Dying for Christmas (23 page)

I selected the sharpest sliver of china and kicked the remaining fragments into the corner of the balcony behind my chair. Then I sat back down, trying to slow my racing heart.

‘Wake up, Jessica.’ I’d closed my eyes pretending to be asleep. ‘Wake up.’

My hand was resting on my belly and I controlled my breathing from in there just as Sonia had taught me. I heard the sound of Dominic putting the paints down.

‘Not yet, Jessica. I still have plans for you. It’s not time yet. Wake up!’

I kept my eyes shut.

‘Shit,’ I heard him mutter.

I felt his breath a split second before he put his hands on my shoulders, then his hair brushing my lips as he put his head to my chest to listen. The shard of china was in my left hand and I channelled all my energy and adrenalin into my forearm as I brought my fist high above my head and plunged the sharp tip deep into the back of his neck.

For a moment we were both silent and still. Then Dominic let out a cry that was more like a bellow and slumped forward. I wriggled out from underneath him, calling on strength I hadn’t known I still had in me. Sure he would be right on my heels, I flung open the glass door and stumbled inside, propelling myself across the wooden floor, only turning to look once I’d reached the far end of the room. Incredibly, there was no sign of him. Sobbing, I threw myself on the handle of the huge, metal front door and turned it.

Nothing.

Then I remembered how Dominic had taken out the purple-fobbed key that first night and locked us in. He always kept the bunch of keys in his pocket. What about the laptop in the other room? Would he have bothered to lock that door again after fetching the art stuff?

I made my way back through the kitchen and around the half wall to the back part of the flat and lunged forward to open that door.

Locked.

I was still sobbing – horrible gulping sobs that ripped painfully from my throat – but I forced myself to retrace my steps across the huge apartment. Before I reached the glass door to the balcony, I stopped. ‘You
will
carry on breathing. You’re
not
going to die,’ I told myself. But everything around seemed to be lurching as if I was on a boat. I made myself look outside but the table and chairs where I’d been sitting were to the left of the door and out of view.

Taking a deep breath, I stepped outside.

He wasn’t there.

He’d managed to crawl to the railing in the far corner of the balcony, leaving a trail of blood like snail slime in his wake. He was half standing, half crouching where the balustrade met the wall, with his back to the river so he was facing me.

‘Forgotten something, Jessica?’ he asked in a voice that sounded stretched on a rack.

And now I saw that he had brought the huge bunch of keys out from his pocket and was holding them in his right hand – the hand that wasn’t clutching on to the railing. With the multicoloured fobs they looked like a posy of flowers in the bright light and for a wild second, I thought he was about to toss them to me. I raised my hands to catch them and Dominic smiled straight at me as if we were sharing the hugest joke. Then he lifted his right arm in an arc and the keys flew over the balustrade and through the crisp winter day, swooping like a dazzling parakeet before entering the river with a splash.

I watched as Dominic slumped to the ground, his strength too depleted by this final, drastic act. Pain was again clouding my head. It was surely over. There were no keys, no way out. Desperate, my eyes scanned the balcony, alighting on the paints.

A message. I could paint an SOS message and hang it from the railing.

The flare of hope that lit inside me at that thought lasted only as long as it took for me to size up the tiny tubes of paint, most of them already rolled up at one end to force the last dregs out. There wasn’t a sufficient quantity to create a message big enough to read from all the way down there.

I staggered back inside and dropped down on to the sofa and rested my head back. Then it came to me.

I knew what I had to do.

* * *

Everyone else had gone out for lunch. It was strange being in the empty office. Creepy. It occurred to Kim that when they came back they might think she’d been going through their things, and immediately she was cross with herself for the ridiculous notion. She tried to concentrate on the notepad in front of her where she was writing out a list of all the troubling aspects of the Jessica Gold case. She wondered what it was about lists that always made her feel instantly more in control.

• Self-harming

• Voices in head (Luton airport incident?)

• Travis Riley acting weird at work (14/15 months ago)

• Jessica Gold acting weird at work (5/6 months ago)

Her phone rang. Sean. He’d be at work, wanting to talk about them – him and her. About what she’d decided. About whether she’d come to her senses. He’d probably tell her which one of the children had cried themselves to sleep last night, although like as not, they’d have been right as rain in the morning.

She let it go to voicemail.

* * *

I tugged the bottom sheet off the bed, then dragged it to the kitchen and went through the cupboards. Luckily the one that housed the mop bucket wasn’t locked. Even better, there was a serrated knife by the sink. I felt a surge of triumph as I pictured him preparing breakfast and lazily leaving it out, convinced I was too weak to present any kind of threat.

I dropped the sheet in the middle of the floor of the living area, and then carefully spread it out across the wooden boards. Each movement was an effort. Then I put the knife in between my teeth, picked up the bucket and headed towards the balcony, pausing before I went outside to check that Dominic hadn’t moved. He was still slumped where he’d been before. The sun was now quite low, dissolving into a low wall of yellowy-grey haze before it reached the river. I didn’t have long. My heart plummeted when I saw his shoulders moving. He was still alive, then. That would make what I had to do so much harder.

* * *

The more she stared at the list in front of her, the more despondent Kim became. Maybe Martin was right. Jessica would be fished out of a canal somewhere, or washed up on a beach. Everyone always went on about this being a nanny state with CCTV cameras everywhere, but Kim knew very well that there were hundreds of places a body could get lost. She’d once worked on the case of a twenty-one-year-old man who’d just wandered out of his life one day and never come back. The family had done everything to find him – posters, appeals, the works – and had clung to the fact that there was no body as proof that he was still alive somewhere. New York, his younger brother reckoned. Brighton, thought his parents. Then five months later, a couple of weekend fishermen on a motorboat had noticed what they assumed to be a pile of rags tucked into a ledge at the bottom of a cliff a hundred miles away.

‘Why didn’t he tell us he was unhappy,’ his mother kept saying at the funeral.

The thing was, you just never knew.

Yet still, as she looked down at the piece of paper, she couldn’t bring herself to believe that Jessica Gold was dead. There was something there, some clue that would unlock the mystery of her disappearance, if only Kim could find it.

* * *

When I went out on to the balcony, Dominic was facing away from me and was making a strange noise. Like a gurgle, but it didn’t seem to be coming out of his mouth, rather from some other, deeper part of him. The shard of china had come out of his neck and there was a thick channel of blood snaking out from under his hair.

Transferring the knife to my left hand, and holding the bucket with the other, I approached slowly. Even slumped over and gravely wounded, I didn’t trust Dominic.

When I put the bucket down, he turned his head slightly and opened his eyes. The whites were almost totally bloodshot, so that the irises appeared like blue ping-pong balls floating in a sea of red.

I grasped the knife. I could do this. Yet already I could feel my strength seeping away in the glare of those piercing eyes.

Grabbing hold of his hair I pulled his head back. The blue ping-pong balls fixed on to my eyes and wouldn’t let go.

I forced myself to remember all the things he’d done to me. But it was no use. I let my hand drop, and as I did, he reached into his pocket and before I had time to react, withdrew his flick knife. Without stopping to think, I plunged the kitchen knife twice into his chest.

* * *

The 5th of January. Didn’t that date mean something in some countries? Kim had once spent a New Year’s holiday in Spain with her parents and been delighted when she found out Spanish children receive presents in January, not at Christmas. Her parents couldn’t allow Kim and her brother to feel left out. Cue another last-minute Christmas gift. She couldn’t now recall what it was, just that it had felt deliciously decadent – an unexpected extra that none of her friends back home were having. She remembered a nighttime procession through the streets. Idly she fired up her computer and Googled it. Yes, the evening of the 5th was when the Three Wise Men or Three Kings paraded through the streets and threw sweets to the crowd. And the morning of the 6th was when the children received their presents.

Epiphany. The end of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

Kim smiled for the first time that day. So tomorrow was Epiphany.

* * *

Whenever I looked at the handle of the knife sticking out of Dominic’s chest, I felt like I was about to vomit. At least he’d stopped making those gurgling noises. I didn’t check to see if he was still alive. He was doing a very good impression of someone dead.

I grabbed hold of his hand. His fingers were still curled around his knife and I had to prise them off one by one. Finally I was able to flick it open. When I saw the length of that blade, I remembered how it had felt resting against my skin and I hardened my resolve.

It’s him or me, I kept reminding myself, once more grabbing hold of his hair and yanking his head back. I have no choice.

Still I wavered while holding the blade against his throat. His skin was milk-white in the fading light and vulnerable, like the delicate membrane over the yolk of a poached egg. I thought about the little boy he’d once been, sitting on that plastic stool.

Then I felt again a fluttering vibration inside me like a baby’s chuckle and remembered little Sam who’d had no chance.

I squeezed my eyes shut and slid the knife across his throat.

Adrenalin was pumping through me as strongly as the blood oozing from Dominic’s neck. I grabbed the bucket and held it under the red viscous stream, watching impatiently. It wasn’t shooting out like I’d thought it would, so I knew I hadn’t hit an artery, but there was a steady trickle. Come on, I urged. Hurry up.

The sky was already darkening. There wasn’t much time.

As soon as the bottom of the bucket was covered by blood I made my way back inside the flat, grabbing a brush from the table as I went. The sheet was still spread out on the floor and I set the bucket down and dropped on to my knees. Dipping the brush into the blood, I began to write.

A few moments later, I sat back to survey the sheet.

The letters weren’t regular and the red was fast turning brown, but the ‘HELP’ was clearly legible. It would have to do. I heaved myself upright and stumbled back outside. I could feel my strength failing as I tied the top two corners of the sheet to opposite ends of the railing so that the huge message hung down over the side of the balcony.

Then I collapsed on to one of the chairs. My breath still fast and uneven. In a moment it would be completely dark. There would be very little river traffic overnight – not this early in January with London collectively sobering up and counting the cost of its hangover, and I knew the chances of my message being seen before tomorrow were low.

By the time help arrived, I’d probably be dead. The thought registered as a fact, without actually sinking in. Dominic’s A3 sketchpad was still on the table outside, along with the paints and brushes. There was also a small flat box which turned out to contain drawing pencils of varying degrees of hardness. I took the box and the sketchpad and went back inside the apartment, closing the glass door behind me. I hadn’t realized until I got inside how cold I was, but now I found myself shivering, uncontrollably.

When I dropped down on to the sofa, the last of the adrenalin that had been keeping me going drained away, leaving me hollowed out inside. I wanted to close my eyes, but I knew if I did, I’d never wake up. And there needs to be a record. People need to know what has gone on here. My family need to know.

I picked up the hardest-looking pencil, opened up the thick pad and, in tiny letters on the top of the page, I wrote:

Three interesting things about me
.
Well, I’m twenty-nine years old, I’m phobic about buttons. Oh yes, and I’m dying. Not as in I’ve got two years to live, but hey, here’s a list of things I want to cram into the time I have left. No, I’m dying right here and now. Chances are, by the time you finish reading this, I’ll already be dead.

In a sense, you are reading a snuff book.

Well, you know the rest.

PART TWO

Chapter Twenty-Eight

If I’m ever tempted to have another tattoo, which is hardly likely, I’m going to have the words
Don’t Trust Natalie
tattooed right across my forehead.

That’s what’s going through my head when Mum asks me, ‘What’s going through your head?’

It’s been three days since I was brought to the hospital. I don’t remember anything about my arrival and very little about the first forty-eight hours. There are odd images – a young doctor with very bad skin who leaned so close to me I could see where an ingrown hair on his upper lip had become inflamed; a snatch of conversation between two women where one was complaining that the weather forecast hadn’t mentioned rain and she’d come out in suede shoes. I have no idea who they were, or if the voices were all in my head.