part0037

SHE COULDN’T BREATHE. Throat dry, chest tight. Heart thumping so hard it made her head throb, fighting desperately to control the panic that threatened to overwhelm her. She felt as if she was in a cheap pine box at the bottom of an open grave. Lid nailed down tight, no light penetrating, the only sound the regular thump of dirt landing on the wood an inch above her nose.

She was back in the dark of Robert Garfield’s kitchen. Waiting for her vision to acclimatize while somewhere in the distance a door banged in the wind. She’d just sent Curtis Banks, the petty thief and burglar who’d let her into the house, on his way. He was up to something. She should never have sent him away with the words I don’t want you seeing anything you might regret . She might as well have said stick around to watch the fireworks . It couldn’t be helped. But if he thought he was going to use any of what he’d seen happen tonight, he was in for a very unpleasant surprise.

Banishing all thoughts of him from her mind, she stood stock still, concentrated on the house around her. Banks better have watched it for the last twenty-four hours as she’d told him to do, not snuck off to the nearest bar instead. Again, he’d regret it if he had.

She padded silently across the kitchen. If she stayed standing still too long she’d come to her senses, turn around and get the hell out of there before it was too late. Before she did something she might regret herself, forget about Banks.

She searched the ground floor rooms quickly and efficiently. As quickly and efficiently as anyone can when they don’t know what they’re looking for. When they’re only doing it to be doing something , anything , to stop their mind from driving them crazy. Whatever it was that she had no idea what she was looking for, she didn’t find it.

One corner of the living room had been made into a small home office. There was a cheap desk and office chair but no computer. She was sitting in the chair now, having just finished searching the desk. Swiveling gently back and forth, the movement comforting, calming her.

Was there any point in searching upstairs? Would he be so stupid as to leave something incriminating lying around? Or not even incriminating, just something to go with the name Liverman. The name that ran through her mind constantly like the words to a song that you hate but can’t stop singing in your head.

It wasn’t the words to a song in her head that told her that she had no choice other than to search upstairs as well. It was the nagging head voices that would never give her a moment’s peace if she gave up now.

She jerked herself violently out of the chair. The cheap piece of junk flew across the floor behind her, banged into the table at the side of the sofa. Cheap and lightweight it might have been, flexing as you sat in it, but it still had enough weight to topple the lamp that stood on the table. She watched it fall. Slowly. Gracefully. Like the leaning tower of Pisa had finally given up its long fight with gravity. In the quiet of the room, it sounded to her as if that ancient tower had just fallen on the roof.

It sounded like a low groan. Like a person in pain. Or was it just the creak of timbers in an old house? She strained her ears, breathing suspended in a chest that was as tight as if the falling tower had landed on her. If anybody was up there, they’d have to shout to make themselves heard over the pounding of her blood in her ears.

Deep and comforting, slowing the racing of her heart. She waited a couple of minutes longer, heard nothing more. Do it. Now. She crept silently across the room, out into the hallway, made her way to the bottom of the stairs.

Felt his fear flowing down the stairs to embrace her. She looked up. Saw Robert Garfield staring back at her, his face frozen in horror. Dressed in a sweat-stained T-shirt and boxer shorts that looked as if he’d soiled himself in them, he was a pathetic sight with his little pot belly and his hairless spindly legs that were so pale they almost glowed in the dark.

His mouth opened but nothing came out, his eyes wide with terror. In his shaking hand he held a bucket. An old-fashioned metal one with a wooden grip on the handle. The sort of thing that arty people use to plant flowers in, to brighten up a drab corner.

He didn’t wait for her to make a move towards him, to start climbing the stairs. He heaved the bucket and its foul contents at her.

Standing at the bottom of the stairs she watched it fly through the air almost as if it were in slow motion. Even as the bucket turned in the air, all the clues came together in her mind before it unleashed its filthy load.

Nobody entering or leaving in the past twenty-four hours. The unclean smell pervading the whole house. Garfield’s sweat-stained T-shirt and dirty boxers. His pallor even allowing for his terror. And the bucket. Letting loose its load now. A shower of vomit and bile raining down on her head before she had a chance to move. Splashing her face. Soaking into her hair. Running down her cheeks and her nose and behind her ears and in her eyes. Seeking out every open pore to fill to overflowing with the still-warm, foul-smelling mess.

She bit back a surprised yelp, kept her mouth tightly shut. Thank God for small mercies. Then the bucket hit her full in the face. Sent her staggering backwards into the wall behind her, the rough edge of the lip opening up a shallow cut on her cheek. Without thinking she clawed at her face, tried to clear the sour filth from her eyes and ears, stop it from running down her neck.

She hooked one of the earrings Evan had given her with her fingernail, ripped it out, never even noticed in her desperate panic to clean herself. Swiping and slapping at her skin as if a swarm of angry bees were attacking her, wishing it was nothing more than bees or hornets or any of the other creatures God himself regrets creating and not the excreta of this deviant man’s body.

Above her at the top of the stairs that deviant man exploded into movement, turned tail and dived back into his bedroom. The door slammed with a crash that shook her whole body. As if even the house itself were mocking her futile attempts to creep around.

It was as if the rancid contents of the bucket had achieved their aim, had permeated her skin and flesh, leached into her blood, poisoning it, filling her with a madness that was beyond controlling by rational thought. She kicked the bucket angrily away, did nothing more than hurt her toe, then started up the stairs. The whole house seemed to shake as she stomped up them, ignoring the spatters of sick that lined the wall.

She felt a mean satisfaction deep in the pit of her belly as she pictured Garfield cowering behind the door. As if that would protect him, don’t make me laugh. So she stomped harder and more deliberately with every step, tried not to think about the sight or smell of his boxer shorts when she kicked the door in.

She stood in front of the closed door. Breathed deeply. Not to calm herself. Why would she want to be calm? No, to infuse her body, her muscles, with extra oxygen, feel them swell and respond as she prepared herself physically and mentally for what was to come next.

A pitiful wailing sound came from behind the door. She’d never heard a sound so sweet. You can shove your dawn chorus or the crash of the waves on a shingle beach where the sun don’t shine. And it sure as hell wasn’t shining in Kate Guillory’s heart.

‘And what do you do when they say it? Do you leave them alone? Or do you put your filthy fucking hands all over them?’

She almost laughed. He didn’t know what he was offering. Because all she wanted in this world was the feel of his scrawny neck in her fingers as she squeezed the worthless life out of him until his eyes popped and his body spat out the last of the filth inside him.

So consumed was she by the red mist that had descended on her, she was blind to what was staring her in the face. Because she was never going to find a piece of paper or a computer file labeled Mr Liverman’s contact details . The only place information like that existed was in the mind of the pervert behind the door.

But she couldn’t see it. So she shoulder charged the door. Burst it wide open, banging hard against the wall behind it.

It made a hell of a noise. What did she care? She should have cared. Cared a lot. Because behind the splintering of wood and the crash as the door hit the wall, another door opened quietly downstairs. The back door. And neither of them heard it.

She stood in the doorway like a Viking queen surveying the last survivor of her merciless raid, the smell that greeted her like a charnel house. And it wasn’t the vanquished king who cowered before her, but the lowliest knave. Garfield huddled in the far corner of the room, squatting, back against the wall, arms around his head. An incessant jumble of words and meaningless sounds spewed out of his mouth, a mixture of crying and pleading and begging and offers of anything she might desire.

She felt again the hood over her head because it was that time of night after all. Only this time she was wide awake. Or was she? Tears of anger pricked at the back of her eyes as she remembered how she’d bitten her tongue in two, tasted now the blood in her mouth, rather than give in to her own body’s desire to beg and plead. She’d taken the worst they could give without a sound to compete with their noisy grunts and the heavy slap of fists against flesh. Not once had she cried out or whimpered through swollen lips and loosened teeth.

She took a step into the room and it seemed a smaller space, her righteous anger filling every inch of it. With his head buried between his knees Garfield felt her presence looming over him. Like the Angel of Death come to claim him, for what purpose God or the Devil only knew.

With his butt almost on the floor and his knees up in front of him, she could see his boxer shorts stretched tight over his body. As she looked a dark stain appeared and spread out from between his legs, growing rapidly. Then urine dripped through the sodden fabric, soaked into the carpet.

In that moment she felt sick to her core. Not with Garfield. With herself. A self-loathing so all-encompassing she felt words form on her lips, a plea for him to forgive her. But the words didn’t come because she was beyond words, beyond anything other than the shame of what he had brought out in her.

Tried to ignore his pitiful crying as it followed her down the stairs. She stepped carefully over the pool of vomit that lay at the bottom, surprised there was so much of it. She’d have sworn every last drop had landed on her head. She looked away, didn’t see the glint of a gold earring half submerged amongst the semi-digested food.

As she made her way towards the kitchen and the back door and the fresh air beyond, a different smell seemed to assault her senses. A remembered smell. One she didn’t want to remember. Like unwashed teeth and stale ashtray. She paused. Sniffed. No, it was nothing. Just the remnants of what Garfield had thrown over her still clinging to her skin. It would still be clinging to her every night when she closed her eyes and prayed for sleep.