Sophie could smell Mike as soon as she opened the front door.
She knew that people’s bodies started to decompose from the very moment they died, but she had never realised that they could smell as strong as this. It was like a gas escape mixed with the stench of rotten chicken, and it filled the whole house. Her mouth filled with bile, and she gagged, and gagged again, and then she hurried through to the kitchenette and brought up a mouthful of half-digested cheese roll into the sink.
Almost immediately, though, she went back and closed the front door. She couldn’t have the neighbours complaining about the smell. They were always moaning that she was playing her music too loud, or that she hadn’t sorted her rubbish and put it in the right recycling bin. Before she knew it, they would have some council official knocking at her door.
She dropped her bag on the couch in the sitting-room, and then she went into the small downstairs toilet, took out her handkerchief and sprayed blossom-scented air freshener into it. Holding it up to her face, she climbed the stairs to the bedroom.
Mike looked worse than she could have imagined. His face was glistening grey, with the two knives sticking out of his eyes. His intestines were already bloated, and they had turned the colour of pale greenish pasta. The sheet underneath him was soaked in yellow fluid.
Sophie went over to the window and opened it to let in some fresh air. It was still raining, and she could hear the water splattering from the broken gutter right above her. After a while she turned around and looked at Mike. Even though the sight of his disembowelled body revolted her, she still felt that she had given him what he deserved: an agonising and undignified death, almost sacrificial. But now she would have to find some way to dispose of him and clean up the bed.
She went downstairs to the kitchenette and took her yellow latex gloves out of the drawer. Back upstairs, she opened the airing cupboard and tugged out her oldest duvet cover, which was purple, with even darker purple flowers on it.
Unfolding the duvet cover, she laid it out on the bedroom floor. She gagged again as she turned Mike over, and she had to grip her stomach for a moment and take two or three deep breaths. When she had recovered, she rolled him off the bed and onto the carpet. He landed on his side with a heavy thump, and all his intestines slithered around her feet like escaping snakes, with liquid squelching and balloon-like exhalations of gas.
It took her nearly twenty minutes to insert Mike’s stiff, chilly feet into the duvet cover and then heave and tug and wrestle the rest of his body into it. She managed to pull the knife out of his left eye, but the knife in his right eye was lodged so tightly that she had to leave it where it was. Finally she bent his head forward, with a loud cracking sound from his neck, so that she could fasten all the buttons along the opening of the duvet cover.
‘There, Mike,’ she said, triumphantly. ‘No undertaker would have given you a shroud as pretty as this.’
Little Helpers owned their own van, which they used to collect furniture and other large donations. It was mainly used by one of Sophie’s volunteers, Jeff, but she had driven it herself several times when Jeff had been off sick. She could borrow it this weekend and take Mike’s body down to Ashdown Forest, in Sussex. She knew a small country road there called Kidd’s Hill where she could drag him into the undergrowth, and with luck nobody would ever find him.
She stripped the sheets and the mattress cover off the bed, and dropped Mike’s bloodstained pillow next to his body. She was relieved to see that the mattress had only been slightly stained, so that she would only have to scrub it with bleach and turn it over.
There was nothing more she could do tonight. She left the bedroom window open and closed the door. She would have to sleep downstairs on the couch, but that would be a small price to pay for having rid herself of Mike.
Down in the kitchenette she washed her latex gloves and pulled them off, and then she washed her bare hands. She didn’t feel like eating anything, especially since the house still smelled of Mike’s insides, a pungency that she could actually taste in her mouth. However she had half a bottle of pinot grigio in the fridge. She poured herself a large glass and went through to the living-room.
I’ve won, she thought. I’ve won, and I am never ever going to allow another man to treat me the way that Mike treated me. Just who did he think he was dealing with? Didn’t he realise that one day I would have had enough of his arrogance, enough of his contempt, and enough of his snoring?
She switched on the television. She had a choice between a celebrity quiz show and a nature programme about baboons and the local London news, and so she left it on the nature programme and muted the sound. She took a sip of her wine and then she tried to shrug off her blue velvet jacket.
It was then that she found that the jacket seemed to be stuck to her.
She tugged at the lapels, and tried to pull it off her shoulders, but somehow it felt as if it was clinging to her. She pulled at it harder, and this time it actually hurt, the same kind of skin-tearing pain that she felt when she had her legs waxed. She pulled harder still, and this time the pain was too much to bear. It brought tears to her eyes and she said, Oww-ahh! out loud.
How can it be stuck to me like this? It feels like I have hairs on my back but of course I don’t have hairs on my back. Maybe there was some sort of glue in the lining, and it’s melted, because it was so hot in the shop today.
She gripped the collar with her left hand and tried with all her strength to wrench the jacket off her right shoulder. With a soft crackling sound, it came away, but she felt as if her shoulder had been scraped with glasspaper. She yelped, and panted for breath, but then she took hold of the collar with her right hand, and prepared herself to rip that side off, too.
Why are you doing this, Sophie? Why not leave the jacket on? It fits you so well. It’s like your second skin. Do you really think you could have taken your revenge on Mike if you hadn’t been wearing it? The jacket is me, Sophie, not you. How do you think you found all that strength? Do you really believe you could have blinded him and gutted him all by yourself?
Sophie turned and stared at herself in the mirror over the fireplace. What am I thinking? Whose voice is that, in my head? I feel like I’m talking to myself, but I’m not, am I? There’s somebody else inside me. Oh my God! There’s somebody else inside me!
She slowly approached the mirror and stared at herself even more intently, still keeping her grip on the collar of her jacket. The face in the mirror bore some resemblance to Sophie, like two sisters might resemble each other, but it wasn’t her. This face had sharper-cut cheekbones and a squarer jaw, and a much higher forehead.
You see? This is who you really are now. That’s why you must leave the jacket on, at least for now.
Sophie stepped back from the mirror, almost tripping over the edge of the hearth-rug. She was hyperventilating now. She had never felt so frightened in her life. She had been threatened once by a madwoman on the Tube, a stinking woman with jagged teeth who had sworn at her and said that she would rip her face with her fingernails. But she had never been threatened like this – not by herself – or somebody who looked like her, but wasn’t.
She let out a hoarse, high-pitched scream, although she was panicking so much that she couldn’t hear it. At the same time she tore the jacket off her back and then dragged the sleeves off, and threw it across the room. She felt a ripping pain across her shoulders, and her hands and her forearms were smothered in blood. Her back felt wet, and when she twisted around to look at herself in the mirror again, she saw that her short-sleeved cotton blouse was soaked in blood, too.
She staggered across to the couch and picked up her bag, fumbling inside it for her iPhone, so that she could call for help. Before she could find it, though, she saw that the jacket seemed to be moving. It was hunched up, and it was crawling slowly towards her, its empty sleeves dragging it across the floor.
When she saw it inching its way towards her, she dropped her iPhone and stumbled out of the living-room. She saw herself reflected in the mirror in the hallway, her face white and her blouse drenched in blood, and she could do nothing but whimper at her reflection in pain and terror. She looked back and the jacket had reached the living-room door, pulling itself along as if there were somebody invisible inside it, creeping along on their hands and knees.
She opened the front door and tottered outside, almost losing her balance on the concrete steps. As weak and frightened and disorientated as she was, she managed to turn around and slam the front door shut behind her, just as the jacket reached one of its sleeves out towards the doormat.
She took three unsteady steps past the dustbins, so that she managed to reach the front gate, but then stars prickled in front of her eyes and the street went black and she fell forward onto the wet pavement outside her house, and lay there on her side, in the rain.
She was lying there for more than five minutes before a passing taxi stopped, and the driver climbed out and bent over her. She could hear the knocking sound of its diesel engine.
‘What’s happened, love? Has somebody stabbed you?’
She opened her eyes. All she could see was the pavement and the taxi-driver’s shoes. It was still raining, and she felt chilled to the bone.
‘Save me,’ she said.
She heard the taxi-driver talking on his mobile phone. Then she felt him cover her up with his anorak.
‘Who did this to you, love? Is this where you live? Is he still inside?’
‘Don’t go in there,’ she whispered.
‘What? I didn’t get that.’
‘Don’t go in there. Whatever you do, don’t go in there.’
*
Jerry was almost back at his rented flat, turning the corner from Tooting Bec Common into Prentis Road, when his iPhone pinged. He pulled into the side of the road and took it out.
‘Jerry? DI Saunders.’
‘Don’t tell me. Somebody’s handed the coat in.’
‘No, nothing like that. Well, I don’t know – maybe something like that. We’ve had a call from St George’s. A young woman’s been brought into A&E with severe skin abrasions and apparently she’s raving about her injuries having been caused by her jacket.’
‘What?’
‘Sergeant Bristow sent a couple of PCs over to talk to her, but they called in to say that they couldn’t make head nor tail of what she was on about. She’s quite badly injured, though, and the doctor who examined her said she had fibres adhering to her skin. As far as he could make out, it was the tearing away of the fibres that caused her abrasions. That’s the reason I’m calling you.’
Jerry inhaled deeply. He was exhausted after a long day, and apart from his half-finished chicken-and-mushroom slice, he hadn’t had anything to eat. After he and Jamila had visited Mr Stebbings he had felt like going to the pub for a pint and a packet of porky scratchings but of course Jamila didn’t drink alcohol – nor eat pork, either.
‘So – where are you now?’ asked DI Saunders. ‘Do you want to get yourself over to St George’s and find out what this young woman is ranting on about?’
‘Yes, sir. OK, sir. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.’
