A Twist of the Knife

by Peter James

  And he handed her an envelope. ‘A message for you,’ he said.

  Using the one word of German she knew, she said, ‘Danke.’ Then, as she went back outside to get her second suitcase, she tore it open, with eager fingers and nails she had varnished to perfection for him. For Hans.

  The note read: ‘Meet me at the crematorium. xx’

  She smiled. You wicked, wicked man!

  The cadaver helped her up two flights of stairs to a room that was as tired and drab as the rest of the place. But at least she could see down into the street and keep an eye on her car, and she was pleased about that. She popped open the lid of one case, changed her clothes and freshened herself up, spraying perfume in all the places – except one – that she remembered Hans had liked to press his face into most of all last time.

  Twenty minutes later, in the falling dark, after getting lost twice, she finally pulled into the almost deserted crematorium car park. There was just one other car there – an elderly brown Mercedes that tilted to one side, as if it had broken suspension.

  As she climbed out, carefully locking the car, she looked around. It was one of the most beautiful car parks she had seen in her life, surrounded by all kinds of carefully tended trees, shrubs and flowers as if it were a botanical garden. It barely felt like December here; it seemed more like spring. No doubt the intention – a perpetual spring for mourners.

  She walked up a tarmac footpath that was wide enough for a vehicle, and lined with manicured trees and tall black streetlamps. Anticipation drove her forwards, her pace quickening with every step, her breathing becoming deeper and faster. God, her nerves were jangling now. A million butterflies were going berserk in her stomach. Her boots crunched on grit; her teeth crunched, grinding from the cold, but more from nerves.

  She walked through open wrought-iron gates, and continued on, passing a cloistered single-storey building, clad in ivy, its walls covered in memorial plaques.

  And then, ahead of her, she saw the building.

  And she stopped in her tracks.

  And her heart skipped a beat.

  Oh, fuck! Oh, wow!

  This was a crematorium?

  It was one of the most beautiful buildings she had ever seen in her life. Rectangular, art deco in style, in stark white, with a portico of square black marble columns and windows, high up, like portholes on a ship, inset with black rectangles. It was topped by an elegant pitched red-tiled roof.

  She was stunned.

  There were steps leading up to the portico, with a stone balustrade to the right, giving a view down across terraces of elegant tombstones set in what looked like glades in a forest. When I die, this is where I would like to lie. Please, God. Please, Hans.

  Please!

  She climbed the steps and pushed the door, which was unlocked and opened almost silently. She stepped inside and simply stopped in her tracks. Now she could understand why the crematorium featured so prominently as one of Hagen’s major attractions.

  It was like stepping inside a Mondrian painting. Vertical stripes of black and white, with geometrical squares in the centre, varying in depth, width and height, at one end. At the other end was a semi-domed ceiling, with quasi-religious figures painted on a gold backdrop, above more black-and-white geometrics.

  Beneath was a curious-looking altar, a white cross rising above what looked like a white two-metre-long beer barrel.

  As she stared at it, there was a noise that made her jump. A sudden, terrifying sound. A mechanical grinding, roaring, vibrating bellow of heavy machinery. The barrel began to rise, the white cross with it, the floor trembling beneath her. As it rose higher, behind it a bolt of grey silk slowly unfurled. Then a coffin rose into view. Janet stood, mesmerized. The grinding, roaring sound filled the galleried room.

  Then the sound stopped as abruptly as it had started.

  There was a moment of total silence.

  The coffin lid began to rise.

  Janet screamed.

  Then she saw Hans’s smiling face.

  He pushed the lid aside and it fell to the floor with an echoing bang, and he began to haul himself out, grinning from ear to ear, hot and sweaty, wearing nothing but a boiler suit over his naked skin and black work boots.

  She stood and stared at him for a moment, in total wonder and joy. He looked even more amazing than she remembered. More handsome, more masculine, more raw.

  He stood up, and he was taller than she remembered, too.

  ‘My most beautiful angel in all the world,’ he said. ‘You are here! You came! You really came!’

  ‘Did you think I wouldn’t?’

  ‘My brave angel,’ he said. ‘My brave English angel.’ Then he scooped her in his strong arms, pulled her tightly to him, so tightly she could feel the contour of his body beneath the thin blue cotton, and kissed her. His breath smelled sweet, and was tinged with cigarette smoke, garlic and beer, the manly smells and taste she remembered. She kissed him back, wildly, deeply, feeling his tongue, holding it for a second, losing it, then finding it again.

  Finally, breathless with excitement, their lips separated. They stood still, staring at each other, his eyes so close to hers they were just a warm blur.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘We have work to do, ja?’

  She pushed her hands down inside the front of his trousers and gripped him gently. ‘We do,’ she smiled.

  He drew breath sharply and exhaled, grinning. ‘First we must work.’

  ‘First we make love,’ she replied.

  ‘You are a very naughty little girl,’ he teased.

  ‘Are you going to punish me?’

  ‘That will depend, yes? On how naughty you have been. Have you been very naughty?’

  She nodded solemnly, stood back a pace, and put her finger in her mouth like a little child. ‘Very,’ she said.

  ‘Tell me?’

  ‘I can show you.’

  He smiled. ‘Go and fetch the car, I will be prepared.’

  *

  Five minutes later, Janet reversed the Passat up to the side entrance of the crematorium, where there was a green elevator door. As she halted the car and climbed out, the metal door slid open and Hans stood there, with a coffin on a trolley. There was a strange expression on his face and he was looking at her in a way that made her, suddenly, deeply uncomfortable.

  Her eyes shot to the coffin, then back to his face.

  Then to the coffin.

  Had she made a terrible mistake? To be alone, here, with all her bridges burned, her trail carefully covered. Had she walked into a trap?

  No one at home in Eastbourne knew where she was. No one in the world. Only Hans. And she was alone with him at the crematorium, in the falling darkness, and he was standing, looking at her, beside an open coffin.

  She felt suddenly as if her insides had turned to ice. She wanted to be home, back home, where it was safe. Dull but safe. With Trevor.

  But none of that was an option any longer.

  Then he smiled. His normal, big, warm Hans smile. And the ice inside her melted in an instant, as if it had flash-thawed. ‘In the trunk?’ he questioned.

  Nodding, she popped open the boot of the car, and then they both stood and stared for some moments at the black plastic sheeting, and the curved shape inside it.

  ‘No problem?’ he asked her, putting his arm around her and nibbling her ear tenderly.

  ‘He was good as gold,’ she said, wriggling with the excitement of his touch. ‘Went out like a lamb after I swapped his insulin for sugared water. But he was heavy. I nearly didn’t have the strength to get him into the boot.’

  Where there’s a will, there’s a way, Trevor was fond of saying. And, of course, what was particularly sweet was that Trevor had written a will a long time ago, leaving everything to her, naturally.

  ‘It is good he is so thin,’ Hans said, unwrapping him. ‘I have two cadavers waiting for the burners and one is very thin. I have the death certificates from the doctor’s; we are all set. He will f
it nicely into the coffin with the thin one. No one will know a thing.’

  Down in the basement, as they wheeled the coffin out of the elevator, Janet recognized the beige metal casings, the instruments, the dials. The word ‘Ruppmann’ was printed above them, and on other machines in the room, and on top of wiring diagrams. Opposite them, two coffins sat, one with the lid open.

  A few minutes passed and the thin occupant of the open coffin now had a companion, squashed tightly against him, as Hans screwed the lid down.

  Then Hans smiled. A totally wicked smile.

  A few minutes later, after he had pressed a number of buttons and the mechanical doors had closed, and the roar of the burners of the two huge furnaces rose to a crescendo, they could see, through the observation window, flames licking along the lengths of the two coffins.

  Janet felt Hans’s arms around her waist. Slowly, shedding their clothes, they sank to the floor.

  Smoke rose from the chimney into the night sky. They made love while the burners rose to their optimum temperature, and their own body heat rose at the same time.

  In the morning, Hans raked the remaining pieces of bone into the cremulator, then ground them to a powder that mingled with the ashes. Then they stepped through the crematorium doors, arm in arm. Outside, in the early, pre-dawn light, the world seemed an altogether brighter place. Birds were starting to sing.

  Hans slipped an arm around her, then whispered into her ear, ‘You know, my English angel, I will never let you go.’

  And for an instant he sounded just like Trevor. She kissed him, then whispered back into his ear, ‘Don’t push your luck.’

  ‘What is that meaning?’ he asked.

  She smiled.

  VENICE APHRODISIAC

  The first time they came to Venice, Johnny had told his wife he was on an important case; Joy had told her husband she was going to see her Italian relatives.

  In the large, dingy hotel room with its window overlooking the Grand Canal, they tore off each other’s clothes before they had even unpacked, and made love to the sound of lapping water and water taxis blattering past outside. She was insatiable; they both were. They made love morning, noon and night, only venturing out for food to stoke their energy. On that trip they barely even took time out to see the sights of the city. They had eyes only for each other. Horny eyes, each greedy for the other’s naked body. They were aware that they had precious little time.

  Johnny whispered to her that Woody Allen, whose movies they both loved, was once asked if he thought that sex was dirty, and Woody had replied, ‘Only if you are doing it right.’

  So they did it right. Over and over again. And in between they laughed a lot. Johnny told Joy she was the sexiest creature in the world. She told him no, he was.

  One time, when he was deep inside her, she whispered into Johnny’s ear, ‘Let’s promise each other to come back and make love here in this room every year, for ever.’

  ‘Even after we’re dead?’ he said.

  ‘Why not? You’re stiff when you’re dead, aren’t you? Stiff as a gondolier’s oar!’

  ‘You’re a wicked woman, Joy Jackson.’

  ‘You wouldn’t like me if I wasn’t, you horny devil.’

  ‘We could come back as ghosts, couldn’t we, and haunt this room?’

  ‘We will!’

  Two years later, acrimoniously divorced and free, they married. And they honeymooned in Venice in the same hotel – a former palazzo – in the same room. While they were there, they vowed, as before, to return to the same room every year for their anniversary, and they did so, without fail. In the beginning they always got naked long before they got around to unpacking. Often, after dining out, they felt so horny they couldn’t wait until they got back to the hotel.

  One time they did it late at night in a moored gondola. They did it beneath the Rialto Bridge. And under several other bridges. Venice cast its spell – coming here was an aphrodisiac to them. They drank Bellinis in their favourite café in Piazza San Marco, swigged glorious white wines from the Friuli district and gorged on grilled seafood in their favourite restaurant, the Corte Sconta, which they always got lost trying to find, every year.

  Some mornings, spent with passion, they’d hop on an early water taxi and drink espressos and grappa on the Lido at sunrise. Later, back in their dimly lit hotel room, they would take photographs of each other naked and film themselves making love. One time, for fun, they made plaster-of-Paris impressions of what Joy liked to call their ‘rude bits’. They were so in lust, nothing, it seemed, could stop them, or could ever change.

  Once, on an early anniversary, they visited Isola di San Michele, Venice’s cemetery island. Staring at the graves, Johnny asked her, ‘Are you sure you’re still going to fancy me when I’m dead?’

  ‘Probably even more than when you’re alive!’ she had replied. ‘If that’s possible.’

  ‘We might rattle a bit, if we were – you know – both skeletons,’ he had said.

  ‘We’ll have to do it quietly, so we don’t wake up the graveyard,’ she’d replied.

  ‘You’re a bad girl,’ he had said, before kissing her on the lips.

  ‘You’d never have loved me if I was good, would you?’

  ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Probably not.’

  ‘Let me feel your oar!’

  *

  That was then. Now it was thirty-five years later. They’d tried – and failed – to start a family. For a while it had been fun trying, and eventually they’d accepted their failure. A lot of water under the bridge. Or rather, all four hundred and nine of Venice’s bridges. They’d seen each one, and walked over most of them. Johnny ticked them off on a coffee-stained list he brought with him each year, and which became more and more creased each time he unfolded it. Johnny was a box-ticker, she’d come to realize. ‘I like to see things in tidy boxes,’ he would say.

  He said it rather too often.

  ‘Only joking,’ he said, when she told him she was fed up hearing this.

  They say there’s many a true word spoken in jest but, privately, he was not jesting. Plans were taking shape in his mind. Plans for a future without her.

  In happier times they’d shared a love of Venetian glass, and used to go across to the island of Murano on every trip to see their favourite glass factory, Novità Murano. They filled their home in Brighton with glass ornaments – vases, candlesticks, paperweights, figurines, goblets. Glass of every kind. They say that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and they didn’t. Not physical ones. Just metaphorical ones. More and more.

  The stones had started the day she peeked on his computer.

  Johnny had been a police officer – a homicide detective. She had worked in the Divisional Intelligence Unit of the same force. After he had retired, at forty-nine, he’d become bored. He managed to get a job in the fulfilment department of a mail-order company that supplied framed cartoons of bad puns involving animals. Their best-selling cartoon range was one with pictures of bulls on: Bullshit. Bullderdash. Bullish. And so on.

  Johnny sat at the computer all day, ticking boxes in a job he loathed, despatching tasteless framed cartoons to people he detested for buying them, and then going home to a woman who looked more like the bulls in the cartoons every day. He sought out diversions on his computer and began by visiting porn sites. Soon he started advertising himself, under various false names, on Internet contact sites.

  That was what Joy found when she peeked into the contents of his laptop one day when he had gone to play golf – at least, that had been his story. He had not been to any golf club. It was strokes and holes of a very different kind he had been playing and, confronted with the evidence, he’d been forced to fess up. He was full frontal, naked and erect on eShagmates.

  Naked and erect for everyone in the world but her.

  And so it was, on their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, that they returned to the increasingly dilapidated palazzo on the Grand Canal, each with a very dif
ferent agenda in their hearts and minds to the ones they’d had on those heady days of their honeymoon and the years that followed.

  He planned to murder her here in Venice. He’d planned last year to murder her during a spring weekend break in Berlin, and the year before that, in Barcelona. Each time he had bottled out. As a former homicide detective, if anyone knew how to get away with murder, he did, but equally he was aware that few murderers ever succeeded. Murderers made mistakes in the white heat of the moment. All you needed was one tiny mistake – a clothing fibre, a hair, a discarded cigarette butt, a scratch, a footprint, a CCTV camera you hadn’t spotted. Anything.

  Certain key words were fixed in his mind from years of grim experience. Motive. Body. Murder weapon. They were the three things that would catch out a murderer. Without any one of those elements, it became harder. Without all three, near impossible.

  So all he had to do was find a way to dispose of her body. Lose the murder weapon (as yet not chosen). And, as for motive – well, who was to know he had one? Other than the silly friends Joy gossiped with constantly.

  The possibilities for murder in Venice were great. Joy could not swim and its vast lagoon presented opportunities for drowning – except it was very shallow. There were plenty of buildings with rickety steps where a person could lose their footing. Windows high enough to ensure a fatal fall.

  It had been years since they’d torn each other’s clothes off in the hotel room when they’d arrived. Instead, today, as usual, Johnny logged on and hunched over his computer. He had a slight headache, which he ignored. Joy ate a bar of chocolate from the minibar, followed by a tin of nuts, then the complimentary biscuits that came with the coffee. Then she had a rest, tired from the journey. When she woke, to the sound of Johnny farting, she peered suspiciously over his shoulder to check if he was on one of his porn chat sites.

  What she had missed while she slept was the emails back and forth between Johnny and his new love, Mandy, a petite divorcee he’d met at the gym where he’d gone to keep his six-pack in shape. He planned to return from Venice a free man.