The Dinner Party
Page 21
A scream.
It tugged him back. He’d passed out again. Consciousness was as slippery as his grasp on the leg, which jerked from under him before a bare foot caught him full in the face. The harsh impact deadened his hearing, warm blood filled his left nostril and darkness closed on his thoughts like a snare.
Wake up!
But his internal voice was being suffocated and scarcely penetrated the barrier his brain was erecting against the assault.
Wake up.
No urgency in the muffled command now. He was withdrawing, leaving physical sensations far behind. Oblivion beckoned.
‘Ted!’
His eyelids shot open. The return to the kitchen was as painful as his injuries.
His hand was empty. She’d got free. The consequences of that rushed into him as fast as the room.
‘Ted!’ It was Juliette.
He saw Kathryn’s face, shock suspending her expression.
Juliette. She was standing. The bloodied knife he’d taken from his stomach was in her hand, and she’d thrust the blade half inside Kathryn’s neck.
Kathryn’s hand went to the injury and blood poured over her fingers and the canary yellow collar of her robe. She turned to Juliette, uncoiled hair bisecting her expression, lips open as the red torrent cascaded from the wound.
Black flooded in. Ted was swept away.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
‘Georgie!’ Raising his voice resonated the wound in his stomach and activated the jagged pain in his back. But the doctors had said it had only been a matter of luck the knife hadn’t severed any main arteries or pierced Ted’s liver and that the prong had just missed his spine.
‘Coming now!’ Georgie usually had to be summoned a couple of times, but over the three months of Ted’s recovery he’d been quick to respond.
Ted heard Georgie scuttle along the landing and waited for him as he descended the stairs. ‘I have to go now. Zoe’s here.’
Georgie reached the bottom of the stairs and nodded despondently.
Georgie used to get excited about Zoe sitting him, but she was now a daily visitor. Every weekday Peta picked him up from school and handed him over to Zoe until Ted came home. The time that had followed his struggle in the kitchen with Kathryn had been a blur of hospital appointments, visits to Juliette and interviews with Detective Inspector Renton.
‘I’ve left money for lunchtime pizza. Zoe’s got the menus. Save me some stuffed crust.’ He tried to make it sound like fun.
‘When will she be coming home?’
‘I’m hoping to find that out today.’ Ted had noticed Georgie had started calling Juliette ‘she’. He’d said that if the police were holding his mother then she must have done something wrong, like Auntie Kathryn. Ted had tried to explain but, without giving him the specifics, it was difficult to convince him otherwise.
Zoe had told Ted that the story had broken on TV soon after he’d been taken to hospital, so the kids at Georgie’s school were bound to be telling him things he’d rather have contained. Georgie had stopped asking questions about his Auntie Evie, Uncle Jakob, Uncle Rhys, Auntie Orla, and Auntie Kathryn but Ted was sure they occupied his thoughts as much as his.
‘Brendan said they’re going to throw away the key.’
Ted tried not to react. He sat down on the third stair up from the bottom and patted the space beside him.
Georgie seated himself.
‘You don’t say “she”, OK?’
Georgie nodded reluctantly.
‘We all help our friends. You’ll understand. But sometimes you have to draw the line, particularly if you’re breaking the law.’
‘Like when you visited Uncle Jakob in the park?’
‘Yes. That was a very difficult decision to make.’
‘Even though you couldn’t help him.’
Every morning he woke with the image of him hanging lifelessly from a tree, a desperate act of suicide for a crime he hadn’t committed. Evie, Jakob, Rhys, Orla and Kathryn; would they all have shared the same fate if they hadn’t played the trust game? However it happened, Ted figured that, sooner or later, the truth of what the four women had done to Steve North would have surfaced.
Juliette was being sentenced at one, and Ted had taken Georgie out of school for the day. He knew his classmates were mercilessly teasing him, even though Ted had asked his head teacher to step in. ‘Remember what I said about ulterior motives? Just don’t let your friends lead you down the wrong path.’ He tried not to imagine Juliette, Kathryn and Evie watching while Orla assaulted Steve North.
‘Shouldn’t you try to save your friends from doing it though?’
He nodded. ‘Just surround yourself with people you can trust.’ Connor had visited him at home the previous Wednesday. He was bringing up two children alone now, and Ted was determined to help him deal with what had happened. He still didn’t know what his secret was or Jakob and Rhys’s but compared to what the game had been orchestrated for they were probably as insignificant as his. ‘Maybe your current friends don’t appreciate you’re a good guy, but the next ones might.’
‘But I don’t think I’ll meet any new friends.’
Ted was going to tell him he would, that it would happen. But right then both of them were in the same boat.
The night around the table still played back in his head – the girls’ reactions and glances and the expression on Juliette’s face when he burnt her envelope with her secret inside. Had she really thought that was an end to it? Or maybe the four women knew that was a sure way to begin to expose what they’d done. None of them could have foreseen how badly it could have gone wrong. He shook the image of Juliette planting the knife in Kathryn’s neck and looked at his watch. ‘I’m late. Got to go.’ He stood and so did Georgie.
Georgie took a lavender envelope out of his pocket and handed it to him. ‘It’s a good luck card for her. I made it today.’
Ted examined it. Georgie had unwittingly used one of the remaining envelopes that Juliette had at the dinner party. Her secret had been inside a lavender one. ‘That was a nice thing to do.’ He would dispose of the envelope before he gave it to Juliette. ‘I’ll be back in a few hours.’ He shouted down the hall. ‘Zoe, I’ve got to go!’
She came up the hallway nursing Pippa. ‘Hope it all goes well.’
Ted acknowledged that she was wearing bright lipstick again. She always did when she came round now. A fact he was studiously ignoring.
‘Come on you.’ She rallied Georgie. ‘Let’s order those pizzas.’
Georgie plodded down the hallway towards her. ‘We have to get stuffed crust for Dad.’
‘We won’t forget Dad.’ She smiled at Ted.
‘And what are we going to do after that?’ Georgie asked her.
She stepped to one side so he could pass and touched his head as he did. ‘Who knows? Let’s see what happens when he gets back.’ She kept smiling, held Ted’s gaze for a few seconds longer than was comfortable and then escorted Georgie to the dining room.
Ted watched them go but lingered in the hallway and listened.
‘Alexa, play Zoe’s playlist,’ the babysitter instructed.
Some synth pop kicked off and Ted could no longer hear what she was saying to his son.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First of all, big thanks to you, the reader, for selecting this story and allowing my dinner party characters to live in your head. I hope they were worthwhile guests. Without your imagination books are redundant.
I couldn’t write without my faithful support base, namely my patiently wonderful and wonderfully patient wife, Anne-Marie, and my Mum and Dad, who are all experts when it comes to creating a loving atmosphere around a dining table.
At big debt of gratitude goes to Finn Cotton, my astute editor at HarperCollins, who enthusiastically seized on this idea and ran with it. I appreciate the insightful notes along the way and those too of Janette Currie, my copy editor.
A very special thank you to author, Noelle
Holten, who has consistently championed my work and was instrumental in getting this picked up. Hope you still have time to read my stories as well as creating your own!
And, as ever, I can’t underestimate how grateful I am for the time spent by reviewers and bloggers who are such a vital cog in every author’s career. Thanks for your generosity online but, moreover, for giving up your valuable time so other readers can enjoy the wealth of great writing out there. A special salute to Karen Cole, Jen Lucas, Nicki Richards, Donna Maguire, Zoe-lee O’farrell, Nigel Adams, Suze-Clarke-Morris, Kaisha Jayneh, Berit and Vicci at Audio Killed The Bookmark, Katie Jones at The Book Cave, Amanda Oughton, Emma C. at Booking Good Read, Sean Talbot, Rachel Broughton, Alison Drew, Magdalena Johansson, Diane Hogg, Renita D’Silva, Martha Cheeves, Joyce Juzwik, Amy Sullivan, Kelly Lacey, Norma Farrelly, Rebecca Pugh, Claire Knight, Chelsea Humphrey, Ellie Smith, Lorraine Rugman, Steve Robb, Emma Welton, Stephanie Rothwell, Cleo Bannister, Abby Fairbrother, Sarah Hardy, Meggy Roussel, Sheila Howes, Linda Strong, Maxine Groves, Joanne Robertson, Susan Hampson, Kate Moloney, Eva Merckx, Jules Mortimer, Mandy White, Malina Skrobosinski, James Atkins, Kaz Lewis, Fran Hagan, Stephen Edger, James Garcia Jr, Shell Baker, Mandie Griffiths, Jo Ford, Marilina Tzelepi and Scott Griffin.
Please swing by my website for all the latest: richard@richardjayparker.com or find me on Instagram (bemykiller), Twitter (@Bookwalter) and Facebook (RichardJayParkerFans).
About the Author
R. J. Parker’s creative career began as a TV script writer, editor and producer. It was this background that fed into a series of cinematic, high-concept thrillers that grabs the reader from the very first page and doesn’t release them until the last. R. J. Parker now lives in Salisbury.
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