Peter James - Dead Like You

‘I’m sorry, Officer,’ she said, her voice sounding edgy and slurred. ‘I think I might have been going a bit fast.’

Upperton knelt to get as close to her face as possible, in order to smell her breath. But he didn’t need to. If he’d lit a match at this moment, flames would have probably shot out of her mouth. There was also a strong smell of cigarette smoke in the car.

‘Got bad eyesight, have you, madam?’

‘No – er – no. I had my eyes tested quite recently. My vision’s near perfect.’

‘So you always overtake police cars at high speed, do you?’

‘Oh, bugger, did I? I didn’t see you! I’m sorry. I’ve just had a row with my ex-husband – we’ve got a business together, you see. And I-’

‘Have you been drinking, madam?’

‘Just a glass of wine – at lunchtime. Just one small glass.’

It smelt more like she’d drunk an entire bottle of brandy to him.

‘Could you switch your engine off, madam, and step out of the car. I’m going to ask you to take a breath test.’

‘You’re not going to book me, are you, Officer?’ She slurred even more than before now. ‘You see – I need the car for my business. I’ve already got some points on my licence.’

No surprise there, he thought.

She unclipped her seat belt, then clambered out. Upperton had to put his arm out to stop her staggering further into the road. It was unnecessary to get her to blow into the machine, he thought. All he needed to do was hold it within a twenty-yard radius and the reading would go off the scale.

Friday 9 March

‘Johnny!’ his mother bellowed from her bedroom. ‘Shut up! Shut that noise up! Do you hear me?’

Standing on the chair in his bedroom, he removed another of the nails clenched between his lips, held it against the wall and struck it with his claw hammer. Blam! Blam! Blam!

‘JOHNNY, BLOODY WELL STOP THAT NOISE! NOW! STOP IT!’ She was screaming now.

Lying neatly on the floor, exactly the same distance apart, were each of his prized collection of high-flush lavatory chains. All fifteen of them. He’d found them in skips around Brighton – well, all except two, which he had stolen from toilets.

He took another nail from his mouth. Lined it up. Began hammering.

His mother ran into the room, reeking of Shalimar perfume. She wore a black silk camisole, fish-net stockings with suspenders not yet fastened, harsh make-up and a wig of blonde ringlets that was slightly askew. She was standing on one black stiletto-heeled shoe and holding the other in her hand, raised, like a weapon.

‘DO YOU HEAR ME?’

Ignoring her, he began hammering.

‘ARE YOU BLEEDIN’ DEAF? JOHNNY?’

‘I’m not Johnny,’ he mumbled through the nails, continuing to hammer. ‘I am Yac. I have to hang my chains up.’

Holding the shoe by the toe, she slammed the stiletto into his thigh. With a yelp like a whipped dog, he fell sideways and crashed to the floor. Instantly she was kneeling over him, raining down blows on him with the sharp tip of the heel.

‘You are not Yac, you are Johnny! Understand? Johnny Kerridge.’

She hit him again, then again. And again.

‘I am Yac! The doctor said so!’

‘You stupid boy! You’ve driven your father away and now you’re driving me crazy. The doctor did not say so!’

‘The doctor wrote Yac!’

‘The doctor wrote YAC – Young Autistic Child – on his sodding notes! That’s what you are. Young, useless, sodding pathetic autistic child! You are Johnny Kerridge. Got it?’

‘I am Yac!’

He curled himself up in a protective ball as she brandished the shoe. His cheek was bleeding from where she had struck him. He breathed in her dense, heady perfume. She had a big bottle on her dressing table and she once told him it was the classiest perfume a woman could wear, and that he should appreciate he had such a high-class mother. But she wasn’t being classy now.

Just as she was about to strike him again the front doorbell rang.

‘Oh shit!’ she said. ‘See what you’ve done? You’ve made me late, you stupid child!’ She hit him again on the thigh, so hard it punctured his thin denim trousers. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’

She ran out of the room, shouting, ‘Go and let him in. Make him wait downstairs!’

She slammed her bedroom door.

Yac picked himself up, painfully, from the floor and limped out of his room. He walked slowly, deliberately, unhurriedly down the staircase of their terraced two-up, two-down on the edge of the Whitehawk housing estate. As he reached the bottom step, the doorbell rang again.

His mother shouted, ‘Open the door! Let him in! I don’t want him going away. We need it!’

With blood running down his face, seeping through his T-shirt in several places and through his trousers, Yac grumpily limped up to the front door and reluctantly pulled it open.

A plump, perspiring man in an ill-fitting grey suit stood there, looking awkward. Yac stared at him. The man stared back and his face reddened. Yac recognized him. He’d been here before, several times.

He turned and shouted back up the stairs, ‘Mum! It’s that smelly man you don’t like who’s come to fuck you!’

Saturday 27 December

Rachael was shivering. A deep, dark terror swirled inside her. She was so cold it was hard to think. Her mouth was parched and she was starving. Desperate for water and for food. She had no idea what the time was: it was pitch black in here, so she could not see her watch, could not tell whether it was night or day outside.

Had he left her here to die or was he coming back? She had to get away. Somehow.

She strained her ears for traffic noise that might give her a clue as to whether it was day or night, or for the caw of a gull that might tell her if she was still near the sea. But all she could hear was the occasional, very faint wail of a siren. Each time her hopes rose. Were the police out looking for her?

They were, weren’t they?

Surely her parents would have reported her missing? They would have told the police that she hadn’t turned up for Christmas lunch. They’d be worried. She knew them, knew they would have gone to her flat to find her. She wasn’t even sure what day it was now. Boxing Day? The day after?

Her shivering was getting worse, the cold seeping deep inside her bones. It was all right, though, she thought, so long as she was shivering. Four years ago, when she had left school, she’d worked for a season as a washer-upper in a ski resort in France. A Japanese skier had taken the last chairlift up one afternoon in a snowstorm. There was a mistake by the lift attendants, who thought the last person had already gone up and been counted at the top, so they turned the lift off. In the morning, when they switched it back on, he arrived at the top, covered in ice, dead, stark naked, with a big smile on his face.

No one could understand why he was naked or smiling. Then a local ski instructor she’d had a brief fling with explained to her that during the last stages of hypothermia people hallucinated that they were too hot and would start removing their clothes.

She knew that somehow she had to keep warm, had to ward off hypothermia. So she did the only movements she could, rolling, left and then right on the hessian matting. Rolling. Rolling. Totally disoriented by the darkness, there were moments when she lay on her side and toppled on to her face and others when she fell on to her back.

She had to get out. Somehow. Had to. How? Oh, God, how?

She couldn’t move her hands or her feet. She couldn’t shout. Her naked body was covered in goose pimples so sharp they felt like millions of needle points piercing her flesh.