CJ SKUSE is the author of the Young Adult novels Pretty Bad Things, Rockoholic, Dead Romantic, Monster and The Deviants and the bestselling adult novel Sweetpea. She was born in 1980 in Weston-super-Mare, England. She has first class degrees in Creative Writing and Writing for Children, and, aside from writing novels, works as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018

Copyright © CJ Skuse 2018

CJ Skuse asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008216740

Praise for CJ Skuse

‘If you like your thrillers darkly comic and outrageous this ticks all the boxes.’ The Sun

‘This isn’t a book for the squeamish or the faint-hearted … think Bridget Jones meets American Psycho.’ Red

‘This darkly comic novel…has the potential to become a cult classic.’ Daily Mail

‘Sweetpea hits all the right buttons. A dark, twisted read about a female serial killer with dollops of humour, sarcasm and a lightweight approach…keeping you gripped and on the hook, both smiling and squirming.’ Maxim Jakubowski, Lovereading.co.uk

‘You MUST read this book especially if you like your (anti) heroes dirty-mouthed, deadly and dark, dark dark. ADORED IT.’ Fiona Cummins, author of Rattle

‘This book is OUTRAGEOUS.’ Compulsive Readers

‘This anti-hero is psychotic without doubt, sexually voracious and incredibly funny.’ Shots magazine

For Matthew Snead. From a distance,

you’ve been an excellent cousin.

‘The odour of the sweet pea is so offensive to flies that it will drive them out of a sick-room, though not in the slightest degree disagreeable to the patient.’

– A TIP FROM The 1899 Old Farmer’s Almanac

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

Sunday, 24th June – 7 weeks pregnant

Monday, 25th June – 7 weeks, 1 day

Thursday, 28th June – 7 weeks, 4 day

Sunday, 1st July – 8 week exactly

Monday, 2nd July – 8 weeks, 1 day

Wednesday, 4th July – 8 weeks, 3 days

Friday, 6th July – 8 weeks, 5 days

Monday, 9th July – 9 weeks, 1 day

Friday, 13th July – 9 weeks, 5 days

Monday, 16th July – 10 weeks, 1 day

Friday, 20th July – 10 weeks, 5 days

Monday, 23rd July – 11 weeks, 1 day

Wednesday, 25th July – 11 weeks, 3 days

Saturday, 28th July – 11 weeks, 6 days

Tuesday, 31st July – 12 weeks, 2 days

Wednesday, 1st August – 12 weeks, 3 days

Saturday, 4th August – 12 weeks, 6 days

Tuesday, 7th August – 13 weeks, 2 days

Wednesday, 8th August – 13 weeks, 3 days

Thursday, 9th August – 13 weeks, 4 days

Friday, 10th August – 13 weeks, 5 days

Saturday, 11th August – 13 weeks, 6 days

Sunday, 12th August – 14 weeks exactly

Monday, 13th August – 14 weeks, 1 day

Thursday, 27th September – 20 weeks, 4 days

Friday, 28th September – 20 weeks, 5 days

Saturday, 29th September – 20 weeks, 6 days

Tuesday, 2nd October – 21 weeks, 2 days

Thursday, 4th October – 21 weeks, 4 days

Friday, 5th October – 21 weeks, 5 days

Saturday, 6th October – 21 weeks, 6 days

Thursday, 11th October – 22 weeks, 4 days

Tuesday, 16th October – 23 weeks, 2 days

Friday, 19th October – 23 weeks, 5 days

Monday, 22nd October – 24 weeks, 1 day

Thursday, 25th October – 24 weeks, 4 days

Monday, 29th October – 25 weeks, 1 day

Wednesday, 31st October – 25 weeks, 3 days

Friday, 2nd November – 25 weeks, 5 days

Saturday, 10th November – 26 weeks, 6 days

Sunday, 11th November – 27 weeks exactly

Wednesday, 14th November – 27 weeks, 3 days

Friday, 16th November – 27 weeks, 5 days

Wednesday, 21st November – 28 weeks, 3 days

Friday, 23rd November – 28 weeks, 5 days

Monday, 26th November – 29 weeks, 1 day

Tuesday, 27th November – 29 weeks, 2 days

Thursday, 29th November – 29 weeks, 4 days

Saturday, 1st December – 29 weeks, 6 days

Sunday, 2nd December – 30 weeks exactly

Wednesday, 5th December – 30 weeks, 3 days

Saturday, 8th December – 30 weeks, 6 days

Thursday, 13th December – 31 weeks, 4 days

Tuesday, 18th December – 32 weeks, 2 days

Thursday, 20th December – 32 weeks, 4 days

Sunday, 23rd December – 33 weeks exactly

Monday, 24th December – 33 weeks, 2 days

Tuesday, 25th December – 33 weeks, 3 days

Wednesday, 26th December – 33 weeks, 4 days

Thursday, December 27th – 33 weeks, 5 days

Friday, December 28th – 1 day post-partum

Extract

About the Publisher

Sunday, 24th June – 7 weeks pregnant

KNOCK KNOCKKNOCK KNOCK KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.

So there I was, red-handed, red-faced, naked and straddling a corpse. His body is covered in my DNA so even if I did toss him over the balcony onto several parked hatchbacks, the evidence would lead straight back to me.

KNOCK KNOCKKNOCK KNOCK KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.

‘Jesus Christ police have got loud knocks. Okay okay okay okay think whatdoIdowhatdoIdowhatdoIdo?’ Prison is a no no. I’ve seen Orange is the New Black. I can’t do all that lesbianing. It looks exhausting.

ANSWER THE FUCKING DOOR!

‘Yeah, I guess I’m gonna have to, aren’t I?’

I fling on my dressing gown and tiptoe across to the bedroom door. The knock comes again and I jump a clear foot in the air.

For crying out loud, Mummy. This isn’t just about you now. You’ve got me to think about. Answer it and tell them you can’t speak to them now.

‘Oh yeah they’re gonna love that, aren’t they? “Sorry, Sarge, could you pop out for a couple of doughnuts while I dispose of this corpse I’ve been sleeping with, then do feel free to come back with your Marigolds on and have a good root around?” It’s not gonna wash, Foetus Face.’

KNOCK KNOCK.

Right well that knocking is getting right on my tits now so just answer it. You’ll think of something.

I’ll admit, I’d have been lost if it hadn’t been for that little voice from beyond my own vagina telling me what to do. I tiptoed across the cold floor.

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.

The words ‘shit’ and ‘creek’ spring to mind and there ain’t a paddle in sight. ‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK!’

Damn stupid to kill him here in the first place. What was I thinking? Must be the start of ‘Baby Brain’. That’s what I’m going to blame it on anyway.

Don’t you lay this shit on me.

How did I think I was going to get a six-foot Australian man-child out of my flat, along the hall, down two flights, across the car port and into my tiny car without being seen by some busy-body with a nose for cadavers? I’ve told you what to do - cut him up! Fortunately AJ wasn’t decomposing quickly – I’d drained him out over the bath before I left for the hen weekend. This slows the process down. I saw Dad do it once through a warehouse window – him and his associates, all in balaclavas.

Not just a pretty face, am I? *wink emoji*

Anyway, my heart’s pounding and my mouth’s all dry but the situation is what it is. There’s no escape. The knock echoes once more, I take in a deep lungful of air, prepare my best ‘shocked and saddened’ face and open the door of the flat.

And it’s Mrs Whittaker.

I let out my deep breath. Our kleptomaniac neighbour who gets more Alzheimersy each time I see her usually annoys the knicker elastic off me with her unsolicited visits, but today I could lick her bristly mouth.

‘Hello, Rebecca,’ she says.

My name is Rhiannon but nobody ever gets my name right. Even at school. Even when I got famous, few news editors could spell it. I get it – people are stupid. I let old Whittaker off a bollocking for the simple fact that she isn’t wearing latex gloves or brandishing a search warrant.

‘I’m popping into town in a bit to do my big shop and I wondered if you wanted anything. I know your young man’s away at the moment.’

The implication being that I, as a young woman alone, can’t cope. Bless. She’s eyeballing the room over my shoulder, as usual, obviously wanting to come in and snoop for unattended objets d’art.

‘Ah that’s nice of you, Mrs W,’ I say, keeping an eye out for cops on the stairs. But there’s nothing and no one.

I think briefly about sending her on a mission for a Dyson noise-less power saw but feel it will garner too many questions. ‘I think I’m okay, thanks.’

‘When’s your young man back? France, isn’t it?’

‘No, Holland. He’s gone to watch the football.’ I haven’t got time to go into details about Craig’s arrest and subsequent charge for the three murders that I actually committed so I leave it at ‘Yeah, he’s having a great time, seen some clogs and stuff.’

‘Bet the flat’s felt ever so empty without him. I know when my John died…’

She witters on for three minutes about how long it took to come to terms with her husband’s passing and I’m going ‘Mmm’ and ‘Aah’ in all the right places, but my mind is going in a hundred directions. When’s she going to leave? When are the police coming? Where am I going to cut him up?

As I’m standing there, a bubble emerges from my think tank.

She’s going out. Her apartment will be empty for hours.

If I can drag AJ’s body downstairs into her flat, it will leave my flat clear for the police. If this is my rescue boat it has some huge holes in it, but you can’t look a holey old boat in the mouth, can you? So I start rowing.

‘Okay I better be off to get my bus,’ she says.

‘Actually, I do want a couple of bits and bobs if you don’t mind,’ I say. ‘I’ll just grab the list. Come in.’ She can’t resist a root around my nick-knacks.

Parking her in the lounge, I retreat to the kitchen and locate the bottle of cooking oil under the sink. I break the seal and pour it down the plughole. She’s pootling about beyond the partition wall, commenting on how warm it is with our underfloor heating. Her block heels click towards the record player.

‘Yeah, here we go,’ I say, joining her in the lounge – the empty oil bottle trailing by my side. She’s nosing through Craig’s vinyl, lifting out Listen Without Prejudice and trying to pick off the HMV sticker that had been on there since Craig bought it. She doesn’t see what I’m doing.

‘It’s only this cooking oil actually. We’ve run out.’

‘Rapeseed oil.’ She frowns, putting George back in the stack and taking the bottle from me to squint at the label. ‘Where do you get that?’

‘With the other oils. If you can’t find it, don’t worry …’

‘Oh I’ll find it. I like a quest,’ she says, smiling so toothily I fear her falsies are gonna shoot out of her mouth. ‘I never cooked with this before.’

‘It’s so good for you,’ I say, surreptitiously parroting the label blurb. ‘I think it has the lowest amount of saturates of any other oil on the market and no artificial preservatives, and it’s kind to cows and stuff.’

‘Sounds wonderful,’ she smiles again as I guide her back towards the front door. ‘Might get some myself. It doesn’t make chips taste funny, does it?’

She walks on ahead of me, right into my oily trap…

WALLOP

She goes down like a perv priest on a preschooler, but to my chagrin doesn’t bang her head. I rush in and do it manually, grabbing her ears and yanking her skull back for hard contact to ensure disorientation.

‘Ooh! Ow! Ooh! Ooh, what’s happened? My head! Ahh, my arm! Where am I?’ she gabbles on, flailing about like an upturned tortoise.

‘Oh dear, it’s all right,’ I say, dialling 999. ‘You must have slipped. I’m going to put you in the recovery position now…’

‘Oh it hurts. Oof! Oww! Owwwww!’

‘That’s okay, pain is good. Pain means it’s getting better.’

With her settled as comfortably as she can be on her side in front of the afternoon film – Calamity Jane – I go to my room and wrap my secret love in the sheet he’s lying dead on. There’s a thump when he hits the rug.

‘What was that?’

‘I dropped something,’ I say to the back of her head as I drag AJ’s body across the lounge floor behind her. Doris Day dances about on a counter. Crazy bitch.

Whittaker keeps trying to look back at me. ‘I’m in so much pain, love.’

‘Ahh lie still, Mrs W. The ambulance is on its way. You’re going to be fine but you have to stay still. You could have a broken… primula.’

Could not think of the name of that bone. Damn baby brain.

It’s not my fault. You got yourself into this mess.

I’m sweating like a pork chop as I drag my human fajita through my door and downstairs to Mrs Whittaker’s flat, bundling it inside with seconds to spare. I hear the quick pad pad of shoes down the corridor and I look up to see Jonathan Jerrams careering towards me, arms out.

‘Rhiannon!’ he yells, barrelling into me at speed.

Old Mr and Mrs Jerrams bring up the rear, apologising in his wake.

Jonathan’s my self-appointed ‘best friend ever’ because of something I did for him over two years ago. I saved his life. Sort of. There used to be a guy of no fixed abode who’d hang about the concourse shouting abuse at residents, tipping over bins and stealing bikes. He wore a pig mask to frighten people – I nicknamed him The Notorious P.I.G. Anyway, he picked on Jonathan something chronic because Jonathan has Down’s syndrome and he could get money out of him easily. One day, The P.I.G. threw an apple core at Jonathan’s head as he was coming back from feeding the ducks – one of the few solo pursuits his parents afforded him – and I saw it happen.

It’s one of my rules – defend the defenceless. I had no choice.

So immediately after the apple-flinging, I strode up to the P.I.G., snapped the mask from his face and yelled ‘If you don’t disappear I will visit you in the dead of night and cut your real fucking face off.’ Got spit in his eye and everything. I eyeballed him until he looked away, got onto his bike and sped off, laughing like it didn’t matter. Clearly it did. We never saw him on the estate again.

For ages after, Jonathan left me presents outside my door, sent random cards and flowers, then Craig got jealous and asked him to stop. Now it’s tackle hugs and proclamations of love across the car park.

‘We’re going to the zoo, we are,’ says Jonathan, rocking to a tune only he could hear; trouser hems flapping in the breeze.

‘How lovely,’ I say, wiping facial sweat on my dressing gown sleeve.

‘I like animals, I do.’

‘Yeah, so do I. They’re great, aren’t they?’

The Jerramses laugh for no apparent reason.

Jonathan prods Whittaker’s door with his spoony digits. ‘What’s in there?’

‘I’m watering Mrs Whittaker’s house plants. She’s gone into hospital.’

‘Oh dear,’ says Mrs J. ‘What’s happened?’

‘She had a fall.’

The Jerramses accept this. Whittaker’s a proper Weeble, always falling over – usually in the stairwells. Most residents have had to carry her flabby arse up two flights before now. It’s like a rite of passage in this place.

‘Where’s your dog?’ Jonathan shouts, two feet away.

‘Tink’s staying with my parents-in-law,’ I tell him.

‘Do you like my t-shirt?’

He opens his jacket to reveal a Jaws t-shirt with a sizeable belly underneath and a bolognaise stain on the neck. Why do people who look after the disabled never dress them in good clothes? It’s always cheap Velcro shoes and washed-out charity shop threads that never fit. The shark glared at me, teeth gleaming. It didn’t have as many calcium deposits as Jonathan.

‘Nice,’ I say. ‘You wear it well, JJ.’

I’m still sweating like I’m at hot box yoga even though all I’m doing is talking – meantime I have a corpse mouldering in one flat, a broken pensioner in another and a police forensics team arriving any second. It’s only when I’m making my excuses I realise my dressing gown has opened and boobage is on the prowl. Old Jerrams can’t take his eyes off them. I have to say, it’s a big turn on when he looks up my dressing gown as I’m climbing back up the stairs.

‘What are you doing, Rachel?’ Mrs Whittaker calls out, scaring the crap out of me. I’d forgotten she was still there in front of Calamity Jane. Doris and some other tart are singing about a woman’s work never being done.

Too fucking true, Doris.

‘Just went to see if there was any sign of the ambulance.’ I mop over the oil puddle with a bleachy dishcloth. ‘You all right there while I get changed?’

‘Oh yeah, you carry on love, don’t mind me.’

I change my bed, turn the mattress, Febreeze the room and open both windows. When I’m changed, I go in and sit next to Whittaker and watch a bit more of Calamity Jane ’til the ambulance comes.

‘I’ll water your house plants, don’t worry,’ I call after her as they stretcher her into the lift. ‘And I’ll call Betty for you. Leave everything to me.’

It’s minutes between the ambulance leaving to the police drawing up. I’m on the balcony, chewing a Dime bar. Three be-suited people – a tightly-bunned black woman and two men, one tall, blond and erect; the other like the short tubby guy in Grease who’s about forty years too old for high school. It’s then time to get into character as the wronged girlfriend of a serial killer.

I’ve learned a lot from watching those Crocodile Tears docus on YouTube. It all comes flooding back, like an old First Aid course when you have to treat a casualty. Not that I’ve ever had to. Or would, let’s face it.

I’ve remembered the key points about lying to police and they are these:

1) Strong emotional displays – dead giveaway.

2) Micro-expressions – Keep gestures to a minimum. Rubbing one’s face denotes self-comfort/lying. Stillness/shock are natural responses.

3) Shaking hands – good, if you can manufacture it. Luckily, my hands were shaking efficiently – the adrenaline of my frantic lunchtime running round hiding corpses and maiming pensioners.

4) Script – less is more. Any idiot who killed his wife and went on TV to beg for help in ‘catching the bastard’ always makes the same mistake – their dialogue is too prepared. Sandwich the lies between truths – I was on a hen weekend, Craig did call me from Amsterdam to say he’d been arrested, he did habitually use pot to relax. Then the lies.

5) Co-operation – do everything they say without hesitation.

The detective leading the investigation, DI Nnedi Géricault from the Major Crime Investigation Unit in Bristol, interviews me with DS Tubby Guy from Grease. The blond guy dons gloves and snoops around the flat. They have had to get a warrant which is presumably why they have taken so long to get here. Thank Fuck.

‘Do what you need to,’ I say, still in utter shock and bewilderment, fiddling with the solitaire on my fourth finger.

I tell them I’m pregnant and that I have high blood pressure – a half-truth so they’ll treat me with kid gloves. Works like a charm.

‘We’ll keep it brief today as clearly it must be a stressful time for you,’ says Géricault.

‘I can’t believe it,’ I keep repeating. ‘Please tell me this is a mistake.’

If there’s one thing I’ve always been able to do well, it’s cry on demand. I learnt from an early age that people soften when you turn on the waterworks – nothing too dramatic, just some light sobbing at the right moment and you’re laughing.

Internally, of course.

‘I’ve known the guy for four years,’ I wail. ‘I live with him. I sleep in the same bed as him. I’m having his baby. How the hell is he supposed to have killed three people behind my back? It makes no sense.’

‘Would you like some water?’ Géricault offers, motioning to the blond in the kitchen. She has a couple of fingers missing on her left hand – the fourth and fifth are stumps. I wonder if they’ll find AJ’s blood spatter in the grouting. You’ll only see it if you’re looking for it. And this isn’t a crime scene.

Yet.

‘How long will this take?’ I ask, glass shaking in my adrenalized grip.

DS Tubby Guy from Grease says ‘It’ll take as long as it takes.’ I’m so thankful I pay my taxes to keep his ass in cheap suits.

As it turns out they stay around two hours forty minutes. They ask all sorts of questions – questions they already know the answers to, like where Craig is right now and where his van is and even questions about my dad’s well-documented vigilantism.

‘Craig didn’t know my dad for long. He didn’t know about what he did in his spare time. He wasn’t one of them.’

‘How can you be sure?’ asks Géricault.

‘I guess I can’t,’ I shrug. And they ask no more about it.

They say I’ll need to move out for a while. I inform them that Craig’s parents Jim and Elaine have said I can stay with them. They take Craig’s laptop and his pot in evidence bags, some of our kitchen knives (not the Sabatiers of course as those babies were hidden in advance) and his spare tool box from the cupboard outside our bedroom.

‘Some people are experts at hiding what they are,’ says Géricault as they are leaving. ‘You mustn’t blame yourself.’ She nods and holds my stare.

It’s clear from this meeting that Craig’s in the frame. I’m a key witness at best; the pregnant, scared girlfriend of a man who was, by day, a mild-mannered builder – by night a vicious, apex predator. They’d got the bastard.

*Gordon Ramsay clap* DONE.

*

So, I guess now you want to know about the old choppy-choppy? Well, it was the messiest, most nauseating thing I’ve ever done. God, when I think how easy it was for murderers in the olden days. All you had to do was lace someone’s tobacco with arsenic or push them in the Thames. They rarely caught people like me back then – sudden death was usually down to ‘The Pox’. Now you’ve got to do all this dismembering and fingerprint-hiding shit.

First I had to make a list for Homebase –

• rubber gloves (1 box)

• plastic sheeting and/or cling film (lots)

• shovel (1)

• bleach (2 bottles, possibly 3)

• duct tape (3 rolls)

• cleaning sponges (several)

• electric power saw and/or bow saw (1 of each).

How did I know what to get? My dad was a vigilante – kids pick these things up.

Then I scrubbed out rubber gloves, bleach and sponges from the Homebase list and decided to get them in Lidl so it wouldn’t look like I was doing a supermarket sweep for dismembering tools. I also added Penguins, Kettle Chips, oil and elderflower pressé. Lies sandwiched between truths.

Annoyingly, Craig’s power saw – a bloody expensive one he’d bought with his Screwfix vouchers – was still in his van which is, as I write, being impounded by police in Amsterdam. I therefore had to buy a new one.

The guy I pounced upon in the masonry paint aisle at Homebase – Ranjit – was only too happy to help. I played my Dumbass Girly Girl role to the hilt, saying the saw was Hubby’s birthday gift and that he ‘wanted to get started on our decking pronto’. Ranjit had just the tool – a power saw. I chose the Makita FG6500S with dust guard and free goggles for two reasons:

1) it cut through wood like butter and

2) it was the quietest.

I bought my bits and pieces, got it all back to Whittaker’s flat and set everything up in her bathroom. It took ages. And then doubt crept in. What if someone heard the saw? What if Jonathan and his folks returned early from the zoo? What if one of Whittaker’s friends popped by just as I’m up to my elbows in Australian long pig? It was getting on for four o’clock. I needed to see what the situation was outside my own private abattoir.

I dressed in my most girly outfit, brushed my hair so it went all Doris Day and grabbed the spare set of Craig’s keys. Up and down the hallway I went like the fucking Avon lady, knocking on doors asking if they’d been dropped in the lift. Only three families were in on Whittaker’s floor – the gays with the cats, the couple in wheelchairs and Leafblower Ron and Shirley who were watching TV and eating haddock and mash judging by the smell.

It wasn’t ideal but I had to chance it. Saw and be damned.

You can do it, Mummy. I believe in you.

When I started, I kept seeing his face flash across my mind. His eyes. His smile. The moment he told me he loved me.

I had to keep telling myself ‘It’s only a dead pig. The pig was a bad, bad pig’ and threw a tea towel over its face when it was staring. ‘I don’t like being blackmailed by a lanky dead Australian pig.’

But all the while a little voice was telling me differently.

That’s not a pig though, Mummy. That’s my daddy.

I vomited until it was stringy water. I don’t know if it was pregnancy sickness kicking in or the pervading stink of bleach or the fact that on some level I’d appalled myself. The thigh bones were the worst – I used a hammer to drive the knife down deeper to break into them. I used the saw as sparingly as possible, French-trimming the bones before smashing down through them. I ended up with six pieces. Wrapping them took longer than cutting them.

The whole process was not to be repeated. By that evening each section was tightly wrapped in cling film – head, torso, arms, right thigh, left thigh and lower legs. I packaged them in two sports bags and took it all down to my car with my other stuff – clothes and Sylvanians. Nothing else mattered.

And it wasn’t just the body parts I had to dispose of either. I also had:

• the plastic sheeting from the bathroom

• the shower curtain

• all my bed linen

• all AJ’s possessions – including his rucksack, passport and phone

I’d have to burn as much of it as I could. Somehow. Somewhere.

I didn’t allow myself to cry until I was in the car and half way up the motorway towards the coast. The rain lashed against the windows. I half-wished it would skid off the road as I drove. I could barely see through my tears or the windscreen at one point.

It was getting on for midnight by the time I turned up on Jim and Elaine’s doorstep in Monks Bay. I was sobbing, soaked and spent of energy. I fell into Jim’s cashmere arms, ready for him to take care of me. Ready for Elaine to wash my face and make me hot chocolate and dress me in warm, pyjamas and tuck me into their spare room on the second floor and tell me everything was going to be all right.

Ready for someone else to take the reins.

Monday, 25th June – 7 weeks, 1 day

1. People in washing powder adverts who are surprised when the washing powder gets the clothes clean, i.e. does its fucking job.

2. The first man who got the first woman pregnant. And the first woman who thought that was a good idea.

3. People who buy fake flowers.

4. People who make fake flowers.

5. Tourists in open-toe sandals – now that it’s summer there are suddenly yellowing, gnarly trotters everywhere. Now I know how the Nazis felt when the Ark of the Covenant opened.

6. Johnny Depp.

For just a moment the other day, I thought I was running out of items for my Kill Lists. But then lo, a new morning breaks and with it arrives a whole new bunch of thorns in my raw little side.

I gave Jim the Gazette’s switchboard number and left him to explain why I was off sick. I can take as long as I need. Bet they’re loving this. Nothing as newsworthy as this has ever happened in that town. I can see Linus Sixgill now, creaming his genius over his by-line:

PRIORY GARDENS SURVIVOR IN SEX SLAYER SHOCK SHE USED TO MAKE OUR COFFEE!

or

GAZETTE GIRL’S BOYFRIEND IS GAY SEX SLAYER! WE ALWAYS THOUGHT HER COFFEE TASTED FUNNY!

or perhaps

GAZETTE JUNIOR LIVES WITH SICKO SEX FIEND: Did she make his coffee too?

I’ve felt sick all day. And thirsty. And dizzy, like I’ve been stuck in a revolving door for a decade. I’m also shivery, which Elaine says is ‘either a chill or pneumonia’. She is making me endless cups of tea and checking my temperature on the hour.

Either Jim or Elaine have come into my bedroom unannounced twelve times since I woke up with the doorbell at 9.58 a.m. Tink scampers in too. She hops up on my bed and makes a beeline for my face, licking it all over. She seems to love me again, even though Jim has taken over her care now.

God I feel awful. Perhaps I’m dying. Wouldn’t that be ironic? What if Elaine’s right and this is what pneumonia feels like? How the hell is a thing the size of a chickpea causing me so much discomfort?

You overdid it yesterday. You need to rest. I need to grow in peace.

FFS. It’s talking to me all the time now. Like Jiminy Cricket but without the musical interludes.

Elaine’s been in to change my sick bucket and bring in a two-litre bottle of water and a piece of dry toast. I wonder if this lot will stay down. Got no appetite at all. I don’t have a hunger for anything. It’s like Heil Foetus has invaded Womblandia and drenched that fire in amniotic fluid.

Ugh. I feel sick again. Every time I close my eyes, I keep seeing his thigh meat all over my hands.

Thursday, 28th June – 7 weeks, 4 day

1. People who share Facebook posts like ‘Hey, put a star on your wall to support brain cancer’ or ‘Post this as your status if you have the best hubby/wife/dad/hamster ever.’ Stop with the whole global community thing. It ain’t gonna happen, not with me in the community anyway.

2. Tourists with their faces in their Greggs nosebags, who walk in human chains along pavements.

3. People who say ‘There are no words’ when there’s been some tragedy. There are always words. You’re just too lazy to form them into complete sentences.

Tink’s barking woke me up. Jim always answers the door to spare me and Elaine and today I heard a snippet – national press. How they found out I’m living here I don’t know, but one peek out of Jim and Elaine’s bedroom window shows they’re camped out for the duration.

I think about going all Tudor on their asses and tipping a bucket of piss over them but I guess I need them on my side, which is a shame because I have rather a lot of piss in me right now. And wind. And vomit.

Jim only announces callers when it’s a flower delivery – and we’ve had many. Sixteen in all. Jim will bring them in, vased, say who they’re from – their friends, the Gazette, one of the PICSOs (my old ‘friends’, the people I couldn’t scrape off), some random school friends – and set them down on my nightstand so I can see them as I’m drifting back to sleep. Then Elaine will come in, take my temperature, set down a plate of chopped banana and dry crackers and take the flowers out because ‘plants sap all the oxygen out of the room’. I don’t know where they go after that.

I managed one trip downstairs today to get a biscuit mid-afternoon. Saw a pile of business cards and scraps of paper on the dresser. Notes from reporters, asking for ‘my side of the story.’ My life with Craig Wilkins – the most vicious serial killer the West Country’s ever seen. We only want the truth.

If only they knew the real truth. It should be my face on those front pages. My headlines. I did those things, not him. I want to stand on that doorstep and scream it: IT WAS ME. ME. ME. ME. FUCKING ME!

But then another tsunami of nausea sweeps my way, crashing out every other thought in my head other than ‘Get to the toilet, quick.’

Not today, Mummy. Back to bed.

I’m throwing up water now. Elaine says it ‘must be something in the bottles’. She’s read how pregnant women drinking from plastic bottles can pass on abnormalities.

‘One baby in India came out with two heads and they said that was because of bottled water.’

I don’t want to split my hoo-ha so I guess I’ll have to make the switch to filtered.

Sunday, 1st July – 8 weeks exactly

Ugh.

Monday, 2nd July – 8 weeks, 1 day

Double ugh. I opened the fridge to get some chilled water and screamed – on the bottom shelf was a dead baby tied up in a see-through bag. Turns out, Elaine had just bought a chicken for tea. Once seen, not forgotten.

I crawled back upstairs and into bed like the girl out of The Grudge.

My head is swimming and I can’t see the point of doing anything. Though one of the journalists on the doorstep did wink at me when I went out to bring the milk in. I must look like 180 pounds of shit in a ten-pound bag but still, it was a brief boost.

Wednesday, 4th July – 8 weeks, 3 days

1. Elaine – the way she loads the dishwasher is the stuff of nightmares. Okay so I’ve killed people but at least I don’t stack un-rinsed muesli bowls and leave them for days to dry out. It’s clean-dish SUICIDE.

2. The woman in the Vauxhall Meriva who cut us up on the motorway.

3. Yodel van drivers – they are out to kill us all.

I feel a bit better today so I’ve decided to go back into work before they sack me. Jim says they can’t do that or there’ll ‘be hell to pay’. Elaine said it’s ‘far too early’ but I was adamant and she made me a packed lunch – a superfoods salad with fresh lettuce ‘not bagged because bagged salads have listeria in them.’ Jim drove me, even offering to linger in town all day before driving me home again. I don’t deserve them. And they don’t deserve me.

As it turned out, Elaine was right. It was far too early. And I didn’t stay long. I made a huge, unplanned boo-boo.

I’m dropped off outside the Gazette offices and there are two paps on the doorstep as I swipe my key card. They snap away like it’s about to fall off, asking questions about Priory Gardens and Craig. The new receptionist greets me on the front desk. She has an accent – Spanish or Geordie – and looks like the President’s wife – far too glam to be a greeter. I give her three months.

I head into the main office. At first glance, everything’s the same. The same faces, same haircuts. Same plate of cakes on top of the filing cabinet. Same clink, tap, whir sounds and aromas of strong coffee and newsprint.

Ugh, coffee. What used to be my heroin is now my abhorrence. Heil Foetus does not like coffee.

I’m not a foetus yet. I’m still an embryo until next week. Mmm, doughnuts.

That artless piss drip Linus is on the phone, leaning back in his chair, fingering his bald patch with his Mont Blanc. The subs are meerkatting at me over the tops of their monitors. Bollocky Bill’s eating a doorstep sandwich, the postman’s leaving with an empty sack, Johnny the photographer is getting his list of jobs from Paul. Claudia Gulper, AJ’s aunt, is on her phone, but affords me the briefest of glances.

My daddy you mean. Auntie Claudia! Yoo hoo! She killed him, Auntie Claudie! You have to save me!

Anyway, nothing has changed.

Then I go to my desk.

Some five-year-old bobble head in a short skirt and a blouse that looks like it’s been torn down from a care home window is sitting in my chair. My things have all vanished – my stapler with the sparkly Chihuahua stickers, my Sylvanian pencil case, the gonk on my monitor that AJ bought me, the coffee rings next to my Queen of Fucking Everything coaster. Even the coaster. The ‘Rhiannon’ label on my in-tray has been messily torn off and replaced with a clean one saying ‘Katie’.

All eyes are on me but nobody says anything.

The handle yanks down on Ron’s office door and out he struts –greasy-shiny, Cuban heels, trousers crotch-tight. ‘Sweetpea! How are you?’

I don’t know how to answer. I’m struck dumb.

‘This is Katie Drucker, our new Editorial Manager. Katie’s been holding the fort while you’ve been away.’

Katie stands up from my chair and smiles. I smell her breath before she opens her mouth. Marmite. Huge yellow teeth. In my mind, she is gaffer-taped to my chair and I’m pulling out those massive gnashers with the biggest pliers you’ve ever seen. ‘Hi, how are you?’

‘Fine thanks,’ I say.

She glances at Ron who takes the proverbial ball and runs with it as fast as he can in his Cuban heels, specifically made for short-arses like him. ‘So how’s everything?’

‘Fine,’ I say again.

‘Did you get our flowers?’

‘Yes.’

‘You poor thing, Rhiannon,’ says Katie Drucker, Patronising Fucker.

‘Do you want to pop in my office and have a quick chat?’ asks Ron.

No, I’d like to pop into your office and see if your £500 shredder will accommodate more than five fingers at once.

And don’t be fooled by the breezy tone and friendly-sounding ‘pop’ and ‘quick’. ‘Pop’ in particular is a caped crusader and ‘quick’ its evil Boy Wonder. This wasn’t going to be some brief, cosy chinwag – this was going to be a rip-your-head-off-and-shit-down-your-neck-conversation, beginning with ‘we have to boot your arse out the door’ but ‘how about a think piece on Craig before you do?’ as a drizzle of honey on the festering shit heap.

Ron summons Claudia over because when you’re a boss who’s as powerful as a fart in a bag, you can’t face altercations on your own. She grabs a pad and sweeps over from her desk, affording me a bright smile on the way.

‘Hi Rhee, how are you, Sweetpea?’

‘I’m FINE,’ I say, louder, garnering two more meerkat subs to peer atop their monitors. And it’s then that time does a Matrixy thing. Katie’s phone pulses in her knock off Vuitton handbag beside my desk – old school Britney. The main door opens and in strides that malodorous slunt Lana Rowntree. Tight grey skirt, chunky platforms but less of a swish to her blonde hair than usual. The woman who shagged my man and sent me off down this road in the first place. A human satnav of hideous betrayal. Her head is down. My throat aches.

It’s all. Her. Fault.

That’s my only thought as I watch her dish out papers and glide through the office towards the sales department, like nothing happened. Like her life hasn’t changed one bit. She doesn’t notice me.

Doesn’t see me coming.

The ache in my throat burns as I move closer to her, closer, closer –

I’m.

Not.

That.

Innocent.

I’m reaching out, grabbing a fistful of blonde, pulling it backwards. A waft of Herbal Essences flies past my face as she goes down. I don’t hear what I say. I don’t know who pulls me off her. I’m pounding her face. Over and over.

Oops, I did it again.

And the next thing I know, Jim is buckling my seatbelt and the engine’s running and his and Ron’s voices carry through the crack in the passenger window. Hormones. Just needs some time. Knew it was too soon. Cameras click. Someone calls my name. Look up for me, Sweetpea.

And I’m sitting there, picking flakes of her blood from my knuckles.

Friday, 6th July – 8 weeks, 5 days

1. People who tap dance – more unnecessary noise.

2. People who present any TV programme before 6 p.m.

3. Any of those design programmes about people who take a nice little abandoned barn and turn it into a soulless, four-storey gym with diamond encrusted swimming pool and a remote-control garden etc. Ugh.

Jim’s on the phone to Ron now – Lana isn’t pressing charges. I listened through the bannisters. He’ll come up in a minute and tell me what was said, he’s that kinda guy. I’ve already heard what I needed, I’m that kinda gal.

*

I made the front page! Gripper Killer Girlfriend in Office Brawl. Jim has been trying to keep me away from the news but we walked into town earlier and stopped outside the newsagent so Elaine could go in and get her Woman’s Own. There was a stand of papers outside.

‘Come on,’ said Jim, taking my arm, leading me towards the seafront.

I’m actually better at handling the attention than either of them gives me credit for, but of course I have to pretend it affects me deeply. It blew up the week I moved in. The angle then was PRIORY GARDENS SURVIVOR IS SICK KILLER’S GIRL. Elaine has banned all news bulletins from the house – she doesn’t want to know. Jim craves news so he has to buy his daily paper and read it in a café on the seafront to get his fix. I saw him once. The headline on his paper was THROW AWAY THE KEY: WILKINS’ SICK AND DEPRAVED ACTS SHOCK NATION and there was a picture of Craig being led from a police van, grey blanket over his head.

I preferred that one to

GRIPPER’S GIRL IS CRECHE ATTACK SURVIVOR… and she’s UP THE DUFF! One paper is calling him this year’s ‘Hot Felon’.

Photographers were outside the house most mornings, snapping away like a pack of North Face-clad alligators.

‘Oi, Priory Gardens!’

‘Oi, love, gissa quote, gissa smile!’

‘Hey Rhiannon, have you seen Craig Wilkins yet?’

‘Where are the other bodies, Rhiannon? Did he tell you?’

‘How’s he doing in prison?’

‘Did you know, Rhiannon?’

‘Did you help him?’

‘Wossit like living with a monster, Rhi Rhi?’

That winky journalist is usually there in the throng and I noticed this morning his lanyard says the Plymouth Star. He has black hair, a square jaw and his smile is knicker-wettingly blinding. If I met him in a bar he’d be paying me child support.

Some fucker should.

‘How are you, Rhiannon?’ he asked me.

‘I just want to get on with my life, thanks,’ I say, opening and closing the door once I’ve brought the milk in, flashing him some unsolicited leg through the dressing gown, as is my wont.

‘Is it true you and Craig were engaged?’ I hear as I flick the chain on.

On the days, I’m feeling up to it, I don my Victoria Beckham sunglasses, sweep my hair to one side, prepare my downcast face (not difficult – I look like a ghost most days thanks to the vom) and sashay through the melee throwing out breadcrumbs like ‘I’m fine thanks’ and ‘I knew nothing’.

I’m just giving them what they want – they see what they want to see. Not looking past what’s already been decreed – that Craig Wilkins, my boyfriend, did knowingly and wilfully murder three people in cold blood and masturbate over their corpses. That moi – Rhiannon Lewis – she of that terrible crèche massacre at Priory Gardens all those years ago, is just the naive girlfriend. Remember when they brought her out of that house, wrapped in blood-soaked Peter Rabbit blankets? How can one girl get so unlucky twice in one lifetime? It’s too tragic.

When they can’t get a comment from you, they shove notes through the letterbox instead. Business cards, scrawled scraps of paper, all asking for me to get in touch. I could barely read the writing on some.

One of the notes was barely legible, scrawled on a scrap of notepaper ‘To my Sweet Messy House’ it looked like and there was a phone number underneath. I’m thinking it could be the local mental case – he sometimes posts rants about the government and how they’re trying to kill us through our tap water on his way up to the war memorial to talk to dead soldiers.

What I resent most of all about this kind of press intrusion is that all they’re interested in is Craig. How he did it. How he could rape that poor woman. What it was like for me living with a monster? How he’s feeling about being the most hated guy in the country right now.

He’s not actually. There’s always paedophiles. And according to Twitter there’s a guy who sprinkled his girlfriend’s ashes on his Shreddies who’s way worse.

I don’t know who I am now. It’s like one day I was in a couple with a flat and we had a baby on the way and the next I went into a phone box, spun around three times and now I’m Poor Little Murderer’s Preggo Girlfriend – I even come with accessories: eighteen-carat white-gold solitaire on my ring finger, meek smile, washed out Primark panda pyjamas, greasy hair and slight stomach protrusion.

Jim and Elaine walk along the seafront every morning – it’s their ritual. And they’ve allowed me and Tink to join in too. We sit on a bench with a hot drink and a bun – iced for them, brown seeded for me – and we sip and chomp in silence. Everything is small here. Small and safe. From across the estuary at Temperley, Monks Bay looks like a bucket of tiny houses tipped down a hillside by a giant child. There’s no design to it at all – it’s a higgledy-piggledy mess of streets too narrow to drive a Fiesta down without cracking your wing mirrors, a funicular railway, a church and quaint little B+Bs and cottages called names like The Sloop and The Brigantine.

For me, killing has been what makes life worth living. So at the moment, I’m not living, I’m merely existing. I’m like that polar bear I saw once at Bristol Zoo. Wandering back and forth, back and forth across his concrete. Safe, fed and secure but slowly going ever further out of my mind.

‘Go on, love, eat your roll,’ said Elaine. ‘You’ve got to keep your energy up. You didn’t eat your Protein Puffs this morning either.’

I took one bite. Tink leapt off my lap. She knew it was coming before I did. I vomited on the sea wall. A seagull promptly ate it while it was hot.

Monday, 9th July – 9 weeks, 1 day

1. Owner of the bulldog-with-the-ridiculous-bollocks walking along the seafront who laughed at Tink’s diamante collar and called her a ‘poof’.

2. Dentists – but hey it’s FREE now I’m up the duff so screw you, Rapey Eyes Mike. That’ll be £300’s worth of porcelain fillings and be quick about it.

3. The editor of Take a Break magazine.

Living with Jim and Elaine has its downsides – Jim’s adenoidal symphony in the dead of night is one. Elaine’s obsessive dusting is another. Other things they do irritate me for no apparent reason, like the both-getting-out-of-the-car-to-put-petrol-in thing. I just don’t get it.

But the best thing about living with them is their garden. Me and Jim have bonded over our mutual love of all things green and wild. All I had at the flat were window boxes and container herbs, all of which have since died – but here there are large raised beds and espalier apple trees along the fencing, Japanese maple, flowering dogwood, large white roses that look like ladies’ blouses and smell like heaven, ice cream tulips, tiny bleeding hearts. I try to name as many as I can – dahlias, camellias, blood red rhododendrons, alliums, yuccas, nasturtiums, silvery catmint, Michaelmas daisies, deep blue larkspur. The little herb bed with lemon thyme and rosemary and soft sage leaves I can’t stop rubbing along my lips —

Dammit, didn’t Ophelia do that in Hamlet, list all these flowers? Told you I was going out of my mind.

For Jim the garden isn’t ever finished – he’s always deadheading or pruning or stroking a leaf like he’s injecting himself with medicine. He says he could never live anywhere but England because of our climate and our flowers, though he has expressed an interest in going somewhere called the ‘Carrizo Plain’ in California. He read about it in the Daily Mail.

‘The Superbloom,’ he said, his eyes all twinkly. ‘I’d love to see that. The desert comes alive with wildflowers – purples, pinks, yellows – only for a month or so and then it disappears. It comes when the desert’s experienced a lot of rain and it’s extraordinary. Oh the colours, Rhiannon!’

Jim’s one of the few people I’ve ever met who encourages weeds too. He allows the back of the garden to grow wild for the butterflies and his shed is covered in ivy. Jim says other gardeners hate ivy because they think it throttles growth but Jim says it’s terrific and ‘does so much good for the ecosystem, the birds and the insects’.

He loves all plants, good or bad, pretty or ugly. Even ones that stink or the spiky ones that catch flies.

‘Ivy’s a tenacious little thing too,’ he says. ‘No matter what you do, she grows back, climbs up, there’s no stopping her. There’s an old wives’ tale that if ivy’s grown on a house it can protect you from witches.’

Gonna need a shit load more ivy then, Jim.

*

Went to the dentist’s after lunch. There was an article about Craig in the Take a Break magazine – a centre page all about his fetish for gay chatrooms and gimp masks. None of it’s true but since when has that mattered? I got quite the jolt when I saw him, smiling on a beach in Cyprus. We’d had sex after we took that, as the sun was going down. I’d been cut out of the picture – his Facebook avatar – it was a joint selfie originally.

Jim says we shouldn’t talk to the press, despite the wedges they’ve offered. The Gazette had wanted an exclusive, being my old employers and all, but Jim said no. No interviews, no news coverage, nothing.

‘You’re not up to it, Rhiannon. I’m putting my foot down. We can’t have you stressed so early on in your pregnancy. Think of the baby.’

I am thinking of the baby but I can’t help thinking I’m missing out. This could be my moment. It could be Miracle of Priory Gardens: Reloaded. I could be on Up at the Crack again, eating croissants, sitting between that homeless cat who wrote a bestseller and the kid who got all those retweets for chicken nuggets. But instead I’m here. Doing nothing. Playing Best Supporting Actress – an award where nobody ever remembers the winners.

I did do one useful thing today though – updated AJ’s Facebook status. It’s the one of the few times Facebook’s good for something – when you’re stealing people’s holiday photos to create the illusion that someone is absolutely not dead and in several cling filmed pieces in the boot of my car. There have already been some comments underneath the post, one from Claudia.

Glad you’re having a great time. Bulgaria looks as beautiful as you said it would. Wouldn’t hurt to ring your aunty once in a while! Love you, C XX

Need to find somewhere to bury him soon.

Jim’s been in – the police are finished with their investigations at the flat so I can go and pick up the rest of my stuff. He says he will drive me – later, I said. Gonna sleep now.

Friday, 13th July – 9 weeks, 5 days

Elaine saw this flyer in the library for The Pudding Club – a weekly social where ‘new, expectant and seasoned mummies get together for a natter and a cuppa and cake in mum-friendly spaces’. She suggested I go along.

The words ‘natter’ and ‘cuppa’ make me want to tear off my eyelids.

I knew it would be a load of old clit but I went along for said ‘natter’ and ‘cuppa’ because according to Elaine ‘it isn’t healthy to be staying in all the time on your own’. She practically pushed me out of the door.

I met the group in a lilac and white tea shop off the seafront called Violet’s – the place to go in Monks Bay if you’re a) cake-oriented b) a mum and c) have several screaming children clinging to each limb.

The scene in the café was like a Muppet Babies homage to the Somme.

It was a wall of noise. Screaming. Squealing. Cupcake missiles. Tiny sandwich grenades. Mini roll IEDs. Babies wailing in adults’ arms or banging yoghurty spoons on high chair trays. One blonde toddler was full-body tantrumming on the carpet like she was in pain. I wanted to leave immediately.

The Pudding Club mummies were ensconced in a somewhat-quiet booth at the back. The leader of the gang was obviously Pinelopi or ‘Pin’ as she preferred – forty-eight, Greek and expecting her fifth. She’s got a PhD, drives a Jeep and is married to a guy called Clive who works in finance. Pin claims to have once shagged Prince Andrew but she says ‘it was years ago so he probably wouldn’t recall’. She presumably added this last bit in case one of us rang him to check.

Then there’s Nevaeh – Heaven spelled backwards – twenty-nine, black, gay and likes to be called Nev. She lives with her wife and kids and the kids’ dad Calvin which I think is the ideal family set up. If I’d have been born with three parents I’d still have one left. Nev intends to call her forthcoming twins Blakely and Stallone, presumably because she hates them. She smokes ‘to keep their weight down’ and calls everyone Darlin’. I asked Nev about childbirth.

‘They say the moment you first look into your baby’s eyes you’ll fall in love but you won’t – you’ll just be thinking “Thank Christ that’s over, get me a Subway.” Seriously, Darlin’. When Jadis was born, I hadn’t eaten for two days. She ripped me from earhole to asshole. My vadge looks like the Joker’s smile.’

Scarlett is the youngest Pudding at nineteen. She’s as vain as a WAG and cranially underdeveloped but I guess that doesn’t make her a bad person. She takes a selfie every twenty minutes and thinks World War Two started with an iceberg. She’s due at exactly the same time as me – to the week. I said:

‘I’m envisioning a scene from that terrible Hugh Grant film as our babies come out in the delivery room and some strange foreign doctor is shuttling back and forth between our gaping vaginas like a rhino on speed.’

Nothing.

Scarlett didn’t get the reference – nor did she know what ‘envisioning’ meant. She then asked ‘Was High Grant the one in The King’s Speech?’

Then there’s the tedious one, Helen. Ginger hair, milk-white skin covered in fish food freckles, huge overstuffed bump. She is slightly cross-eyed and her chin zits look like spheres of chorizo, though of course it’s de trop to mention either.

‘Helen Rutherford,’ she said, all pinched and evil. ‘Nice to meet you.’

‘Likewise,’ I returned, more evil. She only joined in the conversation to correct some statistic or brag about how easy her last pregnancy was, how she ‘breastfed Myles until school’ and how tight she is cos she ‘kept up her exercises.’ She thinks anyone who doesn’t breastfeed or give birth ‘naturally’ is the Devil incarnate. Helen is my least favourite pudding. In fact I hate her already.

A baby started screaming in its high chair on the next table and all of them looked at it with that same expression of ‘Ahh, bless.’ I was horrified. This was no place for the noise-sensitive.

There was one Pudding who wasn’t as ball-achingly thick, arrogant or tedious as the others and this was Marnie Prendergast – twenty-eight, conker-brown eyes and a soft, Brontë-country accent. She’s due in September but has a tiny bump so her clothes still fit. Her parents are dead too – her mum after birthing her brother (a blood clot I think but the cakes were coming) and her dad had ‘some kidney thing’. Her brother lives abroad and they don’t speak.

‘Orphans Unite,’ she beamed, clinking her coffee with my water. ‘We’re like Annie and that little kid she sings to in the night, aren’t we?’

‘Molly?’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ she laughed. She laughed at many of my comic asides today. Nobody ever laughs at my comic asides. I liked Marnie immediately.

I liked her outfit today too – a Frankie Says Relax t-shirt, black jacket and pedal pushers. She had on black and white Vans too – like the pair I wore until Craig got paint on them. We got onto the subject of Sylvanian Families – she adored them as a child. She even still had her Cottontail Rabbit family and Cosy Cottage Starter Home, though it was ‘still in the loft somewhere’. I can forgive her for that. But yeah, despite her incessant phone-checking and the Take That badge on her lapel. I’m pretty sure I’ve made a friend.

I asked her where to buy cool maternity clothes, not Helen’s kind that looked like she’d crash landed on a chintz marquee.

‘If you want to trawl threads, I’m your gal,’ she said. ‘I love shopping.’

‘I hate it,’ I said. ‘But yeah we could go to the Mall or something.’

‘It’s a date. Let’s swap numbers and I’ll give you a buzz at the weekend.’

This was the only nice conversation I had at Pudding Club – the rest involved either pre-eclampsia, nipple-hardening or pissing oneself. I strained to hear most of it over all the screaming and though I laughed along and enthused about joining their antenatal classes I wasn’t feeling it. I kept thinking, Is this my life now? Is this all there is? The one saving grace was that no one was bringing up the Craig thing.

Until someone brought up the Craig thing.

‘So what’s happening with the trial, Rhiannon?’ asked Pin, chewing her apricot Danish. All heads except Marnie’s turned to me.

‘Uh, nothing at the moment. He’s due to plead in November and then I think the trial will be set for some time next year.’

Nev was working her way through a vegan brownie. Her teeth were covered in brown clods. ‘What’s he going to plead?’

I fiddled with my engagement ring. ‘Not guilty.’

‘But did he do it? Did he kill all those people?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s been a lot to process.’

Marnie cleared her throat. ‘Rhiannon might not feel comfortable talking about this—’

‘Yeah do say if you’re not comfortable talking about it, Rhiannon,’ said Pin, at full volume. Pin used to be in the army so could easily project her voice like it was still fighting for attention with the landmines. Several eyes from the other tables turned to ours as she was talking. ‘But you must have known something, surely.’ The tiny tantrummer on the carpet started up again, furious at having her face wiped.

I smiled meekly, my Just-Your-Average-Preggo smile. ‘I really didn’t know anything.’

The others nodded along like they were stuck on a back windscreen.

‘I saw you on Up at the Crack a few months ago,’ said Scarlett.

‘Oh, for the Woman of the Century award?’ I said. ‘Yeah, that was fun.’

Not.

‘Yeah you had a lovely top on. Sort of peach with frills?’

‘Miss Selfridge,’ I informed her.

‘Cool,’ she said, getting her phone out and Googling it.

‘Why aren’t you talking to the press?’ said Helen. ‘Bit of a wasted opportunity if you ask me.’

Marnie sighed. ‘Helen, for goodness sake—’

‘No it’s fine,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t feel right. Feels like I’m selling him out.’

‘Why don’t you though?’ asked Helen, her fish-flake cheeks pounding down her banana bread. ‘He’s left you high and dry with a baby on the way. You need all the money you can get, surely.’ She was looking down at my engagement ring. ‘That must have cost a pretty penny too.’

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘My sister Seren and I inherited our parents’ house—’

‘He is a murderer after all. Don’t you think the victims of those appalling attacks deserve some answers?’

‘What victims?’ scoffed Nev. ‘That guy in the canal had it coming by all accounts. And the dude in the park was a –’ pause to lower voice to a whisper ‘– sex offender – and that woman in the quarry—’

‘What?’ said Helen, all raised eyebrows and pass-ag. ‘The MOTHER in the quarry who was held for weeks and tortured, then raped and thrown into a pit? She had three children, Nevaeh. Thee!

Nev shut up. Scarlett looked at Pin. Helen looked at Scarlett, snooty as a fox. My heartburn scorched my throat and my arse had begun to twitch. Pin called the waiter over for our bill. Marnie patted my forearm and mouthed ‘I’m so sorry.’ I think she meant it.

I turned to Helen. ‘It hasn’t gone to trial yet.’

‘And you’re standing by him, are you, Rhiannon?’

They looked at me. The waitresses looked at me. Tiny Tantrummer looked at me. Old Me would have said something meek and non-controversial but today, I just couldn’t be bothered. I could see the Pudding Club becoming like the PICSOs – bloody hard work. In a parallel universe, it might have been different. We’d have dinner parties, drink Prosecco into the small hours and bond over risqué conversation about fluffy handcuffs and fisting. Perhaps we’d have had barbecues and playdates and swapped ideas about nativity costumes in the schoolyard. But in this universe? No chance.

‘Yes Helen, I’m standing by my knife-wielding, rapey-lady, torture-happy, murderous asshole of a boyfriend. Now get me a doughnut before I pass the fuck out.’

Monday, 16th July – 10 weeks, 1 day

1. TV programmes about billionaires who spend millions on lampshades and ornaments and STILL find stuff to bitch about.

2. TV programmes about benefit cheats who buy fags, tattoos and Heineken but have ‘nothing to feed their kids’. Cry me a river.

3. People who say ‘might of’ and ‘could of’ not ‘might have’ and ‘could have’.

Plymouth Star guy was on the doorstep when I went out the front to shoo seagulls off the bird table. Him and a curly-haired camera guy.

‘Hey, Rhiannon. How you doing?’

‘Good thanks.’

‘Any chance of a couple of words for the Star?’

‘Yeah, I’ve got two words that would be perfect for you.’

‘Come on, throw me a bone, I’ve been in the job ten weeks and the most interesting thing has been Kids Set Fire to Furby in Precinct.’

‘I know what it’s like. I used to work for a local newspaper. Not the heady heights of crack reporting mind you – just editorial assistant.’

‘So you know what it’s like?’ he said. ‘Please. I need a scoop or they’re going to fire my ass. This is a huge story and you’re right at the centre.’

‘Too true,’ I sighed, folding my arms.

‘Please? Anything I can take back to the office? You’ll be getting your own side across. Some of the tabloids are saying you knew all along what Wilkins was doing.’

‘I did not know anything,’ I said. I noticed then he had Voice Memos recording on his phone. The camera guy was clicking. I calmed myself with a breath. ‘Tell me why I should bare my soul to you. Give me one good reason.’

He backed away. ‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s my job,’ he said. ‘This is what I do. There isn’t a good reason.’

‘Come on, give me a sob story. Why should I put you through to the second round? Dad dying of cancer? Brother out in Afghanistan? Granny just too damn nuts in the nursing home to recognise your face anymore? Tell me why I should give you my story and not the Mirror or the Express. They’ve offered me shitloads more than Pleases.’

He backed away, frowning. ‘I don’t have anything to give you. I just need a break.’ I stared him out until both he and the camera guy had disappeared through the front gate and out of my sight.

*

I have made a boo-boo – I shouted at Elaine. In fact it was worse than shouted. I jumped on the highest of horses, whipped its ass and rode it right through her. I caught her dusting around my Sylvanians country hotel in the corner of the lounge and rearranging things in the rooms.

‘DON’T FUCKING TOUCH THAT! WHY ARE YOU TOUCHING THAT?’

I didn’t mean to say it, it just splurged out. And I know they’ve been good to me and looked after me and blah de blah blah, but JEEEEEEZUS why can’t people leave my things alone?! I’m not asking too much, am I? She’d moved the front desk into the sitting room. She’d made up the bed in the cat family’s bedroom when the maid was CLEARLY on her way there to do that herself. And she’d taken out everything in the fridge and put it on the kitchen floor.

Nerve = touched.

‘Rhiannon, I was only having a look, love …’

I could see my mother’s face in hers – What’s the big deal? It’s only a few toys, Rhiannon. You’re too old for toys now.

‘You weren’t “having a look”, you were touching things! Why can’t you leave them?’ My fingers were lengthening; my breathing grew sharper the longer I looked at her blank face. The room seemed to pale away and into sharp focus came the phone cord and Elaine’s saggy neck. Wrapping it around again and again, pulling on it, squeezing it, that face going purple.

‘I’m sorry,’ Elaine blushed. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She sprinted from the room.

I took the hotel upstairs and shoved it in my closet, safe and sound. I knew it was too exposed downstairs but I had no room to display it up here. I had more Sylvanian stuff than I had clothes.

When I resurfaced, the house was quiet and there was a note on the hallway table – Elaine was at the church hall with her Christian women’s group for the craft fair and Jim was on the beach with the dog. I walked down there to find him sitting on the large rocks watching Tink sniffing in the rock pools. He didn’t mention the Sylvanians debacle at first; he started off-topic.

‘Did you look into that Airy B thing for me?’

‘Airbnb?’ I said. ‘Yeah, all done.’

‘You’ve done it?’

‘Yeah, I’ll show you later. We’ve had a few enquiries already. I think it’s looking quite good for August.’

‘Oh that’s great, thank you.’

‘No problem at all. It’s the least I can do, isn’t it?’

He smiled, looking out to sea. ‘I don’t have a clue about this internet lark. That place needs to start paying its way to keep the bank happy.’

See this is a lie pie if ever he’s baked one. One of the discoveries I’ve made about Jim since living with him is that he’s LOADED. He has quite the property portfolio. It’s another hobby – buying up shitholes and turning them into sought-after real estate. I’ve seen his bank statements. He’s got three projects on the go – a flat in Cresswell Terrace where a junkie melted into the floor, a five bed house on Temperley called Knight’s Rest where a hoarder stashed several hundred ice cream tubs of his own shit, and a holiday cottage called the Well House on the Cliff Road which has just finished being refurbed. For years it was used as a derelict meeting place for local teens to shag and break bottles. Jim asked me to put it ‘on the line’ now that it’s ready for holiday bookings.

That’s Jim’s problem, he trusts me. And I, being the gal that I am, am letting him down. I’ve put the listing up but once I’ve shown him, I will take it down again. I’ve decided I need the Well House – it’ll be my refuge. A place I can go anytime I want to eat and escape Elaine’s factoids about hot baths causing abortions and the link between obese mothers and autism.

‘Elaine mentioned you’d had a set-to about your doll’s house.’

I sat down on the lower rock next to Jim. ‘My deluxe country hotel, yes.’

‘Bit OTT wasn’t it?’

‘No.’

‘She was only cleaning it, Rhiannon.’

‘I DON’T WANT IT CLEANED.’

‘All right, all right. Cor dear, those hormones are playing up today, aren’t they?’ He laughed. He actually laughed.

I glared at him. ‘You don’t get it.’

‘Get what?’

‘After Priory Gardens, I went into a children’s rehab facility in Gloucester. It was horrible. It stank of cauliflower and farts. I was lonely. One morning, my dad and my sister went on breakfast TV to talk about it and how I was doing. Seren mentioned I liked Sylvanian Families. And I got sent so many. All the shops, all the animals. Seren would bring them in for me to play with. The toys the centre provided were either chewed or dirty but these were new and mine. I learned to talk again using my Sylvanians. I learned to hold things again, grip things. They helped me more than anyone will ever know—’

‘You don’t have to say anything else—’

‘—nobody else was allowed to touch them except Seren and she knew she could only play with them when I was playing as well. I used to rub the rabbits’ ears on my top lip and suck the clothes. No idea why, just liked it. Mum was always complaining about it – she said it made them stink. She said it was childish. I was still playing with them when I was twelve. Then one day, I came home from school and they’d all disappeared.’

‘Disappeared where?’

‘Mum had got rid of them. My post office, my supermarket, my country hotel. All the animals, all the little bits had vanished. She’d sent the lot to a charity shop. I screamed. Threw things at her. Bottles. Remote controls. Shoes. But she shut the door on me, refused to talk about it.’

Jim blew out a breath as Tink scurried over to him and begged for a pick up. Dogs always know. ‘That’s sad, Rhiannon.’

‘Seren had managed to save some of them of them for me before they went – Richard E. Grunt, a few rabbits, couple of the little books and the bathroom set. We sneaked out and buried them in the garden one night when Mum was asleep. The Man in the Moon was our only witness.’

‘Rhiannon, you don’t have to explain—’

‘That’s when I started saving up. Every bit of spare money I got, I’d spend on buying every last Sylvanian back. Piece by piece. I saved up all my pocket money, got a newspaper round, washed cars, mowed lawns. That’s the only thing I like about being a grown up. I can fight the battles I lost as a kid.’

‘I do understand,’ he said, stroking Tink’s silky apple head. ‘Our Craig used to say about your brain injury and how you liked things just so. I’ll have a word with Elaine, don’t worry.’

‘I miss Seren,’ I said, only then realising I had said it out loud. Jim seemed to be waiting for me to say more but I didn’t.

‘Of course you do. She’s your big sister.’

‘She’s half who I am,’ I said. ‘She taught me lots of stuff. Good stuff. French plaits and tying shoelaces and how to wrap presents so the corners were all tucked in. She’s practical like that. She’s a good mum.’

‘I expect she looked after you too when you were younger?’

‘Sometimes,’ I said, the night of Pete McMahon’s death flashing into my mind. His body on top of hers. Her drunken mumblings. The knife cutting through his ribs like a spoon through jelly. ‘Sometimes I looked after her.’

A silence fell between us. Without a word, we both got up and continued our walk. Tink trotted along between us. I placed my feet in footprints other people had left behind. It’s funny how you can’t walk in someone else’s footsteps, isn’t it? It doesn’t work. You end up taking too-long strides or placing your feet unnaturally to where you’d choose to put them.

We’d gone about ten minutes before Jim stopped and pulled a piece of paper from his back pocket. ‘This came today.’

I knew what it was from the postmark – a letter from Craig. I’d been expecting it after Elaine intercepted the last one and set fire to it on the hob.

Jim rubbed his mouth. ‘Can’t ignore him forever. This is the fourth one.’

I scanned it through. His writing had got better. I’d only ever seen his scrawls on builder’s invoices or scrappily-written shopping lists. Clearly he’d taken some sort of calligraphy class while he’d been on remand. ‘I can’t see the point of visiting. It would only be more lies.’

He shook his head. ‘I know the evidence speaks for itself but it doesn’t answer everything. It doesn’t explain that on the night that woman’s body was dumped in the quarry, he was nowhere near. He’s on CCTV at Wembley, clear as day.’

‘What about the others?’ I said. ‘The man in the park? The semen all over that woman’s body? The… severed penis in his van?’

I refrained from saying ‘cock au van’. This wasn’t the time for that joke. It was never the time for that joke but it was still a good joke.

‘He’s still saying he’s being framed,’ said Jim. ‘That Lana sort he was seeing. He’s still my son, Rhiannon. I can’t give up on him.’

‘He’s Elaine’s son too. She’s given up on him.’

‘She’ll come round. We’re not going to leave him in there to rot, not when there’s a chance someone else is to blame.’

Tink nuzzled into the crook of Jim’s arm. Jim turned to look at me, his eyes filling with water. ‘I was the first person in this world to hold him. Before the doctors. Before Elaine. I won’t leave him when he needs me the most.’

Jim had brought back boxes of our stuff from the flat; his clothes, vinyl, the dehumidifier, all his old football programmes. The remnants of sawdust on his jeans. I cried when I opened the boxes. I found a bottle of his aftershave – Valentino Intense. I’d stitched the guy up like a quilt and now I’m crying about it. Pregnancy screws you right up, I’m telling you.

‘I’ll go with you,’ I said. ‘To see him. I’ll go. Not yet, but I’ll go.’

Jim put his arm around me, eyes all glassy. We watched Tink run after a Jack Russell, chasing it round in circles like a furry whirlwind. And we laughed. It was funny. But both laughs were too forced.

Friday, 20th July – 10 weeks, 5 days

1. Seagulls – this town is building-shaped croutons in a seagull-shit soup.

2. Man in the mobility scooter who tutted that I was taking up too much of his greeting cards aisle at the garden centre.

3. Sandra Huggins.

One of the side effects of being pregnant is vivid dreams. I often wake up in a cold sweat, my heart racing, having spent most of the night before screaming at my mother or watching my sister Seren get attacked by birds or wolves or some strange man in a hood – those dreams seem to be on a loop in my head. Last night there was a new showing – the fortune teller from the hen weekend. It was an almost exact re-run of what actually happened.

Me walking into her shop on the seafront. The red-haired woman with smoker’s mouth-creases and bad eyebrows. The crystal ball on its claw-footed stand. The Tarot cards spread out – The Hanged Man, Judgement, The Hermit, The Ace of Swords, The Devil himself.

You don’t work well with others, she said. You need to have no one.

Staring into the ball, her drawn-on eyebrows furrowing in the middle. Pulling her hand away from the ball. Her breaths getting faster.

I won’t be on my own, will I? I ask her. I’ll have the baby?

No, she says, tidying the cards.

Does my baby die? I ask her.

I saw a baby covered in blood.

I smash her face in with the crystal ball and she crouches behind the table, cowering, her hands over her head. Even when she’s unconscious I keep going. There’s no stopping me. I couldn’t kill a baby. I’m not capable. There is good in me somewhere.

But it’s buried so deep, she says. It’s the last thing she says.

*

This morning, once Jim’s morning farts had cleared from the big bathroom, I treated myself to a bubble bath and a hair wash with two shampoos and the posh antenatal conditioner Elaine bought. Thing is though, my hair is STILL greasy. What happens in a preggo’s body that makes her hair greasy? Why is my body giving my foetus all my shine and bounce?

Also – dry hands and feet – the fuh? I’m taking on water like the Titanic but every extremity is as dry as a nun’s gusset. This kid is leaching all my moisture and redirecting it to my scalp. I looked at myself in Elaine’s mirror and I cried. I cry at nothing nowadays. I cry at burnt toast and RSPCA adverts and when I got my dressing gown cord stuck in the front door and the UPS guy saw my foof. I suppose that’s down to Heil Foetus as well.

You wanted him to see it.

I thought Marnie would have called this weekend about going maternity clothes shopping but I guess she was full of it like everyone else in my life. Bullshit City, that’s where I hang my hat.

Instead I have been dragged outside the house today to ‘get a bit of fresh air in my lungs’ even though I’m perfectly happy with my existing lungal air. Elaine reckons I’m depressed but I’m not. I’ve just got the morbs. Even serial killers get the blues you know.

We’re currently sweltering our giblets out in motorway traffic en route to the garden centre.

‘Do you want another Murray Mint, Rhiannon?’

‘No thanks. Still working on the last one.’

I’m sitting in the back of the car, strapped in like a child. We used to go on seaside trips when we were kids – me and Seren in the back listening to music through shared earphones, Mum in the front, Dad driving. Mum feeding him wine gums. Dad turning up Spice Girls so we could all sing loudly. My Sylvanians would be buckled in beside me and on cold days, me and Seren would snuggle under the big green picnic blanket.

Jim and Elaine have the radio tuned to Coma FM. Usually I can’t stand it because there’s too much chatting and this lunch-time quiz where the callers are a sack of dicks, but they’ve just played ‘Father Figure’ and now I’m crying. It had been playing on a paint-splattered radio in a pet shop Craig and Dad were refitting as a tattooist’s the first time we met. The week before he was arrested, Craig said it should be our first dance at our wedding. I wanted to do a routine to ‘Opposites Attract’ but he said it depended how pissed he got.

Yes, he used to annoy me. Yes, he cheated. Yes, he used to talk through movies and stub out his blunts on my Hygena sideboard. But once upon a time he was mine. And I miss it. This is not the family I was meant to have.

*

We’re looking at the potted trees – well, Jim and Elaine are. I’m updating AJ’s Facebook page – he’s ‘in Moscow now, where water’s more expensive than vodka’. Found a pic of the Kremlin and some random guy wrapped in winter knits that obscured his face to accompany the post.

I heard them talking about me when they thought I was in the loo.

‘I wonder why she’s not buying anything for the baby. Spends all her money on those toys. It’s worrying.’

‘If it makes her happy I don’t see the harm, E, leave her be.’

‘I’m not saying it’s harmful. Just odd. She should be nesting. She doesn’t read those books I got her, she doesn’t talk about it, ever.’

‘I know, I know.’

‘We need to find out what her plans are.’

This exchange bugs me all the way round but I swallow it. At a quarter to midday, we headed into the café as Elaine wanted to ‘beat the queues’. We ordered scampi and Jim told me to get the table near the play area.

I watched some toddlers on their springy ride-on things. A mum was stood behind one of the little girls, her hand on the child’s back. Another was consoling a boy who’d banged his knee. She rocked him and kissed his forehead. There was an older lady – mid sixties – pushing two girls on the swings. They shouted ‘Higher, Granny!’ and she laughed. And they laughed.

The sun bounced off the metal swing post into my eyes. I got my bottle of Gaviscon out of my bag and swigged it.

Jim appeared with our tray of cutlery and condiments, gibbering away like an angry badger, and plonked it down on the table.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I don’t believe it,’ he huffed, setting out the cutlery. ‘Bloody woman.’

‘Who, Elaine?’

‘No,’ he said on an angry breath. ‘Over there, third table on the right.’

I swigged my Gaviscon again and counted along the tables. Two women were eating croissants. The penny didn’t drop immediately.

‘Sandra Huggins,’ he said.

The world around me stopped. A bomb could have gone off and I wouldn’t have noticed. Those two words were enough for me to forget everything. My heartburn merged into something else – for the first time in weeks I felt my own heart beating again, faster and faster the more I took in her face. It was like I’d been dead and she’d brought me back to life.

I’ve never seen anyone I wanted to kill more.

‘I don’t know her,’ I lied, barely able to sit still.

‘You know her face, don’t you? She’s dyed her hair but it’s her all right,’ said Jim. ‘I expect she’s been given a new name, new home, all on the taxpayer’s ticket. I bet those kiddies never got as much.’

‘What kiddies?’

He leant across the table. ‘Don’t you remember? She was the one taking pictures of these kiddies at that nursery. Sending them to these horrible men. Little boys. Babies. I think they’re still in jail. Pity she isn’t, rotting. I hope Elaine doesn’t notice she’s back round here.’

‘Oh god, that’s awful,’ I said, watching Huggins’s three chins as her mouth worked on her Danish. That one word circled my head like an eel: babies. Babies. Babies. She’d done it to babies.

Huggins was still as pig-dog ugly as the selfie they’d printed in the paper months ago. Not one of her teeth was aligned and she had the most disgusting forearm tattoos (names in Arabic writing, the obligatory Harry Potter quote, etc). There was a green coat on the empty chair next to her and a red leather handbag, gaping open like a saggy mouth.

‘Vile woman,’ said Jim. ‘No, she’s not a woman, she’s a creature. I’ve got half a mind to go over there—’

‘Don’t Jim, think of your palpitations.’ Hypocritical of me I know, seeing as I was pretty tachycardic myself at the time, only for a whole other reason.

He started his deep breathing exercises. ‘I’m all right, I’m all right. Just can’t believe that is allowed to walk around free. Should have thrown the key away. I don’t know if I want this scampi now.’

‘Come on, try to relax. It’s all right.’ The refrain of ‘Spice Up Your Life’ popped into my head and began reeling through it like ribbons.

‘If Elaine sees her she’ll go spare. One of the women at WOMBAT, her granddaughter used to go to that nursery. That Huggins creature had four kids of her own you know, all got put into care. Nasty.’

It always amazes me how such a warthog manages to get laid so much. Then you’ll catch a glimpse of what’s been banging it – some eight-stone diarrhoea streak with three teeth and sovereigns on every finger. You know the type. There was no sign of a man today though – just a mousey woman in a paisley dress and questionable ankle boots.

Sandra was so close I could smell her cigarette smoke.

You need to nip this one in the bud, you cannot kill her. And stop sniffing that smoke. It’s not good for me.

Mind you, I’d need an elephant gun to take her down.

As Elaine was bringing over our scampi, Sandra moved her chair back, as did the Mousey Ankle Boots. Sandra scuffed towards the trolley parked next to ours at the café entrance and wheeled it away.

‘Sorry, need the loo again,’ I said, getting to my feet.

I followed Huggins and Friend through the bedding plants towards an area of terracotta pots set out in towers on wooden pallets. The women were heading towards the herbs. The mousey one was clearly some kind of social worker – she had a lanyard around her neck and the tag read ‘NewLeaf’ – a quick Google confirmed my suspicions. NewLeaf was a rehab centre for ex-offenders. The closest branch was Plymouth. Obviously Sandra’s case worker.

Mummy, what are you doing?

Mousey Woman’s handbag was on her shoulder, but Sandra’s red leather one was in the trolley, next to two geraniums and a bag of compost. She was picking out her herbs. I ducked down. I had to wait an age before they moved away from the trolley and went to compare lavender plants around the corner. Because I only had seconds, I decided to live within my means – I took the first thing my hand fell upon inside the bag – a small brown envelope – then walked away slowly, blending into the celebration roses.

Inside the envelope was more than I could have hoped for – a wage slip from Mel & Colly’s Farm Shop. Their logo was crossed carrots on a potato. The name on the payslip was Jane Richie – her new moniker perhaps. I knew where that shop was – out towards the motorway. I had her full new name, her National Insurance number, the total hours she’d worked that month.

I even had her address.

Monday, 23rd July – 11 weeks, 1 day

Jim asked if there have been any Airbnb bookings for the Well House.

‘No, not yet,’ I said. ‘But I’m sure there will be, any day now.’ Of course there won’t be. Not now I’ve buried AJ in one of the flower beds up there.

I can’t stop thinking about that old sow Huggins. You’d think that dismembering a body in a bathtub would leave me sated for murder for a long time but it hasn’t. What if the ‘serial killer cycle’ is shorter when you’re preggers? What if the feeling of balance and completion doesn’t last so long when you’re killing for two? There’s nothing in the pregnancy books on it, of course, and Google is next to useless on the subject. Though my in utero Jiminy Cricket is putting the kybosh on all those sort of shenanigans via tiredness, heartburn and nausea, I want it so bad. I want her so damn bad.

Plymouth Star guy is back on the doorstep but he hasn’t knocked. He’s just sitting there, looking all handsome and fed up. I wonder if he wants my body? The state it’s in right now, he can have it.

I went downstairs and peeked through the net curtains – there was a bunch of flowers next to him on the step. I opened the door.

‘What’s this?’ I said, startling him into standing up.

‘Hi,’ he said, picking up the flowers – yellow and white roses – and handing them to me. ‘To apologise for hassling you.’

‘You’re apologising for hassling me by hassling me. Are they bugged?’

He laughed, biting his lip.

‘They are, aren’t they?’

‘No no, they’re not bugged I assure you.’

‘Be a waste of time if they were bugged anyway. We don’t talk about the case at home.’

‘Oh? Why’s that?’

I pretended to zip my mouth. ‘You’re not getting in that way either, Sneak. I know your game.’ I smelled the roses. They didn’t carry any scent at all – mass-cultivated supermarket crap. Ugh. I handed them back to him.

‘You’re going to have to try harder than that.’

‘What do you like then?’ he said as I was closing the door. ‘Tell me and I’ll get it for you. Anything.’

‘Not bribing me, are you?’

‘No, but—’

‘Cos if you are, maybe try doughnuts. Krispy Kreme for preference.’

*

That evening, Elaine dragged me along to her monthly WOMBAT meeting. They’re a Christian women’s group who go on outings, raise money for various different charities, eat cake and pray. Tonight’s meeting featured their new ‘Kindness Circle’.

Yes, it’s just as dull as it sounds.

WOMBAT stands for the Women of Monks Bay and Temperley and Elaine says it’s ‘full of characters’. There’s Big-Headed Edna, Morbid Marge, Poll Potts, who dresses like a sister-wife, Pincushion-Face Grace, Erica the Overfriendly Troll, Bea Moore the Colossal Bore, Wheelchair Pat, Wheelchair Mary, Rita Who Sits By the Heater, Elephant Vadge Madge, Jean Coker the Strokey Smoker, whose palsy makes her look like she’s constantly trying to eat her own neck, Black Nancy and White Nancy. Black Nancy calls me ‘Bab’ and is covered in dog hairs. She’s knitting a cardigan for the baby, whether I want her to or not. I’ve only exchanged brief ‘Hellos’ with White Nancy but as far as I can tell she’s a twat.

This is what I do now. This is what I have become. I meet up once a month with a group of women I don’t want to know. We gossip, we pray and we eat cake. My life will return to normal when the baby’s out in the open, of that I am sure, but while he’s gestating, I’m stagnating. I’m a freak on a leash.

It feels odd. Not wrong exactly, just nothing seems to fit. Everything’s too small. Too mundane. I’m a square peg and every damn hole is round. Yeah sure Baby Bear might be contented but Momma’s getting grizzly.

Erica the WOMBAT secretary had the idea to incorporate Kindness Circle into the meetings and tonight’s is the first one. Spurred on by ISIS and our world leaders basically all being megalomaniacal shits, she thought people needed to ‘make time to be kind’. Everyone breaks off into groups like they’re in the damn Brownies and partakes of kind activities – organising collections for the food bank, creating cross-stitch patterns for underprivileged traffic wardens or sitting around talking about how lovely everything is.

I heard the word ‘lovely’ precisely 126 times this evening. I want to hurt the word ‘lovely’. I want to beat lovely to within an inch of its life, tie lovely in a sack and fucking drown it.

Erica, I should mention, is also responsible for the ‘lovely’ rhymes in the church hall kitchenette:

Wash, wash, wash your plates

Gently down the drain

Rinse rinse, rinse them clean

Then dry them up again

And on the fridge door there’s

Welcome welcome, one and all,

To our communal milk and tea,

But if you use the last of them,

A refill’s nice to see!

And don’t get me started on If you’re happy and you know it wash your hands…

They’re so goddamn twee they make me want to gnaw concrete. Erica was all abuzz this evening having announced that the ‘church hall fund has agreed to splash out on hanging baskets for the smokers’ area’. You know, so people can admire the pansies while their tumours metastasize.

So I’m sitting there at Clit-Lickers Monthly and we have to go around the circle and say happy things. I’m with Erica, Tight Bun Doreen, Debbie Does Donkeys, One Armed Joyce and Rita Who Sits By the Heater. Erica’s rattling through a long list of contentments, which surprises me as she has a face that would make a blind child cry. Then it’s my turn.

‘Uh, I have nothing,’ I said.

‘Come on,’ said Debbie Does Donkeys. ‘There must be something.’

‘It’s a bit hard to think of anything right now. There’s a lot of bad happening in the world.’

‘Yes but we choose love,’ said Rita. ‘We might have to look a bit harder to find it but it is always there. Happy thoughts, you must have some.’

‘No, I don’t,’ I say. ‘I don’t have any. I’m not a happy-go-lucky person.’

Tight Bun Doreen pipes up. ‘Well perhaps if you were you’d find it easier to come up with something?’

‘Perhaps,’ I said, heartburn biting. Inside my head she is flat on her back beneath a hydraulic drill press. My finger’s on the button.

Doreen’s lips pursed. ‘Maybe you need to change your world view?’

‘Maybe I do,’ I said.

‘So? Do you have a happy thought now?’ she asked.

‘What, because you tell me I have to have one? Yes, all right then, I do.’

Doreen frowned and waited. ‘Well? What is it?’

I continued to stare at her, smiling. ‘Can’t say else it won’t come true.’

Later, Debbie Does Donkeys read the lesson – a passage from Luke about Jesus anointing a sinful woman – the lesson being that one who has sinned deserves a second chance because ‘she has faith in the Lord’.

You can tell an evening has been a washout when the best part is being given a Bible. I was given my own Good News Bible.

I don’t think they like me at WOMBAT. I heard a few whisperings about Elaine’s ‘beast of a son’ and there were some sly looks, mostly from Edna and Doreen. Irritating people is the nearest I can get to fun these days so I’m going to go to next month’s meeting. In fact, I’m going to read my Bible too.

Let’s see what God has to say about the kind of sinful woman I am.

Wednesday, 25th July – 11 weeks, 3 days

1. Sandra Huggins.

2. People who use the hashtag #familyiseverything.

3. People who brag about stealing stuff from Buckingham Palace – what do you want, a medal? Though you’re probably in the right place if you did.

4. Helen at Pudding Club who wants to ban fireworks, the works of Charles Dickens and clown gifs on Twitter. Apparently they’re all ‘triggering’.

5. Peter Andre.

I’m bed-bound and teetering on the lip of insanity. I’ve watched back to back eps of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares even though I’ve seen them all before. I get up only to drink, piss, or puke and even then I’m dizzy. I’m lying here, falling down endless internet rabbit holes. I could read one of the preg books Elaine got from the library – What to Expect When You’re Gestating or Mummy to Be: A Day to Day Guide to the Most Magical Time in your Life but I don’t like library books in my bed. You never know what’s been done to them. Or in them.

So I stick to online stuff, mostly Buzzfeed, Bustle and Jezebel. And you know how you look up one thing and it links you to another and before you know it you’re reading whole articles about Jeffrey Dahmer or water polo or coping with psoriasis, even though you don’t have it? I somehow got on to watching the Murder Made Me Famous docu on YouTube.

The Miracle of Priory Gardens.

I watch it every time I want to see my dad. He and my mum are interviewed throughout, sitting on the wicker sofa in the conservatory at our old house, clutching each other’s hands like they’re about to take a death leap.

All the parents relived the moment they were told their son or daughter was dead. Then Dad relived the moment he was told I was the only survivor. Mum grips his hand tighter. Dad looks down, his hand wipes his eyes.

I couldn’t take it in. I was sure she was dead. She’s our miracle.

My big tough boxer dad, crying his eyes red.

Someone up there helped us out that day, that’s for sure.

My mum says little in the docu – she just echoes Dad, maintaining her rabbit-in-the-headlights stare. There’s footage of her giving me a hug outside the hospital when I was released. I missed her hugs as I got older.

There was some home movie footage of the kids who died – two-year-old Jack blowing out his candles. Kimmy in her dad’s arms in the maternity unit. Ashlea in red boots in the snow. The twins eating ice cream. Their mum did Britain’s Got Talent last year but a sob story only takes you so far if you can’t sing for shit.

There’s old news footage from before the presenters went grey – footage of people laying flowers outside Number 12. The sounds of wailing parents as they fight to get through the police cordon. The glistening doormat. Three little stretchers. And then the money shot – me all limp, wrapped inside the blood-stained Peter Rabbit blanket.

Then there are the photo-calls of me coming out of hospital in my wheelchair, weeks later, bandage wrapped tightly around my bald head.

Me in my beanie hat being given the huge teddy bear on This Morning.

My first day at school, Dad wheeling me into the front office and us stopping so the press could take our photos.

Giving the thumbs up on my first day of secondary school.

Thumbs up again after my GCSE results.

The ‘Hasn’t She Done Well?’ front page of the Daily Mirror, with me starting my A Levels and talking about wanting to be a writer.

There was an interview with the shrink – Dr Philip Morrison – who had treated the murderer, Antony Blackstone, for his psychotic rages.

You had one job, Phil.

‘He was a ticking bomb,’ said Phil. ‘Allison’s family knew the marriage was not a happy one – there were signs that he was controlling and abusive. He’d call her incessantly. Track her movements. Even monitored what she was eating so she didn’t put on weight. Her sister had begged her to leave him and one day Allison found the courage. It appeared – at first – to be a mutual arrangement which Blackstone accepted. But it lit the spark in the powder keg.’

Phil was the one who diagnosed me with PTSD after Priory Gardens, even though Mum swore it was ‘growing pains’ and, as I got older, ‘hormones’. He always gave me a Scooby Doo sticker after a session. It’s one of the more depressing parts of growing up – we don’t get stickers anymore.

There’s a playground where the house used to stand now and a plaque on a sundial beside the slide bearing the names of all the kids. Mrs Kingwell’s name too. My name isn’t there of course, being the lucky one.

When Dad talks about it, I can feel his sadness. Otherwise, I don’t feel anything. I can’t even hate Blackstone, cos he’s dead.

The closing footage on the documentary is me and Seren playing with the Sylvanians in the rehab centre. The boxes are dotted all around, wrapped in big bows. I’m lying in my bed and watching her, moving the figures about on my tummy and Seren is telling me some story about mice. It strikes me hard how she’s the only person I have left in this world – the only person who knows the real me. Even though she despises me these days, I do miss her.

Priory Gardens was the spark in my powder keg. The reason Mum got sick. The reason Dad gave up. The reason I have little emotional reaction to anything except Death. I can’t feel unless I’m killing. Then I feel everything.

We’ve had another note. This time I caught sight of the person who posted it as he was loping off up the seafront – a big guy in blue jeans, hoody. No other wording – just the same again. ‘To my Sweet Messy House’. And a number.

‘I don’t want to fucking talk to you!’ I screamed through the letterbox, screwing up the note and scuffing back into the lounge. Gordon Ramsay had started on one of the high channels – he was counselling a crying chef who’d lost all his microwaves.

*

Jim’s been in – the estate agent says two couples are interested in Craig’s flat. The forensics have finished, so he’s released it for sale to start paying the lawyers. One of the couples is expecting. I imagine them walking around, hand in hand, looking in our wardrobes, talking about the ‘nice views from the balcony’. Looking inside the cupboards that I watched Craig build, that autumn we first met. We got Tink from the RSPCA that autumn, a little warm ball of toffee ice cream who licked my cheek and stopped shaking the moment I held her. It’s all I can do to prise her away from Jim these days.

Saturday, 28th July – 11 weeks, 6 days

1. Cafés that pre-butter toast or toasted tea cakes.

2. The guy that keeps posting illegible notes through our front door.

3. Weathermen who stand in hurricanes strong enough to blow cataracts from their eyes and ‘can’t believe how strong the wind is’.

My Bible doesn’t seem to be able to offer me any guidance on feeling less tilted than I do at the moment, aside from ‘Offer yourself up to the Lord’ or ‘God’s mighty hand will lift you up if you just believe.’ Not a bad read though. That Delilah was a bit of a head case.

Marnie texted – Fancy a trip to the Mall to find your maternity clothes? I can chauffeur – Marn x

I was still annoyed by the fact it had taken her so long to ask but she was offering to drive, so gift horses and all that.

The traffic was bad on the way up but Marnie was in a good mood and when you’ve got stuff to chat about, it doesn’t feel like you’ve been stuck in a car for hours. We talked about our respective families and how dead they all are, how I barely speak to Seren in Seattle and how she barely speaks to her brother Sandro who lives in Italy and runs residential art classes.

‘How come you don’t speak to him?’ I asked.

‘Oh you know how it is, you grow apart as you get older, don’t you?’ she said and left it at that. ‘Isn’t that what it’s like with you and Seren?’

‘No, Seren says I’m a psychopath like our dad.’

Marnie glanced away from the traffic. ‘Are you?’

I shrugged. ‘Bit.’

She laughed. Probably thought I was joking, I don’t know. We played the number plate game and she had cola bottles and sour cherries in her glovebox and Beyoncé on the Bluetooth so I was happy.

‘Tim doesn’t like me eating sweets at home,’ she said, then bit down on her lip like she shouldn’t have said it. ‘He’s got me into blueberries so I eat those instead. They’re incredibly good for you.’

‘Yeah I’ve had the blueberry lecture from Elaine. She makes these vile blueberry granola bars for me to peck at if I’m hungry. They taste like old teabags and feet. Why doesn’t Tim let you have sweets?’

‘He worries about diabetes and things.’

‘Halo’ came on and much to my intense delight, Marnie turned it up to full vol. ‘This is my favourite.’

‘Mine too,’ I lied. Mine was actually ‘6 Inch’ from the Lemonade album but I didn’t want to break the moment.

Before too long we were singing. Unashamedly. Not even holding back on the big notes. It was so easy, so immediate. Like we’d been friends for years. All thanks to Queen Bey herself. We made it to the end of the song—

Then her phone rang.

It rang twice, both times Tim, first asking where she was and who she was with (I had to say ‘Hello’) and the second time to ask if they had any ant powder. Marnie did most of the talking and I noticed she kept asking if things were all right. ‘Chicken Kievs for tea if that’s all right?’ and ‘Back about six if that’s all right?’ His voice reminded me of Grandad’s.

‘My grandad never let my nanny have any freedom either,’ I said when she had ended the call.

‘No, it’s not like that,’ she said, for once without a little smile or a giggle at the end of her sentence. ‘He just worries about me, especially now.’

‘My nan blamed me for my grandad’s death. She said I’d killed him.’

Marnie glanced over, briefly, as she indicated to come off the motorway. We came to a halt at the traffic lights. ‘Why did she say that?’

‘Cos I was there when it happened. He had a heart attack while he was swimming. He liked wild swimming. I was on the bank, watching him and I didn’t do anything. He drowned.’

‘Oh my god,’ she said, as the lights went green. ‘How old were you?’

‘Eleven.’

‘Well of course you couldn’t have done anything, you were only a child. That’s a terrible thing for an adult to put on such a young person.’

‘Yeah, I guess. She’d taken me to meet Mr Blobby that summer too. Proper sadist, my nanny.’

She didn’t laugh but patted my knee. I was going to tell her. The words were locked and loaded and ready to come out – I was going to tell her how I’d watched my grandad hit Seren that morning for not bringing in the eggs and how much I wanted to kill him. To push him down the stairs or into the slurry or to drive an axe right down deep into the back of his neck while he was stacking the logs. But I didn’t say a word. I didn’t tell her that watching my grandad drown had been an exquisite pleasure. I kept that to myself because Marnie had patted my knee and seemed to care that I was the innocent one. And I liked the feeling. I wanted to hold onto it.

The Mall was heaving with people and though Marnie was more than happy to mooch about trying things on, I couldn’t find a single atom of my body that cared about maternity clothes. She didn’t buy a thing, even stuff she said she loved. Dresses she’d point out as ‘stunning’ or ‘exquisite’ she would hold up against herself then return them to the peg. When I called her on it she said, ‘Oh I’ll probably never wear it again anyway. It’s a waste of money.’

‘Bet he gives you an allowance every week, doesn’t he?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘This is my money.’

‘My nanny used to get an allowance and she’d never spend it either. She used to squirrel it away. I never found out why.’

We hit the John Lewis café for lunch. I got a lemon and vanilla ice cream crepe, Marnie got a salad.

‘Get some carbs down you for god’s sake,’ I said as we stood in the line waiting for the assistant to scoop my vanilla. ‘You’re drooling over mine.’

‘I shouldn’t,’ she said, biting her lip.

‘Why not?’

‘Slippery slope, isn’t it?’

Marnie’s phone was out next to her plate the moment we sat down.

‘So tell me more about Tim then,’ I said. ‘What’s he like?’

Again, her manner changed, her voice lowered. ‘He’s Area Manager for that plastic shelving place on the ring road. Quite long hours but he loves it.’

‘What did you do before you went on maternity?’

‘Admin, council refuse department. Only for the last seven months though. Before that I was a dancer.’

‘What kind of dancer?’

‘Ballet and tap. I taught classes.’

‘Why did you stop?’

‘Well, we moved down here for Tim’s job and then I got pregnant.’

‘But you could go back to it someday?’

‘Doubt it. The money’s better at the council anyway. I did love it though.’

Her phone rang. ‘Sorry, hang on… Hiya… Yep… that’ll be nice… sounds good… Yeah, Rhiannon’s still with me. Need me to pick anything up?… Okay… Love you.’ She put the phone down.

‘Tim?’ I said, chewing my crepe.

‘Yeah,’ she smiled, theatrically rolling her eyes. ‘He’s booking the hotel for next weekend. Our sixth anniversary. Bit of a babymoon.’

‘Six years,’ I said. ‘That’s wood, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘A wooden garden ornament or something?’

‘He’s not into ornaments. I inherited a load of china ones from my mum but I’m not allowed to display them.’

‘Not allowed?’

‘Well, it’s only a few ballerinas with their buns broken off. I used to play with them as a kid. My mum bought me one each time I passed an exam.’

I pride myself on a few things: my ability to defend the defenceless, to maintain The Act that I am a normal human being in polite society, and to trace vulnerability in people. I can sniff it out as easily as curry plant in a garden full of roses. And it was coming off Marnie in waves.

‘Are you sure it wasn’t Tim who made you give up dancing?’

She frown-laughed. ‘No, my choice. He was right though; the pay was crap.’ She stroked her bump. ‘No regrets. I have everything I want. A great house and steady job and a healthy baby boy coming soon—’

Grandad used to fill Honey Cottage with his stuffed animals. Weasels and stoats and tiny birds that he’d shot out of trees with a pellet gun. Nanny never liked them. She said they looked like they were in eternal pain. Nanny liked Capo di Monte teapots and cherubs and porcelain roses, but she kept them in bubble wrap in boxes because ‘they keep getting smashed’.

‘I think you should put the ballerinas on display,’ I told Marnie, mopping up my vanilla puddle with my crepe.

‘It’s no big deal,’ she said, tucking into her salad again.

I was going to ask what she meant but she jumped into another conversation as she stabbed her lettuce. ‘So will you stay on with your in-laws when the baby comes?’

Before I’d even opened my mouth, her phone rang again.

‘Hiya, Hun… uh yeah I can pick some up… okay… yeah, still with Rhiannon. Oh great. Yep, I will. Thanks, love, see you later. Love you… Bye.’

My eyebrows rose.

‘We need potatoes. Where were we?’

‘We were talking then the guy you live with called twice about nothing.’

She carried on crunching her lettuce. We sat in silence, watching mums struggling with pushchairs, kids skipping along beside them, old friends meeting and hugging. On the next table a dad was talking his two-year-old daughter through the menu choices, like he was teaching her to read. Their meals arrived – he cut up her chips and taught her to blow on them. The child wanted him to feed her instead of doing it for herself so he was eating his meal with one hand, feeding her with the other.

A while later, our conversation restarted and we were back being easy together – I was telling her about WOMBAT and begging her to come along to the next meeting to save me from certain kindness brainwashing. I told her all about the little names I’d given them all—

When her phone rang again. I saw the screen – Tim calling.

She gurned apologetically. ‘This is the last time, I promise… Hi, love… yeah, I think so… oh, that’s good, well done… yeah that sounds—’

I grabbed the phone out of her hand and hit the End Call button.

Marnie shot up, grabbing at her phone. ‘Why did you do that?!’

‘Well for one because it’s rude when you’re talking to someone—’

‘He’s on his lunch break! It’s the only time he can call!’

‘—and two, your husband’s being an endless little bitch.’

She called him back and spent the next ten minutes apologising and eating shit like an absolute pro while I finished my crepe and sipped my tea. When she came back to the table she breathed out long and slow.

‘He’s fine. He’s fine.’

‘Thank god,’ I said, still chewing. ‘I was so worried.’

‘Why did you do that, Rhiannon?’

‘Cos you’re sleeping with the enemy. I staged an intervention.’

‘Please don’t ever do that again.’

A silence fell.

‘Allison, the childminder at Priory Gardens, she was a battered wife.’

‘I’M NOT A BATTERED WIFE!’ she shouted.

Faces looked. Marnie sank down in her seat.

‘I never said you were.’

‘You don’t understand him, I’m okay with it.’

‘Make me understand it. I dare you.’

Marnie frowned. ‘It’s actually none of your business actually.’

‘Two actuallys.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Show me your phone.’

‘What?’

‘Show me your phone.’

‘No.’

I grabbed it out of her hand again and she tried to snatch it back.

‘Give it to me. Rhiannon! Now, I want it, give it!’

‘Uh, pregnant woman being accosted here!’ I shouted, garnering glances as I fought her off me, but nobody in the café paid much mind. Typical. Pregnant women are pretty much invisible to the human eye.

There was a selfie of Marnie and Tim together on her screen saver. She was smiling and he was hugging her from behind – like a chokehold. Hmm, attractive in an Aryan kind of way but a bit too much pulse for my liking.

I checked her call log and messages and once my suspicions were confirmed, I handed the phone back. She was hot in both cheeks, grabbing her jacket off her chair and flinging it on.

‘Fifty-seven calls. In two days. And you live with the guy.’

She wouldn’t look at me. She threw her handbag strap over her shoulder and shuffled out of the banquette.

‘One hundred and seventy-six messages in a week,’ I called after her as she waddled back through café, as fast as she could.

She snapped her head around. ‘So what? He’s protective. I told you.’

We got to the top of the escalators. ‘Just cos you’re married, doesn’t mean he owns you. That kind of thinking went out with McBusted.’

‘He’s not your grandad, okay? He’s not that Priory Gardens guy either. He’s ex-army so he likes things just so and he fusses a bit, that’s all. I get him. I get why he’s like it and it’s okay. I love him. End of.’

‘No not “end of”. Did he make you stop dancing?’ She didn’t answer. ‘Does he hurt you?’

I tried to think of something women’s refugey and supportive to say, but nothing came. All I saw was her eyes not daring to water and the only way I could think of helping was to go straight round to that plastics factory and anally violate the gutless little piss-tray with some sort of pointy thing.

She started down the escalator.

‘Uh, what am I supposed to do, get the bus home?’ I called out.

She waited at the bottom. I went down and stood beside her in silence.

‘He doesn’t hurt me. I promise. He needs me. But I don’t want to talk about this anymore, okay? I’m asking you, please.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Just be a friend today.’

For some reason that word ‘friend’ changed my outlook. I didn’t want her to leave and I didn’t want her anger. I wanted to stay being her friend.

‘Let’s go somewhere else, yeah? How about the museum?’

‘Why the museum?’

‘I used to go there all the time when I was a kid with my friend. Shall we do that?’ She checked her phone. ‘Oh sorry. What time does Goebbels want you back in the Stalag?’

She laughed at that. I didn’t think she would. ‘Six.’

‘Bags of time,’ I said. ‘Come on. It’s not far.’

We drove across town without another word about He Who Must Not Be Named and I gave Marnie a potted tour of Bristol and the harbour side. We took a slow walk up Park Street, tried on hats in a hat shop, shoes in a shoe shop and finally we went to my favourite place: the museum. I showed her all the best bits first – the gift shop, the Egyptian mummies, the rocks and gemstones, the amethyst the size of my head and the stalactite that looked like a willy. Then the stuffed animals gathering dust in their enormous glass cases – The Dead Zoo, as me and Joe called it. I could smell the Dead Zoo before we got to it – musty and pungent with age – and I was drawn to it like a moth. We found Alfred the gorilla, arguably Bristol’s most famous son.

‘Me and Joe used to imagine we were in the jungle and these were all our animals,’ I told her. ‘We lived in the gypsy caravan and at night, the mummies would come alive and we had to hide in case they got us. Alfred would roar and beat his chest and all the mummies would run away. This is Alfred. You have to say Hi when you come here. It’s like a Bristol law.’

‘Hello Alfred,’ she said, waving at him. ‘Who’s Joe?’

‘Joe Leech. He was my best friend when I was a kid. I only knew him for a couple of summers. He was killed. Got knocked down.’

‘Oh that’s awful. I’m sorry.’

‘Apparently when he was in the zoo, Alfred used to throw poo at people and piss on them as they passed underneath his cage. And he hated men with beards. I don’t like men with beards either. Don’t trust them.’

Marnie laughed.

‘Does Tim have a beard at the moment?’

She thinned her eyes. ‘No he doesn’t.’

‘Just checking. We used to spend hours up here, me and Joe.’

‘Smells a bit strange. Some of them look so sad.’

‘Yeah but look at the ones who are grinning. They look insane.’

‘True.’

‘Don’t you find it fascinating? I find death fascinating.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I find it quite creepy actually.’ She moved around the glass cases with caution as though any moment the ocelot or Sumatran tiger or glassy-eyed rhino might crash through the glass and flatten her.

‘There’s a dodo somewhere,’ I said. ‘That was Joe’s favourite.’

‘You look genuinely happy to be here,’ she remarked.

‘Yeah, I think I am. I was happy as a kid. Before Priory Gardens. And when I was with Joe. And Craig. Not so much since.’

This remark seemed to trouble Marnie all afternoon. She brought it up several times as we were wandering round but put it down to the whole Craig-being-in-prison and not-having-a-baby-daddy-around thing.

After the gift shop – where Marnie again noted several things she liked but wouldn’t buy – we went over the road to Rocotillos where me and Joe Leech ate short stack pancakes and shakes for breakfast, and dared each other to blow cold cherries at the waiters. We sat on stools overlooking the street outside. Marnie said she wasn’t hungry but I ordered her chocolate brownie freak shake with whipped cream and salted caramel sauce, same as me, and she ate every bite. The sky darkened and rain began spattering the window.

She sucked her straw in ecstasy. ‘Mmm, I’d forgotten what chocolate tastes like. It’s not good for you, too many sweets.’

‘Is Tim afraid you’ll get fat?’

She nodded, seemingly forgetting herself as she chewed the tip of her straw. ‘He’s worried about diabetes, that’s all. He doesn’t think it’s good for me to gain too much fat.’

‘No, I suppose it absorbs the punches too well.’

Marnie rolled her eyes like she’d known me for years and this was something ‘typically Rhee’. ‘Things change after you have a baby. Men can… stray. That’s what I’m most afraid of I guess. I couldn’t handle that. My dad cheated on my mum and it broke her heart and mine.’

‘So if he cheated on you, you might find the strength to leave him?’ A little thought owl flew into my mind.

‘Don’t even think about it,’ she said firmly. ‘I’d never forgive you.’

My thought owl flew out again. ‘I’d like to meet Tim.’

‘Why?’

I spooned some cream from my shake. ‘Just to be sociable.’

‘You’re not sociable though,’ she chuckled.

‘I’m out with you, aren’t I? What more do you want?’

She looked out of the window but I knew she didn’t want to look at me. ‘He’ll be coming to Pin’s cheese and wine. And she’s planning a big fireworks party in November for her birthday as well. No expense spared.’

‘Oh Christ,’ I groaned. ‘She’s not going to invite me to those, is she?’

‘Of course she is,’ said Marnie. ‘You’re one of the gang now.’

‘Ugh. I need that like a hole in the womb.’

‘Pin’s house is amazing. They’re millionaires.’

‘Whoopee shit.’ I blew a cold cherry at a passing waitress. It missed.

Outside it was raining hard. People rushed past the window with briefcases on their heads and newspapers folded over like makeshift hats. ‘What do you want to talk about then?’ I asked. ‘You choose. Ask me anything. Any question you’ve always wanted the answer to. Priory Gardens, Craig, you name it. Open season.’

Marnie stared at the window and took two bites before answering. ‘If you counted every raindrop as it fell, how many raindrops would there be?’

‘Huh?’

She laughed. ‘I like those kinds of unfathomable questions, don’t you? Makes me feel so small in the world. Like, how long would it take for you to count every single grain of sand on Monks Bay beach?’

‘You must be the only person in the country at a private audience with me who doesn’t want to ask me questions about Craig.’

‘It’s none of my business, is it?’

‘No, it’s not.’

‘I’ve got another one,’ she said, the light flicking on behind her eyes. ‘How do you know you’re a real person and not in someone else’s dream?’

‘Isn’t that a Take That lyric?’

Below the bench we were both swinging our legs beneath the counter, like we were children again. I wished we were.

I don’t know how long we sat there – enough to share a cherry Bakewell freak shake between us and two slices of blueberry pie – and our questions kept on coming.

‘Why is the sea salty?’

‘Who picks up a blind person’s guide dog poo?’

‘Can you remember when you stopped being a child?’

‘What was the first word ever said?’

‘Do you ever hear your baby talk to you?’

Of course I said ‘No’ to that one. It wasn’t time to play the ‘mad’ card.

‘What’s the best advice you could pass onto your child?’ Marnie asked.

‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘Mind’s gone blank.’

‘I like “Find your bliss”,’ said Marnie. ‘I heard someone say that once and it stuck with me. What’s your bliss?’

‘Don’t know. Haven’t found it yet.’

‘You said in the museum you weren’t as happy now as you were when you were a kid. Maybe it’s having kids? Maybe that will make you happy?’

‘Mmm. Life’s full of maybes, isn’t it? You never know for sure.’

‘Maybes and babies,’ she smiled.

‘I still feel like a kid myself.’

‘You’ll be okay, Rhiannon. It’ll all fall into place. It’ll click, all of a sudden. And then you’ll know who you are for sure.’

I smiled like my face meant it. Would have been much easier if it did.

Tuesday, 31st July – 12 weeks, 2 days

1. Grown adults who are afraid of dogs. Strap on a pair, FFS.

2. Pop up advertisers. In fact anything that ‘pops’ at all.

3. Woody Allen.

‘I can’t understand it,’ said Jim, crunching through his All Bran. ‘No bookings at all?’

‘Sorry.’ I packed my face with as much humility as it could muster.

‘No it’s not your fault, love. If you ask me the tourism board has a lot to answer for. This isn’t a destination area anymore. Nothing for the kiddies. The funicular hasn’t had a lick of paint for decades. Council keep putting up the rates so the little independent shops can’t afford to stay put, and that new leisure centre’s still not finished. Six years they’ve been promising that.’

Note: I don’t get an iota of blame. Note: he doesn’t check Airbnb himself. Trust, you see. Complete and total trust. I can’t help finding Jim almost unbearably sexy sometimes.

Another dizzy spell on my way back upstairs – it’s altitude that seems to affect it. I had one yesterday on my way up to the Well House. I lay on AJ’s grave for a full half-hour until it passed. Something to do with my blood pressure. I’m going to have to start carrying around emergency chocolate with me like a St Bernard.

I checked out Tim Prendergast’s social media to get the measure of the man. His avatar is a pic of himself in one of those seaside cut-outs – a fat man in a stripy bathing suit wearing a Kiss-Me-Quick hat.

What a wit.

His eyes are blue with ice splinters in them. I don’t even have to meet him to know he’s a fungus-addled prick of the highest proportions. And for a self-confessed ‘outdoorsman’ who loves hill walking, he doesn’t half spend a lot of time tweet-stalking celebrities. You know the type of thing – RTing how good their books/films/TV shows are. Incessantly @ing them in, saying Good job on The One Show tonight… or Loved your movie – what a talent you are! We’re lucky to have you, and asking them for shout outs and free tickets. The worst part about it is he gets replies. He trades on that tried and tested logic – people will believe anything if it’s a compliment. And it works.

I honestly don’t know what Marnie sees in him.

Talking of her, I haven’t heard anything since Saturday. Two texts so far have gone unanswered. I wonder if he’s throttled her. I wonder if I should go round there. I know where she lives – in one of the new houses in Michaelmas Court. She mentioned it at Pudding Club as the number was the same as their anniversary – the fifteenth.

The Plymouth Star guy was back on the doorstep today, along with several others from the tabloids. He is such a snack, honestly, and it thrills me to wind him up – to play the part of forbidden fruit now I know he wants to eat my ass so badly. I felt quite sorry for him, jostling to be the first to hound me as I sashayed down the front path in my heels and swishy top, like I was at Paris Fashion Week.

‘You brought my doughnuts yet?’ I called out to him.

‘You were serious about that?’

‘Of course,’ I smiled, gliding through the garden gate. Oh boy was I working it today. On the other side I turned back to him and he smiled like we were sharing a secret.

Gusset dryness = history.

Wednesday, 1st August – 12 weeks, 3 days

Drove myself back to the flat to pick up the last of my stuff – only had to stop once on the motorway to vom at the roadside. Otherwise, uneventful.

The flat is all but empty – most of Craig’s stuff has gone into storage. AJ’s blood dot remains – barely visible to the human eye, but to the psychopath’s eye, there’s no mistaking it. Looks more brown than red now.

Mrs Whittaker’s moved out – gone to live in Margate with her sister Betty. She ‘can’t be trusted to live on her own anymore’, so Leafblower Ron informed me in the lift, as he coiled his extension lead around his elbow.

‘Has anyone else moved in there then?’ I asked.

‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘But the cleaners went in yesterday so I suppose the agent’s found someone.’

‘It’s probably for the best,’ I said, trying not to think about the night I cut him up in that bathtub. The foetus doesn’t like it.

I like thinking about my daddy being alive, not cut into six pieces on an old woman’s lino.

Afterwards, I bought some Rice Krispie cakes and a bunch of pink gerberas and roses and went round to Lana’s flat. I took a chance that she still lived in the one above the charity shop in the precinct and lo and behold, when I rang the bell at the side entrance, she came to the door. She nearly slammed it in my face but I put my hand out at the last moment.

‘Please, Lana, please let me in. I’ve come to apologise.’

She pulled the door back slightly so that I saw for the first time the extent of my handiwork. She was purple from her forehead to her chin – I almost laughed but stopped myself in time.

‘I can’t believe you didn’t press charges,’ I said. ‘You should have.’

‘Yeah, well,’ she said. ‘I figured I owed you that at least.’

‘Thank you. I truly am desperately sorry. I brought cakes.’

She opened the door wider and I followed her up the narrow staircase – think Anne Frank’s house with junk mail and stair rods.

I passed her bedroom – the door was ajar, the duvet unmade, clumps of clothes dotted around the floor – knickers, socks, some hideous pyjama bottoms covered in Minions, a dressing gown draped across the bed. The bed where she’d moaned in my boyfriend’s hot ear and bitten his lobe as her vagina gripped his penis and he slid into her so many times…

‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ she said, ushering me through to the lounge. Each of the worktops in the poky beige kitchen was covered in debris – side plates with hardened puddles of butter, smudged glasses, sticky cutlery, greasy frying pans, and saucepans ingrained with old scrambled egg.

‘How are things at the Gazette?’ I asked when she brought a mug of tea in. There was a purple fleece throw on the sofa, all rumpled into a nest where she’d been sitting watching Bargain Hunt. I sat in the armchair.

‘They’ve put me on gardening leave,’ she said, sitting down and wrapping herself in the blanket. ‘Got someone in to replace me already.’

‘I know the feeling,’ I said.

‘Katie Drucker?’ she said. ‘Yeah she’s, well, malleable. You know Linus is back after his eye operation? Daren’t be off sick for any length of time in that place. Someone will jump in your grave. Do you think you’ll go back?’

‘No, don’t think so. I feel quite free actually.’

‘I miss it,’ she said.

‘So shall we talk about the elephant in the room or shall we let it quietly shit itself in the corner?’

Lana took a breath and put her mug down on the table. ‘I can’t believe Craig’s capable of doing those things.’

‘I don’t know anymore,’ I said, putting my mug down too. ‘I don’t want to believe it but the evidence, Lana.’

‘But on New Year’s Eve at least, he was definitely with me.’

‘All night?’

‘Well no, but—’

‘Where were you, here?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what time did he leave?’

‘After the bongs, about twelve-fifteen?’

‘The police said Daniel Wells was killed between midnight and four. I didn’t hear him come in.’

‘What about the other two?’

‘He said he was out with the boys on February twelfth. Gavin White was killed in the park around ten p.m. The boys said he nipped outside for a fag around that time. It’s possible is all I’m saying.’

‘Oh god. But that woman in the quarry. That wasn’t him, was it?’

‘I don’t know. They found evidence all over the scene.’

‘But he was in London, he couldn’t have killed her.’

‘I’m as stumped as you are,’ I said, catching sight of my lying face in her glass cabinet. ‘All I know is that I’m afraid. I’m afraid if they let him out, he will come after me for not giving him an alibi. He went a tiny bit Scarface because I said I wouldn’t lie for him.’

‘He’s asked me too.’

‘There you go,’ I said.

‘But I was with him on New Year’s. For a bit.’

‘You’ve got to let your conscience be your guide, Lana. I’ve got the baby to think about. What if he’s released and he hurts us?’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay well away from him.’

‘I haven’t seen him for weeks. I wouldn’t, not now.’

‘But you’re going to give him an alibi for New Year’s Eve?’

‘It’s not an alibi, it’s the truth.’

‘You were with him right up until he killed that man and severed his penis. What are the police going to make of that?’

She wringed her hands. ‘I can’t lie to the police.’

‘I’m not saying you should lie. You should think carefully before claiming he was with you all night. Because if he’s going down, he will bring you down too. That’s the kind of guy he is. I know it’s shocking but we have to protect ourselves. Craig’s capable of anything.’

*

I nipped into town after Lana’s to pick up some pregnancy vitamins and Gaviscon from Boots. Saw Claudia at the perfume counter. She didn’t see me.

My auntie Claudia!

I don’t miss the Gazette at all. Why would I? Why would I miss Claudia’s patronising orders and Ron’s letching, and downing tools every hour to make coffee for people too educationally far above me to make their own? Why would I miss the Cuntasaurus Rex Linus Sixgill and his excruciating attempts to be funny? And, for the record, I don’t give a shit that he wears an eye patch now – cancer doesn’t suddenly make an arsehole clean.

I miss the gonk from the top of my computer screen. That’s all I miss.

My daddy gave you that.

I also saw one of the PICSOs, Anni, pushing a buggy out of Debenhams. Anni and Pidge turned out to be quite good friends in the end – both of them went to the police separately to air their suspicions that Craig had been abusive – they’d seen bruises on me, told them of my evasive behaviour when asked about him. But of course, I had The Act to keep up – poor, manipulated, brainwashed girlfriend. Innocent victim. Deny, deny, deny. Pretty soon even they washed their hands of me. People I Can’t Scrape Off were officially – Scraped.

Anyway I managed to avoid both Anni and Claudia and I was so busy avoiding people I knew that I ran straight into someone I didn’t want to know.

Heather – aka the woman with the yellow scarf who I’d mistakenly rescued the night I killed two rapists in a quarry. Today the scarf was mauve. She caught up with me near the floral gardens.

‘Rhiannon?’ she said, eyes wide. Breathless. Hopeful? ‘Oh my gosh!’

‘No,’ I said feebly, switching direction from where I intended to go – the Cookie Cart – to the car park at the back of the big church and the relative safety of my car. She blocked my escape.

‘I’ve been hoping every day I might bump into you. Can we talk?’

I switched to the river path. She followed me, kept trying to converse.

‘I’ve been coming to the Gazette offices for weeks, hoping to catch you—’

‘I don’t work there anymore.’

‘I want to talk. Please, give me five minutes.’

‘No. I bloody knew I couldn’t trust you. Bugger off.’

She didn’t get the hint. Her foamy soles stalked me like the opening chords of ‘Billie Jean’. ‘Hear me out. I promise it won’t take long.’

I had visions of her mounting my bonnet, such was the fervour in her voice, so eventually we sat on a bench in the floral gardens, looking for all the world like two colleagues having a dainty, cross-footed lunch on a summer’s day. Rather than what we were – rape victim and her heroic serial killer liberator, reminiscing about the night one lost her shit and killed two men to protect the other’s sorry ass.

‘I’ve been thinking about you constantly since that night.’

‘You make it sound like we had an affair.’ I looked around to see if anyone was listening in. The water cascaded over the little weir. Two pigeons were pecking at a discarded sausage roll under the opposite bench.

‘My husband thought I had.’

I afforded her a raise of eyebrow.

‘I was all fidgety and checking my phone for news updates in the days after. I was terrified someone had seen my car or seen us walking back from the quarry.’

‘Keep. Your. Voice. Down.’

‘I was in chaos, Rhiannon. I’d have these night terrors and relive the whole thing, waking up in a cold sweat. It affected my work, it was awful. Anyway Ben – my husband – confronted me about it and I told him.’

‘Oh great—’

‘No no, he was so grateful. He’s not going near the police, I promise. Why would he? He doesn’t owe those men justice. As far as he’s concerned, they got it. Police think those men are responsible for seven rapes along that same road where they took me. That night could have ended differently for me if you hadn’t been there. What I don’t understand is why you were there at all. Why your car was parked up. And how even in the pitch dark you knew your way across those fields.’

‘I grew up around there.’

‘Were you waiting for them?’

‘Yes,’ I said, without the slightest intonation. ‘You got in the way.’

The chestnut tree in the centre of the park had been hacked away by the council. I used to sit underneath it eating my lunch sometimes. It would shelter you from a sudden downpour or the hot sun. Now it looked like a huge hand reaching up to the sky with all its fingers sliced back to stumps.

Heather eyeballed me. ‘You enjoyed it, didn’t you? Killing them?’

I stared at the pulse in her neck, thumping away.

Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Did you kill the others as well? The ones your boyfriend—’

‘I don’t have to listen to this,’ I said, standing up.

‘No please don’t go,’ she said, standing up as well. ‘I’m sorry. Those others – from what I read they were bad people.’

It was my turn to eyeball her. She was wearing a mauve BodyCon dress and while she wasn’t fat, it was still far too tight for her. I could see her belly button. I could see the mole in her belly button. That’s just ridic.

‘What do you want? Money? Tough shit.’

‘I don’t want anything.’

‘You want to threaten me?’

‘Rhiannon I’ve represented rape victims for twenty years. I’ve seen the full impact rape has on a human being, both women and men. And their families. It’s worse still when they have to relive it in court. That could have been me and it wasn’t, thanks to you.’

‘What do you mean, “represented” them?’

‘I’m a solicitor. Ben is too. We practice—’

‘Yeah yeah, I don’t want your life story, thanks.’

‘I wanted to give you this and to say again, thank you. Even if you didn’t mean to, even if you enjoyed it – thank you.’ She handed me a business card with W&A embossed on one side, and a phone number and a tiny etching of a golden gondola on the other.

‘Wherryman and Armfield,’ I said.

‘Armfield passed away some years back so it’s just us Wherrymans now. We’re based in Bristol and Ben and I live locally with our boys. Sorry, I know you don’t want my life story. Call me, if you need anything. Anything at all. If I can’t help I can probably find someone who can.’

She got up and started walking away from me without another glance. Then without warning she stopped and turned around to face me. ‘I knew you’d done this before. I knew it that night.’

She looked like she was about to say something else but her mouth kept closing like a fish’s – scared to bring the words forth. And then they came.

‘Patrick Edward Fenton.’

‘Who?’ I said.

She started walking away, her scarf fluttering up on the breeze. ‘Last I heard, he was working in Sportz Madness in Torquay.’

‘Why would I care about this?’

‘He’s my one that got away.’

When she’d gone, I stared at the card. Keeping it was a link – to her, to that night, to the two dead men. I was about to post it into the bin at the side of the bench when a thought struck. Gift horses and all that.

Saturday, 4th August – 12 weeks, 6 days

1. The person who tries to draw a swastika on the fence outside the hospital but keeps getting the prongs the wrong way up.

2. Quorn manufacturers. Stop kidding yourself. It tastes nothing like it.

3. Sandra Huggins.

Had one of my dreams again – this time about the baby. I’m in a garden and in the centre is a deep pit and the baby’s at the bottom, naked and kicking and crying. I climb down inside but when I get to the bottom it’s gone, though I can still hear it crying. And I look up and standing at the edge of the pit is a woman holding a bundle. I can’t get out. And the shaft of light above me gets smaller and smaller. And I can’t scream because my mouth won’t open. What in the name of cock does that mean?

Jim and Elaine were out early at the hospital for Jim’s checkup, leaving me to feed Tink, a loud sing-a-long to Nicki Minaj in the shower, and a damn good wank. There being no decent dicks on the horizon, this is about as good as my sex life gets these days. There are three remote possibilities – a bin man who bears a passing resemblance to Ryan Reynolds, the blond guy in the dry cleaners who wears Iron Man socks, and what Elaine calls ‘The Element’, who sits on the war memorial in piss-stained joggers, drinking Diamond White and telling passers-by how Frank Sinatra stole his medals.

But for now, to the Masturbation Chamber it is.

It’s so much better when the olds are out. You try fudding yourself off with a silent vibe when your bedroom wall is cracker-thin and your mother-in-law’s practising her descant for ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ in the next room. Now that my sickness seems to have subsided, my other symptoms have come screaming into view. Horniness is one of them. Another is mood swings. Yeah, I know, I’m a psychopath, mood swings come with the territory, but these are more frequent – like Quasimodo on a bell rope.

Any given day I’ll start off Angry (e.g. gameshows), then veer into Sad (e.g. woman on TV with kid born without eyes) then I’m awash with Guilt (e.g. shouting at old man crossing the road/anxiety dream about AJ) then euphorically Happy (e.g. being in the garden or watching documentaries with Tink and Jim). This rotation sometimes only takes about twenty minutes.

Hungry for some junk, I took a little trip to the mini mart and then walked with Tink up to the Well House.

A tranquil, former fisherman’s cottage built in the 1700s and burnt down in the 1750s, it’s newly-thatched and white-washed, a little gravel path winds through the trees to the front door – painted blue with a brass knocker shaped like a knot of rope. Through the back garden gate there’s a patio right in the sun spot, with two chairs and a glass-topped table. The walls are thick granite and the ceilings are low and uneven. The floors are all worn flagstone downstairs and hardwood above and in the living room is an inglenook hearth with wood burner and a log basket. You can burn allsorts in there.

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