As she crosses the bedroom to the window, arms wrapped around herself to keep out the cold, a blue light begins to pulse against her floral wallpaper, a neon wash that keeps time with her heartbeat.
With trembling fingers, she nudges the curtains apart, instinct warning her to be discreet.
On the road outside, there is a battalion of parked cars. A knot of figures in hats and gloves are gathered by her gate, their breath coming in smoky gasps. Television cameras. Lights. A babble of voices.
The urgent carousel of a police car’s beacon.
Catherine covers her mouth with her hand. She knows what this means and has prayed every night for more than twelve years – since that first, faint line on her pregnancy test – that it would not come to this. But the events of the last few days prove she’s been stupid to think otherwise.
She pulls on her jeans and a jumper and grabs the packed rucksack she keeps hidden in her wardrobe. Stumbles across the landing into Honor’s bedroom. The night light is on and she glimpses herself in her daughter’s mirror. Mousy hair, brown eyes, not overweight exactly, but a comfortable body. An ordinary thirty-one-year-old woman.
Forgettable.
The girl mumbles something unintelligible. A tear trickles down Catherine’s cheek. She presses her palm against her daughter’s face and feels something inside her break.
‘Wake up, Honor. We have to go now, sweetheart.’
Her daughter kicks out a restless foot and turns towards the wall. Catherine shakes her again, more forcibly this time. When Honor doesn’t react, she tugs at the duvet. ‘It’s time to leave. Come on, love. Get up.’
Mussed-up hair and screwed-up eyes. One pyjama trouser halfway up her leg. A yawn, and through that, a mumble. ‘What’s happening, Mum?’
Someone bangs on the front door.
Time slows. Catherine is aware of each catch of her breath and drum strike of her heart. Edward is awake now too. She can hear him, moving about in their bedroom. Every part of her longs to freeze this moment, to protect her girl from Before and After, and preserve the life she has made for herself and her family. The life she never expected to have.
But while she possesses a great many talents, she is not yet able to stop time.
In one minute and twenty-six seconds, Catherine Allen will be dead.
2
Three days earlier –
Monday, 10 December 2018
Catherine had never understood that song. She liked Mondays. To her, Mondays meant a new week, and every new week pulled her further from her past.
This Monday had begun in the way they usually did. Catherine had said goodbye to Edward, who was wearing a shirt she had ironed and carrying a leather satchel the right side of stylish. She watched him walk down the narrow lane towards the bus stop that would take him to the station. At the bend in the road, before he disappeared behind the conifers, he would always stop and wave. He had done this for the last twelve years, since Honor was born. But on this particular Monday morning he did not break his stride, but walked on, head bowed into the knifing wind.
Catherine lingered on the doorstep in case he changed his mind, but after a couple of minutes, she realized he wasn’t coming back. The sting of it surprised her. Even so, she boiled milk for porridge and pasted on a smile for her daughter, whose hair was still damp from the shower, resisting the urge to nag her to dry it before she walked the short distance to school in the winter chill.
Honor was quiet that Monday morning, mauve shadows beneath her eyes, rolling blueberries around her spoon but not eating them. Her mobile was on the table and the girl checked it obsessively. Once upon a time, she would have devoured her breakfast, chattering non-stop about the day ahead. Not now. She was changing, hardening, on the cusp of adolescence.
‘Looking forward to the Christmas holidays?’ Catherine smeared redcurrant jam on a croissant, eyes firmly on her plate. Honor did not enjoy scrutiny. It made her clam up.
She sensed rather than saw her daughter’s shrug.
‘I suppose so.’ The ghost of a grin, a flash of her old self. ‘No homework.’
Honor put down her spoon, leaned against the back of her chair and yawned for what felt like a long time. Catherine risked a glance. Her daughter had covered her mouth, but through the gaps between her fingers, her teeth were full of metal. It gave her the appearance of a snarling animal.
‘Tired, love?’ This was a sensitive subject, but the words were out of Catherine’s mouth before she could bite them back.
Another shrug, and a flick of her hair, but when Honor’s eyes met her mother’s, Catherine saw shame in them. ‘Did it happen again?’
‘’Fraid so, but I’m sure you’ll grow out of it soon.’ A concerted attempt at jollity. ‘We can make another appointment with the doc—’
In a burst of petulance, Honor shoved her hands against the edge of the table, cutting short her mother. Catherine’s coffee cup wobbled, but she buttoned down the urge to shout. Her daughter didn’t mean it. At twelve, embarrassment was a powerful driver of behaviour. As God was her witness, Catherine knew all about that.
She stood up and put an arm around Honor’s shoulder. ‘Is there something on your mind, love? You can talk to me about anything, you know. I promise I won’t get cross. The doctor said stress or worry can trigger—’
‘I’m fine.’ Her rebuttal was clipped and impatient. She shook off her mother’s concern and left the kitchen, breakfast uneaten.
Not for the first time, Catherine wondered if lying about her daughter’s nocturnal disturbances might make for a quieter life. But while Honor’s friends were still inviting her for sleepovers and Catherine was persuading her to decline, the girl deserved the facts.
Although she had lied about so many things, Catherine refused to airbrush the truth about what happened to Honor during the night. Protecting her daughter was her primary motivation. She’d been doing it since she was born.
Despite her claims to the contrary, Catherine knew Honor would rather die than risk exposing herself to ridicule by the alpha girls in her class, who were the head-tilting, shiny ponytailed, insincere types. Her mother didn’t blame her. Catherine had extensive experience of her own with girls like that.
Mostly, it began with the scratching. Honor would claw at her arms, dragging her nails down her skin, marking it with chalky tramlines that reddened into welts.
Catherine, a light sleeper, would catch the creak of Honor’s bed as her scratching intensified and she thrashed around, throwing out her arms and kicking against her covers.
Sometimes, Honor would scream, a primordial expression of fear that was dragged from a secret place inside her, a sound that belonged in the past, to long-dead ancestors clad in animal pelts, cornered by their nightmares while hunting in the dark.
Sometimes, she would whisper.
This whispering frightened Catherine more than the screaming. She would slip from her own bed and stumble down the hallway to her daughter’s room, unease crawling across the nape of her neck. She knew what she would find when she opened Honor’s door. The girl pressed into her pillows, blonde hair spread around her shoulders, eyes fixed on a distant corner of the wall.
While her mumbling was incoherent, her daughter’s body language was not. Arms stiffened into sticks, the cords of her neck pronounced above her collar bone, panic carved into the planes of her body.