Kiss Me When I'm Dead

by Dominic Piper

  I walk across her office and push open the door that leads to the area where Fisher’s goons tried to search me. The first thing I notice is that the high-pitched whine of the faulty security camera has gone and there’s no sign of any of the little red lights. Well, perhaps that’s not so strange. If there’s no one here today, then there’s no need for anyone to be spying on them. Still, I was surprised that no alarm went off when I came in here, key card or no.

  I decide to take a look around Raleigh’s office. Surprisingly, the door is unlocked. The first thing I see is Rosabel’s portrait. She’s staring straight at me, as if she’s threatening to tell Raleigh that I’m in here without his permission. Somehow, though, I think she’d be pleased. Even as I turn away to look at the rest of the office, I can feel her eyes boring into my back. It’s odd; the last time I was here I thought I was looking at a portrait of a living woman.

  I’m curious to find out what would happen if I tried to remove the Monet from the wall. I’m sure that would set off a silent alarm that’s linked to the local police station. Perhaps I’ve already unwittingly set off an alarm just by coming in here. Perhaps the police are already on their way. I pat Lincoln the dog on the head as I walk past him.

  I take a look at one of the enormous Natuzzi sofas and it’s tempting to just lie down on one of them and go to sleep. I really must try to go to bed early tonight.

  There are two doors leading out of this office apart from the one I came in through. One of them is the one that Raleigh appeared from the other day, surprising me as I was looking at Rosabel’s portrait. I open it and find myself staring into an empty corridor. There’s a smell of new carpets. I can see a kitchen at the end of the corridor and head towards it, pushing open the two doors to my right as I proceed.

  The first door leads into a bedroom that doesn’t look like it’s used very much. There’s a double bed, a big freestanding wardrobe, a couple of chairs and an en suite bathroom. The second door opens to reveal a small sitting room. There’s a sofa, three big armchairs, a coffee table and a huge flat screen TV.

  The kitchen is big but doesn’t have much stuff in it. There’s a wide window which looks out onto a large-ish garden. The garden has been concreted over and most of the plant life is in terracotta pots of varying sizes. That’s not to say it isn’t attractive. There are lush bamboos growing here, plus a good variety of ornamental trees.

  The kitchen and the two rooms are possibly used by Raleigh as a little pied-à-terre when he’s staying here overnight. I leave the kitchen and walk back into the hall, again standing still for a few seconds to see if I can pick up signs of anyone else being in the house. Once again, everything’s totally silent. I’m a little uneasy about this. There’s no reason on earth why this house shouldn’t be empty in the middle of a weekday, and Anjukka said it wasn’t the main office, but the place just seems too big to be deserted at this time of the afternoon. And getting in here was just too damn easy.

  I go back into the office and try the second door, while Rosabel looks on indifferently. Although it looks like the one I’ve just gone through, this one is locked. Luckily, it’s a basic two-lever mortise lock and it takes me five seconds to pick it with a useful tool I have attached to my key ring. I don’t really know why I’m bothering to do this, but I feel compelled.

  Unlike the previous door, this one opens into almost total darkness. I carefully pat my hand against the wall to my right, trying to find a light switch. I don’t really want to explore whatever’s here if there’s a chance I’m going to fall over something. After that fails, I pat the wall to my left. I’m just starting to wonder if Raleigh has a torch somewhere in his office, when my hand finally finds a small switch, a little lower down than you’d normally place one, almost at hip height.

  When I turn it on, I’m greeted by yet another corridor. This one is carpeted much like the first one and from what I can see, leads directly to the back garden. There’s fussy red flock wallpaper on the walls and lots of expensively framed prints of countryside scenes on each side. A little over the top for a corridor, but then it’s Raleigh’s corridor, to do with as he wishes.

  The lighting is muted here, and as I walk along, I can hear the door to the office closing behind me with a loud click.

  There’s a door at the end with a Venetian blind covered in a cherry blossom pattern. It’s very pretty. This door leads out to the garden. It’s an unusual layout, but maybe Raleigh likes to take a stroll around his shrubs in between power meetings.

  I walk towards the cherry blossom door to see if I can get out to the garden. I know that it’s probably locked, and I don’t really know why I’m doing it, but I somehow think it’s worth a try.

  I turn the handle, but there’s no give at all. I pull one of the slats down and look out into the garden. Same view as from the kitchen. I turn around to head back to the office, but as I approach the door, I can see that there’s no obvious lock or handle to the office on this side. There obviously was a handle there at one point, but it’s been removed. Now why on earth would you do that? What a stupid thing to do, and how stupid of me not to check. This means I’m trapped in this corridor. The only thing to do is to break out of the cherry blossom door into the garden.

  Then I notice a straight line travelling down the wall on my right about five feet away from the back door. For a moment I wonder if I’m hallucinating, then I spy another one about three feet away. Is this a door? The light in here is pretty dim, but it was the flock wallpaper that prevented me from seeing this when I passed it the first time and the prints take your eye away from it. I wonder what would happen if I gave this area a hard push?

  To do that, I’d have to take two of the prints down, so I do. I lean them up against the wall on the opposite side of the corridor. I place my hand flat against the wall and push. Nothing happens and it feels pretty solid. But about a foot beneath my hand, I can see that the wallpaper is slightly worn, as if someone has been attempting the same thing as me, but slightly lower down. Normally, this would be covered by one of the prints and would not be noticeable.

  I place my hand on the worn area and give it a tentative shove, wondering why I’m actually doing this. There’s a little bit of give so I push harder and the door that isn’t a door swings open.

  I’m immediately hit in the face by a blast of cool air and my first thought is that this is some sort of wine cellar, but on the ground floor. I take a tentative step inside and a light flickers on without me doing anything. I assume I must have stepped onto some sort of pressure pad.

  It isn’t a wine cellar. It’s just a very chilly room with nothing in it apart from a wooden sideboard and a single leather sofa. A bizarre print hangs on the wall, featuring a floating naked woman holding an hourglass in one hand and a plumed helmet in the other. There’s a drinks tray on top of the sideboard with a few bottles of spirits and some glasses. What kind of a room is this? Does Raleigh pop in here for a scotch and soda when he’s feeling stressed? And why is it so cold?

  There’s yet another door to my left. What’s behind this one, I wonder? This is getting to be like a Grimm’s Fairy Tale. Well, I’ve gone too far with this now and I can’t say I’m not curious about this place. I’d come here to find what the hell was going on with this guy and now I’ve ended up snooping around his house like a burglar.

  This new door isn’t disguised in any way and it doesn’t appear to have a lock, just an ordinary handle like you might find in a normal house. I grab the handle, push it down, open the door and step inside. This time the blast of air that hits my face isn’t chilly but most definitely frigid. No automatic light switch-ons, but the interior is already lit up by half a dozen halogen lamps built into the ceiling. They’re all low wattage, so things are quite dim, apart from two brighter ones in the centre of the room which are aimed downwards at an angle of about forty-five degrees.

  The two of them sit side by side on a pair of slate grey hi-tech wheelchairs like you might find in a hospital. These
are not the type you can push yourself along with; these are transport chairs that someone else would push, and there are multi-directional castors on each of the four legs.

  I have a mental exercise that I sometimes use to cope with fear, especially if I think it’s going to get in the way of clear thinking. I try to imagine the fear as a sheet of paper which I then crumple up into a tight ball and throw into some deserted corner of my brain; out of sight and out of mind. It usually works, but not this time.

  I can feel a chill running up my spine which makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I can feel the chill spread to the sides of my face and I’m aware of my heart racing and my palms sweating.

  They’re both naked. Rosabel is certainly the scarier of the two; her facial features are pinched, her lips are pulled back in a grimace, her hair is straw-like and her breasts are shrivelled and seem to be too high up on her chest, certainly higher than in her portrait. You can see the shape of her skeleton underneath her skin, which I think you’d have to describe as parchment-like.

  Her body looks like it’s been treated with some sort of thick makeup, perhaps to partially disguise the scars on her abdomen. I presume these are the result of the embalming process. She certainly bears little resemblance to the beautiful woman in the portrait, but that was painted over ten years ago. Perhaps the fact that I still recognise her at all means that the embalmer, whoever it was, made quite a good job of it.

  She sits in the same pose as the portrait, head turned slightly to the right, hands on her lap. I start wondering how difficult it would be to dress and undress someone in this condition. I start wondering about how they did it for the portrait. Is that the reason her breasts were exposed? Was there some difficulty with getting the dress onto her body? Was she too stiff? Was it all too awkward? But that’s ridiculous. Any decent artist would have been able to paint the clothes on afterwards, but that makes the pose even more creepy and disturbing.

  I take a deep breath and walk into the main part of the room. There’s no mistaking Viola. She still looks like the girl in the photograph, and without all the knowledge I have in my head, could almost pass muster as a living human. Her hair is still thick and shoulder-length, her eyes, which are possibly glass, stare straight ahead, all the intelligence and flirtatiousness expunged; no longer humorous, no longer tragic.

  Her body is still voluptuous, but the muscle tone is different, and as you get closer to her it’s obvious that this is a corpse, albeit one in an unusual posture and condition. She sits in the same pose as her mother, hands on lap and back straight, but I can see there’s something wrong with her left side. The shoulder is slightly hunched at a peculiar angle and the arm looks somewhat twisted, causing the back of her left wrist, as opposed to the palm of her hand, to rest on her thigh. The curve of her waist is abnormal, as if a few ribs have been removed. Something has happened to her. She’s been damaged.

  I touch her cheek with the back of my hand and then pull it away quickly when the softness I expected isn’t there. There’s a moderately strong chemical smell in here, similar to the one I noticed on my first visit to Raleigh’s office. At the time, it reminded me of carbolic soap, and I’m sure it’s a phenol of some sort, but mixed up with several other smells that I can’t identify.

  In the far corner of the room there’s piece of equipment that looks vaguely scientific. It’s like a long, narrow, silver tub about four feet high and it’s on three castor wheels for easy movement. There are two rubber tubes coming out of it and a couple of metal ladles hanging off the side. God knows.

  To my left, there’s a silver trolley, but there’s nothing on it. Next to that is a cream-coloured, freestanding medical cabinet with three drawers. I pull one of them out and it’s full of scalpels, syringes, scissors and several instruments I can’t identify.

  As a contrast to the creepy scientific-looking stuff, there are a couple of old-fashioned wardrobes made from some dark wood. One of them is slightly open and I can see two or three dresses hanging up. So what’s that all about? Does Raleigh treat his former wife and daughter as a couple of luxury, life-sized Barbie dolls?

  For the sake of my own mental stability, I tear my eyes away from the pair of them and take a look inside the wardrobes. I look in the one that’s already open. There are all sorts of gowns and dresses in here; some of them look and smell new, other not so new. From the look of them, I would guess that they are/were Viola’s, though nothing is certain in the world of the insane.

  At the bottom of the wardrobe are a variety of shoes, ranging from espadrilles to seven-inch heels to plain black court shoes. There’s even a little Tupperware box with half a dozen bottles of perfume inside. I push the clothes away from the right-hand side and can see a couple of racks screwed into the wood. One of them has three belts hanging from it and the other one has a couple of pairs of stockings. Nothing, really, that you wouldn’t find in a living girl’s wardrobe.

  The second wardrobe isn’t open, but a quick tug at the handle rectifies that. Again, this is filled with clothing, but there are also coats in here, including a silver fox fur coat. I run my hand down its length. It’s real fur. There’s a faint smell of a flowery perfume that is probably coming off the clothes.

  The clothes in here are more luxurious and expensive-looking and I guess this is Rosabel’s stuff. I pull out a drawer at the base of the wardrobe. This is full of lingerie, as well as a couple of unopened boxes of perfume. One of them is in a pink box with Victoria’s Secret: Bombshell on the side and another says Absolutely Irrésistible: Givenchy. At the base of the wardrobe are a load of shoes, mostly in disarray. There is also a pair of what I think would be described as ‘mules’ with high heels and pink fluffy stuff at the front.

  I close the doors and look around the room once more, only now noticing that the walls are solely decorated with photographs of Rosabel and Viola. I take a deep breath as I stroll around. Without realising it, I’d been producing a lot of adrenalin. There’s only one shot of them both together, sitting on a bench in front of a big hedge. There’s no mistaking Viola, but she’s quite young in this; maybe nine or ten. Rosabel is smiling, but her eyes are expressionless.

  I guess that this room must be the ultimate shrine to both of them, but it doesn’t just have the clothes and the photographs, it has the women themselves. I try to put myself into the mental state where you might do something like this, but I can’t.

  I walk back to where Rosabel and Viola are sitting and take another look. Could either of them ever, ever imagine that it would come to this? I’m trying to get my brain to work out the implications of what I’ve found in here, but all it can manage is a kind of debilitating sadness. I don’t even know who the sadness is for. Rosabel? Viola? Raleigh, even?

  I can’t tear my eyes away from them; it’s like looking at some obscene, erotic art instalment and I’m mesmerised by it. I’m wondering whether the best thing to do would be to hand this entire, nauseating, odious matter over to the police.

  And then my head explodes.

  24

  A MOUTHFUL OF BLOOD

  The first thing anyone does when regaining consciousness is to take a deep breath. This happens even when you’ve been asleep. It’s the shallow breathing that does it; your body wants a little more oxygen and it’s telling your brain what to do to get it.

  But I don’t know what’s happened to me yet, and I don’t want to let whoever may be watching me realise that I’ve come round. I keep my breathing shallow.

  I do a quick tour of my body, in no particular order of importance. My back is the first thing I notice. Quite apart from the residual agony from Sakura’s expertise, there’s a hot pain radiating from an area about six inches below my shoulder blades and it feels like the muscles there are cramping up.

  I remember staring at Rosabel and Viola, then experiencing a colossal jolt of pain that snapped my head back so hard that I thought my neck had been broken. After that, nothing; I have to assume that someone jabbed
me with an ultra-powerful stun weapon of some sort.

  Despite that, I think I’ve only been out for about five or ten minutes. From the cold, I think I must still be in the same room as Viola and Rosabel, or maybe the one just outside. I’m sitting in a chair with my head slumped forwards. It’s very bright. If I am in the same room, either someone has been hitting the dimmer switch or I’m sitting next to Rosabel and Viola in their special spot-lit spot.

  Both of my shoulders ache and that’s because my hands are tied behind my back. I give my wrists a miniscule twitch, but there’s no give at all. I can feel the tight binding of a plastic wrist tie. There are a number of ways of getting out of these, but most don’t work if your hands are behind your back, so I’ll put that problem on ice for the moment.

  I don’t have to move my feet to know that my ankles are tied to the legs of the chair by the same method. The feeling in my hands and feet is starting to get fuzzy and they’re both probably starting to get discoloured by now. I think it can safely be said that I’m not in a good place at the moment.

  I allow my consciousness to expand into the room. In thirty seconds I can tell that there are two people in here apart from myself. Whoever they are, they’re not talking – to each other or to me. I listen out for breathing, inhale gently for scents; anything to give me an idea of who or what I might be dealing with. To my right, I can hear soft but erratic breathing and I can smell perfume. I run the scent through my mind to see if it’s at all familiar.

  It’s Mitsouko by Guerlain, the perfume I bought for Anjukka. Is she sitting there, silently watching me? Is she in on this in some way? I can feel the other presence in front of me and to my left. No perfume, but a mix of male sweat and deodorant. Whoever it is, I can hear them shift slightly in their seat and hear a gentle creaking of wood. I can feel the focus of both of them on me. I suppose I’ve got no real reason to continue this pretence, but I do it anyway. Just to give myself some time to think.