Pretty Little Things: 2018’s most nail-biting serial killer thriller with an unbelievable twist

The woman’s thirty, for God’s sake.

It looks idiotic but I’m starting to think maybe there’s something more sinister here than I had first thought. Maybe the whole selfie-style idiocy is just a clever front?

I click on her name, and her profile fills the laptop screen.

Her profile has a few things that are public. Mostly it’s the same selfie shots (complete with the filters!) that fill the page but I look anyway and, after a few seconds, I see something of interest. A link to several local newspapers and another to an online petition.

The news articles are about the accident. Most of them will give all the details of Paul Selby, the man who caused this whole mess, the case coming up for trial. None of the articles will, I’m confident – no, I know – go into too much detail about me, but then there’s this link to the online petition.

I see the main headline displayed without the need to click to go to the actual page.

Install traffic cameras on the Linkway – Sign the petition now!

Oh, what a surprise.

So, the Linkway.

It’s the road where my car was all but destroyed and, despite being a main cut-through across the village, there are no cameras on that particular stretch of road.

Ruby Tate thinks this will help her boyfriend in court when he pleads not guilty to dangerous driving and use of a mobile while behind the wheel of a fuck-off-tonne HGV.

Yes, Ruby is Paul’s girlfriend and she’s launched a one-woman crusade to clear his name, despite the evidence stacked against him.

I cast my eye over the comments under the link. A few people have just written ‘Signed!’ but one or two comments are attacking me. I click away from Ruby’s page, the harsh words lingering in my head.

I pull my reading glasses off my face and rub my eyes, forgetting I still have my makeup on; I look at my fingers, see smears of mascara, and curse under my breath.

I look up when I hear Elle tut at me.

She gives me a half-smile. I hope this is a truce without any words needing to be spoken. What few memories of Elle as a little girl I do still have flood my mind.

There is vagueness surrounding the half-terms and the long, six-week breaks in summer, but despite the lack of something solid for me to latch on to, I know I was rarely around for her, even then. It makes me feel enormously sad and regretful.

The memories I do have when I did manage to take a break from work, I can barely remember.

The accident, the head injury, it’s taken a lot of precious memories. They should mostly return to me, but that doesn’t stop the feeling of sadness when I look back at photographs and can’t recall the emotion that should be attached to them.

Elle’s first birthday is patchy. Her first day at nursery is but fragments of random parts of that day. I remember her first Christmas well but the rest is still fragmented. I can remember the week leading up to the accident reasonably well, although there are gaps. These gaps are the one thing my solicitor is a bit worried about, but still, there is time yet for all the memories to come back before this goes to court.

Elle hands me a tissue for my fingers.

‘Thanks,’ I say, as I wipe mascara off my fingertips. I feel her eyes on me, though, and when I do finally look at her, I see something’s bothering her. ‘You OK? I’m so sorry for today.’

She looks like she’s choosing her words carefully before speaking them.

‘It shook me up, I can’t lie,’ she says. ‘No one likes walking that path beside the Linkway.’

This crushes me.

I reach out and take her hand. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’ve done this to us.’

‘It’s not your fault. I know that, but you worry me.’

‘I can’t help how I feel, Elle.’

‘I know, and I know some of it is to be expected, but I do wish you’d trust me more. I can make my own decisions.’

I remove my hand from hers.

‘You’ve made it hard for me, for your father. After the accident—’

‘I know what I did then, but I was stupid. I wasn’t thinking straight. I didn’t know what to do or say around you. I didn’t want anything to set you back but you were acting weird and Dad was . . . well, you know?’

I wince inwardly. I think about the box of pills in our bedroom.

It’s these ripple effects that no one really ever talks about or prepares you for.

It’s times like this that I want to tell Elle all about my brother, Miles. Then maybe she’ll see why, before my accident, I was so scared to really bond with her, really connect like a mother should do. Since my accident I’ve gone out of my way to change this.

I look at her, really take her in. She looks uncomfortable. ‘Look, I know you’re under a lot of stress. Dad, too, with the business . . .’

She shuts up when I frown.

Has Iain really been talking to our daughter about money problems? If so, why not come to me?

‘I’m sorry, Mum, about earlier. I was angry, but that’s not what’s really bothering me.’

I look at her fully in the face and see the child she still is, looking back at me.

This almost vulnerable side of Elle, most people never see. True, she can be a nightmare, packed full of hormones and thinking she has the weight of the world on her shoulders, but there’s another side to her and I know she loves me, even if she does like to portray me as the enemy, and her father as the saviour.

‘Mum, I know the real reason Jason stayed with me until you came back home.’

I let her words sink in, trying not to give too much away. It pains me that something like this is worming its way into our little nucleus.

‘I saw the note left on the door. I didn’t read any of it. I pretended not to see it when Dad took it off the door and tried to hide it, but I knew it must be to do with the acc—’ She breaks off abruptly. ‘I mean, what happened.’

One thing Elle never likes to do is remind me of the collision. As if the face staring back at me when I look in the mirror each day isn’t reminder enough.

‘It’s nothing,’ I say, and replace my glasses on my face and look at the laptop screen again.

‘Mum, you really should take it to the police. They can warn her off. There are laws to stop this.’

That throws me. Elle’s not as naïve as she likes to make out sometimes.

‘It’s nothing, really.’ I smile. I’m not sure if I speak these words to convince her, or myself.

‘Mum, I know Dad won’t say this to you directly, because he doesn’t want to upset you, but—’