The Stepson: A psychological thriller with a twist you won't see coming(11)

Liam turned out to be a natural.

Duncan started coming in every day for his lunch to check on his progress.

And then, one red-letter day, Duncan asked Maggie out to a fancy hotel for dinner to thank her for all her help with Liam. They had a lovely meal, and she soon forgot that she was showing him up with her common ways. They laughed and laughed. They drank a fair bit, of course, which helped. And then, walking her back to her flat, Duncan started crying and muttering about Kathleen.

She hugged him.

He kissed her.

And then he started crying again.

‘How can I be feeling the way I do about you, when Kathleen . . . when Kathleen . . .’ And it all came pouring out. That he’d been attracted to Maggie from the start, from when she’d been in the programme. ‘Little Miss Prickles.’ He admitted that he’d enjoyed her company so much that he used to dread the time she’d leave the programme. ‘We just clicked, didn’t we? We had so much fun. I felt I’d known you all my life.’

Maggie couldn’t believe it. It was like she’d just stepped out of her real life and into her wildest dream.

But she knew she should go slow. She told him it was too soon. He was still grieving for Kathleen. Aye, she had feelings for him too, and aye, she agreed that they’d ‘clicked’ all those years ago – in fact, she’d had a massive crush on him – but they should just stay friends, for now at least.

The sexual tension this embargo had produced had been incredible.

A month, he’d held out. A long, frustrating, electric month of ‘accidental’ touching, as she handed him his coffee or his change. She’d reeled him in good and proper.

And now look!

She knew it was going to be fine. She knew Duncan Clyde loved her, maybe even more than he’d loved Kathleen.

She kicked off her shoes and pulled up the duvet and sighed as she sank onto the comfy mattress, lying on her side as she had to now. There was a window right opposite with a view across the lawn and the fields to the hill that she had to stop thinking of as Billy McLetchie. It was pure dead gorgeous. Everything here was gorgeous. Even the window was a posh old wooden one with four panes in it, framing this view of the bonnie Scottish Borders countryside.

Maggie shut her eyes, sinking into sleep, breathing in the cool, clean, fresh country air.

For the first time in her life, she had a real home and a real family.

For the first time in her life, she felt safe.





3





Lulu - May 2019





The blood was like threads, threads that thickened into string, into rope, coiling through the bath water, coiling over the doughy, pale grey skin of the person who lay there, on his side, his back turned towards her so she couldn’t see his face.

Lulu was clutching the door handle.

She couldn’t let go the door handle.

It was a strange room, gloomy and dingy with peeling paint and a grubby floor, but the bath in the centre was the bath from Braemar Station, the big cream enamel bath with the chip in the side where her brothers had hit it once with a cricket ball.

She needed to get to him, but she was caught in a thick, heavy inertia, as if the air around her wasn’t gas but solid, and there was nothing she could do, she couldn’t get to him and she couldn’t stop what was happening.

He flopped over, and she saw his face.

It was Dad.

And then light was searing through her eyelids and she was awake, all of a sudden, awake and weeping, staring at the bright wall of glass opposite the bed.

The blinds were rolling up and music was blaring from the integrated sound system.

‘Close to You’ by the Carpenters.

Thank God, thank God, thank God, it was a dream!

She closed her eyes.

That had been hellish. Even worse than usual.

Every night, as soon as she closed her eyes, her brain seemed to take this as a cue to go back over her clients’ traumas, but not with Lulu as an objective observer. Oh, no. Lulu was her clients, as she imagined the events they’d experienced happening to herself. And when she eventually managed to drop off, this often bled into her dreams.

She felt like she’d only just fallen asleep, but it must be 7:30 already. Instead of an alarm, Nick set a different track to come on for her each morning. But she didn’t feel ready to face the day. As Nick had slept like a baby through the night, she had lain awake for hours, battling against the urge to take a zolpidem. On the advice of the private doctor Nick had insisted she see, she was trying to wean herself off her prescription sleeping pills. She was currently allowed one tablet every three nights, and this hadn’t been one of those blissful occasions. She’d grabbed her phone at intervals to chart the progress of her wakefulness – ten to one, quarter past two, half past three, four o’clock.

That meant she’d had a maximum of three and a half hours’ sleep.

Not enough. She knew that wasn’t enough to get her through the day in anything like decent shape. Her head ached already. But at least tonight was a pill night – not that she generally felt any better when she woke after taking one, her head muzzy and stupid, her mouth dry and sticky, her bowels rebelling. There was no easy answer, it seemed, to what the doctor had referred to as the ‘chronic anxiety-related insomnia’ caused by the stressful nature of her work. Nick had pounced on that, of course, as yet another reason why she should give it up and do something else.