Текст книги "Mr. Mercedes"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

There are tract houses on the city’s North Side. They were built between Korea and Vietnam, which means they all look the same and they’re all turning to shit. Most still have plastic toys on the crabgrassy lawns, although it’s now full dark. Chez Hartsfield is at 49 Elm Street, where there are no elms and probably never were. It’s just that all the streets in this area of the city – known, reasonably enough, as Northfield – are named for trees.

Brady parks behind Ma’s rustbucket Honda, which needs a new exhaust system, new points, and new plugs. Not to mention an inspection sticker.

Let her take care of it, Brady thinks, but she won’t. He will. He’ll have to. The way he takes care of everything.

The way I took care of Frankie, he thinks. Back when the basement was just the basement instead of my control center.

Brady and Deborah Ann Hartsfield don’t talk about Frankie.

The door is locked. At least he’s taught her that much, although God knows it hasn’t been easy. She’s the kind of person who thinks okay solves all of life’s problems. Tell her Put the half-and-half back in the fridge after you use it, she says okay. Then you come home and there it sits on the counter, going sour. You say Please do a wash so I can have a clean uni for the ice cream truck tomorrow, she says okay. But when you poke your head into the laundry room, everything’s still there in the basket.

The cackle of the TV greets him. Something about an immunity challenge, so it’s Survivor. He has tried to tell her it’s all fake, a set-up. She says yes, okay, she knows, but she still never misses it.

‘I’m home, Ma!’

‘Hi, honey!’ Only a moderate slur, which is good for this hour of the evening. If I was her liver, Brady thinks, I’d jump out of her mouth some night while she’s snoring and run the fuck away.

He nonetheless feels that little flicker of anticipation as he goes into the living room, the flicker he hates. She’s sitting on the couch in the white silk robe he got her for Christmas, and he can see more white where it splits apart high up on her thighs. Her underwear. He refuses to think the word panties in connection with his mother, it’s too sexy, but it’s down there in his mind, just the same: a snake hiding in poison sumac. Also, he can see the small round shadows of her nipples. It’s not right that such things should turn him on – she’s pushing fifty, she’s starting to flab out around the middle, she’s his mother, for God’s sake – but …

But.

‘I brought pizza,’ he says, holding up the box and thinking, I already ate.

‘I already ate,’ she says. Probably she did. A few lettuce leaves and a teensy tub of yogurt. It’s how she keeps what’s left of her figure.

‘It’s your favorite,’ he says, thinking, You enjoy it, honey.

‘You enjoy it, sweetie,’ she says. She lifts her glass and takes a lady-like sip. Gulping comes later, after he’s gone to bed and she thinks he’s asleep. ‘Get yourself a Coke and come sit beside me.’ She pats the couch. Her robe opens a little more. White robe, white panties.

Underwear, he reminds himself. Underwear, that’s all, she’s my mother, she’s Ma, and when it’s your ma it’s just underwear.

She sees him looking and smiles. She does not adjust the robe. ‘The survivors are on Fiji this year.’ She frowns. ‘I think it’s Fiji. One of those islands, anyway. Come and watch with me.’

‘Nah, I guess I’ll go downstairs and work for a while.’

‘What project is this, honey?’

‘A new kind of router.’ She wouldn’t know a router from a grouter, so that’s safe enough.

‘One of these days you’ll invent something that will make us rich,’ she says. ‘I know you will. Then, goodbye electronics store. And goodbye to that ice cream truck.’ She looks at him with wide eyes that are only a little watery from the vodka. He doesn’t know how much she puts down in the course of an ordinary day, and counting empty bottles doesn’t work because she ditches them somewhere, but he knows her capacity is staggering.

‘Thanks,’ he says. Feeling flattered in spite of himself. Feeling other stuff, too. Very much in spite of himself.

‘Come give your Ma a kiss, honeyboy.’

He approaches the couch, careful not to look down the front of the gaping robe and trying to ignore that crawling sensation just below his belt buckle. She turns her face to one side, but when he bends to kiss her cheek, she turns back and presses her damp half-open mouth to his. He tastes booze and smells the perfume she always dabs behind her ears. She dabs it other places, as well.

She places a palm on the nape of his neck and ruffles his hair with the tips of her fingers, sending a shiver all the way down to the small of his back. She touches his upper lip with the tip of her tongue, just a flick, there and gone, then pulls back and gives him the wide-eyed starlet stare.

‘My honeyboy,’ she breathes, like the heroine of some romantic chick-flick – the kind where the men wave swords and the women wear low-cut dresses with their cakes pushed up into shimmery globes.

He pulls away hastily. She smiles at him, then looks back at the TV, where good-looking young people in bathing suits are running along a beach. He opens the pizza box with hands that are shaking slightly, takes out a slice, and drops it in her salad bowl.

‘Eat that,’ he says. ‘It’ll sop up the booze. Some of it.’

‘Don’t be mean to Mommy,’ she says, but with no rancor and certainly no hurt. She pulls her robe closed, doing it absently, already lost in the world of the survivors again, intent on discovering who will be voted off the island this week. ‘And don’t forget about my car, Brady. It needs a sticker.’

‘It needs a lot more than that,’ he says, and goes into the kitchen. He grabs a Coke from the fridge, then opens the door to the basement. He stands there in the dark for a moment, then speaks a single word: ‘Control.’ Below him, the fluorescents (he installed them himself, just as he remodeled the basement himself) flash on.

At the foot of the stairs, he thinks of Frankie. He almost always does when he stands in the place where Frankie died. The only time he didn’t think of Frankie was when he was preparing to make his run at City Center. During those weeks everything else left his mind, and what a relief that was.

Brady, Frankie said. His last word on Planet Earth. Gurgles and gasps didn’t count.

He puts his pizza and his soda on the worktable in the middle of the room, then goes into the closet-sized bathroom and drops trou. He won’t be able to eat, won’t be able to work on his new project (which is certainly not a router), he won’t be able to think, until he takes care of some urgent business.

In his letter to the fat ex-cop, he stated he was so sexually excited when he crashed into the job-seekers at City Center that he was wearing a condom. He further stated that he masturbates while reliving the event. If that were true, it would give a whole new meaning to the term autoerotic, but it isn’t. He lied a lot in that letter, each lie calculated to wind Hodges up a little more, and his bogus sex-fantasies weren’t the greatest of them.

He actually doesn’t have much interest in girls, and girls sense it. It’s probably why he gets along so well with Freddi Linklatter, his cyber-dyke colleague at Discount Electronix. For all Brady knows, she might think he’s gay. But he’s not gay, either. He’s largely a mystery to himself – an occluded front – but one thing he knows for sure: he’s not asexual, or not completely. He and his mother share a gothic rainbow of a secret, a thing not to be thought of unless it is absolutely necessary. When it does become necessary, it must be dealt with and put away again.

Ma, I see your panties, he thinks, and takes care of his business as fast as he can. There’s Vaseline in the medicine cabinet, but he doesn’t use it. He wants it to burn.

6

Back in his roomy basement workspace, Brady speaks another word. This one is chaos.

On the far side of the control room is a long shelf about three feet above the floor. Ranged along it are seven laptop computers with their darkened screens flipped up. There’s also a chair on casters, so he can roll rapidly from one to another. When Brady speaks the magic word, all seven come to life. The number 20 appears on each screen, then 19, then 18. If he allows this countdown to reach zero, a suicide program will kick in, scrubbing his hard discs clean and overwriting them with gibberish.

‘Darkness,’ he says, and the big countdown numbers disappear, replaced by desktop images that show scenes from The Wild Bunch, his favorite movie.

He tried apocalypse and Armageddon, much better start-up words in his opinion, full of ringing finality, but the word-recognition program has problems with them, and the last thing he wants is having to replace all his files because of a stupid glitch. Two-syllable words are safer. Not that there’s much on six of the seven computers. Number Three is the only one with what the fat ex-cop would call ‘incriminating information,’ but he likes to look at that awesome array of computing power, all lit up as it is now. It makes the basement room feel like a real command center.

Brady considers himself a creator as well as a destroyer, but knows that so far he hasn’t managed to create anything that will exactly set the world on fire, and he’s haunted by the possibility that he never will. That he has, at best, a second-rate creative mind.

Take the Rolla, for instance. That had come to him in a flash of inspiration one night when he’d been vacuuming the living room (like using the washing machine, such a chore is usually beneath his mother). He had sketched a device that looked like a footstool on bearings, with a motor and a short hose attachment on the underside. With the addition of a simple computer program, Brady reckoned the device could be designed to move around a room, vacuuming as it went. If it hit an obstacle – a chair, say, or a wall – it would turn on its own and start off in a new direction.

He had actually begun building a prototype when he saw a version of his Rolla trundling busily around the window display of an upscale appliance store downtown. The name was even similar; it was called a Roomba. Someone had beaten him to it, and that someone was probably making millions. It wasn’t fair, but what is? Life is a crap carnival with shit prizes.

He has blue-boxed the TVs in the house, which means Brady and his ma are getting not just basic cable but all the premium channels (including a few exotic add-ins like Al Jazeera) for free, and there’s not a damn thing Time Warner, Comcast, or XFINITY can do about it. He has hacked the DVD player so it will run not just American discs but those from every region of the world. It’s easy – three or four quick steps with the remote, plus a six-digit recognition code. Great in theory, but does it get used? Not at 49 Elm Street, it doesn’t. Ma won’t watch anything that isn’t spoon-fed to her by the four major networks, and Brady himself is mostly working one of his two jobs or down here in the control room, where he does his actual work.

The blue boxes are great, but they’re also illegal. For all he knows, the DVD hacks are illegal, too. Not to mention his Redbox and Netflix hacks. All his best ideas are illegal. Take Thing One and Thing Two.

Thing One had been on the passenger seat of Mrs Trelawney’s Mercedes when he left City Center on that foggy morning the previous April, with blood dripping from the bent grille and stippling the windshield. The idea came to him during the murky period three years ago, after he had decided to kill a whole bunch of people – what he then thought of as his terrorist run – but before he had decided just how, when, or where to do it. He had been full of ideas then, jittery, not sleeping much. In those days he always felt as though he had just swallowed a whole Thermos of black coffee laced with amphetamines.

Thing One was a modified TV remote with a microchip for a brain and a battery pack to boost its range … although the range was still pretty short. If you pointed it at a traffic light twenty or thirty yards away, you could change red to yellow with one tap, red to blinking yellow with two taps, and red to green with three.

Brady was delighted with it, and had used it several times (always while sitting parked in his old Subaru; the ice cream truck was far too conspicuous) at busy intersections. After several near misses, he had finally caused an actual accident. Just a fender-bender, but it had been fun to watch the two men arguing about whose fault it had been. For a while it had looked like they might actually come to blows.

Thing Two came shortly afterward, but it was Thing One that settled Brady on his target, because it radically upped the chances of a successful getaway. The distance between City Center and the abandoned warehouse he had picked as a dumping spot for Mrs Trelawney’s gray Mercedes was exactly 1.9 miles. There were eight traffic lights along the route he planned to take, and with his splendid gadget, he wouldn’t have to worry about any of them. But on that morning – Jesus Christ, wouldn’t you know it – every one of those lights had been green. Brady understood the early hour had something to do with it, but it was still infuriating.

If I hadn’t had it, he thinks as he goes to the closet at the far end of the basement, at least four of those lights would have been red. That’s the way my life works.

Thing Two was the only one of his gadgets that turned out to be an actual moneymaker. Not big money, but as everyone knew, money isn’t everything. Besides, without Thing Two there would have been no Mercedes. And with no Mercedes, no City Center Massacre.

Good old Thing Two.

A big Yale padlock hangs from the hasp of the closet door. Brady opens it with a key on his ring. The lights inside – more new fluorescents – are already on. The closet is small and made even smaller by the plain board shelves. On one of them are nine shoeboxes. Inside each box is a pound of homemade plastic explosive. Brady has tested some of this stuff at an abandoned gravel pit far out in the country, and it works just fine.

If I was over there in Afghanistan, he thinks, dressed in a head-rag and one of those funky bathrobes, I could have quite a career blowing up troop carriers.

On another shelf, in another shoebox, are five cell phones. They’re the disposable kind the Lowtown drug dealers call burners. The phones, available at fine drugstores and convenience stores everywhere, are Brady’s project for tonight. They have to be modified so that a single number will ring all of them, creating the proper spark needed to detonate the boom-clay in the shoeboxes at the same time. He hasn’t actually decided to use the plastic, but part of him wants to. Yes indeed. He told the fat ex-cop he has no urge to replicate his masterpiece, but that was another lie. A lot depends on the fat ex-cop himself. If he does what Brady wants – as Mrs Trelawney did what Brady wanted – he’s sure the urge will go away, at least for a while.

If not … well …

He grabs the box of phones, starts out of the closet, then pauses and looks back. On one of the other shelves is a quilted woodman’s vest from L.L.Bean. If Brady were really going out in the woods, a Medium would suit him fine – he’s slim – but this one is an XL. On the breast is a smile decal, the one wearing dark glasses and showing its teeth. The vest holds four more one-pound blocks of plastic explosive, two in the outside pockets, two in the slash pockets on the inside. The body of the vest bulges, because it’s filled with ball bearings (just like the ones in Hodges’s Happy Slapper). Brady slashed the lining to pour them in. It even crossed his mind to ask Ma to sew the slashes up, and that gave him a good laugh as he sealed them shut with duct tape.

My very own suicide vest, he thinks affectionately.

He won’t use it … probably won’t use it … but this idea also has a certain attraction. It would put an end to everything. No more Discount Electronix, no more Cyber Patrol calls to dig peanut butter or saltine crumbs out of some elderly idiot’s CPU, no more ice cream truck. Also no more crawling snakes in the back of his mind. Or under his belt buckle.

He imagines doing it at a rock concert; he knows Springsteen is going to play Lakefront Arena this June. Or how about the Fourth of July parade down Lake Street, the city’s main drag? Or maybe on opening day of the Summer Sidewalk Art Festival and Street Fair, which happens every year on the first Saturday in August. That would be good, except wouldn’t he look funny, wearing a quilted vest on a hot August afternoon?

True, but such things can always be worked out by the creative mind, he thinks, spreading the disposable phones on his worktable and beginning to remove the SIM cards. Besides, the suicide vest is just a whatdoyoucallit, doomsday scenario. It will probably never be used. Nice to have it handy, though.

Before going upstairs, he sits down at his Number Three, goes online, and and checks the Blue Umbrella. Nothing from the fat ex-cop.

Yet.

7

When Hodges uses the intercom outside Mrs Wharton’s Lake Avenue condo at ten the next morning, he’s wearing a suit for only the second or third time since he retired. It feels good to be in a suit again, even though it’s tight at the waist and under the arms. A man in a suit feels like a working man.

A woman’s voice comes from the speaker. ‘Yes?’

‘It’s Bill Hodges, ma’am. We spoke last night?’

‘So we did, and you’re right on time. It’s 19-C, Detective Hodges.’

He starts to tell her that he’s no longer a detective, but the door is buzzing and so he doesn’t bother. Besides, he told her he was retired when they talked on the phone.

Janelle Patterson is waiting for him at the door, just as her sister was on the day of the City Center Massacre, when Hodges and Pete Huntley came to interview her the first time. The resemblance between the two women is enough to give Hodges a powerful sense of déjà vu. But as he makes his way down the short hall from the elevator to the apartment doorway (trying to walk rather than lumber), he sees that the differences outweigh the similarities. Patterson has the same light blue eyes and high cheekbones, but where Olivia Trelawney’s mouth was tight and pinched, the lips often white with a combination of strain and irritation, Janelle Patterson’s seem, even in repose, ready to smile. Or to bestow a kiss. Her lips are shiny with wet-look gloss; they look good enough to eat. And no boatneck tops for this lady. She’s wearing a snug turtleneck that cradles a pair of perfectly round breasts. They are not big, those breasts, but as Hodges’s dear old father used to say, more than a handful is wasted. Is he looking at the work of good foundation garments or a post-divorce enhancement? Enhancement seems more likely to Hodges. Thanks to her sister, she can afford all the bodywork she wants.

She extends her hand and gives him a good no-nonsense shake. ‘Thank you for coming.’ As if it had been at her request.

‘Glad you could see me,’ he says, following her in.

That same kick-ass view of the lake smacks him in the face. He remembers it well, although they had only the one interview with Mrs T. here; all the others were either at the big house in Sugar Heights or at the station. She had gone into hysterics during one of those station visits, he remembers. Everybody is blaming me, she said. The suicide had come not much later, only a matter of weeks.

‘Would you like coffee, Detective? It’s Jamaican. Very tasty, I think.’

Hodges makes it a habit not to drink coffee in the middle of the morning, because doing so usually gives him savage acid reflux in spite of his Zantac. But he agrees.

He sits in one of the sling chairs by the wide living room window while he waits for her to come back from the kitchen. The day is warm and clear; on the lake, sailboats are zipping and curving like skaters. When she returns he stands up to take the silver tray she’s carrying, but Janelle smiles, shakes her head no, and sets it on the low coffee table with a graceful dip of her knees. Almost a curtsey.

Hodges has considered every possible twist and turn their conversation might take, but his forethought turns out to be irrelevant. It is as if, after carefully planning a seduction, the object of his desire has met him at the door in a shortie nightgown and fuck-me shoes.

‘I want to find out who drove my sister to suicide,’ she says as she pours their coffee into stout china mugs, ‘but I didn’t know how I should proceed. Your call was like a message from God. After our conversation, I think you’re the man for the job.’

Hodges is too dumbfounded to speak.

She offers him a mug. ‘If you want cream, you’ll have to pour it yourself. When it comes to additives, I take no responsibility.’

‘Black is fine.’

She smiles. Her teeth are either perfect or perfectly capped. ‘A man after my own heart.’

He sips, mostly to buy time, but the coffee is delicious. He clears his throat and says, ‘As I told you when we talked last night, Mrs Patterson, I’m no longer a police detective. On November twentieth of last year, I became just another private citizen. We need to have that up front.’

She regards him over the rim of her cup. Hodges wonders if the moist gloss on her lips leaves an imprint, or if lipstick technology has rendered that sort of thing obsolete. It’s a crazy thing to be wondering, but she’s a pretty lady. Also, he doesn’t get out much these days.

‘As far as I’m concerned,’ Janelle Patterson says, ‘there are only two words that matter in what you just said. One is private and the other is detective. I want to know who meddled with her, who toyed with her until she killed herself, and nobody in the police department cares. They’d like to catch the man who used her car to kill those people, oh yes, but about my sister – may I be vulgar? – they don’t give a shit.’

Hodges may be retired, but he still has his loyalties. ‘That isn’t necessarily true.’

‘I understand why you’d say that, Detective—’

‘Mister, please. Just Mr Hodges. Or Bill, if you like.’

‘Bill, then. And it is true. There’s a connection between those murders and my sister’s suicide, because the man who used the car is also the man who wrote the letter. And those other things. Those Blue Umbrella things.’

Easy, Hodges cautions himself. Don’t blow it.

‘What letter are we talking about, Mrs Patterson?’

‘Janey. If you’re Bill, I’m Janey. Wait here. I’ll show you.’

She gets up and leaves the room. Hodges’s heart is beating hard – much harder than when he took on the trolls beneath the underpass – but he still appreciates that the view of Janey Patterson going away is as good as the one from the front.

Easy, boy, he tells himself again, and sips more coffee. Philip Marlowe you ain’t. His mug is already half empty, and no acid. Not a trace of it. Miracle coffee, he thinks.

She comes back holding two pieces of paper by the corners and with an expression of distaste. ‘I found it when I was going through the papers in Ollie’s desk. Her lawyer, Mr Schron, was with me – she named him the executor of her will, so he had to be – but he was in the kitchen, getting himself a glass of water. He never saw this. I hid it.’ She says it matter-of-factly, with no shame or defiance. ‘I knew what it was right away. Because of that. The guy left one on the steering wheel of her car. I guess you could call it his calling-card.’

She taps the sunglasses-wearing smile-face partway down the first page of the letter. Hodges has already noted it. He has also noted the letter’s font, which he has identified from his own word processing program as American Typewriter.

‘When did you find it?’

She thinks back, calculating the passage of time. ‘I came for the funeral, which was near the end of November. I discovered that I was Ollie’s sole beneficiary when the will was read. That would have been the first week of December. I asked Mr Schron if we could put off the inventory of Ollie’s assets and possessions until January, because I had some business to take care of back in L.A. He agreed.’ She looks at Hodges, a level stare from blue eyes with a bright sparkle in them. ‘The business I had to take care of was divorcing my husband, who was – may I be vulgar again? – a philandering, coke-snorting asshole.’

Hodges has no desire to go down this sidetrack. ‘You returned to Sugar Heights in January?’

‘Yes.’

‘And found the letter then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have the police seen it?’ He knows the answer, January was over four months ago, but the question has to be asked.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I already told you! Because I don’t trust them!’ That bright sparkle in her eyes overspills as she begins to cry.

8

She asks if he will excuse her. Hodges tells her of course. She disappears, presumably to get control of herself and repair her face. Hodges picks up the letter and reads it, taking small sips of coffee as he does so. The coffee really is delicious. Now, if he just had a cookie or two to go with it …

Dear Olivia Trelawney,

I hope you will read this letter all the way to the end before throwing it away or burning it up. I know I don’t deserve your consideration, but I am begging for it just the same. You see, I am the man who stole your Mercedes and drove it into those people. Now I am burning like you might burn my letter, only with shame and remorse and sorrow.

Please, please, please give me a chance to explain! I can never have your forgiveness, that’s another thing I know, and I don’t expect it, but if I can only get you to understand, that would be enough. Will you give me that chance? Please? To the public I am a monster, to the TV news I am just another bloody story to sell commercials, to the police I am just another perk they want to catch and put in jail, but I am also a human being, just as you are. Here is my story.

I grew up in a physically and sexually abusive household. My stepfather was the first, and do you know what happened when my mother found out? She joined the fun! Have you stopped reading yet? I wouldn’t blame you, it’s disgusting, but I hope you have not, because I have to get this off my chest. I may not be ‘in the land of the living’ much longer, you see, but I cannot end my life without someone knowing WHY I did what I did. Not that I understand it completely myself, but perhaps you, as an ‘outsider,’ will.

Here was Mr Smiley-Face.

The sexual abuse went on until my stepfather died of a heart attack when I was 12. My mother said if I ever told, I would be blamed. She said if I showed the healed cigarette burns on my arms and legs and privates, she would tell people I did it myself. I was just a kid and I thought she was telling the truth. She also told me that if people did believe me, she would have to go to jail and I would be put in an orphan home (which was probably true).

I kept my mouth shut. Sometimes ‘the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t!’

I never grew very much and I was very thin because I was too nervous to eat and when I did I often threw up (bulimia). Hence and because of this, I was bullied at school. I also developed a bunch of nervous tics, such as picking at my clothes and pulling at my hair (sometimes pulling it out in bunches). This caused me to be laughed at, not just by the other kids but by teachers too.

Janey Patterson has returned and is once again sitting opposite him, drinking her coffee, but for the moment Hodges barely notices her. He’s thinking back to the four or five interviews he and Pete conducted with Mrs T. He’s remembering how she was always straightening the boatneck tops. Or tugging down her skirt. Or touching the corners of her pinched mouth, as if to remove a crumb of lipstick. Or winding a curl of hair around her finger and tugging at it. That too.

He goes back to the letter.

I was never a mean kid, Mrs Trelawney. I swear to you. I never tortured animals or beat up kids that were even smaller than I was. I was just a scurrying little mouse of a kid, trying to get through my childhood without being laughed at or humiliated, but at that I did not succeed.

I wanted to go to college, but I never did. You see, I ended up taking care of the woman who abused me! It’s almost funny, isn’t it? Ma had a stroke, possibly because of her drinking. Yes, she is also an alcoholic, or was when she could get to the store to buy her bottles. She can walk a little, but really not much. I have to help her to the toilet and clean her up after she ‘does her business.’ I work all day at a low-paying job (probably lucky to have a job at all in this economy, I know) and then come home and take care of her, because having a woman come in for a few hours on week-days is all I can afford. It is a bad and stupid life. I have no friends and no possibility of advancement where I work. If Society is a bee-hive, then I am just another drone.

Finally I began to get angry. I wanted to make someone pay. I wanted to strike back at the world and make the world know I was alive. Can you understand that? Have you ever felt like that? Most likely not as you are wealthy and probably have the best friends money can buy.

Following this zinger, there’s another of those sunglasses-wearing smile-faces, as if to say Just kidding.

One day it all got to be too much and I did what I did. I didn’t plan ahead …

The fuck you didn’t, Hodges thinks.

… and I thought the chances were at least 50-50 that I would get caught. I didn’t care. And I SURE didn’t know how it would haunt me afterward. I still relive the thuds that resulted from hitting them, and I still hear their screams. Then when I saw the news and found out I had even killed a baby, it really came home to me what a terrible thing I had done. I don’t know how I live with myself.

Mrs Trelawney, why oh why oh why did you leave your key in your ignition? If I had not seen that, walking one early morning because I could not sleep, none of this would have happened. If you hadn’t left your key in your ignition, that little baby and her mother would still be alive. I am not blaming you, I’m sure your mind was full of your own problems and anxieties, but I wish things had turned out different and if you had remembered to take your key they would have. I would not be burning in this hell of guilt and remorse.