The FACEBOOK KILLER: Part 2 (5 page)

To tell you the truth, at that point in time, I didn’t actually have a plan for Gerradine and his pals. I cursed the day that we emailed him to start with. Bloody Norman and his drinking. All I knew was that I had an ear at last. All these months of silence, with no one to talk to or discuss things with, hadn’t been the most enjoyable period of my life, albeit a very necessary period.

I had found the nightmares starting to return. Maybe it was the strange surroundings that I found myself in or the alien language? When we all lived together in Laputa, things had been better. We all felt safe. I had begun to miss Kalif as well. He was younger than Norman and Albert and we had gotten along so well. It felt like yet another part of me had been torn away.

I couldn’t wait to get the job finished in this god-forsaken country and head home, back to our tree, to face our destiny. To face the apple tree.

It would be two days until I contacted Gerradine again. I knew I had to get my head together. I felt like things were starting to fall apart. Paranoia and nervousness had become part of my waking being. Yet when I sat down and thought about it, there was no logical reason for it. No one knew where I was or even what I looked like anymore. The English orchard lay bare. I had the choice to stop this now. I had enough money left to buy a house somewhere and live out the rest of my days in solitude. But something was pulling me deeper into the darkness. To this day, I still can’t explain it; I suppose you have to experience it for yourself. The pure hatred of a person cannot be put into words, I couldn’t write it down. Not for myself or for them. It is something you have to breathe, a poison in your veins, a hatred, which rots your soul and the only way to cleanse yourself, is to eradicate the cause.

When I was a small child, I remember a neighbour kicking my arse for hitting a tennis ball against the side wall of his house. My parents grounded me for a week, during school holidays of all times; I remember festering in my bedroom for those long, seven days. Maybe that was the start of the rage? On the eighth day I stole a few shillings from my Mother’s purse and paid some older boys to teach that neighbour a lesson. I told them that he had touched me in a place that he shouldn’t have, a place that even my parents wouldn’t go. I watched from my bedroom window as those boys beat that man to within an inch of his life in the alley behind our house. I watched as he lay in the pool of his own blood and I had a strange feeling of satisfaction pass through me.

Adela Nissar
.

Age: 17. Location: Lahore, Pakistan. Status: Engaged.

Adela and Hamid were second cousins. I found out about the arranged marriage through Adela’s prolific Twitter account. She bleated on like a spoilt princess about the ring he had given her with their entwined initials on it, how sweet he was and how she couldn’t wait for the date to be set. Wake up time! I’m setting the fucking date bitch!

Adela was proving a little trickier to find than some of the other apples. She didn’t mind blurting out her private life all over the net, but she kept certain things close to her chest. For instance where she lived, worked, played, ate and drank. To tell you the truth, she was beginning to piss me off. I had spent a whole day online, trying to find her, but at each turn, I drew a blank.

I had begun to wonder whether Nissar was her actual surname or perhaps she was just using a middle name. I couldn’t find anyone Nissar of the same caste as Hamid’s parents in the whole of Lahore. They would obviously have to be of the same wealthy standing, property owners or maybe industrialists?

I studied her photographs for the umpteenth time. There were no telltale signs, like the time we spotted Renee’s nametag. This girl was clever. None of her pictures had anything in the background, just her and her friends. Adela was a strange looking girl. She appeared older than her seventeen years, the black headscarf emphasising her dark, sunken eyes. However she looked, she was still too good for that bastard Hamid. I moved from one photograph to another. Saving them, enlarging them, 41, 42, 43. Nothing. When I closed my eyes for a moment all I could see was her face. Those eyes. Those sad eyes. 58, 59, 60 and then there it was. The eyes had gone, the sadness hidden, behind sunglasses.

As those glasses grew on the screen, I almost felt like I was holding them in my hands, like I could whip them off her face and see those eyes again. I felt a shiver pass through me. I could see those boys kicking the man in the head. As soon as I saw that reflection, I knew I was about to find her.

*

I still had the image of those sunglasses in my head, as I waited at the bus stop opposite the graveyard. It was ironic how things were reversed now, like a negative. Sun had become shade and vice versa. Where the sunglasses would have been, there was now a mere slit from which to view the world. Where my face would have been bathed in glorious sunshine on such a January day, there was only cloth. Trapping my breath inside. Fuck I hate this burka.

Each time a bus pulled up, I stepped back. I didn’t need a bus, not yet anyway. My rectangle of vision was all that I required at present.

There were only two men present at the burial. One of which, I assumed was Fatima’s husband. The other may have been her boss from the mosque; I didn’t know and really didn’t care. The ceremony was over in less than ten minutes. A pauper’s funeral by all accounts. Her fate was in Allah’s hands now.

Another bus, another step back. The gravediggers were shovelling in the soil, stamping it down with a ferocity that intimated they knew what Fatima had been, what she had become. Then they were gone.

I waited and I watched. I thought about that building, the one in the reflection. If only it hadn’t been sunny that day, if only she hadn’t been wearing those sunglasses then maybe death wouldn’t be on her doorstep now. But it
had
been sunny, she
had
been wearing those glasses and that was, without a doubt, the Eiffel Tower. She
had
been in Paris with Hamid and Fatima and
that
is why I knew she would come to pay her last respects. Here, today, witnessed through the slit of my burka, Adela Nissar would make her last mistake.

Chapter 10.

I took another step back. Not because of a bus, this time, but because of her. Those sunken, sad eyes passed by not two feet in front of me. She was wearing her headscarf, but no jewellery this time. I watched as she crossed the road and walked defiantly past the “No Women” sign, displayed to the left of the cemetery gates and headed straight for her friend’s final resting place. That flattened rectangle of soil; stamped down by angry feet.

I felt like a sniper watching Adela through that slit. I knew she would be joining her friend soon, wrapped in nothing but a cotton shroud, facing Mecca together. As she stood saying her private prayers, I felt no anger towards her; the rage hadn’t surfaced. Not yet, but I knew it was only a matter of time.

Since the moment we had arrived in this country, I had felt a cloud hanging over me, no, more of a thunderstorm than a cloud. Charged with electricity and bolts of lightning capable of killing a man instantly. A cloud the locals called the Death Penalty. And by God this country wasn’t afraid to use it. I knew we had to be extra careful with everything we did, especially if the authorities were aware that we might be here. I had already been in touch with Serge; he said he would send the box immediately. It should arrive at the hotel within two days, he promised. All I needed now was to find out where Adela lived.

Three buses and ten minutes later Adela left the graveyard. Her task complete; mine just beginning.

As she walked amongst the sea of brown headscarves, I weaved my way through the busy streets trying to keep her within sight. Each time she crossed the chaotic, grid locked roads, I took my life in my hands. I had become desperately thirsty but there was no time to stop, let alone the possibility of drinking whilst I was still wearing the burka. The only thing I could hear clearly was my own breath. I felt like I was about to suffocate at any moment. We must have walked for well over an hour, past the electronic stores, mini-markets and clothes shops, through two bazaars before eventually finding ourselves in a more affluent residential area. There were advertising signs everywhere. Gulberg this, Gulberg that. I naturally assumed that we had arrived in Gulberg.

During our journey, the crowds had fallen away like autumn leaves. Adela hadn’t looked back once, but now there were only five of us en route. I hoped she would reach her final destination soon; the last thing I needed was for someone to spark up a conversation with me in their own language.

As we trudged on, I was beginning to get pissed off. It almost felt like this bitch knew that I was following her and she was giving me the run around. Like she knew I was dehydrating, sweating, finding it hard to see ten steps in front. My cheek was starting to throb, but I kept on walking, kept planning. I watched the rickety old postal van hit the speed bumps. I took note of which houses had surveillance cameras. I walked and walked and walked.

And then I heard it. The only word I had learned so far in their language, yet still one of the most important, “Abba,” Adela called out. It was her father. He was sitting in a large black Mercedes, waiting, as the electric gates slowly opened to allow him access to his driveway. The driveway in front of a house so big, if it was picked up and dropped in London it would easily be worth £60 million.

Adela was home, number 137, home with daddy. As I turned to walk away, I hoped they would enjoy their last 48 hours together. After all, none of this was
his
fault.

*

I spent the next two days going out of my head, locked in that bloody hotel, waiting, waiting, waiting. Waiting for Serge’s box to arrive. Two whole fucking days I waited. I spent my time researching the remaining apples and tried to bury the overwhelming urge to go back to number 137 and cut that little bitch’s throat. Fuck! Why not finish off the rest of the family as well? They
were
tainted after all. Guilt by association. It was people like this that had forced me to stay locked up in hotel rooms, curtains drawn, for days at a time. Jesus! I wasn’t the enemy. I didn’t start this. They fucking started it!

Chapter 11

Serge proved true to his word. The hotel receptionist called me around noon to say that the box had arrived, so I asked them to deliver it to the suite. The timing was perfect, Norman had just returned from his buying trip in town. We sat on the bed looking at the two boxes sitting next to each other on the floor. One was empty, the other contained Adela Nissar’s fate and it would be her misguided love for that bastard fiancée of hers that would seal it.

The shopkeeper had warned Norman of its dangers when he bought it. He even gave him a list of private clinics that could administer an antidote if things went pear-shaped.

I couldn’t help feeling smug as I sat looking at those two boxes. Norman suggested we had a drink by way of a celebration, but I declined. We had a job to finish first, I told him, there would be plenty of time to celebrate afterwards.

It appeared that Serge had followed my instructions to the letter. The address label had been written in marker pen so that no trace would show on the box when it was removed. It peeled off with ease, allowing me to replace it with
her
address, number 137. The label bearing the sender’s address also came off without a problem, revealing the hole he had cut in the back of the box. The hole that would allow death to pass from one innocent-looking piece of folded cardboard into the other.

Now, at this point, I was shitting myself. One wrong move and it was Game Over. Offline. I didn’t have the necessary equipment to make the transfer but it had to be done. I took Albert’s hands out of the safe, pulled them on and then wrapped a hand towel, from the bathroom, around my nose and mouth; at least it would be some protection in the worst-case scenario. Christ, I had gone over this so many times in my mind, yet I still found myself shaking. I was terrified.

I felt detached from my body as I watched Albert’s wrinkly old hand making that first incision, but he seemed to know what he was doing. He slowly cut out the circular hole to match the one on Serge’s box. I held my breath as the circle neared completion. It was vital that we kept it in place until the boxes were joined. The final cut and Albert slowly withdrew the blade. I watched in terror as the cardboard disc strained against the knife. The only thing standing between death and us was that small circular piece of cardboard. And then the knife was free.

We quickly pushed the boxes together, the holes lined up perfectly, I heard the cut out drop down inside, we slid them against the wall and wedged them tightly together with a chair. Then we waited.

The transfer of the deadly contents wasn’t half as exciting as I had imagined, merely a dull hiss, the sound of escaping gas. As the noise died down, we knew the transfer was complete. We had one second to replace the label over the hole and Adela’s time bomb was complete. I bet she wouldn’t wait to open it. Sent all the way from England by her loving fiancée, it must be something special? ... Very fucking special my dear.

Christ I wished Kalif was still with us, Albert looked bloody ridiculous in a turban, but we figured that using Kalif’s voice we could probably get away with it. Everything was in place. We had called the main Post Office, pretending to be in a rental apartment on Adela’s street, and found out what time the mail was delivered each day.