‘All this time, you knew what happened to Tim?’
I nod my head.
‘I can’t believe you didn’t say anything.’
‘I didn’t want to upset you,’ I reply, which is the honest answer. ‘I knew you would worry about what seeing such a thing might do to me.’
Mum doesn’t react well to that comment, almost laughing as she continues to fight back tears. I feel bad for seeing her like this, so I get up off the floor and go for the box of tissues on my dresser table, handing them to her before taking a seat on the bed beside her.
I can tell that she feels uncomfortable to be this close to me right now, but she doesn’t move away. Is she scared of me? I certainly hope not. I think she just needs time to process all of this.
‘I don’t blame you for what happened with Tim,’ I say, watching as she wipes her eyes. ‘I know you were just trying to protect me.’
I was only trying to make Mum feel better, but that last comment seems to have made her feel worse, and now she is really crying, sobbing hard and rendering the one tissue she has in her hand useless against the tide of so many tears.
‘Mum, it’s okay,’ I say, reaching out for her hand, but she pulls it away quickly, confirming my fears.
She is scared of me.
‘I don’t know who you are,’ she tells me in between sobs. ‘I don’t know what you’re capable of.’
The look in her eyes as she stares at me is one of genuine confusion, but I can’t blame her. I have given her a lot to take in over these last few minutes. Not only have I shocked her with the admission that I saw her kill Tim ten years ago, but I also admitted to killing Rupert. I’m sure she has gathered from that what happened tonight with Jimmy wasn’t just me acting in a way to protect us. It was a way of me getting to experience my favourite thing and the thing I’ve been fascinated with ever since I was seven years old and saw that dead body lying downstairs in the front room.
Murder.
Seeing Mum kill Tim when I was so young made an impression on how I developed as I continued to grow. I’m well aware that very few people are ever supposed to see such an act of violence as that one, let alone a seven-year-old girl who had just woken up and crept out of her bedroom to see what all the noise was about downstairs. The sight of all that blood pouring from Tim’s neck is almost as vivid to me today as it was all those years ago, and there has not been a night since when I haven’t gone to bed and thought about it over and over again. But it wasn’t just the shock of what I saw that kept the image replaying in my mind.
It was also the thrill of it.
The more time that went by, the more I longed to experience it again. I wanted to see somebody else die. I wanted to see that blood again. But this time, I wanted to be the one who made it happen.
It took ten years before I finally made a plan to act out my fantasy. Getting Rupert alone in that park was all done to ensure that I would get my chance to do what Mum had done to Tim all those years ago, although, in the interests of making it look like an accident, I couldn’t make it quite as bloody. Instead of a broken wine bottle through the neck, I came up with the idea of making it look like he had fallen and banged his head. In reality, I had beaten him to death with the bottle of vodka, which had proven surprisingly sturdy as I had bashed it against his skull over and over again until he had stopped fighting.
I know Rupert didn’t deserve to die, and unlike Mum, I hadn’t acted in such a violent manner to protect somebody else, but that didn’t mean it didn’t feel good. Taking a life had felt just how I had imagined it would.
Exhilarating. Breath-taking.
And terrifying.
As much as I would have loved to have been as composed as Mum was back when she killed Tim, who was able to hide the body and get on with her life as if nothing had happened, I wasn’t quite as capable as that in the moment. I panicked a little and started to worry that I was going to get caught and spend the rest of my young life in prison. That was why I decided to call Mum. Not only did I need her help, but I was already aware that she knew exactly what to do to make a problem like that one go away. If she could hide Tim’s body, then she could hide Rupert’s.
And so it proved.
Mum came to my rescue, selflessly and tirelessly working to ensure that Rupert’s death would not ruin my life just like Tim’s had not ruined hers. It also proved to me something that I already knew from that fateful night ten years ago, which was that Mum really would do anything to keep me out of danger.
I have never known the full story of why she killed Tim, although as I got older, I began to form a good idea. At the time Tim was around, I was too young and innocent to read anything into his behaviour towards me, but when I got older, I was able to look at it with a more experienced eye, and that’s when I realised that he was probably more interested in me than he was in my mum. The fact that he approached us in the supermarket, pretty much making a beeline for the first single mother
