The First Cut (15 page)

She lay back and listened to the silence. It was complete. The window was open because of the heat. She wished for a moon that might shed some extra light, but that thought stayed only for a moment. There had been a time when she loved moonlight. Stop it, she told herself sternly, forcing herself not to go down that dark road to Grace; she wasn’t strong enough tonight to cope with it. Instead she concentrated on the fact that for the first time there were no goddamn planes. It emphasized the solitude, allowed her to feel what a magical place this must once have been when it had a family creating happy memories in it, before it was abandoned to rot away. A night creature, probably an owl, screamed outside. She felt jealous of its freedom; she wanted to be walking across a beautiful lawn, feeling dew between her toes. She wriggled her swollen foot. Not tonight, Josephine. She rolled over and began to think of Adam asleep in the bed on the other side of this wall, his dreams peopled by nubile girls the right side of twenty-five. She felt the unfamiliar ruffles on the nightie she was wearing. She had put it on to protect herself from she knew not what; she always slept naked at home, but she was far from home now. God, she had been so stupid, selfish and vain, testing her marriage to Greg in such a foolhardy and pointless way. Grace would not have approved. Grace would have expected better. A tear formed and slid across the bridge of her nose and down into the pillow. She had tried to live up to Grace, to live a better life in memory of her. But as she lay in the dark, she worried that she’d failed.

Nicky opened her eyes and tried to adjust to the blackness. She blinked twice before fear washed across her in a wave. Someone was in the room. She could just make out a shadow by the door. Before she could cry out the figure took several quick steps across the room and Adam loomed out of the gloom. He put his finger on her lips and bent down close to her ear.

‘Don’t leave this room.’ He was across the bedroom in a moment and out of the door.

She sat up in bed, her heart hammering in her chest. She was disoriented and bewildered. She groped for the phone on the bedside table, desperate to know the time, to get a handle on her fear. She couldn’t find it. Her fingers probed ever more frantically, but didn’t touch it. It was so bloody dark in this house she couldn’t even make out a phone on a table. She was swinging her feet out of bed when she heard a shout. Was that Adam? She froze, transfixed. Sounds of an argument ebbed and flowed for a few seconds before a smashing noise ricocheted up from below, the sound hideously loud in the rural silence. Somebody else was in the house. As she stood her senses were assaulted by a series of noises, each more violent than the last: grunts and guttural shrieks, something heavy rebounding off furniture, she guessed. In her confusion and in the dark she couldn’t remember where the walking sticks were so she hobbled to the door. She heard a groan and something that might have been swearing. Scrabbling noises were interrupted by a thump as an object fell to the ground and rolled, a faint light swinging up the wall and lighting the stairwell. Someone had dropped a torch.

She started down the corridor, trying to use the wall as a support for her sore foot. The noise below was intensifying with deeply unpleasant sounds and she was bewildered, unsure what to do, whether to stay in the bedroom or fling herself into the melee below. She knew that noises could be misinterpreted, that her visions of what was occurring at the bottom of the stairwell might be very different from reality.

‘Adam!’ She screamed involuntarily and immediately wished she hadn’t. The scuffling lasted a few more moments before the faint light from the torch died. It was pitch black in the corridor now. She held her breath, straining to get beyond the white noise in her head. She jumped as she heard creaks, then she realized she could hear another sound. It was her own whimpering. She was frozen, not knowing whether to retreat or go forward, her mind unable to provide a rational explanation for what might have occurred downstairs in the middle of the night. She waited, trying to hear what was happening, and all the while her fear was mounting in her chest. Someone else was in the house, someone uninvited. What if Adam was injured downstairs? What if he needed her help? The myriad of unpleasant possibilities froze her to the spot. She was unable to process them all at once. However hard she strained, the darkness didn’t lift. The agony of her indecision was swiftly brought to an end when the torch went on again, throwing ghostly jumping shadows round angles and up walls.

Someone was climbing the stairs.

Slowly, with a heavy tread.

Nicky tried to run. She retreated down the corridor, limping painfully, making for the back stairs. Anything was better than passively awaiting whoever was coming up the main staircase. She bumped into a chair in a corner – she couldn’t have advertised her presence more clearly if she’d tried. The back stairs had a door at the top and she scrabbled for the handle, yanking it open and pulling it shut behind her before plunging into the pitch black. Clutching the banister for support she half fell down the whole flight, then spent a frantic few seconds trying to open the door at the bottom, but the latch wouldn’t lift. Finally she tumbled out and for the first time could see the faint outline of objects in the hallway beyond. The door was opening at the top of the stairs so she forced herself to keep moving, the pain in her foot a dull ache that fear and adrenalin rendered her unable to even feel.

She actually tripped over the body. Tumbling to the floor in an uneasy mess, she could feel the warm fleshy undulations beneath her bare knees. She had fallen on his stomach, but he lay unmoving beneath her. As she tried to right herself light beams bouncing off the ceiling announced that the person pursuing her had arrived.

‘Nicky!’ Adam’s voice came in little more than a whisper from the stairs. He approached, holding on to the walls as he went, gasping for breath and clutching his stomach. His torch threw wild shadows on the scene around them but she still struggled to take it in.

She sat on the floor, her legs almost touching a middle-aged man who was lying face up on the carpet. He wore a black windcheater, black jeans and dark shoes; beneath his feet one of the hallway rugs rumpled in waves, the sign of his final desperate attempts to dig his heels into life. His eyes stared ahead, unseeing.

Adam was struggling to speak, strange gurgling noises coming from him. He was almost doubled over and must have been punched in the stomach. She could see a ballooning black eye forming.

‘What happened?’

He nodded his head towards displaced furniture and overturned chairs. It seemed the effort of doing that was too much and he sank to the floor against a door frame on the other side of the dead body. ‘I jumped on him from the stairs, but he was stronger than I expected.’

‘Do you know him?’

‘What? Why would I know him?’

‘You were talking.’

Adam shook his head. ‘He saw me on the stairs as I came down but he didn’t run.’

Nicky leaned forward and felt for a pulse on both sides of the man’s neck. ‘He’s dead, Adam. The sound of the fight was horrible, just horrible!’

‘He attacked me. It was me or him.’

‘When you came in to my room, what had you heard?’

‘I was lying awake in bed and I heard noises I didn’t like.’

‘Are you hurt, are you injured?’

‘I’m fine, I’m fine. You?’

Nicky felt her heart still jackknifing around in her chest, adrenalin making her breath come fast and shallow. ‘It scared the shit out of me. The noises . . . God, that was horrible.’

Adam didn’t, or couldn’t, reply. He seemed in no hurry to move, he was probably in shock, but she was becoming desperate to end this nightmare.

‘How did he get in?’

Adam looked around and closed his eyes. ‘I don’t know.’

Nicky tried to stand, and pain exploded anew in her foot. But she had things to do now, a huge list of things to organize if order was to be reimposed on this chaos. She ignored her foot and took the torch from Adam’s limp hand. The beam of light fell on a crowbar lying under the bureau, and its black metal glinted. It was then she gave a cry of disgust. As the light shifted back to the dead man she saw he was wearing latex gloves.

She looked carefully at his face. The mouth hung slackly; there were livid scratches in his skin; a trickle of blood stained his teeth under a blond moustache; a darker and larger stain was spreading backwards across the carpet under his head. Her hands shook as she closed his eyelids.

‘How did you . . .’ She tailed off, unable to say the word.

‘I hit him with that.’ He pointed at the crowbar. ‘And that.’ He pointed at the broken bits of ceramic from a bowl that had been thrown in the fight.

Nicky forced herself to get going. She began to haul herself up the stairs back to her bedroom to get the mobile.

‘Where are you going?’ Adam’s voice sounded desperate.

‘To phone the police.’

He struggled to standing. ‘No. Don’t do that.’

She turned to face him from the stairs and her hand clutching the banister was rigid. ‘Adam, we must phone the police.’

Grey tinges of dawn had begun to seep into the hallway, turning the centre of the room pale. She could see Adam standing over the dead body in a possessive way. ‘We can bury him. He’ll never be found.’

Nicky had a sensation of the world tipping and never righting itself. She heard her voice coming from far away. ‘Adam, we must go to the police. What’s happened is not your fault. They will understand. I will back you up. But we must call them
now
. Adam, we are in this together.’ She kept using his name. She’d heard that this was supposed to help those that were becoming unhinged.

‘No.’

She gripped the banister even more tightly, to keep herself from losing control. ‘Adam, you’ve had a shock, so have I. This man broke into your house and attacked you. This is what the police do; they help people in this situation.’

‘You think so?’ He snorted with derision. ‘Lucky you. You’re going to help me bury him. You’re as much a part of it as I am.’

‘You’ve lost your mind! This isn’t a sane reaction! I’m going to get the mobile and we
must
call the police!’ She turned and started up the stairs again, cursing over and over that she wasn’t fully fit. The phone was just a few metres away and an end to this horrible night was—

‘It’s not up there. I’ve got it, and we’re not phoning the police.’

She turned and looked down on him looking up at her. She was plunging down a dark tube into a world she had no experience of – and didn’t want to. She stood in a dead woman’s nightie in front of someone who was strong enough to have killed another man, someone who had just won a fight for his life. She looked again at the rucked carpet under those worn shoes. How hard had he struggled to stay alive, she wondered. How much extra strength had he summoned? How vicious is a fight to the death? As nasty as it gets. And here was a man who wanted to cover it up; to deny it ever happened.

Be careful, Nicky’s inner voice counselled. Be very careful indeed.

She was strangely calm. Some of the pretence had fallen away. They were standing on opposite sides of an ever-expanding chasm. Soon it would be impossible to jump over, soon it would be impossible to speak, because to do so would articulate how far apart they were from each other – how mad he was. If she couldn’t get him to change his mind she knew, as surely as night follows day, that he wasn’t going to let her go. And where that led . . . well, she couldn’t even let her imagination take her there.

‘You have killed a man. In self-defence – I will back you up on that. But even this man, whoever he is, had a family and a life and people who will mourn. And you’re scaring me, Adam.’ She was testing, seeing how far she could push it. ‘You cannot cover this up. It is madness to even try.’ She took a step down the stairs. ‘One phone call away is all the kindness, counselling, sympathy and resolution that you could wish for.’ She took another step, getting bolder. ‘You are one hundred per cent in the right on this. You’ve done nothing wrong.’ She took another step. ‘Make the call.’

‘No.’ He looked up the stairs straight at her. ‘Maybe he wasn’t here to burgle the place.’

Nicky stopped her walk down the stairs as a thought came to her, a thought so horrible it robbed her of her ability to move. Grace. It was not rational to think of Grace at this moment, but that’s where her mind took her. Someone had come for Grace that night and Nicky had not known until it was too late; she had not understood what was happening.

‘You don’t get it, Nicky. I’m doing this for you. I’m saving you.’

‘Saving me from what, Adam?’

He paused, looking pained. ‘I’m not sure.’

There was to be no revelation here, Nicky realized. This was simply the ravings of a madman. ‘Adam, see sense. Maria knows where I am. She knows I’m with you.’

Adam bent down under the bureau and pulled out the crowbar. For a hideous moment Nicky thought he was about to swing it at her and she lost her footing as she tried to duck, giving a helpless little cry as she stumbled on the stairs. He put the crowbar on the bureau. ‘You thought I was going to hit you.’

She looked up at him, bewildered. ‘I don’t know, Adam. Were you?’

He made a scoffing noise and began to trace the ballooning skin around his eye. ‘I did this for you, Nicky. You need to trust me, not fear me.’

‘But how can I do that, Adam, when I’m injured and cannot leave your house, and you won’t phone the police?’

‘You’ll live.’ Adam let out a huge sigh and stared down at the man he had just killed. ‘I just hope you’re worth it.’

‘What did you just say?’ But he had closed his eyes and was swaying in the doorway. ‘Adam?
Adam
?’

He opened his eyes and stared at her and Nicky felt a swoop of terror down her back. ‘I’m going to make some tea. Come with me.’ Nicky sank slowly down onto the stairs, the strength in her legs failing. ‘Now.’

She got up again, fast. The tone in his voice left no room for dissent. She limped after him into the kitchen.