Chapter Forty-Three
LARA USES THE phone in the kitchen.
It’s not long before help arrives. She opens the door to flashing, revolving lights, red and blue, on the street outside the house; they’re mesmerizing.
And then she is surrounded by medics and police.
They observe her with concern. Wordlessly, she lifts her bound hands and points in the direction of her husband.
Everything after that happens in a blur.
An officer carefully removes the zip tie from her hands and puts it in an evidence bag.
The medics treat her arm and look at her head.
And then the questions begin. Somehow, she is in the kitchen, sitting at the table with two police officers.
All the lights are on. She’s aware of other people in the house, bending over her husband, just out of sight.
‘Can you tell us what happened?’ one of the police officers asks her.
She looks back at him, stupid with shock. Her head is pounding. She can’t focus. He asks her again. Finally, she manages to say, ‘There was an intruder. A man.’
‘Was he alone?’ He’s writing in a notebook.
‘Yes.’
‘Can you describe him?’
‘No.’ She tries to concentrate. But she’s confused. She can’t remember what she’s confused about.
‘Was he tall? Short?’ the officer coaxes.
‘He was tall, maybe just over six feet,’ she says, trying to think. Ben was about the same. ‘Fit. Strong.’ She adds, ‘He was wearing a mask – a black balaclava. And he was dressed all in black. Black pants, black running shoes, black jacket.’
It’s so hard to concentrate. They’re in the kitchen at the back of the house, but she’s distracted by the activity she can hear in the hall, where she knows many people are working around her dead husband.
She can’t process it. Earlier tonight he was humming in the bathroom. She’s stunned. She must think.
‘Tell us, step by step, what happened,’ the officer says.
They are making her drink strong, sweet tea, for the shock.
Maybe it’s helping, because her mind begins to clear.
‘I couldn’t sleep. We’d just come back from Venice.
We arrived home this evening.’ She forces herself to continue.
‘I decided to go downstairs, but there was this man standing right in front of me.’ She freezes, remembering.
‘Please, go on.’
‘I screamed, and he grabbed me.’ She’s speaking in a monotone. ‘He had a knife.’ She continues haltingly. ‘Ben heard me scream and came out and saw us.’
She’s suddenly not sure what she should say. Should she tell them everything? She can’t think straight because she keeps seeing Ben dead on the floor with the blood pooling all around his head, his eyes open. How will she live without Ben? She really did love him. She stops and stares at the wall.
The officer tries to bring her back to the present. ‘What happened then?’
‘He told Ben to go back to the bedroom, and we followed. He had ahold of me. And then he tied us up with these ties he had in his backpack.’
‘Okay.’
She pauses, unable to continue. Her mind is in turmoil.
She recognizes the source of the confusion: she can’t tell them everything.
She can’t tell them what he was really after.
If she does, he will come back. She feels rising panic.
He said he would come back if they told anyone, and now she has called the police.
But she didn’t have any choice, after what happened to Ben.
The intruder must realize that! Even so, she’s consumed by fear.
She must not tell them what he was really after.
She’ll leave that out. They don’t have to know.
‘What happened after he tied you up?’
She looks at him blankly. She’s in shock, they will think she’s in shock and that’s why she’s having trouble with her story. But her mind is clearing now, as the need for self-preservation kicks in.
‘He … he … hit me. Across the face.’
‘Go on,’ he prods.
‘And then he started cutting me.’ She whispers, ‘Ben tried to stop him.’ She looks down at her right arm, now clean and bandaged.
And now she stops, not sure what she should say. They will wonder why he tortured her. ‘I think he did it for fun. He was a sadist. He wanted to terrorize us.’
‘Do you know if anything was taken?’
‘Yes. He made me go down to the study with him and open the safe. But first he threw our phones and laptops over the railing so Ben couldn’t call for help.
He took the money in the safe, but not the jewellery.
He brought me back upstairs to the bedroom.
Then when he left, Ben went after him. I don’t know how he got out of his ties, but he did somehow.
I heard a scuffle and ran after him. But he must have’ – she can hardly speak – ‘he must have …’
‘I’m so sorry,’ the police officer says again. After a respectful pause, he explains, ‘We found some nail clippers under the covers on the bed upstairs – he must have used those to cut the zip ties while you were out of the room.’
Poor Ben, she thinks. She imagines him getting the nail clippers out of his bedside table drawer while they were downstairs in the study, managing to free himself, wanting to help.
And all he did was get himself killed. Why did Ben have to go after the intruder when he was leaving?
she asks herself in anguish. They could both still be alive …
She should stop talking now. ‘My head hurts, can we do this later?’
‘Of course,’ he says, closing his notebook.
They still haven’t taken her husband’s body away and they ask her if there is anywhere she can go.
She thinks of her best friend, Jill. Before all this, that is where she would have gone. She would have called Jill first and she would have been welcomed there with open arms. But not now. Ben is dead because of what Ted and Jill have done.
‘I have to call Ben’s parents,’ she says suddenly. They’ll be devastated. They doted on Ben, were so excited about the possibility of grandchildren. That will never happen now. ‘I can stay with them for a few days.’