Chapter 24
‘Maybe we should’ve just opened the car door and bashed him in the face with the poker there and then,’ Audrey offers, shifting in the plastic seat.
‘In front of the neighbours?’ Teddy enquires, archly. ‘And I’m not sure the angle of the poker would’ve been particularly effective inside a car. It’s probably quite hard to beat someone to death inside a confined space.’
‘I know the freezer bags were too small,’ Audrey offers thoughtfully, ‘but maybe I could’ve tied two together and pretended we were doing our sex stuff in the car?’
Teddy’s sigh comes by way of answer.
‘Is it just me,’ Ivy begins anxiously, ‘or are we, like, really bad at this? Like, super, aggressively awfully catastrophically bad at the whole thing?’
‘It’s not just you,’ Teddy inhales heavily. ‘I thought we’d be a lot better at murder. All that planning and talking things through, and we couldn’t even find him.’
Audrey places a comforting arm around Ivy. ‘We’ll regroup, my darling, and have a rethink. We just need a better plan.’
Paula leans a tired head on Teddy’s shoulder. ‘At least I let his cat out as we left,’ she offers and they all smile at one another. That is something.
They’re at a private clinic in London, positioned somewhere between Teddy’s apartment and the scene of their nightmare visit to kill Dominic Shipman.
As they drove away in what should’ve been the getaway car, Teddy put in a call to her concierge doctor service about Ivy’s foot.
Paula listened in amazement as Teddy’s on-call private doctor offered on loudspeaker to meet them at the apartment in the middle of the night to assess the injury and arrange treatment.
There was talk of a private X-ray service arriving in a mobile unit with a radiologist and a physio on board.
Paula thinks of her next-door neighbour, Samira, who had to wait six months to find out a bone in her knee was broken, and that she needed an operation, having made things worse by walking on it the entire time. It is astonishing stuff, money.
Ivy refused the doctor’s offer though, insisting they head straight to a clinic instead. A private one, but an A she’s doing something to help Gemma.
Paula feels so much better.
‘Come on,’ Audrey says kindly to Ivy, helping her limp out of the clinic and out into the cold night air. Paula stops for a moment as they reach the car, taking in all the darkness around them. Teddy’s getting the abuser arrested and they don’t have to kill him.
‘Thank you,’ she says to Ivy and Audrey sincerely, wondering when she was last out with friends at this hour of the night. Certainly not in decades. Probably never, if she’s being honest. She was never much of a night owl or a wild party animal, not even in her youth.
‘For what?’ Ivy says, looping an arm through hers and nuzzling in.
Paula shakes her head, unsure what she meant.
This has been the most exhilarating night of her life.
There were so many highs and lows. So many joyous and terrifying firsts for her.
And on top of all that, they’ve actually managed to help someone who needed it!
Not to mention punish an Evil Bastard who deserved it.
Her whole body is abuzz with adrenaline.
It has all gone wrong tonight, but also so right.
And for the first time in her life, Paula was right there, at the heart of the action, wearing silly estate agent booties.
They deserve at least a four-star review on Amazon for that.