“I, erm…” She pushed the smile. “I wondered if we could conduct our business here and now, instead of at mine tomorrow.” She was tempted to wink.
He swallowed, and because he was thinking with his dick, it didn’t even occur to him to ask how she’d got his address. “I… er…” He glanced over his shoulder as if seeking authorisation from someone who wasn’t there.
He rubbed his face, and almost instantly it changed from one of consideration to one of incomprehension as though he was thinking: what the hell is she doing at my house at this hour?
It was as though the penny had dropped. The incomprehension fled from his face, and fear took up residence.
Sidmouth tried to slam the door but Jess got her foot in there first. The door hit it and bounced back against the wall. He turned and ran up the hallway, his open-backed slippers slapping against the floor and against his bare feet. He shouted something incomprehensible, like the scream of a child being chased across the playground. She launched herself up the final step and into the hallway, her gloved hand already searching inside the rucksack.
“Everyone feels brave in their own office, Jessy,” Tony had said, “but get him at home, see how vulnerable he feels then.”
Sidmouth was halfway up the steep, dark stairs when Jess wrestled the axe from the rucksack. She sprinted up the first four stairs and then swung the blade like she was chopping wood. The back of Sidmouth’s right heel split wide open; the axe cleaved the slipper and the stair carpet and became lodged in the wood beneath. Sidmouth howled like a wounded dog, and his ascent slowed but grew more frenzied as Jess got to work yanking the axe free.
Blood had splashed across the wall.
He took a quick look back and screamed again, a long string of saliva whipping from his lower lip.
Jess freed the axe as Sidmouth rounded the top step onto the landing, screaming still in a high-pitched boy’s voice. It sounded like, “Mam! Mam!” He dragged his dead foot behind him, leaving a shining trail of blood on the filthy carpet.
Jess, teeth bared, clambered up the stairs, yelling a battle cry, and rounded the corner to see him cowering by the open bathroom door. His arms were already raised, palms facing her, tears mixing with the snot on his face, more saliva dancing in the wind from his mouth as he pleaded with her, “Leave me alone! Please, please, I won’t touch you again, please!”
He saw her determination, and squealed, dragging himself across the floor and into a poorly lit bedroom with cobwebs in each corner of the ceiling. “I’ll sign you off, Jessica, please. I’ll get you full access to your boy. You’ll never have to meet me again!”
Chapter Fifty-Four
She grinned. The logical part of her mind had stopped working altogether; only the animal was left, and it wanted blood, not false promises. She walked along the landing, turned, and saw him trying to squeeze under the metal frame of his single bed.
The bedding was orange, the pillows pink, blue, and white stripes. The carpet threadbare, the walls dark brown fleur-de-lys, the curtains faux velvet. Ancient stuff from the eighties – the room of a boy who had remained a boy into his forties; who only appeared to become a man in his tweed suit, carrying his briefcase. But it was feigned. His only pleasure lay in destroying the lives of damaged women, getting hard on the power they gave him.
She swung the axe at his other ankle but missed.
He screamed, his eyes so wide that she could see the tiny red veins in the corners. She tugged the blade out of the floor. He pulled his legs up but she struck bone with her next blow, and Sidmouth’s screams became inaudible, petering into a series of hearty sobs, the kind where the bottom lip hangs out and catches the tears.
Fear propped his eyes wide still. She grabbed the bed frame and lifted it up, getting her strength from the same place he got his erections – the suffering of others. She pushed it away, and as it hit the floor, it knocked into a flimsy wooden cabinet whose doors opened as it fell forward. Sidmouth’s toys fell out across the floor.
He was isolated in the centre of the room, an island surrounded by his own blood, confronted by his own sickness.
Jessica stared. The light was dire, but these were not the kind of toys you would find in a nursery school. They whispered ‘apprentice dungeon master’. They said ‘wannabe paedophile’; they shouted ‘practising sicko’.
“I can explain!”
“Don’t bother.” She raised the axe.
John Sidmouth cowered, scrabbling on the bare wooden floor with his one good heel pushing like crazy; his damaged heel working too, but just slipping on blood. His eyes were hollow black holes of terror as she swung the blade at his hands like a fly-swatter, taking one off completely and slicing the other across the wrist until it hung by a strip of glistening tendon, a useless appendage. She wasted no time celebrating, but swung the blade again, this time aiming for his crotch. It struck home and suddenly Sidmouth went silent.
Blood sprayed into her face, misted on the cap.
His eyes and mouth were open wide; blood pumped from his arms in comical arcs, and more leaked into the floor. He gasped once or twice and then stopped breathing. The arcs stopped.
“You fucker,” she yelled, and brought the axe down across his face.
Blood sprayed across the wall, trickled down the remains of his left ear, flowed across his shoulder and turned his almost white t-shirt red. But her anger hadn’t diminished – it had increased. The fucker had made her do this! This wasn’t in the master plan; this was a dangerous detour that might attract the attention of the police – again. But, if it was possible, she hated this man even more than the others; operating under a government umbrella for countless years, tormenting people while waving forms and privileges and freedom under their noses.
Jess stamped on his face and he slid to the floor like a slug. She almost spat on him – almost, but caught herself just in time.
She stood there panting, wanting to carry on until the bastard was nothing more than strips of meat and fat, and lumps of mushy red hatred, but she was exhausted. She stood, hands on her knees, head hanging limp, sweat-dampened hair twitching with each hammered heartbeat, air rasping down her constricted throat.
Jess heard whimpering and held her breath. It was coming from the bathroom to her left, and she knew the sick fuck had a kid in there. A prickle ran up her back – that’s why he was so hesitant at the front door: he already had company.
She stood straight, took a fresh grip on the blood-smeared axe, and walked out of Sidmouth’s bedroom, across the landing. She peered around the doorframe into the bathroom.
It wasn’t a kid at all. A fat old woman in a knee-length nightdress was sitting on the toilet with her pants around her ankles. Her breasts fell outside of her legs. Her neck fat removed all evidence of a chin, just blended it perfectly into her chest. Her chalk-white hair sat in rows of curlers under a piece of black netting. Shaking old hands outstretched, pleading.
“My John,” she whispered.
Jess entered the bathroom, breathing through clenched teeth. “You raised a monster.”
“Please!”
She swung the axe.
* * *
Once back inside that cosseted place in the darkness of the alleyway, shaking and breathless, Jess propped the axe up against the wall. She pulled off her outer layer of clothes: baggy man’s jeans, a grey sweater three sizes too big for her, and a CAT Diesel Power cap. It was too dark to see properly in here, but they all looked to have been spattered nicely with fresh blood. Last thing to come off was the swimming cap she’d worn as a barrier between herself and the CAT cap. Her hair was wet through with sweat.
She took the axe, the clothes and the cap, and dumped them all into the stout shopping bag that she’d secreted by the hedge. Once the latex gloves were off, she waved her hands about until the sweat on them had evaporated.
And then she walked casually back out into the comparative brightness of the streetlights, not even looking across the road at that open
door. Strange, she thought, what goes on in people’s houses. Who knew what Sidmouth got up to in his bedroom – or in the cellar, even? How many more Sidmouths were there in this street, in this town, this city?
The thought sent a shudder skittering up her back. She shivered at the coolness of the evening, and began the long walk home, dumping the gloves in a wheelie bin at the top of the street, confident it had been the best meeting she’d ever had with Sidmouth. “Very productive.”
DAY 6
Chapter Fifty-Five
Eddie’s eyes flickered open, and he wondered where he was. For an awful moment he thought he was in some shitty bedsit above a carpet shop in Wakefield city centre. He woke up quickly then, hands in the tangles of a sweaty duvet, and a racing panic in his skipping heart.
When he saw his room, the present-day normality leaked back in. He breathed out a quivering sigh and dropped his head back on the pillow, finding some kind of solace in the familiar cracks in the ceiling.
Was it last night’s heart-to-heart with Troy that had brought the past back to piss on his bonfire like this? He thought all of that was behind him – all that he’d hoped was behind him. Whenever his thoughts were dragged back to Jilly or Sam, he felt weak and vulnerable all over again. And he’d worked hard to shift that burden to a disused section of his brain that was like a quagmire, holding onto past terrors and refusing to let them go. The quagmire had a steel shutter door and a padlock the size of a dinner plate; it wasn’t easy for him to inspect those memories, and it wasn’t easy for them to escape. But escape they had.
Sam had been killed by a hit and run driver just before his twelfth birthday. Jilly had decided that she couldn’t live without him – and, furthermore, couldn’t live with Eddie – so she bailed on him with a bottle of pills. Eddie had never been the same since.
He’d tried.
Ros had been the next in line to ride the Eddie Collins rollercoaster. And she’d done a great job of holding on… until her own ghosts had frightened her off, and Eddie was left holding the spare set of keys that he’d had cut for her. He was also left holding a heart that was in a dozen pieces.
So Eddie had grown a skin so thick that no one could break in ever again. He’d also developed a cunning master plan for keeping people out – acidity. This gruff exterior wasn’t something nature had bestowed upon him; it was something he’d grown, something he’d worked at, and it had kept him safe until now.
Moneypenny was knocking at that gruff exterior, tickling his extra-thick skin.
He found himself shaking his head as he remembered Troy, and how he’d opened up a little about his own addiction. What the hell was going on? It wasn’t long ago that Eddie would have kicked Troy’s arse out of the door and never let him back inside, let alone actually helping the kid to get off the drugs.
It was all getting too personal. He didn’t want anyone getting close to him ever again. And he didn’t want to raise that shutter door and start inspecting memories of lives past. He wanted his old wounds to stay in the quagmire. He felt sure that a shrink would tell him otherwise – that to free your demons was to exorcise them.
Bollocks to that. He buried them, the deeper the better.
“The fuck was I thinking?”
Just inviting trouble. Inviting pain.
Eddie shook his head, and made a mental note to stop this stupidity before it became serious. Look at Dad, he thought, living under a cloud all the time just because someone on Facebook took an interest in him and taught him to cook stroganoff without getting poisoned. Flattery… that’s how they do it. Every time.
Eddie just had to hope that the mental note wouldn’t get lost in the wash.
He picked up his phone, unplugged it and noted the time was a very pleasing four minutes past nine. He felt quite pleased with himself, being able to laze for a change instead of getting up early and being sore-headed all day.
But being up late didn’t wipe away his memories of the way Troy had blitzed his romantic evening with Moneypenny – and just her name caused him to gasp; not because she was utterly beautiful, not because she was good company, ranking a good two levels above tolerable, but because he had to think of a way to extricate himself without causing her any pain. He had no choice.
And then his mind wandered to the next topic, as it was apt to do when it wasn’t constrained by time or by getting to work early. It wandered to Troy. And there it stopped until his finger pressed the green button on his phone’s screen. Next to it was a generic grey cut-out of a person, and TROY was beneath it. He heard it ringing, and then he heard a tinny voice tell him no one was available to take the call, and would he like to—
Eddie pressed the red button, threw the phone on the bed, and got up. He opened the door and heard the same old female voice he’d heard only yesterday, the one he’d mistaken for a DJ on the radio. What the fuck was she doing here again? Eddie walked along the corridor until he reached the lounge, where he propped himself against the archway and watched Superbitch and his father chatting. Eddie’s ears were about to get warm. And then they were about to catch fire and fall off.
* * *
“Fetch me some more tea, Charles. There’s a dear.”
Eddie heard the chair creak, and heard footsteps in the kitchen. He moved forwards and peered around the corner, watched her as she flicked through the channels on the TV, pausing at food channels but stopping mostly at the pay-per-view ones.
The kettle clicked off. “Would you like more biscuits, Wendy?”
“Digestives. Milk chocolate, not plain this time. You know I don’t like plain.”
Charles shuffled to her side with a tray of tea-making equipment that he didn’t even know they owned. The only tea-making equipment Eddie was aware of was a mug and teaspoon, but here was a porcelain pot, another for the water, a milk jug, a silver sugar bowl and spoon, all sitting on an ornate tray with a plate of biscuits. Eddie nearly coughed, but he was too engrossed by the whole freak show to avert his eyes.
“Have you arranged a meeting with the estate agent yet?”
“Ah,” said Charles, “it slipped my mind! I’ll get onto it this afternoon.”
“Nonsense. You’ll get on with it this morning. We need to know where we stand, Charles.” There was a pause as she snapped a biscuit and nibbled on it. “These are McVities, aren’t they? I won’t have own-brand biscuits, Charles.”
“Yes, yes, McVities.”
“You do understand, don’t you, about the estate agent?”
“Of course I do.” Charles wasn’t smiling under her torment. His face was a delicate shade of scarlet. “I’ll get on with it soon.” He looked as fragile as the porcelain teapot.
“Well, we simply can’t progress this whole thing until we have a value. So the ball, as they say, is in your court, dear.”
“I know.”
“And when are you telling Eddie?”
Eddie’s heart kicked, and he almost fell over.
“Soon. I’ll tell him soon.”
“Hurry up about it. He can’t stay, you know. You do know that, don’t you?”
“Yes, dear. I’ve said I’ll tell him. I will, just give me some time; it’s delicate.”
“Delicate? How? Would you like me to tell him?”
“No. No, it’s fine; please just leave it to me. He can get a bit touchy.”
Eddie pulled his chin back off the floor.
“I mean, I can’t even decorate, Charles. Have you seen the state of his room?”
“He’s a free spirit.”
“No, I’m afraid he’s not. He’s just a slob. It smells in there, you know. Did you know that? It smells awful.”
Eddie staggered back to his bedroom, feeling numb. Once at his door, he took a deep breath; he opened it, closed it, and broke wind. He could hear her ‘tut’ from out here. And although that caused him to smile a little, he was still dumbfounded by all her talk of decorating and kicking him out. He emerged into the lounge, trying to keep the smile away as he
saw the satisfying disgust on Wendy’s face. “Morning.”
“Hi, Eddie,” Charles stood. “I’ll, er, I’ll go have a shower.”
“Whoa, big boy,” Eddie said. “I’ll go first. Just need coffee.”
Charles sat down again, looking at his watch.
Eddie saw Wendy raise her eyebrows and nod her head in Eddie’s direction. ‘Go on’, she mouthed.
“Eddie,” Charles began.
“Want some tea, Dad?”
“Er, no, thank you.”
Eddie peered over at Wendy. “Want your cauldron topping up?”
She squinted at him. “We want you out, Eddie. As soon as possible, but certainly by the end of the week.”
“What?”
Charles slapped a hand over his face.
“We’ve discussed it, and it’s the right thing for all of us. You shouldn’t be living with your father at your age. You should start wearing long trousers, boy.” She stuck her nose in the air, and peered down it at Eddie. “Make your own way in the world. Do I make myself clear?”
“How come you’re not at work?” asked Charles, smiling as though none of this unpleasantness were real. “It’s almost half nine.”
“Never mind the work thing, let’s rewind and listen to Cruella again.”
“Don’t be facetious! That’s very rude, boy.”
Eddie bowed slightly. “Yeah, well, diplomacy is for people who aren’t fluent in sarcasm.” He poured water, stirred his coffee, and turned around. She still looked confused. “Anyway, I’m going now because I don’t have the energy to pretend to like you today.”
“Seriously,” said Wendy, “why aren’t you in work today?”
“They gave me the day off on account of I work too hard.”
“Answer me, Eddie.”
Eddie sighed. “How come no one ever believes that fucking line?”
“Language!”
Eddie blinked. “British English. With a soupçon of slang, while leaning heavily towards I-don’t-give-a-sideways-shit.”
“What’s happened?”
The Death of Jessica Ripley Page 20