In the end I opted for poison. The caretaker in our block endlessly moaned about the rats – however much powder he put down, he couldn’t get rid of them. So it wasn’t tough to half inch a tube of the stuff. I thought this was the best way. The mutt was a greedy little beggar, could never resist a feed. So I made him a very special one. The cheapest, shiteist dog food laced with rat poison. He scoffed the whole lot.
I laughed later when I saw the mess. Dog shit and dog puke all over the kitchen floor. The life poured out of him from both ends and within a couple of hours he was dead. Mum was fucking terrified, wanted to bin it before Dad got back, pretend the mutt had run away or something. But he’d bunked off early and caught her in the act.
He went mental, knocking her around, screaming at her. But she was as confused as he was. In the end, he found the empty rat poison tube in the rubbish outside. Stupid mistake really, but I was still young. He exploded back into the room clutching the tube and silly cow that I am I smiled. And that really did it.
He stamped on my head, kicked me in the stomach, booted me between the legs. Then he grabbed my neck and held my head against our three-bar fire. On and off, on and off. Don’t know how long he went on for. I passed out after twenty minutes.
The decorations were coming down and life was getting back to normal. There’s something peculiarly sad and depressing about an office still swathed in tinsel after the Christmas festivities have passed. Some people like to keep them up until well into January, but Helen wasn’t one of them and she’d tasked a pliant constable with removing every last bauble and streamer. Helen wanted her incident room back the way it should be. She wanted to refocus.
Predictably Whittaker wanted an update, so Helen headed straight to his office. The press coverage of Sam’s murder seemed to have calmed down a bit – a large seizure of cocaine at Portsmouth harbour had distracted the local crime reporters for now – and Whittaker was happy enough, so their catch-up was brief for once.
Returning to the incident room, Helen could tell immediately that something was up – there was a tension in the atmosphere, with no one quite daring to meet her eye. Charlie hurried over, then paused, unsure how to start. It was the first time Helen had ever seen her tongue-tied.
‘What’s happened?’ Helen demanded.
‘Sanderson just took a call from uniform.’
‘And?’
‘They’re down at Melbourne Tower.’
Oh God no.
‘A mother and daughter found dead in their flat. Marie and Anna Storey. I’m so sorry.’