A Killer Came Knocking

by S. B. Caves

  Dillon dropped the phone and a scream ripped out of his mouth. His head jerked violently to the side and he spun around, flailing his arms, and then collapsed. He continued to scream as he rolled around on the floor, and the sound of his distress filled the warehouse.

  Jack could not work out what had happened to the man. His screams only served to startle and bewilder him further. He could see blood now, some of it sprayed across the painted cinderblock wall, some of it dotting the floor. Jack hesitated, still unsure of the situation, and then he saw Emily off to the side, stepping out from behind a column of boxes. She was holding something, her complexion the colour of sour milk.

  It was the nail gun.

  Jack looked back at the man, but he was still rolling around so frantically that Jack couldn’t quite see where the nail had struck him. He put it out of his mind for the moment and saw the green glow of the mobile phone’s screen. Jack picked it up and held it to his ear.

  ‘Dillon?’ A deep, uninterested voice said down the receiver. The voice had an accent. Jack terminated the call, undid the back of the phone, removed the battery and snapped the SIM card in half.

  ‘He was going to tell,’ Emily said shakily. She sounded like a little girl. ‘Here,’ she extended the nail gun toward him like a gift. ‘Take this. He… he was going to tell.’

  The man was howling like an injured dog. He got onto all fours, cupping his mouth and chin with his hands. Blood spilled through the gaps in his fingers. When he pulled his hands away, a cupful of blood splashed onto the floor and the man’s screams filled the warehouse.

  ‘Take this, please!’ Emily thrust the nail gun into Jack’s chest. ‘Take it, will you!’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, accepting the nail gun. He placed it on the metal stairs that led up to the office, and rested his hands on Emily’s shoulders. She flinched and backed away from his touch. ‘You did the right thing. You did the right thing, Emily.’

  ‘Can’t you get him to be quiet?’ She pressed her index fingers in her ears and screwed her face up. ‘I can’t bear it.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Don’t freak out. It had to be done.’

  Jack turned and saw the man struggling to his knees, clawing at his face. The screaming had been replaced with high-pitched shrieks that came out with every breath. Jack saw that this whole time the door had been wide open. He strode across and went to close it with his right arm. There was an instant blossom of pain through his shoulder as he pressed against the door, so he barged it shut with his other shoulder. Then he saw the car jack on the floor and picked it up.

  ‘Emily, are you still there?’ Jack asked, without turning to see.

  ‘Y-yes,’ she said, almost choking on the word.

  ‘I want you to turn away and press your hands over your ears. You’re not going to want to see this.’

  ‘What are you—?’

  ‘Emily!’ he bellowed. ‘Do it.’

  She turned away as she had been instructed, and stared at a stack of imitation marble countertops piled in six-foot towers.

  Jack looked down at the man. A three-inch nail had pierced his cheek at an angle and appeared to be lodged in his soft palate. The blood pouring out of his mouth was black and thick as treacle.

  ‘Look at me,’ Jack said to the man. The man’s eyes were wild with fear. His face had turned sickly pale from the blood loss. ‘Is there anyone else on their way here?’

  The man’s eyelids fluttered. He gargled. His white hands trembled up to his face, his bloodstained fingers nearing the nail. He tried to pinch at the head of the nail and cried out in pain.

  ‘I’ll help you with that nail if you answer the question. Is there anyone else on their way over? Just nod yes or no.’

  The man shook his head.

  ‘You’re not lying to me, are you?’

  Again the man shook his head.

  ‘Good,’ Jack said, and then swung the car jack with all his strength.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  The van’s headlights carved a slice of the motorway out of the darkness. Emily sat up front and watched the white lines on the tarmac blur past as the road unfurled before them. She concentrated in an effort to keep her thoughts at bay and to try to stem the motion sickness that was slowly swishing in her stomach. Beyond the fusty, oily metallic smells that lived in the van, she picked up Morley’s putrescence and wound down the window. The cool night air kissed her hot skin and she was dimly thankful for it.

  Jack muttered under his breath as they clocked up the miles. She couldn’t make out much of what he was saying, but it sounded as though he was planning out their next steps. She stole glimpses at him as the van passed beneath the overhead motorway lights, periodically washing the car in an amber glow. His eyes were wide and unblinking.

  ‘Why did he do it?’ she said, her words sounding odd as they broke the silence between them. ‘You said he confessed. I need to know, Jack.’

  Jack looked over at her for a long, hard moment. The van began to veer into the left lane and Emily’s feet started to tingle. What was he thinking, taking his eyes off the road for that long while they were barrelling along at this speed? Then he returned his gaze to the road, righted the van’s course, and said bluntly, ‘She was having an affair.’ His eyelids lowered until his eyes were nothing more than gleaming slits. ‘Her boss.’ There was a dull squeak as his grip tightened on the steering wheel. ‘It was his baby, not mine.’

  Emily looked at him.

  ‘The man was already married with kids. Kate was trying to blackmail him, threatening to tell his wife, to tell people at work unless he kept paying her.’ A low, dry laugh left his lips. ‘I was wondering why she was buying all those designer shoes. She said that she got a pay rise and I believed her like a damn fool. Turns out it was hush money. Anyway, this man she was fucking’ – he paused, cleared his throat – ‘he used to buy coke from Morley, and one day he told him about the situation. Morley offered to get rid of her for five grand.’ A tear ran down his face and he wiped it away. ‘So there you go. Mystery solved.’

  Emily rubbed her face. She sat there a moment, bent forward, one hand pressed firmly over her mouth.

  Then she said, ‘I don’t believe it.’

  Jack rolled his shoulders, blinked more tears. Drily, he said, ‘Oh yeah? You seemed to believe everything else he said.’

  ‘I don’t believe it because I know she loved you.’ As she said this, Jack bit down hard on his lower lip, the muscles in his cheeks twitching. ‘I knew Kate as well as I knew myself, maybe even better. And one thing I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt was that she loved you, Jack. You remember how superstitious she was, how much she believed in karma. She would never do that to you, even if she wanted to.’

  The tears rolled down his face freely now, each drop large and greasy.

  ‘I’m telling you, Jack, she didn’t do that.’

  ‘Maybe you didn’t know her as well as you thought you did.’

  ‘You don’t know how close we were…’

  ‘I know you were close until university. Then you dropped out and she stayed on, got a new bunch of friends, got involved with me, became her own person and not just a twin any more.’

  Emily didn’t think there were any more tears left in her. She was wrong. ‘So you really believe that, do you?’ She wiped the tears away with the back of her hand. ‘You believe she cheated on you and was murdered to keep it secret?’

  ‘I don’t want to believe it,’ he said, ‘but hearing him say it made sense. It was like I’d found the missing piece of a jigsaw and now I can see the whole picture.’

  Emily made a disgusted, spitting sound. ‘Morley was trying to make her the villain to get you on his side. He knew you were going to kill him no matter what, so he gave it a shot.’

  Jack flicked the indicator on and pulled off the motorway. ‘I think we will just have to agree to disagree. He’s dead, and that’s all I care about.’

  Chapter Fifty

  When they came
off the motorway, Jack drove them through a series of country lanes. Emily could only make out their surroundings in the light from the van’s full beams, and felt the road dipping and rising beneath the tyres. The van rumbled along on the rocky ground. The leafless tree branches flanking them on either side of the lane scraped the windscreen and roof with an eerie screech.

  Jack deviated from the lane, continued on to a patch of field and shut off the engine.

  ‘Where are we?’ she asked.

  ‘The middle of nowhere. The nearest building is a pub about four miles down the road. Come on.’ He got out of the van and Emily quickly followed behind him.

  ‘What if a car comes along?’ She reached out and touched his arm, but could barely make out his silhouette.

  ‘The hedgerows hide the van from the road. And anyway, I doubt a car will come by this time of night.’ He opened up the back doors, releasing a backdraught of fetid, human odour. ‘But if they do, they won’t see the van.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He reached into the van and grabbed a shovel, a torch and a canvas bag. ‘We’ll dig the hole first and then come back for the bodies.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Emily asked, just about able to make out the bag in the moonlight.

  Jack switched the torch on and trained the beam inside the bag, showing her the gun and hammer.

  Emily felt warm breath leave her cold lips. ‘You… you went back?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then… how?’

  ‘Does it matter? There’s nothing else that can tie us to Morley now. We bury it all together.’

  He led her to a patch of grass by the hedgerow. ‘Here,’ he said extending the shovel. ‘Dig.’

  She took the shovel. It felt weighty and cumbersome in her hands. She hadn’t dug anything since she was little, playing with a bucket and spade on the beach with Kate.

  ‘Maybe it’d be better if you…?’

  ‘You’re going to dig the hole,’ he said. ‘My back is giving me murder.’

  She had been thinking that he would likely get the job done quicker and more efficiently, even with a bad back, but she said nothing. She placed her foot on the shovel head and pressed her weight down until it broke through the earth. She chipped off a small portion of the soil and heaved it to the side.

  ‘Don’t toss the soil so far,’ he admonished. ‘We need it to cover them up when they’re inside the hole.’

  She began to build up something of a rhythm. The friction from the shovel’s metal handle was already blistering her palms, and the muscles in her forearms burned. Her mind was almost completely blank as she worked, but every few minutes a thought did resonate: she was burying a pair of human beings. Their bodies would rot in the ground and the worms would feast on their flesh until nothing but bones and the fabric of their clothes remained. And while all this was happening, she would go on living her life, growing old and decaying in her own way, pushing the memory of this night further into the back of her mind until it became a dream.

  The earth was hard, and after half an hour, she hadn’t made much of a dent. She tossed another shovelful of soil to the side and paused to catch her breath. Her cheeks were hot with the effort of her labour, and she was sweating inside her clothes. The cold no longer bothered her, but she could feel the large blisters pulsing on the pads of her hands. She spared a thought for Morley, what it must have been like for his whole face to erupt with blisters like an outbreak of acne, and then went back to work. Her lower back was starting to seize up, and her forearms became as stiff as tree roots. She flexed her fingers, heard the percussion of her popping knuckles, and tested the hole with her foot.

  ‘Hurry it up,’ Jack said. ‘You don’t have time to admire your work. You haven’t even dug a foot in the earth yet. We need to bury them deep so that nothing digs them up when we’re gone.’

  ‘I’m trying,’ she said, sticking the shovel back in the soil.

  ‘Try harder.’

  She gritted her teeth and decided to plough through the pain. The muscles in her neck and upper back were knotting up and she could feel the perspiration dripping off her chin. Soon she was standing in the hole, and in the torch’s beam saw that she had dug about a bathtub’s depth in the earth. Her progress spurred her on, and she attacked the soil with a renewed sense of determination; the quicker she dug the grave, the quicker she could bury her old life with them.

  ‘What do we do after this?’ she asked, huffing through her task. Her palms felt wet and she thought she might have popped her blisters, but she didn’t stop to check.

  ‘We drive back to London and carry on like nothing ever happened.’

  He shone the torch into the hole to gauge how the grave was coming along. Another couple of feet and they could chuck the bodies in it.

  ‘Take that light out of my face,’ she said. ‘I can’t see.’

  ‘Want me to take over?’

  She looked at him warily. He extended his hand. She took hold of it, seething as their palms made contact, and climbed out of the hole.

  ‘I’ll finish up,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you wait in the van?’

  ‘I’m not waiting in there with… them.’

  He climbed into the hole, relieved her of the shovel and started digging. ‘I’m sorry about everything I said back at the warehouse. I didn’t want to do any of this. I don’t want to hurt anyone. But this had to be done. I couldn’t live with myself if I let him go.’

  She watched the fluidity of his movement as he dug without respite or complaint.

  ‘I’m just a man that loved his wife more than life itself, and without her I’m… I’m nothing. I’ve woken up feeling empty inside every day since she died. I hope you never…’ He paused. ‘I hope you never have to know what that’s like.’ He tossed earth over his shoulder, wincing, and said quietly, ‘Even if she did cheat on me, she still didn’t deserve what she got. And I still love her.’

  She heard the anguish in his voice and turned away.

  * * *

  The sky was beginning to brighten by the time Jack was finished. Emily could just about make out the hills in the horizon, and had a better idea of how vast the surrounding fields were.

  Jack got behind the wheel. He turned on the ignition and began to drive. Emily wanted to ask him if he thought the hole was deep enough, whether there was any chance of foxes or badgers unearthing them, but in the end, it didn’t make much difference. Even if he reassured her she would still wonder about it, and maybe that constant paranoia would be the luggage she would have to carry with her for the rest of her life.

  They drove through the growing dawn and watched the sun appear over the hills as a dull yellow smudge in the misty white sky. Their eyes were wild and bloodshot in their grubby, sweat-streaked faces.

  They looked like two people that had spent all night digging a grave.

  The sun was warm and the sky was blue when they arrived at Jack’s house to get cleaned up. Emily thought she could smell the first signs of spring in the air, but could very well have imagined it. A thought fluttered through her mind like a butterfly: Kate was still alive and Emily was just arriving for a visit. They were going to have a girls’ night in with white wine and crap romcom movies, and any time Jack tried to poke his head round the door he would be banished because this was sister time, no boys allowed. She wondered how Kate would’ve coped with getting old, how she would’ve dealt with grey hair. She wondered about the trips they would’ve taken to New York like they always said they would.

  She wondered what Kate would say if she could see her now. Would she be happy that they had killed Morley? Would she pat Emily on the back and tell her that she had done the right thing, that anything done for love was the right thing?

  She wondered a lot as she entered Jack’s house. She went up to the bathroom and washed her hands and face, saw the purple crescents beneath her eyes. Her eyes didn’t look the same to her any more. They were now as dull and lifeless as old coins.

 
When she came downstairs, Jack was waiting for her by the door. ‘I suppose you want to be on your way,’ he said, unable to look her in the face.

  ‘Yeah. I think it would be for the best.’

  ‘I want to give you something,’ he said, and held out a bulging envelope.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked, without taking it from him.

  ‘It’s about three grand. I’ve got some savings here and I thought this would come in handy for you. Go on, take it.’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head.

  ‘Emily, please,’ he implored, gesturing to the envelope. ‘I want you to have it. It isn’t much but it will give you some breathing space. Go on.’

  She shook her head firmly. ‘I don’t want any of your money, Jack. I just want… I just want to know that everything will be all right.’

  ‘It was a deep hole. I packed the earth well and it didn’t look too obvious.’

  ‘I don’t mean that. I mean, just in general.’

  ‘If you’re asking me whether I think we’ll get found out for Morley, then the answer is no.’

  She swallowed the obstruction in her throat and said, ‘I don’t know if that’s what I was asking.’

  She turned the door lock and stepped out. The birds were singing and the sun shone directly into her face, warming her skin. ‘She didn’t cheat on you. You know that as well as I do.’

  ‘I’m not so sure any more,’ Jack said. ‘I didn’t want to believe a word Morley said, but that rang a bell with me. Doesn’t matter much now either way, does it?’

  ‘No,’ she replied quietly. ‘Because I think we killed an innocent man. Two innocent men,’ she quickly amended.