and considered it yet again. ‘I think we’re trapped, Shelley.’

Trapped . I was struck that she’d used that word. We were still mice after all, mice caught in the spring of the metal trap, our little matchstick necks cleanly snapped in two.

‘Isn’t there anything we can do?’

She covered her face with her hands and dragged them down until they were pressed together at the point of her chin as if in prayer. ‘Not that I can see, Shelley. Not that I can see. We’ve got very few options open to us.’

I thought about all we’d been through to avoid detection — burying Paul Hannigan’s body in the oval rose bed, driving to town in the burglar’s battered turquoise car, the terrifying run-in we’d had with Four-wheel-drive Man, Mum’s late-night journey into the national park to dump the bin bags in the abandoned mine shaft. Had all that been for nothing? Were we going to be defeated now, not by brilliant detective work, but by some loathsome money-grubbing blackmailer ?

‘What options do we have?’ I asked, the pitch of my voice rising sharply.

Mum turned her elegant, exhausted face towards me. She was so tired that she was hardly able to keep her eyes open when shafts of sunlight managed to break through the morning clouds and fill the kitchen with bright spring sunshine.

‘We can go to the police and confess everything before the blackmailer gets here,’ she said. ‘Whatever else, it’ll be better that the police hear it from us first. A confession — even at this late stage — could still help us in court when it comes to sentencing.’

I saw the ghostly white tent erected over the oval rose bed, the scrum of journalists on the gravel, the back seat of the police car, its black upholstery hot to the touch. And what would come after that? Hours of questioning at the police station, the humiliation of mug shots, fingerprinting. Then, after months of miserable waiting, the trial. Standing in the dock on trembling legs while the prosecuting barrister unleashed the unanswerable question: ‘If you really thought you’d done nothing wrong, Miss Rivers, if you really thought you’d been acting in self-defence at all times, why did you bury Mr Hannigan’s corpse in the garden of Honeysuckle Cottage?’

If prison had been a real possibility the night we’d killed Paul Hannigan, it was surely inevitable now. Medieval horror in the twenty-first century. My brilliant career diverted into a siding to rot neglected for God knows how many years. Forced to share my most intimate space with girls more savage, more vicious than Teresa Watson and Emma Townley knew how to be. I knew I wouldn’t be able to survive it. I wouldn’t be able to bear the brutality, the philistinism, the filth. I knew I’d end up taking my own life. .

‘Isn’t there anything else?’ I asked, struggling for breath as if the noose were already tightening around my neck. ‘Isn’t there anything else we can do?’