Chapter 20
Blood on the Kitchen Floor
The first thing she knew was the ceiling going by.
It was a long strip of cream plaster, moving in jerks, with a brown stain in the shape of Africa and a hairline crack running through it like a river. It went past her face from right to left in slow shuddering lurches, and every lurch came with a tearing pain in her scalp, and a sound. It was a rough wet rasping sound, in and out, in and out, like a saw going through green wood. It was a man breathing.
She was being dragged.
She understood it slowly. Her mind had come back to her in pieces, like a house with the lights going on room by room. There was the cold of the floorboards against her back. There was a hand knotted in her hair, hot and wet and slippery, wrenching her head up and forward at each heave so that her neck bent like a bow. There was her own heel, bumping on the boards. There was a thick mouthful of blood, and a ringing in her left ear, and over everything, rising and falling like the tide, a heavy oily sleepiness, a warm gray fog that wanted her to lie down.
The tea, she thought. I swallowed some.
She kept her eyes almost shut. She let her head loll. Through the fringe of her lashes she saw the hall go by: the hooks with their coats, the umbrella stand, the green leather chair. The telephone table. The gray plastic answering machine on it, with its red eye gone dark. They were going toward the stairs.
"Not much longer," said Martin.
He was talking to himself. It was a thick, hoarse, panting mutter, broken by wheezes, like a man humming to keep his courage up. "Not much longer, love. Not much. It's only a few steps. You'll be all right. You won't know. It'll look like, you were, it'll look like you'd had a drop. You'd had a bad week. They'll say, poor soul. They'll say, it was the grief. They always say it's the grief."
She heard the drip. It fell on the floor beside her ear in heavy slow splashes, pat, pat, pat, and she knew without turning her head that it was his blood.
"I don't want you to be frightened."
He stopped. He had reached the foot of the stairs. She felt him let go of her hair, and the back of her skull cracked against the bottom step, and she bit her tongue to keep from crying out. She lay still. Above her the staircase went up into the dark, the worn brown carpet, the brass rods, the white-painted banisters, and somewhere in the shadows at the top the landing window showed a small gray square of night.
He was kneeling beside her. She could hear him struggling with something, with a rip and a mutter. She slitted her eyes. He had taken a tea towel from his pocket, one of her good linen ones with the blue stripe, and he was winding it round his left forearm, over the black ragged slit in the sleeve, with his teeth in the end of it, pulling it tight, grunting. The knife lay on the carpet beside his knee. It was dark to the hilt. It had been drawn out, and wiped on his trouser leg, and she saw the long ugly shine of the blade.
He's going to carry me up.
It came to her with perfect clarity, quiet and cold. A flight of fourteen stairs, steep, carpeted, with a turn at the half-landing and a rail that came to a man's hip. A woman, a widow, alone in the house at night, with a sleeping draught in her blood and a bottle of brandy on the kitchen table. A fall. A broken neck. A neat, tragic, utterly unremarkable accident, such as the coroner of Wexcombe saw twice a year.
They'll say it was the grief.
She lay with her eyes closed and her breath held, and a great calm came down on her. It was not courage. It was something more primitive. It was the pure cold animal knowledge that she was going to die in the next five minutes unless she did one thing exactly right, and that she would have only one chance to do it.
He picked her up.
He did it as one lifts a sack, with a grunt, hooking his arms under her armpits from behind and heaving her up against his chest. Her head fell back on his shoulder. She felt the heat of him, the sweat, the heave of his ribs. She smelled the blood. It was thick and metallic and sweet, and it was all down the front of his shirt. And she felt, with the clear indifferent perception of the very frightened, that he was weakening. His arms trembled. His breath was a thin high whistle. The forearm she had opened was pumping, she could feel it hot and slick against her side, and he had lost a great deal.
He climbed.
He went up backward, step by step, dragging her, with her heels thumping on each tread. One. Two. His breath rasped in her ear. Three, and the stair gave its small soft familiar groan under his weight, the creak in the key of G, and in that instant, with the same sudden shock of grief that she had felt at the graveside when the earth struck the lid, she thought: Daniel used to step over that one.
Four. Five. They were nearly at the turn. She felt his legs shaking. She felt him pause, with a long indrawn wheeze, to shift his grip, and in the pause she opened her eyes and looked straight up, at the blur of the half-landing, the cream wall, the framed print of the Wex at sunset hanging crooked on its nail. She could see the banister. She could see the rail. And she could see, a foot from her face, the wet white cuff of the sleeve on his bleeding arm, bound in blue-striped linen, black with blood.
She reached up. She took hold of it in both her hands.
She dug in her thumbs.
She aimed for the wound. She felt it through the cloth, the soft hot ragged lip of it, and she drove her thumbnails into it with every ounce of strength in her torn palms, grinding, twisting, as hard as she could. And Martin Ashby screamed. It was a sound she had never heard come out of a man. It rose and rose, high and wild and cracked, like a hare in a trap, and his arms flew open, and she dropped.
She hit the stairs on her back. The breath went from her. She slid, and her head struck the banister, and the world flashed white, and she rolled, helplessly, down three steps, four, her arms flung out, her skirt tearing, until her shoulder jammed against the rail and she lay still. She looked up.
He was standing on the half-landing with his arm clutched to his chest. He swayed. His face was a dreadful red mask, glistening, slack-mouthed, with the eyes rolled back and the lips drawn off his teeth, and the blood ran from his sleeve in a thin steady stream down the stair carpet. He took a step toward her. He put out his good hand.
And his foot found the third stair.
She saw it happen. She saw it with a slow, clear, almost aesthetic exactitude, as one sees something in a dream. The old board gave, with its small groan. His heel slid on the blood. His arms flailed. He opened his mouth, and there was no sound in it, and his big body went sideways, slowly, awkwardly, like a tree, through the white banister rails with a splintering crack, and hit the hall floor below with a noise she felt in the soles of her feet.
She did not stay to look.
She never knew, afterwards, how she got up. She remembered the rail under her hands, and the roar of her own breath, and the stairs going up and up in front of her face, endlessly, like a ladder in a nightmare. She remembered the crash from below, a second, a ringing clatter, a splinter of plastic, and understood vaguely that the telephone table had gone over, and the gray box with it, and that it had hit the tiles and burst open like an egg. She remembered, at the top, falling against the wall and clinging to the frame of a door.
Below her in the dim of the hall a thick low sound began. It was a groan. It rose and broke and rose again, rough and wet, with a thread of words in it. Oh. Oh God. My leg. Amara. And then, quite distinctly, in a strange sing-song, as if he were talking to a child: Amara. Come down. Come down, love. I'm hurt.
She put her hand over her mouth.
She went along the landing on her hands and knees. The carpet was wet under her palms. She did not look to see why. She crawled past the bathroom, past her mother's room, past the door of the bedroom she had shared with Daniel for fifteen years, in which the lamp was still burning on his side of the bed. At the end of the landing, behind a curtain, there was a window. It was an old sash, painted shut, over the flat roof of the kitchen extension, and she hauled it up with a shriek of wood and a smell of paint and cold, and fell through it into the night.
It was raining again. It came down out of a black sky in hard cold sheets, straight, heavy, drumming on the flat tarred roof of the extension and spouting from the gutter in a ropy silver stream. She lay on her stomach in the wet, and it fell on her back like a cold hand, and washed the blood from her face, and she opened her mouth and drank it. She was shaking so hard that her teeth clacked.
Move.
She slid to the edge of the roof. The garden was a pit of darkness below her, the shed a black square against the paler wall, the pear tree a shape like a drowned hand. She turned herself over, and hung from the edge by her torn fingers, and let go.
It was nine feet. She hit the lawn on her heels and her knees and went down in the wet grass with a crunch of pain from her ankle. She lay a moment, gasping. Behind her, in the house, a light went on. It came through the kitchen window in a long yellow blade across the lawn. And in it, small and black and distinct, she saw a shadow come slowly, unevenly, round the door frame, and stop.
He was coming.
She ran. She ran through the dark garden in her stockinged feet with the wet grass whipping her shins and the rain in her eyes, past the shed, past the blue pot, to the back wall, a six-foot brick wall topped with broken glass that Daniel had cemented in the year they bought the house to keep out the cats. She hit it with both hands. There was a trellis. It had never been strong enough to climb. It tore away from the brick with a rending crack, and she fell back, and lay in the wet, and heard the back door of the house bang open.
A torch beam swung over the lawn. It was a long thin white blade, wavering. It slid across the grass, the wall, the pear tree, the empty washing line. She flattened herself against the foot of the wall behind the water butt and made herself small. Her breath came in sobs. She pressed her palm to her mouth. It was wet and warm, and she did not know whether it was blood or rain.
"Amara!"
The voice was thick and strange and astonishingly gentle. It came across the garden through the roar of the rain, hoarse, almost tender, with a catch in it like a man trying not to weep. He was standing on the step, she thought, with the torch held out in front of him, leaning on the door-frame. She could hear his breath. It sawed in and out. "Amara, it's, I can't, please come out. I'm hurt. I think my leg's broken. I can't follow you."
Liar.
"I'm so sorry," said Martin. "I never wanted this. I swear to you. I swear on Ben's life. You were, you were, I loved you, you know. Both of you. I loved you both."
She did not answer. The torch beam passed across the water butt, a foot above her head, and moved on.
"I'll send for someone," said the voice. "I'll ring an ambulance. I'll say I found you. I'll say I came, I came round, and the door was open, and you'd, you'd had a fall. We'll say that. We'll say that, and it'll be all right. Nobody has to know." A pause. "Amara. Please."
She waited. The rain fell. And slowly, with the infinite patience of the hunted, she moved along the foot of the wall on her belly toward the shed.
It stood in the corner, against the fence, a lopsided wooden hut with a tarred felt roof and a door that never quite shut. She had been into it ten thousand times, to fetch a trowel or a bag of compost. She knew the smell of it, creosote and dry earth and old rope. She knew the cobweb on the window. She slid in through the gap in the door with her heart in her mouth and drew it to behind her, and stood in the black pitch dark with her back against the boards, shaking.
Her hands found the rake. The hoe. The cold iron of the lawnmower. And then, standing in its place against the wall in the corner, where it had stood since the spring, with its blade turned up and its long smooth ash shaft polished by his hands, her fingers closed on the spade.
He found the shed in about four minutes.
She heard him come across the lawn. It was not the steady tread of a man in command. It was a stagger, an uneven drag, a grunt and a stop, and a long wheezing pause, and then the stagger again. The torch beam came first. It slid under the door in a bright thin line, along the floor, across her feet. She did not move. She held the spade in both hands, high, over her right shoulder, with the long handle slanting down against her cheek, as she had once seen Daniel hold it when he was about to dig a hole for a rose.
The latch lifted.
The door swung back on its hinge with a long creak. The rain roared in. She saw nothing but light, a blinding white disc, dazzling, swimming in the dark, and behind it the great bulk of a figure in a black coat, filling the doorway, with one arm hanging and the other raised. There was something in the raised hand. It glinted.
"There you are," said Martin, softly.
She swung.
She had no skill. She had no strength left. She put the whole of her fear into it, and the long shaft whipped round in a flat curve and the flat steel blade struck him on the side of the head with a sound like a wet sack dropped on a stone floor. It was a dull, huge, final sound. The torch flew out of his hand and spun away across the grass, turning over and over, throwing mad spokes of light across the garden. He fell sideways against the door-frame with his mouth open. A tooth, or a piece of one, fell out and rolled on the boards.
He did not go down. He clung to the wooden post with both arms, swaying, and turned his face toward her, and she saw what she had done. The side of his skull had caved in a little above the ear. A flap of scalp hung open, glistening, and the blood poured out of it in a black sheet down his neck and under his collar. His glasses were gone. His eyes were wide and blank and unfocused. And in the hand that was not holding the post, the knife, which he had never let go, rose slowly, vaguely, as if he had forgotten what it was for, and came down.
It caught her across the left shoulder.
She did not feel it. That was the strange thing. She felt only a hard thump, and a heat, and the cold wet slither of her own sleeve going dark. She saw him look at the blade, with a faint stupid puzzled air. She saw him raise it again. And she hit him with the spade a second time, flat, in the middle of the chest, with a ringing clang, and he went over backward through the open door, into the rain, and landed on the grass on his back with the knife skittering away in the dark.
She did not stop to see whether he got up.
She went over the wall.
She never knew how. There was a strength in her then that was not her own. It came out of the dark and the rain and the great hollow roaring in her skull, and it lifted her onto the water butt, and from there to the rotten wooden gatepost, and from there, with a scream, with her bare feet slipping in the slime, up and over the six feet of bristling brick. She felt the broken glass go through her palm. She felt it tear her thigh. She dropped on the far side, in a bed of wet lavender, into Mrs. Gethin's garden, and lay on her face in the earth, and sobbed.
She could not stand. She crawled. She dragged herself across the lawn on her elbows and her knees, past a small stone Buddha and a birdbath, toward a square of yellow light that swam in the dark like a lamp underwater. It was a kitchen window. A small round figure in a flowered housecoat was standing at it, with a tea towel in her hand, staring out with her mouth open.
She got to the back door. She reached up. She hammered on the glass with her fist, and left a long red smear.
"Help me," said Amara.
The door flew open. A flood of light and warmth poured out, and a smell of toast, and Mrs. Gethin's voice, shrill and cracked and enormously alive, crying, Oh my Lord, oh my Lord, it's Amara, it's Amara Hale, Stan! Stan! Ring them! Ring the ambulance! Hands seized her. A blanket came down over her shoulders. She was lifted, and carried, and set down in a chair, and a wet cloth was pressed to her face, and a hundred voices seemed to be speaking at once.
"He's in my garden," she said.
"Who is, dear?"
"Martin. Martin Ashby. He, he tried to, he killed Daniel. He tried to kill me. He's in the garden. He's got a knife."
"Stan, lock the door!"
"He's hurt," Amara said. Her teeth were chattering so hard that she could hardly form the words. "I hit him. I hit him with a spade. I think, I think I, I think he's, he's dead."
"Hush now, hush."
"He isn't dead."
It was Stan Gethin who said it. He was standing at the window in his pajamas, a thin gray stooped retired postman of seventy-six, with his hand on the glass. He had not moved. He was looking out into the black rain, over the wall, toward the Hales' garden. And as she watched him, in the warm bright kitchen with the blanket round her and the world swimming, she saw his face change.
"There's a car," he said. "Out in the lane. Engine's started."
They all listened. Through the beat of the rain, thin and clear, from somewhere beyond the end of Marsh Lane, came the sound of an engine turning over, and catching, and revving, and then, rising in a long steady whine, going away.
"He's off," said Stan Gethin. "Whoever he is. He's got away."
Amara sat still. She looked at her hands. They lay in her lap on the rose-patterned blanket, torn and open and red, and she saw that they were shaking, and that the blood on them was not all hers.
Somewhere in the distance, rising and falling, a siren began.