Till We Meet Again

  For Susan, it was like watching a film in slow motion. They weren’t saying much, Reuben intent on rolling a joint, Zoë lying on her side, propped up on one elbow watching him.

  ‘Where do you reckon the old bat’s gone to then?’ Zoë asked suddenly. Susan knew she was referring to her.

  ‘Back to Bristol, I expect,’ Reuben replied.

  ‘I hope you don’t think I’m going to do the cleaning and the cooking,’ Zoë said petulantly. ‘That’s not my scene.’

  ‘You’re too beautiful for such menial tasks,’ he said, passing her the lighted joint. ‘I’ll get someone else in to do it.’

  ‘If it were me, I’d sell the place,’ she said, taking a deep draw and exhaling slowly. ‘Let’s face it, Reub, they’re a load of wankers, and with the money you got, we could live like royalty in Thailand.’

  ‘I’ve got a good little business going,’ he said defensively. ‘Besides, I love it here.’

  Well, I can’t promise I’ll stay with you then,’ she said with a toss of her hair. ‘It’s so remote. I like bars, clubs and shops.’

  Susan began to feel a little sorry for Reuben then, for she knew just how much he loved Wales. He wasn’t going to find happiness with Zoë after all. He would get punishment enough when she moved on, and Hill House collapsed around him. Perhaps she didn’t need to do it, she found herself thinking. Maybe she should just wait for him to get his natural justice.

  But she was stuck behind the bush. If she moved away they would hear her.

  Zoë seemed to mellow after the joint and more whisky. She lay back on the rug and remarked on the sun coming through the bare branches above. Then, without any prompting from Reuben, she unzipped her leather trousers and began wriggling out of them.

  ‘Give me some sexual healing, then,’ she said with a giggle. ‘A good hour of licking my fanny will do for starters.’

  Susan found herself blushing as Zoë peeled off a pair of black knickers, opened her legs wide and parted the lips of her vagina. She couldn’t believe that any woman could be so dirty and crude. It was worse than embarrassing, she found it deeply shaming. Liam had introduced her to oral sex, but it had taken her quite some time to overcome her shock that any man would want to do such a thing. She had come to love it eventually, for Liam was a persuasive and skilful lover. But even so, she could never bring herself to indulge in it in broad daylight, and she would certainly never have had the effrontery to demand it.

  Something else took her over entirely as Reuben knelt between Zoë’s knees and obliged all too willingly. Susan was squirming with embarrassment, yet rooted to the spot with horrified fascination. Reuben was slobbering over her, Susan could see his tongue running up and down the length of Zoë’s vagina, and after a short while he had to unzip his jeans to release his penis, which was rock-hard.

  Zoë was shouting out the most filthy things, she called him Daddy and urged him to finger-fuck her at the same time. It was disgusting, and Susan felt they were desecrating the beautiful glade where she had felt so happy and at peace. She watched in ever-increasing revulsion as Zoë got on to her knees, pushed Reuben down and then sat on his face, writhing herself into his mouth, at the same time massaging her own breasts.

  All at once, the full force of Susan’s anger came back, stronger than ever. She had lost her home, her friends and everything for the sake of this trollop. Incandescent with rage, she watched their indecent behaviour, incensed that Reuben had wanted that more than her loving support.

  ‘I’m coming in your mouth, Daddy,’ Zoë yelled out. ‘Do it harder, fuck me with your tongue.’

  Susan found herself almost robotic as she lifted the gun. Despite the shaking in her hand, she supported it calmly with her left hand and told herself to wait, for if she was to shoot now she would hit Zoë first and that might give Reuben time to get away.

  At last Zoë rolled off him, murmuring stuff about him being the world’s greatest lover, and Reuben leapt on to her, showering her face with kisses and telling her he had never loved anyone until he met her.

  It was when he leaned back on his haunches, holding on to Zoë’s hips as he thrust himself into her, that Susan fired at his back.

  Even when she missed and caught his side, only winging him, she remained unfazed. He seemed to jump, and the birds surprised up out of the trees rose squawking in protest.

  ‘What was that?’ Zoë exclaimed, presumably too dim to realize that what she’d heard was a gunshot.

  ‘I’ve been shot!’ Reuben gasped out, clutching at his bleeding side and trying to get off her.

  Zoë didn’t scream, only made a daft sort of gasping noise.

  At that point Susan stepped out from behind the bush, calmly took aim and fired again. She had the satisfaction of seeing Reuben mouth her name in shock just as the bullet hit him in the chest. A second later he slumped down on to Zoë.

  Zoë screamed then, and tried to wriggle out from under him. Susan took a step or two closer, just as Zoë had managed to push him off her. ‘It’s your turn now, you slag,’ Susan said.

  In that moment as she stood over Zoë, she understood completely why people used the expression ‘Revenge is sweet’. It was sweet to see Zoë’s blue eyes wide with horror and terror, all her confidence and smart retorts gone.

  ‘Yes, it’s the old bat,’ Susan said as she squeezed the trigger. ‘You will stay here forever with him now,’ she added maliciously as the bullet hit the girl in the chest. Zoë’s mouth opened to scream, but no sound came out, only a soft plop as she fell backwards on to the rug.

  Even though it was well over two years ago, Susan could still feel the satisfaction of that moment. The job was done. It was over. But that was the only emotion she felt, if it could be called that in her robotic state – no horror at what she’d done, not even a twinge of regret. It was as if someone else had done it and her role was only to check it out.

  She walked over to them and looked down at them coldly, the gun still in her hand. Zoë’s torso lay in one direction, Reuben’s in another, joined only by their entangled legs. Their eyes were wide open, a look of astonishment on both their faces. She could smell their genitals even over the cordite and blood. She was glad they were dead, she wasn’t even nervous someone might catch her before she could bury them.

  That strange calm stayed with her even as she dragged their bodies to their grave. She bundled in Zoë first, without ceremony, pushing her down as if she were just a side of meat.

  Reuben was much heavier. She had to wrap him in the blanket and pull him over the rough ground, and she was sweating profusely by the time she’d got him in on top of Zoë.

  When she went back to pick up Zoë’s leather trousers and knickers, and Reuben’s jeans, she found a bundle of £20 notes in one of his pockets. That made her smile. It was so like him to carry money around with him, he didn’t trust anyone at Hill House.

  There was over £300, not nearly as much as he’d taken from her, but it would help her put her life together again. She didn’t mind stamping down the soil over their bodies one bit. She even did a little dance as she swigged at their whisky.

  The silence in the darkness of the cell suddenly seemed menacing. She had grown used to the sounds of other people breathing, snoring and talking in their sleep. There was silence here in the hospital wing, and it was eerie, the way it used to be in her room at Belle Vue.

  She realized then that rather than getting her life back together after leaving Wales, it had fallen apart completely.

  Chapter nineteen

  Steven paused outside the prison gates before ringing the bell, looking up at the tall wire fence and the razor wire topping it. The sky beyond was almost black, threatening snow later. He shuddered. It looked so bleak and forbidding.

  It was Monday morning, and he expected that Susan would have got even less sleep than himself over the weekend. Yet he was glad she was well enough to resume the confession today, for the sooner it was done the sooner he might be able to regain some
sense of normality.

  He hadn’t telephoned Beth and he had purposely turned off his car phone this morning in case she tried to contact him. He thought it kinder to leave her in ignorance until the whole confession had been completed, rather than stringing it out over a weekend. As for what Susan had told Roy about her, he had concluded that was no business of his. He would leave Roy to decide how to tackle it.

  Anna had been impossible all weekend, crying, shouting at him and accusing him of not loving her enough. He supposed she had picked up on the fact that his mind had been elsewhere recently and it was making her feel insecure. It didn’t seem to occur to her that she had been making him feel insecure for most of their married life. Or that his job involved him looking after other people even more needy than her.

  He rang the prison bell and as he waited for an officer to come to open the gate for him he wished he had gone in for some branch of the law that wasn’t so exacting. Conveyancing was the one that sprang to mind.

  ‘Are you really feeling up to continuing today?’ Steven asked Susan once she was brought into the interview room.

  She was very pale, with dark circles beneath her eyes. Her hair needed washing and she’d pinned it back unflatteringly behind her ears.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ she said, but glancing at her hands he noticed she’d been biting her nails over the weekend.

  ‘The police will be here any minute,’ he said. ‘Is there anything you wish to discuss with me or ask before they get here?’

  She shook her head. ‘I just want to get it over with as quickly as possible,’ she said curtly.

  Longhurst and Bloom arrived within minutes, and Longhurst began by reminding Susan that on the previous Friday she had reached the point in her confession where she went up to the woods to wait for Reuben and Zoë to turn up there.

  Longhurst started the tape with the date, time and those present, then asked Susan if she would continue. She agreed she would.

  ‘Did you go up to the woods with the intention of killing Reuben Moreland and Zoë Fremantle?’ he asked first.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘I’ve told you that already. I put up the tent, got myself organized, then I began digging their grave.’

  ‘So it was entirely premeditated?’ Roy asked.

  ‘Of course it was,’ she snapped. ‘I wouldn’t camp out in a wood just for fun.’

  Roy was well used to being surprised and shocked in his job, but as Susan related how she spent the next five days digging the grave, deciding exactly where she would hide to wait for her victims, and keeping a watch on Hill House, he felt sickened.

  He could perfectly well understand her feeling murderous towards Reuben and Zoë. If she had gunned them down in the house while distraught, he might have been sympathetic. But the meticulous planning and the waiting put her crime into a different realm, one he found utterly repulsive. As she graphically described her preparations, the concealment of the tent and the grave-digging, he stopped seeing her as a short, dumpy woman on the wrong side of forty, but as a female Rambo on the loose, lurking behind trees waiting for her victims to come and make love in the glen so she could gun them down.

  It was only when she got to the point where the couple arrived in the glen and Zoë lay down on the blanket that she began to show some emotion. Her voice shook as she related the conversation she’d overheard.

  ‘I did have second thoughts then,’ she admitted. ‘You see, I sensed that Zoë would ditch Reuben if he didn’t sell the house and go gallivanting around the world with her. I even felt a bit sorry for him getting tangled up with her. But she started being so dirty with him, I got angry all over again.’

  ‘What do you mean by dirty?’ Roy asked.

  Susan blushed and couldn’t look at him. ‘I can’t say all that,’ she said. ‘She took her trousers off and she was showing herself to him and stuff.’

  Roy had a pretty good idea what she meant by this and decided he didn’t need the graphic details. ‘They were making love? And you were still behind the bush close by them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How close?’

  ‘About twelve feet away.’

  ‘Who did you shoot first?’

  ‘Reuben,’ she said. ‘But I only winged him in the side with the first shot. I suppose I was shaking. So I came out of the bush round in front of him and shot him again, through the chest. Then I shot her.’

  Roy had to make Susan explain with the aid of a diagram where she was, and the angle at which she fired all three shots.

  ‘Did Zoë try to get away after you’d fired the first shot?’ Roy asked.

  ‘No, I don’t think she knew what the sound was, she only tried to get away once I’d come out from behind the bush and shot Reuben the second time, but she was half trapped beneath him. I shot her straight after Reuben.’

  ‘Then what did you do?’

  ‘I dragged Zoë to the hole I’d dug first, put her in, then went back for Reuben. I had to wrap him in the blanket and pull that because he was so heavy.’

  There was complete silence for a moment, all three men looking stunned.

  ‘Then you buried them?’ Roy said, his voice cracking.

  ‘Yes.’

  He found it almost unbelievable that she’d stayed up in those woods for another two nights. That she’d been able to make herself something to eat and to sleep soundly only a few yards from the newly filled grave.

  ‘It must have been cold up there at night,’ he said. He wanted her to tell him she was sorry that she’d done it. Or say something that might prove she was mentally deranged. But she only smiled faintly.

  ‘I had the rest of their whisky. That kept the chill out, and besides, I needed to stay a while to make sure they were well covered. The hole I dug wasn’t very deep.’

  Once again Roy asked her if she’d draw a plan of where the bodies were buried, and once again Steven reminded her there was no obligation to do so.

  ‘I thought you wanted me to tell the whole truth?’ she said scornfully. ‘They’ve got the cake, they might as well have the icing too.’

  Like before, she drew a very clear map, showing the way she entered the glade, and marked the place where her victims had been making love, and where she hid to shoot them.

  She drew a small circle to the left of the glade. ‘You would have found the camping equipment here. But that wasn’t where I pitched camp, I moved it all before I left,’ she said, putting a larger circle on the far side of the glade, close to the cross which marked the grave. ‘That’s where I originally pitched it. If you push through the undergrowth about another twelve or fifteen feet on from there, you’ll come to a little spring. That’s where I got my water from.’

  ‘How much camping had you done before that time?’ Roy asked. It didn’t have any bearing on her statement, he was just curious.

  ‘None since I was a child,’ she said. ‘I used to go with my father for weekends of shooting when I was about eight, up till when I was ten. Usually around Tintern, he liked forests and the whole survival thing. He taught me to cook on an open fire, dig holes for rubbish and stuff. He did all that when he was in the army.’

  Roy remained silent for a few moments. ‘Why, Susan?’ he asked eventually. ‘Why did you have to kill them?’

  ‘Because they’d destroyed me,’ she said, but it sounded as if she were asking a question rather than stating what she believed.

  ‘But if you had just left, gone away and found a job, you could have rebuilt your life,’ he said.

  ‘Could I?’ she retorted. ‘With what? I had nothing left but their insults ringing in my ears, the humiliation burning inside me.’

  *

  Roy ended the interview then. He had all he needed, including the maps of where the bodies were. He got all those present to sign and date both the map and the tapes. He’d heard more than enough for one day.

  As Susan was led away down the corridor by a prison officer to her wing, the men went in the opposite direction
to leave, Sergeant Bloom some way ahead of Roy and Steven.

  Roy paused for a moment and leaned against a window-sill. ‘Were you satisfied at the way I conducted the interview?’ he asked, his dark eyes grave and troubled.

  ‘Perfectly,’ Steven said. ‘But then she gave it to you on a plate.’ He sighed and rubbed his hand over his eyes. He guessed Roy felt just as he did, stunned and drained. ‘That woman’s got more layers than an onion.’

  ‘Enough to make you wonder if there’s any more bodies anywhere,’ Roy said drily.

  Steven’s eyes widened, and Roy half smiled. ‘That was meant to be a joke, in poor taste, I admit. I suppose it’s to cover up how foolish I feel. I saw her as a weak little woman half mad with grief. But she’s a one-woman commando raid.’

  All at once Steven felt a surge of respect and real liking for this man. A great many policemen would be gloating at getting such a cut-and-dried result, in a tearing hurry to get back to the station to report on it. But Roy was too bright and compassionate not to sense that he had only really scratched the surface of what Susan had gone through mentally. She may have told them the facts about what she did, and when, but she hadn’t given them more than a glimpse of her emotional state.

  Looking at his watch, Steven saw it had just turned eleven. ‘Too early to offer you a beer or even lunch,’ he said regretfully.

  ‘I could murder a large scotch,’ Roy admitted. ‘I’d like to chat a while with you too. But I’ve got to get back with these tapes and start the procedure for the searches. Perhaps another time?’

  ‘I’ll have to update Beth too.’ Steven sighed. ‘This is going to knock her for six.’

  Roy reached out and grasped Steven’s forearm. He said nothing, but Steven knew it was intended as a gesture of friendship and understanding.

  ‘Beth’s another one with more layers than an onion,’ Steven said. ‘Help her unpeel them.’

  As it turned out, Steven didn’t get to see Beth until late in the afternoon. The threatened snow started during the drive back to the office, reducing the traffic to a crawl, and by the time he got there, she was at court for the afternoon with a client.