Peter James - Dead Like You

She lay still, watching him.

Watching the leer on his face. He was smiling again. Back in control. Coming after her.

Upright now, he towered over her, holding the knife, with blood on the blade, in his right hand and taking out the spanner from his top pocket with his left. He took a lurching step towards her, then raised the spanner.

In less than a second, she calculated, he would bring that spanner down on her head.

She bent her left knee, then kicked forward with every ounce of strength that remained in her body, visualizing a point a yard behind his right kneecap, heard the snap as she connected, driving her foot into the kneecap, just as she had driven that hockey stick all those years before into the knee of the school bully.

Saw the momentary shock in his face. Heard his hideous howl of pain as he fell over backwards, with an echoing clang, on to the grid. Then, hauling herself up with the help of the railings and holding on, began to hop, dragging her right foot, away from him.

‘Owwww! My knee! Owwwwww, you fucking, fucking, fucking bitch.’

There was a vertical ladder she’d seen earlier at the far end of this walkway. She lunged at it, not looking down, ignoring the height. Gripping the edge with both hands she half-hopped, half-slipped, down, down, down, down.

He still had not appeared above her.

Then, as she reached the bottom, a pair of hands gripped her waist.

She screamed in terror.

A calm, gentle, unfamiliar voice said, ‘Jessie Sheldon?’

She turned, quaking. And found herself staring at a tall man with silver wisps of hair either side of a black baseball cap. On the front of the cap was written the word police.

She fell into his arms, sobbing.

Friday 23 January

‘You’re unbelievable! You know that? You are un-fucking-believable! You know how much evidence there is against you? It’s un-fucking-believable! You filthy pervert! You – you monster!’

‘Keep your voice down,’ he replied, in a subdued tone.

Denise Starling stared at her husband, in his shapeless blue prison tracksuit, with the black patch over his right eye, sitting opposite her in the large, garishly furnished, open-plan visiting room. A camera watched them from the ceiling and a microphone was silently recording them. A blue plastic table separated them.

Either side of them, other prisoners talked with their loved ones and their relatives.

‘Have you read the papers?’ she demanded. ‘They’re linking you with the Shoe Man rapes back in 1997. You did those too, didn’t you?’

‘Keep your bloody voice down.’

‘Why? Are you afraid of what they might do to you in the remand wing? They don’t like perverts, do they? Do they bugger you with ladies’ shoes in the showers? You’d probably enjoy that.’

‘Be quiet, woman. We’ve got things to discuss.’

‘I’ve got nothing to discuss with you, Garry Starling. You’ve destroyed us. I always knew you were a sodding pervert. But I didn’t know you were a rapist and a murderer. Had a good time on the ghost train with her, did you? You took me on the ghost train on one of our first dates and jammed your finger up my fanny. Remember? Get your rocks off on the ghost train, do you?’

‘I didn’t go on any ghost train. It wasn’t me. Believe me!’

‘Yeah, right, believe you. Ha! Ha fucking ha!’

‘It wasn’t me. I didn’t do that.’

‘Sure, right, and it wasn’t you at the cement works, was it? Just someone who looked like you.’

He said nothing.

‘All that tying me up shit. Making me do things with shoes while you watched and played with yourself.’

‘Denise!’

‘I don’t care. Let them all hear! You’ve ruined my life. Taken my best years. All that not wanting to have children because you had such an unhappy childhood shit. You’re a monster and you’re where you deserve to be. I hope you rot in hell. And you’d better get yourself a good solicitor, because I’m not standing by you. I’m going to take you for every penny I can.’

Then she began to sob.

He sat in silence. He had nothing to say. If it had been possible, he would have liked to lean over the table and strangle this bitch with his bare hands.

‘I thought you loved me,’ she sobbed. ‘I thought we could make a life together. I knew you were damaged, but I thought that if I loved you enough maybe I could change you. That I could offer you something that you never had.’

‘Give over!’

‘It’s true. You were honest with me once. Twelve years ago, when we married, you told me I was the only person who had given you peace in your life. Who understood you. You told me your mother made you screw her, because your father was impotent. That after that you were disgusted by women’s private parts, even my own. We went through all that psychology shit together.’

‘Denise, shut it!’

‘No, I won’t shut it. When we got to together I understood that shoes were the only things that turned you on. I accepted that because I loved you.’

‘Denise! Bitch! Shut it!’

‘We had so many good years. I didn’t realize I was marrying a monster.’

‘We had good times,’ he said suddenly. ‘Good times until recently. Then you changed.’

‘Changed? What do you mean changed? You mean I got fed up fucking myself with shoes? Is that what you mean by changed?’

He was silent again.

‘What’s my future?’ she said. ‘I’m now Mrs Shoe Man. Are you proud of that? That you’ve destroyed my life? You know our good friends, Maurice and Ulla? The ones we have dinner with every Saturday night at the China Garden? They’re not returning my calls.’

‘Maybe they never liked you,’ he replied. ‘Maybe it was me they liked and they just put up with you as my whingeing hag wife.’

Sobbing again, she said, ‘Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go home and kill myself. Will you care?’

‘Just do it properly,’ he said.

Friday 23 January

Denise Starling drove home recklessly in her black Mercedes convertible coupé. She stared at the wet road ahead through her mist of tears. The wipers clop-clopped on the windscreen. A chirrupy woman was wittering away on BBC Sussex Radio about disastrous holidays people had experienced, inviting listeners to call in.

Yeah, every sodding holiday with Garry Starling had been a disaster. Life with Garry Starling had been a disaster. And now it was getting even worse.

Shit, you bastard.

Three years into their marriage she’d fallen pregnant. He’d made her abort. He didn’t want to bring children into the world. He’d quoted some poem at her, some poet whose name she could not remember, about your parents screwing you up.

What had happened in Garry’s childhood had twisted him, that was for sure. Damaged him in ways that she could never understand.

She drove, way over the limit, along the London Road, past Preston Park, and shouted, ‘Fuck you!’ when the speed camera there she had totally forgotten about flashed her. Then she turned into Edward Street, drove along past the law courts, and Brighton College and the Royal Sussex County Hospital.

A few minutes later she made a right turn, opposite the East Brighton Golf Club, where Garry was a member – not for much longer, she thought, with some strange, grim satisfaction – let him be a sodding pariah too! Then she crested the hill, swung into Roedean Crescent and finally turned right, into the driveway of their large mock-Tudor house, passing the double garage doors, and pulled up in front of Garry’s grey Volvo.

Then, her eyes still misted with tears, she unlocked the front door of her house. She had trouble, for some moments, unsetting the alarm. Typical! The one time we have trouble with the alarm, Garry’s not around to get it sorted!