Ikon Read Free Page B

stared at herself full-face in the mirror. In that instant, and in that last instant only, she looked just the way she had always looked in all her photographs, wide-eyed, surprised, frightened by everything she knew but even more frightened by everything she didn’t.
    In that same instant, Henry Friend snapped the saw down past her face and pulled it tight against the flesh of her bare neck. He was so fast, he had trained for this single act of killing for so long, that she didn’t even have time to take in enough air to scream. All she made was a high inward gasp, and then Henry had ripped the saw hard to the right and hard to the left, tearing through soft white skin, through the strong sternocleidomastoid muscle at each side of the neck, through the fibrous sheath which contained the carotid artery, the jugular vein, and the vagus nerve.
    He let out a loud, desperate, ‘Ah!’ of effort and horror, and then he gave one last rip to the right, and the wire-bladed saw pulled clear through the cartilage between her cervical vertebrae, and her head rolled off her shoulders and dropped with a hideous drumming noise on to her dressing-table, amongst her combs and her make-up.
    Blood fountained spectacularly out of her gaping neck, gouting and splashing all over her mirror and halfway up the wall. Her body tilted off the stool and fell heavily to the floor still pumping pints of sticky red all over the white carpet, all over the bedspread, like some ghastly and unstoppable action-painting, Jackson Pollock in gore. One foot twitched and shuddered, and actually kicked off its fur-trimmed satin slipper.
    It took Henry a long time to recover himself. He stared down at the floor because he couldn’t face the severed head which was lying on the dressing-table. The head was splattered with blood, but it still looked unnervingly alive, as if Margot’s eyes would suddenly roll and stare at him, as if Margot’s voice would whisper from its lips.
    ‘Jesus,’ he said to himself. He was shaking all over. He must be losing his nerve.
    After two or three minutes, he turned away from the chaos of blood and went to the bathroom. It was still steamy and fragrant from Margot’s shower. He washed the saw under the basin faucets. The mirror was too cloudy for him to be able to see himself: all he could make out was a foggy pink face, an indeterminate monster from a past that was probably better forgotten, the ectoplasm of other people’s nightmares. Blood circled the basin and whorled around the drain.
    He packed away the saw with the neatness of a professional workman. Then he left the bathroom, closing the door behind him, and walked straight across the bedroom, deliberately diverting his eyes from the dressing-table. He went into the kitchen and found a large green plastic trash bag under the sink. He peeled off his bloody surgeon’s gloves, rolled them up, and dropped them into the bag. For a moment, he closed his eyes, like a man with a migraine. But it had to be done. He returned to the bedroom, carrying the bag, and forced himself to step right up to the dressing-table and look down at Margot’s head.
    It wasn’t the blood that disturbed him. He had seen plenty of blood before. Once, in Oklahoma City, he had crushed a young Italian up against a parking-lot wall in his car, and severed both of the boy’s legs, femoral arteries spouting blood like hoses. And aferwards, as he drove away on Kelley Avenue under a blue Oklahoma sky, he had lit a cigarette with a hand as steady as Black Mesa on a clear night. Blood was no problem. Blood was part of the job.
    Yet, Margot’s head unsettled him badly. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because, historically, she was already
    dead, twenty years buried; and while he might have succeeded in murdering her body, her personality had somehow survived this execution unscathed; as if Henry had done nothing more than lop the head off a waxwork dummy. Her life-force, her legend, remained intact. That