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No Longer Safe(109)

By:A J Waines


The next day, the police took me back to the interview room and everything was more serious this time. It was no longer a friendly chat. I was very careful about what I said; I didn’t want to fall into a readymade trap.

They asked me about Stuart. Of course my DNA was on his body – I’d found him down there in the cellar in the dark. I’d held him and cradled him, because we were in love and about to embark on a wonderful journey together. No, I didn’t know he was there! No, I didn’t know how he died – except there was blood on his face and his head was caved in. Ask Karen, I said.

They brought in Exhibit A inside a plastic bag and asked if I recognised it. Yes, it was my pyjama top, but no – I had no idea how it got covered in Stuart’s blood. Karen, I said. It has to be her doing.

Then there was Exhibit B; did it belong to me. Yes, it was my camera; I’d taken shots of the mountains, the trees, the lake.

Later that day, I was taken back to the hospital and a different doctor came to see me, a police officer at her side. She asked about my headaches.

‘Quite bad, actually,’ I told her.

‘And how many sleeping tablets did you take?’

‘Just the odd one – and only since I’d been at the cottage, as a last resort. Nothing for anyone to worry about,’ I insisted.

Her questions went on and on. Had I been feeling unwell at any time? Had I taken any other medication? Didn’t I have some kind of seizure in the bathroom?

‘Yes, I’d had a little episode, but it was just a panic attack.’

I knew it. Karen had told them all my private, personal things and was making out I was some kind of deranged nutcase. But I kept my cool. I knew that once they probed deeper, the truth would come out and I’d be going home.

‘What about when you hit your head, did you black out?’

I remembered the clocks. Karen had told me it was only a second or two, I told her, when I thought it was more like twenty minutes. The doctor shared a knowing look with the police officer and I smiled, because I knew then that Karen was going to be in trouble for lying through her teeth.





Chapter 54




It was Alice’s camera that sealed it.

The night Charlie broke in, there was a photo of the open kitchen window, with the time logged at 2.45am. The police never worked out what that picture signified and only Alice’s fingerprints were on the camera, with a few partials from Nina, the woman she met by the loch. But I knew that it proved Alice was up and about that night.

She was the one who brought down the stool on the back of Charlie’s head. It must have been the last thing he was expecting!

Why Alice would have taken a picture of the spot where he broke in, I have no idea. She had no recollection of any of it, but then people do strange things when they’re sleepwalking.

I heard the noise of him falling in Alice’s room during the night and rushed in to see what had happened. She was back in bed by then, curled up like a baby.

That’s when I took the stool. I knew what I was doing. Alice would have freaked out if she’d known she’d killed him. She would have insisted on giving herself up and the police would have been crawling all over the place, getting in the way of my plan to steal the child. I couldn’t afford to let her mess things up.

It was better for her to think it was a freak accident at first. Then the possibility it could have been me – or even her – kept her on her toes. By then it was too late to alert the police – we’d handled the body, messed with a crime scene.

The police asked me to stay in the area for questioning, so while Alice was being interviewed, I picked up a local paper to find the latest news on the loch.

Charlie hadn’t been found and the police had called off the search. The first two dives brought up only a battered oil drum, a fishing seat and an old cast-iron meat mincer. As soon as Brody was discovered back at home, the police looked at other lines of enquiry – no one else had been reported missing so they didn’t know there was still a body in the water. They were looking for Charlie, but they thought he was on the run, they didn’t know he was dead.

None of the witnesses could be certain what had been dumped that night – there was evidence of a smashed-up boat, that’s all – assumed to be the work of drunken tourists.

Charlie was hidden for good.





Chapter 55




My world collapsed after that. I didn’t even get to see Stuart at the mortuary to say a proper goodbye. The police fired the same questions at me over and over: When had I last seen Stuart? Did I remember taking photographs at the cottage? They started talking again about my camera and fingerprints and sleepwalking and suddenly a psychiatrist was shining lights into my eyes.