Page 87 of The Psychopath Next Door

We found Fiona and Rose in the kitchen, playing chess.

‘Everything been okay?’ Emma asked, her voice clipped.

Fiona looked up from the board. Half the pieces had been taken, the endgame approaching. ‘Yep. It’s all been quiet, hasn’t it, Rose?’

Our daughter didn’t remove her eyes from the game. ‘Uh-huh.’ She moved her knight and sat back.

I couldn’t stop staring at them. It was such a wholesome scene. The babysitter and my daughter quietly playing chess in the kitchen. Was I going crazy, imagining everything? Was I completely wrong to worry about Fiona? Creating problems that didn’t exist?

I should dismiss my fears as paranoia, I thought. I should definitely dismiss the drunken ranting of my most unpleasant neighbour who’d called Fiona a ‘psycho’.

Except I couldn’t. And, apart from making Emma think there was something going on between me and Fiona, Tommy had actually given me an idea.

‘I’m going to bed,’ Emma said, not looking at me as she left the room.

Fiona raised an eyebrow. ‘Trouble in paradise?’

I kept calm, smiled, said, ‘No, everything is fine. Who’s winning?’

Fiona and Rose exchanged a glance that, for some reason I couldn’t understand, sent a shiver along my spine.

‘We both are,’ Fiona replied.

31

One in the morning. Fiona watched from her upstairs window as the taxi pulled up outside Iris’s house. It was an electric vehicle, almost silent as it glided to a halt beneath a lamp post. Fiona could see the driver in the cabin, reading something on his phone while he waited for his fare to emerge.

After five minutes, when she hadn’t appeared, he got out of the car and knocked on the door. Waited some more, then knocked again. Looked at his watch and stood back, peering up at the house, hands on his hips. A shake of the head, then he stomped back to the taxi.

Drove away.

He would let his controller know that the fare hadn’t been at home. This kind of thing must happen all the time. They’d assume she’d decided to drive herself or take an Uber, forgetting to cancel.

At the airport, when the plane was being prepared for take-off, perhaps someone would notice a passenger hadn’t checked in – but that must happen all the time too.

It would only be eight hours later, when the plane landed and Iris didn’t appear, that anyone would notice she was missing. Fiona didn’t know who Iris had been intending to visit in Canada. A sibling? A son or daughter? Old friends? Whoever it was, they would try to phone her, text her. They might check with the airline to askif she’d showed up. Then, when Iris never got back to them, they would call the police.

By then, Fiona would have disposed of the vinyl records she had taken from the house – the ones Rose had seen her dad describe as valuable. She would have got rid of the jewellery too: the wedding ring she had yanked from Iris’s finger; the diamond earrings and necklaces and other expensive rings she’d found in the old woman’s bedroom. She’d have burned the Canadian dollars.

A burglary gone wrong. That’s what it would look like. A burglar disturbed by the homeowner, panicking, grabbing a heavy brass candlestick from the mantelpiece and smacking the poor woman over the head.

That had been the messy bit. Fiona hadn’t hit her hard enough to kill her instantly. Instead, Iris had gone down on her knees. She had pleaded with Rose to help her, unable to understand why the girl was just standing there, expressionless, as Fiona hit her again, and again, until understanding anything was beyond her. Fiona was annoyed with herself for getting blood spatters on her clothes and hands. She’d had to get changed, but she didn’t think Emma or Ethan had noticed when they got home. She was annoyed because there was blood on her new trainers too. All of it would have to be destroyed, and the candlestick would have to be dumped with the other stuff.

A lot of work, and something that brought the police uncomfortably close to Fiona’s door, but she hadn’t had much choice, had she?

It turned out Iris had known Dinah. Not at the time Fiona had lived with her, but years before. When Fiona and Maisie were arrested and the story was in the papers, Iris had paid particular attention because she had once served on a charity committee with the victim. She had looked at the photos of the perpetrators,finding it hard to believe that someone as young and pretty as Fiona could be guilty of something so heinous.

‘You look different now,’ she had said, as Fiona stood before her in the hallway of her house. ‘You’ve changed your surname too, haven’t you? But your eyes. You can’t change your eyes.’

Patrick had said something similar, and Fiona had made a mental note to do something about it. Contact lenses, maybe. Or spending more time practising, gazing into the mirror. Perfecting her lifetime’s effort to pass for normal.

Afterwards, she and Rose had strolled back across the road. If anyone had spotted them, Fiona would say they had gone to see the old woman to wish her a good trip. No one would suspect a twelve-year-old girl of being involved. She was like armour.

This was what it was going to be like from now on, at least until Rose grew up – and Fiona had plenty of time to figure out what would happen then.

It was so easy.

Fiona had deposited the items she’d taken from Iris’s here, in her spare room, got changed, then gone back to the Doves’ house, where Rose had asked if she wanted a game of chess.

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