Aftermath

“You made a mistake in judgment and it almost got you killed.”

“Do you think she would have killed me if you hadn’t come?”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know. I’ve got a lot of thinking to do. But Lucy was… she was as much a victim as anything. You weren’t there. You didn’t hear her. She didn’t want to kill me.”

“Maggie, for crying out loud, will you just listen to yourself! She murdered God knows how many young girls. She would have killed you, believe me. If I were you, I’d put the victim thing right out of my mind.”

“I’m not you.”

Banks took a deep breath and sighed. “Lucky for both of us, isn’t it? What will you do now?”

“Do?”

“Will you stay at The Hill?”

“Yes, I think so.” Maggie scratched at her bandages, then squinted at Banks. “I don’t really have anywhere else to go. And there’s still my work, of course. Another thing I’ve discovered through all this is that I can also do some good. I can be a voice for people who don’t have one, or who don’t dare speak out. People listen to me.”

Banks nodded. He didn’t say so, but he suspected that Maggie’s very public championing of Lucy Payne might well tarnish her ability to act as a believable spokesperson for abused women. But perhaps not. About all you could say about the public, when it came right down to it, was that they were a fickle lot. Maybe Maggie would emerge as a heroine.

“Look, you’d better get some rest,” Banks said. “I just wanted to see how you were. We’ll want to talk to you in some detail later. But there’s no hurry. Not now.”

“Isn’t it all over?”

Banks looked into her eyes. He could tell she wanted it to be over, wanted to stand at a distance and think it through, get her life going again – work, good deeds, the lot. “There still might be a trial,” he said.

“A trial? But I don’t…”

“Haven’t you heard?”

“Heard what?”

“I just assumed… oh, shit.”

“I’ve been pretty much out of it, what with the drugs and all. What is it?”

Banks leaned forward and rested his hand on her forearm. “Maggie,” he said, “I don’t know how to say this any other way, but Lucy Payne isn’t dead.”

Maggie recoiled from his touch and her eyes widened. “Not dead? But I don’t understand. I thought… I mean, she…”

“She jumped out of the window, yes, but the fall didn’t kill her. Your front path is overgrown, and the bushes broke her fall. The thing is, though, she landed on the sharp edge of one of the steps and broke her back. It’s serious. Very serious. There’s severe damage to the spinal cord.”

“What does that mean?”

“The surgeons aren’t sure of the full extent of her injuries yet – they’ve got a lot more tests to do – but they think she’ll be paralyzed from the neck down.”

“But Lucy’s not dead?”

“No.”

“She’ll be in a wheelchair?”

“If she survives.”

Maggie looked toward the window again. Banks could see tears glistening in her eyes. “So she is in a cage, after all.”

Banks stood up to leave. He was finding Maggie’s compassion for a killer of teenage girls difficult to take and didn’t trust himself not to say something he’d regret. Just as he got to the door, he heard her small voice: “Superintendent Banks?”

He turned, hand on doorknob. “Yes.”

“Thank you.”

“Are you all right, love?”

“Yes, why shouldn’t I be?” said Janet Taylor.

“Nothing,” the shopkeeper said, “Only…”

Janet picked up her bottle of gin from the counter, paid him and walked out of the off-license. What was up with him? she wondered. Had she suddenly sprouted an extra head or something? It was Saturday evening, and she had hardly been out since her arrest and release on bail the previous Monday, but she didn’t think she looked that different from the last time she’d been in the shop.

She climbed back up to her flat above the hairdresser’s, and when she turned her key in the lock and walked inside she noticed the smell for the first time. And the mess. You didn’t notice it so much when you were living in the midst of it, she thought, but you certainly did when you went out and came back to it. Dirty clothes lay strewn everywhere, half-full coffee cups grew mold, and the plant on the windowsill had died and wilted. The smell was of stale skin, rotting cabbage, sweat and gin. And some of it, she realized, turning her nose toward her armpit, came from her own body.

Janet looked in the mirror. It didn’t surprise her to see the lank, lifeless hair and the dark bags under her eyes. After all, she had hardly slept since it happened. She didn’t like to close her eyes because when she did, it all seemed to play over and over again inside her mind. The only times she could get any rest at all were when she’d had enough gin and passed out for an hour or two. No dreams came then, only oblivion, but as soon as she started to stir, the memory and the depression kicked in again.

She didn’t really care what happened to her as long as the nightmares – sleeping and waking – went away. Let them kick her off the Job, put her in jail, even. She didn’t care as long as they also wiped out the memory of that morning in the cellar. Didn’t they have machines or drugs that could do that, or was that only something she’d seen in a movie? Still, she was better off than Lucy Payne, she told herself. Paralyzed from the neck down in a wheelchair for life, by the sound of it. But it was no less than she deserved. Janet remembered Lucy lying in the hall, blood pooling around her head wound, remembered her own concern for the abused woman, her anger at Dennis’s male chauvinism. Appearances. Now she’d give anything to have Dennis back and thought even paralysis too slight a punishment for Lucy Payne.

Moving away from the mirror, Janet stripped off her clothes and tossed them on the floor. She would have a bath, she decided. Maybe it would make her feel better. First, she poured herself a large gin and took it into the bathroom with her. She put the plug in and turned on the taps, got the temperature right, poured in a capful of bubble bath. She looked at herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. Her breasts were starting to sag and the lard-colored skin was creasing around her belly. She used to take good care of herself, work out at the police gym at least three times a week, go out for a run. Not for a couple of weeks, though.

Before dipping her toes into the water, she decided to bring the bottle and set it on the edge of the tub. She’d only have to get out and fetch it soon, anyway. Finally, she lay back and let the bubbles tickle her neck. At least she could clean herself. That would be a start. No more off-license clerks asking her if she was all right because she smelled. As for the bags under her eyes, well, they wouldn’t go away overnight, but she would work on them. And on tidying up the flat.

On the other hand, she thought, after a good long sip of gin, there were razor blades in the bathroom cabinet. All she had to do was stand up and reach for them. The water was good and hot. She was certain she would feel no pain. Just a quick slit on each wrist, then put her arms underwater and let the blood seep out. It would be like going to sleep, only there would be no dreams.

As she lay there wrapped in the warmth and softness of the bubble bath, her eyelids started to droop and she couldn’t keep her eyes open. There she was again, in that stinking cellar with Dennis spurting blood all over the place and that maniac Payne coming at her with a machete. What could she have done differently? That seemed to be the question that nobody could, or would, answer for her. What should she have done?

She jerked to consciousness, gasping for breath, and at first the bathtub looked as if it were full of blood. She reached out for the gin, but she was clumsy and she knocked the bottle on the bathroom floor. It shattered on the