The Comeuppance

The MP stood aside to let the police in. He said that he’d found her after turning up for a dinner date (not romantic, he stressed. Purely business. We just needed to compare notes on an upcoming event) and finding her door open. He walked in, calling her name. He could tell that something was off, but he was a decent guy and couldn’t just turn around and leave. And then he found her. Swinging from a bizarre contraption in her bedroom. It was like a cross between a sex swing and an interrogation device from the Inquisition.  

Several detectives paled on seeing the aftermath. One had to step into the bathroom to vomit. Ada Bryce specialised in serious assault cases and had seen it all, so to speak, so she felt only sadness on seeing this young woman trussed up. Sadness, and revulsion at the MP currently sat in the victim’s living room, head in his hands.  
 
She studied him as if he was a moth, splayed out for analysis between slides of glass. He was tall, tanned, handsome in a vacant sort of way, without charm. She had a feeling he could turn it on, though, in front of a crowd or a journalist. ‘How long has she been dead?’ said Ada.  
 
‘How would I know?’ he said.  
 
‘Because you’re missing a cuff link.’ He instinctively looked at his left wrist, and she knew she had him. ‘Did you really think you’d get away with it?’ she said, becoming sadistic. ‘There’s CCTV from the hallway alone that puts you outside this apartment an hour before you said you came here. Then there’s the cufflink. It came off in your panic when you were trying to free that poor woman from that medieval torture device in there, after it all went wrong. We found it under the bed.’  
 
He sat silently now, a certain smugness to his countenance as he prepared to ask for his lawyer. Beside them was a large picture window overlooking Central London, with all its angular and concrete features. It was a grey and drizzly afternoon.  
 
There was a picture of the victim, who'd been the MP’s intern since leaving Oxford a year ago, on the coffee table. She was stood with her mother, a plump and cheerful, middle-aged woman. They both held puppies in their arms. The MP hadn't noticed it.  
 
‘What I want to know is, what made you think that you could just lie your way out of this?’  
 
‘I want to see my...’  
 
‘Lawyer. Got it. Before he gets here, though, I might as well be upfront about this. You won't be leaving here. Ever.’  
 
He looked at her, and then belched out a blasphemy as the dead woman, his intern, walked out of her bedroom. Her neck was still discoloured where he’d snapped it, but shades don't need bones. Their bodies stay upright on willpower alone.  
 
The MP looked around the flat for someone to save him, but he was alone with Ada and the dead woman, whose naked body held no erotic charm for him now. ‘All I ever wanted was to do the right thing’ she said. ‘All I ever wanted was to be the best version of myself. And now my mother has to bury me.’  
 
He thought about running for the door, but just like in a nightmare, his legs were leaden. Ada put a hand on the corpse’s shoulder. ‘And she would have had to watch as your boss’ lawyer showed everyone that vibrator your best mate bought you as a joke, and your dog-eared copy of an erotic fantasy novel, and used them to make out like you wanted it really.’  
 
The two of them grabbed the MP, surprisingly strong for souls without flesh, and dragged him screaming towards the device. Central London looked on, none of the office workers in the distance bothering to pick out one window among hundreds, even thousands.