Left You Dead

53

Feeling completely hollowed out, Roy and Cleo sat in the Relatives’ Room eating some kind of pasta with plastic forks. Macaroni, linguine, fettuccine, penne, whatever. Although they’d not eaten for hours, neither of them had any appetite.

‘I just can’t believe it. He’s that bad... this is awful, darling.’ Cleo’s voice was breaking up and she started crying again.

He hugged her tight.

She bowed her head for some moments, then looked up at him, sniffing and wiping her tears. ‘Look, I wasn’t going to tell you this, not tonight anyway, but maybe you should hear it before you see it for yourself.’ She fell silent.

‘See what?’

She shook her head. ‘Forget it, I shouldn’t tell you. Now isn’t the time.’

He looked hard at her. ‘You can’t leave me dangling. What is it? Tell me?’

She shook her head. ‘I shouldn’t have raised it, not tonight.’

‘Well you have,’ he said, his anxiety rising again. ‘So what is it? Tell me, please?’

‘Bruno’s two favourite hens, Fraulein Andrea and Fraulein Julia.’ She looked at him flatly.

‘Yes, what about them?’

Hesitating again, she said, ‘I went out this morning to let them out. But I couldn’t find them anywhere. So I looked inside the hen house thinking they might be broody and sitting in nesting boxes. They were in there.’ She looked at him with a strange expression.

After some moments, Roy Grace said, ‘Broody, as you thought?’

She shook her head. ‘No, Roy. They were dead.’

‘Dead?’

She nodded.

‘Poor things. It said in that book you got that sometimes they die suddenly and young — often when an egg gets stuck. Is that what happened — they got egg-bound?’

She gave him a resigned look. ‘I wish I could say it was.’ She shook her head again. ‘But I don’t think getting an egg stuck would do that to Andrea and Julia.’

‘What is it? What aren’t you telling me?’

‘Both had their necks wrung, their heads twisted round the wrong way.’