Kill Who You Want

Chapter Twenty-two

Plot reminder: Abigail is the now bereaved daughter of Heather Gilchrist, the editor of the local newspaper who committed suicide following her covert communications with the murderer. The girl's friends Giles, Phil and Becky were first mentioned in the final chapter of part one. They often smoke dope in the abandoned house from where Sophie was shot. A curfew has been imposed on all tye town's under-16s. In the previous chapter Vince is seen following the vehicle he believes the murderer got into during the aftermath of the shooting.
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Underlit by the torch of his phone which was placed on the bare floorboards between them, Becky Callaghan's nose, reflected Giles, seemed even more porcine than usual. "Place always was a little creepy," she commented, swigging from the vodka bottle. "Now it's like a hundred times so."

"A million times," corrected Phil Tomkins, one arm dangled around her neck, the other grabbing the bottle from her hand.

"Hey!"

The resulting playful struggle for control of the bottle led to the inevitable nauseating kiss. The filthy, rat-infested surroundings of Randolph Underhill's former bedroom obviously had some kind of weird effect on their hormones, Giles could only conclude. How else could one explain all the gross used condoms lying around? Or at least, that had used to lie around before the cops had come and taken them all away. Like a murderer would be stupid enough to leave several desert spoons' worth of his own DNA all over the place! It was quite amusing really, the thought that some forensics officer somewhere had been required to splice the DNA out of Phil Tomkins' squack.

Yet despite Becky's puffy cheeks and protruding bottom lip, despite her limited intellect and appalling taste in music, despite that nose, Giles felt only a burning, agonising envy towards Phil. The closest he ever came to such physical intimacy with a female was in sticky, disrupted dreams.

"Just cut it out you two would you? There are children present."

As the pair continued to suck on each other's faces, he made a vomit gesture at Abigail. There was no hoped-for smile though. She didn't even seem to notice. Just stared at the floorboards through the gap between her folded up legs. Though the most frequent star of his nocturnal mind porn, and quite exquistely beautiful in a delicate, elfin kind of way, he just didn't understand the girl sometimes. For as long as he'd known her she'd done nothing but complain about what a bitch her mother was. Rather than this constant crying and distractedness, he would have thought she'd be overjoyed to be finally free of her.

"Pass me the effin' bottle Phil. Starting to sober up here."

Along with falseness, morality and formal education, sobriety was another of Giles' pet hates. The human mind, it was his considered opinion, had not evolved to tolerate anything less than mild inebriation and was at its most brilliant in a state of complete wastedness. Though marijuana was the substance most conducive to achieving such a state of mental liberation, desperate times called for desperate measures. With the last of his previous score of skunk having been smoked several days ago, and with his dealer Kevin stuck behind bars for the forseeable future, cheapo vodka from that shop on Croxley Street where they never asked for I.D would have to suffice.

Finally coming up for air post-snog, Phil took a couple of quick glugs before dutifully handing the bottle over. "Just imagine," he said, his tone dramatic, eyes flicking towards the window. "The guy was standing right there when he pulled the trigger." He held an imaginary sniper gun in hands, one eye screwed shut as he lined up the sight. Right finger hooked, he gave a gentle squeeze. Then: "Squuuooosh!" As if that were the sound the projected bullet had made. "The Markham girl couldn't have known what hit her. One second she was alive..." He pinched fingers of his right hand together, thrust them to his forehead. "The next" - the fingers of his left hand now splayed out behind him - "her brains were splattered all over the wall." A graphic representation which earned him a leg-deadening thump on the thigh from Becky's balled fist.