Plastic (31 page)

‘I think if you search your heart you’ll find you’ve already made up your mind.’ Rennie’s fingers brushed my shoulder lightly. ‘Tell me, June, when was the last time you had really good sex?’

‘That’s none of your business.’ The question was impertinent, but the answer would have shocked him.

‘I bet it was a really long time ago.’ He reached back, and before I could see what was happening, he kissed me.

I remember that kiss. Body warmth, Cartier aftershave, a prickly chin, something else, something stony and secret, so different from Stefan. I broke free, flustered, trying to speak. ‘Listen to me a minute,’ I asked. ‘You don’t know what I’m like.’

‘I think I do. If you’d fallen in with a wild crowd or done something crazy instead of trying to please people, you could have got away, but you left it too long and one day you woke up next to a man you didn’t love. You lay in bed watching him sleep, wondering how you could leave and survive. What you should have done was take a chance and walk. Life is too short to worry about what other people think.’

It was as if he could read my mind. ‘Do you know how often I’ve painted my nails at home?’ I asked him. ‘Every day, while I watched the Living Channel. I thought I was addicted to the smell of polish remover, but since I’ve been here I haven’t even thought about doing it. I don’t think I even care about my cuticles any more.’

He turned to me and smiled. ‘Scientists say we’re shaped by our environment, June. There’s hardly any hereditary influence at all. After all the social experiments, they discovered that the family no longer has a hold on us. It means there’s still time for us all to change. So how do you want to do it? Benjamin Disraeli said that London is a modern Babylon. It’s a tribal society. All you have to do is pick your tribe.’ It sounded like a line worn thin with previous use, but I didn’t care. He kissed me again, his warm, peculiarly large tongue searching my mouth. I thought of Stefan and felt ashamed, but closed my eyes as he embraced me.

This time he broke away first. ‘I’m sorry, June.’

I opened my eyes. Rennie had the gun in his hand. He held it with the muzzle down, as though he felt it was inconsiderate and unnecessary to point it. ‘Let’s go upstairs and figure this whole thing out.’

This is a really sleazy way to die,
I thought as we climbed the stairs into the Ziggurat,
my mother’s worst fears will all be confirmed. You failed to have children, your husband walked out on you, of course you were bound to be shot in the head by gangsters.
I felt strangely calm, like Anne Boleyn going to the axe. At least I would never have to return to Hamingwell again, never have to spend arid days waiting for nothing in particular to happen, never have to hold dinner conversations so dull that they dried my mouth to sand.

Rennie guided me, his hand firmly pressed at the base of my spine as I climbed. When we reached the penthouse, I was surprised to see that the two remaining Foshes had revealed a flair for interior decoration. Perhaps they were a couple. The covers were thrown back from the lounge furniture and dozens of fat cream candles had been lit. The room looked positively cosy, although there was no disguising the vulgarity of the soft furnishings.

I hadn’t expected him to hit me. The blow, the back of his hand across my face, caught me completely by surprise, so that I was thrown down onto the sofa. I tasted blood in my mouth; a tooth had cut my gum, nothing more, but it stung. One of the Foshes inexpertly slipped another plastic tag over my wrists. I studied Rennie, bewildered.

‘That was for making me go shopping with you, that’s all.’ He checked the edge of his hand and rubbed it. ‘You shouldn’t get involved with things you don’t understand.’

‘I had to. I did it for her.’

‘Who?’

‘I couldn’t let Petra go like that,’ I explained, ‘without anyone caring whether she even existed.’

Rennie considered the point for a minute. ‘I think there’s something I should tell you.’ He shrugged at the Foshes. ‘This wasn’t about Petra hiding the book. That’s not why she was punished. Your friend Stefan knows the truth. You should have asked him when you had the chance.’

One of the Foshes strolled out of the room and re-entered with a thicker plastic tie looped over his arm.

‘No,’ I said quietly.

I tried to climb over the back of the sofa, but he snapped the thing around my throat in one smooth movement; it was an action made quotidian by repetition. He tightened the band, clicking it until it enclosed my neck tightly. Now I understood why Petra’s hands had been tied. It had been to stop her from wriggling her fingers under the noose.

‘You know why we use this, don’t you, June?’ asked Rennie. ‘Everyone understands once it’s on them.’

I did understand. It was not a method of torture but control, pure and simple. A dog, a slave, a subservient creature who would be forced to obey. Now that I could feel the edge at my neck, it was obvious.

Rennie slid his arms beneath me and carried me gently to the bedroom, laying me down on the bare mattress. ‘You two, go and put some lights on in the kitchen, and bring Stefan up here.’

Rennie called the rest of his men out into the hall and said something to them. Even without catching his words, I understood what was to happen. The incinerator would start working as soon as the building works were finished. I twisted my head to read my watch: 21:46pm. I wondered if anyone would ever find me; I wasn’t even wearing my wedding ring anymore. That had vanished in the ransacking of the house. Even my charm bracelet was in the incinerator.

It was becoming hard to catch my breath. It was as though someone had put a plastic bag over my head. Rennie was arguing with the others about something. I sat up, then tried to stand, but the room was in darkness and my tied wrists made it difficult for me to keep balanced. My vision had started to spackle with orange dots, like phasing television reception.

I needed to conserve my breath. I remembered that the bedroom had sliding doors leading to the balcony, but couldn’t find the handles with my hands tied behind me. Lost to a world of pain, I fell back and spread my fingers wide, distantly searching for the catch. When I found it, I pushed down hard. The door rumbled softly as I pushed it back. Night air swept into the room, cooling the molten band at my throat.

I can’t do it again,
I thought,
not now, I nearly killed myself last time
. As it turned out, I didn’t have the option. The top of the yellow rubble pipe had fallen away. There was no other way down.

I had reached the end of my journey. I was never intended to leave the Ziggurat. Something had always drawn me back here, to my final resting place.

What would I have sacrificed in return for one more minute, one more second of breath? I was the stroke victim, the heart attack sufferer, the dying patient we must all one day become. The darkness drew choking blinds around me. I felt myself tipping and falling to the balcony floor.

The pain vanished as I lost consciousness.
This is my death,
I thought calmly.
It’s not so bad. Nothing can hurt me ever again.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Flight

I
WAS AWAKE
on the floor, and the scalding pain was back. The fall had twisted the muscles of my neck, allowing some small passage of air. There was nowhere for me to even crawl. I thought of throwing myself over the balcony, anything rather than the death I had seen Petra suffer, but the parapet was beyond my reach. Rennie wouldn’t want me falling into the traffic-filled street, where someone might raise an alarm, not when the incinerator…

The incinerator.

I tried to clear my oxygen-starved brain. The gas was due to have been turned back on between nine and ten. Ashe had said it would be a while before they could sort out the electrics. No pilot lights. No flames. Someone would have to air the occupied flats because it would only take a spark –

Rennie’s men had put out the fire in Malcolm’s flat, but had filled the penthouse lounge with candles, and were now carrying lights into the kitchen.

I prayed for a combustive journey to oblivion, but nothing happened. The plastic loop seared as it cut the sides of my neck. The pain shot down my spine, trapping nerves, paralysing me. The least agonising thing I could do was lie very still.

Why wasn’t the kitchen in flames by now? Ashe had been overcautious, a typical bloody gas board employee justifying his job. I fought to clear my senses through the hammering chaos of a neural firework display, but pain overrode all thought. There was still conversation in the kitchen, but now another voice was being raised.

Stefan was there with them.

I could no longer draw breath. I knew the small capillaries in my eyes were bursting, as they did in strangulation victims. The penthouse walls began to slide away in a sparkle of light. All sound was subsumed in the drumming of my blood. I could feel nothing now except the white-hot band around my neck. I tried to crawl, but my limbs refused to obey commands from my blood-starved brain. I knew I had only moments left to live, but I could think of nothing, not my parents, not love or happiness or regret, not my life with Gordon, no memories of my lonely childhood, nothing at all except the all-enclosing pain.

And then the collar opened. It was like being rushed into a bath of iced water. The force of my returning senses overwhelmed me as I looked up to see Stefan standing in the doorway with his finger to his lips. He had a penknife in one hand.

He lifted the collar off, and I breathed deeper than I have ever done before or since. Returning with water, Stefan squatted beside me and dribbled it into my open mouth. ‘
Juin
, I am sorry. They would not come in here. Very bad luck to see a woman die. You must get out of this place right now.’

‘What do you think I’ve been trying to do?’ I rasped. Confusion clouded my judgement. I could no longer tell who to trust. I rose to my feet and stumbled past Stefan, out of the room, into the dark tunnel of the corridor, hitting the door frame as I fought to regain balance.

He tried to come after me, but was abruptly involved in a shoving match with the Foshes. I was momentarily forgotten as their old enmities surfaced. I had one advantage; over the course of the weekend I had come to know my way through the building’s secret folds and angles without the aid of light. I flew out into the stairwell, pumping blood back into my limbs, amazed to be alive.

There was no other way down. Suddenly I was reliving a childhood nightmare, chased by some malevolent assailant from the top of a house toward the safety of daylight and the front door, knowing that even as I descended, the closing gap between us meant that safety was exponentially retreating.

‘Wait!’ I heard Stefan calling as he ran after me, ‘don’t go down there!’ I was between the third and second floors, passing through a concrete box of angled shadow when the burger-shoveller made his grab for me, seizing a thick handful of hair. My banshee scream into his face must have shocked him because he looked like he had just sucked a live three-pin plug.

I lashed up at him, connecting at least three nails (plastic, pearlised, chip-resistant) with his face. One (index, right hand) broke off in his neck with a satisfying snap. He released my hair to pull it out, but I was wearing a lot of lacquer and it wasn’t as easy to get his fingers loose as he’d expected. For a minute we grappled with my head attached to his hand like Perseus trying to rid himself of the Medusa or Magic Johnson taking control of the ball.

I lost some split ends and my glitter-spackled faux-tortoiseshell slide, but I made it around the next corner to the stairs below as he grabbed at me again.

This time, his reach was better. A fat hand clamped my upper arm and hauled me back. He slipped both arms under mine and lifted me from the ground as though I weighed nothing. I kicked back instinctively – sadly not in my lethal heels – but failed to connect with his legs. As he held me tighter, I couldn’t help noticing that he smelled of vinegar. Still, he couldn’t carry me downstairs like this because suddenly Stefan was hanging on to the back of his jacket, pulling him over. After a few moments, the burger-shoveller was forced to drop me onto the landing, and then I kicked back hard.

This was the first time I had ever hit a man in the testicles, and I was thrilled by its effectiveness. Burger-Boy seemed clouded by confusion rather than agony, as though recalling an unpleasant childhood memory of being sick on a long car journey. In the brief moment that he lost his orientation, Stefan showed surprising agility by dropping onto him from a great height and fixing his wrists into a pair of handcuffs. I was off down the stairs, taking them in threes, widening the gap between us.

When I reached the lobby I didn’t mean to fall down, but my legs simply stopped supporting me, and I did a kind of slapstick drop to the floor. I remember laughing weirdly and asking Stefan where he had got the handcuffs from. He said something about keeping them under his bed, and only using them when someone had been very naughty.

‘Well, I’ve been a very naughty housewife,’ I heard myself saying as I passed out.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Untraceable

I
WAS ONLY
unconscious for a few seconds, but it was enough to punch me back into reality. Stefan was shining a torch in my face and staring at me in great concern. Part of me knew we should get out of the building while we still had a chance, but for some reason we stayed in the darkened lobby, whispering.

‘None of this would have happened if I had explained properly,’ Stefan admitted, holding my hand and pulling me to my feet. ‘But you were off on your crusade, running about – I did not mean things to go so far.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said, leaning on him.

‘You said you want people to know that this girl Petra existed, but you see... she did not exist. There was no Petra. I wanted to tell you, but the next time we met you’d taken her cause to heart, imagining some poor refugee girl.’