Epitaph (17 page)

‘You haven’t told me yet how you managed to get me out of my flat last night,’ Paul said.

‘Does it really matter?’ the voice taunted him.

‘You must have broken in.’

‘It wasn’t difficult.’

‘How did you know where I lived?’

‘We’d been watching you.’

We. So there’s more than one of the bastards up there.

Paul frowned, stretching his mind to try and consider who might be capable of carrying out such a monstrous act.

‘For how long?’ he enquired.

‘Who cares?’

‘You had no reason at all to take me. No evidence against me.’

‘We thought we did. And now we’ll be proved right.’

‘What if you left fingerprints back at my flat? You must have left some evidence behind.’

‘We were very careful.’

Paul felt his mouth drying up and tried to lick his lips but it felt as if his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. After a moment or two he managed to manufacture enough saliva to enable him to moisten his lips and he spoke slowly.

‘Listen, I’m very, very sorry about what happened to your daughter,’ he said. ‘But I swear to you that I had nothing to do with it. I’m not that kind of man. I’ve got a girlfriend. I’m not interested in kids. I’d never hurt a little girl. Never.’

‘Prove it.’

‘How can I do that when I’m in this fucking box?’ he snarled angrily.

Paul punched the right-hand side as hard as he could and the coffin was suddenly filled with an ear-splitting, high-pitched whine.

‘Jesus,’ he hissed through clenched teeth, the sound jabbing into his ears.

‘Don’t do that again,’ the voice told him reproachfully.

‘What the hell was that noise?’ Paul wanted to know.

‘There are two microphones in the coffin, one on each side about a foot from your face. That’s how I can hear you. There are two small speakers as well. That’s how you can hear me. You can’t reach them even if you wanted to because you can’t move your arms far enough. They were placed out of your reach deliberately in case you tried to damage them. Any impact against the coffin could have caused that sound.’

‘So you’re an electronics expert as well as being a burglar and kidnapper,’ Paul exclaimed angrily.

‘It didn’t require that much expertise,’ the voice told him.

‘You still haven’t told me how you got me from my flat to here.’

‘And I said it wasn’t important.’

‘Tell me. I need to know.’

‘Why? It won’t help you get out.’

‘I know that.’

‘You were drugged. Is that enough for you?’

‘You broke into my flat, drugged me, kidnapped me and buried me alive.’

‘I told you.’

‘And I told you that I didn’t touch your daughter, so why don’t you just let me out of here? If I die the police will find you and you’ll go down for murder. There’s no two ways about it. What you’re planning to do is murder me. If you let that happen there’s no way you’ll be able to escape, nowhere you’ll be able to hide.’

‘No one will ever find you. How will they know you haven’t just run off somewhere?’

‘Because I’ve got family and friends who will miss me and who will report my disappearance. Sooner or later someone will realise I’m not at home and they’ll contact the police, then they’ll start looking for me.’

‘That will all take time. Days. Weeks even. You’ll be dead long before that. I told you, you’ve got about an hour before your oxygen runs out. That’s it. After that it won’t matter. I don’t care if the police come looking for you. They’re not going to save you. Only one person can save you and that’s yourself, by telling me the truth about what you did to my daughter. And if you don’t do that
in the next hour you’ll die. You’ll suffocate. It isn’t a nice way to die.’

‘There’s no such thing as a nice way to die,’ Paul snapped.

‘It starts with a tightness in your chest,’ the voice went on evenly. ‘You know when you try to hold your breath and you’re at the point where you can’t hold it for much longer? Apparently it’s like that. It feels as if someone’s sitting on your ribcage, pressing down harder all the time until it feels as if your lungs are being squeezed. You start to feel light-headed. The pain in your chest gets worse.’

‘What are you, a fucking medical expert now?’

‘Some people have a heart attack before they run out of breath. Did you know that when you die all your muscles relax? You’ll die lying in your own piss and shit. I think that’s very fitting in your case.’

‘You’re insane.’

‘Grief can do that.’

Paul screwed his eyes tightly shut and allowed his head to relax back on to the satin at the base of the coffin.

You’re not going to talk your way out of this one, sunshine. Not like you did with Amy.

He swallowed hard, wondering why those thoughts in particular had resurfaced, especially now.

You talked your way out of it with Amy, didn’t you? You know the time. What was that other girl’s name? Trish, wasn’t it? Or was it Claire? Which one was it that you managed to persuade Amy you weren’t having an affair with? You used your charm and your bullshit on her, why not just do the same with the person who put you in here?

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered.

‘What did you say?’ the voice enquired.

‘Nothing,’ Paul lied. ‘Nothing you’d want to hear.’

How long ago had it been now? Two years? Longer? You still miss her, don’t you?

And the memories came hurtling back into his mind.

‘Penny for them.’

Paul Crane heard the voice beside him and turned his head slowly towards their speaker.

Trisha Bennett moved a little closer to him, one of her hands resting on his chest, her fingers grazing the flesh there as she stroked them back and forth.

‘I didn’t hear you,’ Paul said, smiling.

‘You looked like you were deep in thought,’ Trisha told him. ‘I wondered what you were thinking about.’

‘Nothing important,’ he confessed. ‘My mind was a blank. Like it usually is.’

They both laughed and she kissed him lightly on the lips.

‘Your mind never stops working. That’s why you’re so good at your job,’ she told him, straightening up in bed and reaching towards the nightstand beside her.

‘Flattery will get you everywhere,’ he smiled, studying her with approval.

With just the night light on behind her, the soft glow seemed to
create a halo around her head. It made her shoulder-length blonde hair look almost luminescent. The sheet that had been covering her breasts slipped down, exposing the pert globes and swollen nipples.She made no attempt to cover herself, knowing that he was watching her.

She took a sip from the glass of Bacardi and Coke and rattled the ice in the empty receptacle.

‘Refill?’ he asked and she nodded.

Paul took the glass from her and tipped more rum and Coke into it before handing it back to her. She smiled and drank a little more before setting it down once again.

‘It needs more ice,’ she commented. ‘We’ve run out.’

‘Call room service for some more,’ he offered.

‘I’ll survive,’ she told him, settling down beside him again.

‘No, go on,’ he insisted. ‘Then you can answer the door dressed in just my shirt like they always do in films.’

‘I could answer it naked,’ Trish grinned.

‘Give the room service bloke a treat.’

‘He might be young and cute. I might fancy him. I might want to shag him.’ She giggled.

‘As long as I can watch,’ he laughed.

‘You dirty sod,’ she said, punching him playfully on the arm. ‘Would you like that? Watching me get a good seeing-to by another guy? He might be better at it than you.’

‘No chance,’ Paul said, shaking his head.

They lay close and he kissed her lightly on the forehead.

‘What time have you got to be at work in the morning?’ he wanted to know.

‘I’ll get in for about half-nine,’ she told him. ‘How about you?’

‘I’ve got a breakfast with a client at nine. If we get the alarm call for eight then you and me can have coffee here before I have to leave.’

‘I hate the mornings,’ she confessed. ‘I hate it when we have to leave the hotel separately. I’d just like to be able to walk out with you. Just once.’

‘I’m sorry, too, Trish, but that’s the way it goes.’

‘You mean that’s how it goes when you’re having an affair.’

‘I thought you didn’t like calling it an affair.’

‘I don’t.’

‘So what do we call it? We meet up at a hotel once or twice a month, go out for dinner, spend the night together during which time we fuck each other’s brains out. Sometimes we get to have lunch together. I talk to you on public phones so the calls can’t be traced and we don’t send each other e-mails to our personal computers. It certainly looks like an affair.’ He smiled almost apologetically.

‘We’re friends.’

‘Friends who sleep with each other.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I know what you mean but I don’t think anyone else would. It certainly looks like an affair from the outside.’

‘What would Amy say if she found out? Would she finish it with you?’

‘Let’s hope it never comes to that.’

‘Do you think she would?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so, but you can’t tell with something like that, can you?’

‘Sometimes I feel bad for her. For your girlfriend. I wonder what I’d feel like if my boyfriend was cheating on me.’

‘You haven’t got a boyfriend,’ he reminded her. ‘You did have but you dumped him because he was emotionally unstable. Like most of the guys you go out with seem to be.’

‘You know what I mean,’ she continued, slapping him playfully on the stomach.

‘Where’s this come from?’ he asked, turning to look at her more sternly. ‘One minute you’re asking for another drink, the next you’re trying to make me feel guilty for being here with you.’

‘I wasn’t trying to make you feel guilty,’ she told him, resting her head on his chest. ‘I was just thinking aloud.’

‘If that was what you were thinking then perhaps you’d better stop,’ he told her, his left hand now gently caressing her shoulder beneath her hair.

‘Don’t you ever worry about Amy finding out about us?’ Trisha wanted to know.

‘I don’t think about it. As long as we’re careful, there’s no reason why she should ever find out.’

They lay in silence for a moment and he kissed the top of her head as she nestled against him.

‘Can I tell you something?’ she said finally.

‘Of course you can,’ he told her.

‘I’m not sure I should.’

‘You’re pregnant.’

‘Fuck off,’ she chuckled.

‘No, nothing like that.’

‘Go on then, tell me.’

She raised her head and looked at him.

‘I’m falling in love with you,’ she breathed.

Paul could see her clearly in his mind’s eye and he wondered why that particular image had forced its way into his consciousness at this precise moment.

Perhaps it’s part of your past life flashing before your eyes. It was quite a big part of your life, that affair with Trish. How long did it go on? Three years, wasn’t it?

Paul rubbed his face with both hands, hissing in pain when he felt the splinter jab deeper beneath his nail as he accidentally caught it against his jaw. He was suddenly aware of the relentless throbbing in that finger once more.

‘Didn’t you ever feel guilty about what you’d done?’

The voice seemed to fill the coffin as it filtered through the speakers.

‘Guilty?’ Paul said, confused.

They’re talking about the murder, not your affair with Trish.

‘Why should I feel guilty?’ he asked. ‘I haven’t done anything. Not to your daughter.’

‘I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I’d done something like that.’

‘If you let me die will you be able to live with yourself?’

‘Why shouldn’t I? Letting you die would be fair. It would be justice that my little girl never got.’

‘It’d be revenge, that’s all.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘Revenge is a kind of wild justice. Someone famous said that.’

‘I don’t really care who said it.’

‘But you care about revenge on me.’

‘For what you did. It’s what you deserve.’

‘What about a trial with a judge and jury. Shouldn’t I be entitled to that? That’s the law.’

‘The law doesn’t always work.’

‘You mean I might be found not guilty. Then you wouldn’t get your revenge. It won’t bring your daughter back. Killing me. It just makes you as bad as me.’

‘So you admit it.’

‘No, but if you kill me then the people who love me will want revenge on you. What if they come looking for you and kill you?’

‘So someone loves you, do they? Who?’

‘My girlfriend. My mother.’

‘Your mother will know what I feel like when she loses her child.’

‘She doesn’t have to know what that feels like. You’ve got the power to stop her feeling like that. You can’t wish that on someone else, surely. Not when you know how painful it is.’

‘You didn’t think about how much pain I’d feel before you murdered my daughter, did you?’

‘I didn’t murder your daughter. How many times do I have to say it?’

There was a long silence then the voice came again.

‘What’s the worst experience of your life?’ it asked finally.

‘Apart from this one, you mean?’ he snapped irritably.

‘Whatever it is, it can’t compete with sitting in a room in a hospital with a policewoman, waiting to identify your dead child. That’s what I had to go through. Because of you.’

Paul thought about protesting, then considered it useless.

‘Have you ever had to identify a dead body?’ the voice went on.

‘No.’

‘You’re lucky.’

‘I’ve seen one. When my dad died.’

‘That’s different.’

‘He was my father.’

‘I had to sit in this little room and all the time I kept saying to myself that perhaps someone had made a mistake and that it wasn’t my daughter who was dead. Perhaps it was someone else’s child. I wished that. I prayed for it. I know that’s awful, wanting someone else’s child dead, but I didn’t care. I just didn’t want the body I had to look at to be my daughter.’

Paul could hear low breathing coming through the speakers.

‘It seemed to take ages,’ the voice told him. ‘It was like I was sitting there for hours and the policewoman didn’t say anything. She held my hand every now and then but
what else could she do? Nothing she could have said or done would have made me feel better. Even now I can see that room if I close my eyes. There was a little wooden table in the middle of it with a couple of magazines on it. There were five chairs. Plastic ones. And there was a water cooler. You know, those things where they have the little triangular paper cups in a holder next to them. The floor was lino and it was dirty. Scuffed. It was like hundreds of people had been in the room before me. I wondered if they’d all had to go through later and identify bodies or hear bad news. It was like this was the bad news room in the hospital. They brought you here to give you the worst news. I wondered if they took people there to tell them they had cancer. And there were posters on the walls about swine flu and meningitis and HIV, but all I could think about was my daughter.’

Paul listened to every word, each passing moment convincing him more intently that he was truly never going to get out of this coffin. Whoever had put him here would never release him. Not a chance.

There is a chance. It’s a slim one but slim is better than none.

Paul exhaled slowly.

‘Someone came into the room in the end,’ the voice continued. ‘Another policeman. He was in plain clothes, though. I think he was a detective. He said could I follow him so I walked through into this other room with him and the policewoman and there was some glass and some white curtains. Not like net curtains but really thick white ones and they said I had to look through the glass. So, when I was ready, someone on the other side pulled the curtains back and I could see that there was a body lying
on a sort of metal table in this other room. I could see straight away that it was my daughter. I remember screaming and the policewoman put her arms around me but I tried to get away from her. I just wanted to hold my daughter again. I must have thought that if I touched her she’d come back to life. I don’t really know what I was thinking. Then I must have passed out because I woke up back in the other room again. The first room where they’d made me wait.’

‘What did the police say to you?’ Paul enquired.

‘They tried to be understanding. I suppose they couldn’t do anything else really. They were just doing their jobs. It wasn’t their fault and I actually felt quite sorry for the policewoman who had to stay with me. I asked her if she had any kids and she said she had. She was probably trying to imagine what she’d have felt like if she’d heard that kind of news and had to identify her dead child.’

‘Did they tell you how she died?’

‘I wanted to know but they said it was best that I didn’t know the details. I suppose they were trying to protect me.’

‘Why did you want to know? I mean, why did you feel as if you had to know every single detail of the way she died?’

‘I don’t know. Don’t the Americans call it closure or something? Perhaps I thought that if I knew every single detail of how my daughter had died then I’d be able to get over it. Move on, or whatever they say. I’m not sure I want to move on.’

There was a long silence. Something Paul was becoming accustomed to.

He wondered what the owner of the voice looked like. How old? How tall? How fat or thin? If she was a woman he tried to imagine what colour hair she had. Brunette. Red-head. Blonde.

Like Trish?

Paul wondered why those thoughts were flooding his mind again. Why here? Why now? Why her?

She was part of your life. She was also part of a lie. You should be thinking about Amy now, not about your mistress. What would the owner of the voice say if she knew you were a cheat and a liar? That wouldn’t look very good when it came to defending yourself, would it?

‘Shut up,’ Paul hissed.

‘Did you say something?’ the voice demanded. ‘I thought I heard you speak.’

‘No. It must have been static,’ he offered.

Again the memories filled his mind.