When his screams stopped, I would feel no more than the stars did as they looked down on the scene. He had used your death for his own horrifying ends, and I had stolen the notebook because nothing of you – or Tiffany – should be left with that evil man.
I wasn’t sure what I’d do about the Clarkes yet. I disagreed with your dad. He always was a better person than me. You and he made me the happy person I was, but that had all been shattered. You see, I thought that Chloe should pay for what she had done to you. Maybe your death was an accident, a lashing out in a violent temper. I didn’t care. Chloe took your life; that was all that mattered. She extinguished the light of my life, and took you from me forever. Since that moment, darkness had spread across my soul like a storm cloud over the moon.
Dispensing justice might not bring you back, but it felt right.
I had years yet to make a plan. I would see what happened. Perhaps I’d feel differently when the baby arrived. For now, I stood beneath the full moon, listening to Glenn’s shouts get more desperate. I thought of how I had saved children from screaming by obliterating his life. In the distance the sea was rushing towards me. It was a long way off yet, but it came in faster than a person could walk. I couldn’t hang around to watch Glenn drown. Which was a shame, really.
*
I turned. Walked away towards the distant lights of the village as the wind roared its approval and tugged at my clothes. Or was it you, Beth? I swear I heard you whisper to me as I smiled.
‘I love you to bits and whole again.’
Epilogue
The cry for help is ragged and desperate, the voice hitching. There is no one to hear it.
A moon hangs so fat that it oozes an aura into the sky that almost blots out the stars surrounding it. It looks down on land as flat as an open palm, and as unforgiving as a clenched fist, and gives no answer to the screams of fear and rage that float up to it.
This is the wind’s playground. It races across the North Sea and hits the land full force. There is nothing to slow it; no hills, few trees or hedges here on land reclaimed from the water to create the marshes and fertile flats of Lincolnshire. It screams ecstatically, punching the handful of houses it comes across, revelling in its unfettered freedom as it rattles windows. On its journey it picks up the entreaties for help that are echoing into the sky. Hurls them across the landscape, as gleeful as a toddler with a toy.
‘Help me! Please! Help!’
There is no one to catch the words.
No one, except a lone figure, turning, walking away towards lights in the far-off distance.