by Ingrid Black
A severed finger next to it.
The night had clearly not gone according to plan.
Fleming was distraught. For a time he couldn’t think straight. All he could do was blame himself for allowing Marsha to talk him into taking part in her insane scheme. He should have walked out of work the moment she called, it didn’t matter if he was fired, nothing else mattered except that he should have come round to protect her.
He knew one thing.
It was his fault she was dead.
But then another, stronger thought began to gnaw at him. It wasn’t his fault at all. Solomon was the one who was to blame. He’d driven Marsha to this last insane act. In a way, he had killed her. And Fleming wanted him to suffer for it. He longed for that more than anything he’d longed for in his life. He was the one who’d driven Marsha to put her life at risk, so he was the one who had to pay. Fleming already loathed Solomon because Marsha had wanted him so badly. Now he had even more reason to hate him. To want him punished.
Fleming even convinced himself that if it hadn’t been for Solomon then maybe there’d have been a chance for him and Marsha to be together. That it was Solomon, rather than her own dark appetites, which had kept them apart. And he thought he knew exactly how to get his revenge on this man who had made him suffer so much.
He would frame him for her death.
He took the necklace, planning to plant it in Solomon’s office when he had the chance, wearing the same shoes he was wearing that night so that the physical evidence traces would match. It wouldn’t be difficult to get inside. Theatres are open places, like Zak Kirby said. So that’s what he did, first covering her obscenely displayed dead naked body with a sheet because he couldn’t bear to see what had been done to her. And then he took the tapes from the hidden camera at Marsha’s door too, knowing they could clear Solomon’s name.
His hurt at being denied kept him going for days, consumed him, sustained him, and then he stopped sleeping, and lay awake remembering her brutalised body, and repeating to himself over and over that the man who did that to her, and would surely do it to other women too if he was not stopped, was still out there. He couldn’t go through with it anymore.
He didn’t want to be the kind of man who crushed someone just because they’d had what he himself had wanted so badly. He wanted to be better than that. So he confessed – and brought along with him too a holdall containing the missing surveillance tape.
**********
Later, we sat in Fitzgerald’s office, as Walsh took Fleming downstairs to make a statement, watching the grainy black and white tape, seeing the clock ticking down to midnight, Marsha coming home, unsteady on her feet; the taxi driver helping her with her keys. Once they’d vanished from view, a cat, sleek as dark, out hunting, tiptoeing carefully across the path in front of the door before halting, startled by a new arrival, and fleeing.
Then there he was, Piper, strolling to the door as if on a social call, entirely unaware that he were being filmed, and disappearing inside.
The surveillance footage told us nothing we didn’t now know already, but there was still a grim fascination in watching the seconds tick by on the tape’s own clock, whilst inside the church, in one of those seconds, Marsha Reed’s life was snuffed out.
Was it that second?
Or this?
Eventually, Piper reappeared, and he walked down the path and out of sight, and we fast forwarded to see Todd Fleming himself arrive at 2am, stepping nervously, not knowing that to expect, and finally there was only the cat again, tail raised, distrustful and alert, back to sniff the porch where these strangers had been, rubbing itself against the stone to replace their scent with its own. It sat on the path and looked up at the camera, as if it knew it was there, and its eyes glinted like mirrors in the dark. Then nothing, as the camera was switched off.
Case closed.
“More champagne?” said Fitzgerald.
She’d brought the half-empty bottle with her from the restaurant.
“I’d say there’s about two glasses each left. We’ll have to drink it out of paper cups from the coffee machine,” she added, “but champagne’s champagne. Just one condition.”
“Yeah?”
“Not a word about Marsha Reed. I’ve had quite enough of her for one night, the stupid girl. What do you say?”
“Consider it done,” I said with feeling. “I don’t know about you, but I’m in the mood for getting seriously drunk. When the world ceases to make sense, you might as well join it.”
It was only afterwards, when we’d gone back to my place to sit on the balcony and start on another bottle, and I was savouring a cigar and blowing the smoke defiantly across the rooftops of the piously non-smoking city below, that it occurred to me how similar Lucas Piper and Marsha Reed had been. What they had in common was that neither could cope with a situation most of us have to learn how to handle at least once in our lives: being dumped. Not being wanted. Their inability to cope with it had made one a killer and the other a victim.
It was on the tip of my tongue to share this nugget of dubious wisdom with Fitzgerald when I remembered what she’d said. Not a word about Marsha Reed.
A deal’s a deal.
It could wait.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Epilogue