Very Nearly Dead

by A K Reynolds

  I considered screaming to get attention but knew it was unlikely to bring anyone running to help me. I figured my best course of action would be to keep her talking and hope some sort of opportunity to escape presented itself. Failing that, I’d scream for help. ‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked, hoping it’d buy me time.

  She returned to her perch on the sofa before answering. ‘I got fed up of worrying that someone would crack and I’d get sent down for a murder I was involved with a long time ago,’ she said. ‘I didn’t see why I should carry on living in fear for the rest of my life. And I was sick of kowtowing to Seth. I realised if everyone who knew our secret was out of the way, I could lead a normal life. It’s that simple.’

  My mind went into overdrive. How had I not worked all this out? How had I been so blind? How could I keep her talking longer and what would it gain me other than a few more minutes?

  ‘What are you planning on doing to me – to us?’

  She took a sip of her coffee. ‘Wait and see,’ she said.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘I need to know.’

  Jake’s eyes were wide open with fear. I couldn’t say I blamed him. Mine were probably the same.

  ‘No you don’t,’ she said. ‘But as you ask, you and your boyfriend are never going to be seen or heard from again. You’re going to disappear like so many people do.’

  I guessed we’d both be poisoned in some way, taken to a remote spot, and buried in a shallow grave. Maybe she had other plans for us, but that’s the way I saw it panning out. My fear reached epic levels even I had never known before. When all else fails, plead for your life, Jaz, I thought.

  ‘Don’t do this, Kylie. You don’t have to. I’ll keep our secret. I’ve kept it all this time, haven’t I?’

  I was clutching at the most inadequate straws going, which is what drowning men and women have always done.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I need to free myself of the paranoia I’ve had to endure all my adult life. I can’t put up with it any longer and I won’t be rid of it until every last witness who could testify against me is dead. Unfortunately your boyfriend has been drawn into things. Collateral damage you might say. But that’s war for you.’

  I clutched at an even smaller straw. ‘What about Seth?’

  She smirked. ‘What about him?’

  ‘You were in love with him. How could you do it to him?’

  She took another sip of her coffee then held the mug in both hands, leaning forward. ‘Yes I was in love with him, was being the operative word,’ she corrected me. ‘You wouldn’t believe the things I did for that man in the name of love. But he cheated on me in spite of the loyalty I showed him, so I decided I’d be happier without him than with him. I was right. Killing him was an unexpected pleasure. By the way, he was the easiest of the lot of you to get rid of, because he thought he was untouchable – and because I was the one person he never suspected.’ She put the mug down on the floor, walked over to me and crouched low so her face was above mine.

  ‘What’ll it take to make you change your mind?’ I asked.

  ‘If you could give me a time machine so that I could go back into the past and erase our mistakes, that would just about cover it. Have you got a time machine? No? I didn’t think so.’

  I began to yell as loud as I could but she quickly put the gag back on me so I only managed about two seconds. No-one came running to my rescue.

  ‘I’m going to leave you two lovebirds for a few minutes. I need to get some things to help me tidy up,’ she said, then she left and I heard the outside door slamming behind her.

  The words ‘tidy up’ scared me. I didn’t think they referred to getting Jake’s maisonette straight. I was still groggy from whatever she’d used on me so I shook my head to clear a little of the fog from it. I thought I might have a chance of standing up if I got on my belly so I tried to roll over but couldn’t manage it. I tried wriggling like a caterpillar but found any form of locomotion impossible. It didn’t help that my ankles and wrists were throbbing.

  I somehow rolled on my side and in desperation got myself into a foetal position by drawing my knees up to my chest, and then with a huge effort born of adrenaline fuelled fear, I forced my hands, which were bound behind my back, down my butt. Then by pulling my knees up even higher I got my hands over my feet. Until that moment I’d had no idea I was capable of such a manoeuvre. It’s amazing what a body can do when you’re knocking at death’s door.

  With my hands now in front of me I was able to get into a crawling position and push myself to my feet. I then made a series of awkward jumps towards the small kitchen at the back of the maisonette but lost my balance and fell heavily. When I landed it hurt like hell and felt as if I’d put my shoulder out.

  Almost there, Jaz, I said to myself. Don’t quit now.

  I didn’t think I could risk standing up again so I got on my hands and knees and did a cross between a crawl and a shuffle the rest of the way. Once in the kitchen I stood up and immediately staggered. I couldn’t afford another fall – not onto the tiled kitchen floor. Somehow I managed to clutch the worktop for support.

  I pulled open a drawer and found a small knife. It was a dinner knife rather than a cutting knife, but it seemed to have enough of a blade to cut my bonds, so I bent over and sawed my ankles free. It took some doing with a blunt dinner knife.

  It was impossible for me to turn the knife around and use it to sever the cords binding my wrists so I cut the gag from my mouth, slashing my face in the process, and felt my own blood running down my face, saw it dripping onto the tiles I was standing on. It made a plip-plip noise and the sight of so much of my own blood would’ve scared me shitless if not for the fact I had bigger things scaring me right then.

  With the handle of the knife between my teeth I was able – just – to saw the cord tying my wrists together. My jaws were aching by the time the strands were coming loose – and at that point, I heard the front door open.

  This is it, Jaz, it’s fight time, I whispered.

  The sedative Kylie had administered to me was still in my system and although I’d been able to untie myself I was unsteady on my feet and knew I’d have no chance against her unarmed. I had the knife but it was pitifully small.

  Think, Jaz, find a weapon.

  I could’ve used the knife and would have done if it’d come down to it, but a dinner knife didn’t seem threatening enough somehow, so I rummaged around in the drawer again and found a rolling pin. That’d be better, I thought. I grabbed it in my right hand and immediately had to put it down. My shoulder was hurting so much I couldn’t pick it up. I used my left hand and rushed into the lounge just as Kylie entered it from the lobby, leading with her left shoulder, her right arm being occupied with dragging something. She glanced down and saw I was no longer on the floor then turned her head to look my way. By that time I was nearly on her. She looked on in horror as I brought the rolling pin down as hard as I could in a deadly arc.

  What happens when you hit someone on the head with a hard object? Do they fall unconscious and wake up an hour later none the worse for wear, like they do in old movies? Or do they get a fractured skull, brain haemorrhage, and death or permanent disability from such a blow?

  These thoughts ran through my mind in the instant I delivered the blow. They must have had some subconscious effect on my actions because when the rolling pin hit her, it didn’t strike where I’d aimed on the crown of her head; it just missed her ear and landed near her right shoulder.

  She let go of whatever she was dragging and fell against the wall. With a look of disbelief on her face she slid down it until she was sitting on the floor, back against the wall, knees drawn up into her chest.

  Her right shoulder looked to be about two inches lower than her left one. She reached across her body with her left hand and gingerly ran her fingers along it towards her neck. Afterwards she looked up at me with sad eyes.

  ‘You’ve broken my collarbone,’ she said, in the
voice of a small child. Still speaking in a small child’s voice, she added: ‘You shouldn’t have done that. You’ve upset me now. I thought you were a nice girl, Jaz.’

  She burst into tears. That’s when I realised she was unhinged. She’d been carrying a bigger burden of guilt around than I had, and it’d fucked her up more than mine had fucked me up. I should’ve spotted the signs years before, I suppose, but I’d been too preoccupied with myself to take any notice of what might be going on in Kylie’s head.

  Fearing she might attack me, I was still holding the rolling pin aloft ready to defend myself. I realised it wasn’t needed, as the one blow had knocked all the fight out of her, and I lowered my hand to my side, dropping my makeshift weapon to the floor. My handbag was on the sofa. I rooted in it and got out my mobile. Jake was making urgent noises through his gag. I glanced in his direction.

  ‘Don’t worry, Jake, I’ll untie you in a minute,’ I assured him.

  Then I did something I should’ve done eighteen years earlier: I called the police.

  When I’d finished speaking to them Kylie looked up at me again. By this time her blubbing had subsided to sniffling. Wiping the tears from her eyes with her good hand, she said, ‘Was the baseball bat a nice touch?’

  ‘Yes, Kylie,’ I replied. ‘It got me barking up all kinds of trees, none of them the right sort.’

  She looked pleased with herself. ‘I knew it would.’

  Jake made some more anxious noises from under his gag to get my attention so I set him loose.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘She made me lure you here by holding a knife to my throat. I was convinced she was going to use it.’

  ‘You were right. She would have used it.’

  When the police arrived I told them everything that had happened eighteen years ago, and I even fessed up to my more recent crime of killing poor Sean Price. I explained I’d been drugged when I’d run him over.

  Kylie confirmed my version of events. She’s since been charged, tried, and sent to Broadmoor – the prison for the criminally insane.

  The newspapers and TV reported her trial and the sensational background to it, portraying me as almost as much of a victim as Charlotte. Charlotte’s brother Joshua subsequently broke the news he’d been able to talk to her for some time but hadn’t let on for fear of the criminal gang coming back to finish the job on his sister they’d started almost two decades before. Now the gang was finished he felt he could reveal all.

  The police didn’t take any action over the part I’d played in ruining Charlotte’s life because she refused to give them any evidence against me. I’ve never been able to figure out why she did that, but I’m deeply grateful to her. The police did charge me for leaving the scene of the accident in which I killed Sean Price. My solicitor put forward a terrific plea in mitigation, arguing that being drugged and stressed had affected my reasoning, and so on, and I got off with four penalty points and a £2,000 fine.

  The thing Kylie had been dragging into the room when I’d hit her was a wheelie case. She had a second one in her car. I don’t know what she was planning on doing with them. One of the newspapers speculated she was going to shut me and Jake up in them and leave us in the house, like the poor spy who was found dead in a holdall in his own apartment. Another suggested she’d wheel us out one at a time and dump us in the canal, or on a railway siding. Either way, it wouldn’t have been a good end for us.

  Danny Scott didn’t go to ground after all – he died in his own cellar. He’d gone down there to get a few items he needed but he never made it back up. He breathed his last at the bottom of the cellar steps, another of Kylie’s victims.

  I’ve given up my legal job and gotten a low-paying admin job working for Bromley Council. I make ends meet by letting out a room to a lodger. I guess one day I’ll retrain and get back to earning a half-decent income. In the meantime I have the satisfaction of knowing I’m no longer helping criminals escape their just desserts and I’ll never return to that line of work.

  Me and Jake didn’t get back together, of course.

  I doubt I’ll ever visit Charlotte again, or speak to any other member of her family. It’d be too traumatic for them and for me.

  Right now I’m shaking like a leaf in a force-twelve hurricane because I’m desperate for a drink. I’m not going to have one, though. I spoke to Bernie – my AA counsellor – earlier today, and tonight I’m going to my first AA meeting in months. I’m determined to stay off the sauce for good.

  This time I really mean it.

  The End

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the team at Bloodhound Books for doing such a great job of producing my book and bringing it to the attention of readers.

  I’d also like to thank Clare Law for her great edit.

  Finally, I owe a big thank-you to all the friends I have who’ve encouraged me with my writing. In no particular order, they are: Paul D, Denis, Pearl, Martin, Melinda, Paul M, Owen, Debbie, Marc, Julian, Sean, Phil, and Ted. (I hope I haven’t left anybody out – if I have, I’m very sorry!)