Need You Dead

12 Wednesday 20 April

He was calming down now; an hour had passed, he realized, as he strode along the Hove seafront promenade by the Lawns, passing the beach huts, heading back towards the King Alfred leisure centre. A plan was forming. Apologize. He knew what he had to say to her, to convince her that he really was going to leave his wife for her.

He was sorry he’d lost his rag. He never normally lost it, ever. She knew that. All the sympathy he had shown her over these past lovely months. All those afternoons and early evenings when they had lain in bed, entwined, talking about that monster, Corin, and their future together.

Please, please don’t let her have made that call. Please. Please don’t. My career. God, my career.

He realized he needed to hurry back, to stop her.

They’d both been mad, totally out of character; she’d bloody started it. But surely they could work through this, sort it out? She had been angry, OK, he could understand. It wasn’t the way it looked, really it wasn’t. He’d explain to her, when they were both calmed down. Then everything would be how it always had been between them.

He loved her. He wanted a life with her. They were soulmates. So often he had told her that and she’d looked into his eyes and said the same back to him.

He reached the block of flats, let himself in the front door and climbed the stairs, not wanting to risk getting stuck in the lift. Lorna had once been stuck in it for three hours.

Back inside the flat, he closed the front door and called out, a tad apprehensively, ‘Lorna? Darling?’

Silence.

The room was dim, with no lights on and no music playing.

He didn’t like the silence.

Nor that he could not see her.

‘Lorna?’

He pressed the light switch on the wall but nothing happened.

‘Lorna!’ he called out again, walking towards the bathroom. ‘Lorna, darling?’

Had she left? Gone home?

Oh God, Lorna, please still be here.

Then, entering the dark bathroom, he smelled burnt plastic. Where on earth was she? Shit. He felt sick with fear. He went back into the living room and dialled her phone. Seconds later he jumped as he heard it vibrating right behind him.

His panic deepened.

She always had the phone with her, on silent. So they could talk whenever she could get away from Corin.

He switched on the torch app on his phone and went back into the bathroom, walking slowly. Slowly. Pointed the beam at the water.

Saw the cable.

And froze.

Lorna lay back in the tub, where he had left her. Beneath the surface of the water. Looking utterly, stunningly beautiful.

Utterly motionless.

The hairdryer in the bath with her.

No. Oh please, no.

His heart plunged down through his insides. He saw the cable, and the blackened plug socket.

Noticed again the acrid smell of burnt plastic.

He dived for the socket and yanked the plug out of it.

‘Lorna!’ he cried. ‘Lorna! Lorna!’

Christ. Had he done that? Had it fallen in, during his earlier fury?

He tried, desperately, to replay exactly what had happened. No, surely not, it wasn’t possible, was it? He hadn’t done that?

Please, God, no!

He lifted her out of the bath and laid her on the sitting-room floor, kneeling on the carpet beside her. There was still some daylight outside, just enough to see in this part of the flat. ‘Lorna? Lorna?’

He pressed his mouth to hers, frantically trying to recall everything he had learned about CPR in the last refresher course he had done, and began to alternate mouth-to-mouth breathing and chest compressions, a rhythmic thirty pumps, two breaths, thirty pumps, two breaths, thirty pumps, two breaths, his panic growing deeper by the second.