Chapter 38
‘Tell me,’ Philippa says, her voice steady.
Eve holds the phone close to her mouth. ‘Someone came here. Looking for… him.’
‘And?’
‘That person’s still here.’
Silence while Philippa digests this information. ‘How is he? The visitor.’
‘Not well.’
‘You?’
‘OK. But I could use help with… with cleaning up.’
A longer silence. ‘Go nowhere. Do nothing. Help will come. Promise you’re OK.’
‘I promise.’
‘Good. Wait. There will be a password. Which you will know.’
‘How will I know?’
‘In the context of your true desire.’
‘What do you—?’
The phone goes dead.
‘Shit. Shit.’ Eve shoves it helplessly into her pocket.
Around her, the room is chaos. Chaos that it’s impossible to focus on, or even see, because there, in the centre of the floor, his clawed face staring, his right eye surmounted by the hilt of Philippa’s dagger, his mid-region an oozing red swamp, is Finbarr Williams. There’s blood everywhere.
On Eve’s hands and arms, on the sleeve of her sweater and the knee of her jeans, on the carpet, on the floorboards, on last week’s Radio Times, on Philippa’s discarded hoodie, and in a thick, darkening pool around the body.
On the sofa, Pyewacket is licking his bloody paws.
This is a fucking nightmare. Everything I left London, and Oxana, to avoid.
How did I get caught up in it again? To hell with Philippa, her stupid-ass son and her tinpot witchcraft.
Why does shit like this follow me around?
Seriously. Do I seek it out? Is there something about me which attracts violence and chaos?
Because that’s not who I am or have ever been.
I came here to reclaim my old self. To be who I once dreamed of being.
But there’s no chance of that now. You don’t get to walk away from something like this.
There’s the body of a man stiffening at my feet in several pints of his own blood, and no matter that he was a bad man, a man who destroyed lives without a thought, I can’t get around the fact that I killed him.
I will be named, my life will be raked over by tabloid journalists – Ex-Spy in Drug Slaying – and I will be memorialised in a low-budget Netflix true-crime documentary.
This is not the future that my parents hoped for me.
It’s nearly midnight when Eve decides to turn herself in.
She’s been sitting, almost unmoving, for hours.
She’s going to ring Jack Demerell, as kind and decent a man as she’s ever met, and ask him to take charge of the situation.
Ask him to ring the police and wait for them with her.
He’ll be shocked, but he’ll come. She’ll call him, she decides, on the stroke of midnight.
The minutes and the seconds pass, and Eve’s reaching for her phone when there’s a knock at the door.
A quiet knock, but Eve almost jumps out of her skin.
Heart pounding, she crosses the room, steps into the hallway, and opens the door a crack.
Standing outside is a middle-aged female police officer in a yellow high-vis vest.
Eve stares at her, speechless and open-mouthed. She feels an immense, overwhelming tiredness. But it had to end this way. The police officer, who has dark, tightly braided hair, steps closer to the door. ‘Spice Girls,’ she murmurs.
Eve continues to stare.
‘The password, Eve. Spice Girls. Don’t keep me standing here.’
Wide-eyed, Eve opens the door, and the woman hurries inside. She inspects the carnage in the sitting room briskly and professionally, sees Pye watching her from the sofa, and sits down next to him. Unbelievably, she grins. ‘You haven’t got such a thing as a cup of tea, have you?’
Still wide-eyed, Eve nods.
‘Best make a pot. There’ll be a few of us.’
‘You’re… You’re not—’
‘Bless you, no. Nothing like that. We’re here to…’ She nods at the corpse.
‘Philippa sent you?’
Before she can answer there’s another knock on the door, and another woman, whom Eve vaguely remembers seeing behind the till in the supermarket, bustles in.
The policewoman touches Eve’s arm. ‘Tea,’ she says firmly.
Eve retires to Philippa’s kitchen and fills the kettle.
When she returns to the sitting room, there are six of them.
Sensible-looking women in everyday clothes, aged between twenty-five and fifty.
They look at her with bright, sympathetic smiles.
‘Four white, no sugar,’ the supermarket woman says. ‘Two white, with.’
Mutely, Eve returns to the kitchen. When she comes back holding a laden tray, the policewoman takes it off her, and sets it down on the floor.
‘I want you to do exactly as I say,’ she tells Eve.
‘Go upstairs, change into your night things, bag up the clothes you’re wearing now in a pillowcase, and bring them down here.
Then have a hot bath, go to bed, and do not come downstairs again, for any reason, until the morning.
I repeat, do not come downstairs again until morning. ’
‘Got it,’ says Eve. ‘And… thank you all.’ She looks around the room.
Six pairs of eyes look calmly back at her.