Chapter Forty-Eight
Forty-Eight
When Beverley comes to, eyes blinking groggily, she realizes she is being dragged somewhere by her feet.
Her arms are trailing behind her head. She opens her mouth to scream, but nothing comes out.
She tries to kick her legs, to thrash her arms, but it is as if she is no longer the owner of her body, she no longer has a say in her skin or her organs.
He is in control of her flesh. He can do what he wants with her. He always could.
He will kill her. She is sure of that. She just does not yet know how.
She hopes that Margot came back for Elsie, that they got Enid out, that they are safe somewhere far away from here.
She knows she has only minutes left in this body, only minutes more of this hell.
Her children flash into her mind: Benjamin and Audrey chasing each other around the pool; Benjamin grabbing his tiny feet, his gorgeous little toes, on his changing table; Audrey dancing so unselfconsciously while Beverley sits, grinning, on the sofa.
She smells her mother’s perfume, feels the soft crepiness of Alice’s skin, sees the light slanting in through the church window onto Henry’s face on their wedding day.
She didn’t think it would end like this—with her becoming a victim herself—but she supposes, through the final fogs of her life’s breath, that there is some poetic justice to it.
Through warped swells and pulses of sound, she can hear Roger muttering something.
She strains her ears, although part of her wants to give up, wants to close her eyes and let the calm roll in.
But she should know what he says before he kills her. She owes it to the girls to hear those words.
She catches only partly formed scraps of sentences as Roger hauls her toward a pile of boxes, then bends to lift the top half of her body into a seated position. He wants her to watch what he is about to do.
“…ruin it all…” she hears him say. “Nosy bitches…” Each time she blinks, she is amazed that her eyes open again, that her body is still fighting.
Blink.
Roger is moving across to the pipe at the center of the room.
Blink.
He is holding the shears, the ones Elsie used to cut Enid’s wrists free.
Blink.
He lets them dangle at his side as he inspects her.
Blink.
Is it pity she sees in his eyes?
“You should have realized, Bev, that no one knows how to think more like a criminal than a cop.”
Blink.
He stands at his full height and takes the handles of the shears, opening the arm-length blades and waving them close to her neck. This is it, then, is it? This is how she dies, her neck severed like one of the sunflowers in the garden?
There is a noise coming from somewhere else in the room, but Beverley cannot locate it. Her thoughts are drifting—to sunshine, to flowers, to air.
There is a bang, a loud one, and Beverley wonders if it’s that, a bang, and not angels’ singing, or children’s laughter, that one hears when one dies.
It comes again, like a car backfiring. She can still see Roger above her. She can see his face, the cold shock upon it. He looks down at his chest. There is a black spot there, opening and opening and blooming red. He turns his head slowly. Beverley’s gaze follows his.
There is someone standing at the foot of the basement steps.
Enid.
She is holding a gun—presumably Roger’s. She must have known where to find it, Beverley realizes with her last breath—under their bed, in the top drawer of his desk, in a safe in the living room…
As Roger crumples to the ground, Enid speaks, the words rattling but strong enough.
“And you should have realized, Roger, that no one knows how to think more like a cop than his wife.”