‘The wind?’ asked Clay.

‘The water beneath the wind. The waters where the women went. The lost and lonely women with no faces. The water women. And, so, off she floats to nowhere.’

Norma Maguire looked at Clay and there was a new air about her: she looked like she had left a precious heirloom in a public bathroom and had just returned to find it gone.

‘What are you thinking, Norma?’ asked Clay.

‘I see it now. I see it all,’ said Norma Maguire, fixing her gaze on Clay. ‘I am lost, aren’t I?’

‘You’ve got a lot to face and much to go through in the next year. You need to take full responsibility for your part in the terrible crimes you’ve committed. This involves telling the truth.’

‘Where do you want me to start?’

‘Start at the beginning and don’t leave out anything,’ said Clay.

Norma Maguire nodded and whispered, ‘The truth, the brutal, ugly truth?’

‘Yes,’ said Clay.

‘Look at me!’

Clay looked at her and was convinced of one thing: if Death had a face, it would certainly look like the woman facing her.

‘My name is Norma Maguire and I am a killer.’ She smiled at Clay. ‘I have felt the urge to kill since I was three years old.’

A nostalgic smile formed on her face.

‘It was a compulsion I never tried to resist. Three years old, yes. What a happy summer’s day it was when I found a sparrow with a broken wing in my mother’s back garden.’

The rain picked up a gear and hammered the building.

‘I remember. I folded it in my little hands. I could see its eyes peeping between my fingers. I could feel its heart beating against the palms of my hands. I went looking for a stone.’

137

8.29 pm

‘I liked the way your hair used to be,’ said Philip. ‘Why did you change it to blonde?’

Over her son’s shoulder, Eve Clay caught sight of herself in the tall mirror in the hallway of her home. She looked at the blonde hair that hung down from the woollen hat she wore, concealing her bandages from her son.

‘Do you remember when you started putting gel on your hair, Philip? You were curious to see what you’d look like. It was a bit of that…’ She hugged him a little bit tighter. ‘But guess what? Don’t tell anyone. I did it to trick a baddie.’

‘Did it work?’

‘It helped, I think.’

Eve Clay realised that the last time she’d seen her son, she’d had her own natural colour, brunette.

Philip stepped out of the embrace and looked closely at his mother’s face and hair.

‘It is you. But it isn’t you, Mum.’

‘Don’t worry, Philip. When you wake up in the morning, I’ll have dyed it back to my own colour and be one hundred per cent me.’