Chapter 45 Simon
Simon
Simon looks down at her prone body on the steps, her tumbled auburn hair half fallen across her face, across her closed eyes. She is more beautiful than he remembers even, something delicate about her, rare and untouchable, like an animal in the wild.
He thought she knew the day she came into the surgery. He’d added her to his patient list as soon as he’d seen her address. He’d been interested to see who might end up in a house like that one. Someone who wasn’t bothered by the acts that had happened there or who was oblivious to them.
But she didn’t know who he was when she met him, obviously. Or if she recognized him from the neighborhood she was a very, very good liar.
She perched there, on the plastic patient chair beside his desk, and she’d let him touch her: her wrist, her arm, the skin warm and soft, her scent of jasmine and something warmer.
She’d let him listen to her heart, strong and healthy in her chest, the sound of her lungs filling and emptying.
Then she’d told him her problem, inches from him, her body so close; she’d talked about her sleepwalking, her move, the divorce, her need for medication.
She’d been embarrassed, vulnerable, as tender as bruised fruit.
He knew she was lonely and pretending not to be. He’d been a doctor for fifteen years and a liar himself for twenty.
She needed the meds, that was clear. A recent divorce, a move, the changes involved in overhauling a life—medicine wasn’t rocket science.
So, he’d prescribed some nice heavy meds, something she’d really feel. Something that might prove useful one day.
He couldn’t believe how close he’d got to her, in those twenty minutes, without her even knowing.
—
Simon had first seen the cat, with the camera collar, five days ago, as it looked in through the kitchen doors at him while he was on his laptop. He’d seen the lens instantly, and after a moment’s confusion understood that it was trained on him.
He’d smiled for the camera and gone to let the cat in to check for an ID disc. But the cat had fled and he had to work out who the owner was another way.
It was potentially an issue; he knew that and he was going to have to take a lot more precautions.
He’d easily found a photo of the cat on the neighborhood group, and its owner, Frankie. The woman he’d already added to his patient list, the one who had moved into the house on Northcroft Road. Her WhatsApp photo immediately told him what she looked like, and he started to watch her movements.
She hadn’t left the house much since moving, she’d told him in her appointment. And that didn’t appear to change. He’d kept an eye on her on and off since the camera, since her appointment.
But he saw her at the police station, through the tall glass front windows, which was more than a little concerning.
But she walked away in the early hours looking disappointed.
The good thing about working for the NHS is you can work at a laptop anywhere, at any hour, and as long as you have your lanyard on, the coffee’s discounted and no one bats an eye.
She looked angry when she left the station, and scared, and he’d enjoyed watching her from the safety of the all-night coffee shop.
No one came to his door the next day, no police asking questions. Which made him realize she didn’t know enough yet about Anna or what he was hiding—but she knew something and it might only be a matter of time.
Either way, whatever she had seen clearly wasn’t enough for the police to get involved.
But then she showed up on his video doorbell today, walking one way and then the other, stopping two doors down with her eyes wired, her features set.
She had somehow now located him—Anna, the room, all of it—and Simon understood what that meant.
Francesca Green must have video footage of the room, of Anna. He wasn’t sure how much, or how telling it might be, but that must be how she’d found them.
He would have to tidy everything up—so while she was out in her car, he slipped up the scaffolding at the back of the empty house beside hers, all the way to the top where a window remained open a crack, and he went in.
He took back the meds he had so kindly prescribed her, because that would be the best way to do it.
And then he went back home and got ready.
He had to end things with Anna now, of course, he knew that. All evidence needed to disappear. It was a shame; everything had worked so well with Anna down there. The transition from a relationship in the world to down there had been so easy.
Of course, he would be lying if he said he hadn’t considered keeping Frankie, replacing Anna with her.
He wanted Frankie, as much as he’d ever wanted Anna; he’d thought about her almost constantly since he’d taken her pulse in the surgery. It had been hard to keep neutral during her appointment.
Frankie’s freedom, independence, that live spirit, like Lissa’s, was so refreshing after what Anna had become in captivity.
Simon knew, in his heart, he and Anna were over now anyway; it had been slowly dying for a while. The spark, the excitement, gone. They both knew it, if they were honest.
And it got him down, seeing Anna tirelessly trying to keep things alive. Simon had been putting off the inevitable for some time now.
Everyone says it’s hard to end a relationship that’s run its course, but they really have no idea, Simon realizes. His relationships end with a finality that others don’t.
Simon knows it will be painless; Anna won’t even know it is happening.
He made a promise to Melissa, after all, that he wouldn’t hurt anyone else. And he won’t. Given the circumstances, he’s sure that Melissa would understand the urgency required here.
What else was he supposed to do with Anna after she found out about his past? He couldn’t kill her.
The problem was, she was supposed to want to be with him, like she said the night she fell—that was their dream, that was her dream. He had merely facilitated it.
Anna had struggled to come to terms with the restraints of that.
He’d explained, after the fall, that if she didn’t adapt to the flat, then they would have to end the relationship, and he explained in no uncertain terms what that would necessitate.
In her heart, she must have known even then it would never work.
Being a doctor had helped to an extent after the fall, but being a GP wasn’t being a specialist, and Simon was always honest about his capabilities.
He had access to medications that could make things painless, but he couldn’t really fix them.
He had needed to hurt Anna a few times since the fall, too, and while he knew it was not the way he would ever want to do things, the facts stood: she really did only listen to him when he hit her.
If she hurt him he would correct that behavior, if she tried to endanger them both he would need to show her that it was not acceptable.
Aggression was the only thing that seemed to get through to her when she got like that.
And that first time he hurt her, the old Anna seemed to return overnight.
She smiled, she let him get close to her again, she let him touch her, be near her, talk to her.
She became the perfect woman. His perfect woman.
Anna’s mother had been a problem obviously. The woman in West London sent him a text when Cynthia arrived at her door.
But she had ultimately been easy to sort out; some people really were too easy.
Simon moves Frankie’s body inside, and considers once more keeping her, moving her in. Once Anna was gone from the room, there would be space for Frankie.
Frankie would learn to like it, eventually; he could tell she would be more resilient than Anna, she would adapt to her new life better than Anna ever had—for all Anna’s efforts, he could always see the sadness behind her eyes.
But the logistics were too complex; he would need to get rid of Anna first.
With a fizzle of interest, he wonders if he could keep both, together down there, but then that would be too dangerous; he would be outnumbered.
No, he could not keep Frankie.
And he would need to end Anna’s life now, too. It was all too risky. He’d sort Anna out then take her, small piece by small piece, to the hospital incinerator, on his out-of-hours shifts at the local emergency care unit.
He could always find gaps there, patient lulls in the early hours before dawn, without too much fuss, turn the cameras away and do what he needed to do.
Life was so much easier for him now that he was older, and had more control of logistics. In his late teens, with Melissa, he had to concede that luck had played the largest role in covering his tracks. Luck and a lack of modern technology.
Now you could track everything.
He’d watched Frankie search the street for Anna’s room, on the door camera, and go into Matt’s renovation house. Then she’d scaled two walls and the abandoned house next door to his to reach him, and Simon let her come, he’d waited for her to walk right in.
It would be so easy to keep her. She’d already gone missing from another man’s house. No one had followed after her; he’d seen the actress on the man’s doorstep, heard Frankie’s phone ring after Aoife left.
If someone were coming, they would have come quickly.
He lifts Frankie’s phone up to her face and peels back her eyelids.
The screen unlocks. He scrolls through her text messages.
There are hardly any back-and-forths since she moved in nearly a week ago.
The few there—group chats and work-related messages do not concern him—are all just polite, general, surface nonsense.
He swipes through videos looking for the cat camera footage and finds a hastily recorded video, clearly taken from another recording. It shows the basement window, a blurry bruised Anna, her startled expression. He taps another: Anna holding up a message.
Simon tuts. There she is, he thinks, the real Anna, the one who doesn’t want this anymore.
But he knew that already. Simon deletes the recording, without watching more, then, raising Frankie’s eyelids again, opens the deleted folder and deletes it from there too.
She will have the real footage on her computer at home, he concedes; he will deal with that when he gets to it.
Whatever she has on her laptop, he’ll destroy.
Next, he opens her emails, to see if she mentions any of her cat recordings to anyone at all, though his estimation of her psychology was pretty clear the day she cried in the chair opposite him and begged him for something to help.
From what he can see, she has not disclosed any of this to anyone. A more in-depth analysis will follow, but he begins to wonder if he might actually be able to keep her, after all. It might be possible—safe, even.
He could take her bank cards, as he did with Anna, use them here and there, continue to pay her bills.
Well, some of them. Eventually the mortgage would lapse, the house would be repossessed.
But people ran out on their lives all the time.
It was clear from looking at her emails that she was in the middle of accepting a job offer; but he could simply change her mind for her.
He would amend her medical record to suggest “concern for her well-being” after her appointment.
And as with Anna, he would intermittently post to social media on her account, continuing in whatever style, in different locations, with flowers, coffees, old selfies, and then they too would peter out.
He wonders what Frankie would be like if he kept her.
She would hate him, at first, of course; she would miss her old life, and she’d desperately try to get back to it, but that would fuel her. Her hope would keep her going. Simon could use freedom as a lure and a threat, always available at hand.
Simon wasn’t a bad person, not deep down, he knew that, even if the facts suggested otherwise.
He feels sick that he does what he does; it haunts his dreams and mires every waking hour. He wishes he’d never met Melissa, that this had never started, but it did.
Sometimes, he argues to himself that perhaps what he has done to Anna is not really so bad, in the great scheme of things—historically. Their living arrangement wasn’t so different really to what married men did to their wives in the 1950s, in Victorian times, in time immemorial.
Simon thinks of himself as a feminist—in essence, he believes women are equal to men, better, even.
But the thing is, he also wants to share his life with a woman, and keeping them like this was, unfortunately, the only way that could work for him, long-term, given his past and the things he has done.
He wishes relationships could be easier; he wishes women would stay with him of their own free will, but they don’t, he knows that, they all eventually run.
So, Simon considers Frankie and the choice of whether to keep her or get rid of her. Surely it is better to let someone live than kill them, isn’t it?
But if he can’t keep her, she could be easily taken care of in the same way as Anna’s mother, he reasons—just another lonely woman, unhappy with the way her life had panned out. He has her pills already.
People were so keen to believe the story that women give up all hope. Funny really—given in Simon’s experience, women almost never give up hope, even when there is realistically no hope left.
But with suicides, you only had to frame the story right, and people would buy it: a coroner would sign off on it and that was that.