The Guilty Couple(86)
‘Mate!’ Smithy steps closer. ‘What are you doing with that shitty old burner phone? You can afford a gold-plated iPhone now if you want!’
I laugh and pick up the phone. ‘A gold-plated iPhone? This is worth much more than that.’
Chapter 56
NANCY
Nancy is lying flat on her back on a mattress so thin and uncomfortable she wouldn’t give it to a dog. She’s trying to remember the words to ‘You’ll See’ by Madonna in an effort to block out the sounds of the health wing of HMP Bronzefield: the groaning, the moaning, the sniffing, the coughing and the swish-splosh-swish of the cleaner’s mop. When that doesn’t help she returns to her favourite subject: planning her escape.
She’d come to on the cold tiles of Dominic’s kitchen to the sound of hammering from elsewhere in the house. Moments later a team of uniformed officers and plainclothes detectives burst into the kitchen and stared at her in surprise. She told them she’d discovered that Dominic Sutherland and Olivia, his ex-wife, had murdered Olivia’s lover Jack Law and that Dominic had attacked her after she’d threatened to tell the police. Then she burst into tears and said she couldn’t move her legs.
The part about her legs was true. The tears were all part of the act. The doctors in A&E asked her lots of questions about her medical history and what had happened, examined her and then sent her for a CT scan. The doctor who spoke to her afterwards was grim-faced. The pain Nancy had been feeling in her leg before the incident was due to bulged discs and, when Dominic had thrown her against the wall, the discs had ruptured and were lodged in her spinal cord. There was only a sixty percent chance she’d regain the use of her legs after spinal fusion surgery and she’d require months of rehabilitation. The police returned, several hours later, and she was interviewed under caution. Seventy-two hours after that she was arrested and given a police guard. She tried to joke with him that she wasn’t exactly going to run off, but her attempt at humour fell flat.
She wiggles her toes under the thin prison blanket, then, keeping an eye on the cleaner in the corner of the room, rolls her feet inwards and then back out. When everyone’s asleep at night she’ll get out of bed and do a few laps of the ward.
It’s been a couple of months since her operation and, despite some pretty intensive rehabilitation, she’s still paralysed from the waist down. At least that’s what her therapist and the guards think. She’s also in pain, terrible, terrible pain, so bad she screams the ward down and requires a morphine injection.
It’s irritating, drifting into an opioid haze, when she’d rather keep her brain sharp and alert, but it’s all part of her plan. Since she arrived at HMP Bronzefield she’s been a model prisoner – polite, helpful and patient – but all the while she’s been watching and listening, mentally noting the details of the guards’ comings and goings and when the health-wing nurses clock on and clock off. She knows that agency staff are used to cover sickness and that the staff on the front desk have different shift patterns. That means the same person who checks an agency nurse in, won’t necessarily be the same person who signs them out.
Nancy smiles a self-satisfied smile as the cleaner’s swish-splosh-swish grows closer. All she requires to action her escape plan is a morphine injection, snatched from a nurse’s tray. She’s already hidden some bandages to use as restraints and, once she’s jabbed the next agency nurse that attends to her, she’ll strip her of her uniform and pass, then dress herself up and make her way to the exit and sign herself out.
She takes a deep happy breath and closes her eyes. She’s made so many wonderful plans for when she gets out. The first thing she’ll do is write to Dominic. She won’t see his expression as he reads her carefully coded message but she’s got a pretty good idea how he’ll react. She chuckles to herself as she pictures his face – the dropped jaw, the wide eyes and the surge of anger that will flush his whole face red.
She’d realised she was on borrowed time with Dominic long before Jack came on the scene. The first flush of their affair was over: the longing, the anticipation, the frenzied shagging was gone. They no longer ripped each other’s clothes off the moment they were alone, and Dominic had stopped ogling her as though he couldn’t believe his luck. Their plan had been to divorce their respective partners and set up home together but Dom had itchy feet, she could feel it. He’d already started making excuses why he couldn’t see her: working late, doing something with Grace, a trip to the gym. Sex no longer bound him to her the way it once had. She needed something weightier, more permanent to keep him in her life.
The solution came to her as Dominic ran up the stairs to get his phone and Jack, bleeding and silent, stared up at her from the fireplace with fear in his eyes.
The only thing more powerful than sex was death.
Jack tried to fight her off as she pinched his nose shut and clamped a hand over his mouth but his injuries had made him weak and his arms became tired, glancing off her body before they dropped to his sides. When Dominic returned with his phone Nancy was forcing out tears.
‘You killed him,’ she sobbed. ‘Now what do we do?’
Now, a sharp pain in her shin makes her eyes fly open. The cleaner – a mousey-haired woman with breasts that sit on her waistline – is standing at the foot of the bed holding a pin in one hand and a full bed pan in the other. The smell – of blocked toilets and decay – drifts towards Nancy and makes her stomach turn.