Now the only sound in the bathroom was Caitlin’s sobbing, which echoed off the mildewed tiles. Joe couldn’t see her face. His head was pointing the other way, so all he could see was the shower curtain wrapped round the dark triangle of her pubic hair – soaked with urine – and her naked legs, her feet twisted awkwardly, and a bulbous, distorted reflection of the room in the bath taps, showing the two men standing over him.
It took no more than a minute for the third man to return. Joe didn’t know what he was carrying until the other two pulled him back up from the bath again. The man spoke, but his voice was still muffled by the SOCO suit, so Joe couldn’t discern his accent. ‘Do the fingernails,’ he instructed.
‘Joe,’ Caitlin whispered, her voice oozing dread, ‘what’s happening?’
But all Joe knew was that his hand was being lifted towards Caitlin’s face by one of the intruders, who bent his fingernails forward and scraped them two inches down Caitlin’s left cheek.
And suddenly Joe understood.
They were making him scratch Caitlin’s face to put her DNA under his fingernails, to make it look as though there had been a struggle between them. And they were wearing the suits to stop their own DNA from contaminating the crime scene.
Because that was what they were creating. A crime scene.
A murder scene.
Conor’s door opened. He immediately gulped down his tears because he didn’t want anyone to think he was a baby. But it was too late. Charlie’s mum was leaning over him. He could smell her perfume. ‘What’s the matter, my little love?’ she asked in a concerned whisper, stroking his hair.
‘Nothing,’ said Conor, but his voice wobbled as he said it, and he couldn’t stop himself crying again.
‘Homesick?’
Conor nodded.
‘Why don’t we call your mum?’ she suggested. ‘Would you like that?’
He nodded again. He would ask Mum to come and get him. He didn’t want to stay here any more.
Joe’s brain was shrieking at him. If he could just move… If he could just do something… But it wasn’t possible. His horrified thoughts were trapped inside a useless body. He was powerless.
A new sound. The ringing of Caitlin’s mobile phone from the bedroom. The intruders stood perfectly still, obviously listening to the ring, and the faint buzzing as the phone vibrated.
It fell silent.
‘Do it,’ came the order from behind a SOCO suit. ‘Now.’
With every ounce of his being, Joe tried to lash out. But all he showed for it was a hoarse whisper from the back of his throat. ‘No…’
Now he saw what the man had fetched from downstairs: a kitchen knife with a slightly buckled blade of about three inches long. One of his assailants was forcing it into his hand, wrapping his fingers around the handle.
It was only as one of them lifted him under his armpits and another clenched his knife hand firmly that Caitlin appeared to understand what was happening. In an instant she stopped shaking, as though her body was frozen. ‘Joe,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t let them… please don’t let them…’
But there was nothing Joe could do. His eyes were fixed on Caitlin’s face. He thought he had witnessed true terror before. He realized now that he had not.
Charlie’s mum put her phone back down. ‘Oh dear,’ she said kindly. ‘She’s not answering.’
They were sitting in the front room now, Conor in his pyjamas, still sobbing. Charlie’s dad was in his usual place, a can of beer in his hand and a glazed look on his face.
‘Why don’t you have another go at going to sleep?’ said Charlie’s mum. ‘It’ll soon be morning, eh?’
But the suggestion only made Conor cry even more. He had given up trying to be brave. ‘I want to go home,’ he said. ‘I want to see my mum…’
‘Ah, take the lad home,’ muttered Charlie’s dad. ‘We won’t get any peace until you do.’
Charlie’s mum gave her husband a dark look, but then started stroking his hair again. ‘Would you like that, love? Would you like me to take you home?’
Conor nodded.
The shower curtain was not easily punctured.
At first the point of the knife just made an indentation both in the curtain and in the soft flesh of Caitlin’s belly. It needed a sharp yank forward to pierce the plastic, but once it came into contact with Caitlin’s skin, it slid in with gruesome ease.
‘
Caitlin gasped. Immediately blood gushed from the wound. Most of it remained trapped between her skin and the clear plastic curtain, but some of it seeped through the hole and onto the handle of the knife, Joe’s hand and the paper suit of the man controlling him.
Joe’s mind started to spin. He heard Caitlin’s sharp, pained intakes of breath. He felt his hand being pushed downwards, slicing through her belly in the direction of her womb. A distended bubble of intestine slid softly, monstrously, from the gash as his hand was pulled back and reinserted, not into her belly this time, but into the area around her left breast. This was clearly more painful. She shouted out, but her cry faded after only a second as the strength sapped from her.
There was so much blood, most of it still caught between the shower curtain and her skin. Joe tried once more to fight against his paralysis, to take control of his body. It was useless. His assailants were moving him further up the bath now, forcing his knife hand towards the vicinity of Caitlin’s throat.
Their eyes locked. Joe had seen enough people die to realize that life was ebbing from her.
She spoke. A single word. ‘Conor…’
And there would have been no time for Joe to reply, even if he’d been able to. All his effort was focused on trying to stop the intruder from moving the knife forward. For an instant, when the tip of the blade was just three inches from Caitlin’s throat, he thought that maybe…
But it was much too little, and much too late.
The incision of Caitlin’s throat was physically the easiest. There was no shower curtain to get through – just the unblemished skin of her smooth neck. And below the skin, the tight lengths of sinew that required a little more pressure from the intruder, but not much.
Caitlin’s eyes rolled. A disgusting mixture of blood and saliva foamed from her mouth and over the vomit that was now oozing down the side of the bath. Her whole neck was scarlet. As the knife was pulled out, she tried to breathe in. But her windpipe was punctured, and all Joe saw was a little of the blood around the wound being sucked back in, before oozing out again.
‘Enough,’ said one of the men behind him.
Joe felt himself being dropped, the knife still in his hand. His head hit the side of the bath before he crumpled to the floor. All he could see now was the pedestal of the basin, the toilet next to it and three pairs of SOCO-suit-clad feet walking out of the bathroom and into the hallway.
He could hear a sinister gurgling sound from the bath.
It lasted no more than ten seconds. And then there was silence.
A small spider crawled out from behind the basin’s pedestal. It scurried in the direction of the bath and out of Joe’s field of view.
His left leg twitched. Movement. He tried to manoeuvre it consciously. Still nothing.
Something was happening on the landing. He didn’t know, and couldn’t see, what. And he almost didn’t care. The horror of the past few minutes was burning his mind. He kept seeing the knife entering Caitlin’s body, kept seeing the blood piss from her wounds. Kept hearing her last, strangled, desperate word.
‘Conor…’
He felt his body jerk. The leaden numbness of his muscles was dissolving. Was the injection wearing off?? He tried to move again. His knife hand shifted an inch. But no more.
