Peter James: Need You Dead

Wednesday 20 April

‘Lorna! Lorna! Don’t do this to me! Baby. Baby. Lorna.’ He shook her, frantically. Then he looked at his watch. He was sweating heavily. Thirty minutes had passed. Lorna’s eyes were open, her pretty but often sad blue eyes, staring sightlessly up, clouded. A startled expression in them.

He was shaking. No. Jesus, no. This could not be happening. It just could not. It had to be a dream, a bad dream, a nightmare.

He was trying desperately to think clearly. Must not panic.

‘Baby,’ he whispered. ‘Come on, baby.’

He thought he saw a tiny flicker of movement. ‘Baby?’

Had he imagined it?

‘Lorna?’ He shook her again, pressed his lips to hers and gave her more breaths, then chest compressions.

The doorbell rang.

He froze.

There was a rap on the door.

He held his breath.

He glanced at his watch. 7.35 p.m. Who the fuck was calling at this hour? No one came here, no one but them.

Another rap.

Whoever was out there would know someone was in. Who was it?

He heard the rustle of paper. Shit, was someone coming in?

Shaking, he turned and saw a note had been pushed under the door. Tiptoeing across, he knelt and picked it up. It was a standard, printed form letter from a firm of electricians.

Dear Occupier,

We are currently working in this building. At the request of the landlord, we called today to make an appointment to upgrade the wiring in your flat. Please call us on the number below to arrange a convenient time for this work to be carried out.

Yours sincerely,

Now it had his fingerprints on it, he realized. Idiot. Shaking almost uncontrollably, he folded it and pushed it into his trouser pocket, then went back to Lorna and stared down at her naked body. Her beautiful figure; her full breasts.

Fear gripped him, clawing at his skin, tightening his scalp. He gave one final try, his lips against her cold lips, then more compressions.

Nothing.

He peered into her eyes. Nothing. Then he felt again, hoping against hope for her pulse. There was none.

Behind him, somewhere below the falling darkness beyond the window, was a sharp squeal of brakes and angry hooting. He heard the cry of a gull. His brain raced, uselessly, showering fragments of thoughts.

Think.

CSI!

He went over to the kitchenette and tugged on the yellow rubber gloves Lorna used for washing up. Then, returning to her, he placed one arm below her knees, the other behind her back, and lifted her up. She was heavy, shite. She seemed much heavier dead than when she was alive. He staggered forward into the bathroom, where the acrid stench of burnt plastic seemed even stronger now, and laid her, clumsily, back in the bathtub. Water spilled over the edge, onto his suit trousers and his shiny black boots. Her head flopped forward, and in a way he was glad about that, glad that her eyes were no longer looking up at him.

But it didn’t look like an accident any more.

He repositioned her so that the back of her head was against the bloodstain on the tiles.

Could fingerprints be taken from a wet body? DNA?

With shaking hands he grabbed the sponge, soaped it, then washed her face, neck and every part of her body, trying to remove all his fingerprints, all traces of him.

‘Oh God, I’m sorry, my darling Lorna.’

All the time thinking.

Thinking.

Where else in here might his fingerprints be? His DNA?

When he had finished with her body, he took a bottle of bleach from the kitchen and wiped all around the surfaces of the bath. He was about to wipe away the smear of blood on the cracked tile, then hesitated. Better to leave it. He didn’t want to make it obvious someone had cleaned up.

He lifted the hairdryer out of the bath by its cord. Its air vents were blackened. Using a towel, he carefully and thoroughly wiped the casing to remove any fingerprints, curled the fingers of her right hand around the grip, then laid it back in the water, between her thighs.

To make it look like suicide or an accident. She electrocuted herself and in the shock her head flew backwards, striking the tiles. Yes.

He was in such turmoil, he was finding it hard to think clearly in any way. What had he touched since coming here? The front door to the flat, which he had pushed open. Her computer keypad, to wake it up to look at the photograph. Anything else?

Could his prints be found on her body?

Once more, with the sponge, he soaped the back of her knees and then her back, then wiped it all away. He wiped all around the washbasin, the loo handle, the seat.

What else?

Think. THINK.

He carefully rinsed out the sponge in the basin, looking around the tiny bathroom, then took a few paces back and stared at everything in the little flat. The place that had become the centre of his life. Where he had always looked forward so much to coming. To seeing the woman he truly loved.

He opened the fridge, where earlier he had put the bottle of Champagne, wiped it clean and replaced it. What else? What else?

There was a framed photograph of the two of them on the table, by the fruit bowl. One of them high up on Wolstonbury Hill, with miles of open Sussex countryside below them. He debated whether to simply remove the photograph, or take the whole thing. A frame with no photograph would look odd, wouldn’t it — to a trained eye? Evidence of someone trying to hide something.

His raincoat lay folded on the armchair. He put the photo frame, with the photograph still in it, on top, intending to conceal it with the coat as he left. Back in his car he’d rip up the photo and dispose of it in a bin, then the frame in another. He was starting to think more clearly, suddenly. THINK. THINK. THINK.

It was still not completely dark outside. Bloody British summer-time. Probably another half an hour before it would be fully dark. It was OK, his wife knew he was at work, he’d told her he would be home late.

He walked back into the bathroom. ‘Darling, you just got it so wrong,’ he said, quietly. ‘You did. I really was planning to leave her. I told you white lies, but I really, truly did believe we would have a life together.’

Oh God. What have I done? he thought.

Suicide?

Could the police believe she had committed suicide with the hairdryer?

His eyelids crushed his tears as he looked around the bathroom, checking it once more. What had he touched? To his horror, he saw the hairdryer plug lying in the sink. Shit! He pushed the pins back into the blackened wall socket and carefully wiped it.

What had he forgotten? Stepping back out of the bathroom he looked around again. The little dining table and the two chairs, where they’d eaten so many meals together, half naked, in the afterglow of having made love. Deliveries mostly. Pizzas; Chinese; Thai. He looked at the armchair. The fridge and kitchenette. The bed. Any other pictures? He checked. Just the two faded old Brighton prints, in their cheap frames, that had always been there as part of the flat’s meagre furnishings. However, her phone was a problem, her laptop another.

Her phone was a cheap pay-as-you-go job. The phone that she had told him her husband didn’t know about. Corin, she’d said, was insanely jealous and she was convinced he’d installed tracking software on her phone, somewhere. So when she came here to meet him, she left her iPhone at home, so it wouldn’t show any movement from the house, and only ever brought this one.

He picked it off the table, and studied it for a moment. His heart was still hammering and his hands shaking. He looked through the list of dialled calls. They were all to his own private iPhone number. Then he looked at her received calls. They were all from withheld numbers. Glancing down at the times of them, all except two tallied with calls he had made to her. One of the exceptions was three days ago, on a day he had not seen her. Another was earlier today, just after 11 a.m. this morning. He wondered who that was, and knew he would never find out now. Probably her best friend, Roxy, who was the only person, so far as he believed, Lorna had ever told about their affair.