Page 70 of The Trap by Catherine
That was the day I discovered the cellar.
I went there the next time too. And the time after that.
It’s where we’re going now, but you probably figured that out already, didn’t you?
Why didn’t I stop? Well, it’s simple really. That first woman... No one seemed to care that she was gone, let alone where to or who with. I saw one little article online about her being a missing person and then nothing at all after that.
No one came for me.
And that was despite me leaving her phone at the scene with God knows what on it, although maybe she hadn’t had a chance to plug any address in yet at all, and when it rained that night perhaps it had washed away the blood or whatever, but there was still my massive fuck-up.
You see, the strap of her bag was still around her shoulder when I buried her up at the cottage, and stupid me assumed that everything that had beeninsidethe bag still was. Then, one morning, Amy’s had a big clear-out and we’re taking bags of stuff off to the clothing bank, and I’m folding down the back seats to make more room in the boot, which involves lifting up a flooring panel, and what do I see?
Stuck down the side, right in the corner: keys and a purse and a card and a bra.
Herkeys and purse and card and bra, the one I bloody killed her with,bloodybeing the operative word.
Honestly, I nearly shit myself.
Amy had come out of the house. She was only a few steps away. I had one second, maybe two, to decide what to do. I reached in, opened one of the handbags Amy was donating and swept all the items inside it. Later, after we’d arrived at the clothing bank, I found a second to hide the most troublesome item inside one of the bag’s zippered pockets. Then I shoved the bag down the chute myself, pushing until it disappeared into the darkness, making sure there was no way anyone else could come along and pull it back out.
The signs said that all donations went to a central location to be sorted into recycling, charity, resellers, and whatever else. I just had to hope that bag would end up in a recycling plant somewhere, lost for ever.
Whatever happened to it, no one came for me.
So I did it again.
That next onewasmissed, from the get-go. The attention was insane. I didn’t know what the difference was, but it was nothing like the first one. I had been far more careful, but this one’s face was all over the news. I figured I’d do it one more time, soon, because surely now timewasrunning out.
And she turned out to be a right pain in the arse. Not even worth it, to be honest with you. Eventually she became so unmanageable that I took her out of the cottage, threw her back in my boot, and drove off, higher into the mountains. I was going to take her out in the most desolate place I could find to show her there was no point in resisting, that there was nowhere else for her to go and no one had any idea where she was, and the only other option was death so, you know, thank your lucky stars and all that.
But then the stupid bitch only went and escaped.
Yeah, I did not know there was a fuckingglow-in-the-darkemergency release button in my boot that opened it from the inside. We have idiotic children and their litigious parents to blame for that. It’s been a safety feature for something like twenty years, it turns out.
So now I’m thinking,Well, that’s it. It’s over. My time has come.I tell myself one night to clean up everything at the house and one more night with Amy, and then I’ll finally do the deed, but then I turn on the radio and what do I hear? The bitch has been run over. She got out of my car and ran right into the path of another. And shedied, taking care of the problem she’d caused me all by herself.
I mean, you couldn’t make it up.
But I was a little freaked out by the whole thing. It was all headline news now, all the time, impossible to ignore.
I was, as the mob guys say on TV, starting to feel the heat.
So I packed up my gear, turned my back on the mountain, and started the long trek out of Base Camp. My mountaineering days were over. The memories of what it felt like to stand on the summit would have to sustain me.
And then came you.
Just when I thought I couldn’t get any luckier.
Because I’ve been absolutely haunted, haven’t I? In the Cork sense. When we say that, we mean exceptionally lucky. As in,I was haunted the flight was delayed by two hours because the second I got to the airport, I realized I’d left my passport at home. I used to think everyone in Ireland said it until I went to college and got the complete piss taken out of me.
Anyway.
I hope you’ve enjoyed our conversation, because we’re here.
Welcome, finally, to the Pink House.
The trees were hiding the moon and its light from her, but the stretch of sky she could see was a blanket of twinkly stars. There was no breeze, but the air was gloriously cooler and a little damp. She held her breath and listened but couldn’t hear anything that didn’t belong to the night.
