Page 69 of The Trap by Catherine
Anyway.
Niamh and Shane’s house is on a few acres, with a long drive leading from the road up to the house. Cars were parked all along it, the spaces right outside the house long gone: exactly the situation I’d been hoping for. I pulled in behind the first car I came to and got everything out of the back seat. The cake and the flowers and the present. I hadn’t been consciously keeping the action out of the back seat that night, but boy was I glad I had. Losing them while assisting another motorist would’ve been difficult to explain.
Obviously, later, I started putting the women on the back seat, but by then the stuff their blood destroyed were mere props, disposable.
I don’t need to tell you that, though, do I?
I hope you’re still listening to me back there.
So, yeah. I went and joined the party. It was, needless to say, a strange night. I was dressed like Shane, for a start. And I was probably a bit hyper, throwing myself into the swing of the enforced fun much more than I would’ve normally. I hadn’t even wanted to go to this thing in the first place, but now it was where I was spending what I thought was going to be the very last night of my life. I acted accordingly. I wasn’t worried about the leaking corpse in the boot of my car because I told myself that that was tomorrow’s problem, and there wasn’t going to be enough tomorrow for it to become one. I’d be gone before it did.
Plus, there was alcohol.
If anyone at the party wondered how someone could’ve got stuck in the mud on a dry, cold night, or why my helping them out of it resulted in such a mess that I had to change everything down to my socks, they didn’t vocalize it.
And they were hardly going to conclude that it was because what I’d really done was kill a woman who was, at that very moment, fifty feet away, locked in the boot of my car, turning blue and stiff, now, were they?
The next morning, I woke to an alarm I’d set for 5:00 a.m. and then woke Amy briefly so I could tell her I was needed back at work, that there was some emergency on a very important project. I kissed her goodbye and told her I loved her and that she was the only good thing that had ever happened to me.
I wanted to say sorry for what I was about to do, for what I had already done, and that she deserved someone good, someone better, and that after all this was over I hoped she’d find him, but I couldn’t. Instead, I took some paper and a pen from Shane’s study, plus a bottle of whiskey from his bar cart.
The last thing I was going to do was write Amy a note.
I walked down the drive to my car in the pitch-black dark; I had to use my phone’s torch app to avoid twisting my ankle. The ground was wet—it had rained overnight. I drove back to the beach...
And I drove straight past it.
Because I didn’t want to die. Not yet. Not when I hadn’t even done the thing I wanted to do. Nearly killing a woman with a blow to the head and then having to finish the job by strangling her, outdoors, with all that blood, all that mess...
That wasn’tit.
That was just me being one of those idiots who trek to Base Camp so they can see a mountain. I hadn’t evenstartedtoward the summit. I’d barely got a glimpse of it through a break in the clouds.
I would do it right andthenI would end it, I decided. Soon. In the next few days. Before I got that knock on the door.
That particular clock was already ticking, surely.
But I couldn’t keep the body in the boot of the car all that time. Obviously. I needed somewhere to stash it.
Somewhere that would be safe, just for a few days.
As it happens, I had just the place.
You see, a few years ago, I’m sitting at my desk in work when, out of the blue, I get a phone call from an heir-hunter. Yes, anheir hunter. H-E-I-R. Yes, they’re a thing. He was trying to track down the last living relative of some woman in her nineties who had passed away ten months before, who he said was my maternal grandmother’s first cousin. I don’t have any contact with my family and haven’t for years, so this was news to me. I was having visions of having to clear her dusty crap out of some assisted-living facility and getting ready to deny that I was the guy he was looking for when he told me that I stood to inherit the deeds to a cottage in Wicklow.
Now, Amy and I had scraped together everything we had and borrowed more than we could afford to buy a claustrophobic, north-facing three-bed semi in Citywest just the year before. The mortgage payments were killing us financiallyandemotionally, because we didn’t even like the place. It certainly wasn’t our forever home. Suffice to say thata cottage in Wicklowgot my attention. In my head, we were already selling both properties to fund the purchase of a site and the building of our dream house when the guy on the phone said something like, “I’ll send you through some pictures via email but, trust me, the reality is worse.”
He wasn’t wrong. The “cottage” was actually four crumbling stone walls and a rotting roof, already derelict and well on its way to being condemned, with no electricity, heating system, or phone line. It sat on a tiny plot of level land on what was otherwise a steep incline, just about accessible in good weather via a dirt track and not at all in bad, miles from anywhere else, in the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains, within touching distance of the Dublin county line.
Once the paperwork went through I put it straight on the market as adevelopment opportunity, but it didn’t even get many views on the property website, let alone any inquiries. The agent said it would take a miracle to sell it. And even if Amy and I changed everything about our lives, future plans, and personalities and decided that we could live in a place like that, we didn’t have the money to make it liveable while also paying for an actual place to live, so all we could do was wait and hope that someone would, eventually, want it. But that morning, I was glad we’d never got as much as a sniff.
Because that’s where I went.
With her.
And my bloody clothes.
And to wash the car once they were all out of it. The only thing still working in that hellhole was the plumbing, luckily.
