Stephen Gallagher - The Boat House

She was wet, but she didn't even shake herself. She stepped back and considered again, as someone might consider an arrangement of wedding gifts on a table.

Amis, he thought.

How much more wrong could he have been?

The waitress was going about this business as if it was just a minor, routine part of her day; no big challenge, nothing to get too excited about, simply take a dead man out of one hiding place and put him somewhere else. And if it was a task out of proportion to her stature, she didn't seem to feel it — the strength that she now showed as she pulled out the running hose and hauled the freezer across the floor was greater than Aldridge would have expected from her. After swinging it around, she got behind the appliance and started to push it toward the big two-way doors that stood floor to ceiling in the far wall. She moved like a compact, powerful engine, the freezer rolling like a block of stone on its way to the pyramid. When she came level with the doors, she left it for a moment in order to open them.

They were delivery doors, opening to the outside. Beyond them was a loading platform, and beyond that a dead-ended spur of road with a turnaround for vehicles. A hook and winch hung in silhouette above like gallows tackle; the waitress got behind the freezer again, and carefully manoeuvred it to stand directly underneath.

If she was planning to use the winch, she'd need power. With the generator stopped, every power point on the site would be dead. She turned and started across the kitchen, and for a moment Aldridge thought that she was heading straight for him; but she was walking toward the door at his side, and he backed off and into the growing shadows as she emerged and passed by.

She didn't even glance his way. He waited as she crossed the forecourt and disappeared around the back of the reception block, intending to go into the kitchen the moment that she was out of sight. But he almost couldn't bring himself to move; something had slipped through his senses and his intellect and found the coldest spot in his soul… and now, having been touched, the cold spot was spreading.

And before he could begin to fight it, every damned light in the place came on.

He'd assumed that she'd be restarting the generator, but he hadn't been expecting this; all of the switches must have been down when the generator had failed. He could take her now; he'd seen enough.

But he slipped around the corner, where she wouldn't be able to see him and where he could watch her from another window.

Her returning footsteps were as even and confident as before; and although he was placed so that he couldn't see her, he could see her long shadow thrown out in three overlapping versions by the floodlights. She seemed to be carrying something, but he couldn't tell what. He heard the cafeteria door open, and then bang shut again.

Aldridge eased himself level with the window and paused to take another look, more carefully this time because he knew that there was more of a chance that he might be seen. The kitchen now blazed white under row after row of unshaded fluorescent tubes, the spilled water on the grey tiled floor making a long, mirror-like trail from the gap to the loading bay. Where previously the open doorway had been a square of light, it was now a square of darkness,

The waitress was back at the freezer. Now he could see what she'd been carrying.

It was a ski stick. A pretty obvious thing to find lying around, considering the nature of the place. It was the fibreglass type, about three feet long, with a slim metal spike at one end and a wrist loop at the other. She'd climbed onto the top of the appliance again, holding the stick in her left hand; in her right was the wooden mallet from the carpenter's own toolkit.

She positioned the spike carefully in the open freezer below her. Then she raised the mallet, and gave the top of the stick a single, hard blow to get it sited. There was a lot of spring in the shaft and the job wasn't easy, but the stick seemed to go in about an inch. When she paused to change her grip, the stick stood up on its own.

It was hard going. Aldridge watched, unable to drag himself away, as the ski stick was hammered fraction by fraction into the body at the bottom of the freezer. Halfway through she had to change position, alter her angle a little; she gripped the stick with both hands and stirred it around, as if seeking the route of least resistance through bones and sinew.

Aldridge was sickened. Go in and stop her, he was thinking.

But he was also fascinated.

Twenty minutes or more must have gone by, twenty minutes of calm, patient work as the carpenter's corpse was efficiently spitted. Finally the waitress hopped down, went around to the other side, and thrust her arm in deep as if feeling for something; and then, apparently satisfied, she went over to the control box beside the door and pressed the button to lower the winch.

She used the nylon rope again, attaching one end to the wrist loop on the stick and the other to the winch's hook. Then, returning to the control box, she started the raising.

Slowly, Amis sat up.

His face was almost black. The ski stick had entered his chest just below the breastbone, and had taken a lot of his shirt through with it. There was no blood. He sat like a doll, newly baptised, water running from his hair; the fibreglass shaft was bent almost double, trembling with the strain of holding him up, and it seemed likely to break if the body should be raised any further.

But the waitress appeared to have planned for this. Stopping the winch before he could rise any more, she moved around behind the body with a second loop of the nylon line. Although he couldn't see exactly what she was doing, Aldridge could make a guess; he reckoned that she was throwing the loop over the protruding spike of the stick to centre his weight under the hook. This done, she returned to the winch control and continued the operation.

No rigor, it would seem. Amis came out hunched into the shape of the freezer's interior, but then he slowly began to unfold as if the dead matter was too dull and stupid to give anything better than a delayed reaction to the change in circumstance. He looked as if he'd been that way for some time. He was shoeless.

The waitress walked around him, sizing him up as he swung slightly in the breeze outside the open doors. The water still ran from his sodden clothes and skin, splashing down into the freezer from his dangling form.

A neat arrangement. The waitress seemed to be taking time out to appreciate her own work.

Which finally gave Aldridge the break that he needed to pull himself away. How long had he wasted, transfixed by the scene? Too long. He stepped back from the window and, walking as quietly as he could, headed for his car. He could make the arrest any time now, no problem; Aldridge stood about five-eleven, weighed around a hundred and seventy pounds, worked out with weights on rare occasions, could still swim a mile, and had once run a decent half marathon. The waitress was considerably smaller, and probably little more than half his weight. But he'd made his decision; he was going to wait and watch some more, and use the waiting time to get a head start on calling in some backup.

Because if she took the body down to the lake, and started to fake up yet another of those 'accidents'… well, he wouldn't just be grabbing her for Amis.

He'd be taking her for all of them.

The Venetz sisters' Renault stood before him, waiting for its gruesome load. He made a wide circle around it, and glanced back to be sure that he wasn't being followed.

Help would take something close to an hour to get to him. There would have to be CID, forensic, scenes of crime, press officers, the works. The valley would be like one big circus for a while, and the aftermath would probably never be forgotten.