Like Clockwork

47

Cathy King went upstairs to her daughter’s bedroom. She had been sleeping in India’s bed ever since they’d found her body. She had given Portia the weekend off. Brian would not be back for a long time. She was alone. She put the tape she had brought with her into her dead daughter’s video machine and took the remote to the bed with her. If she pushed her face deep enough into the pillow there still was the faintest trace of the smell of India. Underneath the scented cleanliness traces of India lingered, a once-grubby, sunshine-warm child.

Cathy wrapped one thin, scarred arm around the pillow, pulling it against her breast. She looked at the bolt on the inside of her daughter’s door, suffused with shame at her own weakness. Cathy opened the bottle of pills. This she could do. She tapped the pills into her open right hand. They looked like sweets. She dropped them into her mouth, washing the bitterness away with lemonade.

The phone rang deep inside the house. She ignored it as the pills started to dissolve, making her feel ill. She swallowed her nausea. It would take an hour, at most, to free her of the terror and guilt she had endured since marrying Brian King. Cathy lay quietly, remembering her phone call to the pathologist who had done India’s post-mortem. Dr Mouton had gently reassured her that all suspicious deaths – car accidents, suicide, murder – came to him, and that the bodies were kept together in one place. He had answered her questions patiently, as if he sensed her need to find out, to know all she could as a way of coping with her bereavement. What Piet Mouton told her that day had made Cathy eager for the end. And she felt especially eager now, even as her body rebelled against the pills she had swallowed. At least she knew that her own body would be taken in a van to the mortuary where India lay. India would no longer be alone among the alphabetically ordered rows of corpses, their naked feet flopped outwards, as if napping. Cathy would be there to watch over her. This time, she would not fail her daughter.

The house phone stopped and her cellphone started bleating. Cathy King waited until it stopped, too, before she pressed ‘play’. She did not hear either of Clare’s desperate messages. She settled herself back into her daughter’s bed and watched the film in which she starred, with her husband directing her gang rape. Here in her home. She recognised Kelvin Landman as she watched him twist and rip her clothes. He had been for dinner here earlier. She had served a perfect rack of lamb that night, she remembered. She watched as he used his beautiful knife to carve his initials delicately into her back, her hand reaching instinctively to touch the scar. It was when the credits rolled that she saw the other name. She pressed ‘pause’, understanding quite clearly now who had killed her daughter. Cathy reached for her phone, but the barbiturates tightened their lethal grip on her body. She slid bitterly towards death, the phone falling uselessly to the floor.