Chapter 60
TOM
I don’t know how long I stand there, feeling the room tilt, like a hand has tipped a glass and everything inside wants to spill.
I can’t move.
The sound has stopped—the screaming, the scuffling, the thud of bodies—and in its place there’s just this awful, swollen silence.
James is on the floor, a heap of flesh, his limbs twisted at angles that don’t make sense. His eyes are still open, catching the kitchen light in a way that makes it hard to tell if he’s looking at me or through me.
There’s blood — so much blood — pooling and spreading, tracing the cracks between the tiles, creeping toward my shoes. My chest won’t expand; the air feels heavy, like I’m breathing through cloth.
Part of me is waiting for him to move — for his chest to rise, for him to cough, to swear, to prove the world hasn’t tilted this far. But he doesn’t. He just lies there, eyes glazed, mouth slightly open.
I realise, with a hollow sort of clarity, that there’s no coming back from this — for him, or for any of us.
Emma has become a tornado of motion. She’s on the other side of the room — hands to her face, then twisting her hair, then that sudden, ferocious stillness when she realises the practicalities of the moment.
She keeps glancing at James’s body with that expression that’s a mixture of terror and calculation.
I turn to Pete, who’s pressed into the corner of the kitchen. His eye unfocused as if someone has left a light on inside his head and it’s blinking too fast. He’s breathing, but it’s the shallow, mechanical kind that makes you think the thing inside him is on standby rather than alive.
I don’t know what to do about James’s body. But Pete, Pete I can help. I rush to him. “Are you ok?”
He doesn’t respond, his eyes still glazed over. I grip his arm and lift him. He is heavier than I expect, not in muscle but in absence. I guide him to the sofa and sit him down like he’s a person I’m borrowing for a minute.
“Wine,” he says. One word. Not a request. A flat instruction.
Rather than question his request, I move on autopilot.
I grab a glass and bottle of red already open on the side.
Pouring him a large glass. I hand it to him because it’s something to do, a gesture that says I am still here, He takes it, brings it to his lips, and for the first time his fingers actually register as fingers, gripping the stem like someone trying to remember how to hold a life.
I turn to Emma. “Are you okay?”
She nods.
“We need to call the police,” I say. Of course I do.
“No,” Emma says, flat and fast. She turns and looks at me as if I’ve suggested we bring in a circus. “We can’t call the police.”
My shoulders give a small, reflexive shrug of disbelief. “What — what do you mean? He’s dead, we have to.”
“We pinned him down. Tom, we need to—”
“It was self-defence. He was coming for all of us. He had a knife.”
“It will look like murder,” she tells me.
“It wasn’t murder!”
“We pinned him down and stabbed him.”
“You stabbed him!” I fire back and instantly regret it. This isn’t the time to turn against each other.
“It was an accident!” Emma fires back.
“Exactly!”
Her eyes glitter with tears but there’s an edge to them that is not sorrow so much as a cold arithmetic: risk, exposure, consequence.
“They won’t see it that way. Not with me, I know what they will say.”
“They will when they see what James is like,” I say, remembering the videos I have.
“What do you mean?”
“There are videos, from the CCTV around the house. Of James being aggressive, violent. It paints a picture of who he is.”
“So, you did get access to the CCTV?
“Yes, on the laptop upstairs.”
“So, what we did, that would be recorded too?” she asks.
I nod. “I think so.”
Emma’s face hardens. “We need to see it, before we call the police. We need to know what it really looks like when we play it back, that it definitely looks like self-defence. And if not we can delete it.”
“Okay,” I reluctantly agree. I hesitate to leave Pete alone, but have no choice. “Come with me.”
We rush out the kitchen to the study.
The laptop is closed; the Mac’s sleep light is a smug little dot. I open it and the password prompt is waiting like a small, polite guard.
“Do you know the password?” Emma asks.
“No, I need Pete’s Apple Watch to unlock it for me. That’s how I got in last time.”
I run to the bedroom to find his charging dock. It isn’t there. I check the drawers in the room. Nothing.
“I can’t get in. Only Pete can open it,” I admit.
With that Emma spins and runs back to the kitchen.
When I join them, Emma is closer to Pete, her words a continuous, frantic whisper. Her hands are on his knees. “Pete, please, let us get into the CCTV. I need to get in.”
Pete isn’t responding. He’s just sipping his wine.
“Please, please Pete,” she keeps saying.
“Emma—” I try to cut in.
“Or tell me about Chris. Tell me where he is. Where is Chris?”
“Emma, not now,” I say as I step closer. “We can talk about Chris another time.”
She ignores me. “You can tell me now, Pete. Now that James is gone. You always said if James wasn’t around, you’d help me. Please, where’s my brother?”
“Emma, this isn’t the time. We need to call the—"
Pete turns to her suddenly. “You really want to know?”
“Yes, tell me! Where is he?”
No, no, I think. No, not now. I know what happened to Chris. He’s dead at the hand of James. I saw it with my own eyes. Now, with another body lain on the same kitchen floor, is not the time for the revelation that Emma’s brother is dead.
What is Pete thinking?
“Okay,” Pete says simply.
Pete’s face goes blank for a long breath. Then he reaches for the TV remote, bringing the sixty-inch television mounted on the wall to life. Everything in the room goes quiet, as if the house itself is inhaling. Pete taps on his phone for a second, before a video starts streaming in front of us.
“No, Pete…” is all I manage.
I know the video. I’ve seen how it plays out. But watching it again, now with Emma watching too, is like some real time YouTube reaction video.
The fight.
The struggle.
The stab to the neck. And the second. Third. Fourth.
The blood. The blood everywhere.
Then the silence.
Emma is the first to make a sound — an intake like someone being punched. Her hands bury her face. She falls to her knees, hands scrabbling at the carpet as if she can drag the picture back together. “No,” she wails. “No, no, no.”
I can’t breathe. My chest tightens.
Emma looks up at Pete. “You told me he was alive,” she says, the accusation collapsing into something that might be grief.
Pete’s face changes as the video plays. There’s a new clarity there, like a film negative burning into shape. He watches with an attention that is almost surgical. When the frames end, he doesn’t weep. He doesn’t fall apart. He’s very calm.
Emma scrambles up and throws herself at him, voice raw: “Why did you tell me he was alive? Why did you keep saying it? Why—”
He’s very quiet. His fingers flex around the arm of the sofa. “I hedged,” he says. The room goes very still — like the moment before a storm. “I hedged my bets.”
“What does that even mean?” Emma cries.
“Because you needed to believe that James had to be out of the way for you to find out where Chris was.” Pete calmly turns to me. “And you needed to believe that James was going to kill me.”
I shake my head, confused. “What?”
“I needed James gone. And between the two of you, I always thought one of you would do it eventually.”
Pete takes another sip of wine. “And now that he’s dead,” he says softly, “we can get down to business.”