Lucy’s bedroom was at the top of the stairs. The door must have been painted pink many years ago but the covering was now peeling away to expose the original white underlay.
I didn’t wait. Wrapping my knuckles on the door – I always found knocking disarmed the most immediate of objections – I pushed into Lucy’s room.
"Rae…. is that you?" Lucy’s soft and innocent voice drifted up from below her fluffy duvet.
I pulled the small chair from her dresser over the floor and wedged it under the door handle. That would slow anyone trying to enter the lock free room down.
"No," I said – my own deep voice a million miles different from her flatmates own feminine tones.
Lucy sat bolt upright in bed.
She was dressed in a tiny, strappy nighty. The silk straps that reached up from the swell of her breasts, strained over her shoulders before reaching down her back seemed no thicker than threads of silver.
"Who… huh?" she curled the duvet around herself and rubbed her eyes, trying to peer into the dark corner I had settled myself in.
I counted backwards from three before reply, "Do you know Ralph Woodward?" I asked. She did. Ralph was the Facebook guy and the Dark Rose member. Sometimes just throwing a familiar name out there was enough.
Not in this case.
"Who the hell are you?" Lucy demanded again, becoming more forceful as she wiped the sleep from her eyes.
She was a pretty girl. She was young, very young, innocent but attractive enough despite being free of makeup. I liked the way her hair spilled over her shoulders.
"You can call me Grant," I gave her a name because I knew that would also go a long way at calming her down. Giving her the same name as her flatmate Rae was just common sense. "I’m here to help you, Lucy. Woodward is a bad character. Dangerous." I paused, letting those initial comments sink in. "He’s a killer, Lucy. He kills people."
You see; I had two possible routes ahead of me. One path involved getting Lucy onside – if I managed that then today would be easy. One path involved dragging Lucy, screaming and kicking, to the outcome that we needed. That would be less easy.
"I don’t believe you!" Lucy’s voice was defiant but I could read her body language said otherwise. She was becoming even more defensive, curling up in her thick duvet, tucking her legs under herself and trying to retreat from me.
I tossed a fat envelope onto her bed. It wasn’t sealed and a set of large photographs slid out onto her lap.
Lucy leaned forward and one of her slender nighty straps slid off her shoulder as she reached down to pick up the pictures. "She looks so happy,"
I had to burst her bubble, "She’s dead. The smile on her face is due to the drugs that she was injected with. She died with that grin forever painted her face. The autopsy counted more than 17 different types of sperm in her body."
Lucy didn’t know what to say. She blinked at me from the shadows of her bed.
"She was speaking to Ralph Woodward over the internet. She agreed to meet him. When she did – he and his fellow cultists jumped her, gang-fucked her and then killed her with a chemical compound that dates back to ancient Babylonian days." I pressed on, it was worth it – she wasn’t screaming, she was listening to me, it was worth getting to the end.
"The poison that killed her has been associated with devil worship for hundreds of years. It’s killed thousands of virgins. Some people would tell you it’s been used to summon hundreds of demons – the cultists care about that sort of thing, you know. Ralph, for example, Ralph would happily sacrifice a virgin for the cult he’s a part of."
Lucy was still in a shocked silence – one last push from me, "Are you a virgin Lucy? Are you meeting Ralph tonight?" |