The Hollow Girl

Prologue

The Last Murder

1977

He has the impertinence to laugh, as if they’re old friends, not murderer and victim.

‘I think I’d know if you’d poisoned me.’ But even so, he wipes the corners of his mouth with the napkin and runs his tongue around his inner cheeks, then over his lips. Oh God, yes, there is something. Bitter, acrid, sharp. Burning? Why didn’t he notice before? His heart rate quickens. Why did he even agree to this dinner? Spits out what’s left in his mouth, pushes the plate away. Frowns, blinks. Why is everything blurry?

Instinctively, he reaches for the wine to wash the poison from his mouth, from his throat, lungs, veins, nerves, bones, cells, atoms, but his hand stops midway as he realises the exquisite dilemma – the poison could be in the wine.

‘Do you want money? Is that it? I have money. Loads of it. Could set you up for life.’

‘No, I don’t want money.’

He tries to make sense of those absurd words – who doesn’t want money? – but his brain feels like it’s made of strips of dark blue velvet rubbing up against one another like the front legs of blowflies. Must concentrate. Use his brain. Like he did that other time.

There’s a gasp, as pain knifes his stomach, but he forces himself to ask the next logical question. ‘What do you want, then?’

No response. He tries again. ‘This is insane. You won’t get away with it.’

‘Oh, that’s rich – coming from you. Besides, I’m pretty sure I will.’ A gloved hand points an index finger into the air. ‘Actually, there is something I want.’

He clutches his stomach. The pain is beyond excruciating. ‘What? What is it?’

‘But first, you should know I have this.’

Alarm is spreading through his veins like cold tentacles unfurling, but he watches, transfixed, as a small brown bottle is placed at the far end of the table.

‘An antidote.’

He thrusts out a hand to grab it, but his arm is like rubber and lands uselessly beside his plate. And now the table, the room, the gloved hands are all moving strangely, like they’re high in a cable car being rocked by a slow wind.

‘I’ll give you what you want . . . this bottle . . . if you give me what I want. Do we have a deal?’

He tries to stand, but another burst of pain has him clutching his stomach. He sucks in air as if he’s just surfaced from under water, lets out a groan of agony, holds his head to keep his brain from falling apart.

From the other end of the table: ‘Do . . . we . . . have . . . a . . .deal?’

He nods. What choice does he have?

‘Excellent. Now, according to Fowler’s Guide to Household Poisons, the hallucinations and the pain will all be over in’ – they both swivel their heads to look at the clock on the wall, tick, tick, ticking louder and faster, louder and faster, its hands looming and retreating, looming and retreating – ‘approximately half an hour, at which point, your life will cease. Unless, of course, you swallow this.’ The bottle is swung back and forth, just out of reach. ‘So don’t try anything, alright?’

The pain and his fear are now so intense, anyone would feel sorry for him.

Anyone who didn’t know what he’d done.

‘Alright, alright. I won’t try anything. Just hurry up.’

The reply is sluggish and thick. The green-yellow wax inside his ears melts, flows in and out like a tide, pulling the words explaining his side of the deal into his brain like ants stuck in honey.

The incorrect details, minor though they are, still annoy him –they certainly don’t account for his brilliance. Anyway, it’s not as if anyone’s ever going to actually read it. It’s really quite ludicrous how easy it will be – once he has swallowed the antidote – to destroy the document and then his would-be killer. Correction: the other way around.

When he puts down the pen and lifts his head to say, ‘That’s my side of the deal done,’ he is already planning the attack. But cannot stop himself from panting with fear and relief as the gloved hands holding the bottle – the precious brown bottle – draw closer.

He snatches it out of the gloves, unscrews the top as fast as he can, but lifts it slowly to his mouth, desperate not to spill one lifesaving drop. Tips his head back, pours the liquid in, sucks on the glass rim to make sure he’s got it all. The thick oil cools his throat, works its way into his veins, reassuringly heavy and quick like mercury.

Relief, relief, relief.

Odd, though, that it smells and tastes of mint.

He looks up with horror as he realises what he has just done.

‘Oh, sorry. Did I say “antidote”? One of my inaccuracies, as you’d no doubt call it.’ The voice echoes back and forth, slamming into one side of his head, then another. ‘But I certainly wasn’t lying when I said I’d poisoned your dinner. Laced with oven cleaner, and a dash of toilet cleaner. Of course, according to Fowler’s, you’d have recovered after an hour or so – and a few violent vomits. The bottle you’ve just drunk from, though? A lethal dose of pennyroyal oil, which you willingly, indeed eagerly, swallowed. So, any second now, the real agony will begin, and’ – there was a sigh – ‘I’m afraid the only antidote to this poison is death.’

His terror is betrayed by the cracked mosaic of the last words that emerge from his mouth. ‘But what have I ever done to you?’