Someone Out There (33 page)

The noise infuriated Anna.

‘Joe loves me and I love Joe. Get it? I’ve always loved him, always do, you hear, and you,’ she was spraying spittle, ‘you have always been in the way.’

Laura gasped as if she’d been punched hard in the stomach. Shock, not just at the words, but because the face in front of her, the face of her grateful and friendly client, was now twisted with hate, teeth bared like a beast of prey.

‘I don’t believe you. You’re insane,’ she said, desperately.

Anna put her hand in her coat pocket, drew back her arm and hurled something at Laura. It hit her on the side of the face before splattering onto the dark wood floor. Some of its contents sprayed over the large antique rug in the centre of the room. It was the used condom.

‘Jesus Christ, Anna, what are you doing?’ Laura cried out, stunned.

‘That’s a little souvenir I’ve been keeping for you. Joe and I have been together for eight months now and I want you to know that the sex is great.’

Laura put a hand on the back of a chair and sat down heavily. She closed her eyes for a moment. Anna was behaving like a madwoman but her very passion testified to the likely truth of what she said. Her heart sank as she realized it might explain some of the things that had been bothering her about Joe.

‘Why have you come here?’ Laura asked in a whisper. She wanted to stand up, to face Anna, but she couldn’t trust her legs.

Anna Pelham was cooler now and calculating. Much as she longed to tell Laura that she was going to die, that she and Joe were finally to be rid of her hated presence, it would not do to put her on her guard.

‘Because I wanted you to know. It was time you found out.’

Laura tried to think if it had ever even crossed her mind that Joe might be having an affair. She didn’t think so. How total her faith in him had been.

Quickly, Anna moved away from the fireplace and came towards her, stood right in front of her.

‘Take a look,’ she said, shoving her mobile in front of Laura’s face. It was the photo, the one she had taken when he was sleeping; herself and Joe in bed together. ‘Go ahead and look. He’s hot in bed isn’t he? But maybe you don’t remember.’

Anger erupted in Laura then, pushing through the shock and she stood up, with no problem at all, knocking the mobile from Anna’s hand onto the floor.

‘How dare you!’ she yelled in Anna’s face. ‘How dare you do this to me!’

Anna Pelham battled for self-control. ‘You ask me that?’ she spat. ‘After taking him from me, after ruining my life. I’ve waited twenty years for this moment.’

Laura looked into green eyes full of hate. ‘Get out,’ she shouted, ‘Get out of here now.’

‘Oh no, you’re not getting rid of me. Haven’t you noticed’, Anna Pelham hissed, ‘that we’ve been trying to get rid of you?’

‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,’ Laura said, and then her breath choked in her throat as the ghastly thought struck her that perhaps she did. The pieces of the puzzle flew together in her head, faster and faster, slotting into place until the picture was whole. A chilling, monstrous picture. Laura reeled under it, heard her world crack apart.

Suddenly there was a knife in Anna Pelham’s hand.

The jolt of adrenaline through Laura’s body came long after the moment of understanding. Too late. She felt the knife strike her flesh.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Laura heard herself cry out in terror as she was knocked over by the blow and fell on the rug. At the last moment, instinctively, as Anna Pelham lunged at her, she moved to the side and the blade missed her chest. Instead, it ripped through the sleeve of her dressing gown and slashed her upper arm. She felt a sharp burning sensation but no pain. Her adrenaline was pumping too hard for that, nor was there any shriek from her cracked rib – it too had been silenced by the need to survive.

Vaguely, she registered that blood was bubbling up through the gash in her sleeve and then she was rolling away, trying desperately to get out of the awkward dressing gown, as Anna Pelham came after her and the knife skimmed through the air again. It caught her face, slicing her left cheek, as she tried to twist away. Blood ran down her chin.

Her hands grasped the edge of the rug, and as she rolled off it on to bare floorboards, she yanked at it hard. Anna staggered backwards as the rug moved under her feet, almost lost it. Just for a second. Then she was up and running again. Laura saw her face as she came towards her. It shocked her, even at that moment when there was no time to be shocked anymore, only time to stay alive.

Gleeful. That was the word for it. The look on Anna Pelham’s face was gleeful.

Laura crouched on the floor, breathing hard, looking round frantically for something she could use to defend herself. Nothing. There were two small tables near the fireplace that might have done, but they were too far away. No time left now anyway. Her attacker stood over her, the knife raised high in a killing arc.

It was the moment Anna Pelham had waited for, had dreamed of for oh so long. Laura Maxwell was going to die now, in this room, among the debris of her shattered photographs. She waited a beat, savouring the moment, looking down at her victim. Saw the blood trickling down the smooth, creamy skin, saw terror in the large hazel eyes. A smile of absolute contentment lit up her face.

‘You will feel the pain,’ she said, politely. ‘You will know how it feels to have a knife in your heart.’

Laura stared up at her. Anna was tall and athletic, maybe five-foot-eleven, a good six inches taller than she was. She would have a long reach with the knife.

‘You don’t remember me, do you? From when we were at school. When I loved him and you took him from me,’ Anna’s voice rose.

‘Get off me! Get off me!’ Laura screamed, struggling to get free.

‘Remember me now,’ Anna said, screeching out the words, ‘because I’ll be the last thing you ever remember.’

She brought down the blade in a furious, hard thrust.

Laura’s right arm was still in the sleeve of the dressing gown and she swung it backwards and hurled the garment towards the knife hand, enough to deflect the blow from her heart, but not enough to completely avoid it catching her left arm again, this time hitting exposed flesh just below the elbow. She hardly registered the injury, thought, in passing, that it would just add to the mess that was the left side of her body.

The dressing gown had wrapped itself around Anna and it took her a few seconds to pull it off. Seconds for Laura to use, to get away from another stabbing. She ran towards the tables, grabbed one of them and held it in front of her. Broken glass dug into the soft soles of her slippers.

Anna stared at her. She tried to laugh because she could see the damage done, see the blood from Laura’s bare left arm starting to soak her nightclothes. But the laughter wouldn’t come. It stuck in her throat, because all she could really see were the clothes – the cute little pink camisole and silk shorts. This was what |Laura wore in bed with Joe and it was undeniably attractive; disgusting, hateful images of the two of them together crowded into Anna’s mind.

They were so vivid that she shook her head violently to try to clear them, but they would not go away. Bubbles of anger fizzed in her brain, more and more of them, like a tablet dissolving in water. She struggled with the rage; she struggled but she lost.

Anna Pelham started screaming. Screaming that Laura must die, that she deserved to die, that she would not escape again. She flew at her, like a cat pouncing on its prey. Laura tried to block her, to force the table legs into her face and upper body and knock her off balance, but Anna hardly faltered. She jumped nimbly to one side, grabbed one of the legs and began wrestling the table from Laura’s grasp. With her left arm injured, it took all Laura’s strength to hang on, and as she clung to the table with both hands, Anna lashed out again with the knife, slashing the cute pink camisole and cutting deep into the flesh beneath. Laura lost her grip on the table, stumbled to her knees, her right hand clutching at the bloody new wound.

Anna Pelham’s eyes burned with hatred and triumph. This was it then.
Finis
. She went in for the kill.

‘Die now, you fucking bitch.’

Anna sprang at her again, hitting her full on and knocking her to the ground. The speed and power of the assault sent both women sliding together, struggling, across the polished floor. Their progress was stopped by the fireplace and then, despite all Laura’s efforts, Anna was sitting astride her and she was staring into the glittering green eyes of the woman who was to be her executioner. The gleeful face was back; Anna Pelham looked very pleased with herself, very pleased indeed.

Time stood still for Laura. She was at the frontier of existence, facing extinction. There was terror in her mind but there was also determination not to go without a fight. Fight like a tiger, not just lie there, cringing, waiting to be butchered. She watched as Anna’s head turned on its slender neck and the eyes searched for the blade that had dropped from her hand in the struggle. It had not gone far. Just a few inches away among the sea of smashed glass and photo frames. Anna reached for it easily and her long, slim fingers once more curled lovingly around its handle.

Laura lay back, apparently in submission, her arms stretched out behind her head as if she had given up herself to her fate.

Anna smiled.

‘You understand now, don’t you,’ she asked, soothingly, ‘why you have to die?’

Laura’s right hand grasped something smooth and sharp in the mess on the floor. She gripped hold of it hard though it cut her fingers. It was a glass shard and it felt horribly small. Too small, surely, to do much damage, but it was all she had. The knife had begun to move, begun its strike down towards her chest and if she didn’t stop it she was done for and the last thing she would see in her life would be the red fingernails and triumphant face of Anna Pelham.

Her hand came up off the floor, moved fast towards Anna’s throat. The jagged piece of glass, which not long ago had framed a photo of her and Joe, was clutched between her fingers. She shoved it, with all her remaining strength, into the soft white skin.

A look of surprise came on to Anna’s joyful face as the glass entered her flesh and pierced the artery in her neck.

‘No!’ she screamed, ‘No! No!’

A massive wall of warm, bright red blood spurted into Laura’s eyes and blinded her. Anna’s screams stopped, drowned by the blood spraying and bubbling in her throat. Laura felt hope begin, knowing she’d hit something big. Thick jets of arterial blood were coming at her and a weight was falling on her, pinning her down. Then a searing, terrible pain ripped through her chest as the knife punctured her left lung.

After that, Laura lost track of things. Hazy, light-headed, she could hardly breathe. There was a period when all hell seemed to break loose again, though it was a different kind of hell, full of noise and people and general confusion. She really couldn’t say because she was so tired. Incredibly tired, as she had never been before in her whole life. And she wanted so much to go to sleep, absolutely had to go to sleep, but some man with a moustache kept shouting at her and telling her to stay awake, to stay alive.

She knew who this man was and he was no friend of hers. She was sure of that. Now he was yelling at her again. And she wanted to yell back at him to shut the fuck up and just let her go to sleep where she was. But she didn’t have the breath to do it. In fact she didn’t have any breath left at all because a huge hand was squeezing her chest, squeezing the life out of her. Suffocating her.

Resurfacing. Excruciating pain. Cold. So cold. Sleep. Death coming to meet her. More noise and more men and the first one, the one who was definitely not her friend, was shouting again – he never seemed to stop – and then, thank God, he wasn’t there anymore.

It was such a huge relief. Laura went to sleep at last.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

There was an appalling amount of blood. A dark, viscous pool of it spread across the floor and as Harry ran towards the two women, his shoes slid in it and he almost fell. He stared at the scene, forcing down the urge to be sick.

His wife was lying collapsed on top of Laura Maxwell, her right hand still grasping the knife she had buried in the other woman’s chest. Her head lay twisted on Laura’s shoulder, blood oozing from her throat though it no longer pulsed. The big green eyes were open though they no longer sparkled. He winced, remembered how they used to look at him, sincere and loving, the way she always did before she told a lie. Remembered how they had fascinated him, how everything about her had fascinated him.

Now he could hardly bear to touch the flesh that once he had loved. Quickly he bent down, checked for a sign of life, and when there was none, felt his chest heave with emotion, with a terrific sadness for what he had lost even if it had existed only in his imagination. Once upon a time, she had made him feel so good, so special. He thought, wretchedly, of Martha. Not just to have lost her mother, but to have had such a mother. His heart ached for his daughter.

All he could see of Laura Maxwell was a bloody mess. Her head and upper body were covered in the stuff, her hair matted with it. She’d been stabbed and slashed and he assumed that she too was dead. So it came as a shock to him, if anything else at that moment could shock him, to see bloody air bubbles coming from the wound in her chest. They frothed around the hilt of the knife.

Harry shoved aside his wife’s body, pulled off his jacket and began wiping the blood from Laura’s eyes and nose, shouting at her to wake up. He didn’t dare shake her or slap her, just yelled in her ear, and after what seemed a very long time, her eyes flickered open. She tried to speak but no words came out, just a soft gurgle as if she was under water. A trickle of blood fell from the corner of her mouth and he was terrified that he had come too late and she was going to die in front of him.

Drowning. Suddenly he was certain she would drown in the blood in her throat. Keep her alive, dial 999. He hadn’t got a mobile and he looked round frantically for a phone. Can’t see one. Jesus Christ. Blood in her mouth. Lips turning blue. Please God, surely not. He was bellowing, as if yelling at her to survive would make it happen. Think, block out the panic getting in the way. Dial 999 was all his brain would say. No go. No time left. Drowning. Up to you, mate. No-one else to help.