Chapter 6
A lot happens in the next few seconds, so I’m going to have to calm down and try to get it in exactly the right order.
Em screams – someone screams, at least, I couldn’t swear it wasn’t me – and jumps to her feet.
I realise she’s about to run into the hall and try to accost a drunk, erratic, armed man, who’s just shot someone else by the sound of it and won’t have much compunction about firing again.
Better stop her. Jonny’s between us, but he’s had the same thought.
Em shakes off his arm, and runs to the door, shouting, ‘Elle! Elle!’
She stops shouting a second after she gets through the door, though. Even as I’m scrambling past Jonny, I feel relieved that she’s come to her senses, then realise the man might just be pointing the gun right at her.
Then, as I’m running, I realise I might accidentally be running into a situation where I might get myself shot – who are these people to me anyway?
– and I’m so appalled at my own momentary burst of selflessness that my foot swerves sideways of its own accord, meaning I wobble into a reproduction bust of Julius Caesar by the door, sitting on a fake column.
Then the rest of me realises that Jonny’s about to cannon into me from the other side, and I push off it into the hall.
The pillar and bust start heading to the floor.
All this happens in the eight feet and two seconds between the sofa and the study door. I know, I know, it seems like a lot. I don’t know how I fit it all in.
As I get through the door, this is the sight that greets me: Em is standing halfway across the floor.
The front door is swinging open, and just inside it, straddling the inner and outer halls, the master of the house is lying on his back.
The stained glass from the door between the porch and the hall makes a shattered rainbow around him.
Elle must have knocked him out somehow. But how?
She’s half his height and wouldn’t have expected him to open the door.
Then I realise Elle is nowhere to be seen, and weirder still, the man’s changed his shirt. The previous one was white and cotton. This new one is scarlet and satin, and absolutely covered in … Oh.
Someone has removed a good portion of our new friend’s middle. That’s the shot we heard. And now Sausage Fingers appears to be stone dead on the stone floor.
Behind me, there is a massive boom, as the marble bust hits the floor and Julius Caesar cops it all over again.
‘Nobody move.’ That’s Jonny, behind me. He approaches Sausage Fingers, steps gingerly over him, nudges his foot out of the way with his own, and rams the front door shut.
‘What do we do?’ Em.
Jonny says: ‘Ambulance?’
‘Good shout.’ Em’s hand goes to her pocket.
‘Guys. No.’ What sort of bastard denies an ambulance to a man who’s just been shot in the chest? Me, it turns out. ‘Look at him. They’d take half an hour to get here, you know that. I don’t think you can keep going without a middle for that long. He’s dead.’
Jonny and Em look at each other, then at the body. In my defence, he’s clearly not getting up any time soon. Em leans down, and I say – again, it’s weird how quickly you can think in these situations – ‘Don’t touch him. Fingerprints.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Al. I want to see if he’s breathing.’
‘And I’m saying you can see he’s not. He’s done.’ Em stays where she is, bent over him. ‘We have to just get our things together and—’
And then Sausage Fingers heaves a ragged sigh, and I nearly die of fright.
He starts hauling in breath after breath, God knows how. There’s so much of his torso missing – what was it, a shotgun? – that I have no idea what he’s even breathing with. One of his arms gropes in the air, then flops back like a spent fish across the remains of his chest.
‘Hey. Hey.’ Em is down next to him. ‘You’re all right.’ (No idea why she says this.)
His eyes wobble towards her, but he’s not really with us.
‘We’re here to help you.’ Debatable, in my opinion, but Em’s a diplomat.
‘Pen?’
‘What?’
He’s properly drifting now. A corner of his mouth twitches and his wandering eye catches mine for a second. ‘Get your money. It’s all … in the … out … building.’
And then he dies, this time for good. His breathing tails off, and his eyes film over. I thought it was made up, but there’s a tangible moment where the spark of life actually leaves the premises. It’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen.
We all fall silent. Nobody wants to be the first to speak. And then a voice comes from behind us.
‘What’s going on?’
Elle is standing in the doorway leading to the back of the house. And I’m clearly going mad, because I find the time to think: Ah, good. At least she got her coat.
Ten minutes later, we’re back in the van. Here’s what happened between then and now:
We left Sausage Fingers where he was. No paramedic on the planet could do him any good now.
We gathered our things.
We wiped for fingerprints as best we could, but I had no memory of what I’d touched since I’d got there. We were all in shock.
We headed to the back door, because who knew who was lurking around near the front with the same gun they’d used to kill our host.
We slipped out, raced to the end of the garden, scrambled over the fence, and had a horrible muddy slither round the edge of the neighbouring property until we were back on the lane. Then we ran through the village, strung out. I was in front.
Finally we arrived back at the van, tumbled in, fired it up, and started driving in any direction.
The road is unlit and the moon’s gone in.
It’s pitch dark. We’re on the outskirts of Bridling, and after that there’s nothing but sudden Blair Witch-style woodland.
The sides of the road rise up ten feet high on either side, the tarmac sunken between them.
It feels like we’re driving into a grave.
I imagine unknown figures lying ahead of us in the dark, waiting for our headlights.
‘Al. Al.’
‘Huh?’
‘Can you slow down a bit? There’s nobody after us.’
I ease off, and the needle creeps down from sixty to a slightly less suicidal forty. But at the first turning I see, I brake hard, drag the wheel round, nearly overturn the van hauling it off the road, and switch off all the lights.
‘Al? What the hell was that, you could have …’
‘That was very inconsiderate, I have an over-plastic collarbone …’
‘Who taught you to drive, Vin Diesel?’
‘Shh.’
We’ve stopped on a little farm path, which I can see runs about twenty feet before collapsing into spring mud. Nobody’s going to be taking this exit tonight.
We stay there for a minute, then two, waiting. I’m looking back along the road as if the tarmac’s about to rear up and eat us. And behind all the surface stuff there’s a thought nagging at a corner of my mind, but I’m so tense and exhausted and shocked I can’t locate it.
‘Al, I really think—’
‘Shut up. Just wait.’
Time passes. Nobody overtakes us.
‘OK. OK, we’re probably safe for the moment.’
Elle speaks. ‘What the hell happened back there?’
Em fills her in. I’ve thought of a question I can hardly hold back until she’s finished:
‘Jonny. You said he was in Dubai. Why wasn’t he in Dubai?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Jonny.
‘You said you had flight data! Did you not check if he’d got on the plane? Why wasn’t he in Dubai where he should have been?’
‘Obviously he was in hiding,’ Em snaps. ‘He was waiting in a dark house with a gun. Clearly he thought someone was coming to kill him. Naturally he would have thought it was us.’
‘But we weren’t.’
‘No,’ she says, as if explaining to a kid. ‘We weren’t. So we’re going to be all right.’
This feels optimistic.
Em keeps talking. ‘Obviously we can’t go back. There’ll be someone in the house by now. We must have scared the killer off when he was at the door, but by now he might have—’
‘Or she.’
‘What’s that, Jonny?’
‘The killer. You assumed it was a he. Could have been a she.’
‘Thanks, Jonny. Always good to get a lesson in everyday sexism from an unexpected angle.’
‘It’s important to remain aware of our unacknowledged biases.’
Em nods, slightly wearily. ‘… Yeah. So what do we do next?’
The thought I can’t grasp is still itching away at me. Something, somewhere has gone badly wrong. Not just in the obvious way – that much is clear – but there’s another aspect too. Something personal to me. What is it?
Elle says, brightly, ‘Well, we’re clear of the house. We’ve got our gear. We can just get out. Nobody saw us go, nobody followed us. Feels to me like that’s all fine.’
‘The police will definitely turn up,’ I say. ‘They’ll fingerprint the place.’
‘So?’
‘So has anyone here ever been fingerprinted?’
Em and Elle say no in unison.
‘Good. Me neither.’
There’s a little gap. Then Jonny says, ‘I might have been fingerprinted once.’
‘Might have, Jonny?’
‘I went to a protest and did a bit of property damage. Got arrested, then released. But they got my fingerprints on file. It was eight years ago. Is there a chance they’ve deleted them?’ He’s speaking quietly, as if embarrassed by the trouble he’s realised he might cause us.
‘We can’t guarantee it. You know what the Met are like. So this is a problem.’
‘What was the protest?’ Elle asks, encouragingly.
‘It was something called the Campaign to Stop Urban 4x4s.’
‘Oh, well, brilliant,’ Em says. ‘Glad it wasn’t a lost cause or anything. Definitely worth sacrificing our liberty for a decade ago. You tit, Jonny.’
‘Sorry.’
‘What did you touch?’
‘Not much. Almost nothing, actually.’ Then his eyes widen. ‘Oh, shit.’
‘What?’
‘The keypad. I touched that lots on the way in. And the gateposts. And the back door.’
‘OK. Maybe we can deal with that. Any other evidence?’
We all think for a minute. Then Jonny pipes up. ‘Pub.’
‘What?’
‘The pub had CCTV. At least one camera, overlooking the car park. It’ll have picked us up as we arrived and left. The lighting levels weren’t ideal for it, though, and they might have been using an old system. I didn’t pay it much attention.’
‘Surely the police won’t bother looking at the CCTV of a random nearby pub?’ I say.
‘They might,’ says Em. ‘I mean, this is a murder, not a bike theft. Even the police out here will probably pull their heads out of Hedge Weekly or whatever they read and do a bit of scouring.’
‘OK. Let’s think about that in the morning.’
And then I remember the really bad thought. But I don’t want to just say it outright, and there’s a slim chance that it might be me overreacting, so I ask, ‘Er. Did anyone go back into the study after we left it?’
‘No.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘You did? Em, you hero. Did you clear our stuff out?’
‘I got my phone. He’d smashed it, remember? Wasn’t going to leave that behind.’
‘OK. And when you were in there, did you by any chance pick up a black case, about this big’ – my hands frame the shape of the object that is going to cook my goose – ‘with a little leather strap?’
‘Er … no, sorry. Was I meant to?’
‘Oh, God.’
At this point, I think I should admit what I do for a living.