The Good Samaritan

by John Marrs

‘Did he tell you we spent the night together recently?’ I said. ‘Several nights, actually.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘After I was attacked.’

  ‘That’s right, your “attack”.’ She used her fingers to mime speech marks. ‘Did they ever catch the person responsible?’

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘I thought not,’ she said. ‘Funny, that. And Tony was at great pains to point out that he spent the first night on the armchair in your room and the next couple in the spare bedroom.’

  ‘Is that what he told you?’

  ‘It’s what I saw. I came to your house when you were asleep to drop a change of clothes off to him the night of your “attack”. I love how you’ve kept the smoke-damaged walls. It’s very shabby-chic.’ She let out a yawn that seemed to take her by surprise.

  She had violated my space. She had been in my house.

  I swallowed hard to keep my anger at arm’s length.

  ‘No one here likes you,’ I said, ‘so when I tell them what you’ve accused me of, they’ll all be on my side. And then I’ll go to head office and tell them their biggest fundraiser and treasurer is being bullied out of her job by her husband-stealing manager.’

  ‘Go ahead, Laura, be my guest,’ she replied, and reached into her ugly orange handbag to remove Ryan’s Dictaphone. ‘I’d love to know what they’ll say when I play this to them.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  RYAN

  There was no reply when I knocked on Laura’s front door.

  The last time I’d been here, I’d not been in control of myself. Her leaving a dead piglet by Charlotte’s wedding dress had pushed me over the edge, which is exactly what she’d wanted. Even after all Tony had told me about her, my only hope was that somewhere inside Laura was a scrap of decency I could appeal to.

  I knew that by turning up at her home I was breaking my restraining order and risked being arrested again, but that’s how desperate I was. She’d left me with no other choice.

  I crouched to talk through the letterbox.

  ‘Laura, please answer the door,’ I begged. ‘I’m not here to cause trouble. I just need to speak to you.’ But there was no response. I surveyed each window, but no shadows moved behind them. ‘I’ll do anything,’ I continued. ‘Just please withdraw those allegations against me. You’ve won. I don’t have any fight left in me.’

  I sank to my knees, then curled up in a ball on the doormat and wept.

  Eventually, I clambered back inside the car, found the business card Janine had given me as I’d left our meeting and dialled her direct line again. I was sick of waiting for her to act; I needed her to do something now. I reached her answerphone.

  ‘I’m coming to see you,’ I began. I heard my words slur, but couldn’t stop them. ‘I gave you what you needed and you did nothing. You fucking owe me.’

  As I drove in the direction of End of the Line, I still didn’t know how to react to my parents’ response to the accusations being hurled at me. I wanted to scream, yell, cry, defend myself and hurt them as much as they were hurting me, all at the same time.

  Knowing they didn’t have faith in their own son wounded me badly. Johnny had already washed his hands of me and now they were doing the same. It was all so unfair.

  As I pulled up at a red traffic light, I took a swig from the bottle of vodka I’d left in the glovebox. I didn’t care if I was pulled over and breathalysed by the police. Let them arrest me. I was no stranger to it and it’d be the least of my worries. Maybe I should be behind bars anyway? Perhaps I was a danger to myself because I couldn’t make rational decisions. If I could, I wouldn’t have been caught up in this shitstorm. I’d lost everyone I’d ever loved or relied on, and I had no one to turn to.

  I drove through the housing estate where Granddad Pete had once lived, and passed the park where, as a boy, I’d cycled for hours at a time with my mates. I passed the supermarket where we’d hang out, trying to blag cigarettes from the older lads. I saw the bus stop where I’d shared my first kiss with Lucy Jones. My heart ached for the innocent days I’d never get back.

  As my past caught up with my present, I realised I had no future. Even if by some miracle this was all cleared up, I’d be forever ruined by the accusations. Laura and Effie’s lies were spreading across social media with the speed of a contagious disease and, by now, everyone I worked with and beyond would be aware of what had been written about me. The story would only grow bigger and bigger as each student and parent shared it. My life as I’d known it was over. Mud sticks and I was covered in it.

  For the first time since she took her life, I understood how Charlotte had felt when she reached the depths of her despair.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  LAURA

  I’d never seen Janine look so self-congratulatory as when she brandished Ryan’s Dictaphone in her hand. Her face was so contorted by smugness, it threatened to fold in on itself.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ she asked. ‘It’s a recording Ryan made of every conversation you and him had. Hour after hour of you going against everything End of the Line believes in, by encouraging him to end his life.’

  I let her talk.

  ‘You were supposed to be offering an impartial ear to those people,’ she continued. ‘No matter what they told you about their intentions, it was your job to listen, not to talk them into dying. You need to be stopped.’

  ‘And I suppose you’re the one to do it?’

  Janine smiled and then blinked hard.

  ‘Why haven’t you done anything with it yet?’ I asked. ‘I thought you’d have been straight to head office with this little bit of gossip.’

  ‘Let’s not underplay this, Laura. It’s hardly a “little bit of gossip”, is it? It’s proof that one of my volunteers has been encouraging and assisting suicide, which, as we both know, is against the law. But after much umming and ahhing, I’ve decided to give you a choice. I can either pass this to management and report you to the police, or I can give it back to you and you can destroy the evidence.’

  ‘In return for what?’

  ‘That you leave my branch, right now, and never set foot in it again.’

  ‘Is that it? That’s all you want from me?’

  ‘Not quite. You’ve also got to agree not to see your family again. You stay away from Effie, Alice, Henry and Tony.’

  ‘What?’ My blood ran cold.

  ‘Tony will be applying to the family court to file for divorce for your unreasonable behaviour. Our bargain is that you don’t defend yourself and that you give Tony full custody rights. Once you get your decree nisi, then you can have this Dictaphone and your children can start their new life without you.’

  Janine had finally revealed her true colours and they were almost as self-serving as mine.

  ‘You are no better than me,’ I said. ‘If I’m such a bad person then why are you using those recordings for your own gain?’

  ‘When did I ever claim to be any better than you?’ she laughed. ‘We all have our own agendas, Laura. Yours is to encourage people to die. Mine is to make a life with your soon-to-be ex-husband.’

  ‘You’re fooling yourself if you think that’s going to happen. Tony and I are meant to be together, along with our children. Effie is already back in my life.’

  ‘But for how much longer? I’m going to hazard a guess not very. Tony called me just before I came down here. He knows Effie is being molested by her teacher. It’s all over the school’s Facebook page. Apparently she’s inconsolable. I looked at the profile name that made the first post – Charlotte Smith. Ryan’s wife, if I remember rightly? Neither Effie nor Ryan would’ve benefitted from doing this themselves, so unless Charlotte has risen from the ashes, that only leaves you. I don’t think Tony or your daughter will be welcoming you back with open arms any time soon.’

  Janine blinked hard again, as if something were distracting her.

  ‘Press play,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

&nbs
p; ‘On the Dictaphone. Press play. You can’t expect me to agree to your demands without hearing what I’m being accused of.’

  ‘Really?’ she replied. I nodded and she shrugged as she pressed a button. She sat back on the sofa as the machine made a hissing sound. A few seconds of silence passed before she looked at the display screen. She pressed a button to fast-forward. She hit play again but still there was silence. Her face went from muddled to anxious and then confused in a moment. She pressed more buttons, played with the volume and checked the batteries. The Dictaphone was blank.

  ‘Well, Janine, it’s nice to have met you properly after all this time,’ I said, and smiled as I stood up. ‘I think I’m going to take my chances and let fate, not you, decide what happens to me.’

  ‘What did you do?’ she bellowed, and slowly rose to her feet. However, her legs suddenly gave way and she fell back onto the sofa. She steadied herself before attempting, and failing, to rise up again. I walked towards her as she tried to comprehend what was happening to her body.

  ‘The powdered sedatives I baked into your muffins appear to have kicked in,’ I began. She glared at me, bewildered at first, before uneasiness slowly spread across her wrinkled face. ‘They’re not all “store-bought”. Let me take this first,’ I continued. I snatched the Dictaphone from her weak grip and dropped it into my pocket.

  ‘Let’s set the record straight about a few things, shall we?’ I reached into my bag to remove the leather driving gloves Tony had left in the garage at home. ‘You and my husband will never get your happy-ever-after. You will never be allowed to expose me and what I have done to anyone. You will never understand why I do it or what it’s like to hear a person’s last breath, because you don’t have the capacity to feel in the way I do. You don’t respect the fragility of human life like me. You’ll never know how the beauty of death equals the beauty of birth, or how those first and last gasps of air are exactly the same. You don’t know any of this because you don’t help people. I help people. I save them from themselves.’

  I pulled the gloves slowly over my fingers and palms, and felt inside my bag again until I found what I was looking for.

  ‘When a person is breathing their last, everything they have done in their life, every success or failure they have ever enjoyed or suffered, no longer matters because we are all equal. Good or bad, saint or sinner, you or me, one day we will all be on a level playing field. I have been fortunate to have been asked many times to be the only person who will ever hear that sound. And while you haven’t asked me directly, I can only assume you won’t object when I take it upon myself to be here for yours.’

  Janine’s face was awash with fear. The sedatives made her limbs heavy and her vision blurred. But she could still feel scared. Before she could formulate another word or raise her arm to defend herself, I swung a hammer clean into her windpipe.

  The first blow left a dent the size of a ten-pence coin, but the collision of metal and skin and cartilage was more like a soft thud than the crunch I’d expected to hear. Her eyes were open saucer-wide as her nervous system sent pain signals to her brain. The sedatives were affecting her coordination, so when she instinctively tried to move her hands to protect her throat, they hovered hopelessly by her sides instead. She gasped for air through her broken windpipe, slowly suffocating.

  I held the hammer above my head again and waited for her eyes to meet mine. I needed her to understand the first blow wasn’t a one-off before I directed the second strike to just above her eye socket. This time I heard the crack I’d wanted and the skin split open like a sausage. There was little movement at first, and then her head began to judder involuntarily like she was having a seizure. Her dilated pupils remained focused on mine, and after ten seconds or so, the fit came to an end.

  Janine was still conscious when the third blow hit her slap bang on the top of her head, like I was hitting a nail into a floorboard. Her eyes rolled back in their sockets, and I knew that with one more strike it would be over. But I didn’t want her dead just yet.

  I lowered myself next to her on the sofa and leaned across her, blood from the wound on the top of her head trickling down her face and onto my cheek and neck. There wasn’t as much of it as I’d imagined, though.

  I rested my ear as close as I could to her lips so that, between the loud palpitations of my heartbeat, I could just about hear her in the last moments of life. It was as if all my senses were being stimulated in unison: everything I saw, heard and felt was magnified, from the scent of metal in her blood to the sound of her fingertips delicately tapping the fabric of the sofa. Janine’s breathing, already barely audible, became lighter and lighter until I could no longer feel it against my ear. And then, with one last tiny expiration, her body shut down completely.

  At first, I couldn’t move. My mind was completely blank and I went into a kind of refractory period. I allowed myself a few moments for my high levels of adrenaline to lower and for my pulse to slow before I continued with the next stage of my plan. There’d be plenty of time for reflection in the future.

  I clambered to my feet and indulged myself with one lingering look towards Janine’s motionless body. Everything that evil bitch had put me through almost felt worth it in order to steal her last breath.

  I needed to act fast. I used the hammer to break the padlock that separated the appointments room from the derelict building next door. I wiped her blood from my face, ear, neck, hair and chin with a packet of wet wipes, then from behind the sofa I removed a bag with an identical set of clothing to that I was wearing and changed. I dropped the soiled clothes, my notebook and Tony’s gloves into a bin liner, slipped on a pair of latex gloves and left Janine’s body to begin livor mortis and her brain cells to die. I left the door ever so slightly ajar.

  Inside the neighbouring building, I affixed a new padlock to the door to delay the inevitable police search. The torch on my phone guided me through the darkened corridors until I reached the rear entrance. With two firm whacks, I broke the lock to the rear door, then dropped the murder weapon on the floor. And, after double-checking I’d missed nothing, I left the building. I removed the pair of man’s-size running shoes I’d been wearing to leave impressions on the dusty floor, and slipped my own back on. I screwed up a photograph and tossed it into an overgrown grass verge. Then I slid open a one-way bolt on the gate, put the latex gloves in my bag, clutched the bin liner, checked the alleyway was clear and walked home.

  Once there, I threw both sets of clothes I’d worn that day on a hot wash – the first of three cycles I’d put them through – while I showered. Tony’s gloves and running shoes had been buried in a shoebox in the field behind the house.

  Then I sat at the breakfast bar in my cosy dressing gown and slippers, and poured myself a glass of Rioja. There was still so much to be done, so I started typing a list on my phone. As a company director for Tony’s IT firm, I earned a regular monthly wage for doing nothing but remaining quiet about where we’d found the money to fund the business in the early days. So, first I would hire a decorator to repaint and paper the walls scarred by the fire, then I’d have to find a gardener to bring the overgrown rear garden into some semblance of order.

  I’d need a glazier to replace the boarded-up bifold doors that Ryan had smashed, then make an insurance claim. I’d probably earn some compensation from him when it went to court. Then once the house was back to how it used to be, it’d be ready for Tony and the girls to move back in.

  I put my phone on charge, ready for the influx of calls I was soon to receive about Janine’s death. ‘Oh my God, no,’ I said out loud in many different ways until I found a tone that sounded believable.

  I glanced at the clock on the oven; Janine must have been discovered by now. The police were likely already there, and waiting for a forensics team to suit up and search our building along with the premises next door. That’s where they’d find the hammer I’d stolen from Ryan’s flat when the estate agent wasn’t looking. I’d spotted it on a
sideboard and was careful to slide it into my bag using only the sleeve of my jacket. Tests would reveal it to be covered in Janine’s blood, hair and skin, and Ryan’s fingerprints.

  In an autopsy, the contents of her stomach would reveal she’d been drugged, but she ate so much and so frequently it’d be hard to tell how they’d got into her system. And as everyone knew, she refused to eat my glutinous pastries. So I’d be safe.

  Outside in the yard, they’d find a screwed-up photograph of me that I’d torn from the walls the night I went to ‘Steven’s’ house. In a panic, I’d stuffed some into my pockets before he confronted me. I hoped it might be covered in Ryan’s fingerprints and an invisible tracking code linked to the serial number of his printer – or, even better, his prints on the adhesive tape. It wouldn’t contain mine, though. I’d worn gloves.

  Ryan’s vendettas against me, End of the Line and Effie were already on record with the police and the school. Judging by the number of Facebook likes and shares my posts had received, hundreds of people across the community had watched the video of him breaking into my house and witnessed how violent he was. And there was proof in the diary that he’d made an appointment to see Janine this afternoon.

  Ryan and Janine. Two birds killed with the same stone. Well, the same hammer.

  I became excited when my phone began to vibrate, but it was Effie’s name that appeared on the screen.

  ‘Hi, darling, I’m expecting an important call. Can I give you a ring later?’

  ‘How could you, Mum?’ she sobbed. ‘Everyone at school knows I made that recording. They all hate me and say I had sex with Mr Smith. They’re calling me a slag and saying I led him on.’

  ‘Ignore them, darling. In situations like this, it’s always the woman who gets the blame.’

  ‘But I am to blame, aren’t I?’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that, Effie. There are things you’re too young to understand, things that he’s done that we can’t let him get away with.’

  ‘I don’t care!’ she cried. ‘You’ve ruined my life. I don’t ever want to see you again.’