Doctor Who_ Warchild - Andrew Cartmel [26]
Jessica squared her shoulders, turned the key and strode across the threshold. Her first impression on entering the small house was of total silence. It immediately confirmed her worst fear, and she realized that in some tiny corner of her heart she’d been harbouring the hope that this was all some kind of mistake, that Roy would be here, waiting for her.
Roy wasn’t here.
No one was here.
She stepped into the hot, quiet house, locking the door behind her. Her second impression was that someone had failed to take the waste-bin out of the kitchen. An over-ripe smell hung, faintly detectable, in the warm stale air. But Jessica knew she had emptied the kitchen bin. She’d done it just before she left.
She pushed through into the kitchen.
White and blue. That is how the kitchen had looked to her during that terrible night. She had been clearing up endless fragments of blue glass from the bright white tiles of the floor. And that was the image of the kitchen that had remained locked in her mind since she left. Bright blue scattered on the stainless white.
But now, in some kind of nightmare reversal, the clean white kitchen tiles were splashed with red.
Bright jagged slashes and splashes of red, her spotless kitchen floor transformed into a giant canvas in some ruthlessly modern art gallery; snow-white background with monstrous angular splashes of intense red.
A network of jagged red splashes, and there at the centre of them—
‘Roy.’
Jessica felt a dire caving-in of emotions in some central portion of herself. She looked at the shape on the floor and, despite everything, she immediately recognized it as Roy.
And following on that recognition came a flickering instant of intense joy and relief.
Because this explained why Roy hadn’t turned up at the airport. He hadn’t abandoned her at all. He just couldn’t make it.
And swifter still, flooding into her mind to drown that joy and relief, came an agonizing shock of animal pain and loss.
Jessica made a small sighing sound and fell to her knees, banging them painfully on the cold white tiled floor.
She didn’t feel it. She reached out to touch Roy and then drew her hand back and studied the sticky patch of blood it had suddenly acquired.
How could this have happened?
She looked away from the torn body. Who could have done this to Roy? She was standing up again, getting to her feet and even going to the sink and washing her hand.
Moving like a life-sized mechanical doll dressed as an airline stewardess.
Jessica’s mind slowly began to function again.
Something about a phone. Something she had to do.
Something one always had to do in situations like this.
Use the phone. She had to use the phone. Jessica carefully dried her hands and went back out to the hall. She was numb, as if she’d shrunk into a tiny replica of herself, lost deep in her body and forced to operate her own limbs by remote control.
She stepped into the hallway, closed the kitchen door with one long distant arm, turned on her tall remote legs, walked a few steps.
Her bag was on the floor by the front door where she’d dropped it. Where she always dropped it, with a sigh of relief, when she first got home.
She bent over, moving very carefully, in case her head might come loose and roll off her shoulders. She bent over to pick up her bag and get the phone out of it, so she could call the hospital, call the police, call whoever one called in situations like this.
It was as she was bending over that Jessica suddenly realized something else was wrong.
The silence as she had stepped through the front door.
Something was wrong. Not just Roy. Something else was missing.
As Jessica reached for the phone she remembered the old woman in the car. Mrs Woodcott’s face in the moonlight as she went on and on, talking about the invisible enemy.
The trusted servant. Taken for granted. Ignored. The killer within.
Jessica had the phone in her hand now, but she wasn’t even aware of it. She had realized what else was missing and she was