Dead Simple

you go down and see a guy in leathers and the next moment you shoot your bolt before you’ve barely got back inside me.’
    He rolled off and sat up beside her on the floor, a wave of gloom washing through him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I just have a shitload of stuff going on in my head at the moment.’
    ‘And I don’t?’
    ‘Maybe you’re better at handling this than I am.’
    ‘I don’t know what you’re capable of handling, Mark. I thought you were the strong guy and Michael was the weak one.’
    He leaned forward and placed his face in his hands. ‘Ashley, we’re both tense, OK.’
    ‘You shouldn’t be tense, you just had a great orgasm.’
    ‘OK, OK, OK. I have apologized. You want me to work on you? I’ll make you come – you know – by hand.’
    She stood up abruptly, picking up some of her clothes as she did. ‘Forget it, I’m not in the mood any more.’
    They both dressed in silence. It was Ashley, putting on some lipstick, who finally broke it. ‘You know what they say, Mark? Good sex is one per cent of a relationship; bad sex is ninety-nine per cent.’
    ‘I thought we had great sex – normally.’
    She checked her lipstick in her compact mirror, as if she was about to go out on a date. ‘Yes, well, I did, too.’
    Mark walked over and put an arm around her. ‘Ashley, darling, come on, I apologized – I’m so damned stressed. We should go away for a few days.’
    ‘Sure, that would look good, wouldn’t it.’
    ‘I mean when this is all over.’
    She gave him a sharp look. ‘When exactly will it all be over?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    She put her mirror away in her handbag. ‘Mark, darling, it can never be over while Michael is alive. We both know that. We burnt our bridges on Thursday night when you took out the breathing tube.’ She gave him a peck on the cheek. ‘See you in the morning.’
    ‘Are you going?’
    ‘Yes, I’m going. I always go at the end of the day; something wrong with that? I thought we were supposed to be keeping up appearances?’
    ‘I guess, yes – I mean…’
    She looked at him for a couple of seconds. ‘Pull yourself together, for Christ’s sake. Understand?’
    He nodded lamely. Then she was gone.
    He stayed on for another hour, working on his emails, then, with the noise of the cleaners driving him to distraction, he decided to quit for the day and take the rest of his work home.
    On his way to the door, he picked up the package he had signed for earlier and tore it open. There was something inside, a small object, tightly wrapped in cellophane then bound with tape.
    Frowning, he wondered what it was. A replacement sim card for a mobile? A computer part?
    He pulled a pair of scissors out of the desk drawer and snipped one end open, squeezed it, and peered inside.
    At first he thought it was a joke, one of those plastic fake fingers you can buy in novelty shops. Then he saw the blood.
    ‘No,’ he said, feeling giddy suddenly. ‘No. NO.’
    The severed fingertip fell from the pack and landed noiselessly on the carpet.
    Stepping back away from it in horror, Mark saw there was an envelope inside the packet.

69
    Grace turned off the main road and onto a country lane, barely beyond the outskirts of Lewes. He passed a farm-shop sign, a telephone booth, then saw a tall mesh fence topped with barbed wire, some of it erect, some in a state of collapse, ahead on his left. There were two gates, wide open, that didn’t look as if they had been closed in a decade. Fixed to one of them was a faded, cracked painted sign which read ‘WHEELER’S AUTO RECOVERY’. Beside it was another, much smaller warning sign, reading ‘ GUARD DOGS! ’
    The appearance of the place was about as near to a hillbilly homestead as Grace had ever experienced. It was beyond ramshackle; it was beyond the most untidy place he had ever seen in his life.
    The yard was dominated by a large blue tow-truck, parked amidst a dozen or so partially or totally cannibalized carcasses of vehicles, some smashed, some badly rusted, and one, a small Toyota, just looking as if it had been parked and someone had nicked everything it was possible to nick from it.
    There were piles of sawn and unsawn logs, a wooden trestle, a rusting bandsaw, a decrepit Portakabin, against which was a faded chalked sign which read ‘ XMAS TREES SALE ’, and a wood-framed bungalow that looked as if it could collapse at any moment.
    As he drove in and switched the engine off, he heard the fierce, deep