Читать книгу Half Past Dead - Jane Clifton - Страница 10

A clean, wide strip of black-and-white checked lino stretched to the front door like an elongated chequerboard, challenging her to make the first move.

Where was the body? I mean, where is Lawrence? she corrected her thoughts. There was nothing in the hallway now but shafts of sunlight peppered with dancing dust motes. Had she dreamed the whole thing? Was she dreaming now?

Trance-like, she walked to the spot where she had last seen him. Nothing. No body, no blood, no flies.

She stood staring down at the gap between the lino and the skirting board for any sign that, just over an hour ago, a body had been lying there. Don't be ridiculous! she thought. What are you looking for? A fingertip? The end of his shirt? Time to start looking round for the bottle marked 'Drink Me'!

Perhaps he was in the bedroom, she decided, with a complete absence of logic. If he was, he was very quiet. Asleep maybe? Dead to the world? Ha Ha. She almost went to knock on the door, then opened it slowly.

The room was unoccupied and, like the hallway, totally clean. It was as if, during her short absence, Mary Poppins had flown through the window and thrown tidy-up sugar around. Not an object was out of place. Books and magazines were neatly stacked. Every drawer was closed and the bed looked like a display item in a bedding bazaar. There was not a takeaway container or beer can to spoil the effect. The field of shoes had been reduced to three pairs, lovingly reunited and dust-free, the rest probably tossed into the built-in wardrobe.

No Lawrence, however. No body.

Was it possible that he wasn't dead, after all? Was there, in fact, a God? And had He sent her a guardian angel?

She sat on the edge of the bed of her undoing. She hadn't actually checked that he was dead, had she? She hadn't laid a finger on him. Specifically, not on his pulse or his heart, say. Hungover, guilt-stricken and filled with drunken remorse, she had taken one look at his body, jumped to the worst possible conclusion and fled the house in fright.

Okay, so there was blood which she assumed emanated from a fatal head wound, but he was lying face-down. She hadn't seen his face or even a wound, for that matter. He could have fallen and hit his head hard enough to knock him unconscious. Maybe it was a neighbour's door that had slammed? The speeding car could have been coincidental. Dammit, he might have had a nose bleed and a bump on the head! For all she knew he was one of those people who fall asleep without warning, what are they called?

He could have keeled over, then, after she ran away, revived, tidied up and taken himself off to a doctor. Or, even better, have had no ill-effects at all. He was probably at Arthouse right now wondering where she was.

Of course he wasn't dead. Dead men don't clean houses! Neither do living ones, she conceded, but that was hardly the point. There was every possibility that he was not dead. She was off the hook... well almost... the fact that he wasn't dead was a big plus. If she had to explain her behaviour last night to anyone, at least it wouldn't be as a suspect in a murder investigation. She sighed. It was going to be okay. If she never saw him again it would be too soon but at least he was 'undead'. For the first time that day she felt like eating.

But she still had to find the necklace. There was no point in searching the bed as it was newly made, with fresh, plain brown linen. Perhaps he had found it and put it away somewhere. She opened one of the drawers. Empty. She opened another, then another. All empty. The wardrobe too was bare, except for the ubiquitous tangle of wire coathangers. Had the room been stripped or were the drawers and cupboard empty to start with?

She recalled that Lawrence wore a reasonably large range of clothes, but there was no evidence of it in this room at all.

She lay on her stomach so that she was eye-level with the floorboards, and looked in all directions, including under the bed. No sign of a necklace. No suitcases or storage boxes. No dust either. The room was spotless.

Someone had done a professional job on this place and done it in the hour it took her to travel home, shower, change and come back again. Lawrence could certainly afford a cleaner on the salary Dexter was paying him and that made much more sense than the idea of the same man who lived in the pigsty she had visited last night bouncing up this morning after a spot of concussion and whizzing round the house with a vacuum cleaner. What about the blood in the hallway? That would take some explaining, wouldn't it? Well, not if he was alive.

All the same there was something not quite right about this theory. The cleaning job was too perfect. Clinical, even. On the other hand, what did she know about cleaners, other than wishing she had one? Maybe this was how her house would look if it were done properly instead of the rush job she threw at it every ten days or so. Maybe this was standard?

Lawrence or his cleaner must have found her necklace then. Either way, she concluded, she would get it back. Confident that further inspection of the rest of the house would bear out her theory, she closed the door on a room she hoped never to see again.

Back in the hallway she was aware once again of the faint hum. Now that it could no longer be a posse of blood-crazed blowflies, and with Boyd's handkerchief stowed in her pocket, she headed in the direction from which the noise seemed to be coming.

Into the kitchen, which was, as she had anticipated, gleaming. The bin was empty and relined with a new bag. The hum emanated from a large airconditioning unit on the wall; hence the slight chill she had felt on re-entering the house, the icing on the perfect cleaning job.

She started to laugh.

She laughed at her stupidity, her panic and her wild imagination. The same imagination, she realised, that had dreamed up the whole crush on Lawrence in the first place, the same imagination that made her such a talented designer. On the wrong day, at the wrong time, that imagination was a liability. She laughed long and hard as relief flooded through her, then walked back up the hallway to the bathroom. This time she would use the toilet, without fear of encountering Lawrence, or anyone else who might walk in. She no longer had anything to fear or anything to explain.

Having a pee, however, was an excruciating experience. White-hot, it brought a wave of nausea and no sense of release. I just need to eat something, she thought.

In the lounge room she realised that the difference she had noted earlier was a slight rearrangement of the furniture, and that the videos in the milk-crate had been returned to Blockbuster.

She saw the cat again in the laneway, sleeping on its side, its tail idly flicking away flies. It stirred at the sound of the gate and bounded over to her like a long-lost friend. She bent to stroke it but it flicked its head, sunk its fangs into her wrist and took off with a yowl. Ronnie pulled back her hand as blood oozed from the scratch and she felt her stomach tense up all over again. 'Relax,' she said, steadying herself. Then, wrapping the handkerchief around it, she carved her way through the heat to the sanctuary of her air-conditioned car.

Each time they hit a bump, his body thumped and rolled around the boot. Even so, Lawrence Konitz felt that the car was travelling at a modest speed: no point in attracting unwelcome police attention, particularly during the holiday speed blitz.

It was dark and suffocating and his back ached from the trussing which bound his hands to his feet behind him, the rope cutting deeper into his wrists with each jolt. He suppressed waves of nausea, not wanting to choke to death behind his taped mouth. The gorge reflex was something he'd learned to control at an early age.

He should never have come back. He knew the risks, knew she'd find him, but he hadn't counted on it being this easy.

The last thing he remembered was going downstairs to take a piss, leaving Ronnie Collins alone in his bed. As he walked towards the bathroom, a noise behind him made him turn and cop a blow with a heavy object to the right side of his head which laid him out cold.

Lawrence regained consciousness but not vision, as four rough arms silently bound his limbs and carried him outside. He heard the sound of a car boot being opened and, just as he was being turfed into its cramped interior, the evil-smelling cloth that covered his head shifted just enough to catch sight of a huge head with a baseball cap, aviator sunglasses and a gold-capped grin.

'It's your lucky day, cunt,' it rasped. 'You got a date with a lady.'