Trust No Bitch: Part 3

Alice Jenkins

"Hi, Gem. It's Alice calling...again."

It was the 5th call Alice had made to Gemma in the last 10 minutes. Clara had just been taken to hospital so she could not call her and Lilly? Knowing that she probably wouldn't pick up wasn't the only reason Alice didn't bother calling. If she was going to cry down the phone to anyone, as she felt herself about to do, it would be Gemma. "It's about Clara...She's gone into hospital...I don't know what happened but I think she might have broken her leg or something. Would you please just-" The inevitable crack in her voice was the indicator that the blockade she had trained herself to erect against the tears was disintegrating, "-call me back? Please. Okay."

Hanging up the call, she held the palms of her hands to her eyes to suppress the tears and made her way over to the kitchen area, leaning on the worktop and staring down at the pasta wrapped around her fork. Why she had made it, she was unsure. She had no appetite anyway. What was there left? Everything had reached a dead end. The whole night of Cleo's death and the sequence of events that preceded the murder itself was beginning to feel like a word that had been repeated too many times, completely hollow. So Cleo had met Clara, then her brother, got in a taxi, gone home, fought with her stepdad, and then got in a car, a car Alice did not know anything about, not its license plate, its make, or even its colour. There was Sasha Evan's blog yet Alice was pretty certain Sasha hadn't actually committed the murder, and had no proof even if she had. The plan to catch the Supplier, gone to shit. Her degree, gone to shit. Her apprenticeship, gone to shit. Her immaculate outer shell, gone to shit. What are you going to do about that? She silently asked herself, only to internally reply that the Alice who always knew the answers had been effaced. Like a message written on the sand in the dead of the night, gone by the early morning. It was only the doorbell ringing that pulled her out of her own head, causing her to start, the fork slipping onto the floor with a clatter. Pushing her dinner to one side, she hastily wiped the tear tracks from her face and strode over to her front door, smiling serenely at the person that stood on the other side of it.

"Oh, Louis!" She murmured as brightly as she could, her boyfriend not replying, just stumbling in and throwing a hand against the wall to stop himself from keeling over. Think positive, she thought to herself. At least you don't have to pretend to be pleased to see him. He will have forgotten anything that happens now by tomorrow morning. "You're drunk again. Brilliant."

"What did you say to me?"

"I said..." Alice strolled towards Louis, eyes flitting towards the ceiling in annoyance. "You're drunk, again, aren't-"

Slap.

Her head slammed down hard on the kitchen table as she fell.

Though the pain was not the defining element of the last few moments. Louis had smacked her, and not lightly, the hand that struck her face a drunken, bar-brawl style half-fist. The shock of it was hot like a poker stuck through the middle of her chest.

"I know what you did, you stupid slut." He snarled, as she recovered, pulling herself up with a hand to the cheek he had hit.

"I don't know what you-"

"Don't lie to me." Louis spat, his hand stretching out and then closing around her neck. Still, shock was the most prominent emotion. Forget the air thinning around her, vision blurring like when you try and take a photo out the window of a moving train. She had seen Louis hit people whilst drunk, but of all the things that worried her, that same fist being closed around her own neck was never one of them. "Don't lie to me."

"Louis, please..." Alice wheezed, grabbing his muscular arm and aiming feebly to wrest his hand away from his neck. Laughing at her attempt, he released her himself and just watched with contempt as she made a hoarse cry for help.