by Ali Knight
Something is so deeply wrong about all this that my fear ramps with every passing second. ‘You’re bait.’ And I realise I have swallowed it.
He frowns, fully awake now. ‘What’s Gerry doing here?’ Paul picks up the cricket bat and shakes his head.
Before I can explain that we’re now in a fight for our lives, a sound that feels almost physical shoots up the back of my neck and into my ears. I can hear screaming. ‘Paul, tell me the kids aren’t here . . .’ It’s Josh, shrieking. ‘Paul . . .’ My voice dies in my throat. It’s a plea for Paul to deliver me from that sound.
The cry works on Paul like an electric charge jolting him fully awake. He’s out of the office and taking the stairs to the top floor two at a time. ‘Josh!’ He’s round the curve on the next floor before I’m halfway up. ‘Josh?’ He’s opening doors, bounding up to the second floor. ‘Ava! Where’s Ava?’
‘Dad! Dad! I can’t get out!’ Josh is hammering somewhere on the floor above.
‘Kate! Help me, Kate!’ Josh is not in the bedroom but thumping on the square opening to the attic in the bedroom ceiling. The pole that opens the door and pulls the fold-away ladder down is missing. Paul is grunting with the effort of pulling the guest bed into the middle of the room.
‘Is Ava in there?’ I shout at Josh.
‘Mum! No she’s not.’
‘Where’s Ava?’ I spit at Paul. My desperation to see my daughter knows no bounds.
‘I don’t know!’ he says, straining to pull the catch on the attic door. Josh’s head pokes through and Paul pulls him down in an untidy tumble. ‘How did you end up in there?’
Josh is crying and he can’t get the words out. ‘That woman who came round—’
‘Portia—?’
‘– said you needed a box from up there and told me to get it and then she shut me in . . . is that blood, Dad?’
‘Where was Ava?’
‘Here.’ Josh starts sobbing. ‘You didn’t come and get me!’ I hold my son tightly, trying to absorb some of his fear. Paul and I stare at each other over Josh’s head. Things are moving fast and it is probably only for a second or two, but that look sums up so much. We are back on the same side. We are fighting the same battle, united in our struggle to save what is most precious to us. Paul’s lips are a malevolent line. His chest rises and falls in an ever-quickening cycle. His outrage is escalating. He snatches the bat and heads for the stairs. ‘Jonah’s gonna eat the fucking whale.’
‘Paul, wait!’ but before anything else can be said Paul gives a cry as he turns to the short flight of stairs that leads down from the top floor. A door has slammed and with a sinking heart I know which door it is. Our house was bedsits when we bought it, its grand proportions chopped and reduced to accommodate the washing and privacy needs of many unrelated adults. Most of the internal doors groaned under the weight of heavy Yale locks, which we removed. But the lock to the door to the top floor, to its one bedroom and bathroom, we kept, thinking our guests would appreciate a bit of extra privacy. That door now keeps us prisoners.
‘Portia! Portia, let us out!’ Paul is pleading as he ransacks the bedroom for something heavy enough to get that door down. Ava Ava Ava . . . My heart beats time for my daughter. Paul starts jumping down the stairs, trying to use his feet to break the door. ‘Why’s she doing this? It doesn’t make any sense!’
‘Yes it does, Paul. Don’t you see? Kill Melody and you and Lex are immediately in the frame. Ruin the reputation of Forwood’s directors and the final part of the sale won’t happen. One or both of you could be classed as bad leavers. After all, you did have a bloody affair with her!’ My anger is boiling up. I slap him. ‘I’ve seen Lex’s foot video!’ The purple pump tangles its way round my guts, pulling me apart with jealousy. Again and again I slap him, incoherent words tumbling out. I am furious and jealous but most of all I’m full of fear. There are different categories of affair: the one-night bunk-up in a faraway place, a passing passion that could be acted upon or not; and the deadly slow build-up that once unleashed cannot be controlled. Melody was his type, she was a woman to admire and to respect and to share a life with. The stakes could not have been higher. ‘How could you do that to me! To us!’
Paul is looking more desperate than I’ve ever seen him. ‘I’m sorry, Kate. I’m so sorry. That night I didn’t come home, when I knocked over the dog, I was thinking it all through. I’d ended it the week before and I was trying to sort it out in my head. I made a mistake but I couldn’t tell you.’ He grabs my hand. ‘I was ashamed. I’ll make it up to you if it’s the last thing I do.’
‘Mum?’ Josh is standing limply watching us and a deep shame that our grubby secrets are being witnessed by our son lies on me like a blanket. This is an argument for another day, but first we have to get through this one.
‘Lex is dead, and her intention is that you will be too. If Portia makes it look like Gerry did it her position at CPTV is unchallenged.’
‘But the scarf . . . ?’
‘Were you wearing it that night you knocked over the dog? You can’t remember, can you? I thought you were, but maybe I was wrong. When you met her that night in the car I think she took it without you noticing, because you never notice things like that, and she used it and she planted it back here. She must have crossed over the canal from the towpath and dropped the knife in the water on her way – Max and Marcus were away, remember? So all she had to do was open the back window and throw the scarf in; it was even better for her that Ava found it in the morning and hid it. She planned this all a long, long time ago.’
‘But Lex challenged her on the finances—’
‘So he had to go, and now she’s trying to tie up the loose ends. My video exposed a financial theory, but with Gerry downstairs it could just as easily be the work of a madman – the unhinged celebrity getting rid of those that made him famous.’ I stop. Something has drifted into my senses that makes me stand stock-still. Oh no, it can’t be. ‘What’s that smell?’
‘What?’ Paul is sniffing and getting nothing.
‘It’s gas.’
‘No.’
I sniff again. There it is, unmistakable, as it curls unseen under the door and drifts up the stairs. The house is filling up with a deadly and explosive cocktail. I race to the wardrobe and pick up an old computer screen inside and hurl it with all my force through the paper-thin Victorian-glass window that overlooks the garden. One pane explodes with an almighty crash and plummets to the patio three floors below, bursting into myriad pieces and spreading shrapnel over the plants. I glimpse the Marie Rose through the rain-blurred trees and wish with all my heart that Max and Marcus were there now; that the noise of something shattering would turn Max’s head from his navel towards that porthole and he would amble up the grass in his bare feet and save us. But the boat sits unmoving. I curse fate, my life and myself. And all the while my heart screams over and over again for my daughter.
‘She’ll blow the house.’ Paul is standing at the top of the flight of stairs, preparing to launch himself off. We’ve reached the endgame. He’s trying to get through that door, he’s clinging, clinging with desperation to the thought that he can. The blood from his weeping head wound has stained the top of his grey T-shirt. He’s fighting for his family, fighting for our lives over his own. He stands up another step, judging how high he can go before a jump will be guaranteed to break his legs.
He leans back, about to hurl himself off when I shout.
‘Paul, don’t!’
He looks up at me, his forehead a hideous brown from dried blood. ‘I’m so sorry, Kate.’ He launches off and lands on the door with a groan and a thump, but it doesn’t budge. He lies winded on the floor for a moment. The smell of gas is growing stronger. The meter is in the cupboard under the stairs, the gas pipes lining the walls. She’s cut or hacked through a pipe and now the gas is being pumped out under pressure into the belly of my house.
‘Mum, I’m scared.’ I am hugging a whimpering Josh in the corner, and
a cold, hard rage against the woman on the other side of the door fills me. Paul is panting with the effort just expended. He limps back up the steps, his eyes hold no light. He goes over to the broken window and shouts out, his voice competing with the rain drumming on the neighbour’s corrugated iron shed roof. Someone might hear us. But it’s only a might and we need much more certainty than that. We need to be saved. Paul peers out for a long moment. When he turns, there’s a chink of light back in his eyes. ‘You’re going through there.’
I join him at the window and look down. Pieces of the smashed computer glitter in the rain on the patio far below. ‘I’m going to hold you and swing you and you’re going in through the bedroom window below.’ I stare at him in disbelief. He opens the second sash window as wide as it will go.
I look out of the window again. ‘It’s too far,’ I whisper.
Paul’s talking urgently now. ‘It’s our only way out. You can’t hold me but I can hold you. You can do it—’
‘No, Paul, I can’t!’
‘You must do it. Trust me.’
My eyebrows furrow. The doubt switch has been turned on again, bright and harsh. We stand now not three miles from Hampstead Heath and on that hot summer evening in the moments after my fall when Paul didn’t catch me what was it he said? ‘Trust me.’ It was those same words on our walk through the Woolwich Tunnel that made me turn him in to the police and brought our world crashing down.
‘Trust me, Kate, it’s our only option.’
I look into the eyes of my husband as he pants with adrenalin. Is this the end you planned all along, Paul? You’d never harm your children, of that I have not the slightest doubt, but me? How hard would you fight for me? There was something else you said on the Heath that day: ‘the final part of the fall is the most intense’. How hard is your grip on my life, Paul?
In the end love is all about belief, and belief is blind. You opt in or you don’t, you choose A or you choose B. At this moment I’m choosing the window, because going out there brings me closer to Ava, brings this whole ghastly saga closer to its end. I grab Paul’s large hand, the hand I held at the altar all those years ago. ‘I trust you, Paul.’
He grabs me in what feels like the closest embrace I have ever known. ‘I love you, Kate. More than you can ever know.’
I look out of the window and feel the rain pelting. Our hands will be slimier, the window sill more slippery. Puddles widen across the patio far below. I tuck Marcus’s jeans into my socks, zip up the leather jacket and fold up the collar, doing my best to protect myself from the broken glass. Sweat slicks my hand. ‘Mum, what are you doing?’
I can’t look at Josh, knowing that nothing must distract me from the task ahead, nothing must lessen my resolve. ‘I want you to stand on the other side of this room and stay there, is that clear?’ Josh says nothing.
We drag the bed close to the window and Paul hooks his legs underneath it, his arms hanging out. ‘Eggy, this is going to work.’
I smile weakly. ‘I always was a good climber.’
‘Just get to that door, I’ll be on the other side.’
I nod and swing one leg out of the window. I don’t look down. I lean back into the room and, facing Paul, bring my other leg out. Paul wipes his hands down his trousers and I grip one wrist, making him wince with pain as I grab the rope welts. ‘Sorry,’ I whisper. He shakes his head, showing me it doesn’t matter. I sense a terrifying weightlessness below the soles of my feet. I let go of the window ledge with an involuntary cry and grab hold of his other wrist. ‘Don’t look away,’ I plead. Paul fixes me with his large brown eyes. For years I’ve bathed in those eyes, whether with pleasure, pain or ecstasy. If I fall or am dropped, they will be the last thing I ever see.
Paul’s grip on me is like a vice. ‘On the count of three, push away from the wall and I’ll swing you in feet first.’ I place the soles of my shoes on the wet wall. ‘One.’ Josh’s bed sits under the window below and should cushion me once I’m through. ‘Two.’ Terror washes over me in a wave but before I can shout stop and climb back in the window he says, ‘Three!’ and my stomach drops away as Paul prises me off the wall and I’m swinging through air three storeys up with a pane of glass between me and death. I lock my knees and Paul lets go of my hands and if I had any time I would pray but before I can I slam feet first into Josh’s window and then I’m through but elation turns to panic as only my knees are in the window and I scream as my body falls backwards and I see the canal the wrong way up as I flail with my legs and catch the backs of my knees on wood and the remaining glass. I curl up, seeing Paul’s blurred head through my tears, and grab on to the sill, straining every muscle in my stomach to get upright. My bum is slipping back out of the window and Josh’s door is swinging open and Portia is advancing across the room. She’s moving fast but I’m quicker, brute fear curling my spine until I’m finally in the room with my bloodied hands up in self-defence. She’s holding a heavy Buddha statue in her hand, the size of a big rock. ‘Is that what you killed Lex with? Planning to leave it here when you go?’
‘Kate.’ Her voice is smooth even now. ‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ She’s taunting me as she moves slowly forwards. ‘Now that all the actors are gathered, we can finish off the show. And I think you’ll agree, Kate, it’s going to be quite some show.’ A hysterical euphoria floods me as the realisation that I’ve just survived a swing through the window sinks in. I sidestep towards Josh’s desk. I know without looking that there’s a brick on the corner with a pile of marbles in the groove. I need to keep Portia talking. My T-shirt feels sticky at the back and I push away the thought of a deep glass cut.
‘Why? Why did you do it?’
Paul is shouting above, the smell of gas is coming in waves.
‘Oh come on. Don’t play dumb with me. Don’t make out you can’t see my reasons. It’s tough to be about to lose everything you’ve worked so hard for, isn’t it, Kate? Your video distraction shows that. The pain of a collapsing marriage—’
‘The police know you did it.’
Portia smiles. ‘You’re grasping at straws. When they get here, and they will in the end, they’ll find that you killed Gerry in an ultimately futile act of self-defence.’
‘How did you get him here?’
‘I didn’t. You did. You texted him this morning and enticed him over with an offer he couldn’t refuse.’ She sees my confusion. ‘Oh, Paul couldn’t stop talking about it. The pride in his voice that you’d found Gerry at Cheltenham, that he came on TV because he liked you, that you and him had a connection, remember? You should have kept more of a watch on your bag at Jessie’s, your phone was practically poking out the top.’
I’m stunned, but I try not to show it. I’m dealing with a woman whose deceptions and quick-wittedness are beyond what I ever thought possible. I hadn’t even noticed that my work phone was missing. ‘Where’s Ava?’
‘Oh, the agony of a lost child. Must be terrible, knowing you can’t swim.’
My eyes glance involuntarily out of the window towards the canal. She wouldn’t . . . couldn’t . . . too late – I turn as the heavy black object comes hard and fast across the room at my head. I manage to get my arm in front of my face but my elbow takes a glancing blow and I stagger back into the desk in agony. She’s on me seconds later and has a knife raised above my head, bearing down on my neck. Beyond her helmet hair I can see the barrier behind which Paul waits to be released. The Yale is high up on the door, the key still in the lock.
We are in a brute struggle for life. Portia is stronger than she looks and I suspect a lot of time on machines in an expensive gym is paying off now. My hand is holding her wrist, pushing her and the knife blade back while I strain my neck away and with the other hand, feel the objects on Josh’s desk. I know each of them by touch: the retractable light sabre, the skeleton-hand pen; a rubber from the Tate Gallery. My fingertip touches something rough. The brick. I hear vicious thumps from upstairs, Paul is redoubling his efforts to get throu
gh that door.
I’m seconds from death but I’m extremely calm, all my effort concentrated into getting my hand on that brick. Portia’s face is red as she strains to murder me and small thread veins are visible this close up on her nose. It’s the first time I’ve seen the chinks in the perfect facade and it gives me extra strength. I pull the brick towards me with my index finger, hearing a marble roll off the pile on to the desk top. Portia’s eyes flick up and I smash her in the side of the face with the London stock, a shower of marbles bouncing over us.
She screams as she drops the knife and I seize the moment to push her off and sprint for the door. My late-night run across Paul’s office comes to my mind and how I was thrown backwards by a door that opened the wrong way. I was fighting shadows then; now those shadows have become real and I know who the enemy is. I’m not making the same mistake again.
I’m in the corridor, my hand on the key when the brick lands in my side and pain explodes across my ribs, making me stagger into the wall.
‘Open the door!’ Paul is screaming.
The key is in my fingers, but every breath I take, every move, is agony. ‘Step away, Kate.’ Portia’s holding a lighter in her hand, swaying.
I move towards the door, triumph surging through me. ‘There’s no guarantee this place will blow, and you know it.’ I can feel the wind blowing fresh air in through the broken window. I’ll take my chances. I insert the key in the lock.
‘Can you take that risk with Ava?’
I stop in my tracks as she holds the lighter upright, taunting me. ‘Fire is very disfiguring on a young girl. Move away, Kate.’
‘Open the door!’ Paul bellows.
I can’t do it. I couldn’t live with myself. I can’t take the chance that she might be telling the truth. I circle backwards towards the bedroom.
‘That’s better. The sooner you realise who is in control here the more likely your children will be able to live their lives to the full.’
‘Where is she?’ Portia shakes her head. ‘Where’s my daughter? Why are you doing this to us?’
