by T M Heron
I’m happy to pay for the furniture myself. It makes a powerful statement. Besides, I’m ridiculously rich. Or as good as. With my inheritance now a certainty I’ll be able to throw my substantial partnership income around with no regard to the future.
The furniture I’ve chosen for my office is antique Chinese. Dark and expensive-looking with tasteful gold-and-red oriental etchings and heavy distressed, dark-bronze metal hinges. There’s a sideboard with a zillion different compartments as typical of the era and a matching desk about fifty percent bigger than my current one. Someone of no concern to myself will have a really hard time getting them into the room. They’ll probably have to take the door off its hinges.
The chair I’ve chosen for the desk is throne-like. The most stunning single item of furniture I’ve ever laid eyes on. Perhaps an emperor did once sit on it.
The phone interrupts my browsing, and I note it’s Ava. For the third time.
“Jo, tell her I’m too busy to talk,” I yell.
The phone stops. About ten minutes later my mobile buzzes angrily.
Ava. I ignore it. She’ll want to talk about last night’s fight, then make up. Let her fret. I’m so sick of her now I can barely stand the sight of her.
◆◆◆
About half an hour before I’m ready to call it a day I lock my office door. Opening my dressing cupboard I lean in and reach over the top shelf. The back panel of this cupboard is fake. I designed it myself. Behind it is a small partition with a depth of twenty centimeters. You really don’t need any more than this to stash special items. Like your emergency supply of coke.
I take a delicate snort — I need my judgement, after all — and return the vial to its hiding place.
I’m proud of this secret compartment. I take great care to lock all visible drawers and cabinets in my office. But the greatest secrets of all are stored in a completely accessible location. A five-year-old with a chair could reach them.
I eye the other items there. My bag of goodies. My envelope of receipts of the various married colleagues I’ve led to damnation at Lily’s. And the appointment diary I stole in retaliation for Jo (probably) taking my phone.
I’m going to confront Jo about that phone if she did take the phone before I kill her. Closure!
◆◆◆
Jo’s house is guarded as if it was located somewhere someone might actually want to break into. I give the door knocker a benign tap. There’s a small wait. Then I hear locks unlocking and chains unchaining and bolts unbolting. The look of astonishment on her face when she opens her door to find me standing there is priceless.
I hold up a couple of work files. “Sorry, promise it won’t take five minutes,” I say.
“Just a moment,” she says, flustered. She closes the door again, locks one of the locks. I hear her climbing the stairs and moving around as floorboards creak. Just as I’m about to succumb to hypothermia she returns. She looks agitated and her fingers pluck nervously at her pink, spotted neck scarf. Civility dictates she ask me in out of the cold. It’s about to rain and we can hardly discuss the files outside.
She asks me if I’d like a coffee which she assumes I’ll refuse but I accept. She becomes even more rattled. If I didn’t have to touch her eye eventually this would be almost enjoyable.
Jo bustles off into the kitchen and I glance around her house. As expected, it’s a shrine to mass-produced furniture and commercial-carpet barns.
“Actually, I thought we should talk about the guy from the restaurant,” I say, when she places a coffee in front of me which I have no intention of touching. “It didn’t seem appropriate to discuss it at work.”
Jo’s countenance transitions from begrudging to a heightened state of receptivity. She straightens her back and rearranges the scarf.
It is at this point I leap up and smack the patch Warren gave me hard on her bare hand. There’s a reason it must be hard: the force is necessary to burst open whatever little corpuscles are contained in the gel so they can render Jo catatonic. “Make sure you get bare skin and it should disable her immediately,” he said. “She won’t be fully inert for half an hour, but after a few minutes she won’t be doing a lot of moving. Be aware initially she’ll still be able to talk. Get her mouth taped up damn quick.”
The confusion in Jo’s eyes that I’ve slapped her hard swiftly ratchets up to alarm as her limbs communicate to her brain that some form of involuntary muscular inertia is occurring. It’s exceptionally interesting to watch and I wish Warren was here to see how well his innovation is working.
“Sit back in your chair,” I tell her. “You’ll want to be comfortable.”
I loosen her scarf and duct tape her mouth. “Don’t worry, it can come off in a few minutes.”
I set the timer on my phone for five minutes.
The five minutes coordinates nicely with me sorting out the special gloves. Jo’s eyes bulge as I carefully douse my forearms and hands with some kind of freeze-drying spray Warren has provided. “I feel like a surgeon!” I tell Jo, shaking my hands one last time before snapping on the gloves. They are super-tight and reassuringly flexible. When I touch her I’m not going to feel a thing, and for a moment I’m almost humbled in my gratitude to Warren.
I rip off the duct tape and place the little vial of eye drops on the table.
“I’ll resign Monday,” is the first thing Jo says once the tape is removed. Her voice is strained, and she’s lost all ability to yell.
“This stuff is amazing,” I say. “I had no idea it’d work so well.” Warren has taken up an almost God-like position in my mind.
“I’ll leave work.”
I sit down, hands folded over crossed knees. “It’s a little late for that,” I say. “But don’t try to tell me you weren’t warned.”
I take out a list of questions in Warren’s handwriting. “Please don’t initiate conversation with me. Now, the gel on your arm is still undergoing trials and your feedback would be appreciated. How are you feeling, physically?”
“Jackson, pl—”
“Uh-uh. Don’t. Don’t make this harder than it has to be Jo. If you do, your daughter may suffer the consequences.”
Jo looks dazed. She always suspected I was evil, but not like this.
“So, how do we feel, physically?”
“Numb.”
“Hot or cold?”
“Cold.”
“Can you taste it in your mouth?”
“Yes.”
“Can you think clearly?”
“Yes. Jackson, I’m—”
“Uh-uh, uh-uh. Don’t talk. Just for once you must listen to me, Jo. Is your vision clear?”
“Uh.”
“Scale of one to ten?”
“Seven.”
“Your hearing?”
“Ten.”
“Hmmn, ten. And how alert do you feel?”
“Ten.”
“Then Warren’s a genius.” I write Jo’s final comment down with a flourish and stuff the notes in my pocket. “But enough about him.” I lean forward in my chair. “Here’s the thing, Jo. You were right about something.”
Jo’s face is starting to look doughy. Maybe all the little muscles are relaxing or freezing or whatever the gel does. I’m sure, though, if I had to assign her a normalized expression, she’d be shooting me a look of disbelief.
Suddenly I have an epiphany as to how therapeutic this experience is going to be. For once a chance to talk to someone. Even though that person is Jo.
“You were right, you know. That the guy in the paper is the same one who approached us at Marcel’s,” I say. “I do know him. He’s a rapist, and probably a murderer. He captures girls and then we have sex with them. One at a time, of course. I always go first.”
Her eyes look at me with terror and disbelief.
“I’m the brains behind the Park Rape Team,” I say. “And for the record, I hate that term. Hate it. So lame. Also, we’re not really a team. Dukie never got any real time with the girls. He just caught them, an
d he was my fall guy.”
I’d assign a normalized look of abject horror to Jo at this stage.
“I didn’t realize he knew who I was until that day at Marcel’s. Kinda embarrassing.” I shrug. “You’re the only person who’ll ever know this, Jo, but he’d caught another woman that day to rape. She was the Canadian tourist who went missing. I went around to his apartment and killed him, then I killed her.”
I realize I’m almost bragging now. It wasn’t as if I just turned up like an assassin. No, it was an arduous process. A gorilla suit was involved, and I got burnt and felt very sorry for myself.
“I was going to overdose her on heroin, but I ended up giving her antifreeze and suffocating her with an oven bag.” I absolutely will not defend my fear of needles to Jo.
“I was going to kill my father, too, with a poisoned cigar. But I was worried it might kill my mother as well. My father was still angry at me for pushing my sister off the pool-house roof when we were younger. She’s a vegetable now.”
Just saying this stuff out loud is raising questions in my mind. “I’m not a hundred percent sure why I did that. I didn’t really think it through. I wasn’t trying to kill her, I don’t think. She was a cool little kid. It wasn’t as if I hated her. I just felt . . . nothing, about her. Which is the same way I feel about almost everyone. I hate her now, though.”
Satisfaction surges through me as Jo’s eyes widen. Pandemonium. That is what is breaking loose in her head.
“She’s a mind-reader now,” I say. “I don’t believe in clairvoyance, but something messed up is going down with her — next time I see her, she’ll know about you. She’s just frightening.”
Jo’s whole mouth has gone slack. Her eyelids are starting to droop. According to Warren, she can still hear me: the eardrum is not a muscle. But I feel a little as if I’m running out of time. Warren needs to invent a slower-working gel.
“You’ve probably realized by now that girl from my office who called me a rapist — she was right too. I tracked her down and strangled her. It was a massive inconvenience.
“And it’s crazy, right, that the wrong guy is now doing time for her murder.”
A sudden thought occurs. “I guess it’s too late to ask you if you took my phone?”
Then I decide, what the hell, I’ll have a look around upstairs and see if I can find it. I put the vial of drops back in my pocket. I don’t want Jo to suddenly regain control and knock the drops off the table. I’m also reluctant to end the fun.
The stairs are narrow and smell of mildew. It turns out Jo and her husband sleep in different rooms. Who could blame the guy? This $10,000 I’ve invested in Warren’s eye drops will liberate him and I’ll never receive commensurate acknowledgment.
Jo’s bedroom is cold and boxy, and condensation runs down the windows. It’s tidier than I expected. I always picture obese people to live like slobs.
There’s a framed photo of her daughter in the good old private school uniform. It’s a blown-up copy of the one she has on her desk at work that has always exasperated me. I’m unaware of wanting children at this stage but if I did have children they’d be going to the same school as Anthony Hartman’s kid, and that Jo’s kid attends the school Anthony’s goes to and mine would is nothing short of a travesty.
As I look round her room, I wonder how they could afford that school. But more important, where would she hide things here? Because I’m suddenly pretty sure that the delay I experienced when I first arrived was Jo hurrying upstairs to hide my phone.
I look in all the normal places. Under the bed. Between the bed and the mattress. Behind the dresser. Eventually my attention returns to the crowning glory of the room — the private school photo. And sure enough, in a plastic folder stuffed against the back of the frame, is my phone.
I knew it. I’m so glad she’s waiting downstairs to be killed.
I rip out the entire folder and replace the photo back on the wall. Nice and straight so as not to arouse suspicion. I am about to go downstairs when I hear a door slam.
The husband’s away hunting and the kid is at boarding school, so who the hell is this? Whoever it will see Jo, and she is looking far from normal.
My mind goes into overdrive. I still need to kill Jo. All she is at the moment is catatonic. Do I stay up here and see what happens next, or go downstairs and kill both of them? Why do things always have to get complicated?
How am I even meant to kill a second person without notice? Maybe if I stay here, they’ll just think she’s asleep and leave. But what if they realize something’s wrong and try to wake her? They may call emergency services.
As it happens, the visitor downstairs does none of the above. Instead they slice a line in Jo’s throat that stretches from ear to ear and is so wide that when I come back downstairs it looks as if her neck is smiling.
She’s one hundred percent dead.
I’m not sure why I don’t think clearly, but I’m feeling scared. It’s the most gruesome sight. Some foreign part of me notices that her ridiculous spotted scarf is missing.
So what I do is pick up the vial of eye drops and just walk out the door, carrying the plastic folder with my phone and the documents. More wasted money on Chang’s products that I never get to use. And something I don’t think about until it’s too late is that I’ve left the work files behind on the coffee table.
24
Stress. I’ve never known the likes of it. One might think I’d be glad that someone else had done the honors. Only now control has slipped through my fingers. Who the hell did it? Who killed Jo? Who else wanted her dead?
My insides are vibrating and a deep chill washes over me. I must be in shock. I find myself driving home. Then, still on autopilot, I sneak over to Mrs. Adams’s shed and hide the folder I stole from Jo’s along with all my other illegal drugs. I no longer care about my phone.
I return home and drink a lot of Scotch.
It’s too early in the evening really, to visit Savannah. But it’s always too something. I get in the Bentley and drive straight over. It’s raining so hard by the time I get there that I worry I won’t be able to see her. She’s not in her room and I sit shivering in the pool house with Warren’s ampoule of lethal droplets in my pocket and no hipflask of bourbon.
I will be very angry if she doesn’t turn up in this moment of need.
Then suddenly the angel walks into her bedroom. It must be warm in there because she’s wearing just a singlet and yoga pants. Savannah realizes I’m here and in particular need and comes across to the window with that fluid meander I’m beginning to know so well.
I’m traumatized tonight, Savannah.
And then I stop. Because Savannah has started posing, and I recognize what she’s doing. I’ve seen Ava do it. She’s doing yoga. Tree pose. One knee bent, foot against the other leg. Arms bent in front, hands pressed together Buddha-like, then slowly raising them above her head. And she stands like that, perfectly still, and I can feel her calmly breathing. The rain has stopped. Savannah smiles.
So much has been said about da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, and I don’t know why, maybe women smiled differently back then and maybe they also had bad teeth, but when Savannah smiles, she is more Mona Lisa than Mona Lisa has ever been. I’d like a painting of her smiling that smile on my wall at home. She soothes me more than any girl before her. Now I’m thinking clearly.
Did I leave fingerprints?
No, I know I didn’t. I was mindful from the start it would end up a crime scene. Much like this pool house.
What about the coffee cup?
Didn’t touch it. But I should have put it in the kitchen. They’ll think she was murdered by someone she knew. That she just let them in.
What will they make of the files?
Ha, they’ll probably think she’s more diligent than she is. She never took work home.
What am I going to do about Savannah’s stepfather?
I’m not sure yet. But I swear to God, I’m going to do something.<
br />
◆◆◆
My cell phone wakes me on Sunday far earlier than I would have chosen to return to consciousness. Mother.
“How are you, Jacky?”
“I’m great, Mother.”
“You’re still good for lunch?”
“Looking forward to it.”
She pauses. “I wanted to let you know Neville will be joining us.”
There’s an edge of excitement in her voice. I immediately feel slightly jealous, then vaguely annoyed at myself.
“We’ve got another surprise for you.” The edge of excitement ratchets up a notch.
My jealousy is replaced with apprehension. Please don’t let it be a surprise like the surprise dinner last Friday. I just couldn’t cope with that right now.
I can barely cope with having to play the role of devoted son and newly made partner with these latest developments. In the shower, trying yet again to scour myself of last night, I remind myself of the importance of not letting either of these two roles slip. Not so long ago, for differing reasons, they were all I wanted.
◆◆◆
The little nurse I’d like to spend some time with is just leaving as I arrive at Mother’s. It happens every Sunday, as if the universe is torturing me. A vivid image of Ingrid Claire suddenly appears in my mind. Then Mother is there, throwing the front door open. Delighted to see her charming devoted son.
Lunch is informal, but delicious. I enjoy none of it.
Across the table Neville talks in the fake, self-effacing manner I despise about the turnaround of one of RIL’s companies they’ve been nursing. This is punctuated by “nnnnghs” from Helena, which of course we all earnestly respond to as if she’s making a valid contribution to the discussion.
She isn’t communicating to personally me today, thank God. Although I’m tense, wondering when it will start, and what she will say.
For a while I reflect on how unfair life has been to me since the paint attack in my office. Then I start seething that here in the family home, where I should be getting respite, I’m surrounded by hostility and mind games. I’m jumpy and on edge.