Read Online Plender by Ted Lewis - Free Book Online Page B

hadn’t put the lipstick on then this wouldn’t have happened: we would have come out of the studio at a different time and in a different way and by now I would be turning the car into her street and saying goodnight to her probably arranging to see her again next week.)
    I tried to stop thinking and bent down near her head and lay the sack with its open end near her hair. I tried to slip my hand under the back of her head in order to lift her up slightly so that I could lay her head on the lower lip of the mouth of the sack. But my fingertips discovered that the back of her head didn’t exist anymore.
    I tried very hard not to be sick.
    The only thing I could do to separate her head from the flagstones was to take hold of some bunches of her hair and pull. There was a sound that made me shudder. Then I let go of her with one of my hands and slid the sacking beneath her head and neck. I tugged the sacking under her shoulders then I covered her head with the top lip of the sack and I didn’t have to look at her face anymore.
    PLENDER
    I watched Knott drag the sack over to the warehouse door and wondered how the bloody hell I was going to get out. I should have chanced it when he went to get his car from the car park. Now it looked as though I was going to get myself locked in. What a bloody idiot I was. Not that I wouldn’t be able to get out; a place like this was kids’ stuff. No, it would mean missing out on Knott’s plan of action, which was something I didn’t really want to do. I cursed again.
    When Knott reached the warehouse door he let go of the sack and stood there sizing up the best way of getting the bundle through the doorway. A thought must have struck him because he left the bundle where it was and walked back past me and past the loading bay right to the other end of the warehouse and began to trundle one of those porter’s handcarts, the kind you see on railway stations, over to the doorway. He lifted the trolley through the doorway then, after he’d checked there was no one about; he manhandled the sack out into the night. Which gave me my chance. The minute Knott and the sack disappeared through the opening I shot over to the warehouse door and pressed myself behind a jutting brick return that flanked the doorway.
    I could hear the iron wheels of the trolley on the pavement outside. The sound stopped and there was silence for a while until I heard the car boot slam. Then the trolley was trundled back to the doorway. Peter Knott lifted it through and pushed it back to exactly where he’d found it. And while he was doing that I nipped through the doorway and raced across the road to the car park.
    KNOTT
    As I drew away from the warehouse the gates at the level crossing began to close. There was nothing I could do without risking an accident so I slowed down and stopped the car and waited.
    I sat with both hands gripping the steering wheel and stared straight ahead beyond the crossing gates, up into the night sky where the low cloud was breaking up and turning into rags that raced across the new moon, its face as pale as death. I felt nothing. There were no emotions churning about in my stomach. It was as if I’d locked off any feelings by closing some kind of airtight door somewhere in my chest; my guts were no longer affecting my brain. Anything I thought now about what had happened was initiated only in my mind; I couldn’t afford for the rest of my body to affect me. Not now, at any rate. Now I had to find somewhere to leave Eileen’s body, a place where it wouldn’t be found for a long time, at least until any trail had had time to go cold. Also a place where no one would remember seeing a brand new Mercedes SL. A place where I would leave no tyre tracks. A place I had to find within the next hour or two, so that my wife wouldn’t suspect me of being unfaithful again because I’d got home late; any questioning that was directed at me tonight might activate the perverse in me and cause me