And it was definitely not my fault that same freelancer sold the details of my private conversation to a rival newspaper, who used it in their diary column.
The publicist shouted at me for five minutes and is now refusing to speak to anyone at our paper. That is my fault, apparently, and the potato-face story is my punishment.
Not that I expect anything more. Colin, the news editor, has never warmed to me. He’s that type. His eyes glaze over when I speak. Every time I suggest an idea, he sucks his teeth and says, ‘No, Brinley. That won’t work for our readers.’ I can’t decide if it’s because I’m younger than him, overweight or a woman. Probably all three.
Anyway, I was in the office, and had just typed this Pulitzer Prize-winning line:
An Elvis fan has made a spud-tacular discovery during her weekly shop.
My desk is midway down the newsroom and tucked out of sight of Colin. This might sound like a boring and irrelevant detail, but it’s not. Because my desk is next to a television.
Sky News runs on a permanent loop with the sound turned down, so I don’t hear it at first. But when I take a break to relieve the tedium of potato-based puns and buy a coffee from the canteen, a headline catches my eye.
HILLTOP HOUSE MURDERS
I stand completely still. The words blur. I blink and refocus. A ticker is running along the bottom of the screen and I follow its progress.
EXCLUSIVE: DO CHILDREN WHO KILL DESERVE OUR FORGIVENESS? SHANNON CARTER GIVES FIRST TV INTERVIEW TO MARK 21ST ANNIVERSARY OF ‘ANGEL OF DEATH’ MURDERS
A woman’s face fills the screen.
My blood pressure drops. A swoop of dizziness loosens my knees and pricks at my skin, and I can’t breathe. I can’t do anything except watch the way her mouth moves and the fluttering of her hands in her lap.
‘Budge out of the way,’ says Lawrie Hudson, the chief reporter, coming up behind me. ‘Boss wants an exclusive on this.’ He reaches for the remote control and turns up the volume.
It’s been twenty-one years since I’ve seen Shannon Carter. Seven thousand, nine hundred and five days since she was led by the police from Hilltop House in blood-stiffened pyjamas, a rusty streak across her cheekbone, white-blonde hair matted with clots.
An angel touched by death.
Dr Richard Carter and his wife, Pamela. Asleep in their bedroom. Stabbed fourteen times with a pair of scissors in a frenzied and brutal attack by their daughter.
Their bedroom had white curtains and white wallpaper. It had wardrobes with sliding glass doors and artex swirls across the ceiling. A sheepskin rug and a lava lamp.
I had played hide-and-seek in that bedroom. I had teetered around in Mrs Carter’s too-big high heels and fur coat when I was ten. I had sat at the dressing table, patting powder on my face and spraying perfume on my wrists.
I knew that bedroom – that house – as well as my own. Because I had lived next door to them since Shannon was born, and their killer was my friend.
You’re probably going to ignore this. Don’t worry, I understand. Please don’t feel bad. After all, I’m just a stranger on the internet. My mother always told me not to talk to strangers. I expect yours is the same.
Perhaps it will make things easier if I tell you a little about myself. Then we won’t be strangers anymore. My favourite flowers are daffodils, my favourite season, spring. Music, the smell of rain on warm tarmac, the buzz of the city, the peace of the countryside, I love them all.
You don’t have to reply, of course. You probably won’t. But I’ve got the oddest feeling this could be the beginning of something important for us both.
4
Catherine ran her blistered thumb under the cold tap, but already the skin was puckering and filling with fluid.
A fragment of memory pierced her. Her mother, leaning against their kitchen sink, the sound of water drumming against stainless steel. Christmas Day, 1996. The last Christmas.
Giggly on her third peach schnapps and lemonade, Pamela Carter had been taking the turkey out of the oven when she lost her balance in her new fluffy mules, tipping scalding fat over her forearm.
Catherine’s older sister Shannon had screamed, alerting their father. Richard, in shirt and tie, had sworn at the sight of his Christmas dinner on the kitchen floor. Even though he was a doctor, he had, as punishment, refused to dress the wound. The blister had been yellow and oozy and left a scar.
Catherine pressed down on her own blister to dispel the image of her mother. Permed hair and lipstick. Foundation that left orange streaks across her neck. Circles of blusher that reminded her of a clown.
She did not want to think about Pamela or Richard or Shannon. Why on earth had her sister agreed to be interviewed by those documentary makers? Had she not considered the effect on Catherine of any of this?
It was an unspoken pact, but both sisters had always shied away from the limelight, the heat of media scrutiny. Deliberately dragging their tragedy back into the headlines was self-flagellation of the worst kind.
Once upon a time, she had loved Shannon with everything she had. Catherine had been the calm, capable one while Shannon, although eighteen months older, was fragile and sensitive, the more childlike of the two.
It was Catherine who’d stood up to their father when he’d forced Shannon to eat her dinner from a dog bowl, receiving a slap across the face for insubordination.
When they had scratched one of Dr Carter’s records by accidentally dragging the stylus across the vinyl, it was Catherine who’d scrubbed the bathroom tiles with her toothbrush, shouldering her sister’s share of the punishment as well as her own while Shannon had wept in the corner.
When Shannon had crept into her sister’s bed for comfort, it was Catherine who had rubbed her back, wiped away her tears and dreamed up grandiose plans for their escape.
She hadn’t seen Shannon since the last day of the court hearing, a bitterly cold afternoon in December 1997. Catherine had been wearing her school uniform, and couldn’t remember much about that time except the constant fidgeting and the look of remorse on her older sister’s face when the guilty verdict was returned.
Her memories of family life before the murders had become faded, like a blanket that had been washed over and over again until the colour had disappeared and the edges were frayed, no scrap of comfort left in its thin folds. She had her own family now. That was enough.
Catherine turned off the tap. Her thumb stung, a physical pain rather than low-level anxiety, her constant companion. She welcomed the distraction.
From the kitchen window, she could see her back garden. The snow had covered the grass and the roof of the summerhouse, and was falling steadily. If it carried on at this rate, there would be a couple of inches by lunchtime. She wondered if they would close Honor’s school. It didn’t take much these days.
The telephone in the hallway began to ring. A brusque sound, it startled her. Nobody used the landline these days except cold callers. She had meant to cancel it but had never got round to it.
‘Hello?’
‘Mrs Allen?’
‘Yes, that’s me.’
‘I’m calling from the office at Sweetwood.’
She recognized the voice. How strange that a moment ago she was thinking of Honor’s school, and here was one of the receptionists, Mrs Samuels, on the other end of the line.