Lucilla
by David A. Riley
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Table of Contents, parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 |
Clouds hung over the rooftops like soiled linen stretched endlessly across the sky.
In sheer desperation, she flew fast beneath them, her body ragged from all its wounds but feeling triumphant. The crows that had attacked her had long since tumbled to the ground, dead, some of them dismembered by her claws. She knew she wouldn’t be able to last much longer, either. Her falcon body and its inadequately tiny avian brain couldn’t cope with her presence. She would need something larger or she would die completely this time.
Downwards in a long, parabolic swoop, she soared towards the rooftops. Somewhere down there she needed to find a refuge. Something with a brain large enough to accommodate her but not so mature that its host would resist her invasion.
Then she saw her. That girl would do.
part 5
“I have a meeting to attend later this morning,” Miranda’s boss told her when she arrived at the Shelter. “You’ll have to hold the fort while I’m out.” As Deputy Manager, this was something Miranda had done numerous times already. Not that there were often any problems to deal with. For the most part, life at the Shelter was so humdrum that it was almost boring, which was as it was intended to be: a violence-free sanctuary within which women could find time in which to heal.
“No probs,” Miranda said as Mary collected her briefcase and coat. “When do you expect to be back?”
“By lunchtime.” She smiled briefly as she bustled to the door.
After this, a minor squabble between several of the residents took up the next half-hour before Miranda could start to deal with other matters. She was trying to catch up when her mobile rang.
Glancing at it, she saw it was Lucilla, ringing from the flat.
“What is it?” she asked.
“You must come home straight away.”
“Why? What’s happened? Has he found you?”
“Please come back, Miranda. I need you here.”
There was such intense desperation in the girl’s voice Miranda said, “I’m on my way.” She glanced at her watch. It was nearly eleven, an hour at least before Mary was expected back at the Shelter. Besides Miranda, there was only Nicola in the building, who she knew she shouldn’t leave by herself.
Barely seventeen, Nicola had only worked at the Shelter for a few months after leaving school. But what could she do? She knew Mary would go ballistic if she came back and found she had left Nicola in charge, but Miranda couldn’t ignore the fear in Lucilla’s voice, whatever happened.
For her part, Nicola looked pleased at being asked to look after things, as if this was a possible shortcut to promotion.
Let her keep her illusions, Miranda thought, too preoccupied with what was going on at her flat. Outside, her car started straight away, and it was only a short while before she was roaring down the short stretch of tarmac towards her flat. Pulling up abruptly, she abandoned her car and ran towards the flat, her door key already clasped in her fingers.
“Lucilla, it’s me,” she called out as she rushed up the stairs. The door at the top was already open. Lucilla was standing beside it, tears glistening down her cheeks.
“I couldn’t help it,” the girl blubbered.
Miranda saw the body lying face down on the living room carpet. “My God, Lucilla, what have you done?”
Miranda recognised Mary’s clothes at once. Her leather briefcase lay on the carpet beside her. Pushing it to one side, Miranda knelt to move Mary’s head so that she could see her face. She flinched when she saw the woman’s features. Drawn in a grimace, her lips were no more than a bloodless slit curled back so far from her teeth that her gums were bared.
Hesitating for a moment, Miranda touched her boss’s face with the tips of her fingers, feeling the hard rigidity of the muscles that had locked across it in a final, paralysing spasm.
“When did this happen?” Miranda asked, though she knew Mary had left the Shelter only a couple of hours previously. It didn’t seem possible for her body to have become so cold and stiff so soon.
“She was banging on the door,” Lucilla said between gasps, wiping tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. “She knew I was here. She was calling my name. She wouldn’t leave.”
“You let her in?” Feeling shaky, Miranda stood as she wiped her hands down the sides of her pants.
“I had to, Miranda; she said she’d ring the police.”
That was Mary all right. All bluster and threats if she had to be. How was the girl to know they’d be no more than that? Mary would have given up eventually if Lucilla had only kept her head and stayed out of sight. There was no way Mary could have known for certain that Lucilla was here.
“What happened?”
“She stormed up the stairs. She said you had betrayed her.”
“And then? How did she end up like this?”
Lucilla shook her head, sobbing. “I don’t know, Miranda. She had a heart attack, I think. She was so angry, so red in the face. She kept shouting at me... till the pain hit her.”
Miranda looked at Mary’s face. The pain-wracked, frightened expression frozen across it could have been caused by a heart attack. But would that explain how her body had become rigid as if rigor mortis had already set in?
“Did you ring me as soon as it happened?” Miranda asked.
When Lucilla nodded, Miranda knew that Mary could not have been dead much more than thirty minutes. Even from what little Miranda knew about death, she was sure Mary shouldn’t have been stiff like this yet.
Feeling sick, Miranda went into the kitchen. She poured water into the electric kettle, though she was sorely tempted to drink something stronger than tea.
“What do we do now?” Lucilla implored.
Miranda shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said, struggling to take it in, finding it hard to grasp what had happened, and wondering if somehow, in some way Lucilla had killed Mary.
As she added milk to their mugs of tea, Miranda looked at the girl. Her face was blotchy and red, tear stains shining down her cheeks. She looked distraught and frightened. And Miranda wished she could go up to her and clasp her in her arms, soothing her, but she couldn’t, not now, with Mary’s body only yards away in the living room.
Miranda knew that whatever they were going to do, they would have to make a decision within the next few minutes.
If only she could be certain Mary had died from a heart attack. But she remembered what happened to Karl Brown. He had died from a heart attack, too.
Why hadn’t Lucilla phoned for an ambulance when Mary collapsed? Surely, she hadn’t died straight away. Mary had looked as fit as a flea this morning. It was hard to believe she could have dropped down dead in the middle of shouting at Lucilla.
What alternative was there? That Lucilla had been responsible? That she had been responsible for what happened to Karl Brown, too? She knew that was ridiculous.
Miranda sipped at her tea, feeling the warm sweetness calming her nerves.
“What do we do now?” Lucilla asked.
“We think. Think hard,” Miranda said, which was what she had already started to do. At least there was now no need to rush back to the Shelter. Only Mary would have made an issue of her absence, though she dreaded to think what might be happening with Nicola in charge. Hopefully, the girl would have the sense to ring on her mobile if she needed help. Till that happened, Miranda had time.
Which was what? Phone for an ambulance? But how would she explain Mary being in her flat? Why had no one phoned till nearly an hour had passed since her attack? Any self-respecting doctor would look at the body and ask why she had been left so long. They might even suspect she had been dead longer. Even to Miranda it was hard to believe that Mary had died so recently.
Questions, questions, questions. There would be multitudes of the bloody things. And most would be from her superiors, putting her position at the Shelter at risk, not to mention any hopes she might have of promotion. Especially if word leaked out about Lucilla.
She glanced at the girl, who was calmer now as she sat on an arm of the sofa, drinking her tea, looking smaller than ever.
What could they do about Mary? What should they do about Mary?
The longer they waited the worse it would look if she were discovered here. Already they had probably left it too long, Miranda thought. Which was when she decided they would have to remove her from the flat.
Miranda remembered seeing Mary’s VW Polo parked outside in one of the spaces left for visitors, She had not paid enough attention at the time to realise whose it was. Putting aside her tea, Miranda returned to the living room. She steeled herself and knelt once more beside Mary, feeling in the pockets of her coat. Seconds later her fingers came across the thick bunch of keys she had so often seen carelessly tossed onto Mary’s desk.
She told Lucilla what she was going to do.
“I’ll need your help to get her downstairs. I’ll fetch her car as near as I can to the foot of the stairs. If we’re quick, we can carry her body out and get her inside the car before anyone sees what we’re doing. It’s usually quiet around here during the day, with everyone at work, so we have a good chance of getting away with it.”
“What are you going to do with her?” Lucilla asked.
“Drive her somewhere else so it will look as if she started to feel ill, parked up and died.” Her voice sounded cold-blooded and unusually calm, which was more than she felt. “I don’t want anything to connect her with my flat.”
Miranda knew this was risky. It escalated things further than she would have liked, but she dared not risk letting anyone know her boss died here. Too many questions would be asked, for which she had no answers.
By one o’clock, she had driven Mary’s car to an empty stretch of land near a derelict factory. Few people used it and it was quiet. No shops, no houses, no workplaces open. And she did not expect anyone to see her when she left the car to walk back to her flat over a mile away. Far enough.
Annoyingly, Lucilla was unable to help. She asked if Lucilla could drive her Fiesta to the site with her, but the girl said she couldn’t drive, though Miranda was far from sure of it. Even helping her lug Mary’s body to the Polo seemed to take every scrap of resolve the girl could muster, and she fled back inside the flat as soon as they had finished.
Miranda felt exhausted by the time she returned to the Shelter.
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Copyright © 2022 by David A. Riley
