by Will Carver
A sigh.
A whimper.
He knew that she did not want to talk about it. Not at that time of night. Not after they’d had such a wonderful evening.
Mr Conroy rolled over, draped his arm across his wife and pulled her in tightly. He kissed her on the back of the head and whispered that he loved her. And that everything would be okay. That ‘she is going to be fine’. And he felt the tension in Mrs Conroy release.
And he didn’t let go.
And they both fell asleep.
Emptier but hopeful.
FOURTEEN
The sound is exactly as you’d expect it to be. But the ease with which Abe clipped straight through the bones of the smaller toes was a shock. The thumbs required a real squeeze. They wouldn’t come off in one cut, he had to gradually break through, but he did it. He successfully removed ten ways to identify Aidan Gallagher – or the artist formerly known as Sythe.
The instructions said to pour half the contents down the drain and wait fifteen minutes for it to start working. That’s how long it takes to begin breaking things down, dissolving hair and other detritus. Then he had to flush it with warm water, apparently. And repeat if the blockage didn’t go.
Abe’s sink was fine. So he poured two full bottles of drain cleaner granules over the severed fingers and toes and left them for quarter of an hour before covering them in warm water.
He would let them sit until morning.
Warning: if splashed onto the eyes or skin, rinse immediately with cold water and contact your doctor. Never use a plunger on a drain where the cleaning fluid has been used. Never mix with other household cleaning products.
A part of Abe wanted to know what would happen if he threw in some bleach.
All that was left to do was wait. Wait to see if the fingerprints would dissolve overnight. Wait to know whether there was a solution to his problem that did not involve the physical exertion of digging a hole twelve feet into the ground. Somehow, Abe had to find a way of getting through the night with a digitless corpse swooning over the bath.
Stupidly, this meant the shower was out of action, as was the sink. So, despite sweating through his favourite blue shirt, Abe Schwartz could not wash his body, and the only way to clean his teeth was in the kitchen, but there were too many dirty dishes. So Abe opted to brush his teeth in his bedroom and spit the toothpaste out the side window.
The shirt went into the washing basket, as did everything else he was wearing, apart from his underwear, which is what Abe always wore to bed. And good old Abe Schwartz did something he had not done for years. He sat on his bed, closed his eyes, and he prayed.
He closed his eyes and called out to a God he had lost faith in and asked Him for forgiveness. He asked not to be found out. And he asked for the strength to do whatever was needed to put things right. He would even the slate. If he could only be allowed by whichever Lord was listening to get away with the murder of another human being.
He wasn’t asking for dispensation, because Sythe was a dick, but it would not have hurt his cause if he had chosen that road.
Abe Schwartz pulled back the covers and got in. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to sleep but he was going to try. Stillness and silence was all that it would take.
The Beresford was quiet. The walls were thick. You could chop somebody up in your apartment without causing a disturbance. The only thing anyone ever heard from another apartment was Mrs May’s music, and you couldn’t complain to the woman who owned the house you were living in.
And, while lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, Abe said another prayer in his head, asking not for forgiveness or a free pass, but to wake up in the morning and find that none of this had actually happened. Or to wake up and do the entire day over again. He could keep everything the same apart from the fight and the murder and the chopping up a body.
Abe tried his very best to hope, to assuage his usual brand of nihilism. He fell asleep eventually. Guiltier and emptier.
FIFTEEN
The day was new and everything that came before had still happened. Sythe was dead. No prayers were answered. And Blair Conroy woke up, on her own, in her own place, to no alarm. No pans were crashing around in the kitchen as her mother baked something for the church. Her father wasn’t whistling or revving an engine in the garage after tinkering with the car.
The Beresford was heaven.
She had nothing planned for the day and, more importantly, nothing planned for her. Somehow, her parents had even managed to resist texting. They were giving her space. She imagined her father restraining her mother and it made her laugh. She was conscious of the noise at first, then realised she could do what she wanted. She could do who she wanted. She could be loud or quiet. She could sing, fuck, read. She could cook her own meals or order the most unhealthy takeaway imaginable.
Blair Conroy could change herself or become herself. Go vegan. Worship Satan. Crochet. Drink rosé wine. She could be anything and anyone. Everyone in that building could be just like Blair Conroy.
Creating themselves.
Recreating themselves.
The Beresford was a halfway house for the disenchanted and disenfranchised, whose focus was to become. To be. To discover and make their impact. The inhabitants were not necessarily the outsiders but were certainly the ones found on the periphery. The wallflowers at society’s ball. You could be an Irish farm boy one minute and the toast of the city’s art scene the next.
Blair knew exactly where she was from, but it was too early to know where she was heading. All she knew was that she felt invigorated and that she was, that morning, heading out for a run. Not to train for a race, it was for pleasure.
Because she wanted to.
Blair could do anything that she wanted to.
SIXTEEN
Abe Schwartz could not do anything that he wanted to do. Not yet. Not since he pulled a Charles Manson and lost himself for a moment. (We all go a little mad sometimes.)
He had slept as well as guilty men do. Soundly. Too deep to dream. And now, he was back on his phone, scrolling through articles and falling into the serial-killer rabbit hole. He made sure to set his browsing to private, which he had not done while panicking the day before when he went straight to Google and typed: ‘How to get rid of a dead body.’
This was causing Abe some anxiety but he could blame one search on morbid curiosity. A follow-up on bone disposal or dissection would do more than raise an eyebrow.
He had discovered that flushing the bones whole – even the smaller ones – was a fast route to discovery. They almost always caused a pipe blockage. There’d be no need for a police investigation, any hack plumber could out you with sufficient evidence.
He found that a body could be buried in a shallow grave for a week or two and it would be easier to peel away the flesh. But that would still require digging and Abe did not want to dig.
Like all good millennials, he wanted the greatest possible outcome for the least amount of effort.
He scrolled.
Jeffrey Dahmer had the solution. The bones needed to be wrapped in a sheet and then pulverised with a sledgehammer. If you could break them into tiny fragments, you could deposit them in the toilet or drop a few in with the recycling or cut a hole in your trouser pocket and discreetly shake them onto the floor like you’re trying to escape Shawshank prison. Dahmer had emptied his bone splinters into the woods behind his house.
Abe had a better idea. He could burn them in batches to make them more brittle and smash them into a powder. Then he wouldn’t have to worry about even having to leave the house.
It was perfect.
He put the phone, face down, on the bed for a moment and thought.
What am I doing?
Can I really get away with this?
He could have and should have called the police immediately. He could have claimed self-defence. He could have said that the artist was temperamental and prone to aggressive mood swings. That Abe was the victim. He was attac
ked by Sythe. His mother’s lawyer would have got him off on a technicality.
But that was gone. There was no turning back for Abe Schwartz.
Abe Schwartz, who has more books in his apartment than Blair Conroy could find in her old small-town library.
Abe Schwartz, who would help a stranger carry heavy boxes up the stairs to her new home, despite not being physically gifted and too lazy to dig a hole in the ground.
Abe Schwartz, who only got into a mess because he was concerned about his neighbour being shouted at on his own doorstep. He is no friend to gossip, and cares about the world and the people in it.
He had hoped the whole thing was a nightmare, that his day would restart and he could put things right, but he had woken up and traipsed into the bathroom to find that Sythe’s fingerprints had dissolved, as had a lot of the flesh. He poked hesitantly at a big toe with the rubber end of a pencil and watched as meat separated from bone. The water was blotched with a deathly film that confirmed Abe was now in too deep to turn back.
So he left everything in the sink for another hour while he researched things on his phone and joined the Jeffrey Dahmer fan club.
Then he got changed. Brushed his teeth again. Sprayed some deodorant over his torso. Drained the bathroom sink. Rinsed the bones that remained. Placed them into a paper sandwich bag. Stuffed them into his jacket pocket. And left the apartment – double-locking the door.
Abe had scrubbed Mrs May’s secateurs and placed them, not where he had found them, but in a plant pot on the front porch. The old dear wouldn’t remember where she had misplaced them.
The front door opened and startled Abe. But it wasn’t Mrs May or the police or the ghost of Aidan Gallagher, it was Blair, clad in lycra, phone strapped to her arm, earphones in.
She took out the left one. ‘Morning, Abe. Out early.’
‘Er, yes. Just going for a walk. Bit of fresh air.’
‘I hear ya. It’s a lovely day. Let’s get it started, eh?’ And she placed the earphone back into place before waving him goodbye and setting off down the street with a smile on her face.
That love of exercise was not something that Abe could understand. He watched the way Blair moved and, for a moment, forgot about the dead guy in his bathroom and the fact that the secateurs were now defunct.
He needed a saw.
SEVENTEEN
Mrs May does the same thing every morning. And she has done it since the day she bought the building known as The Beresford.
She goes straight to the bathroom and runs herself a deep, hot bath complete with bubbles that are supposed to help relax her muscles. She evacuates her bladder and leaves the taps running while she floats into the kitchen. She puts ten tablespoons of ground Colombian coffee – it’s a mild, all-day bean – into her eight-cup cafetière, boils the kettle and pours it over the grains.
Then she waits.
Four minutes for the coffee to steep. Then she plunges and pours into a large mug, which she leaves on the side.
The bath continues to run.
Mrs May listens to some of her music. She does not sit down. After two songs, she knows that the bath is almost full. She undresses and lies in the water until her wrinkles have wrinkles.
She dries and dresses and returns to the kitchen, where her black coffee is now perfectly cold. Just the way she likes it in the morning. She drinks it with her two poached eggs on brown toast with more black pepper than anyone would ever need.
This is every day and it will not alter.
Mrs May remembers that she came back to her apartment the night before, wearing her gardening gloves but without her secateurs. She knows that the last place she was pruning was in the back garden, so checks outside near her favourite rose bush.
She is old and she is slow but Mrs May has all her mental faculties. She knows that she left the tool out the back. She saw both Abe and Blair leave the Beresford in the morning so cannot ask them if they have seen anything or picked them up, perhaps. She knocks on Sythe’s door. No answer.
There is a cupboard in the downstairs communal area of The Beresford. Mrs May keeps it stocked with things like plant feed, tools, firewood, cleaning products, along with two brooms – one for the inside, one for outside – and a vacuum cleaner. If somebody found her pruning shears on the floor outside and it was late, this is where they would put them.
They’re not in there. The only thing she notices is that the firewood needs restocking and both bottles of drain-cleaning fluid seem to have been taken. It’s not a product that is used often, and when it is, it is used in small quantities. So it stands out.
She would replace everything but makes a note to check in with the residents to ensure there are no plumbing issues.
Through the window, Mrs May could see that Blair had returned from her run. She was standing on the front porch, leaning against one of the wooden beams and stretching off her thighs. Blair didn’t even hear Mrs May open the front door because her headphones were still blasting out something upbeat and motivational.
‘Good morning, dear.’
Blair was oblivious. Mrs May tried again. Louder.
‘Good morning, dear.’
Nothing.
Mrs May moved around into Blair’s line of vision.
‘Ah, Mrs May,’ she smiled, her face glowing with sweat and activity, ‘how are you today? Lovely, isn’t it?’ She was still breathing a little heavily.
‘Yes. It is. I see we have another early riser in the building.’
‘I just felt like attacking the day.’
Blair smiled and started walking towards the door as if to go inside.
‘You slept well?’
Blair stopped and turned back, that country-girl smile still draped across her flushed-from-exercise pink cheeks.
‘Oh, like a baby, Mrs May. It was just perfect.’
‘And you’re all unpacked and settled?’ Blair nodded but didn’t have an opportunity to speak before Mrs May continued. ‘And you’ve had a chance to look around? I only ask because I think I left my pruning shears out the back yesterday evening and I can’t seem to find them this morning. I wondered whether you may have picked them up and put them somewhere.’
Blair’s smile dropped a little at what seemed to be an accusation. She felt awkward. Didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know where to look. Above Mrs May’s head she saw a spider’s web in the corner of the porch roofing. Over her shoulder, half a mile down the street, she could see Abe walking home with a plastic bag in each hand, which she assumed were his groceries for the week. Her gaze flitted to the side to avoid the old woman’s eyes and landed on the plant pot by the front door. The one Mrs May had mimed trimming while desperately trying to listen in on Blair and Abe talking at the car.
‘Handheld cutters? Teal-coloured handles?’
‘Ah, you have seen them.’
‘I can see them right now.’ And Blair leant down to pick up the secateurs. The ones that Mrs May was sure she had left in the back garden because she had left them there. These ones, the ones out the front looked exactly like hers, but a lot cleaner – scrubbed and bleached and disinfected and rinsed after chopping off the fingers and toes of her artist neighbour.
‘You may not have noticed but I am quite an elderly woman.’ Mrs May gave a smile that was more a plea for forgiveness than a joke.
Blair Conroy was brought up to be forgiving, to understand and empathise with the failings and faltering of others.
‘An easy mistake to make when you’re so busy.’
There was nothing barbed about her response. Blair had not been ravaged by city life yet. She was sweet and wholesome and fundamentally Christian for an atheist. And she was still riding the wave of new independence and post-exercise endorphin release. So, like everyone who ever lived at The Beresford, she was in the honeymoon period, where everything was changing and everything seemed perfect.
Mrs May was far more cynical and suspicious. She had been at The Beresford from the beginning. And,
though she was certainly old, she remembered everyone who had ever lived there. She remembered the people that had stayed for years and she remembered all the ones who had left without a word.
And she remembered, without doubt, that she had left her pruning shears in the back garden.
EIGHTEEN
It wasn’t groceries. It was a saw and as many bottles of drain cleaner as Abe could fit into his bags.
It would draw too much attention to go to one shop and clear their shelves of the product, he may as well walk into a hardware store and purchase a knife, some rope, masking tape and bin liners.
Abe was a reader. He had read a non-fiction book about a particular tiny village in Germany that had somehow produced many of the top business people at the big automotive companies like BMW, Volkswagen and Mercedes. It was also home to a woman who had started a pretzel company in her garage. And he remembered that she coated her pretzels in lye. Obviously an incredibly corrosive material, however, once heated above fifty degrees, becomes completely safe and gives the pretzels that shiny brown colour that people are so used to.
Abe considered using this as a reason to buy an industrial-sized container. If asked, which was likely, he could claim the pretzel defence.
Then he remembered a fictional thriller he had ingested in one sitting where the killer liked to bathe his victims in bleach but, so as not to raise any questions, he would purchase the six bottles required from different places.
That was the route that Abe chose over the stupid pretzel idea.
He couldn’t see Mrs May and Blair talking outside The Beresford because he wasn’t looking towards the house. The bags weighed too much and every time he looked at his destination it seemed to step back a few hundred metres. Abe decided he would focus on what was directly ahead of him. One step at a time. One sawn leg. One burnt arm. One dissolved hand. If he stayed on course, this would all be over before he would know it.
