30

Kate’s front door was open. I was still thirty yards from the house, walking loudly on the deep gravel. I wasn’t going for the element of surprise, happy to announce my presence.

Kate and I were going to have words. She’d sent her sons to get the Leckies out, but that hadn’t worked out. Perhaps the second time she’d got someone else in. Perhaps she’d told her boys to get themselves an alibi for the day.

There was a crash, like someone had pulled a drawer out past the stops and let it clatter to a stone floor.

I reassessed the situation. People don’t walk into their own house and leave the front door open. They don’t pull drawers out and let the contents clatter over the floor.

Someone else was in there.

The parachutist?

I took cover behind an overgrown rhododendron.

I had two choices, stay and get involved, or leave and live to fight another day. Rule number one, you win every fight you don’t have. But walking away wouldn’t give me any answers about what had happened to the Leckies, just more questions. So I stayed. Not inertia. A conscious decision. Get involved.

Treading softly on the grass, I closed the distance to the house, until the only thing between me and the front door was gravel. No way to cross it quietly. I ran, aiming at a spot three feet to the side of the front door. No point in giving the intruder a silhouette to aim at through the open door.

I pressed myself against the wall beside the front door and listened. Another clatter. Someone was ransacking the place. Lucky for me, the noise they were making had covered the noise of my approach. Which told me something. I wasn’t dealing with any great military or criminal genius.

I crouched down and looked in through the open front door. If anyone had been watching, their first shot was likely to come at waist height, where a man would comfortably hold his gun. I kept lower than that, raising the odds of me surviving that first shot.

But there was no shot, and the clatter from the back of the house continued.

Inside the house, I saw a slipper, discarded on the flagstone floor. Next to it, a foot, protruding from the drawing room. Someone was down.

I hurried in, staying low. Ducked into the drawing room.

It was Kate.

At first glance I assumed she was dead. She lay on her back. Her chest was a mess of blood. Two shots, close up. She’d probably answered the door and been hit straight away. Stumbled back as her heart stopped pumping, collapsed into the study as her muscles failed without the hydraulic support from the heart.

I felt her neck, making sure, and her eyes flickered open.

She looked at me, pleading. I touched her face.

She’d told me her boss would be disappointed, the last time we’d been in this room.

Her lips moved soundlessly. I leant in close, but I still couldn’t hear.

It wasn’t like in the movies, where the dying man gives a monologue, then gently closes his eyes. It doesn’t work like that. The body has shut down. The lungs have expelled their last breath. No air to make the words.

I watched her lips. She brought her bottom lip to her teeth. It looked like an ‘f’, then her mouth went slack.

‘Fault,’ she said.

Another crash from the kitchen. I was crouching on the floor in the drawing room, my back to the door. Every fibre in my body screamed at me to turn, to face the threat.

I stayed with Kate for her last seconds, my hand on her cheek, my eyes locked on hers. I owed her that much.

People talk about the dying finding peace in their final seconds. It’s a comforting thought. It’s coming to us all, so we tell ourselves fairy tales about the experience. Kate wasn’t at peace. Her eyes widened in panic, her brain pleading with her lungs to breathe, refusing to believe the truth. I held her gaze. Even blinking would have been cowardice, allowing myself a respite. I kept my eyes locked on hers until the hundreds of muscles in her face slackened in death.

The back door slammed, and the house was quiet. I -listened carefully. Nothing. No creaks of someone shifting because they’d had to hide. No quiet steps of somebody determined to deal with an unwelcome visitor. Just the -distant call of wood pigeons in the trees.

‘Your fault,’ she’d said. She was right.

*

The kitchen was a mess. The younger son, his nose black from our fight, sat in his armchair by the fire. A cup of tea and half a slice of toast on the table next to him. A few minutes ago he’d been eating his breakfast, back from his overnight stay with the MPs. Now he was dead.

A slight breeze on my neck was the only warning I got. Displaced air, pushed in front of a fast-moving object. A fraction of a second that made the difference between victim and participant, from dead to still fighting. Something was swinging towards the back of my neck. A killing blow.

Instinct kicked in. I launched myself forwards, away from the threat, buying myself more time to assess the situation and plan my counter-attack. I hit the ground and rolled across the tiled floor, my boots clattering against the enamelled stove as I ran out of room. My assailant was already following. He had a knife in his hand, a short, double blade. A soldier’s knife.

I’d been expecting a German uniform, like the parachutists in the comic books Frankie read. But he was dressed in a Tommy’s uniform. Salt stains at chest level, from where he’d waded out into the sea, from the beach at Dunkirk.

It took me a second to recognise him. One of the deserters I’d found in my woods and given dinner. The sergeant. The back door was open behind him. He’d come back.

He paused. He had me cornered, he could allow himself a breather. A mistake, which told me I was dealing with someone who hadn’t yet become habituated to killing. Here was a man for whom the rules of society still held some sway. A fact I could use against him.

‘I don’t care what you did here,’ I said.

Not true, of course, I rather did care, but he had a knife and I didn’t.

In his hyper-alert state, his logical mind had to fight for resources. The expression on his face telegraphed the -turmoil. Hard to think straight when your blood’s up and adrenaline has shut down everything apart from your fight-or-flight reflex.

The decision was telegraphed on his face. His jaw set, his eyes focused.

Above me, a rack of pans hung above the stove. Heavy, black, cast iron. I made a show of looking past him, to the back door, and feinted that way. He took the bait and shifted to his left, blocking my escape. But I wasn’t interested in escape. I’d given him a chance to run, and he’d made his choice. It was a decision that was going to work out badly for him if I had anything to do with it.

I reached up and grabbed a frying pan eighteen inches across. Its grey oak handle fitted my grip perfectly. I could have spent hours trying to design the perfect weapon to bring to a knife fight and not improved on this. Three feet from the tip of the handle to the end of the pan. A large mass, impervious to the knife and certain to do damage to any part of the human body it struck, if swung with force.

He made the same calculation. He backed away, pushing aside a chair with a screech of wood on stone.

He transferred the knife to his left hand, freeing up his right. My heart sank. I could only think of one good reason for that, and he proved me right. He reached behind his waist and came up with a Webley revolver, standard army issue.

I raised my hands. It was what you were meant to do in that situation, if you were to believe the movies. Your assailant would be duty-bound to treat you with grudging respect, take you prisoner, or leave you to fight again another day. Not massively realistic based on what I’d seen in Flanders, or the North-West Frontier. If it was you and another man, and one of you had a gun, there was only one way that -encounter was going to end.

But my assailant was a young man. He hadn’t been at Flanders, or in the dusty mountains of Afghanistan. He thought he was dealing with a man of honour.

He was wrong.

Putting my hands up had increased the frying pan’s potential energy. A large mass, held up high. I let the weight of it drag my hand down, and I pulled it, through an arc, like swinging a cricket bat towards a ball arriving at waist height, giving it everything and going for the boundary. I let go of the pan, on a trajectory towards the man’s head. He had a fraction of a second to react, and he wasted it, raising the gun towards the pan as if he were shooting at a target. The pan knocked the gun from his hand without slowing down. It took him in the neck, its momentum unaltered until it was embedded in the full depth of his soft tissue.

The pan thumped to the ground with a clang, and the man went down, clutching at his throat. I kicked his gun away. Better safe than sorry.

I pulled up a kitchen chair and sat, waiting for him to die. Asphyxiation takes a long time. I didn’t feel any sympathy. He’d killed Kate and her son in cold blood. Odds were he’d done the same to the Leckies the day before.

But why? I could think of a few reasons that would fit if this were a murder novel, one of those paperbacks that were all the rage. He was looking for somewhere to lie low while his unit was transported out of the area, back to their base. He was a long-lost son, back for revenge over some long--harboured slight. Or perhaps he’d heard a story from a mate about a buried treasure kept in the garden. All unlikely, but basically feasible.

The crunch of stones from the driveway warned me I wasn’t going to be alone for long. It was an effective alarm. A car. Idling, then silent. Then the sound of doors opening.

I slipped out the back door and waited to the side, in the shade of an ancient pear tree. I was invisible to anyone in the house, but if I got the chance I’d be able to peer in. I wanted to know who it was. Perhaps the killer had accomplices, coming to retrieve something, or to make sure the job was finished to their satisfaction.

Voices filtered back from the front of the house. They’d found Kate. From the tone of the voices, it didn’t sound like they were affiliated with the killer. They sounded surprised. One of the voices was clearly in charge. He was giving -orders. Calm, measured.

I recognised the voice.

Neesham.

Stay or go. Leaving quietly seemed sensible. I was an -innocent bystander. The police might not see it that way.

A rustle of leaves warned me I wasn’t alone. Someone pushing through the beech hedge at the side of the house.

I turned quickly, assessing the threat. A police constable, truncheon raised, ready to take me down.

The truncheon was a fearsome weapon. Thirty inches of solid lignum, the densest and heaviest wood in the world. Designed to subdue the angriest and most intractable criminal. It didn’t leave me with many options. Either get hit hard, or take out the man wielding it. Me or him.

I hesitated. I’ll do whatever it takes to survive, even if it means killing the man in front of me. But this man wasn’t my enemy. He was a young lad, barely out of school, who’d signed up with the police to do his bit. An honourable choice. Not his fault that doing his bit and smacking me on the head with a truncheon were one and the same thing.

My hesitation made all the difference. Inaction instead of action. Always a poor choice. More footsteps behind me. Leather soles. Another threat. I turned, my attention divided. My head exploded in a bright light, and the next thing I felt was the ground digging into my cheek.