Capital Punishment Read Online Free PDF Page B

girlish for her age of around forty. She was wearing a ball gown. In between them was a very beautiful honey-coloured girl in a long black dress and a dazzling necklace. On the frame of this photograph was a small brass plaque engraved with the words,
On the occasion of the 21st Birthday of Alyshia D’Cruz.
A latex-gloved hand tapped the glass over Alyshia’s abdomen.
That
was the outfit he wanted.
    The beam of light shifted around the room to the fitted wardrobe. He opened the doors, ran his hands over the clothes hanging in desolate flaps, until at one end he found several full length dresses. In a plastic dry cleaner’s sheath was the same black dress from the photograph. He draped it over the bed.
    He went through the drawers in the chest by the bed, sorting through the underwear until he found exactly what he wanted. He put the matching strapless black bra and knickers on top of the dress. He returned to the drawers but couldn’t find what he was looking for. He searched under the bed, lifted the mattress, crawled around the room, peering and feeling under the furniture. Nothing. He went back to the fitted wardrobe. Instinct was telling him that, for psychological reasons, she would keep it here rather than in a safe-deposit box.
    Underneath the clothes in the wardrobe were ranks of plastic shoe boxes. He went through each one, removing the shoes and feeling around inside the box before replacing them. At the bottom he found a pair of old, scuffed Ugg boots with their tops turned over. He felt inside the left boot and found it. A slim box with the words
Asprey London
printed in gold on the top. Inside was the diamond necklace from the 21st birthday photograph. He slipped the box into his pocket, replaced the Uggs, chose a pair of black, strappy, high-heeled Prada shoes, which he put with the lingerie, and rolled them up in the plastic sheath around the black dress. He gave the room a final check and left.
     
    A sucking sound in her ears. A sense of being dragged down into a vortex but without spinning and, with a deep intake of breath, Alyshia came awake into the velvet blackness pressed to her face. She picked her head up off the coarse cotton of the pillow and wiped the drool from the corner of her mouth. She breathed back the nausea, brought a hand tentatively to her face and touched the sleeping mask.
    A calm yet commanding voice, which had been amplified and distorted, said, ‘Don’t touch. Hand back down by your side.’
    She responded immediately. Realised as she rested her wrist on her hip, on the waistband of her knickers, that there was something taped to her arm: a cannula. And she had no tights. She still had her bra on but her Cartier watch was gone and her feet were bare. She remembered vomiting down herself and what had caused it. She shuddered at the memory of the two purple, bug-eyed faces.
    ‘How are you feeling?’ asked the voice.
    ‘Sick and disorientated,’ she said. ‘And I need to go to the loo.’
    ‘Everything has to be earned.’
    ‘Earned?’
    ‘Yes, earned. I know it’s not a concept the entitlement generation are familiar with,’ said the voice. ‘Now roll over onto your back, rest your hands on your stomach. Breathe evenly and deeply.’
    ‘I’d like some clothes. I’m cold,’ she said, but she wasn’t, she just didn’t like to be this vulnerable.
    ‘You can’t be cold, it’s twenty-five degrees in the room,’ said the voice. ‘Stop whining and do as you’re told.’
    ‘I’d like a sheet.’
    ‘Everything has to be earned.’
    ‘Then tell me how I earn these things.’
    ‘By answering questions.’
    She thought about this. Privilege had given her a natural resistance to control by others. On the other hand, she needed to pee. Adapt. Fight from a position of comfort.
    ‘OK, this is for the right to go to the loo.’
    ‘Tell me something that only you or your mother could possibly know.’
    The request made her emotional. Despite their recent difficulties,