Chapter Forty-One
There was an aching pause while Edward faced off against the two giants.
He took a step back and, thank God, found the next stair instead of tripping.
The second stair gave him a tiny height advantage over the two, who were struggling to move forwards in the narrow gap between the wall and the rickety wooden banister.
It seemed as if the masked woman had no sense of where the breadknife was.
She stabbed the air blindly. It could just as easily penetrate her husband as Edward.
As she stabbed, she screamed, a guttural noise like a trapped animal.
Les Boyd moved sideways, conscious of the woman’s looseness of aim. ‘Watch that bloody knife, get back in your chair.’
Edward’s vision become hooded, as when a car accident happens and everything tunnels.
Les was shoving him, trying to make him fall backwards onto the stairs where presumably Edward would be smothered and stabbed by Lily.
He pushed the crash helmet at the giant, hoping to catch him in the face.
The woman yelped as if every movement in her body caused terrible pain.
It was the sound Edward had heard in his garden, where she had clumped at him with the lock-legged march of a zombie.
The crash helmet had missed Les. It made a dent in the wall opposite. Edward felt his shoe catch on a ruck in the stair carpet and reached left to stop his fall, dropping the helmet. Now he was defenceless. Les moved back. Lily moved forward. She swung the breadknife left and right at him.
‘Bloody well take him, Lily, bloody well gut him.’ The man’s voice.
The breadknife swished within an inch of his stomach.
Up another stair. She would have to follow him.
She took the first stair and stabbed viciously downwards at Edward’s feet.
He jumped. The knife cracked against the wooden step and got stuck in it.
He kicked at her hand as she tried to withdraw it.
Les had now moved left and was trying to climb the staircase banister.
Up another stair Edward went. He glanced behind him and saw a darkened hallway.
Suddenly there was a silhouette in the pale light.
Another person, thin, younger. This was it.
He was dead. He had nowhere to go. He half-turned, not wanting to take his eyes off Lily.
Directly above him, a man at least thirty years younger than the two giants was wiping tired eyes as if he had just woken.
‘Mum, Dad, what the fuck?’
Edward barely heard. The voice was quiet. The hearing aid was knocked out and his damaged ear was the one closest to the younger man. Edward was too panicked to speak.
‘This is the fucker,’ said Les. ‘Questions Man.’
‘Mum, what—’ The young man seemed to go into shock, his whole body trembling. ‘Mum, put down the knife, my God, my God.’
The woman on the stairs pulled her mask off. Edward saw her face, the same face he had seen in the church on the day of the Met’s presser, puffy and red, bright ginger hair, freckles.
‘This is him!’ she screamed.
‘Get back in your chair, Mum, or you’ll faint with the pain.’ His eyes flickered to Edward, sprawled on the stairs, and his face tightened.
‘But this cunt—’ she screamed.
‘Never mind “this cunt”, what are you thinking of, threatening him with a knife? What do you think’s going to happen?
Are you going to stab him, really, Mum? Really?
’ With each question, the young man had taken a step further down the stairs, until he stepped over Edward, and stood between him and the massive couple.
With the son between him and the knife, Edward realized he had to get out of this madhouse before the mood turned again.
If the son changed his mind, Edward could not take on all three of them, even with a crash helmet in his hands.
He slid down the stairs, along the banister and around the man, pushing past the massive hulk of Lily Boyd.
She yelped again in pain. ‘I need to sit down!’
Their eyes met. She leant against the wall and used her walking stick to spear the crash helmet on the floor. She lifted it with the stick and pushed it at Edward.
‘Cancer of the pancreas,’ she snapped suddenly, fixing mad eyes on him, ‘and you won’t let me go!’
Edward looked up the stairs. Les might have been stopped by his son but he was deliberately grinding the dropped hearing aid into the stair carpet with the toe of his boot.
‘No more questions from you,’ hissed Les Boyd.
Regretting that he had not taken Kim’s advice and stayed well clear, Edward raced outside and started his moped, as if leaving the scene of his own murder.
. When he looked back at the house, the hulk of Lily Boyd was in the doorway, propped up by the gnarled walking stick; father and son behind her.
He turned back to the road and jumped. The old lady was standing in front of the bike handlebars.
It was the pedestrian he had seen briefly earlier, slowly passing the house, headscarfed, hunched in her shawl.
‘We’re used to it,’ she said. ‘The lady is sick.’
‘You’re telling me,’ he said. He tore away, hearing the moped’s motor burn with the strain.