Dead Simple

forehead. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I love you so much, Alex.’
    She put her arms around his neck, pulled his lips up against hers and kissed him passionately for some moments. ‘I love you too, Vic. I always have.’
    ‘And yet you happily went off and screwed Mark, then Michael. And a whole bunch of guys before them.’
    She stepped back angrily and almost fell over a suitcase. ‘Jesus Christ, what’s got into you?’
    ‘What’s got into me? We’ve fucked up this time, that’s what. OK?’
    ‘We haven’t fucked up, Vic; we have a result.’
    ‘A lousy one-point-two million quid? Half a year of our lives for that?’
    ‘Neither of us could have foreseen what was going to happen – the crash.’
    ‘We should have played it differently. You could have got Michael out, gone through with the wedding, and then we’d have had half his money, and his partner’s.’
    ‘And that would have taken months, Vic – maybe years. They still have some planning issues on their big development. As it is, we got a quick result. And if you hadn’t gambled away half our goddamn money, we wouldn’t have even needed to be here at all in the first place, OK?’
    Sheepishly, he looked at his watch. ‘We have to get going if we’re going to make the flight.’
    ‘I’m ready.’
    ‘You don’t have any idea how fucking painful this stuff is for me, Alex, do you? What we do? My sitting on the sidelines, knowing this year you’re screwing Michael and Mark, before that you were screwing that jerk Richard in Cheshire, not to mention Joe Kerwin and Julian Warner.’
    ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this, Vic. I did what I did because that was my part of our bargain, OK?’
    ‘No, not OK.’
    ‘You’ve always had your sweet revenge on them in the end – so what’s your problem? And this way, I get to spare you and me from a honeymoon with Michael.’
    He looked at his watch again, anxiously. ‘We’ll talk in the car – I have one more thing to do before we leave.’ He lugged her suitcases out into the hall, then went back into the sitting room and moved the sofa right across the room. Then he knelt down and peeled back a corner of the carpet.
    ‘Vic,’ she said.
    He looked up. ‘What?’
    ‘Can’t we just leave him?’
    ‘Leave him?’
    ‘He’s not going anywhere, is he? He’s not going to get out – he can’t even speak, you said.’
    ‘I’m going to finish him off, put him out of his misery.’
    ‘Why not just leave him? No one’s ever going to find him.’
    ‘Take me ten seconds to crush his neck.’
    ‘But why?’
    He glared at her. ‘You are sweet on him, bitch, aren’t you?’
    Blushing she said, ‘I am absolutely not sweet on him.’
    ‘You were never worried about me getting rid of any of the others. What’s so special about Mikey boy?’
    ‘Nothing’s special about him.’
    He let the carpet fall back in place, stood up, and rolled the sofa back to where it had been. Then he repositioned the coffee table. ‘You’ve got a point, Alex, about him not getting out. Why show any mercy on the little bastard by putting him out of his misery? We’ll just let him starve to death all on his own in the darkness. Happy with that?’
    She nodded. ‘Have you checked today’s papers?’
    ‘No, I’ve been cleaning the place out. Got all yesterday’s – nothing to worry about. We’ll check today’s at the airport.’ He grinned. ‘Then after that, no worries, right?’
    Five minutes later the Mercedes was packed with Ashley’s four suitcases and Vic’s large holdall. He locked the front door and pocketed the keys.
    ‘Do you think we should drop them back in to the agency?’
    ‘We have five more months to run on the lease, woman! You want people going in there and sniffing around? Because I tell you one thing, it ain’t going to smell too good in there in a week or two.’
    She said nothing as she clipped on her seatbelt, watching the house out of the window for the last time. It was a strange house, perfect for their purposes because of its isolation – the nearest neighbour was a quarter of a mile away – and in fact doubly perfect in the light of events last Tuesday night. You could never in a million years call it a pretty or stylish house. Built on scrubby wasteland – which hadn’t changed – in the 1930s, it looked like one truncated half of a pair of semi-detached houses, as if the other side of it had never been built. Originally there had been an integral