Two Evils: A DI Charlotte Savage Novel

Creepy, creepy, creepy-crawlies. Little black ticks running over my naked skin. Flies swarming in the air. I slide onto my front, burying my face in the softness of the pillow, but it’s no good, I’m awake now and can’t settle. I roll over. I realise there’s only one fly, not a swarm. Just one fly buzzing against the window. One too many. I don’t like flies. They give me nightmares. Flashbacks. I can recall every last detail. The smell of the sea. The sound of the surf. The blood on my hands.

I blink. The fly is still hurling itself against the window. I stare at the insect and wonder. Something isn’t right. I push myself up from the bed and swing my legs down onto the rough wooden floor. I walk out onto the landing and down the corridor. I knock on the door.

No answer.

I knock again and then turn the brass doorknob. The hinges creak as the door eases open. Inside, the window is unlatched, swung wide, the white net curtains billowing like waves breaking into a sea of foam. Sunbeams flicker in through the window and across the floor to the bed where she lies unmoving. I creep to the bed and where the sunlight strokes her face I bend and brush her cheek with my lips.

Nothing. I try again, this time pressing harder against the dry, cold skin. No reaction, not a twitch. Her eyes remain resolutely shut as if she is determined not to be disturbed by anyone ever again.

This time the creepy-crawlies are real. A dozen flies swarming in the air. I open all the windows hoping they’ll go away. No such luck. More come, following their noses, the promise of decay drawing them in.

She’s begun to smell now, the weather warming, the summer heat growing by the day. Pieces of flesh lie loose on her face and her bare flabby arms and her room is full of insects. Droves. Swarms. Hordes. An odour of rotting cabbage, urine and meat gone bad permeates throughout the house. I sit at the foot of her bed and cry.

The next day I rip up a dozen oak floorboards in her room. I fashion a coffin from the ancient planks. I’m good with tools. Woodworking. Metalworking. I kiss her on the lips one last time, aware as I do so of her cheek twitching and rippling. Maggots beneath the skin. Consuming her.

I roll her in a sheet and pull her from the bed and into the coffin. Slip, flop, thud. The coffin is heavy and I slide it from the room and down the stairs. Outside, I balance the coffin on a wheelbarrow and weave my way out to the orchard. Then I dig down into the soil and rock and bury her beneath the apple trees. A leaf flutters from above and falls into the grave like the first flake of snow in winter. Inside my chest my heart has turned to ice.

Breakfast is a gruel of cold porridge served with a wooden spoon in a cracked bowl. A drop of honey sweetens the goo, but not the day. On the table beside the bowl is a notebook. My diary from years ago. I found the book in her room. Why she kept it I don’t know, but perhaps in some small way what was within helped her to understand where things went wrong.