Pete smiles. They both know it’ll only take him a couple of minutes to get past any lock. “We’ll be in and out in a jiffy. If everything’s aboveboard, and he’s just got a few frozen lamb joints in there, we’ll lock it up again and he’ll be none the wiser.”
Darrell feels a sense of trepidation as they open the unit doors.
Right at the back, the chest freezer hums. It’s very big and dented. A pool of liquid is gently spreading across the concrete floor beneath it.
“You open it,” Darrell says.
“Stand guard.”
Darrell positions himself by the doors and watches the entrance to the yard. There’s no one else here. A warm breeze bends the nettles that have breached the crumbling tarmac. He yawns. From somewhere, he can smell barbeque.
He watches as Pete tries to lift the freezer lid. It’s a bit of an effort, and when Pete succeeds, the seal breaks audibly.
“Fuck,” Pete says. “Oh fuck.”
Darrell starts toward him.
“Stay there! Don’t look,” Pete says but it’s too late.
Darrell sees the body of the woman, a beautiful woman, lying face up. She’s lifeless and thankfully, her eyes are shut but beneath her, horrifyingly, is a man.
His eyes are open, and staring up at them, completely void of life.
And there’s another detail, just as horrifying because it’s so ordinary.
Tucked by their feet are two bags: an expensive man’s messenger bag and a pretty woman’s handbag, in canary yellow leather, with a thick woven strap.
Pete reaches for them.
“Don’t touch anything!” Darrell says and Pete snatches his hand back.
Darrell shuts the lid, stumbles out of the unit, and calls 999.
The landline has been ringing and ringing, but Emily can’t move. Through fear. And pain.
Every time she tries to pull herself up, she thinks she might black out. She has to rest, her head between her knees, and wait until the stars she is seeing recede.
She needs to call the police.
Her ankle has swollen up bigger than it was before. The pain is atrocious.
She tries crawling and it works but she has to stop every few yards.
She’s made it almost to the handset when she hears the key turning in the front door.
“Paul,” she says again.
She thinks her heart might explode with relief at the thought that it could be him.
I push Paul’s front door open. Jayne follows me in.
His house is beautiful, and I feel a little twist of envy every time we come here. The scale of it, the décor, the tech. Hard forhim to leave it, the police will doubtless think, this home and his delicious, young wife, but they’ll only think that until they find the evidence I’ve hidden fairly well, but not so well it’ll remain undetected by a reasonably competent professional hungry to make a name for himself.
“Oh my God,” Jayne says. She rushes past me. I tear my eyes from the chandelier that I’ve always envied and see what my wife has seen: Emily, lying on the floor at the other end of the hallway.
Jayne runs to Emily and holds her, helps her to sit up, starts to ask questions. I crouch beside them, concern plastered all over my face even though I can’t help feeling excited to witness firsthand some of the fallout from my letter, for that, surely, is what this is.
Near to Emily, a phone handset. She is, apparently, trying to reach it. “I couldn’t move,” she says. “It hurts too much.” Without embarrassment she cries plump, attention-seeking tears as the words tumble from her enhanced lips. She doesn’t know where Paul is, she blubs. She hasn’t had any contact with him since she was in the car on the way up to Northumbria. Her phone is lost, dropped in a pool on a lane up there!
