74

‘IT’S TIME TO MARK THEM,’ said Marita to her sister.

They were sitting at the terrace table, cases packed and left by the front door. Marita had a glass of whisky, Marina a rum and Coke. She had just mashed out a cigarette and was blowing a cone of grey smoke into the sky. Her hair was still wet from dying it back to black.

For the two sisters there was just one final job to do. And then it was over.

‘What time is the driver coming back?’ asked Marita, finishing the last of her whisky.

‘I told him midnight,’ replied Marina.

Marita glanced at the clock in the kitchen. A little after nine. She nodded.

‘Plenty of time,’ she said. ‘Are you ready?’

‘Ready,’ replied Marina.

Getting up from the table, they reached for their Berettas and fixed silencers to the muzzles. Marita did the job swiftly, but Marina was not so slick.

‘It looks so easy in the films,’ she said, trying to line up the correct end of the silencer with the tip of the muzzle. Two steady hands just didn’t seem to be enough.

Marita sighed. She was about to take the gun and do it for her when the join and twist action was successfully negotiated.

‘Don’t forget the marker pen,’ she said, and led the way back through the kitchen.

Though it was still light outside, just a few pin-prick stars starting to show, the interior of the house was dark and gloomy, the door leading to the basement lost in shadow beneath the staircase. Marita unlocked it, reached for the light switch and started down the stairs, Marina closing the door behind her, juggling gun and marker pen.

The basement occupied just half of the ground floor area, where the slope of the land allowed sufficient headroom to make it habitable. In years gone by, livestock had been accommodated there – goats, a cow or two, and horses for the plough. Now its floor had been levelled and a thin concrete skin laid over bare earth, the low-ceilinged space divided into three rooms leading off a short passage. On the left side of this passage were two doors – to a boiler and utility room, and to a smaller space almost completely filled by a large deep-freeze cabinet. The third door, standing on the right of the passageway, was the one that Marita now opened, stooping just a little so she didn’t bang her head on the doorframe, and reaching for the light switch. Marina had no such trouble.

The room was long and narrow and lit by a single neon tube. An old kitchen dresser had been placed along one wall and a workbench on the other. The shelves of the dresser were packed with glass jars filled with nails, screws, all sorts of rusting bits and pieces, old tin boxes and tilting flowerpot towers. On the workbench was a clamp-vice, a blade grinder and a small rotary saw, the wall above it a pinboard panel racked with tools. Although the basement had a concrete floor the smell of damp earth was still strong, the cellar’s stone walls flaking with old distemper, its ceiling hung with dust-thickened hammocked spider webs.

At the far end of the room, past the dresser and the workbench, were the two women, Claudine and Midou. They were bound by duct tape to two kitchen chairs, facing away from each other, arms secured behind their backs, wrists heavily taped. As a precaution, to prevent them working on their bindings, their fingertips had also been taped. It looked as though they were wearing silver gloves.

As the door opened and the light flickered on, both women turned their heads to watch Marita and Marina come in. It was only the second time the sisters had come down to see them. On the first occasion, Marita had brought some buttered bread and water. She’d removed the tape from their mouths and fed them herself, one after the other, allowing them choking gulps of water from a tipped jug. Then she’d re-taped their mouths, switched off the light and locked the door. The second time the two sisters had come down together, with a slop bucket. While Marina held a gun on Midou, Claudine was cut loose and encouraged to take advantage of this, with a single warning that if she did anything foolish her daughter would be shot.

Stiff from being bound in a chair for so long, with headaches from the Dyethelaspurane still gently thumping, and certain in the knowledge that these two women would do exactly what they said without the least scruple or delay, neither Claudine nor Midou had done anything to annoy their captors. Meekly they had used the bucket, been given more water, then been re-tied and left alone in the darkness again.

In much the same way that they had accomplished the slop bucket visit, Marina now held a gun to Midou’s head while her sister cut away the tape holding Claudine’s arms and ankles to the chair, helped her to her feet and led her to the far wall. Turning her back to this so that she was facing down the length of the room, Marita then tied her hands in front of her with the end of a length of rope hanging down from a metal hook. Taking the other end of the rope, Marita hauled in the slack through the hook until Claudine’s arms were raised straight above her head, the silken sleeves of her ao dai falling past her elbows. As her weight tautened the rope, Marita tied it off on a bracket fixed to the wall, leaving Claudine with two options: she could either keep her feet flat on the floor leaving her arms stretched painfully above her head, or stand on tiptoes to ease the weight from her elbows, wrists and shoulders. Whichever option she chose, she remained powerless to do anything more, like a writhing snake held by the tail, a wild, panicked expression in her eyes as she watched Marita repeat the operation with her daughter – another hook, another length of rope, hauling the arms upwards – trying to speak through the duct tape but managing only tearful whimpers of protest.

‘You mark for Taddeus,’ said Marita, when the two women were secured, side by side. ‘And I’ll do Tomas.’

Pulling the cap off the marker pen, Marina knelt in front of Claudine and, licking her lips in concentration, drew a single cross on her crumpled, dirty ao dai, just above the left knee, adding two more crosses to her arm and shoulder, a final cross drawn just a few centimetres above Claudine’s right eyebrow.

When she had finished she handed the pen to Marita and watched as her sister marked out the corresponding wounds on Midou that had brought down their brother Tomas.

Four crosses on one of the women, three on the other.

And then it was done.

The two sisters stepped away, Marina going back to the workbench and picking up her gun. Checking the mechanism with a gentle but business-like snick-snick she waited for Marita to join her.

In a minute there would be blood. Marina could feel the excitement, almost shivering with the pulse of power.

‘Are you ready?’ asked Marita, coming to stand beside her.

Marina took a deep, steadying breath.

‘Oh, yes,’ she replied, and raised the gun in both hands to take aim.