Dead Like You

‘I know everything about you, Rachael.’

‘You can let me go. I’m not going to risk her life.’

‘I can?’

‘Yes.’

‘In your dreams.’

27

Thursday 8 January

He liked to be inside nice big houses. Or, more accurately, to be inside the inside of these houses.

Sometimes, squeezed into narrow cavities, it felt as if he was wearing the house like a second skin! Or squeezed into a wardrobe, surrounded by hanging dresses and the tantalizing smells of the beautiful woman who owned them, and of the leather of her shoes, he would feel on top of the world, as if he owned the woman.

Like the one who owned the dresses all around him now. And who owned racks and racks full of some of his favourite designer shoes.

And for a while, soon now, he would own her! Very soon.

He already knew a lot about her – far more than her husband did, he was sure about that. It was Thursday. He’d watched her for the past three nights. He knew the hours she came home and went out. And he knew the secrets on her laptop – so obliging of her to have no password! He’d read the emails to and from the Greek man she was sleeping with. The files with the photographs she had taken of him, some of them very rude indeed.

But for a while, if he got lucky, he would be her lover tonight. Not Mr Hairy Designer Stubble, with his massive, indecently big pole.

He would have to be careful not to move an inch when she came home. The hangers were particularly clanky – they were mostly those thin metal ones that came from dry-cleaners. He’d removed some, the worst offenders, and laid them on the wardrobe floor, and he’d wrapped tissues around the ones nearest him. Now all he had to do was wait. And hope.

It was like fishing. A lot of patience was required. She might not come home for a long time, but at least there was no danger of her husband returning tonight.

Hubby had gone on a jet plane far, far away. To a software conference in Helsinki. It was all there on the kitchen table, the note from him to her telling her he’d see her on Saturday, and signed off, Love you XXXX, with the name of the hotel and the phone number.

Just to be sure, as he’d had time to kill, he’d phoned the hotel using the kitchen phone and asked to speak to Mr Dermot Pearce. He was told in a slightly sing-song voice that Mr Pearce was not picking up and asked if he would like to leave a message on his voicemail.

Yes, I am about to have sex with your wife, he was tempted to say, getting caught up in the thrill of the moment, the joy at the way it was all dropping into his lap. But sensibly he hung up.

The photographs of two teenage children, a boy and a girl, displayed downstairs in the living room were a slight worry. But their two bedrooms were immaculate. Not the bedrooms of children who were living here. He concluded they were the husband’s children by a former marriage.

There was a cat, one of those nasty-looking Burmese things that had glared at him in the kitchen. He’d given it a kick and it had disappeared through the flap. All was quiet. He was happy and excited.

He could feel some houses living and breathing around him. Especially when the boilers rumbled into life and the walls vibrated. Breathing! Yes, like him now, breathing so hard with excitement he could hear the sound of it in his ears, and he could hear the pounding of his heart, the roaring of his blood coursing through his veins like it was in some kind of a race.

Oh, God, this felt so good!

28

Thursday 8 January

Roxy Pearce had been waiting all week for tonight. Dermot was away on a business trip and she had invited Ia

She hadn’t seen him since Saturday afternoon, when she’d strutted around his apartment naked in her brand-new Jimmy Choos, and they’d screwed with her still wearing them, which had driven him wild.

She’d read somewhere that the female mosquito gets so crazed for blood that she will do anything, even if she knows she will die in the process, to get that blood.

That’s how she felt about being with Ia

I am not a good person, she thought guiltily, as she drove home, accelerating her silver Boxster through the street-lit darkness up swanky Shirley Drive, past the Hove recreation ground. She turned right into The Droveway, then right again into their drive and up to the big, square, modern house they’d had built, a secluded paradise within the city, with its rear garden backing on to the playing fields of a private school. The security lights popped on as she headed along the short drive.

I am SO not a good person.

This was the kind of thing you could rot in hell for. She’d been brought up a good Catholic girl. Brought up to believe in sin and eternal damnation. And she’d got herself both the T-shirt and the one-way ticket to damnation with Dermot.

He had been married when they’d met. She’d lured him away from his wife, and the kids he adored, after an intensely passionate affair that had become stronger and stronger over two years. They’d been crazily in love. But then, when they’d got together, the magic between them had steadily evaporated.

Now those same deep passions had exploded inside her all over again with Ia

She reached up to the sun visor for the garage clicker, waited for the door to rise, drove into the space which seemed cavernous without Dermot’s BMW and switched off the engine. Then she grabbed the Waitrose bags off the passenger seat and climbed out.

She had first met Ia

It was his voice she’d fallen for first. The passionate way he spoke about food and about life, in his broken English. His handsome, unshaven face. His hairy chest, visible through a white shirt opened almost to the navel. His ruggedness. He seemed to be a man without a care in the world, relaxed, happy in his skin.

And so intensely sexy!

As she opened the internal door, then tapped out the code on the touch pad to silence the beeping alarm warning, she did not notice that a different light on the panel was on from the usual one. It was the night-setting warning for downstairs only, isolating the upstairs. But she was totally preoccupied in an altogether different direction. Would Ia

She’d opted for something simple: mixed Italian hors d’oeuvres, then rib-eye steak and salad. And a bottle – or two – from Dermot’s prized cellar.

Shutting the door behind her she called out to the cat, ‘Sushi! Yo Sushi! Yo! Mummy’s home!’

The cat’s stupid name had been Dermot’s idea – taken from the first restaurant they had gone to, in London, on their first date.

Silence greeted her, which was unusual.

Normally the cat would stride over to meet her, rub against her leg and then look up at her expectantly, waiting for di

She looked at her watch, then at the kitchen clock: 6.05. Less than an hour before Ia

It had been another shitty day at the office, with a silent phone and the overdraft on fast-track towards its limit. But tonight, for a few hours, she was not going to care. Nothing mattered but her time with Ia