by Alex Bell
‘Well,’ he says finally, ‘God specialises in those.’
The neon lights above us flicker again, making a harsh buzzing sound that crawls across my skin like ants. The walls shrink another inch. My client flinches, the smile vanishes, he shields his eyes with his hands.
‘Do the lights bother you?’ I ask.
‘Can’t you feel it?’ he says, not looking at me. ‘Those neon lights they— It soaks into your head and rots your brain. Toxic. Cancerous. Can’t you do something? Get them to turn it off?’
‘What, and sit here in the dark like madmen?’ I ask. ‘Look, the sooner we conclude this interview, the sooner you can return to your cell. You’ve admitted already that you were the one who chopped up the body. Perhaps if you could just—’
‘She’s not dead.’
I pause. Recall the crime scene. Never in my entire career have I seen so much blood – and I have seen a lot of it in my time. I think of the morgue – cold steel and blinding fluorescent lights, the stench of disinfectant and bleach, clumps of blood-clotted hair, and body parts splattered into wet bowls.
‘She looked pretty dead when I saw her,’ I say finally.
‘She’s not.’ He looks right at me again and now there’s more than one bead of sweat running down his face. His hair is damp with it; his eyes are mad with it. ‘You can’t kill a devil that way. She’s here. She’s right there – over there in the corner.’
I refuse to turn my head but he doesn’t seem to notice.
‘Picking at her nails,’ he says, more to himself than to me. ‘She only does that because she knows how I hate it.’
My neck and shoulders hurt. What I wouldn’t give for a massage. But I force myself not to stretch or rub away the soreness. Never let them see your discomfort.
‘It’s my job to help you, Mr Marlow,’ I say, a line I have said countless times before to countless breeds of killer and lunatic. ‘Your father is paying me a lot of money to do so. Please try to help me understand. If the woman you killed is not your wife as you say, then where is your real wife?’
‘She’s— She was... taken away someplace. When I wasn’t looking. They swapped. My wife disappeared and that... that devil... she slipped right into her place. She thought I wouldn’t notice.’
‘But you did? Forgive me, but they look identical. How could you tell the difference?’
The lights above us flicker and buzz again and he actually groans and clamps his hands over his face. ‘I saw it in her eyes, Goddamn you.’
I wonder briefly whether it might be possible to arrange some flickering lights in the court house when he goes to trial. Performances such as this could only help an insanity defence.
‘When you were arrested,’ I say, ‘and the police asked you why you chopped up your wife – or the devil, if you prefer – you said that God told you to do it. Is that true?’
He slides his hands slowly away from his face, the handcuffs rattle against the table and he squints at me.
‘What was your name again?’ he says
‘Ackland,’ I reply. ‘Josh Ackland.’
‘Josh Ackland,’ he says, looking me right in the eyes, ‘you should not have come here today. We’re the same, you and me.’
I look at him in the sickly glow of the neon lights, and, for a moment – for just this one shocking moment – instead of seeing Marcus Marlow sitting across from me at the table, I see my own face instead.
‘How are you doing this?’ I say, and my own question startles me. I blink hard to dispel the illusion, pull myself together. My fingers burn to rub away the headache I can feel coming on but I leave my hand where it is on the table between us. ‘Look,’ I say, ‘if you do not wish to spend the rest of your life in prison then I am your best chance. Your only chance, really.’ It’s quite true, and usually sobers them a bit. ‘Your wife—’ I begin, but he slams both hands down on the table and cuts me off. Skin tears beneath the cuffs and a trickle of blood runs downs his wrist.
‘My wife! Why don’t we talk about your fucking wife for a change?’
He has raised his voice now to something that’s not quite a shout but is enough to unsettle the nervous guards on the other side of the glass. I hope they have the sense not to come bursting in and interrupt us.
‘My wife,’ I say quietly, ‘is quite irrelevant to your situation, Mr Marlow. If you are so reluctant to discuss your own wife then it’s a pity you didn’t save us all a lot of bother and consider this fact before you chopped her up into small pieces.’
And here he loses it all at once – launches himself across the table at me, takes me by surprise after all these years, knocks me from my chair. Photos of sliced human body parts scatter on the floor around us.
I am aware of the weight of him as he lands on me, the stale breath, the strength of his fingers when they find my throat in that split second before the back of my head hits the concrete floor with a crack that goes through my entire body. For just the briefest moment I cannot see. But the episode, in its entirety, must be over in seconds. The guards are through the door, dragging him off me, out the door and back to his cell.
Hands haul me to my feet but I can’t seem to find my balance and the floor beneath me lurches as fingers dig deeper into my shoulder.
‘There’s blood on your collar,’ somebody says.
I try to focus, to get my bearings, to be the one on top again – the one in control. No one likes to be the one down. And despite the fact that they have just rescued me from my own stupidity, the guards around me feel like the enemy. I know how much they dislike me – the defence attorney who puts criminals back on the street for exorbitant fees. Why shouldn’t they hate me? I’d hate myself if I had the energy for it.
I try to say that I’m fine. But my tongue won’t work, and when I push away the supporting hand I stagger into the table and almost fall down again. For a dreadful moment, I fear I am going to be sick.
But then the worst of it passes and the room comes back into focus and I feel much more like myself if I can only ignore the trickle of blood running down the back of my neck. I wipe it away and my fingers come away sticky with it.
‘You’d better come around the back,’ one of the guards says. He’s so young that he looks almost like a child dressed up in his father’s uniform. ‘We’ll need to write up a report of the assault.’
‘Is that really necessary?’ I say, and my voice does not sound right, even to me.
‘It’s procedure,’ he replies.
And that, I know, is the end of the discussion.
It is, at least, a relief to leave the interview room behind and return to one where there are windows and natural light, even though the sun hurts my eyes. I am given a plastic cup filled with water, and the report is duly filled out. Someone tells the superintendent what’s happened and he rushes in to gloat.
‘Don’t know what you expect, representing people like that,’ he says – a variant of the same thing he has said to me many times before. The tired old script we act out over and over. Some of the security guards try to disguise the distaste they feel for me and my kind but not the superintendent. He has always gone out of his way to make sure that I know precisely what he thinks of me.
‘There’s blood in your hair,’ he says.
‘Hmm.’
‘One of the lads will take you to the hospital.’
‘No thanks. I’m going home.’
He raises his eyebrows, curls his lip. ‘You ought to have that head looked at.’
‘I have a dinner party to get to.’
He shrugs. ‘It’s your funeral, Mr Ackland. You’ll be back again tomorrow, I suppose?’
‘That’s right.’
He grunts something unintelligible and stomps away.
I stand up. ‘Where’s my coat?’ I ask.
‘You didn’t come with one,’ a guard says – the young one from the interview room.
‘Oh.’
‘Are you sure you’re all right to drive home?’
He gives me a dubious look. ‘I can give you a lift.’
‘Thank you but that’s really not necessary. This isn’t the first time a client has attacked me.’ I smile, try to make light of it. ‘It’s really not that big a deal.’
The young guard says nothing but I sense the silent disapproval and no one is smiling here but me.
I drive home. I was telling the truth about the dinner party and if I’m late for the wretched thing Penelope will throw one of her tantrums. I open the front door, bypass the kids watching TV in the living room, and go straight upstairs to our bedroom.
I open the door and walk through. Penelope is in the bathroom – the door is partially open and a beam of light spills out across the floor.
‘Is that you, Joshua?’ she calls.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, for heaven’s sake, what time do you call this?’
I loosen my tie, tug it free, fling it onto the bed. ‘My interview at the prison overran. I told you I have this new client.’
‘The one that sliced up his wife?’
‘Hmm.’
‘Well, get a move on, would you? Luke and Sarah will be here any minute.’
She is just like me – neither one of us really cares. So long as we’re not inconvenienced in any way; so long as we continue to live as we do in this big house with all these fine things, enjoying the spoils of getting criminals off on technicalities. If there really is a God, I wonder what on earth he would think of the pair of us.
I walk to the bathroom door, push it open, freeze in the doorway. Penelope stands in front of the mirror, fastening diamond earrings. She’s wearing a dress that must be new for I’ve never seen it before and it is a shocking shade of scarlet.
A devil, I hear Marcus Marlow’s voice say inside my head, a devil in red...
‘Is that... is that a new dress?’
She looks at me through the glass. ‘I bought it this morning. Do you like it?’
‘It’s— Do you have to wear it tonight, though?’
She freezes in the act of fastening an earring, then slowly lowers her hands and her reflection gives me an icy look. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Nothing. But I mean . . . well, it’s a bit revealing, isn’t it?’
I don’t know what on earth possesses me to talk to Penelope in this way. She spins around and stares at me. Her nostrils flare so I know she is very angry. ‘Say that again.’
‘Never mind. Forget it.’
‘Is this about Luke? Because if you’re going to start up those ridiculous accusations again—’
I pinch the bridge of my nose and wish for the day to be over. ‘Look, could we not do this right now? I’ve not had the best afternoon.’
She does not reply but storms past me and slams the door hard – so hard that I have to clamp both hands to my head and grit my teeth against the pain as the sound vibrates through my skull. When the echoes pass I turn on the shower. There isn’t really time for a wash before the wretched guests arrive, and perhaps no one would notice if I walked around with dried blood in my hair all evening anyway, but I am determined to shower. It will irritate Penelope, at least, and that is always a good thing.
By the time I’m washed and changed, Luke and Sarah are already here. I walk into the living room and Luke sits on my couch, drinking my scotch, probably thinking about the last time he screwed my wife.
When Penelope denied it this morning I felt the mad urge to shake her – shake her hard – and say, ‘You silly bitch, can you really think that I don’t know that you’re having an affair with Luke? Do you imagine that I care? Fuck the whole street if you like; it makes no difference to me.’
Nevertheless, I dislike having it rubbed in my face in this manner. But I take my seat beside Penelope and I act out the charade of amiable host. As we sit and make conversation, Penelope nibbles on the hors d’oeuvres she has served – tiny triangles of toast spread with some kind of salmon paste. I have never, in my life, heard anyone eat toast as loudly as Penelope is doing right now. The crunch and scrape of it throbs through my head, beating and beating against the inside of my skull. It makes it hard to listen to anything that’s being said but then the sound of my name brings my focus back.
‘You know, Josh,’ Luke says in that cheerful way of his, ‘your wife really does give the best damn blowjob I’ve ever had.’
‘What?’
‘What?’
‘What did you say?’
‘When?’
‘Just now.’
He looks puzzled. ‘I said this is the best damn scotch I’ve ever had.’
I glance at the others but no one looks perturbed as they surely would if they had just heard what I had heard.
I really do have the most beastly headache.
Sarah is a little fool and has no idea what is really going on between my wife and her husband. I wonder if they have done it in this house, maybe here on this couch, perhaps even upstairs in our bed. I look at Luke’s smug handsome face and I hate him. I fucking hate him.
Eventually the kids are packed off to bed and we go into the dining room.
‘You’re very quiet tonight, Josh,’ Sarah says when we are part way through the meal. ‘You’ve barely said a word all evening.’
I can’t stop looking at Penelope’s dress. Now that I think about it – and I can’t seem to stop thinking about it – I can’t recall ever having seen her wear a red dress before in the whole time I have known her.
Luke has noticed the dress too, of course, as was doubtless the intention. He is practically drooling. Penelope keeps smirking at him. They are so very obvious about it.
And I find myself wondering how I got here to this place – married to a shrew who loathes me, living in a big house that I dislike, with spoilt brats for kids and clients who do their very best to kill me. Without quite meaning to, I laugh out loud and everyone looks at me.
‘Care to let us in on the joke?’ Penelope says in that poisonous tone of ice she reserves especially for me. ‘Really, Joshua, you’re behaving very oddly tonight.’
‘You look a bit peaky, you know,’ Luke says, and the bastard actually has the audacity to lay his hand on my arm and pretend to be concerned. ‘You’re not ill, I hope?’
I stare at his hand until he removes it.
‘You know,’ I say, ‘I think I might be coming down with something. I don’t feel quite . . . myself.’
I am about to excuse myself when my mobile rings. ‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘I have to take this. It’s probably work.’
I go into the kitchen and take the call. The weird thing, I later think, is that I already know what the police officer is going to say before he says it.
‘Your client is dead. He killed himself in his cell. Someone slipped him a blade.’
There is an accusatory tone in his voice, almost as if he thinks I might have done it myself. I resist the urge to tell him that this is not a service I currently offer my clients.
‘He left you a note,’ the policeman says.
‘Me?’ I cannot hide my surprise. ‘What does it say?’
‘She saw you.’
‘What?’
‘That’s what the note says.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it.’
A flash of red catches the corner of my eye and I look up to see Penelope standing outside the kitchen window, staring in at me. Just staring at me out there in the dark. I’m so startled that I drop the phone. ‘For Christ sake!’ I say. ‘What are you doing?’
She opens her mouth, and I think she is going to speak, but instead her mouth just opens, wider and wider, until her lower lip splits and blood trickles down her chin. Then she turns suddenly on her heel and marches stiffly out of sight of the window, mouth still open wide, arms and legs swinging like some ghastly toy soldier.
‘Penelope, what on earth—’ I stride over to the kitchen door and throw it open, expecting to see her there.
But there is no one. The garden is dark
and empty and cold.
The arms circle around me from behind and I smell Penelope’s perfume as she presses herself up close against my back.
‘Come on, Josh,’ she says sweetly, ‘come back to the table. Our guests are waiting.’
Penelope never calls me Josh and she never, ever speaks sweetly to me.
I slowly turn around and look at the woman in red who is my wife but not my wife. Somewhere outside, a dog howls. It’s the neighbour’s dog, probably – the Goddamn thing howls day and night – I have heard it often enough, I know it is only the neighbour’s dog making its usual racket, I know this. And yet, right now, in this moment, I do not hear a dog at all but rather the manic laughter of Marcus Marlow.
And it occurs to me that, perhaps, after all, it might have been better – for all of us – had I not gone to visit him today.
Stormcats
by
Simon Bestwick
The rain woke Aaron in the morning’s early hours, a bleared light creeping in through the grimed windows and curtains to colour the room a dead and washed-out grey.
No bird sang; there was only the hiss of the rain and the blowing of the wind. But there’d be other sounds soon enough—
Maybe not. Maybe not this time.
He knew he was fooling himself.
He got out of bed, already fully clothed. The room was cold. No heating, except for the log fires in each room, and wood was getting harder and harder to come by.
I won’t last another winter.
He knew it wouldn’t come to that.
Aaron went to the window and touched the curtains. His hand shook. From far away came a distant sound of thunder.
I don’t want to look.
He knew there was no choice.
He pulled the curtain back.
The cottage had once stood on a hill above a valley. It had been a nice valley, once. A stream had run along the bottom of it. There’d been other houses too, and the road that led to the village nearby. All that was gone now.
Today the cottage stood on an island. Water surrounded it, the colour of stone beneath the blotched and storming sky. On good days he could just about see the chimney-pots of the house that had been below them; today he only saw the tops of a couple of nearby hills. Everything else was gone, lost beneath the flood.