Page 74 of To All the Men I’ve Killed Before

She rolls her eyes and holds it out of my reach. ‘Chill Bill. I’m obviously not really recording, am I?’

‘You’re twisted,’ I say.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I take after my big sister.’

I can’t argue with her on that one.

‘Seriously though,’ I say. ‘How are we going to clean this mess up? There’s no way we’re going to be able to get all that blood off. There’s not enough bicarbonate of soda in the world.’

We stare at the pool of blood that has spread like an angry oil slick over the couch and walnut floor.

‘Cleaning’s not really my thing,’ Antoinette muses.

No.

She prefers to leave that part to me.

‘Well, we can’t stage a suicide, for obvious reasons.’

We stare at the gaping hole in Richard Stone’s neck.

‘We’re going to have to make it look like an accident,’ Antoinette says.

‘What? He accidentally skewered himself through the throat? With an ice pick?’

She shrugs. ‘He could have fallen on it,’ she says. ‘Everyone knows the home is the most dangerous place in the world.’

‘Hmm. A freak accident in the home.’ It could work.

I just need to think with the creative part of my brain.

I walk over to the bar area and am impressed by the size of it. It’s got everything. Including a dishwasher.

A story I read online recently pops into my head. A news feature about a man who’d fallen in his kitchen and accidentally impaled himself on a knife that was blade up in the cutlery bit of the dishwasher. I look around the bar. There are knives here, ones he obviously used to cut up the lemon earlier. A plan forms in my brain.

‘Antoinette,’ I say, ‘bring the ice pick over here.’

She does as she’s told and I use my shirt to wipe it clean. No blood, no fingerprints. Then I open the dishwasher, which is full of dirty glasses and cutlery, and pop the ice pick in, sharp side facing up. I add the knife he used as well.

‘Okay,’ I say, ‘now we need to drag his body over here.’

He’s not the lightest man in the world but we are able to drag him across the smooth flooring without too much trouble.

‘Right,’ I say, ‘now we need to flip him over and get the ice pick in his neck hole.’

Trying to manoeuvre the body of a grown man onto such a precise point isn’t the easiest thing but after some ‘to me, to you’-style back-and-forthing we manage it.

‘There we go,’ I say to Antoinette.

‘Ooh, wait,’ she says and, covering her hand, knocks a bottle of vodka over so all the liquid trickles onto the floor.

‘What are you doing?’ I ask her.

‘Making the floor slippery,’ she says. ‘So dangerous in here.’

Not bad.

I stand back and admire our handiwork.