Chapter 42

CHAPTER 42

The next day she calls in sick and buys a train ticket to Felix's local town. His place is an hour's walk from the station, but that's fine; she needs to clear her head.

She has a plan. She can do this.

In through his back gate, round past the swimming pool, along by the red wall, through the orchard. Part of her hopes that the code to the conservatory won't work and she'll have to find some other solution. But: Regard the dozen men in your upstairs room, octopus. And it clicks.

She has to move fast—it's not like last time, just two steps in and out, and she doesn't know when someone might glance at the cameras.

She goes through the conservatory, which is not arranged quite how she remembers it, and up to the games room, which has also changed. The current wife has asserted her presence more strongly than Lauren did.

She is doing a good thing. Zach's back still hurts him. He mourns his lost centimetre of height—she will return it to him.

Into Vardon's room. She looks in the walk-in wardrobe, and the desk (a box of pellets, which she grabs), then she tries the trunk at the foot of the bed. There it is: his air rifle. Nothing to carry it in that she can see; she pulls the pillowcase off one of his pillows and jams it in. It sticks out the end.

It feels very strange to hold a giant kind-of-fake-but-not-really gun.

Okay, down the stairs, fast as she can, and the rifle is way too obvious. Once she's outside she grabs a rake from the gardening shed and clusters it together with the rifle. Is that inconspicuous? Is that better? No, that's much, much worse; she puts it back down.

There's the gym, though, maybe there's something she can use in there. She puts the code in, goes into the first room. Yes: a badminton racket zipped up in a case. She takes the racket out and jams the air rifle most of the way in.

She takes a dressing gown and is wrapping it around the bit that isn't covered when she hears a noise.

She looks up.

The door to the pool room opens. A woman, dark hair tied back, a bikini.

Ah, Lauren thinks. It's the new her. "Laundry service," she says.

"Laundry comes on Tuesday," the woman says, very still.

Lauren turns and runs, fumbles with the door, out along the path, not looking behind because she has to move as fast as she can, but she hears nothing, and she risks a glance, and the woman isn't following her; she'll have phoned Felix, or the police, or the security company maybe; either way, the risk isn't from someone in a bikini chasing her and tackling her and wrenching the air rifle away, it's from the perimeter, it's at the exits, it's in the town. She veers away from the back gate and goes towards a wall instead, one of the ones with vines so that she can climb. She throws her bundle over and follows it up, slipping once or twice as the vines pull away from the wall, and it's fine, she can still do this. The drop at the other side is further than she'd like but she makes it, no problem, until she lands and her ankle rolls and she feels that sickening airless moment of how bad is this before pain rushes in. It's not great.

Okay, she thinks. First things first.The air rifle, the dressing gown. She has those.

A path curves up towards a stile and another field and then she'll be out of view of Felix's place. And she has the wall to support her. At least the field has sheep in it rather than cows, so it could be worse.

The stile will help too; on the other side she can sit and gather herself. And she makes it, and she wraps the dressing-gown cord around her ankle as a makeshift support, and goes to check train times but—

Ah. She doesn't have her phone.

Which is bad. She has dropped it, she supposes, in the gym, and the new wife will have found it, and the police must have a way of unlocking it and finding out her name.

Well. She'd better get a move on, then.

The walk to the train station is slow and excruciating. When she reaches the houses on the outskirts of the town she unties her hair and takes her jacket off in case anyone is looking out for her. At the station she sits at the end of the long row of benches, which backfires when the train comes and stops up the other end and she has to stagger as fast as she can along the platform, badminton racket/air rifle supporting her bad foot.

The journey, too, is interminable. She is on a slow train, stopping at stations she's never heard of, Little Tarpington, Pubbles. Will the Sussex police come to find her themselves, or will they phone the police in Norwood Junction? Without her own phone she can't even look up how arrests work.

She finally, finally gets to her station. It must have rained in London while she was in the country: it's wet and the pavement is slippery, and her ticket was tucked into her phone case so she can't scan to exit, has to wait till someone opens the big slow-moving access gates and rush through before they close. But she takes it easy. She's so close.

And then she's home.

She has to take the stairs slowly. "Hey, darling," she calls to Zach as she nears the top.

"You're back early," he says.

"Yeah, there was a power cut, we got sent home." She steps into the bathroom and props the badminton-rifle-dressing-gown combo behind the door and goes into the living room for her laptop.

"I'm going to have a bath, I think," she says, looking into the spare room where Zach is working. "Do you need the toilet first?"

"I'm good. Can always haul out one of the old bottles if I have to."

She cannot wait to be rid of him.

Bathroom door locked, taps on. While the water runs, she rubs her ankle and watches a video where a man in his fifties explains how to load the particular air rifle she's acquired. She wishes it looked more like an old-fashioned wooden hunting rifle, which would be somehow less weird, but it's full-on tactical grips and struts and black and green. She tries raising it, lowering it. Puts her finger near the trigger, then forces herself to touch it, wincing as she does, not pulling but just in contact. She hadn't been planning to do this right away, but she doesn't know whether the bikini wife has found her phone, whether someone is about to ring her doorbell to ask questions.

By the time she's gone through the video twice the bath is full, overfull even, and she knows she shouldn't dawdle but she wants a moment. Just a moment. So she strips off, and steps in, and immerses herself delicately, the water hot over her body.

She gives herself two minutes before she gets out and dresses, back into the clothes she was wearing because she didn't think to bring any others into the bathroom; they stink of sheep, but she can't go out naked with a gun.

It's so long, so grey. She doesn't like to touch it. She thinks about messaging Bohai for moral support but then thinks: you know what, he might not morally support this one.

"You almost done?" she hears through the door.

"Yeah," she says.

It's time. She drops the dressing gown back over the gun, and opens the door, and smiles at Zach, who smiles back. She walks out, treating her ankle as gently as she can, carrying the bundle; he walks past her into the bathroom and shuts the door.

Once he's gone, she pulls the ladder down, then unwraps the air rifle from the dressing gown. She positions herself in the doorway of the living room. She's looking out towards the ladder, and on the other side there's the bathroom door, and beyond that the stairs. She wants to make it harder for Zach to run at her, and the door frame will help to keep her steady.

This is going to be very straightforward. During her planning over the last couple of days she has read a lot about air-rifle safety rules, and she is about to break almost all of them, but it doesn't seem like hurting Zach badly is a risk unless she's right next to him. This position gives her as much distance as possible, a couple of metres anyway, while still letting her keep the whole landing in sight. It's good. It's tactically sound.

The bathroom door opens. Zach comes out. He notices her, and takes a moment, and frowns.

"Stop there, please," she says.

"Wow, water pistols are getting really over-the-top, aren't they? Where'd you get that from?" He walks through into the kitchen, out of range.

Uh. She adjusts herself against the door frame and waits. He walks back out with a can of Coke.

"This isn't a water pistol," she says. "It's a gun. But don't panic, I'm not going to shoot you if I don't have to. I just want you to climb up into the attic and then everything's going to be okay."

"Put that down," he says, "don't mess around. It's not funny."

Come on, Zach. "I'm not messing around. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry but everything's going to be fine in a few minutes."

"Lauren, come on, stop pointing that at me."

She is going to have to prove herself. She knew this was a risk. If a husband turned up pointing a gun at her she would climb into the attic in terror as instructed, but Zach is too placid, too easy-going, too still-on-codeine. The rifle has two pellets; she can shoot one off to the side, it'll be convincing but not dangerous, and then he'll climb up.

"Okay," she says, definitely not panicked, "calm down, stay back, okay? Watch out," and she moves the barrel away from the husband and then, once, pulls the trigger, and she doesn't know how hard she's going to have to pull but not very, it turns out, and there's a noise but it's not as loud as she'd expected and something happens fast, and what must be the pellet hits the glass on a photo hanging on the wall. The glass cracks. God, this thing might be more dangerous than she's been telling herself, maybe this is a terrible idea .

But it's way too late to back out. Zach is staring at her, horrified, as she wavers the gun back towards him. "Please climb into the attic," she says. "I promise once you've done that, I'll put this down, and we can call the police."

"Lauren, Lauren"—he has his hands extended in front of him—"this is insane, you can't—you can't point a gun at me."

She's gone too far, this is going to backfire. "It's not a real gun," she says. She should have been up-front about this from the beginning, enough of a threat to matter, not enough to make him panic.

"It's—you just shot it!"

"It's an air rifle," she says. "It's just an air rifle. But it'd still hurt a lot if it hit you and you just broke your back and I don't think it would be a good idea for you to get shot and I don't want to have to shoot you. So I need you to climb into the attic. After that I'll put it down. I promise."

Then: she hears a noise. The door at the bottom of the stairs.

Zach is looking at her, hands still out. "That'll be Toby. They're clearing out the fridge and there's some veggie sausages and some pasta sauce, he asked if we wanted them. I said to just bring them up. You should—you should put that down and we can talk about it once he's gone, yeah?"

This is infuriating, this is somehow the worst thing yet. Toby was her friend and here he is fucking up her plan by bringing food to her terrible husband. Can he not go a single day without checking in on Zach and doing him tiny favours? Honestly, does he have no boundaries? "Go away," she yells as he rounds the top of the stairs, and he looks in and he, too, is unable to perceive her as a plausible threat, looks at the ladder, her with a gun, Zach with his hands in front of him, and frowns like he might have stumbled into a parlour game.

She steps back into the living room to get them both in her sights.

And her foot lands on the dressing gown, balled up behind her on the floor, and her bad ankle rolls again.

And she falls.

The air rifle goes off, firing away from her as she lands on her back, sending the pellet between her feet; but not quite between them, because it has nicked her still-damp bare big toe and an arc of blood spatters backwards and forwards from it, red and wet and immediate and her toe . She scrambles back to sitting, then on to her knees, gun back up—they won't know she doesn't have any pellets left—but they're shouting, someone's bound to have heard, shit.

Then she looks up and Zach is paler than ever, and Toby behind him has retreated to the top of the stairs; sauce is spattered across the carpet, spilling out of a Tupperware container, frozen sausages rolling, and he's clutching the top of his leg and more blood is running between his fingers. She thinks for a moment that it's from her toe, that it's spurted magnificently right across the landing, but then Toby looks up and she sees his face and: ah. No.

"You shot me," he says, leaning on his other leg and against the wall behind him.

"It's not a real bullet!" she says, and tries to keep the gun level. His face, his bloodied fingers.

There is only one way out of this, and it's the same as it's always been.

"Lauren," Toby says, "you shot me, my leg, you shot me. What—Lauren, please, Lauren, put the gun down. I don't know what's going on but we can figure it out. We can have a cup of tea and a chat."

"I will. I'll put it down. As soon as Zach's been into the attic." And she steadies herself again, kneeling in the doorway, looking out at them.

Zach is crying. He will feel so much better in a minute. She is also, she thinks, crying; the snot is thick under her nose, the tears hot and then cold on her face.

"We can talk about that," Toby says. "If there's something you need from the attic I can get it, it's okay. Just, Lauren, please."

Her toe hurts so much, Toby's leg, Zach's white face and half-open mouth.

"No. Look. Zach. Please. I promise it will be okay if you climb up. I need you to climb up right now. Okay? I'm—I'm lowering the gun and I'm going to keep it down as long as I see you're climbing. Yeah?"

Zach steps forward hesitantly.

"That's it," she says. "You're doing so well. You can do this. One hand on the rung, that's right. Then the other."

She's shuffled on her knees back into the living room to give Zach space, the gun in her hands but pointing at the floor. Please work, she thinks, please work, please work.

He's climbing.

His head goes in.

Then his body.

His legs.

She can't watch; she turns away. And she registers a sudden rush of movement and it's Toby, isn't it, he's running at her, somehow, staggering, the fucking idiot, how is this the thing that he finally decides to take action over instead of standing around offering cups of tea? But it's too late, it's okay, Zach's foot disappears and all she needs is another half-second, and she swings the gun up in a wide arc as Toby rushes towards her, it's instinctive really, she just needs a moment , she brings it down like a club while she falls backwards again. And lands on the floor, empty-handed.

And the world has changed.