Chapter 52 Simon and Anna
Simon and Anna
Simon has not slept, but everything is now laid out:
A large heavy-duty storage box, for Anna’s body parts. He will use it to transport them to his storage unit in Chingford, where three chest freezers wait. The key to any system continuing is always being prepared for the worst, having a Plan B ready to cover yourself, should the need arise.
Next to the equipment for the second stage lies the equipment for the first stage: a box of Anna’s favorite chocolates injected with morphine. A last supper, of sorts.
Chocolates can’t be a bad way to go, Simon reasons.
She will have some of her favorite chocolates and fall asleep, while he, on the other hand, will not have nearly such a pleasant time. Simon knows it will be a long day, so he figures he might as well not have to spend it feeling guilty about Anna’s last moments.
At 7:00 a.m. he enters her room; Anna is already awake, her energy edgy, expectant. She tries to cover her nerves at seeing him this early with a quick smile.
She heard the bang on the door and the scuffle outside yesterday afternoon. She doesn’t know what it was but she heard him grunting and dragging it away. She can only pray whatever it was wasn’t a person.
“I brought you something,” Simon tells her, kindness in his voice.
“Oh,” she responds, surprised.
He pulls the box of chocolates from inside his bag.
Anna hasn’t tasted chocolate for months and as far as she knows there is no occasion this morning. The air thickens.
Simon wonders if he’s played this wrong.
He hands her the box, sitting beside her as she opens it. She hesitates. She knows they’re poisoned, he realizes. She’s clever. He has played it wrong.
Simon picks up the irony of her being scared of the only good part of what is going to happen down here today.
“It’s an apology, for being so distracted lately,” he tells her.
He drops a hand into the chocolate box, grabs one and bites it in half, offering her the other side. He’s clever too. He didn’t inject two of them. He thought this through.
“In case you were worried they were poisoned,” he says mirthlessly.
Anna smiles, then chews her half chocolate. “You’re funny,” she says carefully, making a joke of it. “Thank you for my chocolates.”
“Do you love me?” Simon asks her suddenly.
Anna rearranges her face into surprise. She has been asked this question before, many times. The answer is always the same.
“Yes. I love you. And I still want to marry you. One day.”
Simon looks down at his hands. He is thinking about the smell of chopping up her body already. He hates the smell.
“Anna. Stop. Just stop, okay.”
Something falters, like a glitch, in Anna’s expression. But it doesn’t matter because Simon is not looking at her anyway.
“What do you mean, honey?” she asks gently, rubbing his back.
He lets her soothe him.
“If I opened the door right now,” Simon asks, looking back to her. “If I opened the door and stood back, would you leave me?”
Anna’s expression doesn’t know what to do with itself for a second before it lands on concern.
Anna realizes that Simon knows about the cat. No one is coming to save her, she realizes, her stomach dropping. He is going to kill her.
“Are you okay, Simon?”
“Just stop!” he shouts.
She stops abruptly.
He continues. “The question I am asking you is: If I open the door, would you leave or would you stay in here?”
He knows the answer, of course, but he wants to know if she’ll keep up the ruse to the end.
The room is heavy with silence. Anna’s leg has started jiggling, her insides beginning to vibrate with fear.
“Is this a trick, Simon?” she asks, almost a whisper.
Simon walks over to the door and opens it with his key. He drags the chair from the table and props the door open, then he moves to the farthest corner of the room and kneels down with his hands behind his head.
“Run. Go,” he says, his eyes locking with hers. “If you want to. Now’s your chance to get away. Do you want to stay here with me or not?”
Anna looks to the open door and beyond it she sees the concrete steps rising up toward grass, sky, warm sunshine.
She looks back to Simon, his route to intercept her blocked by various articles of furniture.
And suddenly she is up and running, her movements not as controlled as she would like but her speed desperate.
Her world blurs as she flies toward the door, her bare feet slapping up the stone steps that she has never seen before, and suddenly she is in the garden.
She hurtles toward the glass back door of the house, and inside, her bare feet squeak over kitchen tiles, then up steps toward a hallway she definitely does recognize. The front door is only meters away.
It is Simon’s old house, she realizes, it always has been.
She grabs the latch of the front door and yanks it hard. It does not budge. She tries again. Nothing. Frantically she pulls and pulls, the latch rattling but not opening.
It is locked.
Again, and again, and again, she tugs, her whole body ramming back and forth against the frame.
The sound of heavy footsteps behind her.
The door will not open. It was all a trick, Anna realizes; there was never a way out of here. She should have scaled the garden wall but she didn’t think.
But suddenly she is aware of movement beyond the front door, voices out on the street, people talking, the blurred outlines of figures, then she catches the flash of blue and red lights farther down the road.
Without a second thought she screams and screams, fists pounding on the glass.
They are so so close…if she could only get their attention.
But he is behind her. She turns. He stands in the hallway looking at her. In his hand, a syringe.
“I guess we know now, right?” he says, stepping closer, impassable, unstoppable.
“What?” she whispers, almost inaudible.
“That you don’t want this anymore. If you ever did.”
She knows there are no words that can turn this around, that can give her another second; all that is left is to fight.
And with that, an overwhelming rage boils up inside her that—after almost twelve months of torture, rape, and abuse—he gets to blame any of this on her.
Without a second thought, she dips to the floor, grabs the nearest object, a wrought-iron umbrella stand, and runs full pelt at Simon, leveraging it with every ounce of momentum that her frame can muster.
The heavy metal connects hard with Simon’s chin, the sound of metal hitting bone and teeth.
Simon is knocked back hard. He stumbles back toward the three kitchen steps.
He grabs the balustrade instinctively to catch his fall but she sees it coming and the second monstrous blow lands with a wet crunch on his hand, smashing bone, his grip releasing.
He continues to fall back, grasping out for purchase, as he crashes down the three steps from hallway to kitchen, his head connecting first with the doorframe, and then with the kitchen’s stone floor, with one wet smack.
Anna stares at his unmoving form for a moment, then turns back to the front door. She needs to get out of here before he gets up, but he has the keys.
She looks down at Simon’s pockets.
Like a nightmare, she imagines him bursting back up and grabbing her as she reaches for them. She is crying now, with deep, body-quaking sobs.
She can’t have that, not ever.
She tightens her grip on the metal stand and moves over to him, straddles his prone form, and brings the stand down one last time on his nose, his face, smashing the delicate, handsome features that she fell in love with.
She collapses onto his static body, trembling hands searching his pockets for keys.
She does not notice the sounds coming from the front of the house now, the people shouting, the banging.
Behind her the front door implodes, uniformed police swarm in, and, like in a delirious dream, hands tear her from Simon’s barely breathing body.
She lets them, allowing herself to become soft once more. The cat came through, she thinks to herself. The fucking cat saved me.
Saved by the cat.
She starts to giggle, then the giggles turn into a laugh, before slipping into heaving, shuddering gasps.
She is alive and she is free.