Lucilla

by David A. Riley

Table of Contents, parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

part 6

“I was starting to panic,” Nicola said as if announcing something of monumental importance as soon as Miranda stepped inside the building. “The police have been on the phone.” The girl looked flustered but pleased with herself.

“What do they want?” Miranda asked, shedding her coat as she strode into the office, feeling the onset of panic and trying to conceal it from Nicola.

“They wouldn’t say. They wanted to speak to you or Mary.”

Miranda felt sick as she sat at the desk and stared at the phone. Had someone seen what she’d done and reported her to the police? Already?

“Thank you,” she said. She nodded at the door, dismissing the girl, which earned her a scowl as Nicola turned on her heel and left. That she might have upset Nicola didn’t bother Miranda. She needed solitude in which to collect her thoughts before she rang the police. She looked at the note Nicola had scribbled on a post-it gummed to the computer monitor. “Detective Sergeant Harridan — tel: 24165.”

Miranda took a deep breath to calm her nerves then punched out the numbers on the phone.

“Sergeant Harridan.” The man’s voice sounded bored, as if he’d had too many calls already.

“Miranda Walters. You left a message for me to ring you.”

He thanked her for getting back to him. “I wanted to ask about one of the women at the Shelter. I don’t have a last name,” he said. “I don’t know why, but all we know is she’s called Lucilla.”

Miranda glanced at the open doorway, relieved to see no one there. She stood up and carefully closed the door, though that was something Mary Milligan would have rebuked her for. Not now, she thought. Not anymore. Her open-door policy had died with her, for the time being at least.

“She’s no longer here,” Miranda said. “She left days ago.”

“Damn it.” The policeman seemed to collect himself and apologised. “Sorry about that, but we’ve had some developments.”

“Can I help?”

“Only if you can tell me where she is.”

Miranda hesitated. “I might be able to find out,” she said. “I’m not sure if I can, but I could try. If it’s important—”

“It is. Any help you could give would be useful.”

“She’s not in trouble, is she?”

“Would it matter if she was?”

Miranda laughed dismissively. “If she’s done something wrong, I wouldn’t protect her, if that’s what you mean. It’s not our job to hinder the police. We depend on you too much, especially when it comes to protecting our residents.”

Sergeant Harridan sounded mollified when he replied. “I forgot. I should have realised that.” He seemed to think about what he was going to say next. “Something odd has happened.”

And for a moment Miranda felt a recurrence of her nervousness. “Odd?”

“The girl claimed to have been attacked. We checked the address she gave. No one seems to be there. As we didn’t have a search warrant, that seemed to be it. A few days later, some of our men had to visit the premises again. There’d been complaints from neighbours about a bad smell. Someone from the council called there and claimed to recognise what it was. He’d had experience at cleaning out places in the past where someone had died and not been found for weeks.”

“Someone was dead?”

“You’ll read about it soon enough in the papers, so I’m not giving anything away. Four bodies were found in the house. First reports are they died from natural causes. Heart attacks.”

“Four of them?!”

“Exactly.” The policeman’s voice was blunt and disbelieving. “Too much of a coincidence, I know. We’re still awaiting detailed results from the post-mortems to see what they really died of. Till then, we’re looking on their deaths as suspicious. One of them was holding a length of wood. There was a nail at one end caked in blood as if it had been used in a fight.”

Miranda visualised the jagged cut down Lucilla’s arm, which had looked as if something like a claw had gouged it. Or a nail, she thought, feeling sick.

“You think Lucilla might know something about these deaths?”

“Perhaps,” the policeman said, non-committal. “It’s a long shot. But she’s all we have at the moment.”

Miranda wondered if they had checked the blood type to see if what they found on the nail coincided with the girl’s. If they hadn’t, they would, she was sure of that.

“I’ll see if I can find something out for you, Sergeant. I’ll ring you back if I do,” Miranda said, eager to end the conversation as soon as she could.

“Would you ring even if you don’t, Miss Walters? I’d like to meet you to discuss the girl.”

“Of course. Certainly.”

With a mumbled goodbye, she slammed down the phone. No sooner had she done so than she reached for the plastic waste bin under the desk and was violently sick, retching into it again and again till her throat felt raw. It was minutes before she finally finished, wiped her mouth with a handkerchief and stared across the room, barely focusing on the white painted wall opposite, with its charts and graphs.

She pictured Karl Brown lying stretched on the pavement outside the Shelter as a policeman tried to save his life. And Mary Milligan curled on the floor in her flat, a ghastly expression of pain transfixed on her face.

Now four more deaths. All heart attacks. Maybe, she thought. Maybe.

Miranda closed her eyes. How could someone as small and fragile as Lucilla be involved with this? It made no sense. It made no sense at all.

She knew, even before it happened, that the day could only worsen. Too tense to eat, she skipped lunch, and stayed at her desk unable to work, staring at nothing. And waiting. Waiting for the call that eventually came at three o’clock that afternoon.

It was a policewoman this time. They had found the Shelter’s telephone number in Mary Milligan’s briefcase, though one of the policemen who discovered her body recognised her from a recent visit to the Shelter.

“What would you like me to do?” Miranda asked, trying to steady her voice.

“Do you know her next of kin? We need to contact them.”

Miranda gave her the number of Mary’s sister. Although Mary had once been married, she had been divorced for more than ten years and would not have thanked anyone for contacting her ex.

To Miranda’s relief, that was it. Nothing more was required. For now, she thought, certain that when Detective Sergeant Harridan heard about Mary’s death, he would be puzzled at one more heart attack.

She finished early, too impatient to return home. She knew she would have to have it out with Lucilla tonight, one way or another. Though she dreaded it, too. Her drive across town took all her concentration. It was getting dark early, and the streets looked gloomy, dispiriting. There was a light rain, and what little she could see could do nothing to ease her feelings of dread.

As soon as she’d parked, she hurried across the puddle-strewn tarmac towards her flat, shivering and clutching her coat against the wind, .

When Miranda pushed the door open into the living room, she saw Lucilla sitting on the sofa, looking listless . The lights were off, and the room was lit only by the television screen. Lucilla muted the sound with the remote control. “Is something wrong?” the girl asked as Miranda stood in the open doorway.

Which was when Miranda’s resolution failed her. She shook her head.

“Nothing we can’t cope with,” she said. She peeled off her coat and hung it behind the door. “I need a hot drink.” Though what she really needed, she knew, was a strong drink.

She went into the kitchen, unwilling to talk to Lucilla yet. She felt torn between the need to find out what had happened and fear of destroying whatever they had between them.

It was not till much later, after they had eaten and washed up afterwards, then settled in the living room on the sofa, a bottle of wine on the coffee table, that Miranda told the girl about her telephone calls.

“Will they question you more?”

Miranda took a long sip of her wine before saying, “I think so, Lucilla. It depends on whether the inquest finds that what’s suspected of having been heart attacks really were.”

“Why do you say that? What else could they be?”

Miranda felt like saying, “You tell me,” but she couldn’t. She sipped her wine instead. She could feel Lucilla’s eyes watching her. Intent. Probing. She felt uncomfortable under their pale green gaze.

Even alcohol was doing little to dull her feelings of guilt tonight. She had known Mary Milligan for years. It was Mary who had interviewed and taken her on at the Shelter. And, though Miranda had often disagreed with Mary over the years, she had admired and liked her, and they had developed a friendship of sorts. A friendship she would miss. She could hardly believe Mary had died in this room only hours ago. Nor did she think she would ever forget the look on Mary’s pain-wracked face.

Miranda closed her eyes, and the image became clearer, sharper, filling her with a feeling of disbelief. She wished she knew what really happened when Mary confronted Lucilla here. She remembered when the girl barred Karl Brown’s way into the Shelter, how she raised one hand towards his chest. How he stopped before falling back from her. How the police blundered in, snatching hold of the man and dragging him out into the street where he died.

Miranda opened her eyes. Lucilla was staring at her, concerned. Worried.

Worried about what? That Miranda might doubt what really happened?

“The police were asking about you,” Miranda said, though she really did not want to talk about it. “They’ve been back to the house where you were attacked.” She paused and wondered whether the girl’s face now looked tense. Or was that her imagination, wishing it on her? “They’ve found bodies.”

“Bodies?”

Miranda involuntarily narrowed her eyes for a sharper view of Lucilla’s face. Was her innocence feigned? Was it real? She yearned to be sure that Lucilla had nothing to do with this. Like Sergeant Harridan, though, she had concerns over too many heart attacks.

“They’re carrying out autopsies to find out how they died.”

She felt cruel telling her this, as if she was somehow trying to force Lucilla to react. Perhaps she was. The girl’s lack of response was worrying, as if she did not care.

“What do you think they will find?” Lucilla asked.

“Heart attacks, I suppose. What else could they?”

That night, Miranda fell asleep as soon as she climbed into bed, her head swimming from two bottles of wine, which were more than she would have normally had, but she’d felt she needed them tonight. Lucilla had said little all evening, as if absorbed with too many thoughts of her own.

Sometime between two and three in the morning, Miranda’s dreams were interrupted by a loud noise. Struggling to regain consciousness, Miranda’s impressions of what was happening were jumbled together with her dreams, and she had difficulty piercing through them to reality.

She sat up in bed, her head pounding from a hangover. She was aware of a violent banging. Something hard, like fists, was beating against the door downstairs. Loud. Intense. Lucilla’s screams became shrill. And, despite the pounding in her head, Miranda piled out of bed, staggered towards the window. She glimpsed what could have been a face outside, before she realised there was no one there. No ladder rested against the sill, and the narrow patch of lawn below was empty, too.

Shaken by her hallucination, Miranda returned to Lucilla and gripped her shoulders, her fingers gentle but firm, though they trembled with fear.

“There’s nothing,” she told her. “There’s nothing to be frightened of.”

Lucilla’s eyes stared back at her. For several moments she was motionless, then she reached out, touched Miranda’s sternum between her breasts. Immediately she felt the breath within her lungs shrink to nothingness and she was gasping for air. She whistled sharply as she sucked it into her mouth, but it was as if it disappeared into a terrifying void.

Terrified at what was happening to her, she flung herself back from Lucilla, breaking away from her tensed fingers; immediately she could feel her lungs fill up with air and she could breathe once more, though her heart was pounding harder than ever.

Lucilla climbed across the bed towards her, but Miranda pushed herself back across the carpet till she collided with the back of the chair at her dressing table. Scrambling, she took hold of the chair. She swung it in front of her, the ends of its legs aimed at the girl.

“Get back,” she warned. She was panting for breath, and her arms ached with the effort of supporting the chair in mid-air.

Lucilla paused. “I’m sorry, Miranda. I didn’t mean to.”

“The hell you didn’t. Is that what happened to all the rest?” Though she felt bewildered at what had happened — and why — she was sure that Lucilla had caused it. She felt frightened, too, as if she had found herself alone with a dangerous animal. “How did you do it? Some kind of martial arts trick?” But who would teach something as deadly as that?

Again, there was a noise at the downstairs door. This time there was no mistaking it. Miranda did not know whether to look towards the sound or keep her eyes fixed on the girl.

There was an even louder series of thumps against the door. In that instant, Lucilla raised her eyes to the lamp hung in the centre of the ceiling. She reached for something on the floor — it could have been an empty wine glass — and flung it upwards. The bulb shattered.

Panic-stricken, Miranda scrambled towards the bedroom door. Her hand reached for the handle and pulled at it with all her strength. Before she could get out, Lucilla grabbed her shoulders and with unexpected strength flung her back into the room. Before Miranda could do anything, the girl fled outside, and the door slammed shut behind her.

Hearing someone burst into the living room, Miranda grasped the door handle with all her strength to stop anyone from opening it from the other side. The veins on her neck rose with the effort. No one — no thing — was going to enter the bedroom while she had any strength left in her arms.

She closed her eyes, wishing she could dam her ears to the sounds that came from the other side of the door. The screams; the floor-shaking bangs and crashes; the splintering of wood as furniture was hurled across it; the rending of cloth being ripped apart — or what sounded like cloth — all the while her head pounded with an intolerable ache that threatened to burst.

White lights flashed before her eyes, though her eyelids were shut in concentration while she held as tightly as she could to the door handle with aching hands. Then she could see Lucilla’s face staring at her, though her eyelids were shut. She could hear her speaking to her as if deep inside her head. Simultaneously there came a terrible pain as if her skull was about to split open.

She knew she had passed out. During that time it seemed as if hours had gone by, with time frozen. However, when Miranda came to, she knew it could have been only minutes because other sounds cut through her consciousness. Sirens were wailing, their stridency dying seconds later as footsteps clattered up the stairs.

Proceed to part 7...

Copyright © 2022 by David A. Riley

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