‘Get some breath back first.’ Rose took a seat on the steps.
‘As you wish.’ Antonia took the torch from her pocket and started shining it over the rubbish around them.
‘Looking for something?’
‘Nothing in particular.’
Rose didn’t believe her. She was capable of anything.
Antonia said, ‘Feet first, I reckon.’
‘What?’
‘When we lift him in, his feet should go first.’
Rose didn’t comment. Her eyes were following the beam of the torch. It picked out a set of rusty fire irons lying loose beside the wheelbarrow. Tongs, a shovel and a poker. The beam danced on to something else, coaxing her attention that way. Some instinct made her resist. Instead she turned her gaze back, outside the pool of light, and saw Antonia put her foot against the poker and covertly nudge it closer to the shelter entrance.
‘Are you listening, Rose?’
Suddenly the torch was shining full in her face. She stiffened like a rabbit caught in a headlight’s glare, except that the paralysing terror struck her a moment before the light. She managed to whisper, ‘What?’
‘Ready to start?’
Rose put up her arm protectively. ‘Stop it. It’s dazzling me.’
‘Get up, then.’
The beam moved away and the immediate feeling of helplessness passed. Rose had her hand to her eyes and she looked between the fingers to where the poker was lying. She’d expected Antonia to make a grab for it. Not yet, apparently. But she would at the next opportunity. ‘If you want his legs to go into the shelter first, you can lift them. I’m not going right inside.’
‘Why not?’ demanded Antonia. ‘You’re smaller than I am.’
‘I don’t like small spaces.’
Antonia lowered the torch and held it out to her. ‘Look inside. It’s all right. No rats or anything. Get a grip on yourself, you great sissy.’
‘That’s enough!’ Rose sprang up and pushed a warning finger at Antonia’s face. ‘I could easily walk away and leave you now.’
The tone switched abruptly from scorn to protest. ‘But you’ve refused all along to lift him by the shoulders.’
‘Never mind. I’m ready to do it now.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake! Have it your way, ducky, but let’s get on with it.’
Antonia dropped the torch and strutted histrionically past Rose to take a grip on Hector’s legs. But the bluster didn’t succeed as a diversion. Rose kept her eyes on the poker. She watched Antonia locate it with her right foot and glance down and attempt to nudge it out of sight under some thistles. Proof positive that she would launch an attack with it any minute. One or two blows on the skull with that would be death.
Disposing of Hector wasn’t enough. Antonia meant to kill again.
Why?
Rose knew why.
It’s the same plan as before, only this time she’s streamlined it. She means to kill me and take over my identity. She’ll bury me here, with Hector’s corpse. She’s got my handbag at home with my keys, my ration book and my identity card. She can get into my house and find my birth certificate and anything else she needs. She’ll use my name to get married to Vic. And then she’ll go to America with him.
She will not.
Rose forced herself to stand up, step woodenly across the rubble and take up the position she had said she would, facing Antonia, with the length of Hector’s body between them. This was the task that had to be completed, whatever else happened. Neither could manage it alone.
She stooped and slid her hands under the back, between the arms. Then she looked at Antonia, who was dipping to take the weight of the legs. They nodded at each other like two removal men lifting a piece of furniture.
Rose knew that the minute her usefulness was at an end, when Hector’s corpse was safely in the shelter, Antonia would attack. She definitely meant to kill.
And if by some chance the bodies of a man and a woman were discovered here later, the woman with an impacted skull, she would be dressed in clothes that had belonged to Antonia. The cunning that had ordered the events of the past few hours was clear.
Rose shuffled forward bearing the main weight of the body, eyes downcast as if she couldn’t bear the sight of poor Hector’s face. Actually her reason for looking down had more to do with self-interest: she was coming to the place where the poker was lying. She made a performance of stumbling slightly when she reached the thistles. It enabled her to nudge her right foot under the poker and push it at least a couple of feet aside.
Antonia seemed not to have noticed. She was making her way backwards down the three concrete steps, dipping low under the steel roof. She was right inside the shelter as Rose came down the steps. Funny. She obviously felt safe. She’d never considered Rose as a physical threat.
‘All right?’
‘Yes.’
They lowered their burden to the concrete floor.
Neither added a word. The silence wasn’t out of respect for the dead.
Now.
Rose turned and stretched across the concrete to reach for the poker. Her fingertips made contact with the handle. She took a grip, turned back towards the shelter entrance and raised her arm high behind her shoulder.
Antonia was bowing low to come out. There wasn’t much light to see her by, but the pale arch of her hair was discernible, and as she lifted her face the eyes appeared colourless. There was an instant when those eyes sighted Rose, a split second of disbelief.
Rose swung the poker and crashed it into the blonde head with more force than she knew she possessed.
Antonia slumped forward, across Hector’s body. Probably that first blow killed her, but there was too much bitterness, too much resentment to be contained in one blow. Rose battered Antonia repeatedly about the head. She sobbed as she struck and the sobs kept the rhythm of the blows for some time before she exhausted herself, slowed and stopped.
31
A long silence.
Rose was incapable of telling how long she remained on her knees with her hands over her eyes. Eventually she sensed that the shaking of her body wasn’t so much from a sense of shock as from cold. Her coat was saturated. Fine rain still lashed down. She stood up stiffly and looked down at what she had done.
And felt more relieved than regretful.
I am safe from her. Whatever I am guilty of, I am safe from her. She can’t hurt me now.
And nor can anyone else if I cover the bodies, bury them under the rubble. Somehow I must raise the strength.
She picked up the torch and trudged up the steps and looked about her. The circle of light travelled over the ground, searching. It stopped at a black area that the weeds had failed to colonize. She went closer and found a folded piece of tarpaulin attached to a length of timber, all that was left of somebody’s coalshed. As she bent to take a grip, a large frog hopped out from under the fold, but she didn’t recoil. She lifted a corner and disturbed other things that would normally have repelled her, woodlice, beetles and centipedes. She was unmoved. She had a new scale of horrors now. With the aid of a rusty old tyre lever that came to hand, she prised and tore the tarpaulin away from the wood. Then she dragged it across the site to the shelter and down the steps.
Before covering the bodies she knelt and used her sleeve to wipe some smudges from Hector’s forehead. His eyes were closed and the pale lashes were damp from the rain. He still had the look of an overgrown cherub. She thought for a moment of that remark Antonia had made about mothering him. But you really fancied me, didn’t you, Hec, she thought. Then she drew the tarpaulin gently over his face and tucked it under his shoulder, separating him from the face-down corpse of Antonia with its skullcap of blood.