In his Queen Anne home, Ralph Rafferty was getting nervous. He’d barely been able to sleep – had ended up getting up at cock’s crow. Nothing was going the way he’d planned. He pushed his chair out from the table where he had been sitting with a coffee, and slid his leather-soled slipper from his bony foot. Heading back to the master bedroom, he attempted and failed to land a savage thwack on his golden retriever. The dog snapped at him.
It couldn’t be helped, Rafferty thought as he stripped the duvet from his sleeping wife. He held her by her shoulder to get better purchase as he beat her, smacking the slipper over her back and down the length of her as hard as he could. She muffled her screams in the duvet she’d pulled up to her mouth. They had been long enough married for her to know that she should be a good girl and take it. That it was over more quickly if he could finish in peace. Anyway, she deserved it. The phone tracker he’d installed on her iPhone revealed the whole sorry story. She’d visited his twin brother in the psychiatric hospital. It turned out she’d been visiting him once a month for years. And she’d seen a solicitor, and he knew what that was about – she wanted a divorce. Well, that wasn’t happening. By rights, he should put his hands around that fat neck and put her out of her misery. But he couldn’t do that, he had to think of his position, so he concentrated on what he could do.
He liked the feel of the slipper in his hand. And he liked the fact that on the nights he was at home, when he stretched out his feet by the fire to warm them, his wife’s eyes would fix on the slippers and her lips would tighten with the memory of private times. On a practical note, too, a slipper didn’t bruise. If you didn’t count the red marks and welts that appeared on his wife’s skin under the blouses and slacks – nothing that nosy-parker constituents or shopkeepers might notice. But it wasn’t quite enough, this morning. He leant over her and allowed himself one savage punch. It wouldn’t do to incapacitate her, but the desire to hurt something or someone was overwhelming. He had to relieve the stress somehow, he told himself. After all, there was so much at stake.
It was all perfectly desperate. Three weeks ago he’d been looking forward to a new technology demonstration at Derkind and then it all went horrifically wrong. And now the General had upped the ante again with this massacre at the museum. Rafferty had barely been able to keep himself from shrieking the truth at his civil servants as they briefed him about the gala. At least Hawke was dead and Syd was theirs. After a respectable amount of time, Syd could be ‘discovered’ by the authorities – and, after all, possession was nine-tenths of the law.
But what had happened to the boys could never come out. His knees started trembling at the idea of it. He sat back down on the mattress as his wife drew the duvet back over herself and huddled beneath it, her shoulders shaking. He just had to trust the General’s plan to salvage this and stop a mess turning into a catastrophe. Whatever it took to keep it hush-hush was fine with him. Whomsoever the General thought had to die. What was another body or two in the grand scheme of things, after so many?