Hossein touches Collette on the shoulder. She’s been silent since they came in, her face hidden by her hair. ‘You need to get going if you want to be gone,’ he says. ‘We need to call sooner than later.’
Collette looks up at them, and they’re all surprised to see that her face is as calm as the face of the Madonna. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she says.
Chapter Fifty-One
They go up the stairs, one by one by one. An execution party, sombre, quiet, their subject composed, dignified. It’s started to go dark outside, the onset of dusk hastened by the rain. But autumn is coming, the season is changing, and Lisa Dunne is going to die.
What a place to go, she thinks. And what a way. A footnote in history, another of the missing. By Christmas, the first of the cash-in books will hit the shelves. Someone at Sunnyvale will go through Janine’s sad little box and find her sad little photo collection, sell them to the Sun and have a holiday.
The smell is less than it was when she came up here before. The windows and doors wide open have stirred up a through draught and at least dissipated the syrupy quality the air in here had before. But still, it’s a horrid place. She looks about her at the sad, drab evidence of the life lived here and feels a moment’s sympathy for Thomas Dunbar. Not a picture on the walls, not a single tiny flourish that suggests that he loved himself. Just the little shrine on the table by the far wall, his collection of memorabilia.
She goes and stands over it, contemplates these trophies of lives lost. There were more than the three we’ve found today, she thinks. God knows what’s happened to the owner of those earrings, the girl who coveted the Louboutins but could only afford the pretend one for her key ring. Do their families know they’re missing? Do they still hope they’ll come back, one day?
She strokes her watch. The last of Janine. The last good gift – the first, really. Her twenty-first birthday present, and not a branded thing, an antique with a gold link chain and a mother-of-pearl face. Janine must have spent months squirrelling away the cash for it. She remembers the pride on her face when she handed it over, showed her the engraving on the back. Tiny letters, but still clear after sixteen years against her wrist: For Lisa, my love always, Janine.
She unclips the clasp and weighs it in her hand for a moment. A comforting weight, solid; her proof throughout her life that, however flawed, there was once love. The last of Janine – she has nothing else.
She lays it down on the table next to the big, self-important bunch of keys that used to belong to the Landlord. Takes a deep breath and lifts her chin. ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Let’s get this over with.’
They decide that the bathroom is the place for the final act. It seems logical, given the charnel he has made of the surprisingly elegant roll-top bath, that any cutting he has done has been done here. What is left of his last victim is little but bone, the flesh stripped off with obsessive dedication. There’s just a leg left uncleaned. It lies pathetically among its deconstructed skeleton, pale meat drained of blood, a rusty stain around the plughole. Whoever she was, she liked shell-pink nail polish. Probably spent a moment admiring it, turning her foot to catch the light, some short time before she encountered the garrulous man with the tinted specs.
Collette is having difficulty controlling her gag reflex. These pathetic remains disgust her. The last thing she wants to do is get down and get closer. And she’s frightened. Afraid of pain, afraid of dying. Afraid of what she is asking them to do. She looks over her shoulder and sees that Hossein has turned pale and Vesta looks grim enough to scare the devil. It’s not just me, she thinks. Neither of them wants to do it either. But they must. Someone has to do it. It’s the only way.
She kneels down and bends her head.
They’re both crying. Hossein and Collette are crying. Despite all the things they’ve done, the things they’ve seen, over the past few weeks, this final act has brought them close to collapse. Hossein stands over her, paralysed. He’s taken the cleaver from Vesta’s hand, come boldly forward, determined to carry it through, and now he’s by her, can see her face, her neck, her shoulder, he has crumbled. He sways like a kid on the bathroom tiles and squeezes the bridge of his nose as tears slide from his eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I can’t. I just can’t.’
‘Please!’ she begs. ‘Please, Hossein! You have to! Please!’
‘I want to. Oh, God, Collette, I can’t. I can’t…’
He shuts up, closes his eyes and deep-breathes. Struggles to compose himself.
‘Hossein, just geton with it. We can’t waste any more time. Cher’s downstairs, for God’s sake. Do you want her to lose her arm? Just do it. Just – please, Hossein, I can’t do this myself.’
He hauls in a huge breath, raises the cleaver and lunges. But it’s a half-hearted gesture. He shies away at the last second, buries the blade in the wall.
Collette screams. With rage, with frustration, with terror. She doesn’t want this to happen. Each time she thinks it’s about to, the blood surges through her veins and it takes every effort of will she has just to keep still. ‘Hossein!’
‘Oh, my God,’ says Vesta. ‘You’re torturing her!’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says again. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry!’
Vesta lets out an old-lady humph of disapproval.
‘Well,’ she says. ‘I guess it takes a woman to do a man’s job.’
She snatches the hatchet from his hand, pushes it out of the way and brings it boldly down.
Collette screams again. Drops to the floor and curls her whole body round her injured hand, clamps her palm over where the fingers are gone, to try to stem the blood. It hurts. She can’t believe how much it hurts. It’s only two fingers. What’s two fingers? How can the pain from two fingers be running through every nerve I’ve got?
Vesta picks up a towel, wipes her fingerprints from the hatchet handle and drops it in the bath. ‘I told you my dad was a butcher, didn’t I?’ she says.
Epilogue
DI Burke walks her back up to the car park. It’s been a long day and he wants a break. He’ll probably take the opportunity to slip out to the Cross Keys for a pint before he comes back in to finish off; the girl’s been done and processed and her laborious, childish signature scrawled across the bottom of each sheet of her twenty-page statement. No more overtime, on this case. It’s open-and-shut, no one to try, everyone slightly resentful because no one’s made a glamorous arrest.
‘That’s the trouble with the serials…’ He voices his thoughts out loud. ‘Half the time it ends up with everyone complaining we didn’t do our jobs because no one knew it was going on.’
‘Oh, I know, Chris,’ she says, sympathetically. ‘I mean, Christ, even Fred West had the grace not to do himself in until after we’d got him. I don’t know what we’re meant to do, though, short of CCTV in everyone’s houses. It’s not like anyone who was living there noticed.’
‘Harr,’ he laughs. ‘You won’t get the Mail pointing that out.’
‘You do wonder, though, don’t you? I mean. Sometimes you have to think that people are deliberately stupid.’
‘No,’ says Chris Burke, ‘just simple stupid. Let’s face it. Anyone over twenty-one living in a place like that isn’t going to be at the top of the evolutionary ladder, are they?’
‘I thought you said the man on the ground floor used to be a music teacher? That’s not exactly stupid, is it?’
‘Touch of Asperger’s, IMO. Not uncommon, with musicians, as it goes. It’s where they get the concentration to practise. Not too good at multi-tasking. You obviously don’t remember, but he was a big joke in the papers last summer. Got sacked from some private school in Cheam for not noticing that half his kids had climbed out on to the roof while he was doing something with a speaker system. Anyway, he’s gone downhill since then. Wife kicked him out and kept the kids. He was out of the house teaching private piano lessons in the afternoons, but he couldn’t find another job. I think he just sat there doing the piano hands to classical music CDs all day while he waited for his access visits to roll around and didn’t notice what time it was, never mind anything else. He hadn’t even noticed that the tenant next door had changed from Nichola to Lisa. Thought they were the same person. That she’d dyed her hair.’