“I can’t really remember the last time I saw him,” I tell her. “One day he was there, and the next day he wasn’t, and that’s how most people will always remember him.”
“But not you,” she says. “You remember him in a different way.”
The way I remember him is indeed different. The way I remember him is with a hole in the side of his skull that a claw hammer would fit nicely into. “I didn’t kill him,” I say, only I did kill him. He rejected me and I hit him with a hammer. People say you always remember your first—and people don’t get much right, but in this case it’s spot on. Ronald was my first—I remember him—I just don’t think about him.
“Are you sure?” she asks.
“Positive,” I say.
“He didn’t come on to you, and you rejected him by killing him?”
“Nothing like that happened at all,” I say.
“That’s a shame,” she says. Again it takes a few seconds for her words to sink in. They only just have when she carries on. “If you had, then we could have linked everything back to the events with your auntie. We could have shown it all started back then, and that what has happened to you since were results of that. People aren’t going to believe that you let twelve years slip by between the events of your auntie and killing your first person.”
It feels like a test, like she is baiting me to suddenly say that I do remember killing him.
“Joe?”
“Yes?”
“I think I have what I need,” she says.
“Already?”
“Yes,” she says, and she stands up.
“And?”
“And what?” she asks.
“What are you going to tell the courts?” I ask.
“I’ll spend the rest of the day going over my notes, Joe, and then I’ll talk to your lawyer.”
“So you believe me?”
She knocks on the door and turns toward me. “Like I said, Joe, I’ll talk to your lawyer,” she says, and then she is gone.
Chapter Forty-Seven
It’s a lazy Sunday. He used to have them with his wife most Sundays, really. Before they had Angela, while they were raising Angela, and they carried on the tradition after Angela moved out of the house. It’d always been their job as parents to prepare her for the world—to set her on a journey into the world—but for the last year he’s thought that that was a mistake. If they’d kept her closer she’d still be alive. If they’d encouraged her to stay at home. If they’d put a lock on her door and protected her.
Ultimately, Raphael knows no matter how you look at it, he let his daughter down. He let his family down. You can attack the argument from any angle, he’s heard it all before—but the proof is, as his mother used to say, in the pudding. Angela was dead. He had failed her. End of story.
The last two days have been good for him. Therapeutic. He’s been thinking that killing Joe Middleton will start a healing process. He doesn’t expect to be able to move on—how can you after what that maniac did to his daughter—but he can expect, perhaps, to start coping better. To live again. Maybe he can try to patch things up with his wife.
Most days since losing Angela have been lazy Sundays, and though he made some progress since Thursday night, he’s reverted back to what has become his normal self. He spent a few hours this morning in Angela’s room, staring at the newspaper articles pinned to the wall. Then he spent some time going through photo albums.
Lazy Sunday is progressing along nicely now. He’s sitting in the lounge and the sun has been and gone and he’s watching video footage of Angela’s twenty-first. She had moved out of the house the year earlier and was renting in town with two of her friends. The party was held in this house. It feels like a hundred years ago. He certainly looks a hundred years younger. He was happy back then. He’s not sure where the Red Rage is right now—buried somewhere, he guesses, beneath the alcohol and the depression, waiting for tomorrow to get on with the show.
He knows why he’s watching the video today. He knows the reason for the sadness. This is his last lazy Sunday. There’ll be no more flicking through photo albums and watching home movies. He knows the Red Rage will get the job done tomorrow. He has one bullet for Joe and one bullet for Melissa, and he has one bullet left over in case he misses—but he won’t miss. He’s on a mission—a movement—and he can’t fail.
It’s after the shooting where things get tricky. Even if he does manage to get away from the scene, he knows the police will come for him. Of course they will. They’re not stupid. Stupid enough, maybe, to have let Joe Middleton kill for as long as he did—but not stupid enough to not figure out tomorrow’s events.
Tomorrow may be therapeutic, but he’s kidding himself when he thinks it’s going to start a healing process. He’s kidding himself in thinking he can get back together with his wife. By the end of tomorrow he’s pretty sure he’s going to be in a prison cell, but he’s okay with that. He will have avenged his daughter and for that he’d be happy to go to jail for a thousand years.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Melissa is tired and excited and nervous. It’s not a good combination. It’s been a long day, albeit a good day, and she did manage to get some nap time a few hours ago. She’s been trying to relax since getting home after stashing the gun back in the office ceiling. Her house isn’t in the middle of nowhere, but her nearest neighbors are a two-minute walk away and she’s never seen them. It’s nice and private and she prepaid her rent the same way she prepaid her gardener. When she stopped being Natalie and became Melissa, she cleaned out her bank accounts. She has cleaned out bank accounts of others since then too. It’s how she survives.
The day has gone now, as has the heat, and what’s left is a cold winter evening of the type nobody in their right mind could enjoy. Her shoulder is hurting too from all of that gun use this morning and she wanted to pop some painkillers and anti-inflammatories, but decided against it.
She left the van she hired earlier parked in the driveway rather than putting it into the adjoining garage. She paid for the van in cash and used a fake ID and took out insurance on it not because she needed it, but because that’s what most people did, and she wanted to be considered part of the most-people culture.
The van is important.
She locks the house behind her and walks to the van, tightening her jacket around her. It takes two minutes for the van to warm up, by which point she’s tightened her jacket so much it’s almost strangling her. The windshield is frosted over. Everything is frosted over. It’s a still evening. No wind. No clouds. Cold, but perfect shooting conditions.
She turns on the wipers and tries to use the jets to spray water onto the windshield, but the jets are blocked. The wipers don’t help, they just swish back and forth over the thin ice. The heater warms up the windshield and then the wipers start tearing at the ice. A few minutes later she can see.
There are a few other cars around. Not many. She turns on the radio to break the monotony of the van engine. Like she knew there would be, a radio DJ is talking about the day’s events, and those that will follow tomorrow, and perhaps later this year. A body—most likely to be that of Detective Inspector Robert Calhoun—has been found. Found by a psychic, of all people. She finds that hard to believe. Impossible to believe, and wonders what the real truth is and suspects Joe may have played a hand in giving up the location. If so, for what? Something to do with the trial, no doubt.
“And of course tomorrow is the big day, ladies and gentlemen,” so the DJ tells her and anybody else who’s listening. “Tomorrow the trial of Joe Middleton begins. The Christchurch Carver. The man for whom the death penalty is being voted on.” She’s expecting the DJ to open up the lines to callers from around the country to give their views on the death penalty, but he doesn’t, not that that matters because she, like everybody else, has heard them all before. Everybody thinks that it’s a dividing issue, that you’re either strongly for it or strongly against it. She doesn’t care one way or the other.