The Moses Stone

37

One of the first things Kirsty Philips did when she arrived back in Britain and had finished unpacking was to drive round to her parents' house. While they'd been away in Morocco, she'd been doing that once every couple of days to check the house, make sure the indoor plants were watered, pick up the mail, check their answerphone messages and generally ensure that the place was in good order.

That morning, she parked her Volkswagen Golf in the driveway of the small detached house in a quiet street on the western outskirts of the city, took out her keys and opened the front door. As usual, there was a pile of envelopes lying on the mat, most of them clearly junk mail of various sorts. She picked them up and carried them through to the kitchen, where she placed them with others that had accumulated since her parents had left the house for what she now knew had been the last time. Her eyes misted at that thought, but she pushed her sorrow aside and began her usual walk-round of the property, inspecting all the rooms one after the other. The last thing she did was go into the lounge and check the answerphone, but there were no messages on it.

She pulled open the door to the hall and immediately came face to face with a man she'd never seen before.

He had a dark-brown complexion and was tall and slim, but strongly built. In his right hand he was carrying a long black tool of some kind, perhaps a crowbar. He looked almost as surprised to see her as she was to confront him.

The intruder recovered first. He swung the crowbar round in a short, vicious arc, the tempered steel bar smashing into the left side of Kirsty's face, fracturing her cheekbone and cracking the side of her skull. It was a killing blow. She felt an instant of shocking, numbing pain, then tumbled sideways, knocked unconscious by the force of the impact. She fell limply on to the carpet, blood pouring from the side of her face where the skin had been brutally torn apart. But that wasn't what killed her.

The major damage was internal, half a dozen blood vessels in her brain ripped apart by the splinters of broken bone. Shards of the same fractured bone had been driven deep into her cerebrum, causing irreparable damage. She was still breathing as she lay there, but effectively she was already dead.

The man looked down at her for a long moment, then stepped over her body and continued walking towards the front door. He'd heard no noise from inside the house before he'd forced the side door, and had assumed that the car he'd seen parked on the drive had belonged to the O'Connors – an assumption he now realized had been erroneous.

He glanced round, saw no sign of any mail, and retraced his steps to the kitchen. He'd have to check each room in turn until he found the package.

On the kitchen table, he saw the post stacked neatly on one side and began searching through it. There was no sign of the envelope he was looking for, so perhaps his boss's deduction had been wrong.

For perhaps a minute he stood irresolute, wondering what he should do next. Who the young woman was he had no idea – a neighbour, a cleaner, perhaps – and already he was beginning to regret hitting her quite so hard. Should he try to shift the body, get it out of the house and dump it somewhere? Then he rejected that idea. He didn't know the area very well, and the risk of being seen carrying her out of the house – or being stopped by a police officer with her corpse in the car – was too great.

He opened the door, glanced around him, and walked away.