by Steve Harris
Getting the crushed gold hoop off wasn’t difficult - she simply unbent it with her fingers - but the removal of the broken closure spring was another story entirely.
She went to the freezer, got the ice tray, crushed a cube and inserted it between her fat (and still bleeding) top lip and her loose teeth, then wrapped a few more cubes in a facecloth and held it to her ear. The ice seemed to make the damage more painful, but Janie persisted.
Holding the ice-pack to her ear, Janie went back down the hall, picked up the telephone and let the handset dangle while she used her free hand to dial the number. The emergency operator was already asking questions by the time she’d retrieved the phone.
‘Ambulance, please,’ she heard herself say. ‘I think my husband is dead.’
And as the words left her mouth, Janie glanced out of the front door to where Billy-Joe’s corpse lay.
Except that Billy-Joe’s corpse no longer lay there.
Tutting you through,’ the operator said.
Janie only half-heard. She was staring at the empty space where her husband had been and thinking, This is impossible. A few minutes ago he was dead. Not breathing. Expired. There was a groove the shape of the rolling-pin in his head.
Oblivious to the new voice bleating in her ear, Janie put the handset back in its cradle and went out into the front garden.
Gone! The word rang in her head like the sound of a great bell.
She began to panic. Billy-Joe was staggering about out there somewhere and he was going to get picked up. Even if he hadn’t been found yet, he soon would be. Someone would see him wandering about badly injured and call the police or an ambulance, and when that happened, Billy-Joe was going to talk. And he was going to say something along the lines of: My wife! My wife did this. I was just sitting watching the telly and she came in from work and tried to murder me with a rolling-pin.
And who were the police going to believe?
There were two words that had been gliding around the periphery of Janie’s mind all day, wheeling lazily like vultures. They were words that seemed like very good advice indeed:
RUN AWAY!
The urge to obey this command was overwhelming. Janie stopped thinking logically about the consequences of doing this and gave into the irrepressible urge. Things could be sorted out later.
She went to the VW, slammed down the tailgate, snatched the keys from its lock and rushed to the driver’s door. For a few ugly seconds she couldn’t make the key fit in the lock and her mind began to crow that it had got bent during her fight. Finally it slotted home and she got in. She glanced up and down the street while she put the key into the ignition, but Billy-Joe was nowhere to be seen.
Get outta here! she told herself and twisted the key, knowing the car wouldn’t start, or that it would be out of petrol in spite of the fact that the needle was showing three-quarters of a tank.
The VW started on the first turn of the key.
Janie revved the engine, found first gear, released the handbrake and rolled out of the drive before she asked herself where she was going. To her parents she supposed. Or to Drezy’s place. There weren’t too many choices.
By the time she got to the dual carriageway that led towards the M3 motorway, Janie was beginning to feel a little shaky.
You can make that a lot shaky, she told herself.
There was a packet of cigarettes in the glove-box. Once upon a time, back in the days before Ace’s offices were designated a ‘smoke-and-we-sack-you’ area, Janie had been a twenty-five a day woman. The habit was broken now, but she still had fond memories of it, and the packet in the glove-box was a souvenir; a connoisseur’s brand of untipped called Sweet Afton.
The dual carriageway bisected a forest and Janie knew there was a picnic pull-off up ahead. She turned into it and stopped.
She undid the glove-box, found the packet of cigarettes, unwrapped the cellophane with shaking hands, waited impatiently for the car’s lighter to pop out, then lit up.
The nicotine hit her like an express train.
Janie inhaled, coughed long and hard then did it again.
This time she blew out a plume of smoke. Her head began to spin.
‘Smoking’s bad for you, babe,’ Billy-Joe said from right behind her.
Janie didn’t for a moment believe she’d heard this, but she glanced in the rear-view mirror anyway. A short high-pitched yelp escaped her lips around the cigarette.
That wasn’t an hallucination of Billy-Joe sitting behind her on the back seat, that was the real thing, head smashed in, blood and everything.
‘Where are we goin’ babe?’ he asked. And grinned.
Janie had left the rolling-pin on the passenger seat. If she hadn’t suddenly become paralysed, her left arm would have managed to reach it in time to kill that grin.
To Hell, I’d say,’ Billy-Joe’s reflection told her. ‘I’d say we were going to Hell in a hand-basket. The two of us. Hand in hand. What would you say, o wifey of mine, o one true love?’
And then his left arm was locked around her throat, pulling her back and choking her, and his right hand was waving in front of her face, snapping the pliers in her line of vision.
‘I think we’d better cure you of your nic-o-tine habit first,’ he said and grabbed the cigarette with the pliers. The hot end showered burning sparks over Janie. Billy-Joe yanked the cigarette from her lips and dropped it into her lap. The cigarette began to burn through her skirt. She could feel a small spot of intense heat high on her right thigh. She batted at it with her left hand, but it wouldn’t go away.
‘Now smile at me, Janie,’ Billy-Joe hissed. ‘Smile at me and show me those lovely loose gnashers you’ve got in your sweet little mouthy.’
Janie’s fingers found the handle of the rolling-pin as Billy-Joe pushed the pliers between her tightly closed lips. She felt her upper front teeth begin to give against the steady pressure, felt the new split in her lip tear wider.
‘no!’ she shouted, and the pliers were in her mouth and snapping like an enraged rat.
Janie brought the rolling-pin up in a long swiping arc. It hit the side of Billy-Joe’s head. The pliers rattled against her teeth, pinched down on a small piece of skin inside her cheek and were roughly withdrawn, taking the nip of flesh with them.
Billy-Joe gasped and uttered a little curse and his grip on her neck loosened. Janie hit him again. And again. Billy-Joe went limp.
‘Bastard!’ she croaked and brought the rolling-pin up again. Billy-Joe fell back into the rear seat.
Squealing in rage and pain, Janie knocked the burning cigarette end off her skirt, swivelled round in her seat and whacked her husband over the head again. He didn’t only have the groove in the crown of his head now, he had matching ones in three other places. His jaw was twisted so far off-centre it surely must have broken clean off its internal hinges. But the pliers were still held firmly in his hand.
&nb
sp; ‘Drop them, you bastard!’ she told him, not realizing he wasn’t going to hear. Then she hit the hand holding the pliers. They fell, but Janie wasn’t finished yet. She couldn’t stop herself. She hit him again, three times, screaming at him each time the rolling-pin cracked bone. ‘Come back from that, you fucker!’ she challenged through clenched teeth.
Then she dropped the rolling-pin, collapsed in the front seat and began to cry. She wasn’t just a carrier of the madness-plague, she had caught it herself. Billy-Joe had passed it back to her and turned her into as violent a psychopath as he had become.
Eventually the sobbing subsided. Unthinking, Janie got out of the car and unlocked the tailgate. There was a car rug in there somewhere under all the other things she had thrown in. She unpacked her things until she found it, dragged it out, put her cases and folders back, closed the hatch and got back inside the car. She wasn’t going to be able to drag Billy-Joe’s body out of the car and there was nowhere to hide it even if she did. She pushed him down until he was sprawled across the back seat, then covered him with the rug.
Then she lit another cigarette and smoked it, staring out at the empty parking area.
Then she started the car and began to drive.
17 - The Fictional Sister
Martin Louis Dinsey didn’t begin to admit that he’d allowed himself to be suckered until he ran out of petrol on the A19 just outside York. He was tired, and he was three and a half hours and two hundred and twenty miles away from London. It was one in the morning, it was raining, the road was empty and there were still forty-odd miles between him and Scarborough.
It was almost as if someone had planned it this way.
He sat in the dead Ferrari Dino and keyed the starter again, knowing that it wasn’t going to do any good. Even a Ferrari wouldn’t run on fresh air.
Especially a Ferrari, he told himself.
Scowling, he reached for his Vodafone, the battery of which held just enough life for it to bleep at him once in a half-hearted fashion before it became completely flat.
Well that’s that then, he told himself bitterly. It’s get out and milk it time. Or get out and walk, because that’s what it boils down to.
There wasn’t even a petrol can in the car. He was going to have to walk God only knew how far - in the rain - to the nearest service station or telephone box.
This is what happens when you let your AA membership expire. And when you let your brain expire too and set out to chase wild geese on a Thursday evening at half past nine. You should have realized it was one of Essenjay’s stupid gags and stayed home with Angela and the kids. Essenjay isn’t even going to be in Scarborough when you get there.
Until now, Martin had not let himself believe that Essenjay could be so spiteful. But when he thought about it, it was just about par for the course. Just about the right kind of childishness he should have expected from her. Should have stayed home instead of getting soaked like this. Haven’t even got a bloody umbrella!
But the truth was, he still thought of home as Essenjay’s flat in Bude, and his real wife as Sarah-Jane Dresden. Which was the reason he had allowed himself to fall for the message in his voice-mail at the office. The one that said she had gone to stay with her sister in Scarborough and that he was more than welcome to join her.
Which was when he ought to have seen what the game was. Because during his years with Essenjay she had never mentioned a sister. He’d called Essenjay’s home again - twice - and had got the answering machine. Then he had looked at the address he’d written down - Mrs Algar, 42 Ellenfield Road, Scarborough - and he had been so sure it was a made-up name and address that he’d checked it out by calling directory enquiries and asking for the telephone number.
While he’d waited to be told there was no listing for this name and address, the ice-block in his brain had burst into life, which he thought ought to be significant. But all it showed him were various snapshot views of his least favourite haunted house. There was Black Rock brightly lit against a sky full of thunderheads and a grey sea. There was a side aspect showing the steep incline down which he’d seen Essenjay fall. There was the overgrown back lawn. The final shot - the one which occurred at precisely the same instant as the recorded voice began to speak - was another view of the front of the house. Except that in this last image, which faded almost as soon as it had formed, one of the upstairs windows was blazing with a blinding white light.
But Martin didn’t think about it for more than a moment because there was a number for Mrs Algar living at that address in Scarborough. He’d jotted it down on a scrap of paper, and put it in his jacket pocket thinking, Eureka!
Looking back on it - which he was now doing as he trudged down the road, squinting against the rain which blew horizontally into his face - Martin felt as if it had been a script, written for him to play and embedded in his unconscious so that he acted it out without really knowing what he was doing or why he was doing it. But the imaginary scriptwriter had been skilful enough to make the scene closely resemble Martin’s real life. So close to life, in fact, that he hadn’t noticed the difference.
What a load of old cobblers, he thought, angrily wiping rainwater from his face. The mistake you made was being too eager. Too eager to fall for Essenjay’s little trick. You thought that the message in your voice-mail box was true because you so badly wanted it to be true. You went for it, hooky line and sinker, just as she expected you to.
Now, as he walked towards a garage that might be nonexistent, he wondered what had made him drive all the way up here without phoning the number to check that Essenjay wasn’t playing a bad joke on him.
Probably because you knew it was a trick all along, he told himself, and couldn’t bring yourself to admit it.
Now the car was out of it and he was reduced to walking in the pouring rain, things looked quite different. Essenjay wasn’t going to be waiting for him at 42 Ellenfield Road, Scarborough at all.
There was certainly a Mrs Algar living at that address, but that didn’t mean she was Essenjay’s sister. Essenjay had probably got hold of a Scarborough telephone directory and picked the name at random. Damnit, the surname even began with an A. She hadn’t even bothered to delve into the directory - she’d just opened it at the beginning and chosen the first name she saw.
The reason that Martin knew he wasn’t simply going to be able to turn the car round when he’d got it going and head for Bude to give Essenjay a piece of his mind was because of the billion to one chance that she might, just might, have been telling the gospel truth. He’d come this far, so he may as well go and knock on the door and see for himself.
There were lights up ahead and if he squinted, Martin thought he could see a tall yellow sign about half a mile away. It looked like a hotel sign and a hotel might be a very good idea at the moment.
Here’s another very good idea, a part of his mind told him.
Martin frowned because he didn’t recognize this as his own inner voice, nor did it seem to emanate from his mental ice-block. In fact, it sounded rather like Essenjay herself.
You could buy her red roses, the voice continued. You could check into a hotel, sleep till you’re feeling fit, get up, get on the phone to Interflora and send her a dozen red roses. Get them to put: I love you, M. kiss kiss, on the card. And ps I’ve had you put on the insurance for the Ferrari. Send her another dozen each day for a week. She’ll have softened up by then.
The concept of putting Essenjay on his Ferrari insurance and letting her drive it offended Martin deeply. It was his car, and he was the only being on the planet rightfully entitled to drive it. But Martin had an understanding of tactics. Putting Essenjay on his insurance was a sure way of making her warm to him. Just because she was on the insurance, it didn’t necessarily follow that she was going to get to drive the car. What harm was there in a little deceit?
I’d let her drive my car, the mental voice chipped in. It’s a brand-new Porsche 911 twin turbo convertible and it cost more than your second-hand Ferrari. She’s already on the insurance, in fact. The car’s stood here on the drive waiting for her to speed off to wherever she wants to go.
‘I’m going crazy,’ Martin told himself aloud. His voice sounded hollow and frightened in his ears. Over the hours the ice-block had hung in his mind’s eye he had changed his beliefs as to its cause. Earlier he believed he’d stripped a few mental cogs due to the pressure of his failed relationship with Essenjay and that he could quite possibly term himself cracked up from now on. Then - in an amazingly short time - he’d found that he could live with that huge cold block standing there like an empty computer screen. It didn’t adversely affect his thinking, it was merely a temporary aberration and, he believed, it would probably be gone when he woke after a good night’s sleep.
