Leaning over the balcony, Jonah threw his cigarette butt into the open well in the courtyard below. The structure creaked and the handrail gave way, sliding down to rest on the floor with a clunk. Maybe crazy old Bridget did have a point about this being dangerous?
Not his problem any longer. He was moving on. This would be his last visit to the house.
He nodded a farewell to the ugly sofas. He had a good memory of them, thanks to his first time with Jenny. In fact, she was the source of most of his happy reminiscences about this place – her and Kris when he’d been here doing his singer-songwriter thing, hanging out in the garden to practise or coming into Jonah’s room late at night to ask for an opinion on a new composition. It hadn’t been a bad place, much better than so many he’d lived in. Jonah wandered into the kitchen and checked in the fridge. Bridget had put some leftover salmon quiche in a plastic box. He mentally counted how many days it might have lurked in there. Too old?
Oh sod it: live dangerously. He polished off the slice. It tasted fine so if salmonella lurked, so be it. No one had predicted he would die of food poisoning – violence, booze, drugs, yes – so it would be kinda funny if was a quiche that ended him.
He padded upstairs, trainers making hardly any noise. Jenny was playing her music really loudly. He didn’t like the piece she had on and he wondered about teasing her into changing it for a bit of Eminem or Bastille, which he knew she quite liked despite being a classical babe. Then Bridget’s bedroom door distracted him. The chance was too perfect to pass over. He turned the handle and stepped inside.
The first thing he noticed was the heavy drapes at the window cutting out the last light of the day. He groped on the wall for the switch. A chandelier lit up, dazzling: curling cupped flowers on silver stems from a centre point. The room was surprisingly decadent. He’d imagine Bridget lying in some nun-like bed with a white counterpane, more like Jenny’s. This was still decorated how it must have been during her marriage: heavy four-poster, blood red velvet hangings with gold fringe, a mountain of satin pillows. You’d get lost in there if you tried to have sex, thought Jonah, overwhelmed by the womblike atmosphere. Complete turn off. Maybe that was why she preferred the simplicity of the daybed upstairs? He’d’ve struggled to get it up in here.
He wandered to the dressing table and pulled open a drawer on the right. Ointments and hairpins, a nest of beads and artificial flowers. Next one down held an upmarket label maker, stapler, and collection of pens and pencils. Bridget was something of a hoarder with old labels and receipts all stuffed inside in no particular order. The one below that contained her manuscript, as did all the ones on the left-hand side, some yellowed with age. Jeez, Bridget, how many of these things do you have? He counted at least five before he gave up. From the front page, they all looked pretty similar. He shut the drawers with a snap.
That music still blasted from Jenny’s room. How the hell could she listen to that crap?
And here was Bridget’s en suite. Jonah had been the only one to use the bathroom in the corridor as both the women had their own. He’d thought that a great deal because it made it as good as his. Jenny’s had been a nice black and white affair, a modern version of Edwardian taste, bath big enough for some fun and games. So what was Bridget’s like?
Oh my God: black and gold! He laughed with pure glee. This shrieked of 80s excess. His and her sinks – kidney-shaped bath with jacuzzi – separate walk-in shower with dolphin-shaped taps: priceless! It was the kind of place that would suit a Trump tower. He walked over to the huge mirror-fronted cabinet and grinned at himself. He looked about as at home in this monstrosity as a mutt at Crufts. He bared his teeth in mock growl.
‘OK, Bridget, what other secrets are you hiding?’ he murmured, opening the cabinet.
Row upon row of bottles confronted him like a mini New York skyline. At first he wasn’t sure what he was looking at, then he read the labels. They were all for painkillers but the prescriptions were made out to other people: Jenny was here, as was Kris. The dates on some of these went back years. He even saw several ancient ones in the name of Paul Whittingham, her husband, as well as for Bridget herself, all issued by Norman, though that supply had stopped when Norman retired a while back. They were all empty. Had she been taking them from the bins, hoarding them for some insane reason of her own? But why keep them? Then he found a strip of tablets at the top shelf with Jenny’s name on them and a recent date: a week’s dose. There were some pills left under the foil.
Hang on …
She hadn’t …?
He went back to the label maker in the desk drawer with Jenny’s prescription to compare. It was set up to print off what looked like a standard pharmacy label.
The vicious old cow! She must’ve been taking the prescriptions belonging to her tenants. Rage boiled inside Jonah. When Norman’s prescribing rights had been removed by his concerned colleagues, she’d taken to nicking Kris’s pain relief, then Jenny’s, and probably putting some placebo, or lookalike pill, in its place on her daily spring-clean because she was too fucking scared to score her own supply. Kris had been dosing himself on paracetamol or bloody vitamins and wondering why his old injury was playing up so badly. No wonder Kris had moved out because his pain got so bad! And then it had been Jenny’s turn. From the looks of these shelves, Bridget had a couple of years to perfect her sleight-of-hand and no one had suspected a thing because, well, who would? She was so nice, wasn’t she? So motherly. Welcome to the house. We’re all one big happy family. You, young man, I need for a good shag; you, little girl, because I can screw you over for your medication.
Bitch.
Taking the box of painkillers to the window, he looked out at the garden and wondered. It was only then that he began to realise the full extent of what Bridget had done to Jenny. Her life had collapsed around her like a house of cards all thanks to her desperation to get pain relief. Bridget had floated around Gallant House on the drugs that belonged to someone else, killed her own pain but pushed Jenny into a cesspit of despair. Jenny had lost her job, her self-respect … fuck, the prim girl who blushed at talk of sex had been thrown on the game. That was Bridget’s work.
Jenny deserved to know.
Jonah threw open the door and strode down the corridor. Music still blasted from Jenny’s room. He tried the handle but the door did not budge.
‘Turn the sodding music off, Jenny! I’ve got something important to show you!’
The only answer was a thump and a bang. Had she fallen?
‘Jenny? Jenny?’ Bloody music seemed to be even louder now. Thumping on the door wasn’t getting any response.
Then someone screamed his name.
Jonah kicked the door in and saw Jenny wrestling with a man – that ginger-haired tosser, Matt. He’d pushed her to the floor, clenched hand at her throat. He was choking her.
‘No, you fucking don’t!’ Jonah hauled him up by the back of the shirt.
Matt came up stabbing at Jonah’s stomach. The blow wouldn’t have hurt it if Matt hadn’t had a pair of scissors grasped in his fist. Fire speared through Jonah as he looked down in disbelief. The scissors were sticking out of his abdomen – so wrong, too surreal, like some gory special effect.
‘You screwed her too, didn’t you, you bastard!’ Matt shouted and started kicking at Jonah, aiming mainly for the head as Jonah had collapsed and curled around his injury, clutching the plastic handle of the scissors. He could barely see through the pain as Jenny got up on her knees, groped for a champagne bottle and brought this down over Matt’s head. It didn’t break, but Matt did – at least his skull. He sprawled out cold on top of Jonah, his fall driving the scissors an inch deeper.
Jonah screamed.