Splinter

38

‘What sort of surprise?’ Benny asked quietly, and this time it was he who expected no answer from Valka as he walked slowly along the passage. The way his ear was burning, he might have been on the phone for two hours.

‘She’s waiting for you in the bathroom.’

Benny’s terrible presentiment hardened into certainty. There was someone in his flat.

The bathroom door was ajar. He pushed it open and peered in.

‘Jesus Christ.’ His instinctive reaction was to look away, but he overcame his initial shock and hurried inside.

She was naked, fourteen years old at most, and lying motionless in his bathtub. Her arms were folded behind her head and her wrists imprisoned in the far too tight handcuffs with which she’d been manacled to the shower pipe. Her small breasts were dappled with discoloured patches, some of which looked like bruises, others like burns. Issuing from between her legs, which were shackled together by the ankles, a red stain was spreading across the white enamel.

‘That’s Magda. She comes from Bulgaria.’

‘You filthy, fucking psychopath.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

Benny felt her pulse but could detect nothing.

‘Why? Why did you do it?’ he demanded over the sound of Valka’s laughter.

‘Come, come! I had nothing to do with it. It was an accident. These things happen when my friends indulge in a little horseplay.’

‘Why?’ Benny yelled the word louder still.

He touched her thin face and began to weep, ran his forefinger over her split lips and sensed, with every fibre of his being, the mental and physical torment this girl must have endured in the last few days of her wretched existence.

Valka, by contrast, sounded quite unconcerned.

‘She’s my insurance, just in case you imagine you can somehow pin that muck-raking journalist’s death on me. It won’t be so easy when they find the girl at your place. That is, unless you think the public prosecutor condones serial murder?’

Benny buried his face in his hands, breathing spasmodically. His fingers – the fingers that had just touched Magda – seemed to smell of death. The fact that he knew her name made everything even worse.

‘In half an hour I’m going to call the police,’ Valka went on, ‘so you’d better hit the road as soon as possible. Because, believe me, even if you managed to dispose of the girl in time, you certainly couldn’t get rid of the traces of DNA that have trickled down your plughole.’

With that he hung up, leaving Benny in a mental torment for which there was no relief. He sat down on the edge of the bath and started to tremble all over. Afterwards he couldn’t remember how long he’d sat there. Although it felt like an eternity, only a few minutes might have elapsed before he heard footsteps in the passage.