Dying for Christmas (21 page)

Now we were inside the room, Dominic’s high spirits were restored, in fact he bubbled with barely concealed delight, reminding me of my niece and nephew when they’d got me a present and couldn’t wait for me to open it.

‘Stay here,’ he said, steering me on to the bed. I sank back among the pillows, which were instantly stained red from where my head had hit the floor. I listened to his footsteps as he made his way through the hallway to the living area of the flat.

Though there was nothing obviously out of place in that room, still there was something about it that made the sweat prickle on my already clammy skin. Surveying the shelves again to take my mind off my growing fear, I noticed most of the books seemed to be to do with cooking, and remembered seeing Dominic reading a recipe book. My eyes drifted over the rest of the shelves: more books, papers, a pack of tea lights, a laptop.

A laptop.

Something roared into life in my chest and it took me a while to identify it as hope. Here was a link to the world outside this flat. I was too weak now to fantasize about escaping on my own, but perhaps I could bring rescuers here.

All too quickly the door was pushed open again and Dominic came back into the room. He was carrying a smallish cylindrical present.

‘Tell me about this boyfriend of yours,’ Dominic said, lying down next to me on the red-streaked bedding.

‘Travis?’

‘How many boyfriends do you have, naughty Jessica Gold?’

His fingers played across my stomach as he spoke and I remembered what he’d said about Cesca’s pregnant belly and how easily it would rip open.

‘Travis is … nice.’

‘
Nice?
Sweetheart, nice is for picnics and next-door neighbours and other people’s cats. It’s not for boyfriends. When I first met Natalie, I wanted to swallow her whole.’

I glanced at the cookery books, and felt a bit queasy.

‘Where did you two meet?’ I wanted to keep him talking, so I wouldn’t have to open the present.

‘I went to price up a company that had gone bust. It was in some industrial backwater – all broken windows and dilapidated buildings. There was literally nothing around there, and then suddenly out of nowhere a truckload of stylists and models and photographers turned up to do a fashion shoot. Two-thousand-quid dresses dragging in the dirt. Natalie was the stylist. The second I saw her, I knew. Do you believe in love at first sight, Jessica?’

I nodded my head weakly without lifting it from the pillow. It wasn’t true, but it seemed safer to agree. This was clearly the right response.

‘So you understand then that I knew instantly I’d have to leave Cesca. It was a shame, but there you are. The heart wants what the heart wants. Isn’t that right?’

‘So you left straight away?’

‘No. There was the obligatory back-and-forth period. Sam was still so little. I couldn’t bear not to be around him. But every time I tried to stop the affair with Natalie, I got sucked right back in. She’s the only woman I’ve ever met whose appetite for pain exceeds my own.’

I remembered then how the whip had felt cutting across my skin.

‘She’s very beautiful.’ I was looking at the painting – the long blonde hair, the curves, the cheekbones.

‘And she knew exactly how to use it. Natalie was constantly playing games. Picking up men, then dropping them. Playing off one against the other. At first I was so besotted I went along with it. I even got off on it, I admit. She would pick up men all over the place and toy with them for an hour or a night or a week, then come home to tell me all about it.

‘Of course, when I finally ripped myself away from Sam and bought this place for her – she chose everything in here, you know, I had it all specially done up – I told her there could be no other men. I even married her, because I thought it would tie her to me. But she couldn’t stop. Or wouldn’t. We used to have crashing, violent rows and she’d disappear, and then come home and taunt me with stories of the men she’d been with.

‘I loved her but it wasn’t enough. You see, she brought it all – all of it – on herself.’

I shivered as I remembered him using the same phrase about Cesca’s parents.

‘And you didn’t … retaliate?’

Dominic didn’t strike me as the sitting-at-home-waiting-by-the-phone type.

‘Obviously I retaliated. It became something of a game for a while. We’d each go off and pick up other people, using elaborate aliases we’d invent together at home. But the problem was, I couldn’t bear to think of her with other men. In the end it drove me to distraction. Maybe it’s hard for someone like you – someone so repressed – to understand, Jessica, how a person can have such an effect on you that you can’t think straight any more. Our rows grew more violent, and our making-up more violent still. There were times I really thought we’d both end up dead.’

‘In the summer she went AWOL – again. So what’s new. Turned out she’d booked herself into a clinic somewhere to have a boob job. We’d had a massive row before she went, and she told me she was leaving me. Said she’d been seeing a Saudi playboy. He was the one who wanted her to get her tits done.

‘I didn’t hear from her for ages. I was going bloody crazy not knowing where she was. I tracked down the playboy. We had words. I don’t imagine he did much playing after that. Not long afterwards, she turned up again, out of the blue. It was late at night and she was in a terrible mood.

‘She started straight in, taunting me, and I’m afraid that was it – the red mist descended. I got out the whip. The very one I gave you the day before yesterday in fact. She was goading me constantly, saying it didn’t hurt, that I was impotent, flaccid, useless. Well, you can imagine.’

I could imagine only too well.

‘I was in a sort of trance and when I came out of it, I was still holding the whip and Natalie was … well, let’s just say she wasn’t modelling material any more.’

Raising myself up on to my elbows, I retched over the blood-streaked pillow, but nothing came out save a dribble of saliva.

‘Careful, Jessica. You must take it easy, my sweet. You’ve got a present to open, don’t forget.’

He placed the compact package very carefully on the bed next to me. When I found the strength to pick it up, it was heavier than I’d expected.

I hesitated, my fingers wandering nervously over the paper.

‘The present, Jessica.’ His voice was sharp and pointed, like the knife I noticed he had taken out of his pocket. It rested on his lap, the blade pointing towards me. I pulled off the wrapping to reveal a candle in a thick glass cylinder. It looked like one of the expensive ones, the wax the rich yellow of cake batter.

Scented candles. It didn’t surprise me. I figured Natalie might have been the scented-candle type. I held it up to my nose and inhaled deeply.

A heavy, sour smell like dried sweat. I sniffed again. This time it wasn’t quite so bad.

‘Well?’ He was clearly expecting more of a response.

‘It’s … distinctive. What is it?’

His face erupted with delight. ‘It’s
her
, sweetheart! It’s all her.’

I swear, he clapped his hands together in joy, like a child.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The candle, the paintbrushes, the chess set. It’s all Natalie. Fat, hair, bone. It’s amazing how many uses a human body can have. I can’t think why that isn’t more widely acknowledged.’

I remembered the brushes, with their soft bristles, and the chess set with those beautiful carved white pieces I’d assumed were ivory. I looked at the candle and the room swam in front of my eyes.

‘What do you think of the painting, Jessica?’

The question was so unexpected it took me a while to drag my eyes away from the candle to the huge nude figure on the far wall. The crude brushstrokes, the slightly lascivious smile, straight out of a schoolboy’s fantasy, the dull-brown flesh tones, so that the body looked bruised, that strange lumpy texture like woodchip.

‘Amazing how I’ve captured the essence of Natalie in that painting and in the one in the living room, wouldn’t you say?’ His voice could hardly contain his glee.

I looked again – and everything went black.

* * *

When I woke up I was in a hot bubble bath.

There was a candle burning.

Chapter Twenty-Six

The next twenty-four hours came and went like through a camera lens passing in and out of focus. There were dreams that didn’t seem like dreams at all. In one, Travis was right next to me on the end of Dominic’s bed, dangling Winston’s lifeless body from his outstretched hands. ‘You wouldn’t listen to me, would you?’ he was saying. ‘And now look what’s happened.’ In another, I saw my parents standing at a grave surrounded by mourners. ‘I can’t wear black,’ my mum sobbed. ‘It drains me.’ In a third, Natalie was stretched out naked on a bed. ‘I’m cold,’ she was saying in Bella’s childish voice. ‘I’m so cold.’

Consciousness was like a blanket I pulled on and kicked off. I couldn’t tell what was real: Natalie in her vulgar nudity, or Dominic who at some point had carried me in from the bathroom and dressed me in a silk nightdress (one of hers, I supposed) and laid me in the heavy-framed bed right next to him this time. Once I awoke panicking that my head wound had bled on to his crisp white pillowcases and I scrubbed at them with the side of my fist.

I knew by now there was something seriously wrong with me. In addition to the still painful sores from the whip, the rash had spread until it covered almost my entire body, even around the hip bone where the festering tattoo had turned septic and was oozing pus. Every few minutes, my stomach would cramp up with crippling pains, I’d lost all but one of my nails and could feel bald patches the diameter of golf balls on the sides of my head. Though Dominic had cuffed me to the bed frame, there was little need. I didn’t have the strength to hit him.

For the first stretch of the strange dreamlike day that followed that restless night, Dominic appeared by my side at intervals like a concerned nurse, laying a cool hand across my forehead, or cupping the back of my head in his palm to raise it up so I could sip from the glass of water he brought me. In my fevered state, I forgot about the whip and the tattoo and the blow that had sent me crashing to the floor the day before. Instead I focused on how his skin felt on mine. Desperate again for human contact, I craved his touch, curling into it like a cat.

But gradually his demeanour changed. On a couple of occasions I opened my eyes to find him glaring at me from the doorway. Once he came in and prodded my stomach as if I was a cut of beef on a supermarket shelf. When I groaned, he turned on me with narrowed, mean eyes.

‘I’ve been as patient as I can,’ he said. ‘But I do have limits. We were supposed to be enjoying this time together. How enjoyable do you think this is for me – watching you lying there, yellow and sweating like a lump of cheese in the sun? We have so little time left and you’re wasting it.’

I mumbled an apology and tried to sit up.

‘That’s better. Good girl.’

He propped another pillow under my head so I was semi-upright.

‘Now wait here while I go to fetch today’s present. I’ve been so worried we might have to ditch the whole plan.’

After he’d gone, I tried to stay awake, but my eyelids were made of lead, closing like shop shutters over my vision. After that I was vaguely aware of being shaken, but the shaking merged into my dream where I was on a boat being tossed around by a violent storm. ‘We have to save her,’ I said, leaning over the side of the bucking vessel. ‘We have to save Bella.’ In my dream I could hear her crying, a pitiful sound like a kitten’s mew. But when I finally forced my eyes open, it wasn’t Bella crying at all, but Dominic.

He was sitting on the floor next to the bed with his back to the wall and his head in his hands, his shoulders shaking.

‘It’s all ruined,’ he said, as if he somehow knew I was watching him. ‘All that planning. You’ve spoiled everything.’

I tried to battle through the cotton wool in my head to reply. ‘But I’m awake now. We can do presents now.’

He flung his head back then to glare at me through reddened eyes.

‘You don’t get it, do you? Even after everything you still don’t get it. It’s after midnight. You’ve missed the whole of Day Eleven. It’s too late now. Everything’s too late.’

‘But I’m ready to …’

‘I threw it in the river, Jessica!’ His voice was shrill, breaking like a dry twig on the last word. ‘You know you’re just like her. Just like Mummy. You pretend to care, but really it’s all about you. Everything is about poor, weak Jessica and how she’s feeling. Well, what about how I feel? What about
me
? What a prize bitch you’ve turned out to be, Jessica.’

Tears pricked at the back of my eyes, but I hadn’t the strength to shed them. So this was it? The end? I’d ruined his plans and now it was all over. In a way the knowledge felt like a release. When the shop shutters came down again, I welcomed the blackness like a friend.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

‘It’s been twelve days, Detective Harper. Kim. And the police seem no nearer to finding my daughter than when she first disappeared.’

Kim sighed. She felt for Liz Gold, of course she did. But did she really think they needed reminding that despite all their investigations, they’d drawn a complete blank?

‘We’re still following a number of lines of inquiry, Mrs Gold,’ said Martin.

Kim was well aware of what his own personal line of inquiry was – finding out how quickly they would discover the body. Ever since the Golds first mentioned Jessica’s ‘voices’ Martin had remained convinced she’d taken herself off to a dark forest with a length of rope and a copy of
The Bell Jar
, and nothing they’d learned since had changed his mind.

He’d been openly patronizing when he heard about Kim’s fruitless trip to see Travis Riley’s supervisor. ‘We’re going to be judged on our results, Kim,’ he’d said, referring to the promotion they were both hoping for, but had mostly avoided talking about. ‘Not on how much extra time we spend chasing up blind alleys. You don’t get Brownie points for wasting time.’