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Half Past Dead. Jane Clifton
Читать онлайн.Название Half Past Dead
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780992329563
Автор произведения Jane Clifton
Жанр Ужасы и Мистика
Издательство Ingram
Her hands gripped the steering wheel as she crested the Westgate Bridge, almost aeroplane height above the chemical stacks of Coode Island on her right and the broad, cobalt sweep of Port Phillip Bay out to her left. It was one of Melbourne's favourite suicide spots. The blast of a semi's horn almost sent her over the edge.
Finally, within the safe confines of 37 Wakelin Street, she stood motionless in the shower, letting the delicious cold water cascade over her, washing away her sins, absolving her in the name of the husband and the son and the holy family.
The bathroom was her chapel, her baptismal font, sacred ground.
She washed herself carefully and ever so gently where it hurt - like a good mother - then dried herself, trying to dodge her reflection in the enormous mirror which ran the length of one side of the room, from the door to the raised bath area.
Sooner or later she'd have to make that call to the police but not now. Lawrence wasn't going anywhere in a hurry and if someone found him first, all the better. It wasn't as if she'd killed him. She wasn't involved in any way. Well, okay, she was possibly the last person to see him alive. She wished she'd never seen him at all! Him and his fake blond hair and shoulder pads. Maybe his eyes had been blue. Maybe he wore contacts. For all she knew about him, one of his eyes could have been made of glass! She wasn't about to screw up her entire life on the grounds of temporary insanity, they could still put you away for that; she was opting for diminished responsibility.
So he'd ended up dead in the hallway of his style-challenged house! She had a job to go to and, if she could just get her hands to stop shaking, she would put her face on and get going. She turned to the mirror and started applying the expensive moisturiser she'd recently started to use.
'Never wash your face with soap,' Faith admonished. 'Lather leaves you leathery.'
They obviously hadn't covered genetics in any of her mother's prime-time favourites. Ronnie was well aware that 'good' skin was either in your DNA code or it wasn't, and no amount of beauty products or avoidance of soap would alter that. As the sun was beginning to set on her thirties however, she had noticed a lack of spring in the body's largest organ. Plunging crow's feet first into denial, she had lashed out on a range of politically incorrect products with seductive packaging to stave off reality. It felt good every morning to massage the sweet-smelling cream into her face, aware that the actual effect it was having on her skin was, in the truest sense of the word, cosmetic.
In the genetic lottery that was DNA Ronnie felt she had come off pretty well, having the best of her parents' physical features to compensate for inheriting all the ethno-psychological eccentricities of her family tree.
With both parents of medium height, Ronnie's five feet five inches came as no surprise. She picked up Faith's great skin but not her continental shelf of a bosom, thus avoiding glacial fissures being dug into her delicate shoulders by overloaded underwire bras, and a dowager's hump by the age of forty. Ronnie had her paternal grandmother to thank for her pretty and more than adequate 12C breasts, which had survived the two-year conscription to maternity and breastfeeding and emerged triumphant from their lanolin- stained constraints still pointing optimistically, almost cheekily, north.
From Godwin, her father, the Stawell Gift contender, she scored a fast metabolism and a certain wiriness that helped keep her arms lithe and her stomach flat. Her longish waist dipped towards jutting hip bones and slim, straight legs with one of those gaps between the tops of the thighs that let the sun shine through. To her eternal gratitude she also inherited Godwin's cellulite-free arse, even though there was plenty of Faith's to go around.
In all, a neat, feisty package of stylish athleticism without the dehydrated, prematurely aged look of the gym-junkie.
Short, straight black hair framed her triangular face in a perfect bob, the fringe just grazing the lids of greenish-brown, almond-shaped eyes that were the star attraction on the dial. Dreamy, faraway eyes but with a constant smile waiting in the wings for a chance to flash wide then crackle with light. When she and Boyd first met, she wore her hair longer and he would introduce her to his friends as Little Egypt. Kohl pencil and mascara wand did their best this morning to disguise the fact that her best features were red-rimmed and bleary, but she took care not to apply too much concealer to the dark shadows beneath for fear of producing the koala-in-headlights effect.
Faith's wide full-lipped mouth provided the perfect setting for Godwin's Hollywood-style perfect bite and needed only a hint of colour - full make-up looked good only on the very young or the very old, Ronnie maintained - and she was done.
She wrapped her kimono around her, then bent to scoop up last night's clothes that should have gone 'straight to forensic'. She walked down to the laundry, dropped them into the washing machine with some powder and punched the switch.
Back in her bedroom the sight of her bed overwhelmed her with a desire to slide between cool sheets and sleep the last twenty-four hours away. Out of the question. She had to get dressed and resume her place in the world, as if nothing extraordinary had happened. She had to go in to Arthouse, just as she told Dexter she would, and help him to finish the 2-SWAN submission in time for their arrival at the end of the week. There was nothing she could do to help Lawrence Konitz. He was no longer her concern.
When the weather was this hot she would usually wear a strappy summer dress. Today she wanted to cover herself completely, go the hijab and burkah. Christ! If there'd been a nun's habit hanging in her wardrobe she'd have thrown it on, wimple and all.
She chose the next best thing, a lightweight, nondescript, sleeveless navy-blue pants-suit which she'd jazz up with some jewellery, so as not to draw too much attention to herself through an uncharacteristic lack of style. Her charm necklace should do the trick.
An antique gold chain of miniature hieroglyphic eyes hung with charms - the Sphinx as centrepiece bracketed by pairs of palm trees, pyramids and pharaohs - it had been a gift from Boyd, presented to her on their fifth wedding anniversary complete with a little speech. He wasn't giving it to her just because of her pet name. No, it was because, to him, she would always be as beautiful and mysterious as the Sphinx. It didn't matter how long they had been together or how familiar they had become, or even how much they loved each other, he said. There would always be a part of her that he could never reach, that would remain unknown, and this made her even more desirable.
Well, she could write the book on the lure of the unknown now.
His speech had taken her by surprise. She had never thought of herself as a secretive person. On the contrary, she accepted most people's view that she was open and frank. Her natural instinct to call a spade by its name had weeded out some acquaintances over the years, but it had compensated her by helping to unearth the few worthwhile people she could number as friends. Up to that point she hadn't felt that she had kept any secrets from him, so his speech had puzzled her. Maybe he was just projecting, seeing what he wanted to? Maybe this was his version of a fantasy lover? How sensible of him to keep it within the marriage bed. She had accepted the gift graciously, accepting with it the mantle of 'woman of mystery' while making a mental note to pursue the topic at a more opportune time. A time which, of course, never came.
Ronnie straightened the neckline of her jacket in the mirror, then returned to the bathroom for perfume and the necklace.
Where had she put it? She remembered choosing to wear it the previous day, as an affirmation of all the people and principles that she held dear. At her convent school she had worn a scapula - one of those horrible brown woolly necklace things that were supposed to remind the wearer of the inspiring life of some saint or other, or the mother of Christ, the BVM. Perhaps she hoped that the necklace would work like that. She would have been better off with a few cloves of garlic on a string.
She'd had it on in Lawrence's bedroom. She remembered now how it had dug into her neck as he pounded away. The discomfort had stopped when he had stopped and she had not thought about it again. She had no memory of taking it off