I opened my mouth to scream, but before my vocal chords had time to get their shit together, my brain clamped them down. I stood burned to the spot. My mind flashed to Brownie, skinning up in the front room. Then Jo. Jesus, Jo. Fear flushed through me. I crouched low on the floor, put my hand on the damp lino to steady myself. I tasted vomit at the back of my throat and forced myself to swallow it down. How long since we’d watched Martha climb the stairs of the Students’ Union? How did she get from there, from moving, alive, to here, a bloated, lifeless mannequin? There was so much I didn’t know, couldn’t understand. What happened? What had she done? I hated myself for not recognizing how deep her pain had been. If I’d been less angry with her, could I have stopped this?
How?
When I felt steadier, I edged closer and forced myself to dip my hand in the bath. My fingers disturbed the water, made a small ripple in its surface. The shoulder nearest to me moved on the wave and it was all I could do to keep my feet planted on the floor. The water was cold as stone. Martha’s dark hair splayed around the shoulder, covering the side of her face.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered. Hot tears.
I straightened my legs and stood up. It took a moment for my knees to lock. Suicide. But I dismissed it almost as soon as the thought became a word, fully formed. You don’t pay a firm of private investigators double rates to find a missing person and then top yourself before finding out whether they’ve succeeded.
When?
I forced myself to imagine her alive, her hair clipped to the side of her head. I pictured us in the university, the tremble in her fingers as she’d stirred her coffee. She’d told us not to ring. Told us she was going out.
Had she been and come back, or did she die before she’d had the chance to go? Where had she gone when she’d left us? I’d assumed she’d been going home, but I don’t know why.
She wasn’t the suicidal type. I felt on stronger ground. I know the type, or, let’s say, I know the signs. She still had hope. She had something to live for. She loved someone.
I glanced around the room. A bottle of shampoo lay on the floor by the bath, and another under the sink. I had the sense that something was missing but couldn’t put my finger on it. What wasn’t here? No drugs, no drugs paraphernalia, no electrical appliances. No cut wrists. My mind flitted around trying to make sense of the scene in front of me. A voice in my head said no woman intends to die naked.
Clothes. I glanced around the room. No clothes. The chair in the bedroom, the shirt hanging over the back of it. The shirt was the shirt she’d been wearing earlier.
Why?
I wanted to roll back time. I thought of Jo and I couldn’t stop the tears. My body wanted to empty itself, but I tried to contain it. To hold it. Martha had said someone was watching her. She’d had the feeling of being watched. I forced myself to look at her again, to make my brain accept the series of unacceptable facts before it. Martha was dead. Someone had killed her. You don’t just die in the bath. Someone must have killed her. I flinched at the sight of her left eye, how it bulged from its socket. Somebody had been here, in the flat, and they’d killed her. They’d killed her because of Jack, because of the missing money, because she knew something I was on the edge of discovering.
I wiped my nose on the back of my sleeve and tried to get a grip. A dressing gown hung on the back of the bathroom door. I touched it and felt its clammy dampness, the collar properly wet. She’d got out of the bath and put on the dressing gown. Her wet hair had soaked the collar. She’d taken it off and got back in the bath. Or someone had put her in the bath.
No sign of a struggle.
I forced myself to turn her head, to look into her wide-open eyes, see if I could decode the message there. Her last thought. Her unseeing pupils, her irises darker blue than I remembered, bore past me, to an indefinable point somewhere in the next life.
I breathed through my options. I swear I thought about ringing the police, but as soon as I got past the ‘I’ve found a dead woman in a bath’ line, I ran into trouble. How did I get into the flat? How did I know said dead woman? When did you last see her alive? What’s her name? None of these were questions I could, or wanted to, answer.
And besides, I was a woman on a tight timescale. Was the person who killed Martha the same person who now had Jo? I could hardly tell the police that I was waiting for drug dealers to phone. Dealers who were going to give me the ransom details for my best mate so I could hand over twenty-four grand and a tin of smack we’d got stashed at our office. There’s no way the police would let that happen, and I couldn’t let them endanger Jo.
All these thoughts passed through my mind in the time it takes to look around a small bathroom. I noticed without noticing two bottles of mouthwash on the windowsill, a woman’s Bic razor, pink-edged, cotton wool buds. I stored the images in my brain, all the time thinking what to do about Brownie. I hadn’t heard him move, could smell the sweet aroma of resin and tobacco mixed. Martha turned in the water in front of me, her head pulling her downwards, but her shoulder preventing the twist. How would Brownie take this? Should I even tell him? Could I get him out of the flat without him noticing?
I was saved from answering any of these questions by a voice behind me.
‘What …?’
I turned to see Brownie standing in the hallway. He held out a spliff towards me. My jacket was about four inches too short for him in the arms and didn’t reach down far enough to cover his grey underpants. The small amount of colour he’d had drained completely from his skin, so he looked like a ghost, a greasy ghost.
‘Jesus.’ He put a hand to his hair and tugged at it as if he were trying to wake himself up. The spliff fell to the floor. ‘What …?’
‘Brownie.’ I straightened and tried to position myself between him and the body in the bath behind me, but I wasn’t big enough.
‘Martha?’ he said in a voice that almost broke my heart.
‘She’s dead,’ I said, never shy of stating the obvious.
His knees went first, and he crashed to the ground like he’d been felled. He dropped, all six foot of him, right in front of me, landing on my Docs with such force I thought he’d broken my toes. I prised my feet from under him. He didn’t flinch, didn’t move at all, his arms and bare legs splayed at odd angles. My first thought was he’d had some kind of massive heart attack and I was now stuck in a flat with two dead bodies, but when I put my hand on his back I felt the rise and fall of his breath, shallow and fast.
I took the crushed spliff from under his arm and stuffed it down the plughole in the bathroom sink. I left the tap running, jumped over him and ran down the hall to the bedroom. I opened the drawers and rummaged until I found a pair of dark blue tracksuit bottoms. I ran back to the bathroom and dropped them on top of Brownie.
We had to get out of there. I had to find Jo. Every time I thought of her another burst of acid hit my veins. I put the cold tap on in the bath. Martha’s body bobbed with the movement of the water, making her seem alive. I shuddered and headed for the kitchen, looking for a clock. The one on the cooker showed nearly midnight, which meant it was almost time for my ransom phone call. I grabbed the resin and the Rizla papers that Brownie had left on the table and shoved them in my pocket. We had to get out. I had to find Jo. I couldn’t do anything else until I’d found Jo. I ran back to the bathroom, turned off the sink tap, making sure there was nothing left of the spliff. I squatted down next to Brownie, grabbed his right arm and dragged him up to sitting.
‘Brownie? Listen to me.’
His pupils did their best to focus, but I wasn’t certain he was seeing me. I waved my hand in front of his face. His gaze didn’t change. I didn’t have time to spare. I snatched my hand back and smacked him as hard as I could across the face. His throat bulged. He made a noise, something between a burp and a cough. I grabbed his hair and yanked his head as hard as I could in the direction of the toilet, just as thin, yellow liquid erupted from his mouth.
Some of it made it into the white porcelain. Some of it didn’t. I wiped my hand on the jacket he was wearing before I remembered it was mine. He retched another two or three times, each time the splash of his piss-like vomit hit the back of the toilet. When I was sure he had finished I flushed the chain.
The water in the bath was nearing the top.
‘Put these on,’ I said to Brownie. He’d collapsed into a heap on the floor. I hit him with the tracksuit bottoms on his calf muscle. ‘Brownie. Focus. I have to go. I’ve got to find Jo.’
‘Can’t leave,’ he said, trying to sit up, his voice high-pitched.
‘I haven’t got time to answer questions.’
‘Questions.’
‘The police.’ I thought about my fingerprints, probably splattered all around the flat by now. I calmed myself with the thought I’d never been arrested.
‘Police.’ He repeated everything I said, like he was learning language for the first time.
‘The police are going to want answers.’ I spoke as slowly as my pulse rate would allow. I didn’t know about Brownie. Maybe his prints were on file somewhere. He struck me as a likely candidate for police attention. But then his prints had a reason for being here. He’d been here before.
‘Right.’
‘Martha is dead. The police will want to know why. How. When. Those kinds of questions.’
Finally, something seemed to register. He frowned, rubbed his eyes, shook his head like a dog might after a river swim. I got to my feet. It was time to get the hell out.
Brownie struggled to get to his. I threw him the tracksuit bottoms for a second time. He caught them in one hand and then stared at them like he didn’t know how they’d got there.
‘Put them on,’ I said.
‘Martha.’
‘There’s nothing we can do.’ I knelt beside the bathtub and turned the tap so that the gush of water reduced to a trickle. I took the facecloth from the side and did my best to squash it up against the overflow, using Martha’s left foot to hold it in place. I swallowed again. Forced myself to look at her face. Her pale, almost translucent body hunched over, the water milky white. ‘I’ll find out what happened,’ I said to her. ‘I swear they won’t get away with it.’
After a moment or two, I stood up, turned my back on her and stepped out of the room, pulling Brownie with me. I closed the door.
‘She’s dead, Brownie. No matter what we do, she’s still going to be dead. I can’t change that.’