Sam West: Home Intruder

“Trust me. He’ll remember.”

Ed looked lost in thought, his big brown eyes glazed over.

“I didn’t start dating Linda until we were sixteen, but looking back I suppose there was the whole love triangle thing going on. Or love square, if there is such a thing.”

“How so?”

“I was totally in love with a girl called Kerry Brown, but I guess Linda had always liked me and we had been friends since forever. I always knew Boko liked Linda. Probably why he flushed my head down the toilet.”

Jaz couldn’t help but giggle, despite her irritation at him.

“So what happened to Kerry Brown?”

“She and her family moved away on my sixteenth birthday. She never even knew I existed and I just kinda fell into seeing Linda.”

“I had no idea you were such a Romeo.”

“You’re the one that wanted to come back here so you brought all the history of my teenage angst upon yourself.”

“Yeah.”

Jaz liked to consider herself an easy going kind of girl. But there was something about Linda that put her on edge. A look in her eyes that, if she was honest, made her flesh crawl.

She’s not right and I don’t like her.

You sure that’s not sour grapes talking, Jazzy baby?

Thoughtfully she sipped her pint.

“Penny for them?” he asked.

“Just a bit apprehensive about tonight.”

“Don’t be. We’ll get rid of them as soon as possible, I promise.”

She smiled across at him, but the vague sense of unease remained.

Linda paced the front room of the tiny, basement flat that she shared with Boko on the outskirts of town. The rough end of town. Seeing Ed had shaken her to the core. She had dreamed of the moment they would meet again after so many years. How their eyes would lock over a crowd of people and the world would stand still in respect for their profound love.

Except it hadn’t happened that way. He had that bitch with him. That skanky whore. How old was she anyway? Was she even fucking legal?

Linda seethed and twisted herself up into knots just thinking about him with her .

And then she thought just of him . He had hardly changed at all, and certainly not for the worse. Still the same floppy brown hair and those big, soulful brown eyes. His boyish good looks had morphed into something manly and handsome.

God. Those eyes… They still made her stomach turn wild somersaults.

She closed her eyes, his face branded in her mind, like it always had been. She glanced at the clock. Boko wouldn’t be home from the job centre for a little while yet, she had time.

Her hand snaked between her sturdy thighs, feeling the heat radiating out from the crotch of her jeans.

Without bothering with the bedroom she eased her jeans down over her chunky hips and lay back on the tatty sofa.

Her fingers delved into her knickers and were instantly wetted with her own arousal.

“Ed, oh Ed,” she sighed, massaging the aching nub of her clit.

The orgasm quickly built and the nearer she came to release, the more her lurid fantasies starring Ed morphed into something else. The images in her head jumbled together; Ed between her thighs, his mouth and chin wet with her arousal, smiling up at her. Jaz’s head, a sizeable gap between it and the neck that had once carried it, lying on the pillow next to hers in a pool of blood.

Ed fucking her from behind as she crouched on all fours over Jaz’s decapitated, naked corpse. In her mind’s eye she smiled down at Jaz’s neck stump as she came.

Jason Jacks stood in his little office overlooking Hyde Park, smoking a cigarette. His rucksack was packed and rested at his feet, ready for the train journey to Cornwall.

It wasn’t however, the view from the window that had captured his attention, but the thousands of photographs that lined every available inch of the four walls. Not a crack of wall showed between them from floor to ceiling.

With trembling fingers, he removed an A4 sized, glossy, black and white photograph.

“So beautiful,” he murmured, tracing a fingertip over the contours of a close up of Jazmine Sullivan’s smiling face.

The photograph he held was a wedding photo, as was ninety percent of the photographs that adorned the walls. Jason Jacks, he of J.J. Photography, was a damn fine wedding photographer, even if he did say so himself.

The other ten percent were snapshots of the couple taken from a distance. Edward and Jazmine emerging from the church where Edward’s mother’s funeral had been held. Edward and Jazmine, walking hand in hand down the busy streets of London.

Blurry images of Edward and Jazmine making love, taken from the bushes outside their London flat. Jason always found it amazing how many people kept their bedroom curtains open a crack.

He pondered on the smiling face of Edward Sullivan.

“How much do you love her, Edward? Will you lay down your life for her?”

Everything was set, Jason was confident he had covered all angles. He was tired of anonymity, tired of keeping his work a secret. No more bringing back the couples to his torture chamber and adding to Britain’s already extensive missing persons list. For the first time he was going to treat himself; he was going to have a married couple whose wedding day he had photographed. It could be the one and only time, he knew this.

On some level, Jason knew that Mr and Mrs Sullivan would be his last. But that was okay. So much pain, and not just for the couples he tortured. Yes, he was ready for it all to end.

Jason picked up his rucksack. It was time to take his show on the road.

Ed’s easy going charm also hid an unwelcome angst. Why had Linda invited herself round tonight? Okay, so they had been each other’s first. First love, first sex, and they had grown up in the same town.

Had being the operative word. He pretty much hadn’t thought of Linda for fifteen years. And now here she was, exploding back into his life like she had always been there, like it was her God given right .

Shit, he knew coming back here was a mistake.

They walked back up the cliff path in silence, weighed down by carrier bags from a trip to the local Co-op.

Ed was the one to break the silence as they neared the house, both of them slightly puffed from the steep incline.

“Why don’t we crack open the wine and sit on the front porch and watch the sunset?”

“A dying man’s wish before he’s executed.”

Ed opened the front door and gestured for her to go in first, frowning slightly.

“That’s a bit dark, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry. I’ll be fine, really, I don’t mean to be a sour puss.”

His frown deepened. Linda had had a dark side, he remembered that now, Jaz’s words had jogged his memory. Although why he should think of that, he did not know.

Damn Linda and her impromptu little visit . It was casting a morbid glow over their time here.

Jaz busied herself in the kitchen, opening the wine and preparing snacks, and Ed wandered out into the hallway.

Yeah, Linda’s dark side. Sometimes she had scared him. He remembered her cruel streak well, now he thought of it. On the surface she was bright, warm and bubbly, but underneath it all he caught glimpses of coldness. When she was seventeen for example, she had developed a thing for Nazis. Maybe that was normal, he didn’t know, but he sure as hell didn’t share her fascination with mass genocide, human skin lamp shades and the sick experiments Nazi doctors performed on live subjects. At the time he told himself it was just a silly, school kid phase, but now, looking back, it did seem a little strange.