The Magpies A Psychological Thriller

Twenty-eight


They had worked out a series of signs. When Lucy and Chris arrived at the top flat, Linda would stamp twice on the kitchen floor. Hearing this, Mary would then ring Jamie, letting the phone ring twice before hanging up. That was his cue.

He sat beside the phone, every muscle in his body tense.

The phone rang. Once, twice. Went dead.

He picked up the key that Brian had given him. His arms felt weak. But there was no way he was going to back out. This had to be done. Chris was a murderer; Lucy his accomplice. Jamie was the only person who could do something about it. He wasn’t really thinking about justice, or the greater good. He wasn’t even thinking about revenge. He merely wanted his life back.

He had decided to wait five minutes before going downstairs. He could imagine Lucy and Chris getting up there then realising they had forgotten something: a bottle of red wine perhaps.. He’d be in the flat and they would come down and find him. He shuddered at the thought.

He watched the clock for five minutes, counting every second, part of him hoping Lucy or Chris would come down the stairs so he wouldn’t have to go through with this. He forced himself to get a grip.

The five minutes were up. He walked out into the hallway, closing the flat door quietly behind him. He opened the front door, gripping the basement flat key firmly in his sweaty palm. It was dark. He had thought about this: it would be OK to turn the lights on in the flat. Lucy and Chris were well out of the way. Unless they leaned out of Brian and Linda’s front window and peered down, they would never see that their lights were on.

He went down the steps to the basement. Now was the first moment of truth. Had they changed the locks since they had moved in? At first he thought the key wasn’t going to fit, but it was because his hand was trembling. It slid into the lock, he turned it and the door opened.

He stepped inside.

He stood in the hallway, thinking that they must surely be able to hear his heart beating from the top flat. There was a strange smell in the air; a smell that had once wafted up to his and Kirsty’s nostrils. He still couldn’t identify it, but it made him feel ill.

The layout of the flat was the same as those above it: living room and kitchen at the front; bedrooms and bathroom at the back. He opened the door to what he knew must be the main bedroom and squinted into the semi-darkness. This bedroom had patio doors which led into the garden. There was something odd about the room. The curtains were open and the moon shone in, creating a little light. It took him a second, while his eyes adjusted, to realise that the room contained only a single bed.

He must have got it wrong - this must be the spare room. And yet when he opened the other bedroom door he saw that this bedroom too only had a single bed in it. Hanging above the bed were pictures of Chris: huge, blown-up pictures. There were tins of men’s deodorant on the bedside table. Mansize tissues; computer magazines. It was clearly Chris’s bedroom.

He closed the door and looked back into the other bedroom. The walls were blank, painted magnolia, no pictures or posters. There were women’s perfumes, make-up on a dressing table, a hi-fi with large speakers. Lucy’s care assistant uniform hung on the front of the wardrobe.

Separate rooms.

He could imagine Lucy lying alone in this bedroom with her phone, recording him and Kirsty making love. Did she get a thrill out of it? Maybe she masturbated while she did it. Was Chris in the room too? Did they play the recordings back for their own private titillation? He felt angry, all of a sudden.

He pulled the door to, a little too firmly. The door banged and he froze, his heart booming. He flicked the light on in the living room, still terrified that Lucy or Chris would appear at any moment and ask him what the f*ck he was doing. It was so strange seeing the place where his tormentors lived. He had begun to imagine them as trolls that lived under a bridge. He thought they would live in some squalid cavern, pages of newspapers stuck all over the walls like the rooms of serial killers in movies. Instead, the room looked perfectly normal with its sofa, armchairs, coffee table and rug – but look closer and there was something ‘off’ about the room. There were no personal touches, no ornaments on the mantelpiece, no books anywhere. There was no mess, no photos of family, nothing that indicated that real people lived here. It was like being in some future museum where a typical early 21st century living room had been reconstructed, but they’d left out all the personal touches, the things that would make it real. There were no wedding photos anywhere either, Jamie noticed, no photos of Lucy and Chris together at all, just a number of pictures of them both on their own. What with the separate bedrooms, it made Jamie wonder if the Newtons’ marriage was a sham. It made a sick kind of sense. Two psychopaths getting together, getting married and living together, but only because they realised they could work better as a team. They were two people who were incapable of love, hugely egotistical – as the pictures of Chris in his bedroom testified – and narcissistic. He shuddered. This place gave him the creeps.

Jamie noticed another strange thing: there were two televisions. One looked like a normal TV – almost the same as Jamie’s, in fact, with a DVD player underneath it – but the other was in one of those old-fashioned wooden television cabinets, with the doors closed. He could see flickering light around the edges of these closed cabinet doors. Weird. He opened the doors of the cabinet.

It wasn’t an ordinary television. The picture was in black and white, grainy and unclear. The present date and time were displayed in the bottom left hand corner of the screen. Jamie realised he was looking at a CCTV monitor which was displaying a live picture of somebody’s living room.

His living room.

He stepped back. ‘F*ck,’ he said aloud. That was his sofa, his bookcase, his armchair. There was the picture Kirsty had brought with her from the house she shared with the other nurses: the picture of the mermaid on a rock.

He bent double. He felt as if someone had punched him in the kidneys. Lucy and Chris had not only been listening to them. They been watching them. There had to be a tiny camera hidden somewhere in the flat, somewhere opposite the sofa. He tried to picture it, but couldn’t work out where it could be hidden. But he would look for it later. He would find the f*cking thing and tear it out of the wall and stamp on it, grind it into the floorboards.

Jesus Christ. How long had this been going on for?

He noticed something else. The CCTV monitor was resting on top of a hard drive. It wasn’t recording now, but…

Oh f*ck.

He looked around, frenziedly scouring the shelves of the bookcase which housed mostly DVDs with handwritten titles on the spines: J&K 1: PARTY; J&K 2: DECORATING; all the way up to 12: J ALONE.

He pulled the DVD labelled J&K 11 from the shelf and inserted it into the player attached to the ordinary TV. He pressed ‘play’ and after a few seconds an image appeared. It was him and Kirsty standing in the living room. Kirsty doing the ironing. The video was silent, but Jamie could remember what they had been talking about. He watched their lips move. He watched them move over onto the sofa. They were talking about the baby; the miscarriage. Kirsty started to cry and Jamie held her, crying too.

He pressed stop. Hatred and anger flowed through him, replacing the sadness. He clenched his fists and stood up. He wanted to smash everything in the room; he wanted to destroy this place, the home of the those f*ckers, those…

He told himself to calm down. He took more deep breaths.

Then he noticed a DVD labelled J&K 8: AWAY. He slotted it into the DVD player and pressed play. Again, it was the interior of their living room, empty. Nothing happened for the first couple of minutes and Jamie almost switched it off, but something told him to wait – and at the two minute mark someone entered the room. Chris. Jamie’s mouth went dry. He watched Chris walk over to the hidden camera and peer into it.

Staring straight at the lens, Chris smiled coldly, then licked his lips.

Lucy followed Chris into the room, looking around, before settling down on the sofa. Chris was out of shot now – this must have been when he installed the virus on Jamie’s PC – and all Jamie could see was Lucy sitting immobile on the sofa, staring impassively at the camera. Then, still looking into the lens, she leaned back and pulled her skirt up around her hips. She had no underwear on and Jamie watched stunned as she began to touch herself, her head thrown back as she masturbated for a couple of minutes until she came, her mouth opening wide for a moment before closing, her expression one of release rather than ecstasy. Then she pulled her skirt back down over her knees and sat still again, her hands crossed modestly in her lap.

Jamie pressed stop, terrified of what he might see next.

He tried to think straight. How had they got in to the flat? They must have a key.

He needed to find it. He was sure he had enough evidence now to go to the police with, but if he could find the key he would feel safer. He wouldn’t be afraid they would come in and murder him in his bed while he slept. Because surely that was next? They had killed his unborn daughter, driven out Kirsty. He knew Chris had killed before. Jamie was certain he was next on the list, and his experiences with the police so far told him they wouldn’t be quick to act.

He dropped the DVD on the floor and moved over to the desk. He pulled open the top drawer and began to rifle through it. Electricity bills, bank statements, Council Tax bills. Nothing useful. He opened another drawer. There were photos of Chris, standing on a sandy beach, pointing out to sea and smiling. There was a newspaper cutting: MAN IN COMA AFTER KARTING ACCIDENT.

He pulled open the door beneath the drawer and groped inside. There was a carrier bag at the back of the compartment. It was full of glasses: around twenty pairs of spectacles, most of them old -fashioned, with brown frames. Jamie furrowed his brow and emptied the bag, tipping the glasses all over the floor, revealing a couple of what he quickly realised were hearing aids, and a single USB stick. Not knowing what to make of all this, he slipped the USB stick in his pocket and moved on.

He dug deeper in the cupboard, finding a manila folder. Inside it was a marriage certificate. He almost threw it aside, but a word caught his eye:

Pica.

His heartbeat skipped.

The two names on the certificate were Christopher Robert Newton and Lucy Marie Pica.

He tore through the rest of the desk until he found a letter with the estate agent’s heading: Anderson and Son. He read the letter in stunned horror. It confirmed the sale of the ground floor flat, 143 Mount Pleasant Street to Jamie Knight and Kirsty Phillips from Ms Lucy Pica. He dug deeper. There was another letter, dated May, confirming the sale of the flat from Letitia Matthews and David Robson to Lucy Pica.

Lucy had bought the flat in her maiden name from Letitia and David and then sold it on to Jamie and Kirsty, making a healthy profit – and getting two new people to torment into the bargain. And as the sellers of the flat, they would have the keys and plenty of time to install surveillance equipment so they could watch and listen to their victims’ suffering to make their pleasure even greater. The recordings of them having sex weren’t made through the ceiling as they’d suspected: as well as the camera in the living room there was probably a microphone somewhere in their bedroom, hidden beneath something, which would account for the muffled sound on the recordings. The keys also gave them the chance to walk into the flat at any time that Jamie and Kirsty weren’t at home.

Jamie threw all the papers to the floor. A wave of anger crashed over him, blinding him. He stood in the centre of the room. The walls spinning around and around, getting faster, everything going white, blurred; going red, crimson, the colour of blood.

He roared. The cry ripped something in his throat, made the room shake around him. He pulled the CCTV monitor out of its cabinet and threw it against the wall. All his working out had made him strong. The monitor hit the wall with a deafening crunch; shards of glass flew across the room. Jamie roared again.

There was only one way to deal with this.

He stomped across the room into the kitchen, throwing open the cupboards beneath the sink. He pulled out bottles of cleaner, bleach, rubber gloves, throwing them behind him. Then he saw what he had hoped to find: a large bottle of white spirit, almost full and extremely flammable. He unscrewed the top and went back into the living room. He splashed the white spirit around, up the walls, over the furniture. He carried it into the bedrooms and splashed some on the beds. He threw some against the poster of Chris. He trailed the stinking liquid from the bedrooms back into the living room.

He took his matches out of his pocket, then pulled out his cigarettes. He threw the empty white spirit bottle onto the carpet in front of him and wiped his hands on his trousers. He lit a cigarette, inhaled, and stood there, motionless, for a moment. He would be burning all the evidence, erasing any proof of what Chris and Lucy had done. He had one moment to change his mind.

He threw the lit cigarette across the room.

It hit a patch of spirit and immediately blue flames flickered to life, racing across the carpet, growing as they spread, orange replacing the blue, smoke quickly filling the room. The flames caught the end of the curtains, ran up the sofa. The crackle and roar grew louder and louder. Fire danced on every surface, and started heading towards Jamie, who had backed up to the threshold of the room. He stood in the doorway for a second, entranced by the flames, and then turned to get out.

It was at that moment that Chris ran into the flat and crashed into him.

Jamie went flying into the living room. Above the roar of the flames he could hear Chris bellowing a stream of expletives. He looked around wildly, taking in what was happening to his flat, his hands on his head, his mouth open. Jamie was surrounded by smoke. He coughed harshly; his eyes started to blur and run with tears. He knew it was only a matter of minutes before the fire consumed the whole room. He tried to get to his feet and Chris kicked him in the chest.

‘You f*cker!’ Chris screamed. He kicked Jamie again, his boot connecting with the side of his head. He reached down and pulled him up. God, he was so strong. He threw Jamie against the wall, punched him in the stomach, then the face. Jamie felt something crack; his cheekbone. Chris punched him again and blood spurted from his nose. He just managed to stay upright. There was so much smoke; he couldn’t breathe. He felt his knees sag and thought he was going to fall.

But then he remembered what he had discovered in the flat. The CCTV. The letters from the estate agent. Another wave of anger gave him strength, made him cry out, hurting his throat. He threw himself at his neighbour, his hands reaching out and grabbing Chris round the throat, pushing him against the door frame. Chris tried to hit Jamie’s arms to break his grip, but Jamie was possessed, overwhelmed and empowered by anger, by all that had happened to him since he had met this man. He squeezed harder, digging his thumbs into Chris’s windpipe. Chris hit his arms again, hit them harder. He managed to knock Jamie’s arms away and fell sideways into the living room. He held his own throat, making a horrible choking sound.

Jamie could hardly see. The whole of the living room was on fire. Thick black smoke obscured everything. Jamie staggered down the hall, pulled open the front door and fell onto his knees on the doorstep. He sucked in air, trying to replace the smoke that filled his lungs. Beside him, the front windows of the flat smashed, blown out by the heat. Glass covered him, sticking in his hair. Smoke billowed out into the darkness.

He pushed himself up and went to stagger away. Then he remembered Chris. He was still inside, in the living room. He hated him – hated him so much – but, despite everything, he couldn’t just leave him to die.

He pulled off his shirt and screwed it up into a bundle, pressing it against his face. He went back into the flat. He could hear Chris calling out, his voice weak.

‘Help.’

Jamie moved towards the sound, but another blast of heat threw him backwards. A patch of ceiling collapsed in front of him, plaster and wood falling on top of him, knocking him to the floor. He was blinded, but he managed to roll over and crawl, back towards the front door. He couldn’t hear Chris calling out any more. The whole living room was gone; an inferno.

Jamie threw himself over the threshold, ran up the steps, collapsed on his knees on the front path. He felt someone grab hold of him. It was Brian. He tried to say something but all he could do was cough.

Brian pulled him away from the flat. Mary and Linda were standing on the pavement, staring at him. Mary was holding Lennon, who was wriggling, trying to get away. Brian was shouting at Jamie. ‘Where’s Chris? Where is he?’

He still couldn’t speak.

He looked up, and there was Lucy. She wasn’t screaming, or crying, or trying to get into the flat. She was simply staring; watching the smoke pour out of her flat, rising up towards the night sky. She watched the flames spread upwards until they could be seen behind the windows of the ground floor flat. Jamie followed her gaze. There it went. Their dream home. Up in smoke.

He lay on the pavement and laughed, coughed, laughed again. He could smell something pleasant. He realised it was the smell of singed hair. His eyebrows had been burnt off, as had most of his hair.

He heard the wail of sirens in the distance.