Pompomberry House (20 page)

I sat in the kitchen, looking out of the window and willing
myself not to cry. I was not the weepy type and certainly not the type to get
weepy about a man, even Gareth. I didn’t cry at our wedding, while everybody
else bawled their eyes out. Even Gareth welled up. Being ecstatic makes me want
to laugh, not cry. If only I was ecstatic now.

There were loud footsteps on the stairs. How could such a
skinny man make so much noise?

“I’m off now, Dee!” he called.

I wiped my cheek with my hand, just in case a tear had
sneaked down there, and made my way into the hall. “Bye,” I said softly.

“Bye!” he replied, and was gone.

What,
no kiss
?

My disappointment paralysed me for a few seconds, then
suddenly I burst into action. I hurried upstairs as quickly as I could, and ran
straight to the top drawer by the bed. I began grabbing handfuls of things and
throwing them onto the bed.

Where were they?

I threw ChapStick, paracetamol, receipts, used lottery
tickets and batteries onto the bed. I was looking for only one thing.

And then I saw them. I relaxed.

Condoms. Gareth hadn’t taken the condoms.

I caught sight of myself in the bedroom mirror. What was I
doing? I was losing the plot. I put it down to the distress caused by just
finding out that a seagull had murdered a woman I knew. Admittedly, I’d only
met her for a few seconds and she hadn’t seemed entirely aware that there was
anybody there. Nevertheless, it was creepy. Thank goodness those birds were
hundreds of miles away from me.

Coupled with that, there was the stress of trying to save
Netta Lewis

Crap! Netta Lewis!

I had tried a further three times to contact her: Facebook,
email, leaving a message with the receptionist at Heart Africa
.
I had received
not one reply.

Would else could I do?

Then I remembered watching Gareth walk out of the door
without as much as a faint shoulder squeeze and I knew what I had to do. I had
to call Rafe Maddocks.

I mean, yes, he was a self-centred, arrogant twit, but he
was also a man who was not Gareth. What better distraction?

Rafe had scribbled his number on my pencil case, knowing
that one day this moment would come. One day I would want to call a man, any
man who wasn’t Gareth, and the obvious choice would be the man who’d vandalised
my stationery.

The rest of my brain caught up. Rafe was a suspect
and
a witness. Either way, he might know who planned to murder Netta. Of course, he
was hardly going to confess, but perhaps he’d accidentally slip up and give
something away.

I grabbed my pencil case, hoping that the number was still
clear — of course it was, it was written with permanent marker.

Hurriedly, I tapped the number into my phone. Would he pick
up? I tried to remember what Rafe did for a living. I couldn’t imagine that somebody
as showy as Rafe Maddocks lived on royalties alone.

“Hullo?” droned a smoky voice. The phone line emphasised its
sexy, rumbling quality.

“Rafe, it’s me! Dee Whittaker.”

He was silent for a moment. Perhaps he’d forgotten me. “Dee!
How you doin’?” he asked with deep, smouldering, flirtatious tones.

“I’m good, thanks. Hey, we should catch up. How would you
feel about going for a drink?”

“I knew you’d come to your senses,” he chuckled. I could
just see him, stretched out on a leather chaise longue, smirking to himself. “How
about tomorrow? Saturday night! I’ll take you out for dinner! My treat.”

“Well, actually I was hoping we could do something a bit
sooner.”

“Sooner than tomorrow night?” I knew his smirk was now so
large that his insides were at serious risk of falling out of his mouth. “I can’t
do anything tonight, I have a live Skype chat event. I’m this week’s featured
writer!”

“What about this lunchtime?”

“Featured writer, Dee!”

“Lunchtime.”

“Lunchtime? What,
this
lunchtime?”

“Please Rafe.” I was going to add, ‘It’s urgent’ but stopped
myself and instead added, “I’m longing to see you.”

“You are?”

“Yes, my titillating turquoise ... eyeballs are
weeping to catch just one glimpse of your ... er ... masculine
man-stature.” I had difficulty holding back giggles.

“All right then! This lunchtime it is!”

Most men, most ordinary men, with heads the size of ordinary
men’s heads, would smell a rat, but not Rafe. Rafe Maddocks’ head was so far up
his own arse, that he couldn’t see a blatant lie waved in front of his face, at
least not when it massaged his ego.

After finalising the details, I nipped upstairs to freshen
up. As I stood in front of the mirror, I told myself that the red lipstick was
to trick Rafe into trusting me, the mascara was to lead him into a false sense
of security and the eyeliner was to tempt a confession. All the while, I
secretly wondered how Gareth would feel if he knew I was going for a drink with
another man.

But then it hit me — at some point, I was going to start
having sex with another man. What would that be like after ten years with the
same lover? The idea of it almost repulsed me. I felt a bit giddy, and not in a
good way.

Then I thought of Gareth. Where had he been going with that
dressing gown? Why had he needed it tonight? Why had he seemed distant? Why
hadn’t I gotten a kiss?

I forced myself to imagine Rafe kissing me. No, that made me
feel a little sick. I imagined him running his fingers through my short
tresses. Nope, that made me feel a little queasy. And was Rafe really a
fingers-through-the-hair sort of man? He’d probably push me against a wall
first or something domineering like that — oh, actually, that kind of worked
for me. I imagined closing my eyes, depriving myself of one of my senses — that
worked even better for me.

* * *

We met at a stupidly expensive bar. I knew the moment I
walked in and saw a rotating spirits cabinet that I was not going to be able to
afford as much as a mineral water. Why hadn’t I insisted on Spoons?

The place suited Rafe. There was ornate ceiling plaster, a
heavily varnished bar, and there were tall, fancy paintings. Beneath fancy
packaging, everything was just ordinary — well-presented mediocrity.

I sat at a table, watching the door apprehensively. Rafe might
not wear women’s shoes, but he was still a suspect and I didn’t want to turn my
back to him. The word of a delusional farmer only had so much clout. Rafe knew
all the plots and Rafe was thoroughly unpleasant — it didn’t look good. But was
he unpleasant enough to be a killer?

As he swaggered in, I rather felt that he
did
have
the qualities of a killer — at least, he matched the sort you see on TV — the
handsome, white middle-class citizen that nobody suspects until the last fifteen
minutes of the show. He bore a certain resemblance to Dexter from
Dexter
.
I shuddered as he came over, beaming.

I knew at once that I wasn’t going to sleep with him. Even
if he could prove his innocence, his face, his walk and his slightly elevated
nose reminded me what a thoroughly obnoxious chap he was. It wouldn’t be worth
sleeping with him to save the species; it definitely wasn’t worth sleeping with
him to punish my ex for a slightly tepid departure. Why had I even entertained
the idea of squelchy time with Rafe Maddocks?

Still, the realisation that this wasn’t going to turn into a
horizontal hustle, meant that I could focus on the much more important business
of finding out whether or not Rafe Maddocks was a cold-blooded killer.

He tried to hug me with his big, firm arms. I went rigid,
the way I often do when somebody thoroughly disagreeable tries to show me
affection through the medium of touch. The fact that I didn’t actively beat him
off felt (to me) like I was making a massive display of warmth.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

“Yes,” I snapped. Then I quickly repeated myself softly. “Yes.”
I remembered that I’d led him to believe that my eyes were yearning for a
glimpse of him.

“You read my short, didn’t you?” he asked, grinning.

“No. Well, actually yes,” I admitted. I’d skimmed though the
whole anthology, looking for clues. I’d found Rafe’s cannibal story
particularly disturbing, in light of the copycat action. Instead of appreciating
the carefully-penned black humour, I found it both repulsive and terrifying.

“I knew it!” he laughed. “I knew you’d read my story, and that
then you wouldn’t be able to resist me.”

“What?”

“I wrote it for you, Dee! It was inspired by
The Red
River
— by you!”

“It was?”

“Couldn’t you tell? The social mockery, the dark comedy, the
flawed characters ...”

“I ... I didn’t realise. I thought you were seeing
Annabel.”

“I can’t be tied down, Dee! I’m a creative spirit!” He burst
from his chair and started pacing around the table. “I must be allowed to roam.
I require varied stimuli. How else will I continue to create diverse and fresh
fiction?”

“Sit down!” I snapped.

He sat down, looking deflated.

“Put your pretentious justifications away and grow up!”

He gawped at me.

“Annabel really likes you.”

“Some things are greater than pandering to the romantic
desires of others,” he said, sheepishly.

“Like your writing?” I asked, sarcastically.

“Exactly!”

“Stop sleeping with her!”

“What?” His green eyes were wide with shock. Then that smirk
came stretching back. “Are you jealous?”

“You’re hurting her. And being a writer does not give you a licence
to behave like a prick. Either commit or leave her alone. Let her move on.”

He stared at me, as if I’d slapped him in the face. He was
clearly unaccustomed to women standing up to him. He studied me for a while,
trying to decipher whether I was real, or a ghostly apparition. I fancied that,
for a moment, he thought that he was in a Dickens novel,
A Grow-Up-You-Prick
Carol
. Then suddenly, a look of understanding spread across his
irritatingly chiselled face. “You
are
jealous.”

“What? No. That’s not it at all.”

“All right, ‘that’s not it at all’,” he laughed, clearly
unconvinced. “Hey, are you going to join the group Skype chat tonight? I’m this
week’s featured author.”

“So you said.”

“Well?”

“Rafe, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

He leaned forward, tresses of his warm brown hair flopped
into the conversation. He groomed them back with his long fingers and cocked
his head to the side. He was obviously expecting a big love confession, that
this would be the moment in which weeks of yearning for him would erupt,
spraying lust lava everywhere.

He braced himself for praise.

“Do you know who’s going to kill Netta Lewis?” I asked.

“What?” He wasn’t looking at me hopefully any more.

“You heard me.”

“Why would somebody kill Netta Lewis?”

“So you do know who she is?”

“She’s a celebrity, everybody knows who she is.”

“You must know more than that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed the copycatting.”

“What?”

“Don’t play dumb with me. Even if you didn’t figure it out
yourself, which seems unlikely, Annabel must have told you.”

“We don’t really
talk
 ...”

“Rafe!”

“I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. Netta is
one of the girls you based your characters on. I noticed
that
.”

“And you don’t think that it’s odd that a pig was pushed off
a cliff during the same week that a gnome wedding was staged and a foot washed
up on a beach?”

“What?”

“Oh come on, Rafe! You must have seen the news.”

“I do watch the news, but I didn’t see any of those stories.”

“Well, I wish you had! I’m on my own here, Rafe. I feel like
I’m going mad. However, I am not mad! Those stories are real. Our anthology is
really coming true.”

“Slow down, Dee.” He firmly held my upper arm with one of
his plate-sized hands and looked at me through his sincere green corneas. “Tell
me exactly what has been going on.”

And so, once again, I explained the news stories, their
significance and their implications for the future. What reaction could I
expect this time? Disbelief? Mockery? Ghost speculation?

“Holy faeces, Dee!” His long arms fell by his side, and he
stared at me, motionless.

“So you agree with me? That this is too much to be a
coincidence?”

“Of course it’s not a coincidence. Three totally improbable
things, all related to our book, all happening together. Of course something
dodgy is going on.”

“Thank you. Thank you!” I was delighted that he was taking
me seriously.

“But I don’t think you need to worry about Netta.”

“What? Why not?”

“The copycat won’t go that far. Putting some gnomes in a
field, and having a bit of fun with a pig are one thing, but murder is in a
different league altogether.”

“Having a bit of fun? That pig could have died!”

“Pigs die all the time, Dee. It’s called bacon.”

“Let’s not forget the foot. That’s pretty sinister.”

“Sinister, yes, but murderous, no.”

“It was a human foot!”

“Yeah, but you can pick them up anywhere.”

“What?”

“You know ... med schools, mortuaries,
undertakers.”

He was beginning to give me chills. He leant back in his
chair, drumming on the table. How could he be so blasé about a human foot being
used to promote our anthology? “You sound as though you know who did it.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Well how can you be sure that he or she won’t strike again?”

“Putting some gnomes on the beach is playful. The pig — yes,
cruel, but hardly murder. The foot — sinister, but again, not murder. It’s a
massive leap to assume that these three coincidences mean that somebody is
going to murder Netta Lewis.”