Page 55 of The Trap by Catherine
And I do meansmashing. I can still hear the crack.
The skin on her forehead parted like the Red Sea, and her eyes went all funny—and then therewasa red sea, gushing blood, coming out of her hairline and down her face and on to her clothes and on to my clothes and the car and the ground and me and I looked at her and I looked down at me—at my hands, specifically—and all I could think was,What? What? What?andhechose that precise moment to abandon me.
AndIpanicked.
Like, full-on body shakes. My chest got so tight I thought I was having a heart attack. Asking myself,What the fuck have you done? What the fuck did you do that for? What the hell were you thinking?over and over and over, wishing I could just snap my fingers or blink a couple of times or wake up from whatever kind of nightmare this was and it would all just go away.
Maybe I was even doing it out loud, I don’t know.
But it was real, and it couldn’t be undone.
She slumped to the ground like a bag of broken things, landing across my feet, and while I stood there in a sticky puddle of blood that I could feel more than see—the headlights were on but, because I’d closed the door after me, that was the only illumination in an otherwise black night—a light suddenly appeared in the dark.
A square of amber glow, filtered through curtains.
There was a house directly across the road, behind the trees.
I’d stopped right in front of it.
I didn’t think. I didn’t consider my options. I just hooked my arms under hers—the blood was warm, sticky,viscous—and dragged her to the rear of the car. The woman couldn’t have weighed more than eight stone and yet when it came time to get her up off the ground and into the boot, she felt like she weighed at least three times that.
I just didn’t have the strength. I couldn’t lift her.
In the house, the glass panel above the front door lit up too.
Had she screamed, I wondered? HadI??? Could that person have heard us? I had to get out of there, and fast.I turned her around so that she was facing the open boot and—somehow—lifted her high enough so that her head and shoulders were over the lip of it and then, before she could slip back down again, I got her arms in there too, and that seemed to tip the balance, so then I was able to pick up her feet and lift her, push her,fold herinto the boot and get it closed.
I think that’s when her arm got broken.
Another light came on, this one outside now, illuminating the house’s front door like a single spotlight on the stage of a pitch-black theatre.
I got back into the car. I was freezing but also sweating and shaking and I couldn’t manage more than a shallow, panting breath. My body was pure adrenaline; I thought I could actually smell the overflow coming out of my pores. My hands were so tight on the wheel, my fingers burned. I put my foot down and took off, tires squealing. I drove for...
You know what? I really don’t know.
I’ve no idea where that spot actually was. It could’ve been five minutes, it could’ve been half an hour that I was driving in a straight line, on what felt like the same, endless ribbon of road.
With blood everywhere and a dead or nearly dead woman in the boot.
I was a murderer, or about to be, and I was definitely going to get caught. Whoever was in the house would’ve come out, seen the blood, and called the Gardaí. They were probably there now, already collecting all the evidence I’d left behind that would point to my identity. Tire tracks. Boot prints. Hairs, maybe.
Her phone.
It had been in her hand but not afterward, not when I was getting her into the boot, which meant it was on the ground.
With theaddress of Niamh’s houseentered into the map app.
Possibly.
Had she actually had a chance to enter it? I couldn’t remember.
I was, not to put too fine a point on it, completely and utterly fucked—but the certainty of it, the utter inevitability of that... You know something? It focuses the mind. Resigned to my fate, I was suddenly overcome with a frightening calm.
And I knew exactly what to do next.
Why am I telling you all this? Well, because you asked. I know, I know, you probably weren’t expecting quite this level of detail, but I haven’t had the opportunity to tell anyone any of this before, ever, and, to be honest, it feels good to talk.
And it’s safe to tell you, since you won’t have the chance to repeat it to anyone else.
