Thicker Than Water

She told us about the first time: about how Kenny had found her and Roman in flagrante, in the climactic phase of a hastily snatched knee-trembler in the flat’s poky kitchen.

She’d been doing the ironing before the sex got under way, and it was the iron that Kenny used to kill her. She was still turning, trying to disengage herself from Roman’s embrace when it hit her, and that was the last she knew. But Kenny carried on hitting her for a long time after she was dead. She knew that because .

. . well, because she’d seen the results. Later.

She woke in the ground: a burning splinter of consciousness filled with fear and urgency, not knowing why it had no eyes to see with and no hands to claw its way free from the undefined place where it was caught.

She did the zombie thing, but the zombie thing didn’t work. Her own body was mostly pulp, bones broken in so many places her insides were like the kids’ game of PickUp Sticks.

But Roman’s body was right next to her, and Roman had been killed with a single stab wound to the neck.

She didn’t know why Kenny had dropped the iron and used a knife: maybe it was a kitchen knife that Roman had picked up to defend himself and Kenny had turned against him. It didn’t matter, anyway. Roman’s spirit had gone on to its eternal reward, and his flesh was lying there with a TO LET, UNFURNISHED sign figuratively pinned to his chest."

"Anita moved in, and sat up. Kenny had buried them in his allotment, and he hadn’t troubled to bury them deep because he was the only one who ever went there.

She carefully replaced the soil so there was no sign of what had happened,Öe h and went off to settle accounts with her bastard husband.

But she wasn’t sure how exactly she should go about it. She didn’t feel she could go to the police because she had no way of proving who she was. She didn’t even know whether the born-again could give evidence in court, or whether she’d be allowed to walk free again once she’d brought herself to the authorities’ notice.

Was taking Roman’s body actually a crime? Would she be dispossessed and kicked out into nothingness? She couldn’t let that happen.

And she’d spent longer underground than she thought she had: almost a full year, in fact, which was why there was no change in the weather to warn her. When she got back to the Salisbury, it was to find Mark already dead.