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

Six months on and I had used the time to reassess my life. Life is precious. Life can be taken as quickly as it can be given.

My daughter, Elle, is currently telling me she wants a car for her seventeenth birthday, which is in almost two weeks’ time.

I keep seeing that HGV and my insides do a somersault.

‘I’ll need driving lessons too. I can’t have a car just sitting there on the drive,’ she’s telling me.

I want to scream at her not to drive.

Ever.

It’s too dangerous and I just want to protect her. She’s my only child and what if it had been her in that crash? What if something like what happened to me, happens to her?

I grip hold of the tea towel I have been using to dry the dishes, and try to pull myself together. I’m being irrational. That’s what my Iain would say if he could hear what’s going on inside my head right now.

Because I’ve gone pale, quiet, she is now peering over her iPad, staring at me. I need to stall.

‘I don’t know, Elle, cars are expensive and—’

‘Dad said I could have lessons,’ she interrupts, anticipating my predictable response.

So much for a united unit, sharing the roller-coaster ride that is living with a teenager.

‘Well, Dad hasn’t discussed anything with me.’

‘Mum, I’m nearly seventeen.’

‘I never had a car at seventeen,’ I say, turning my back to her, busying myself with the drying up.

‘I need my independence.’

I turn to look at her. I know I’m biased, but my daughter is a beauty. She’s got long brown hair that brings out the colour of her bright-blue eyes. Her features are almost perfect and I know her classmates are envious because Elle’s blossomed early.

She’s looking at me now, eyebrow cocked, while playing with her necklace.

I stare at the pendant. It’s a green-enamel four-leaf clover. Iain and I got it for her sixteenth birthday. I remember thinking it was expensive at the time, but compared to a car . . .

Elle lets go of the pendant and gets up from her chair. Standing there in her skinny jeans and slouchy Nirvana top – which she’s only wearing because she thinks it’s fashionable, not because she thinks Kurt Cobain was a lyrical genius – she looks like she could pass for an adult already.

When did my daughter become so grown up?

She looks at me, hope in her eyes.

I’m about to speak but I hear Iain coming down the stairs. He comes into the room dressed in his usual work uniform.

‘How are my favourite girls?’ He comes over to me and, as he shoves dirty clothes into the washing machine, gives me a squeeze and plants a kiss on my cheek.

I immediately look to our daughter.

Iain frowns. ‘Have I just interrupted something?’

‘Mum says I can’t have a car for my birthday.’

I raise my eyebrows at him and he winces as he heads towards the coffee machine. ‘Elle, I didn’t promise anything,’ he says as he grabs a mug.

Elle’s face scrunches up. ‘Yeah, you did.’

He looks at me. ‘I really didn’t.’

‘Don’t lie,’ Elle says.

‘I said we would consider it.’

He says this to me, because apparently I need convincing. I hold my hands up. ‘You shouldn’t say anything without discussing it with me first.’

He looks sheepish.

‘Typical,’ Elle says under her breath, but loud enough for me to hear it. She busies herself with her iPad.

Iain watches my face and mouths a sorry. I face the sink. He is beside me again.

‘I didn’t think,’ he says in my ear and slips his arms around my waist.

‘You don’t think,’ I say. ‘That’s the problem.’

He frowns, eases his grip around me. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Nothing.’

He stares at me until I look at him. He gives a shake of his head. ‘Not in front of her . . .’ he says and goes to the television on the other worktop and flicks it on.

The silence is punctuated with the sound of a commercial and Iain sips his coffee as he flicks through the channels.

‘What’s happened now?’

I don’t bother to turn my head to see what he’s talking about

It’s then that I hear the sound of the twenty-four-hour news programme.

‘I think they’ve found them.’

I hear the concern in his voice and now I do turn to pay attention to the TV screen, feeling as if my blood has turned to ice in my veins at what I see.

Live footage of an isolated wasteland fills the screen.

It’s early May.

Usually you’d see signs that spring is arriving, but not here. What little grass there is dotted around has grown in straggly brown tufts.