Killing for the Company

She inclined her head slightly, then let the towel fall. It dropped heavily to the floor to reveal her slim, delicately curved body, her pale skin and her small breasts.

Chet glanced over to the door. It was still wedged shut with the chair. He turned to look at Suze. She was lying on the bed, and finally managed to give him a nervous smile.

‘Look after me,’ she whispered.

Chet hesitated for a moment, but then, without another word, he went to her.

As the rain fell in the Brecon Beacons, it also fell on the southern outskirts of London. It kept most visitors away from the Greenacres Retirement Home, a recently, and cheaply, built establishment next to the main road through Morden. In truth it hardly took freak weather conditions to discourage visitors to this place. The corridors were starkly lit and smelt of disinfectant and hospital food. There were no stairs, but lifts and ramps to enable wheelchairs to move around the buildings. The day room was decorated with floral curtains and dark carpet tiles. Channel Four News was playing on the TV, even though there was nobody there to watch it; at this time of the evening all the clients of Greenacres were encouraged to be in their rooms. It was easier for the poorly paid, often temporary, often Eastern European staff that way.

In Room 213, on the second floor overlooking the main road, an old lady sat in her wheelchair. It was dim in here — only a low-voltage bulb in a bedside lamp lit the room, but she preferred it that way. Her eyesight was deteriorating, and she found that bright lights almost blinded her.

Her right foot and ankle were swollen and wrapped in a bandage to protect the sores on her skin. She had decided a long time ago that it was easier to stay in the wheelchair all day than haul herself in and out of the armchair that was, with the exception of her single bed and a glossy pine dressing table, the only piece of furniture in her sparse room. A pink hyacinth — her favourite flower — was blooming on the windowsill behind her. Its fragrance went some way to disguising the institutional smell of the place, but the old lady wasn’t thinking about that. She was holding the telephone against her ear, and she was clearly flustered and confused.

‘I… I don’t understand dear,’ she stammered. Her voice was as frail as the thin hands that held the receiver.

The old lady frowned as she listened to the voice at the other end.

‘But… but… where are you? What do you mean, you can’t visit me? I don’t understand. Hello? Hello? ’

She looked at the phone. And then, with frightened and perplexed eyes, she let it fall from her hands and squinted up to see the other woman in the room with her, half hidden in the shadows behind the door.

‘Stay quiet, or I’ll kill you.’

It was clear to the intruder that the old woman was confused, struggling to understand who she was and why she was here. It was perhaps the strangeness and uncertainty of her situation as much as the Beretta Model 70 semi-automatic aimed at her head that was now distressing the old lady.

‘Your daughter?’ the younger woman asked.

The old lady shook her head but she was too scared to keep the pretence up for long, and after a few seconds a pathetic little mewing came out of her lips, accompanied by a trembling of her whole body.

The woman put a mobile phone to her ear. She waited a moment before saying a single word. ‘Traced?’

The reply was equally curt. A male voice that belonged to someone she had never met and never would. ‘Traced.’

She put the phone back in her pocket and returned her attention to the old lady. She was still making fretful little noises. Still shaking. But she had the presence of mind to reach for the body of the phone — an attempt, the woman presumed, to call through to reception and alert them to the intruder in her room. It was a moment’s work to pull the phone from her weak hands and place it out of reach on the dressing table. The mewing grew a little more desperate.

She needed to be killed, of course. That much was obvious. She had seen the intruder’s face and knew what she was after. A gunshot was out of the question. Often the best you could do was mislead people about the cause of death. So it came quite naturally for her to look around the room in search of a more subtle instrument than the Beretta.

It didn’t take her long.

The old lady’s dressing table was neatly arranged. Two fading family photographs of a young girl and an older man, a hairbrush, a bottle of Nivea skin cream and a Tupperware box containing an array of medication. The woman looked through the box, discounting the vitamins and the cod liver oil and paying attention to the less benign drugs. The bottle she finally selected was made of brown glass and bore a printed pharmacist’s label. Warfarin. One capsule to be taken once a day, it instructed, and — in stark, bold letters — ‘in case of overdose seek immediate medical attention’. She shook the bottle. It was almost full.