‘Yeah. Go on then. Spell it out.’

‘I did it, OK?’ she said. ‘I did it. I killed Donny Maguire.’

163

Farmer was watching her face. His eyes were so calm, so honest. She loved his eyes. It hurt her to look at them so she looked instead at kids playing not twenty feet away with their mothers keeping an eye. The sun was shining and the birds were singing. Everything seemed so normal, but nothing was.

‘Well go on. What’s it like, sleeping with a murderess?’ she demanded angrily. ‘You suspected, didn’t you? And you were right. And I cut Baxter Graves to ribbons, don’t forget. Weren’t you scared?’

He didn’t answer that. He looked away from her, then back again.

‘Can you tell me now about the marks on your thighs? Those scars? I asked about them last night, but you said later. Well now’s later. So tell me.’

‘Donny Maguire did it,’ said Angel. She gulped down a shuddering breath. ‘He did it to my mother and then he did it to me when he got tired of her. He liked to hurt us when he had sex. When he raped us. Those marks are burns. And cuts.’

Farmer was silent, listening.

‘So I had to do it. In the end, there was nothing else I could do. I had to kill him.’

‘Tell me,’ said Farmer.

It was water bursting through a dam then. How Donny had treated her mother, wrecking her confidence, belittling her, scorning everything she did, everything she tried to do, until Dora became a drunken sorry shell of the woman she’d once been.

The kids played on, and Angel kept talking while Farmer sat there, elbows on knees, looking at the ground.

‘Then he used me as a weapon against her. I know he hated her. I know he had cause. But what he did to her was vile. And what he did to me was unbearable.’

‘Couldn’t you have got help somewhere? Your family?’ he asked, not looking up at her.

‘Mum fell out with them years ago and the rift never healed.’ Angel’s mouth twisted. ‘She went to the family home once, took me with her. They closed the door on her. I hated them for that.’

Farmer looked at her. ‘But you’re OK with them now.’

Angel sighed. ‘I met my cousin Tom at school. We got to be friends. Then his mother laid flowers on my mum’s grave, and her and my other aunt kept showing up at Tom’s flat when I moved in there with him, so eventually I thought, they’re my family. It all happened in the past, so maybe it was time to let it go.’

‘Tell me about the day of the fire. The truth this time, yeah?’ said Farmer.

Angel gulped and stared down at her trembling hands, clenched in her lap.

‘I stabbed him with some tailoring scissors when he tried to get me back into bed with him. I was sixteen years old. I was terrified. I know you’ll think that doesn’t justify murder. I know that. Then Lenny – my ex, we’re divorced now – showed up and he knew some people.’ She shot him a look. ‘They came and sorted things out.’