Emily was standing in front of the open fridge, gripping the edge of the door. Her eyes fixed on something inside.
Daniel took hold of her, peeling her fingers away from the door and deliberately manhandling her so she could no longer see what was so terrifying. Clinging to him, she burst into noisy, heaving sobs, her shoulders shaking. I hovered uncertainly, my stomach heaving as the sweet, bitter smell permeated my lungs. It was the worst thing I’d ever smelt in my life.
‘Hey, it’s all right. It’s all right. We’re here,’ he soothed, awkwardly rubbing her back.
‘Cat. Downstairs. Cat,’ she moaned.
What was she talking about? I couldn’t make out the words. All I could see was her white face, screwed up in terror and her throat swallowing furiously as if she might gag at any second. I was trying not to breathe through my nose. Daniel passed Emily out of the way and towards me so that he could get to the fridge properly. She was soft and pliable, as if all her bones had been removed and it felt as if she might slip through my arms at any second.
Even though he’d steeled himself, Daniel’s flinch said it all. His face paled as he closed the door firmly. His mouth turning down at the corners.
‘Don’t look, Olivia, it’s not nice.’ Judging from the smell, that was an understatement.
‘What is it?’ I breathed, my arm around Emily, holding on tight to keep her upright, every muscle bunched with tension. She’d started to cry and her teeth were chattering. She was slipping into shock.
‘There’s a white plastic bag leaking blood and it smells terribly and a red cat collar with a little bell on it.’
‘Oh no,’ I moaned. ‘Not Charlie. Why would anyone do anything so horrible?’
* * *
My stomach was churning with fear. The room felt incredibly cold. Wrapping my arms around myself, I tried to stop shaking. I wanted a cardigan but didn’t want to go into my bedroom by myself. Peter must have been in there. I remembered things now, unexplained at the time, my necklace on the floor, Emily’s missing underwear. It all made sense now.
We’d retreated from the kitchen and Emily was weeping copiously, all over Daniel. Shit, it was hard to ignore the way her tiny frame fitted so neatly on his knee, her head just tucked under his chin.
All three of us nearly leapt six feet in the air when the locksmith arrived. It was left to me to answer the door. There was no way Emily was vacating those muscular thighs. Succumbing to my inner bitch, I thought it was a shame she’d stopped screaming. I would have enjoyed giving her a good slap.
A man of few words, Mr Lukic made short work of installing a new lock, even without my constant interruptions.
‘Look, love,’ he said with a sigh eventually, after I’d badgered him solidly for five minutes with questions about the security of the new locks. ‘There are millions of permutations of these keys. No one is going to have a copy.’
‘Are you sure?’
He put down his tools and looked up at me. ‘Yes, love.’
‘But what about someone picking the lock?’ I asked.
His brow furrowed like corrugated cardboard. ‘That happens in films. Not real life, love. Burglars. Opportunists they are. Easy access — they’ll take that every time.’
It wasn’t a burglar I was worried about. I’d read enough psychological thrillers to know that psychopaths started small, torturing and killing pets before graduating to humans. My stomach twisted. Was it Charlie in that bag? What had Peter done to him? How could he? Charlie had been such a sweet little thing. He’d probably walked right up to Peter, weaving in and out of his legs, purring away like he always did. God, I was going to have to tell Charlie’s owner? My eyes welled up. What was I going to tell him?
‘There, love,’ Mr Lukic’s raspy voice interrupted my thoughts. ‘All done.’ Catching sight of my tears, he busiedhimself putting away his tools. ‘Safest thing. Always put the chain on when you’re in.’
It cost £120 by the time he’d finished, easy money for forty-five and a half minutes work. Nice work if you could get it especially with all those keyless OAPs wandering around in their slippers. Mr Rolling-in-fivers was handing out fresh keys by the time the police finally turned up.
Given that a murder wasn’t actually in progress when we’d dialled 999, the police appeared quite quickly — by South London standards. They called it a ‘Suspicious Incident’ but I think Emily’s hysterics in the background had a lot to do with it. Probably took pity on us — her voice can be a bit high-pitched.
To my disappointment there wasn’t so much as a flash of a blue light to herald their arrival. They ambled in, in their black uniforms. Starsky and Hutch they were not.
PC Carpenter and WPC Cartwright were local veterans, so the contents of our fridge didn’t faze them too much. It was a massive relief when they said that the contents of the bag were rotting offal, obviously from a butcher’s and definitely not a cat. Even so, the fact that someone had deliberately done this made me feel sick.
Despite his youthful appearance, I swear it must have taken him three days to grow that stubble, PC Carpenter had probably clocked up more fatal stabbings and drive-by shootings than he’d had hot dinners. He was a fairly weedy looking specimen, while gravelly voiced WPC Cartwright had probably had more packets of unfiltered Gauloise than hot dinners. Pushing forty, her hard, lined face told you that she’d seen and done everything, although she admitted someone planting rotting meat in a domestic appliance was a new one.
She dutifully declined a cup of tea and plonked herself down on the sofa to take notes, propping up her notebook on her knee.It was left to me to relate the full tale, which when told, sounded fairly fantastic.
‘Did you make it clear the emails weren’t welcome?’ asked Cartwright, her hand pausing, glancing up from her closely written notes at Emily.
‘Sort of,’ said Emily wincing.
