Simon
He watches Frankie drift inand out of consciousness. The amount of medication he’s given her should have been sufficient to keep her under. He has had to wait several hours for the cover of dark to do what he needs to do next. But it has given him time to prepare.
He is not keeping her, he has decided. She is too close to home—best to start fresh.
He pours more of the mixture into her mouth.
Her prescription will show up in her blood work, postmortem, an overdose, accidental or deliberate.
She’ll be easier to manage in another ten minutes, he estimates, then he can keep her topped up for as long as it takes to get her where he needs her.
As he slips an arm under her shoulder and lifts her to sitting, propping her against his kitchen counter, something in her pocket clanks onto the ground next to his foot. A small can of self-defense spray.
Simon picks it up with a gloved hand and pops it into the bin bag beside him.
He fishes around in her other pocket, pulling out the palm-size rape alarm. He flicks open the battery housing and tips out the batteries, then adds all of it to his bag as well.
Getting her to and from the car will be the hardest part. But it is already past eleven on a Sunday night and it is finally dark now.
Out on the quiet street, living rooms no longer flicker with Sunday-night TV.
All Simon needs to do is walk Frankie out his gate straight into the passenger seat of his waiting car, drive her two blocks, and walk her into her own house. There he can stage her overdosing body and plant the meds.
Once Frankie is propped up in Simon’s hallway, he heads out to the car and puts his bag of gathered evidence into the trunk.
He scans the street. The sound of a stolen rental bike tick-ticking along a nearby street is audible, nothing else.
He feigns rummaging in the trunk, waiting to see if anyone is around or about to exit their house, but no movement comes from the street.
He knows these streets do not have CCTV. That is why the neighborhood-watch signs were placed at intervals on lampposts down the road, a consolation prize, the notion that someone was watching.
But he got Anna here and kept her here for nearly a year with no one watching until Frankie turned up.
—
He emerges from the house with her, supported, one of her arms draped over his shoulder, her weight cantilevered against his waist. She is a doll, her lax limbs easily misconstrued as something amusing to behold. He makes a little show of talking to her, softly supportive, an empathetic friend to the inebriated.
He gazes down the street, noticing everything, the high-pitched whine of a moped weaving down a neighboring street, a pigeon taking flight from a rooftop three buildings down, the sound of a car door slamming somewhere out of sight.
He deposits her into the open passenger side of the car, the interior lights already disabled. He reaches over and pulls her seat belt across her body. She slips sideways in her seat and he repositions her. She lets out a long groan. He pauses, then clicks her seat belt into position.
Frankie secured, he closes the passenger door and heads to his side of the car, slipping in beside her, a sense of near completion in his mind.
There is no free parking space available directly outside Frankie’s house, much to Simon’s consternation.
He has no choice but to pull into the next nearest spot, the space across the street, outside Number 17, Pam Howden’s house.
The route across the road to Frankie’s front door is clear and accessible.
Simon cracks his door and slips out, taking his time in the evening air while scanning the road.
He knows this road as well as the last: each resident, their habits, their hours.
Aoife’s house is unlit within; she will be out at some photo opportunity or other. She won’t be home until the small hours, and she won’t be up until midday, unless her driver shows up early and has to scrape her out of the house. Aoife won’t be a problem for Simon tonight.
He pops the passenger door. Frankie’s head is propped up as if she’s been sleeping on the curved headrest. He leans in and she groans on the out breath as if in answer, barely audible.
He rises and checks the windows in Pam’s house, but they are darkened, of course. Pam will have returned hours before from her regular Sunday trip to the discounted performances at the opera. Her upstairs curtains are drawn and no light bleeds out from within.
