The Art of Killing, page 16
She bent her eyes to the side to find the source of the sterile light and saw the illuminated screen of O’Leary’s phone through the corner of her eyes next to her pillow facing him. ‘You’d better not be watching porn!’ she threatened, erupting from the haze of her pleasure, reaching over to grab the device.
O’Leary lunged from his folded arms, making an attempt to grab it first, but in his haste, knocked it from her grasp.
The phone slid from the mattress, clattering onto the polished, hardwood floor, and spun beneath the bed.
Sophie pushed him off with an arrogant elbow and scrambled onto her stomach, reaching for the device, her hand feeling beneath the bed until her fingers hit something flat and hard. She fumbled it into her grasp and lifted it clear of the dust bunnies and cobwebs. O’Leary made another grab for the phone, but she slapped the hand away.
The screen had gone to sleep. She stroked it awake again, and looked…
Her emerald eyes widened, shook, and hardened. A hesitant hand moved to cover her mouth, comprehension of what she was seeing taking a moment to hit home.
Sophie’s jittering pupils shrunk away to dots in an attempt to block the horror of what was emblazoned on the screen just inches from her face.
‘What is this?’ she hissed, as she scrolled through the album of aberrations.
She began to shiver, then shake, her breath stuttering. She tore her disbelieving eyes away from the phone long enough to front O’Leary. ‘What in all that’s holy is this?’ she said, turning the phone towards him. She began to weep. ‘How did you get these?’
O’Leary looked panicked and guilty, but strangely unashamed.
A flurry of confused thoughts began to jostle for order in Sophie’s mind, delivering a clarity she’d rather have denied. His changing moods; his hermetic manner; the days he’d worked late, and how she now realised they coincided with the dates the children were reported missing.
She started to sob, then cry, as though she already knew the repugnant answers to the question ‘How did you get these?’
Her tear-glistened face crumpled to the realisation that she was naked, alone, and defenceless in bed with a total stranger.
She looked to the phone again and the surreal image upon it… a photo of the headless body of a child, sliced along its entire length and suspended by wires, its face peering from within the shadows of its spatchcocked body, shocking her stampeding mind into submission.
O’Leary sat like a cornered bird at the foot of the bed on folded knees, panicked eyes flitting from face to phone, extending tentative, involuntary reaches for forgiveness and understanding. ‘You don’t understand, you can’t understand,’ he said. ‘It’s God’s work, God’s will, he’s in me, Sophie. I have to do this!’
She shrunk against the headboard, trying to meld with it, frantically attempting to create distance between herself and O’Leary’s insanity. ‘It’s you! Oh dear God, it’s you! You’re the one. Y-Y-You killed these children!’
O’Leary looked lost, condemned, almost pathetic. How could this man she’d known for fourteen years be the monster the world had been seeking?
She turned to the phone again, stuttering fingers fumbling desperately at the screen for further evidence of her inability to judge character. Feeling the cold denial like crippling indigestion. But she needed to know, to know the truth, however repugnant.
New pictures appeared behind her unsteadied fingers, of a girl, young, cut into neat cubes on a tabletop, her severed head sitting to one side and looking strangely calm, almost alive. She recognised her from pictures on the news: it was the Tweets girl!
She went limp, buckling under the force of the awe and the trauma. What would, or could, she do?
She turned her attention back to O’Leary who was now kneeling bolt upright, face eerily calm, passively threatening eyes peering at her from beneath squinting, torpid lids. ‘Dat’s a shame dat is,’ he said, his voice slurring thick Irish like he’d been drinking. ‘I’ve been meanin’ ter meet ye, moi boy seems to loik you, and I thought you’d be good fer him, and then, you had to go and foind dat. So now, Oi caan’t be lettin’ yer leave, now, can I?’
Sophie recoiled from the stranger’s words, looking back at O’Leary’s inquisitive gaze. She didn’t recognise anything of the man behind the eyes, and she knew she’d have to make a run for it, naked or not.
She started to shudder. ‘I loved you,’ she sobbed into the dim-lit room, her chattering jaw drowning in tears. ‘W-Whyyyyyy…?’
O’Leary slow-lifted a shrug to a tilted head, a dismissive blink, he was almost smiling. But which one was it? Kieran, or Conor? The answer came and hit her hard. ‘Only moi boy can answer dat one, but since you won’t be seein’ him again, I suppose it doesn’t really matter, now, does it?’
‘Oh, pleeease, I– I don’t understand,’ she sobbed, ‘I… I don’t know…’ She suddenly switched to flight mode and hurled the phone to the farthest side of the room.
O’Leary’s head snapped right in time to see it clatter off a chest of drawers.
Sophie sprang from the bed, clambered to her feet, and stumbled towards the door.
She was out and on the landing before O’Leary could react, dashing for the staircase, her terror-weakened legs barely able to hold her weight.
Tears fogging her vision, she fled, naked, thumping down the steps towards the front door. She missed a footing and careened down the final four treads on her heels, her ankle folding beneath her like a deflated tyre, and she sank to the floor with unexpected elegance, clutching her foot.
With a grimace, she slumped her back against the wall just in time to see O’Leary arriving at the top of the rise, arms spanning the handrails, striding towards her two steps at a time, his face livid and unrecognisable.
She screamed and with a heave, she took to her feet again, limping for the door, ignoring the blinding pain firing through her leg like a skewer through marrow.
She saw her car keys hanging from the hook on the wall, but there was no possible way she could retrieve them and get to the door before O’Leary was on her.
Her hand reached for the lock to the soundtrack of urgent, thudding footsteps. She grabbed the latch, twisted it, and wrenched the door towards her with all she was worth.
She swung a look behind her as she ran for the sliver of night sky peeking through the gap. O’Leary was at the bottom step now and lunging in her direction. She let out a desperate wail, tugging the door shut as she hobbled through the opening and made a run for it.
She sprinted as fast as her twisted leg would allow, screaming into the frigid night air. She could feel the kick of her vocal cords in her throat, her screams filling her head.
The door behind her crashed open. ‘Where da fuck do you think you’re goin’?’ O’Leary growled into the night air.
Sophie’s bare feet stung as they slapped along the pebbled driveway. She could see the road, and the meandering glow of approaching headlights warming the tarmac.
Fast, crunching footsteps behind fuelled another scream, the intervals sounding shorter, faster. He, it, was gaining on her.
The hiss of tyres on the wet road ahead grew louder; she sprinted for the widening fan of light ahead, arms pumping. The feeling of cold air on parts of her body usually clad in cloth felt surreal and cripplingly vulnerable, but she didn’t care; she wanted to live.
The hiss of the tyres was now just metres away, the light ahead intensifying, announcing the car’s imminent arrival.
Sophie screamed with all she had, lungs stinging to the shredding harmonic of her desire to escape a fate that had been orchestrated purely by accident.
Her hysterical screams filled the midnight sky and the rain-soaked foliage of the surrounding trees, looming large in the murk like badger baiters observing a kill.
She was just ten feet from the road now, when a blunt, biting, percussive fist connected with the base of her skull, and the scream became a guttural grunt. She faltered and fell, skidding to a semi-conscious halt on her chin and her chest.
The salty, mineral flavours of the gravel mixed with the metallic tang of blood, filling her mouth as she watched the car fizz past, the tail lights – reflecting off the wet road – dimming along with the sound of the engine, the sound of hope – as if it had ever existed – and in the blink of a desperate eye, it was gone.
All went quiet, save for the throb of a heartbeat in her lacerated chest.
A hand took her hair, gathered it into a bundle and dragged her head around towards the door. Her body curled like a serpent, still stunned by the blow, arms dragging limply by her sides.
She could feel the rip of perimeter hairs tearing from her scalp as O’Leary dragged her towards the house again; she blacked out momentarily at the pain, then woke again to find him stood over her, water cascading off his fringe onto her face. She could see his genitals high above her, and tried raising a desperate kick, but the exertion sent a stabbing pain slicing along her spine and over the back of her skull, and the leg fell limp again.
‘You’ve got fight, A’ll give yer dat,’ O’Leary said, a wicked grin on his face.
She continued to drift in and out of consciousness, O’Leary’s face closer to her own with every evanescent waking moment, until it was just a foot away from hers, and he had his hands tightly wrapped around her throat.
Relentless thumbs dug hard into her windpipe, and she felt her head swelling to the pressure, forcing her tongue from her mouth as she coughed vomit into O’Leary’s gurning face.
She panicked, fear leaking onto the gravel from her supine body and mixing with the rain as she attempted to struggle free, but the weight sat upon her was just too overwhelming, and all she could do was claw desperately at the hard, granite expression looming over her.
O’Leary’s livid lip curled as he squeezed harder. She felt a crack deep in her neck, her windpipe fracturing to the relentless pressure.
She wilted, washing oddly calm, resigned to her fate, desperately praying for him to wring her whole throat, cutting off her carotid artery so that she may at least pass out from a lack of blood to the brain, and save her the fear and humiliation of dying – knowledge left over from her training as a nurse.
But the violence remained focused on her trachea, and she began to drown in her own mucus, eyes reddened, bulging, watching the face at the end of the unyielding arms glower with impure enjoyment as she began to slip under…
Sparking flecks of colour washed O’Leary’s face away into the fingers of darkness encroaching on the periphery of her final, fading view of the world, and with a last, violent, choking squeeze, she was gone…
TWENTY-SEVEN
TERRENCE MANLY LAY listening to the resonant beep of his alarm clock, its relentless, nagging tone clashing in his inner ear. He wondered if the uncomfortable harmonic billowing around his head was the onset of some form of tinnitus – not that he actually knew what that was – or if maybe he had an ear infection? He would try and make an appointment with his GP later in the day, after he’d completed his morning chores.
His interest in the sound subsided, and he reached out to slap the alarm quiet again. The LCD screen displayed 3:55am, burning through the murk like a beacon to his unwillingness to rise. He sighed, and his head slumped back onto the soft embrace of the pillow.
It had been far easier to rally himself when his wife was still alive. She would rise with him as a show of solidarity for the ungodly hours he had to keep as a dairy farmer, making him tea and a slice of toast, heavy with Marmite and delivered with a bleary-eyed kiss to fuel his morning. But without that, without her, it was hard, and only seemed to be getting harder.
He lay pondering the ceiling… Perhaps he needed another wife, another ‘Angela’? Not that anyone could truly fill her shoes, he thought – more out of respect for her death than anything real-world, because in reality, of course they could.
What they’d had together wasn’t particularly special or in any way extraordinary, just satisfyingly comfortable and convenient. He’d treated her well, and she’d appreciated it, and if it wasn’t for the cancer cutting her down so young, they would have been happy to remain that way.
His thoughts turned to Phillipa Trent. She’d shown interest in Manly from the very moment his wife had finally succumbed to that terrible disease. It had felt inappropriately soon at the time, but as time had passed, those thoughts had subsided, and he now felt able to feel alive to how attractive and buoyant Phillipa Trent truly was without the feelings of guilt that, before, had built a wall around his affections.
But would she really be suitable for a life like this? he had to wonder. She did come from a farming family, so it’s not like she was unaware of the hours. The 24-7-365 lifestyle.
He yawned and stretched his limbs awake. No doubt he’d see her down the White Lion on Thursday, maybe he’d ask her on a date? ‘A date,’ he said out loud, mocking the concept. A forty-two-year-old man forced into contemplating a date.
He allowed his eyes to close to the thought of her. She was beautiful, perhaps not in a Cindy Crawford, Ariana Grande way, but in a real-world setting, yes, very. And fun too – that was important.
His hand moved to his crotch at the thought of her full, round lips and come-hither eyes, and the way she would lift an affectionate touch to his shoulder whenever he made her laugh; what more evidence did he need?
‘Nope!’ he said, withdrawing the sinful hand from the warmth of his pyjama bottoms. ‘The other girls need you,’ he said, stretching again.
He rocked his legs to sit up, and stood from the bed to check the weather, see which of his clothes he would be needing for the day that lay ahead: wet-weather nylons; dry-weather warm; or dry-weather light…?
He was hoping for dry-weather light, and after a quick peek through the curtains, smiled…
*
Manly stepped from the door of the farmhouse, clad in jeans and a cable-knit sweater. He had on a T-shirt underneath for when the early morning chill eventually lifted, and stooped for a sip from a steaming mug of tea. His other hand cradled a slice of toast coated in a marbled slick of Marmite and butter.
He turned and carefully hooked his pinky around the door handle, trying not to spill the tea, pulling it shut to keep the heat in and the insects out.
He made his way across the yard and stopped midway. It was quiet. Too quiet?
The field where half the herd currently resided was the one directly adjacent to the milking sheds, and the ‘girls’ would nearly always be standing by the gate awaiting his arrival, or at least close by. But today, their booming calls were distant and sounded complaining.
‘So, why’s that a thing?’ he mumbled, looking about the yard for a valid reason, but failing in his efforts to find one.
He quickly gulped a few exaggerated swallows of the tea and tipped the rest away, setting the mug down on a wall. He folded the toast and wolfed it in just three mouthfuls, wiping his fingers on his jeans as he made his way to investigate.
He crossed the field towards the herd who were gathered at the farthest end looking uneasy, their heads turned towards him, watching his approach. The horizon behind burned vivid orange. They looked as if they were on fire.
‘Come on,’ he clapped, trying to effect movement. ‘Don’t you lot want emptying this morning? A full service and MOT?’ he offered.
The cows shifted uneasily, turning looks to each other for reassurance and solidarity.
Manly rounded the herd and clapped low, the sharp slap of skin on skin kickstarting their reluctance to comply.
A few more claps and a couple of jaunty slaps on some of the more reluctant rumps later, and Manly finally effected compliance.
He escorted the herd to the gate and swung it open, but the cows stopped shy of the posts and stood watching him with puppy-dog gazes.
‘What the fuck is wrong with you lot today? Get in!’ he snapped, swinging a politely invitational but insistent arm towards the adjoining courtyard. Once again, the cows all turned uncomfortable looks to each other, then one by one, began filtering through.
‘Thank you,’ Manly said, sarcasm and relief flavouring his words. He frowned, and with a shake of the head, laughed it off.
Manly lolloped across to the milking sheds, yawning his misting breath into the frigid air, but couldn’t hear the coconut-husk sounds of hoof-on-cobble that usually serenaded his journey.
He stopped and turned to observe the sea of pleading faces shrinking away from the shadows of the sheds, watching him from the gate. ‘What is going on? What the hell is wrong with them this morning?’ he asked. He stretched his neck long to do a quick head count, to see if there were any missing… ninety-six in this group, ninety-eight in the top field. He counted ninety-seven; he must have counted one of them twice, but they were definitely all present and correct.
Manly shrugged it off, and turned to fire up the equipment; he felt sure the herd would follow as soon as the sound of the pumps began, eager to unload their heavy burdens.
Something had obviously spooked them. Maybe that feral dog Bill Tomlinson had been talking about down the pub two nights ago?
Manly stretched over one of the holding pen fences and slapped the switches for the lights. They flickered on one at a time, warming the straw-covered floor in popping pools of fluorescent radiation.
Manly twisted a curious look back at the huddle of cows as he made his way along the central corridor that dissected the rows of milking bays. He laughed at their new behaviour, finding mirth in their clandestine weirdness.
His progress was halted by something blocking his route. He stopped, and turned, swiping instinctively at whatever was hanging across his path, stumbling back from the obstacle.
The surprise melted from his face, and his skin turned ashen, his expression now mimicking the cows’ . Manly fumbled back, aghast at the new addition to his farm, woven defiantly across the path of his daily routine.
