The Killer

  She feels dizzy, and the same strange sense of disorientation overtakes her sense, and she doesn’t know what she is thinking, doesn’t know what she is feeling, and all she can hear is the burr of the telephone on the floor of the sitting room, and she tries to turn, and somehow she misses her grip on the edge of the sink and she moves awkwardly.

  She loses her balance, and even as she feels herself falling backwards she is aware of everything slowing down.

  Where am I?

  What’s happening to me?

  Maryanne. Where is Maryanne? Maryanne would know what to do. Maryanne is practical and straightforward, and though she doesn’t really know how to have any fun, she is so cool in an emergency, like when I cut my hand . . . and that was a broken glass as well . . . and there was blood everywhere . . . and she just dealt with it so quickly, and she didn’t even bat an eyelid . . .

  Carole Shaw falls backward, and she is not in slow motion, and there is nothing to break her fall, and even if there was something to hold onto she wouldn’t have possessed the strength to defy gravity and the weight of her own body.

  She hits the floor, and the back of her head bounces off the linoleum with a clearly audible thump.

  The tablets lodge together at the back of her throat, and if she had been conscious she would have felt them constricting her breathing. But she was not conscious. She was out cold.

  Later, within an hour, perhaps two, they will slowly dissolve, and there will be nothing but the slightest trace of them remaining.

  What little life Carole still possessed lasted for less than two minutes, and then she was dead, and yet she wasn’t even really aware that she was dead.

  There was just a sense of quiet, and then a feeling of weightlessness, and somewhere behind those eyelids was a vague memory of her sister’s face, and a vague recollection of one summer in Belvidere, Boone County, Illinois when she and Maryanne had gone to see a B-movie about a pianist who had lost his hands, and then a time when they laughed themselves silly thinking about how it would have been if Maryanne had kept their mother’s maiden name—

  I’m sorry, did you say your name was Marilyn Monroe?

  And then there was almost silence.

  The sound of the telephone line continued, but there was no one there to hear it.

  About the Author

  R.J. Ellory is the author of ten novels, including the bestselling A Quiet Belief in Angels, which was the Strand magazine’s Thriller of the Year, shortlisted for the Barry Award, and a finalist for the SIBA Award. He also the author of The Anniversary Man, A Quiet Vendetta, Candlemoth, and A Simple Act of Violence, winner of the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award.