How to Kill Men and Get Away With It(14)

Joel jolts a little and looks at me.

‘Isn’t that disgusting and disrespectful?’

‘Yeah, it’s not a great way of ending things,’ he says. ‘I’ll do better next time. Promise.’

‘I think you should call her,’ I say. ‘And explain.’

He pulls an expression somewhere between exasperation and annoyance. ‘Kitty, this is getting a bit weird now to be honest. Maybe you should go.’

‘Not until you call her and tell her the truth. She was devastated. Don’t you care?’

‘No. To be honest. Why are you so stuck on that? Men and women meet on apps, they fuck, they move on. It’s not a big deal.’ His phone is on the side of the sofa and I make a grab for it.

‘Call her,’ I tell him.

‘Don’t be mental, Kitty. Go home.’

‘CALL. HER.’ I’m serious now. I open the contacts on his phone, surprised it’s not locked, and swipe through names like Anal Daphne, Big Tits Kayley, Smelly Muff Erin, Mental Maisie. I’m thrown for a moment as Joel lunges at me to get his phone back. He knocks me to the ground and I bang my head on the fucking Farrow & Ball monstrosity.

‘Give me my fucking phone back, you mad bitch.’ Joel’s sitting on my legs now, pinning me to the floor. I can’t move. Apart from behind me. I make a grab for something from the bookcase of horror, which happens to be the metal Burj Khalifa, and – closing my eyes – I swing it in Joel’s direction. The force of the thrust stuns me and I’m surprised by the noise it makes as it connects with his head. I was expecting a thud, but it was actually much wetter – like dropping a watermelon. I know then that it’s bad. Joel hits the floor with a short howl of pain.

And then silence.

I force my eyes open and see that I’ve managed to hit him straight in the face, the long spiny tip of the tower totally impaling his left eye. Surprisingly, there isn’t much blood, just a sort of fluid leaking down the side of his face. But he’s dead. There’s no doubt about that.

Fuck.





10


JOEL’S PARENTS’ HOUSE, GREENWICH, WITH A DEAD BODY

Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.

Don’t panic, don’t panic. This can be sorted.

I think.

I drink the wine, which isn’t the best idea but I need to calm myself down. I take some deep breaths too. Centre myself. In a front room. In fucking Greenwich. With a dead man.

I drink Joel’s wine too. Breathing alone won’t cut it here.

I need to get him out of here.

I need to get me out of here.

I run into the kitchen and rummage through some drawers before I manage to find some bin liners. I take them back through to the lounge and struggle to put one over Joel’s head to stop any gunk leaking onto the carpet. But I almost scream with frustration as it takes me about a hundred years to get one open.

Then I empty the bottle of wine and shove it in my bag, before washing the wineglasses up and, making sure my hands are covered with a tea towel, hanging them back on the rack with the others.

I tentatively attempt to pull the Burj out of Joel’s eye, but it’s stuck in a lot harder than I realise. In the end I have to give it a proper knee-on-his-chest yank to get it out. Having grown up around gore, I find it usually takes quite a lot to gross me out but even I recoil at the bits of brain and eye on the top of the tower. I dry heave as I wipe it on my dress (Ganni, annoyingly) and shove it in my bag, glad I had the foresight to bring the Chanel bucket instead of a clutch.

I have to get him into my car somehow. House to car with no one seeing. A grown man. And the phrase ‘dead weight’ is not a fucking exaggeration by the way.

Then I have a brainwave. I do so love it when my brain kicks into gear like this. Joel’s parents are on holiday, but he’s not. So, there should be at least one suitcase upstairs. I pull the sleeves of my cardigan (Lulu Guinness, ethically sourced wool) over my hands as I make my way upstairs with trepidation.

The front bedroom is Joel’s parents’, so I stay out of there. The first room is the main bathroom, and it is unsurprisingly suitcase-less. But the second bedroom proves more fruitful. I spot a large-ish case squashed into a space next to a standalone wardrobe and grab it, noting a hopeful condom on his bedside table as I leave.

Oh, to have the confidence of a very average white male.

Getting a body into a suitcase isn’t much fun as bones have to be snapped and I have to sit-bounce on it quite a bit to get it to do up, even then. But finally he is packed and all I have to do is get the suitcase into the boot of my car. Still not easy. Particularly when it’s full of some of my weirder purchases like a diamanté sombrero, a pair of roller-skates and some sort of dismembered mannequin, from when I was going through my 1920s Paris décor stage.

I get into the driver’s seat and gingerly reverse off the drive, unsure where I’m going.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. What the hell am I supposed to do with him? I only wanted to get some answers for Maisie and now I have a corpse in my boot and a murder weapon – a tacky one at that – in my bag.

I drive around for bit, clutching the steering wheel for dear life, desperately trying to think of something to do with the body. What do people do with bodies? Burn them? Throw them into the Thames? Feed them to pigs?

The solution comes to me so suddenly that I laugh. I do an actual LOL.