Free Tower of Silence by Sarah Rayne Page B

chair and pushed his head forward a little, and then drove the point of the needle hard into his neck, at the place where it joined the skull. There was a bad moment when the needle hit something hard–bone? gristle?–and Mary was afraid she would have to take it out and try it a bit higher up. But it only stuck for a second or two and then it slid deep in–deep, deep into father’s skull, mushing up his brain and stabbing through all the nerves in the spinal cord. There was another bad moment when she thought he was going to wake up–he seemed to grunt and his whole body jerked as if he were a puppet and strings had been pulled. His hands flailed, anda wet sound came from his throat, and then he flopped forward and Mary came round the chair to look at him from the front, to see what he looked like now that he was dead.
    He did not look much different, but he was definitely dead. People said you could always tell, instantly, if somebody was dead, and Mary saw what they meant. It was as if a light had been switched off inside. There was some blood on his neck where the steel needle had gone in, and he had dribbled some sick out of his mouth–that would have been the wet choking sound.
    Getting him out to the wash-house might have been awkward, but there was a small, lightweight wheelbarrow in the potting shed, and it was the easiest thing in the world to tip father forward out of his chair so that he fell into it. His hands flopped over the sides, and his legs splayed out. Mary saw that his trousers were wet at the crotch, which was pretty disgusting. It had run down the inside of his leg and puddled into his shoe. It was a small indignity, but it pleased Mary to see it, because when his body was found, people would know what he had done while he was dying.
    Christabel was with her as she trundled the wheelbarrow through the house and across the little paved area at the back, and round to the wash-house. It was quite heavy, but it was not very difficult. Christabel watched from the shadows, and when Mary glanced up she could see that Christabel was smiling.
    Do it, Mary, do it, DO IT…
    Without Christabel’s strength Mary might not havebeen able to tip father’s body out, and prop it up against the rusting boiler, and then make the return journey for mother. But it was all right. She managed it, and the strength was still coursing through her body and firing her mind and it was all going to work out exactly as she had planned.
    The next part was a bit tricky, because the essence of the murder–the echoing of an Indian wife’s death–was that mother must not be dead. She must die with William’s body, just as the widows in India died, flinging themselves onto the burning funeral pyres of their dead husbands. And so Mary had to work quietly now, in case Leila roused from her drugged slumber. It was a bit disconcerting to see the rim of white under her mother’s eyelids, but Mary thought that drugged people did look like that.
    First she tied William to one of the rusting pipes protruding from the copper boiler, and then positioned him so that he was leaning back against it. After this she twisted her mother’s hands behind her back and bound them tightly with thin tough nylon rope. She bound her ankles in the same way and stood, considering. Enough? No, she could wind the rope around Leila’s upper arms as well, so that they were clamped to her body. It was absolutely vital that her mother did not manage to loosen the ropes. She bent over, tightening a knot. Yes, that was better. The bitch would never be able to work free of those cords. Now for the next part.
    Working with care, testing the strength of each section of rope and the toughness of each knot she made, shebound her mother’s body to that of her father, so that they were face to face. It amused her to position her father’s arms around his wife, in the travesty of an embrace. She thought she heard Christabel laughing as this was done, and then she