by Will Carver
SEVEN
Like everyone who entered their apartment for the first time at The Beresford, Jordan Irving was amazed at the space, the quality of the finish and the original architectural features. Unlike the others, he didn’t care.
The kitchen would only ever be used for a morning coffee, if he had the time. He would grab his lunch from somewhere in the city and most of the time he would eat out for dinner. He had no qualms about going to a restaurant and asking for a table for one. It didn’t bother him that some families or couples would stare at him and either think he was weird or pity his apparent loneliness.
The lounge had enough space, if he pushed the sofa over a few feet, for him to perform a few body-weight workouts in his first few days. He could find a gym in that first week and get a month-long membership. That way he could be out of the building at 6:00 am, before anyone else was up, and he wouldn’t return until late most nights, meaning that he would never get caught in a situation where a neighbour might ask him about his day or his work or, God forbid, his writing.
It was painful for him to have to explain the writing. He was lucky that he worked in the film industry because it lent a little more credence, but people would often comment that it was ‘just a hobby, then’. It was infuriating. Even more so for Irving because he was so focussed and determined. But he was certain that he could get through the next month and a half without having to explain that to anybody – bar the friendly old woman who had rented him the place.
The bed was huge. He’d need that for sleeping and masturbating – when he could be bothered – but that was it. There was a wardrobe for his clothes, which he hung up immediately, and the ironing board had been placed inside like they do in hotels.
Toilet.
Shower.
Perfect.
Victorian, clawed-footed bath tub: superfluous.
Abe’s old flat had everything its new tenant needed and a little more. When Abe was disposed of, the apartment was cleared of possessions that were unique to him, but all the furniture remained.
Irving was a simple man with simple requirements, and he lived a minimalist existence. Almost all his clothes were packed into that one bag. He used to keep all the books he read, but they were now gone and had been exchanged for an e-reader, which contained more than he would ever be able to read and took up the bookshelf space of half a novella.
He had done the same with his films. Even though it was the area he wanted to work in, he sold them all and bought as many as he could in a digital format, which were stored in the cloud and backed up on a hard drive the size of half a novella.
Pictures were scaled back. He had two of each piece of crockery in case he had a guest over. There was no drawer in his kitchen that contained stuff. Nothing could distract him. Some would think that it took all the personality out of his apartment, and others believed it was zapping the personality out of Jordan Irving. Both some and others were correct.
He was so single-minded in the pursuit of his dream and success that he had forgotten how large the world can be. And that there are other people along that journey.
And that not all success can be measured with a number.
What it did mean, though, was that Jordan Irving was the perfect neighbour for a couple of women who were trying to get rid of two dead bodies.
They wouldn’t have to sneak around. He wasn’t interested in them. That was great, because if Jordan Irving became suspicious, if he evolved into another loose end they had to tie up, the knife wasn’t going to cut it.
Six weeks.
By the time he was due to leave, Gail’s baby would be the size of a papaya.
Maybe even a grapefruit.
EIGHT
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m waiting for you to finish.’
‘You’re sitting on two dead women.’
Gail was pregnant and she had been on her feet all day. Aubrey and Saffy wouldn’t mind, they were dead. It was strangely comfortable. That’s what she wanted to say, but instead she just stood up.
Mrs May explained that the new tenant had told her he’d already had a long day and was planning on finishing some work before freshening up and going to bed early.
‘I’ve seen his kind before. He’s one to stay in that room and hardly ever come out unless it’s absolutely necessary. So you’ve got a decent window to get these two over to your room.’
‘My room?’
‘I’m not having this in my apartment. You can drag them up the stairs to Aubrey’s if you like, but it’s a huge effort and you’re pregnant. Get them out the way. I’ll sort out the library.’
Mrs May liked Gail. She knew her backstory and she could see that her future was all going to be about the baby. But Mrs May did not want to be involved in this side of things. She didn’t want to have to mop up the blood from a businesswoman’s stomach or an entrepreneur’s throat. It was easier with the Sythes and the Abes of this world, because they tried to hide things away. They got rid of the bodies in secret. They did all this crap by themselves.
Those were the days.
Gail performed her minion duties. She placed a bin liner over Saffy’s head and another over her feet, then taped them together around the middle. The idea was that she wouldn’t spread any more blood. But it made her awkward to move so she made a slit in the top of the bag where Saffy’s head was and wrapped her hand around the bird’s nest of hair of the young designer who would never see the faux etching effect on her city warehouse window.
She watched Irving’s door as she dragged the package across the lobby.
Nothing.
Aubrey was so tall that the bags did not meet in the middle of her body, so Gail had to wrap another one around her waist and tape both ends to it. She used the hair winding technique again to drag that tall redhead, who could have easily become her friend.
Mrs May was good to her word. She mopped up the streaks that led from the library to Gail’s room and, when she’d finished, the library looked as it always had. Tidy but dusty.
Gail sat on the floor in her hallway and cried. What had she become? Why was this happening to her? She was a good person. Or, at least, she thought she was. She had escaped an abusive partner. The evil piece of shit had managed to knock her up with one of his soft rape sessions, and she was determined to change her life and the life of that baby. She would show it what love really was.
That child would know that his mother would do anything for them.
It wouldn’t know about the three people she had killed to protect them, but she would ensure that her child would understand what being a mother meant to her.
That is what kept Gail going.
That is what she was clinging to.
But she couldn’t help wondering if there was a way to get out of her current predicament. She thought about her parents and her friends and whether there was a God. It didn’t seem right that there was some higher power, because she appeared to have gone from one hell to another.
What was her way out?
Was her new life actually worse than the one she had left?
And was there anything she wouldn’t do to get to the place she wanted to be?
WHAT DO YOU WANT?
Descend, for a moment, if you will, into the backstabbing, cutthroat world of beauty pageantry. Young girls, too young for make-up and with no need to wear it, painted to look like a filtered photo, and hairsprayed within an inch of their lives, all in the pursuit to understand their individual beauty, by making them all look alike.
And all sound alike.
What makes you different from the other girls competing today?
Nothing. We are all caked in foundation and our hair is scraped back.
Why do you think you are the best candidate for this title?
My mum wants it more than the other mums. She said we have to win because Mrs Pearson is a real bitch.
Where do you see yourself in five years?
I’d like to be doi
ng well at school, but my parents are both chronically overweight, and if I don’t start winning some pageants so that my mother can live vicariously through me, I’m afraid she’s going to hit the crack pipe again and I’ll be left trying to care for her. My dad drinks too much.
This would never be said.
It seems there is no beauty in truth.
With no truth, there’s no trust.
If you could only have one wish, what would you wish for?
Please form an orderly queue, step up to the microphone and say the words, ‘I. Would. Wish. For. World. Peace.’ Then smile like you mean it. Like you’ve given it some genuine thought.
What do you want?
We want truth, honesty and trust.
Nobody wants world peace and everybody knows that. But do you really want truth?
If you have one thing that you can ask for, you have to word it correctly.
You ask for world peace, and the simplest way to make the world entirely peaceful is to erase all human life. Imagine the quiet. The serenity. But that is not what you want. You want things to be better. You want to feel safe at night on your own as a woman when you walk home. You don’t want to have to fear walking past a man because he is more than likely going to say something derogatory or flirt or force himself on you in some way.
You want to trust that your military are fighting to keep you free and not taking part in conflicts that serve the self-interest of a faceless few.
You want your police force to be honest and uphold their oath to protect you, no matter your gender, age or race.
Asking for world peace can solve all of these issues, but the only option for true peace is the extinction of humanity. What you really want here is education and discussion. That is what you must ask for.
Saying that you are eating bacon distances you from the fact that you are eating pig. It is further distanced by not referring to the animal as ‘a’ pig. Buying bacon that was once a local pig only means that the pig was killed closer to where you live.
The only farmers in the world are the ones who grow vegetables because anything to do with meat is a factory. Run in the same way a factory for cars or televisions is run. Only they’re covered in shit and blood, and there’s nobody taking the remote controls away from the televisions as soon as they are made.
And bacon gives you cancer.
Sometimes you want the lies because the truth is as inconvenient to you as a world at peace would be.
Besides, bacon is delicious and you probably won’t get ill because you’re invincible.
You walk into a bookshop and you are not ‘discovering’ anything in there. It is carefully marketed and orchestrated for you to buy the ones that need to be bought. You are being told what to watch, who to vote for, which team to support and which God to believe in.
You want the truth?
All of these things serve to obscure the greatest lie of all.
The fruit and vegetables are placed at the front of the supermarket because the colours draw you in. Everything behind is bad for you.
But you just see the colours.
You buy into them.
You believe them.
It’s easy to do as you are told.
You are not where you think you are.
PART FIVE
ONE
The devil baby was the size of a large artichoke and The Beresford was silent.
It had been another busy couple of weeks for Gail. She had travelled north, south, east and west again. This time a little further than before, never visiting the same place twice, though she did pass through the village where she had filled her petrol tank and dumped Abe’s pelvis. She didn’t stop this time. There had been nothing in the papers, so that bone must have been in landfill somewhere, slowly decaying.
She’d seen enough thriller movies to know that a killer can never return to the scene of a crime, it’s a sure-fire way to end up in handcuffs.
Gail had also travelled north-east, south-east, south-west and north-west. She’d even discovered some of the compass points between those. Towns nobody had ever heard of. The kinds of places you only find because you are lost in the woods or have taken a wrong turn. What better place to do something horrific than the setting for every late nineties horror movie?
Most of the parts had been taken into wooded areas and buried deep. Gail had gone so far into the undergrowth on occasions that she figured she could have left a hand or shoulder on the floor and it would have been devoured by animals. But she wasn’t an idiot. And she wasn’t lazy. There were no risks to be taken. She couldn’t afford it. She would not lose her baby, no matter how many holes she had to dig.
Out in the woods, in one of the directions she had travelled, Gail was approached by two people as she was burying a hand.
Fuck. This is it. Undone by a couple of doggers.
All she had was a small shovel. She could hit one, but the other would get away. If it came to it, she’d take the man out first and take her chances with the woman. She was a mother now, she was stronger.
‘Ahoy there,’ the man said, waving a hand, his other holding on to his partner.
‘Evening,’ Gail responded, surveying the area around her. She had her shovel and a shopping bag that still contained a limb that needed burying. With her foot, she patted down the earth of the hole she had recently filled in.
‘Everything okay up there?’
Gail had the higher ground, which she knew was beneficial.
Castle, that woman-beating, verbally abusive bully of a husband was about to save his wife.
‘All good, thanks.’ Gail tried to look away, hoping they would just move on to whatever car park they were hoping to have sex in.
‘What are you doing up there? Digging?’ The woman joined in.
‘Foraging. Mushrooms.’ Gale dug the shovel into the bottom of a tree, bent down and grabbed a handful of flat brown mushrooms, seemingly stuck together to resemble a hen’s splayed feathers. ‘Hen of the woods,’ she announced, proudly.
Her military ex was fascinated by this sort of thing. She remembered him saying how you should never eat a foraged mushroom unless you are absolutely certain what it is. A shaggy ink cap is perfectly edible but a common ink cap could lead to convulsions and death if consumed with alcohol.
Useless information until one is found burying a body in woodland.
Gail placed her haul into the bag so that it covered the remaining limb.
‘Wow. Impressive,’ the woman responded, nodding at her partner.
They weren’t moving.
‘Yeah. You can find them in the day but they can be quite camouflaged by the tree and leaves. At night, the torch illuminates the white edging so they’re easier to spot.’ This was a lie. Gail was thinking on her feet, trying to recall any information she could about fungi. She droned on about anything until she knew she had bored the couple enough for them to move on with their evening.
Castle: he knew how to survive in the wild on food that was stuck to the bottom of a tree but he couldn’t make himself a god-damned sandwich.
On one occasion, Gail had travelled so far in one direction that she hit water. She thought about a boat, dropping bits of body over the side, maybe weighing them down somehow, and letting a thousand fish nibble at the flesh only to be eaten themselves by some apex predator. But it was getting too elaborate.
Forget the perfect crime.
Cut the body up. Drive somewhere far away. Dig a huge hole. Drop the body part inside.
Repeat until empty.
Somehow, it had become her daily routine. She’d hoped to be working part-time or doing something creative from home. But her days had been filled with driving, digging and burying.
There was no time to discover who she was, only who she was not.
A killer.
A friend.
A mother.
Abe’s head had freaked her out. She had left that part of him until last. She’d done the same with Aubrey. Bu
t with Saffy, it was different. Just the thought of her smug, little face filled Gail with rage. The poor girl hadn’t done anything wrong other than turn up at the wrong time. Still, Gail found a degree of pleasure in sawing her head off.
She liked the sound of the saw biting its way through the vertebrae in Saffy’s neck. She did it quickly and roughly. She just wanted that bitch’s head off. She wanted to call her ‘bitch’. She wanted to spit on her face as the back of her head slammed to the tiled floor. She tried not to smile.
Anger and pleasure.
Who she was and who she wasn’t.
She’d had the box in the corner of her bedroom for three days now but hadn’t wanted to open it until Aubrey and Saffy were completely gone. Gail was trying to be sensible with the money she had saved, especially as she wasn’t drawing in a wage just yet. The crib was basic. White wood. Wheels at the bottom of the legs so she could push the baby into the corner once it was asleep or rock the thing back and forth to help it sleep.
She’d ordered the modular version because it was a little cheaper, and she’d saved the job as a reward for herself once she had disposed of her two latest victims.
She rubbed her stomach.
The baby was the size of a large artichoke.
And The Beresford was silent.
She still hadn’t seen Jordan Irving. It had been two weeks since he had arrived.
Mrs May had kept herself out of the way. The only thing she had really achieved was placing the advert for Aubrey’s apartment.
She needed a new tenant.
TWO
There was something about the old lady that Jordan Irving just liked.
He’d been staying at The Beresford for a fortnight, and he had not had to introduce himself to anybody else who lived there. Work had been demanding but rewarding. He had located an old club called The Crowley that had been shut for two years. There were still flyers in the windows for upcoming shows that had long since passed.