‘What did you do?’ she bellowed, and slowly rose to her feet. However, her legs suddenly gave way and she fell back onto the sofa. She steadied herself before attempting, and failing, to rise up again. I walked towards her as she tried to comprehend what was happening to her body.
‘The powdered sedatives I baked into your muffins appear to have kicked in,’ I began. She glared at me, bewildered at first, before uneasiness slowly spread across her wrinkled face. ‘They’re not all “store-bought”. Let me take this first,’ I continued. I snatched the Dictaphone from her weak grip and dropped it into my pocket.
‘Let’s set the record straight about a few things, shall we?’ I reached into my bag to remove the leather driving gloves Tony had left in the garage at home. ‘You and my husband will never get your happy-ever-after. You will never be allowed to expose me and what I have done to anyone. You will never understand why I do it or what it’s like to hear a person’s last breath, because you don’t have the capacity to feel in the way I do. You don’t respect the fragility of human life like me. You’ll never know how the beauty of death equals the beauty of birth, or how those first and last gasps of air are exactly the same. You don’t know any of this because you don’t help people. I help people. I save them from themselves.’
I pulled the gloves slowly over my fingers and palms, and felt inside my bag again until I found what I was looking for.
‘When a person is breathing their last, everything they have done in their life, every success or failure they have ever enjoyed or suffered, no longer matters because we are all equal. Good or bad, saint or sinner, you or me, one day we will all be on a level playing field. I have been fortunate to have been asked many times to be the only person who will ever hear that sound. And while you haven’t asked me directly, I can only assume you won’t object when I take it upon myself to be here for yours.’
Janine’s face was awash with fear. The sedatives made her limbs heavy and her vision blurred. But she could still feel scared. Before she could formulate another word or raise her arm to defend herself, I swung a hammer clean into her windpipe.
The first blow left a dent the size of a ten-pence coin, but the collision of metal and skin and cartilage was more like a soft thud than the crunch I’d expected to hear. Her eyes were open saucer-wide as her nervous system sent pain signals to her brain. The sedatives were affecting her coordination, so when she instinctively tried to move her hands to protect her throat, they hovered hopelessly by her sides instead. She gasped for air through her broken windpipe, slowly suffocating.
I held the hammer above my head again and waited for her eyes to meet mine. I needed her to understand the first blow wasn’t a one-off before I directed the second strike to just above her eye socket. This time I heard the crack I’d wanted and the skin split open like a sausage. There was little movement at first, and then her head began to judder involuntarily like she was having a seizure. Her dilated pupils remained focused on mine, and after ten seconds or so, the fit came to an end.
Janine was still conscious when the third blow hit her slap bang on the top of her head, like I was hitting a nail into a floorboard. Her eyes rolled back in their sockets, and I knew that with one more strike it would be over. But I didn’t want her dead just yet.
I lowered myself next to her on the sofa and leaned across her, blood from the wound on the top of her head trickling down her face and onto my cheek and neck. There wasn’t as much of it as I’d imagined, though.
I rested my ear as close as I could to her lips so that, between the loud palpitations of my heartbeat, I could just about hear her in the last moments of life. It was as if all my senses were being stimulated in unison: everything I saw, heard and felt was magnified, from the scent of metal in her blood to the sound of her fingertips delicately tapping the fabric of the sofa. Janine’s breathing, already barely audible, became lighter and lighter until I could no longer feel it against my ear. And then, with one last tiny expiration, her body shut down completely.
At first, I couldn’t move. My mind was completely blank and I went into a kind of refractory period. I allowed myself a few moments for my high levels of adrenaline to lower and for my pulse to slow before I continued with the next stage of my plan. There’d be plenty of time for reflection in the future.
I clambered to my feet and indulged myself with one lingering look towards Janine’s motionless body. Everything that evil bitch had put me through almost felt worth it in order to steal her last breath.
I needed to act fast. I used the hammer to break the padlock that separated the appointments room from the derelict building next door. I wiped her blood from my face, ear, neck, hair and chin with a packet of wet wipes, then from behind the sofa I removed a bag with an identical set of clothing to that I was wearing and changed. I dropped the soiled clothes, my notebook and Tony’s gloves into a bin liner, slipped on a pair of latex gloves and left Janine’s body to begin livor mortis and her brain cells to die. I left the door ever so slightly ajar.
Inside the neighbouring building, I affixed a new padlock to the door to delay the inevitable police search. The torch on my phone guided me through the darkened corridors until I reached the rear entrance. With two firm whacks, I broke the lock to the rear door, then dropped the murder weapon on the floor. And, after double-checking I’d missed nothing, I left the building. I removed the pair of man’s-size running shoes I’d been wearing to leave impressions on the dusty floor, and slipped my own back on. I screwed up a photograph and tossed it into an overgrown grass verge. Then I slid open a one-way bolt on the gate, put the latex gloves in my bag, clutched the bin liner, checked the alleyway was clear and walked home.
Once there, I threw both sets of clothes I’d worn that day on a hot wash – the first of three cycles I’d put them through – while I showered. Tony’s gloves and running shoes had been buried in a shoebox in the field behind the house.
Then I sat at the breakfast bar in my cosy dressing gown and slippers, and poured myself a glass of Rioja. There was still so much to be done, so I started typing a list on my phone. As a company director for Tony’s insurance brokers, I earned a regular monthly wage for doing nothing but remaining quiet about where we’d found the money to fund the business in the early days. So, first I would hire a decorator to repaint and paper the walls scarred by the fire, then I’d have to find a gardener to bring the overgrown rear garden into some semblance of order.
I’d need a glazier to replace the boarded-up bifold doors that Ryan had smashed, then make an insurance claim. I’d probably earn some compensation from him when it went to court. Then once the house was back to how it used to be, it’d be ready for Tony and the girls to move back in.
I put my phone on charge, ready for the influx of calls I was soon to receive about Janine’s death. ‘Oh my God, no,’ I said out loud in many different ways until I found a tone that sounded believable.
I glanced at the clock on the oven; Janine must have been discovered by now. The police were likely already there, and waiting for a forensics team to suit up and search our building along with the premises next door. That’s where they’d find the hammer I’d stolen from Ryan’s flat when the estate agent wasn’t looking. I’d spotted it on a sideboard and was careful to slide it into my bag using only the sleeve of my jacket. Tests would reveal it to be covered in Janine’s blood, hair and skin, and Ryan’s fingerprints.