by Pip Drysdale
I had just killed a man.
His body, the body of the man I’d loved, was lying on the street below – it would be seeping a thick, dark red substance, a burgundy set of wings. And the impact as he hit the pavement would have changed him; his limbs would be limp, and he would be gathering attention. Angus is gone forever. I had done it. I had seen it. And yet it didn’t feel real.
But the faint sound of sirens in the distance punctured my paralysis: I needed to keep moving, to think clearly, rationally, strategically. If I didn’t, I would be caught. The sirens were getting louder.
I forced myself to breathe. I needed to get out of that building and back to the yoga studio by 8pm. I turned away from the moon and walked back through that creaky door, leaving it open and unlocked. My head was clear and my heart was numb: the sting of sadness held at bay by shock.
Once inside, I dealt with the evidence: I put the key to the side entrance back in the terracotta bowl above the fridge. I ran through to his bedroom, took the packet of cocaine from the silver tin in his sock drawer, and quickly moved through to his study. I retrieved my purple notebook from his bookcase and then picked up the gun on my way to the front door. With my notebook under my arm, I unscrewed the silencer and placed the pieces back into their relative pockets. Then I slipped on my shoes. Put the cap on my head. And dropped exhibits A, B and C into the front pocket of his briefcase: the cocaine, the green thumb drive, and the crumpled piece of paper containing Felicia’s details.
And just like that I wrote his headline: Angus Hollingsworth, sexual predator, cocaine addict, banker with strong ties to money launderer Nicolai Stepanovich, committed suicide by jumping from his eighth-storey balcony. He left no suicide note, but shortly before he died he forwarded an email to the parents of murdered ex-girlfriend Sophie Reed suggesting that he was responsible for her death.
An image of his mangled body lying on the pavement flashed before my eyes. The sirens were louder now. I wouldn’t have time to retrieve the phone from the storage cupboard, but it no longer mattered: he couldn’t hurt me anymore. And anything found on there could only further solidify any theory of suicide and possibly shine light on the fate of Sophie Reed.
I closed the door behind me and moved quickly towards the stairwell, my eyes briefly scanning my watch: 7.33pm. Fuck. I fought the urge to flick on the light as I entered. Instead I used the banister to guide me. It was safer that way; if anybody else entered the stairwell, the light would warn me.
But I would have to swap to the lift for a short portion of my journey, because the CCTV would now be on. I counted the flights of stairs: seventh, sixth, fifth, fourth, third, second. I moved to the stairwell door and looked through the window out into the hallway. It was deserted. I opened the door, walked briskly towards the lift and pressed the down button. And when it came I got in. I pressed the button for the basement and, just before the doors closed, I remembered Kevin’s trick with the buttons. And so, holding the basement button down, I pressed the ‘Doors closed’ button too. Then, watching as the doors slid shut, I prayed.
‘Please God, please help me, please help me, please help me, please help me.’
The elevator whirred, it began to move and I watched the lights glow red: seventh, sixth, fifth, fourth. I took a deep breath. Third, second, first.
Basement.
Ping.
The doors slid open and I moved to the wall for support, trying to focus on the location of the cameras. And after three seconds, the lift doors closed again and with them, all light disappeared. I followed the rough walls in the dark, past the stairwell, past the assembly of rubbish bins and towards the side entrance. When I got there, I felt for the big round button that would let me exit. Pressed it. Pushed the door. And walked into the road.
The sirens were almost there. I walked down that road with a gun in my pocket, away from his building and the crowd that would be gathering around or running from his body. My hair was damp with fear beneath my cap. But people sweat in yoga, right?
How did I feel? It would be easier to say how I didn’t feel. I didn’t feel like a girl who had just committed murder – I’m not that girl.
Nobody noticed me as I wove my way through those backstreets towards the yoga studio. My mind was frantic but I just kept moving my feet, one and then the other. And only one person passed me on the street that night – a woman deeply ensconced in an imaginary argument, her lips mouthing objections and her forehead crinkling. And she didn’t notice me. Why would she? I was just a girl in yoga pants, walking down a London street with a purple notebook in her hands, and tattered old cap on her head.
My watch told me it was 7.53pm when I slipped in through the back door, pulling the duct tape off the latch and holding it tightly in my hand as I let it close quietly behind me. Nothing else was scheduled until 8.30pm – I’d checked the timetable – so I should have been safe. It should have been empty.
But when I entered, one of the bathroom stalls was occupied.
Did they hear me come in? What could I say? That I was smoking outside?
I ran across the room and locked myself in one of the loos and tried to steady my breath. Then I stuffed my gloves and hat into the pockets of my pullover, took it off and folded it into an unsuspicious I-just-got-hot ball. My blood was fast and my breath was still quick but soon that steady stream of om-ed out women began to fill the change room and it was time to go.
I opened the door and went straight to my locker, trying not to make eye contact. Hairdryers sounded behind me as I opened it. Then I put my pullover bundle safely inside, changed back into my jeans and put on my coat. I grabbed my things, returned my locker key to the front desk, retrieved my £5 key deposit, and made my way to the Tube. Just like I’d planned.
I was standing outside Charlotte’s front door but I couldn’t make myself go in. I felt like a liar. I was a liar. How can you keep something like that from your best friend? So I stood there staring at the old brown mat beneath my feet, self-soothing, telling myself to go inside: It will be okay. But that was another lie. It wouldn’t be okay because it couldn’t be okay. And so, despite the warmth of the yellow light that beckoned from her sitting room, I remained frozen. Breathing, in and out. In and out. As though frightened I might forget how.
But eventually I entered. I smiled my hellos. I moved towards my suitcase – it was in plain view, just beside the sofa. And with Charlotte scolding me from the kitchen as she boiled the kettle – ‘You should have told me you were going to yoga, babe, I would have come. I wouldn’t have liked it, but I would have come’ – I unzipped my suitcase, wrapped the gun in my lilac bra and stuffed it, along with the silencer, towards the bottom. I zipped it up again just as she moved towards me with two cups of cocoa. Three melting marshmallows bobbed on the top – two pink, one white. We sipped our cocoa, Charlotte lamented what a dick Angus was, and I sat there numb, silent and nodding, certain that I would never be the same person ever again. I would have no obituary, but that didn’t mean a large portion of me didn’t die on the pavement that night too.
friday
Master Sun said: ‘Victorious campaigns are unrepeatable. They take form in response to the infinite varieties of circumstance.’
24 FEBRUARY – DAYTIME
I went to work the next day. Maybe that makes me heartless, maybe it makes me cold, and in the eyes of a jury it would probably be quite damning. But it also makes me smart. Because I knew that turning up to work was necessary.
That said, it wasn’t easy. Charlotte certainly didn’t advise it. She’d reasoned with me over a bowl of cornflakes and burnt toast, saying: ‘That’s what sick days are for.’ Ben, nursing a cup of tea while standing in a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt and a pair of blue pyjama bottoms, had agreed with her: ‘Nobody will think badly of you, love,’ he’d said.
But I’d insisted. I’d pulled my hair back into a ponytail, put on mascara, and marched past that yellow-eyed money frog, over the brown welcome mat and out into the world.
/>
I’d held it together on the Tube. Instead of wallowing, I’d searched its sea of downcast, deadened eyes for understanding, shared experience, a glint of something that would tell me that somebody, anybody, in London had done something as terrible as I had. That I was not alone. That there was somebody out there who would understand.
I’d found nothing of the sort. Instead, I’d spent the journey scanning my horoscope for confirmation of my impending doom, looking over the shoulder of a middle-aged woman who, it became apparent during an unexpected jolt when I’d lost my balance and made my presence known, didn’t enjoy the intrusion.
Val wasn’t at her desk when I got in, so I didn’t have to answer questions right off the bat. Instead I focused on behaving normally: checking my bank balance – it was payday – and forcing myself not to Google Angus’s name. I didn’t even Google the news that morning – nothing that might draw suspicion if examined at a later date.
Instead, I made my morning coffee, did the familiar 9am tearoom dance: a hive of worker bees trying to negotiate the limited counter space and badly placed mini fridge, each with an outward smile and an inward chorus of ‘Get the fuck out of my way’. I had – and lost – a fight with the printer when I tried to print an email. And I calculated that every workday consisted of 8 hours, or 480 minutes, or 28,800 seconds. Then I set up an internal betting pool as to when that inevitable tap on my shoulder, telling me about what had happened to Angus, would come. My guess sat at 11am.
It was 10.03am when Val got to her desk.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked, wheeling her chair into my cubicle and placing her hand on my shoulder.
And that’s when the anaesthesia of early shock finally began to wear off and the tears started to fall.
But they were deceptive: they spoke of betrayal but they embodied a funny mix of fear, relief and a flatness I didn’t understand.
So, by 10.05am, my goal in forcing myself to go to work had been met: I was a mess. An obvious mess. And anyone walking past could attest to that. Not an ‘I just committed homicide’ sort of mess, more a ‘That arsehole just screwed me over again’ sort of mess. A loveable mess. A blameless mess. A mess that didn’t know how to hold a gun and had never read The Art of War.
Because it is almost inconceivable that a girl could kill someone and then turn up to work the next day.
And that’s why I had to do it.
Even my clothes said ‘mess’: my shirt had a drip of old coffee on the left breast and the crinkles and fold-marks of the skirt I had fished out from the very bottom of my suitcase looked even crinklier under the bright fluorescent globe that flickered above me.
‘What exactly happened? You only just got back together,’ Val said softly. Discreetly.
And so I retold it, my story of woe. The panties I had allegedly discovered under our bed had taken on a colour and fabric by that point: a sort of washing-machine-induced-greyed-out pink lace. It seemed nuanced enough to be true.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said with a heavy sigh. ‘Are you okay to be here?’
‘Yes, it’s better for me to be here, occupied,’ I replied. She gave one last stroke to my shoulder then wheeled herself back to her side of the partition.
But 11am came and went, and the phone remained silent.
All the time spent practising my shocked face (‘What? He’s dead?’) had been for naught.
So instead I went to the bathroom and called my mother.
‘Oh,’ she said. Gentle. ‘That’s horrible, darling.’
‘Yes,’ I sniffed.
‘Sweetheart, I really think you should come home for a bit,’ she said. ‘If you want to, of course.’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘I can’t really take too much more time off work.’
We sat in silence, on either end of the phone line. She could hear my sobs and I could hear her breath. It was comforting.
‘Well, darling, at least you know for sure now,’ she said, piercing the silence.
We ended the phone call without her ever uttering the phrase I feared most: I told you so. And with me never breaking the news I wasn’t meant to know yet: that he was dead. And I went back to my desk.
The computer screen stared back at me, I pretended to read emails, and every so often I thought: You had no other choice.
It was only at around 2pm that the call finally came.
I’d been reorganising my stationery drawer at the time. Paperclips. They tried my mobile phone first but I didn’t recognise the number, so I didn’t pick up. But a moment later Val was looking at me with a worried expression on her face. If I didn’t already know who it was, that might have warned me.
‘Um, it’s the’ – her voice lowered – ‘police.’ Her voice was soft but her lips mouthed it loudly.
She passed me her receiver. The cord was barely long enough to reach me. And an entire lifetime passed in the moments between when I pressed that cold receiver to my ear and when the voice on the other end of it finally spoke.
It belonged to a woman.
The first syllables floated by without comprehension, as though they were intended for somebody else. I found myself blinking hard, trying wake myself up. I could hear her in the distance saying: ‘Is this Taylor Bishop?’
And then I could hear myself saying, ‘Yes.’
‘My name is Detective Rouhani, I’m calling from Belgravia police station. Would I be able to come and see you this evening?’ she said.
‘What?’ I asked. ‘Why? What is this about?’ I could feel my pulse beating hard through my skin.
‘It would be better if we could talk in person,’ she said, her voice low and steady.
‘Why, is something wrong?’ I asked.
I heard her breathing – she was weighing up her options – and I saw a group of girls huddling around a pink box of cupcakes through the open door of the kitchen.
‘I’m so sorry to tell you this,’ she said, ‘but there has been an accident.’
‘Oh God, what’s going on? Is it Mum? Is she okay?’ I said. I’d practised that at home.
I swallowed hard.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘Angus Hollingsworth. He fell from the balcony. It happened last night. I’m sorry.’
‘What?’ I asked. ‘What do you mean? How?’ My voice was cracking under the pressure. I was cracking.
‘It looks like it was intentional at this stage. I am so sorry for your loss.’ Her words were sympathetic, but her voice was hard-boiled. It had delivered this sort of news many times before.
‘It’s all my fault,’ I said, my voice husky. ‘I shouldn’t have left him – we just broke up a few days ago.’ I was covering my tracks.
‘These things tend to be complicated. Could I pop in this evening and ask a few questions about Angus?’ she asked.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Or I could come in there,’ I offered, wiping my wet nose with the back of my hand.
‘That would be very helpful,’ she said. ‘When would you be able to get here?’
I looked across at Val, who was watching me with concern. The whir of the photocopier filled my free ear with the normality I was no longer a part of.
‘I could be there in a couple of hours,’ I said, looking through my now-tidy drawer for a pen. ‘Sorry, what did you say your name was?’
‘Detective Rouhani,’ she said. ‘Ask for me at the front desk.’ Then she added: ‘Do you have someone who can come with you? These sorts of things can be a big shock to the system.’
‘I’ll be okay,’ I said in a small voice, looking around for a piece of paper. There wasn’t one, just a red pen, so I wrote her name on my palm.
She hung up and I handed the receiver back to Val. Her eyes were searching mine for answers and her lips twitched with involuntary questions she was trying hard not to ask.
‘Angus is dead,’ I said. My voice was a broken whisper. No amount of rehearsal had prepared me for the confusion of real emotion splashing against the tide of what I thought I should be feelin
g. What I would be feeling, if the situation I was presenting were accurate.
My eyes were heavy; they just wanted to go to bed. My breath, shallow and quick while on the phone, had slowed to a deep, lagging rhythm.
I just have to answer some questions. Then this will all be over.
‘They think it might have been suicide,’ I added as I grabbed around beneath my desk for my handbag.
‘Oh my God!’ Val’s gasp was real and her hand moved to cover her heart.
‘I have to go into the police station to answer some questions about Angus,’ I said, standing up. My eyes avoided hers.
‘Of course,’ she said, a voice in the distance. I threw her a half-smile, walked past the reception desk, down the four flights of stairs, and through that revolving door into the cold London air. I waited for it to shake me from my trance. But it didn’t.
I headed to the bus stop, my eyes half-opened, my heart already closed. The C2 would deliver me almost directly to Detective Rouhani, and the trip would take just a little longer than the Tube. I needed the extra time to double-check my alibi, iron out any last-minute kinks. It was never meant to stand up to police scrutiny – it was just supposed to buy me time with Angus. Now it had to keep me out of prison.
And so I needed to keep my head when I spoke to her. Not tell her anything that might suggest I had a motive to hurt Angus.
But with every step the lead marbles of guilt and paranoia weighed heavier in my pockets and it was harder and harder to move. The only thing I could do to lighten the load as I made my way towards her was remind myself: It was him or me.
friday evening
Master Sun said: ‘The warrior skilled in indirect warfare is infinite.’
24 FEBRUARY – LATER
‘Victoria Station.’
The voice jarred me into alertness and my eyes searched for the familiar pavement through the dirty bus window. I got up and made my way down the stairs to the door as the bus jerked and swayed to a stop. As my feet hit the pavement, the smell of French fries washed over me in a wave – salt, oil – but there was no McDonald’s in my eyeline, just tourists and suitcases and traffic.