NINETY

Amber was never sure what happened first, because everything was so unexpected and seemed to happen at once.

She was standing with her face thrust into the shower’s hot cascade, to blast away the cement dust and sweat from her skin and hair. And only while under the vigorous beating of the hot water did she notice the brief dimming of the white electric light inside the wet room. At first she assumed the spotlights in the granite walled room had flickered.

A swift glance over her shoulder convinced Amber there was nothing wrong with the ceiling lights, because they were bright enough to briefly outline the silhouette of the second occupant inside the wet room.

Without making a sound, whoever had just stepped into the room had curled the steam behind them into a slipstream, like the tail of a large serpent. So the dimming had been caused by the passing of a shape, or a person, into the shower; a swift entrance that had interfered with the light that fell into the space from the bathroom proper. And the realization she was no longer alone in the confines of the stall nearly shut her heart down.

The dark walls of the wet room were obscured by clouds of steam; the far wall behind the shower head that housed the black marble toilet was invisible. What part of her mind that panic left available was filled with the image of poor Kelly Hughes’s polythene-draped, near weightless bones being carefully raised from the darkness of the bathroom floor of 82 Edgehill Road.

Amber turned around and crossed both arms over her breasts. Hot water continued to batter her head and shoulders, and now dispersed an aerosol of water over her face. Within the swirls and billows of steam that filled the narrow rectangle, she thought, and then was certain, and then relieved that she had been mistaken, but then dreadfully certain again, that she could see a shape. A silhouette stood no more than four feet in front of her, in line with the door she would need to escape through.

‘Josh,’ she whispered. She hoped it was Josh, despite the terrible discomfort his presence would create in the unlikely event that he had intruded upon her shower.

The figure vanished, or seemed to melt in a torrent of vapour, and then the tatty outline of a head remerged from out of the steam. What she thought, or imagined, was a pair of large spectacle lenses glinted. And even in this place of cleanliness, of fresh water, a space redolent with the scents of gels, lotions and shampoos, she was struck by the hot odour of the thing that had come into the wet room, which was not Josh.

The dimming of the light, the suggestion of the male presence inside the dark, steamy room, and the distant calling of her name from below, which she only realized later was Josh calling for her attention downstairs, all transpired within a few seconds.

And then Amber was coughing to clear her sinuses of the fungal stench of unclean male flesh that polluted the steam and billowed about her face. It was as if the decomposing clothes of a long unwashed vagrant had just been scissored from pallid flesh in a hot, unventilated room: cattle hormone-harsh, the sulphur of swine, the vinegar of vomit, before the first gust was penetrated by the sharper bite of the halitosis of blackened gums. Under such an assault against decency, Amber’s stomach convulsed and she bent over to spit sour beer suds from her mouth as she stumbled for the entrance of the room.

She regained consciousness lying on her back.

The floor tiles were cold against her shoulders and buttocks, the shower water smacked her face and blinded her. A moment was needed for her eyes to right themselves. The impact against the side of her head had made it appear as if her vision had been knocked out of her head, to remain in the air once her body dropped to the sodden tiles.

The mists parted and curled up like waves as something thrust through the steam. A hand clutched one of her thighs with a grip so cold it made her scream. She tried to roll over, but a second contact, and one chilled enough to convince the flesh of her knee it was being burned, kept her down by pushing her legs apart.

She screamed. Screamed and swiped the air above her body. Cut her nails through warm steam, made vapour and air writhe and surge and dance about her frantic hands that swatted the nothingness above her opened thighs.

‘Amber!’

Josh ran into the bathroom beyond the shower room. His booted feet thumped and slid on the tiles. Above her, in the thick white veil, she saw his silhouette appear in the doorway of the wet room, then thrust through and into the steam. ‘God, Amber. Here, let me get you up.’

He paused when he saw her glistening nakedness. ‘Christ’s sake,’ he muttered. ‘Sorry. Didn’t know. You slip, kid?’

She couldn’t speak, and even though the wet room was hotter than a greenhouse for tropical plants, the muscles of her legs and arms shook and jumped as if she had been placed inside a walk-in refrigerator.

Back on her feet, out of the wet room and inside the bathroom, with a towel covering her front, she fell against Josh and sobbed into his shirt.

Out of awkwardness, shock, or just an intuition that she was in no shape to explain why she had been lying on the floor, screaming and thrashing her arms in the air, with her legs thrust open, Josh remained silent until her sobs subsided.

‘He was in there.’ She swallowed. ‘Bennet. In there.’ She pointed at the wet room, peeled herself off Josh’s wet front, rearranged the towel and moved to the door of the bathroom. ‘He’s here. That pig. That stinking pig. That rapist!’

She screamed so loudly, Josh flinched and winced before quickly moving to her. He caught her wrists and lifted her out of the bathroom by her tensed forearms. ‘Amber! Amber! Kid! Listen to me.’

‘That pig! That bitch!’

‘Amber! I found something.’

‘That bastard . . .’

‘I found something. I think I found our man.’

Amber stared into where she thought Josh’s eyes might be; his glasses were opaque with steam. She swallowed and from a throat that hurt she whispered, ‘Here?’

Josh nodded, then turned his head to look at the steaming doorway of the bathroom. ‘We’ll need a spade.’