Janine had finally revealed her true colours and they were almost as self-serving as mine.
‘You are no better than me,’ I said. ‘If I’m such a bad person then why are you using those recordings for your own gain?’
‘When did I ever claim to be any better than you?’ she laughed. ‘We all have our own agendas, Laura. Yours is to encourage people to die. Mine is to make a life with your soon-to-be ex-husband.’
‘You’re fooling yourself if you think that’s going to happen. Tony and I are meant to be together, along with our children. Effie is already back in my life.’
‘But for how much longer? I’m going to hazard a guess not very. Tony called me just before I came down here. He knows Effie is being molested by her teacher. It’s all over the school’s Facebook page. Apparently she’s inconsolable. I looked at the profile name that made the first post – Charlotte Smith. Ryan’s wife, if I remember rightly? Neither Effie nor Ryan would’ve benefitted from doing this themselves, so unless Charlotte has risen from the ashes, that only leaves you. I don’t think Tony or your daughter will be welcoming you back with open arms any time soon.’
Janine blinked hard again, as if something were distracting her.
‘Press play,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘On the Dictaphone. Press play. You can’t expect me to agree to your demands without hearing what I’m being accused of.’
‘Really?’ she replied. I nodded and she shrugged as she pressed a button. She sat back on the sofa as the machine made a hissing sound. A few seconds of silence passed before she looked at the display screen. She pressed a button to fast-forward. She hit play again but still there was silence. Her face went from muddled to anxious and then confused in a moment. She pressed more buttons, played with the volume and checked the batteries. The Dictaphone was blank.
‘Well, Janine, it’s nice to have met you properly after all this time,’ I said, and smiled as I stood up. ‘I think I’m going to take my chances and let fate, not you, decide what happens to me.’
‘What did you do?’ she bellowed, and slowly rose to her feet. However, her legs suddenly gave way and she fell back onto the sofa. She steadied herself before attempting, and failing, to rise up again. I walked towards her as she tried to comprehend what was happening to her body.
‘The powdered sedatives I baked into your muffins appear to have kicked in,’ I began. She glared at me, bewildered at first, before uneasiness slowly spread across her wrinkled face. ‘They’re not all “store-bought”. Let me take this first,’ I continued. I snatched the Dictaphone from her weak grip and dropped it into my pocket.
‘Let’s set the record straight about a few things, shall we?’ I reached into my bag to remove the leather driving gloves Tony had left in the garage at home. ‘You and my husband will never get your happy-ever-after. You will never be allowed to expose me and what I have done to anyone. You will never understand why I do it or what it’s like to hear a person’s last breath, because you don’t have the capacity to feel in the way I do. You don’t respect the fragility of human life like me. You’ll never know how the beauty of death equals the beauty of birth, or how those first and last gasps of air are exactly the same. You don’t know any of this because you don’t help people. I help people. I save them from themselves.’
I pulled the gloves slowly over my fingers and palms, and felt inside my bag again until I found what I was looking for.
‘When a person is breathing their last, everything they have done in their life, every success or failure they have ever enjoyed or suffered, no longer matters because we are all equal. Good or bad, saint or sinner, you or me, one day we will all be on a level playing field. I have been fortunate to have been asked many times to be the only person who will ever hear that sound. And while you haven’t asked me directly, I can only assume you won’t object when I take it upon myself to be here for yours.’
Janine’s face was awash with fear. The sedatives made her limbs heavy and her vision blurred. But she could still feel scared. Before she could formulate another word or raise her arm to defend herself, I swung a hammer clean into her windpipe.
The first blow left a dent the size of a ten-pence coin, but the collision of metal and skin and cartilage was more like a soft thud than the crunch I’d expected to hear. Her eyes were open saucer-wide as her nervous system sent pain signals to her brain. The sedatives were affecting her coordination, so when she instinctively tried to move her hands to protect her throat, they hovered hopelessly by her sides instead. She gasped for air through her broken windpipe, slowly suffocating.
I held the hammer above my head again and waited for her eyes to meet mine. I needed her to understand the first blow wasn’t a one-off before I directed the second strike to just above her eye socket. This time I heard the crack I’d wanted and the skin split open like a sausage. There was little movement at first, and then her head began to judder involuntarily like she was having a seizure. Her dilated pupils remained focused on mine, and after ten seconds or so, the fit came to an end.
Janine was still conscious when the third blow hit her slap bang on the top of her head, like I was hitting a nail into a floorboard. Her eyes rolled back in their sockets, and I knew that with one more strike it would be over. But I didn’t want her dead just yet.
I lowered myself next to her on the sofa and leaned across her, blood from the wound on the top of her head trickling down her face and onto my cheek and neck. There wasn’t as much of it as I’d imagined, though.
I rested my ear as close as I could to her lips so that, between the loud palpitations of my heartbeat, I could just about hear her in the last moments of life. It was as if all my senses were being stimulated in unison: everything I saw, heard and felt was magnified, from the scent of metal in her blood to the sound of her fingertips delicately tapping the fabric of the sofa. Janine’s breathing, already barely audible, became lighter and lighter until I could no longer feel it against my ear. And then, with one last tiny expiration, her body shut down completely.
At first, I couldn’t move. My mind was completely blank and I went into a kind of refractory period. I allowed myself a few moments for my high levels of adrenaline to lower and for my pulse to slow before I continued with the next stage of my plan. There’d be plenty of time for reflection in the future.