Dead Like You

She stared up, almost paralysed by utter terror and confusion. Who was this? The ride operator she’d met outside?

‘Please don’t hurt me,’ she said.

Through the beam of light she saw the silhouette of a man’s face inside what looked like a nylon stocking with slits in it.

As she opened her mouth and tried to scream, something soft and foul-tasting was rammed into it. She heard a ripping sound and the next instant felt sticky tape being pressed over her lips and around each side of her face. She tried to scream again, but all that came out was a muffled choking sound that seemed to shimmy around inside her head.

‘You’re gagging for it, aren’t you, doll? Dressed like that? Dressed in those shoes!’

She lashed out at him with her fists, pummelling him, trying to scratch him. Then she saw something glint in the darkness. It was the head of a large claw hammer. He was holding it in a latex-gloved hand.

‘Keep still or I’ll fucking hit you.’

She still in terror, staring at the dull metal.

Suddenly she felt a crashing blow to the side of her head. Her brain filled with sparks.

Then silence.

She never felt him entering her or removing her shoes afterwards.

47

Saturday 10 January

Garry Starling entered the packed China Garden restaurant shortly after 9 p.m. and hurried towards his table, pausing only to order a Tsingtao beer from the manager, who stepped across to greet him.

‘You are late tonight, Mr Starling!’ the jovial Chinese man said. ‘I don’t think your wife is a very happy lady.’

‘Tell me something new!’ Garry replied, palming him a £20 note.

Then he hurried up the steps to his regular table and noticed that the ga

‘Where the sodding hell have you been?’ his wife, Denise, said, greeting him with her customary acidic smile.

‘Actually I’ve been sodding working, my darling,’ he said, giving Maurice’s barmy-looking Earth Mother wife, Ulla, a perfunctory kiss, shaking Maurice’s hand and then sitting in the empty seat between them. He didn’t kiss Denise. He’d stopped greeting her with a kiss back in the year dot.

Turning and staring pointedly at his wife, he said, ‘Working. Right? Working. A word that’s not in your lexicon. Know what it means? To pay for the sodding mortgage. Your sodding credit-card bill.’

‘And your sodding camper van!’

‘Camper van?’ said Maurice, sounding astonished. ‘That’s not your style, Garry.’

‘It’s a VW. The original split-windscreen one. They’re fine investments, very collectable. Thought it would be good for Denise and me to experience the open road, sleeping out in the wild every now and then, get back to nature! I would have bought a boat, but she gets seasick.’

‘It’s midlife crisis, that what it is,’ Denise said to Maurice and Ulla. ‘If he thinks he’s taking me on holiday in a sodding van he can think again! Just like last year, when he tried to get me on the back of his motorbike to go on a blooming camping holiday in France!’

‘It’s not a sodding van!’ Garry said, grabbing the last spring roll before anyone else could get it, dipping it by mistake in the hot sauce and cramming it into his mouth.

A small thermonuclear explosion took place inside his head, rendering him temporarily speechless. Denise took good advantage of it.

‘You look like shit!’ she said. ‘How did you get that scratch on your forehead?’

‘Crawling up in a sodding loft, trying to replace an alarm wire bloody mice had eaten. A nail sticking out of a rafter.’

Denise suddenly leaned closer to him and sniffed. ‘You’ve been smoking!’

‘I was in a taxi where someone had been smoking,’ he mumbled a little clumsily, chewing.

‘Oh, really?’ She gave him a disbelieving look, then turned to their friends. ‘He keeps pretending he’s quit, but he thinks I’m stupid! He goes out to take the dog for a walk, or a bike ride, or to take his motorbike for a spin, and comes back hours later stinking of fags. You can always smell it on someone, can’t you?’ She looked a Ulla, then at Maurice and swigged some Sauvignon Blanc.

Garry’s beer arrived and he took a long pull, glancing first at Ulla, thinking that her mad hair looked even madder than usual tonight, and then at Maurice, who looked more like a toad than ever. Both of them, and Denise as well, looked strange, as if he was seeing them through distorting glass. Maurice’s black T-shirt stretched out over his pot belly, his eyes bulged out of their sockets and his expensive, hideous checked jacket, with its shiny Versace buttons, was too tight. It looked like a hand-me-down from an older brother.

Defending his friend, Maurice shook his head. ‘Can’t smell anything.’

Ulla leaned across and sniffed Garry, like a dog on heat. ‘Nice cologne!’ she said evasively. ‘Smells quite feminine, though.’

‘Chanel Platinum,’ he replied.

She sniffed again, giving a dubious frown, and raised her eyebrows at Denise.

‘So where the hell have you been?’ Denise demanded. ‘You look a mess. Couldn’t you at least have brushed your hair?’

‘It’s blowing a hooley out there, in case you haven’t noticed!’ Garry replied. ‘I had to deal with an irate client – we’re short-staffed tonight – one down with flu, one down with something else, and a bolshy Mr Graham Lewis in Steyning, whose alarm keeps going off for no reason, was threatening to change suppliers. So I had to go and sort him out. OK? Turns out it was damned mice.’

She tilted her glass into her mouth, to drain it, then realized it was already empty. At that moment a waiter appeared with a fresh bottle. Garry pointed at his own wine glass, draining his beer at the same time. His nerves were shot to hell and he needed drink right now. Lots of it.

‘Cheers, everyone!’ he said.

Maurice and Ulla raised their glasses. ‘Cheers!’

Denise took her time. She was glaring at Garry. She just did not believe him.

But, Garry thought, when had his wife last believed him about anything? He drained half of the sharp white wine in just one gulp, momentarily relieving the burning sensation in the roof of his mouth. If the truth be known, the last time she had believed him was probably on the day they got married, when he said his vows.

Although… he hadn’t even been sure then. He could still remember the look she had given him in front of the altar, as he’d slipped the ring on to her finger and got prompted through the wording by the vicar. It was not the love in her eyes that he might have expected, more the smug satisfaction of a hunter returning home with a dead animal over their shoulder.

He had nearly bailed out then.

Twelve years later, there was not a day that went by when he didn’t wish he had.

But hey. There were advantages to being married. It was important never to forget that.

Being married gave you respectability.