Trust No Bitch: Part 3

Lilly Philipps: Sunday, 8th February, 2016

Nobody would be in town on a Sunday, it would be fine, Alice did not cease to reassure Gemma and Lilly throughout the entirety of their journey into town in spite of their protests over breaking into a psychiatrist's office in the middle of the afternoon.

"When we came yesterday, we didn't lock it back up on our way out so it's not even like we'd be breaking in." She said knowledgeably as they all climbed out of Gemma's car and began their power walk through the town centre.

"That's semantics!" Gemma snapped. "Just because we're not forcing our way in, doesn't mean we're allowed to be in there. And anyway! We have forced our way in! We did yesterday." She shook her head and ran her fingers through her coiled hair. "Jesus, I can't do this, Alice!"

"Oh for Christ's sake! Don't do this again! Look, if we do get found out, a good lawyer could argue a case like this in their sleep. The suspected murder cases the Supplier wants to implicate us in, not so much! That's why we have to do this and find out who they are."

"What if he's gone back since yesterday?" Lilly asked timidly, glimpsing the lurid sign of the kebab shop, situated underneath Jensen's office, in the distance.

"Lilly, nobody had set foot in that place in months. Him choosing the exact same day as we break in to his office to go back to work is completely improbable." Alice said dismissively, picking up her pace so that the other two had to launch into a kind of lackadaisical jog to keep up with her. Whether it was that or the apprehension of reentering the place she had felt so uneasy in the day before that was making Lilly short of breath, she couldn't tell. But she'd had that feeling inside her before she'd even left Cleo's flat earlier that day, before they'd managed to squeeze through the gap in between the kebab and the chip shop, before they'd actually reached the door up to Jensen's office, which was not pulled to a close as they'd left it but instead wide open. Before all those things. It was that pre-rollercoaster, post-jump scare kind of icy tension that shakes you even in the middle of summer.

"Don't you get the feeling that we're walking into something really, really bad?" She murmured as Alice pushed it further and took one step in, not without first kicking the rubbish out of her pathway.

"What is worse than what any of us have already gone through at one point or another?" She said over her shoulder. "I'm not scared anymore! I just want this to be finished! If the Supplier's up there then good. There's 3 of us and 1 of them. Unless they're Arnold bloody Schwarzenegger then they're going to get the shit kicked out of them, aren't they?"

But although she, along with Gemma, followed Alice in anyway, Lilly wasn't sure that things would be that simple. She found that as she advanced up the gloomy staircase, the hand that hovered above the banister could not do so without trembling; upon attempting to steady it with her other hand, she realised that one was quaking too. By the time they reached the top, she had given up trying to conceal her fear, openly squealing at the smashed CCTV camera, the scarf that Alice had thrown over it the day before strewn across the floor. The air smelt too, awful, really awful. Like vomit, stale sweat, excrement, every kind of unpleasant product of the human body you can possibly imagine, all poured into a saucepan and left to boil.

"The camera wasn't like that yesterday!" She yelped, tugging on Gemma's arm. "Let's just go back!"

"Alice, maybe we should just-"

But Gemma didn't get to finish her sentence; Alice, who had already reached Jensen's office was gasping, 2 hands to her mouth, backing up into the wall.

"Oh Jesus Christ!" She said breathlessly, one hand moving to her head, Gemma running in after her. Lilly, however, lingered in the corridor, her unease, hot and syrupy, flowing from her stomach down to her legs and sticking her feet to the floor.