The Devil's Staircase

by Helen FitzGerald

  The light in the cupboard came on.

  ‘Hey you,’ Hamish said, before picking up a tin and smashing it down on my head.

  45

  At the hospital, several different groups of people grappled with the change of circumstances. A nurse had been assaulted. Celia had been taken. Hamish Watson was a killer.

  Vera Oh rang headquarters immediately, dispatching officers to the Royal, offering a description of the suspect, and ordering a nationwide alert.

  No one in Celia’s family could have imagined feeling worse than they had since their beloved had been taken. But they did feel worse. Their helpless grief was now topped with torture and madness. Greg prised himself away from his children. He asked his parents to take the crying boys home, and insisted on staying behind to help the police find his wife.

  And Pete, free at last, grabbed the phone at the nurse’s station to set about finding Bronny.

  Phone cal 1:

  Pete: Francesco, pick up. Francesco.

  Phone cal 2:

  Pete: Where are you?

  Zach: In bed.

  Pete: Have you seen Bronny?

  Zach: Not since around nine. Far as I know, the girls all wanted to find somewhere else to stay.

  Pete: Do you know where Francesco is?

  Zach: No idea, mate.

  Phone cal 3:

  Pete: Francesco, where the fuck are you?

  Francesco: On the roof. The boss has given me some time off.

  Pete: What’s that grunting noise?

  Francesco: Um, it’s Melissa Jeffreys from Point Lons . . .Wo! . . . dale.

  Phone cal 4:

  Pete: Is Bronwyn Kelly there?

  Mr Rutkowksi: Who?

  Pete: Is Fliss there?

  Mr Rutkowski: Fliss who?

  Pete: Cheryl-Anne?

  Mr Rutkowski: I don’t know these people.

  Phone cal 5:

  Pete: My name’s Peter McGuire. I’m a friend of Bronwyn’s. I’m just wondering if you’ve heard from her?

  Ursula: Yes, she rang. I’ve been waiting for her to call back. Is she okay? We’re worried about her.

  Pete: Do you know where she was ringing from?

  Urusla: No idea. I’ve been trying to find out. All I’ve got is a fax and I can’t trace it from here. She was just about to ring the hospital.

  Phone cal 6:

  Pete: . . . Do you know where she was ringing from?

  Dr Gibbons: Actually I do. I called her back on . . . 020 75559083.

  Pete: The Porchester . . . Dr Gibbons: Sorry?

  Pete: Nothing . . .

  (A long beat).

  Dr Gibbons: What?

  Pete: . . . Was it yes or no?

  On Hamish’s computer, the police found three sites he’d just visited – a 24-hour car-hire place, a booking site for P&O Ferries and an AA route planner from London to Dover.

  In Hamish’s bedroom they found the keys to the squat that Bronwyn had lost on the night of the squat-warming party, and a black bin bag of shitty clothes locked in a suitcase under the bed.

  Vera Oh felt like shit. She’d never removed Greg from her suspect list, always thought it might be the bastard husband because she had a thing about bastard husbands. Even as she interrogated Peter McGuire, she continued to think Greg might have killed his wife. After all, she was experienced enough to recognise that Pete might just be a young rogue who was teetering on the edge of growing up.

  But she didn’t have time to dwell on her feelings of guilt because she knew who the killer was now, and it seemed clear that at some time after 9 p.m. he had headed to Dover in a red Fiat.

  46

  When I woke up I was lying on the floor of the cupboard. Hamish had taken his drenched T-shirt off me – it was on the floor beside me – and had changed me into my underwear, netball skirt and polo shirt.

  Earlier, when I’d looked in the mirror and seen the big eyes on the T-shirt, I’d reverted to my former terrified self. I’d run away, hid. But when I woke up in the cupboard and thought about him touching me, dressing me; when I thought about how he’d been my best friend, how he’d given me money and peanut butter, gone to London Bridge with me and Oxford; when I thought about how his pointy little face had irked me on the plane when he’d spoken those very first words: ‘You should never tell a man you’ve had too much to drink,’ I realised that I did not want to hide or run away. I wanted to kill him.

  I could hear him making more commotion – what the fuck was he doing? I crept out of the cupboard and headed towards the noise, which was coming from one of the saunas. The doors to the steam rooms were open and the entire floor was now filled with hot steam. I could hardly see a thing. I walked determinedly towards the room he was in and shut the door of the sauna behind me.

  He still hadn’t heard me. I moved within inches of his back and saw that he was putting gloves on. He turned. We looked at each other.

  I don’t know what I thought I was going to do, exactly, but I thought my bare hands would suffice, and I didn’t expect him to be stronger than me. When I lunged at him, he pushed me to the ground and sat on my stomach, his legs pinning down my arms. I kicked my knees into his back, again and again, and his legs jolted so that my arms became free. I grabbed his face and head, using my unfiled nails to tear at his cheeks and eyes. I pulled hard at his bottom lip, trying to rip it right off his face. I punched his glasses so that they smashed and fell to the floor.

  He managed to stand, and began kicking me in the side.

  ‘This isn’t you, Hamish,’ I said between groans. ‘Hamish? Let me go, and I won’t tell anyone. I won’t tell the police.’

  I was lying, of course. I was still determined to kill him.

  ‘Really?’ he asked.

  ‘I promise.’

  Then he kicked me for so long that I thought I would die.

  Coming to, I realised I was slumped on the lower wooden bench of the sauna, right beside the hot coals. Hamish was yanking my hair so hard with his left hand that I felt he might rip my head off. He was standing over me with his trousers around his knees. He’d locked the door, leaving the key in the lock. The coals were burning hot beside my right foot. The tin Hamish had hit me with was next to the coals. Hamish held his flaccid penis in his other hand.

  ‘The police will be looking for you,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe, but no one will come near here till morning so I’m having what you might call a leaving party.’

  Hamish was hard now. I shut my eyes and prayed for him to disappear, but when I opened my eyes, he was still there, still pulling himself, still pulling the hair from my head.

  ‘Please, stop!’ I begged, to which he moved his pathetic little pelvis back and forward mid-air. I twisted, kicked and punched as much as I could. I wanted to vomit. I wanted to cry. I was crying. He was licking my forehead now. My eyes were scrunched closed and tears were flowing down my face.

  I turned my face to the side, looked out towards the thick steam, opened my eyes, and saw a ghost. Dressed in white. Pressing its face against the glass. I stared at it silently, wondering if maybe I’d died already. If I had, I hadn’t gone to heaven.

  47

  Celia had thought – as he wheeled her at scalpel-point to the car – this could not be happening. She’d been saved, hadn’t she? Hadn’t she been spared? Wasn’t she on the brink of getting her life back?

  She decided to play dead. It wasn’t so hard, seeing as most of her face was covered with bandages. All she had to do was hold her breath in his presence. So that’s what she did. When he pulled the handle to the boot, she held her breath and kept her eyes wide open. She tried not to show emotion or movement in her eyes as she saw his face for the first time. Just a pointy nerd with no chin. An insignificant squiggle of a man. He looked flustered, had a lot on his plate, and so he didn’t check her very carefully, just picked her tiny frame up, tossed her through a high, open window, and left her where she landed, on the floor of a concrete room. She tried to remain c
alm as he came in through the window after her, and then nailed the window shut.

  A noise upstairs made him stop, listen, and then leave. After he disappeared out the door, Celia thought hard. She didn’t have the energy to walk. She knew she wouldn’t get far. She would have to hide. She crawled over to the concrete slab, which was held up by two large boards, and slid in between them. Celia ripped the surgical tape from her mouth and thought hard about her next move.

  A girl ran in and then out. Celia crawled from underneath the concrete slab towards the steamy doorway. She wondered which way would save her, and turned left. She was crawling at a snail’s pace, hoping there would be a door or a window or a telephone nearby, when a gust of air cleared the steam for a moment and a closed glass room came into view.

  The girl was in there. She recognised her now. It was the girl who’d found her in the basement. The girl who she’d tried to contact for days on end, who had talked in her sleep and played the Beatles. It was the girl who’d come to save her, who’d held her and cried, who’d reminded her of the boys and begged her to live.

  The girl was cowering as the man held her hair and rubbed himself in front of her face. Celia looked ahead of her – she should crawl away. She should hide again.

  She couldn’t. On all fours, she moved towards the sauna an inch at a time, her breathing laboured, and when she finally reached it, she banged on the glass with her good hand. She tried to yell and eventually managed a tiny mouse-squeak that no one would ever hear.

  ‘Leave her alone! Bastard! Leave her alone!’

  48

  Bronny could make out Celia’s beautiful crying eyes. She was banging on the glass but not making any sound. Hamish hadn’t noticed. He was too busy yanking at himself.

  ‘Shhh!’ she gestured to Celia with her mouth and eyes, and Celia stopped banging for a second.

  Hamish was nearly there, so he kept saying, nearly there.

  Bronny mouthed ‘Police’ to Celia, but soon realised she couldn’t ring the police. The phone was miles away, upstairs. She didn’t know where, and she couldn’t even stand up.

  Nearly there, nearly there.

  There were only two possible outcomes, Bronny realised. Hamish would either kill her, or kill her and Celia.

  She used all her strength to free herself from Hamish’s grasp, race to the door, grab the key, and push it under the glass. She and Hamish were locked inside.

  Celia was safe now.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Hamish yelled. ‘What the fuck!’

  Hamish tried to open the door, but couldn’t. He beat at the glass with his fists. It shook, as if it might shatter at any moment.

  Bronny grabbed him to stop him from smashing the glass. He turned, pushed her down onto the bench and began to squeeze the air from her throat with both hands.

  Gasping for breath while looking directly at him, Bronny took her right hand, reached down, and took hold of a burning coal. It sizzled into her palm and though a wave of agony juddered through her, her hatred was more powerful than the pain. She pushed the contents of her smouldering palm against Hamish’s bare groin. The coal hisssed as it stuck to the skin of his penis.

  He let go of her throat, screamed, immobilised: a possum electrocuted on a power-line.

  ‘Hang on,’ Bronny rasped, ‘I’m nearly there. Nearly there.’ As she pressed harder, his penis fused with his testicles, the smell of burning flesh rising with his screams.

  His dick flattened to overdone.

  ‘NOOOO!’ he screamed.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, yes.’

  Prising her melted skin from his, Bronny flicked the coal away and put her hand in the bucket of water.

  Hamish fell and rolled around on the floor, yelling. After a moment, he began edging his way towards the glass again, screaming, smashing at it with his hands and legs. Bronwyn no longer had the strength to stop him.

  The glass cracked.

  Bronny realised she could not overwhelm him. She noticed the tin Hamish had hit her with next to her right foot. She looked at it properly for the first time – it was rat poison.

  Another fracture appeared in the glass wall. One more thump and he would be able to kill Celia and her.

  Taking off the lid, Bronny tilted the open tin of liquid poison over the coals and roared: ‘Move and I’ll let it go!’

  Hamish turned and looked. It took him a moment, and then his eyes registered.

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ he said.

  She could see Celia on the floor outside, lying down, eyes barely open. She could see Hamish daring her, not believing her.

  ‘You’re too afraid.’

  Bronny tilted the poison. A drip landed beside the coals.

  She smiled, because an hour ago, Hamish would have been right. She would have been scared – of test results, of ordering drinks on planes, of roller-coasters and heights and . . .

  She smiled, because that was an hour ago.

  Hamish smashed the glass, harder this time, and the fractures expanded.

  Bronny tilted the tin. The liquid oozed onto the coals, spitting and spluttering a dirty yellow steam which rose up to enter their throats like cut glass.

  Hamish and Bronny fell to the floor.

  She’d thought a lot about the actual moment.

  She’d imagined yelling in anger to stop the pain, screaming ‘No!’ or ‘More morphine!’ or ‘Help me, help me! Please, please, for God’s sake, help me!’

  She’d imagined seeing a light and reaching out her hand with a weirdly contented expression on her face.

  She’d imagined embarrassing herself with a grey unflattering bra and shitty underpants that did not match.

  She’d imagined embracing Catholicism at the last moment, just in case.

  She’d imagined flashes of her life zooming past like trucks overtaking her car window on the freeway.

  She’d imagined floating above herself and looking down to a bed surrounded by doctors and nurses and crying people.

  She’d imagined calling the last of a long line of people into the room and telling them it’s okay and that she’d always be with them, in a way.

  She’d imagined calling the first of only a short line of people into the room but being told by a scary nurse that the person had nipped out to the milk bar to get eggs.

  She’d imagined being overcome with tremors of terror that this was it, this was death, it was coming, and nothing she could do would stop it.

  The moment had come and she didn’t want to grab or yell or scream or hold her hand to the light and she didn’t feel terrified or think about final speeches. She was too busy coughing, and if she hadn’t been too busy coughing, the only thing she’d have wanted to do was cry.

  Gathering her upper half into a foetal position and drawing her wide-open knees as close to her chest as possible, Bronny saw a tiny scar on her left knee. She’d never noticed it before – must’ve been from that trike accident when she was three.

  49

  Vera Oh dropped Pete at the front entrance to the Porchester. It looked like the bastard was heading for France.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get him,’ she said, feeling confident that they had their man, that they would find him, save Celia, and that no one else would get hurt.

  Pete leapt out of the police car and ran towards the door to the Porchester. The doctor hadn’t told him, but he could tell from his voice that it was yes. The poor girl, she had it. Pete was glad, at least, that she had found somewhere safe to hide, and prayed as he ran that she would still be there so he could hold her, hug her, tell her it would be okay. Not only would they find a way to deal with it together, but they would have at least twenty years of love and happiness, more than most people get in a lifetime.

  Pete picked the lock and went inside. It was dark, and he couldn’t hear anything.

  ‘Bronny?’ he yelled.

  Pete felt the soil of the bamboo palm. It was wet. She was here.

  ‘Bron, I know you’ve spoken to the do
ctor. Where are you?’

  He looked in the kitchen – no one was there. He walked through the double doors, down past the plunge pool, down the stairs. The place was filled with steam.

  ‘Bronny! Where are you?’

  He walked towards the steam rooms and tripped over. When he stood up, he realised he’d fallen over a woman.

  He knelt down and rolled her onto her back, recognising immediately that it was Celia. He gasped, knowing this meant Hamish was here, that Bronny was in danger. Checking her pulse, Pete carried Celia upstairs as quietly as possible. He put her in the reception booth in the recovery position, satisfied that she was breathing, and rang the police.

  Pete ran into the relaxation area, then downstairs through the mist and looked into steam room 1, steam room 2, sauna 1 . . . then sauna 2. The door was closed, and Bronwyn and Hamish were in spasms on the floor.

  50

  The Sick Man felt very sick. He thought back to when he’d been ill as a boy, and his mother had trickled water from a flannel onto his forehead. It had felt good. The sound was soothing. She might have smiled at him. He couldn’t remember, but he liked to think she had.

  A trickle of water was what he needed, just as he had after days of crippling agony, of listening to every noise at the door, of watching outside to see if she was coming home. Was that her? Coming home? No, it wasn’t. It was a postman, a girl jogging – an okay feeling for a moment – another postman, and another, social services, not a trickle.

  He’d felt sick ever since, except for the occasional moment, but never as sick as he’d felt in his twelve-year-old self’s bedroom, not even now. Not even now, lying on the floor of a sauna that had steam made of razor blades slashing your bleeding innards.