She became the perfect woman. His perfect woman.
Anna’s mother had been a problem obviously. The woman in West London sent him a text when Cynthia arrived at her door.
But she had ultimately been easy to sort out; some people really were too easy.
Simon moves Frankie’s body inside, and considers once more keeping her, moving her in. Once Anna was gone from the room, there would be space for Frankie.
Frankie would learn to like it, eventually; he could tell she would be more resilient than Anna, she would adapt to her new life better than Anna ever had—for all Anna’s efforts, he could always see the sadness behind her eyes.
But the logistics were too complex; he would need to get rid of Anna first.
With a fizzle of interest, he wonders if he could keep both, together down there, but then that would be too dangerous; he would be outnumbered.
No, he could not keep Frankie.
And he would need to end Anna’s life now, too. It was all too risky. He’d sort Anna out then take her, small piece by small piece, to the hospital incinerator, on his out-of-hours shifts at the local emergency care unit.
He could always find gaps there, patient lulls in the early hours before dawn, without too much fuss, turn the cameras away and do what he needed to do.
Life was so much easier for him now that he was older, and had more control of logistics. In his late teens, with Melissa, he had to concede that luck had played the largest role in covering his tracks. Luck and a lack of modern technology.
Now you could track everything.
He’d watched Frankie search the street for Anna’s room, on the door camera, and go into Matt’s renovation house. Then she’d scaled two walls and the abandoned house next door to his to reach him, and Simon let her come, he’d waited for her to walk right in.
It would be so easy to keep her. She’d already gone missing from another man’s house. No one had followed after her; he’d seen the actress on the man’s doorstep, heard Frankie’s phone ring after Aoife left.
If someone were coming, they would have come quickly.
He lifts Frankie’s phone up to her face and peels back her eyelids. The screen unlocks. He scrolls through her text messages. There are hardly any back-and-forths since she moved in nearly a week ago. The few there—group chats and work-related messages do not concern him—are all just polite, general, surface nonsense.
He swipes through videos looking for the cat camera footage and finds a hastily recorded video, clearly taken from another recording. It shows the basement window, a blurry bruised Anna, her startled expression. He taps another: Anna holding up a message.
Simon tuts. There she is, he thinks, the real Anna, the one who doesn’t want this anymore. But he knew that already. Simon deletesthe recording, without watching more, then, raising Frankie’s eyelids again, opens the deleted folder and deletes it from there too. She will have the real footage on her computer at home, he concedes; he will deal with that when he gets to it. Whatever she has on her laptop, he’ll destroy. Next, he opens her emails, to see if she mentions any of her cat recordings to anyone at all, though his estimation of her psychology was pretty clear the day she cried in the chair opposite him and begged him for something to help.
From what he can see, she has not disclosed any of this to anyone. A more in-depth analysis will follow, but he begins to wonder if he might actually be able to keep her, after all. It might be possible—safe, even.
He could take her bank cards, as he did with Anna, use them here and there, continue to pay her bills. Well, some of them. Eventually the mortgage would lapse, the house would be repossessed. But people ran out on their lives all the time. It was clear from looking at her emails that she was in the middle of accepting a job offer; but he could simply change her mind for her. He would amend her medical record to suggest “concern for her well-being” after her appointment. And as with Anna, he would intermittently post to social media on her account, continuing in whatever style, in different locations, with flowers, coffees, old selfies, and then they too would peter out.
He wonders what Frankie would be like if he kept her.
She would hate him, at first, of course; she would miss her old life, and she’d desperately try to get back to it, but that would fuel her. Her hope would keep her going. Simon could use freedom as a lure and a threat, always available at hand.
Simon wasn’t a bad person, not deep down, he knew that, even if the facts suggested otherwise.
He feels sick that he does what he does; it haunts his dreams and mires every waking hour. He wishes he’d never met Melissa, that this had never started, but it did.
Sometimes, he argues to himself that perhaps what he has done to Anna is not really so bad, in the great scheme of things—historically. Their living arrangement wasn’t so different really to what married men did to their wives in the 1950s, in Victorian times, in time immemorial.
Simon thinks of himself as a feminist—in essence, he believeswomen are equal to men,better,even. But the thing is, he also wants to share his life with a woman, and keeping them like this was, unfortunately, the only way that could work for him, long-term, given his past and the things he has done.
He wishes relationships could be easier; he wishes women would stay with him of their own free will, but they don’t, he knows that, they all eventually run.
So, Simon considers Frankie and the choice of whether to keep her or get rid of her. Surely it is better to let someone live than kill them, isn’t it?
But if he can’t keep her, she could be easily taken care of in the same way as Anna’s mother, he reasons—just another lonely woman, unhappy with the way her life had panned out. He has her pills already.
People were so keen to believe the story that women give up all hope. Funny really—given in Simon’s experience, women almost never give up hope, even when there is realistically no hope left.
