Her eyes travelled to the side of her house, taking in ‘Joel’s tree’, as they called it. It was actually two trees grown into each other, crooked and bent but beautiful too with the pretty ‘tree charms’ hanging from it, colourful glass orbs that had been added over the years in homage to her first son. Melissa’s eyes alighted on the latest addition, an orb the size of her fist, sparkling with turquoise green and bright blue swirls. The twins had found it at the craft fair the other day. Melissa smiled as she remembered how excited they’d been to show her.
‘It’s green,’ Lewis had said as he hung it up on the tree.
‘Joel’s favourite colour,’ Lilly had added with a sad smile.
Melissa’s eyes filled with tears. Yes, things were a lot better than they once were. Joel would be proud of her, of all of them.
She took a deep happy breath then twisted the door handle and pushed the door open. She stepped inside, kicking off her work trainers and taking her light denim jacket from around her waist and hanging it up, noticing the nail on the coat peg was coming loose again. She made a mental note to get Patrick to tighten it up later before the dog had another pile of coats collapse on him. Speaking of which, their golden Labrador, Sandy, came bouncing down the hallway, jumping up at Melissa in his usual forceful and enthusiastic way.
‘Hello, baby, hello,’ she murmured as she buried her nose in one of the dog’s silky ears. ‘Down now, down, before you ruin my top,’ she said, taking Sandy’s paws off her chest and placing them on the floor. ‘Too late,’ she added with a sigh as she noticed a red mark above the Bodyworks Centre logo on the collar of her white top. She licked her finger and tried to rub it out. ‘Don’t tell me another jar of chilli got smashed,’ she called out as she padded down the hallway, past pale green walls adorned with family photos, and walked into the kitchen. ‘You’d better have cleaned up the glass, remember when—’
She paused. Her three children were standing pale-faced in the kitchen, blinking down at something hidden by the wooden island in the middle of the room.
‘What’s going on?’ Melissa asked, her blue eyes scouring the room, taking in more spots of red on the wooden countertops and glossy white cupboard doors. ‘Have you been trying to cook dinner on your own again? I texted Dad to suggest we have a barbecue. Where is he?’
They didn’t say anything, just continued looking down at something.
The hair on Melissa’s arms and nape lifted.
Something was wrong.
She walked around the kitchen island then froze, letting out a gasp.
Her husband was lying on the kitchen floor, one cheek squashed against the hard grey tiles, his right arm bent at an awkward angle beneath him.
Chapter Three
Thursday 18th April, 2019
4.15 p.m.
Melissa’s first thought as she looked at Patrick was that he was sleeping. It was how she was used to seeing him at night, turning in the darkness to catch him with his eyes closed in the moonlight, cheek pressed against his pillow as he softly snored.
But he wasn’t snoring. He wasn’t moving at all. And his skin, usually tanned and healthy, was now horribly pale . . . almost blue!
All her senses came alive at once.
‘What the hell happened?’ she screamed at the kids. ‘Did he slip? Have you called an ambulance? Please tell me you’ve called an ambulance!’
‘No,’ Lewis said in a trembling voice as he put a protective arm around his little sister, Grace. ‘We – we only just found him like this after taking Sandy for a walk.’
Melissa’s gaze drew back to the spatters of red around the kitchen, fingerprints of it smeared against the kitchen units, pools of it by Patrick’s head. His head, which, as Melissa realised when she crouched down to tend to her husband, was bleeding freely from a wound on the exposed side, his dark brown hair matted against it.
Not chilli sauce, blood.
‘Patrick, Patrick, wake up, Patrick!’ she said, shaking him.
But he didn’t move, just remained motionless, eyes closed. She pressed her hand against his chest, relieved to feel it rising and falling against the skin of her palm.
The kids remained motionless, though, still gawping down at the prone figure of their dad. Sandy padded over to Patrick and lay down next to him, his paws in his owner’s blood.
‘Are any of you hurt?’ Melissa asked her children.
Grace shook her head, wordless, her large oval eyes impossibly wide. Lewis was rocking back and forth slightly and Lilly’s gaze was focused on her bare feet, staring at the blood on her carefully painted toenails.
‘Come on, phone!’ Melissa said, clapping her hands like she did in the mornings to catapult them into getting ready. Lewis blinked then stumbled towards it.
‘Patrick, Patrick!’ Melissa shouted at her husband as she stretched over to yank a tea towel hanging from the oven handle. She pressed it against the wound on his head, shocked to see how quickly the fabric turned crimson.
Lilly let out a sob.
My poor darlings, she thought to herself.
She grasped her elder daughter’s hand. ‘Can you take Grace into the living room, Lils? She’s too young for all this.’ Grace could actually handle things better than Lilly. Even at ten, she had a stoicism about her that her older sister lacked. So it was more about getting Lilly away from the horror of this scene. Though she exuded this aura of being strong and confident, Melissa knew how quickly Lilly could crumble. ‘Lewis, give me the phone, sweetheart.’
Lilly grabbed her younger sister’s arm and tried to steer her away but Grace refused to move, staring at her father. Lewis stepped around Patrick, flinching when his bare toes made contact with blood, and handed the phone to Melissa with a trembling hand.
‘It’ll be okay, Lewis,’ she said to him, looking her son in the eye and trying to convince him of something she hadn’t even convinced herself of yet. ‘Dad’ll be okay, you hear me?’
He nodded, his face pale with shock as he raked his shaking fingers through the dark hair he’d inherited from his father.
Melissa dialled 999, bloody fingers fumbling over the buttons.
‘So you found him like this?’ she asked the kids as she waited for someone to answer. ‘Just lying on the floor?’ They all nodded, wordless. ‘What time did you get back from walking Sandy?’ She peered at the clock. ‘How long did the walk take? Was anyone here when you left?’
Lilly went to open her mouth but Lewis put a hand carefully on her arm.
‘The walk took about half an hour,’ he said. ‘No one was here when we left. We came back about ten minutes ago.’
Ten minutes?
Melissa had been outside talking to Daphne ten minutes ago. That was plenty of time to have called for an ambulance. Why hadn’t they called for one?
Those were questions for later, though. Now, she needed to focus on Patrick.
Melissa looked towards the counter to see more blood there, and some strands of dark hair too. Yes, that must be it, Patrick slipped. Slipped and hit his head on the side. She’d always been so worried about the end of that wooden counter, so damn sharp. She’d told Patrick time and again to smooth it out. ‘If one of us were to slip . . .’ she would say, voice trailing off, unable to say the words.
Well, now the thing that was unsayable was lying right in front of her.
Sandy stood up and padded away from Patrick across the kitchen, leaving bloody paw prints all over the floor.
‘Jesus. Sandy!’ she shouted. ‘Lilly, can you grab him and—’ She paused, noticing something lying by Patrick’s slippered foot.
A knife.
It was one of their large kitchen knives, the blade slick with blood. She’d only been slicing grapefruits with it that morning!
Her eyes darted from the knife to a pool of blood by Patrick’s hip. She leaned over him, letting out a gasp as she saw the bloody slit in the side of his stomach.
‘Is – is that a stab wound?’ She looked at the kids in shock
. ‘Did you notice?’
‘We didn’t notice,’ Lilly said in a whimper, wrapping her arms around herself.
‘Emergency services,’ a female voice snapped into Melissa’s ear, interrupting her panicked thoughts. ‘Which service do you require?’
‘My husband’s been stabbed!’ Melissa said, the words seeming so surreal and horrific as she uttered them.
‘Name and address, please,’ the operator asked.
‘Melissa Byatt. Number one, New Pine Road in Forest Grove. Please come quickly.’
‘We’ll have an ambulance and the police with you soon, Melissa. Can you check your husband’s breathing for me?’
Melissa put her free hand on Patrick’s firm chest again, so familiar to her and still warm, thank God. ‘I can see he is. His chest is moving up and down but – but he’s so pale.’
‘Where is the stab wound on your husband’s body?’
‘Stomach, the right side.’
‘You’ll need to stem the bleeding,’ the operator said.
‘Get another towel, there’s some in the dryer,’ Melissa instructed Lewis. ‘My son’s getting a towel,’ she explained to the operator.
‘Good. Ask him to press it against the wound, hard.’
‘Press the towel against Dad’s wound, okay, darling?’ she asked Lewis as he pulled out a mustard-coloured towel. He sank down to the floor, his father’s blood pooling around the knees of his jeans as he pressed the towel against Patrick’s side.
‘How did this happen, Melissa?’ the operator asked.
‘I have no idea, I came home from work to find him like this. My kids had only been back five minutes; he was like this when they found him.’
‘And they didn’t call an ambulance?’
‘No. They must have been in shock,’ Melissa said.
Lilly pulled Grace close to her, leaning down to whisper something in her ear as a lock of her long caramel hair trailed over her little sister’s arm.
‘How old are they, Melissa?’ the operator asked.
‘The twins are fifteen, my youngest is ten.’
‘Can you pop the phone on speakerphone and ask the children what happened?’
Melissa did as she asked, placing the phone on her leg. ‘Guys,’ she said, fixing them all with her gaze, ‘you need to tell us exactly what happened.’
‘We found Dad like this,’ Lewis said, brown eyes darting towards the knife and away again. ‘Literally just before you walked in, Mum. We didn’t know he’d been stabbed, right?’ He looked at his sisters, who quickly nodded.
Melissa frowned. She looked over at the knife then at each of her children in turn. She had carried them within her, their fibres mixed with hers, their heartbeats matching hers. She knew them inside out.
And that was why, in that moment, she knew they were lying.
‘Okay, the ambulance is just two minutes away now,’ the operator said. ‘Just stay on the line, okay? Don’t touch anything. The police will want to seal the scene.’
Scene . . . as in crime scene.
Melissa felt nausea build inside. She looked at the kids, who all looked panicked.
In the distance, sirens suddenly punctured the air.
Grace jumped at the sound, face terrified.
‘Oh, Gracey,’ Melissa said. She beckoned her younger daughter towards her. Grace ran over, wrapping her arms around Melissa’s waist as she looked down at her father’s prone body with wide eyes. Lilly walked over and knelt down by her twin brother, the hem of her dress dipping in blood. She placed her hand over Lewis’s to help him stem their father’s blood and they exchanged a solemn look.
‘We’re all here, darling,’ Melissa said to Patrick as she leaned in close to whisper in his ear. ‘Your family are here.’
Family.
She looked at each of the children. What had happened here? Why were they acting so strangely?
There was an urgent knock on the door then. Melissa gently took Lilly’s hand, helping her lay it over the towel covering Patrick’s head wound, then she ran down the hallway, opening the front door to two paramedics. They ran into the kitchen with her and started work on Patrick as the children stepped away, going to Melissa.
She held them all close to her as she watched, struggling to comprehend that this was her husband lying before her on their kitchen floor.
Then she froze.
Where was the knife?
Chapter Four
Welcome to the Forest Grove Facebook Chit Chat Group
Home to Strong Branches and Deep Roots
NOT home to spam, self-promotion, cyber bullying or obscenities.
Closed group. 617 members
Thursday 18th April, 2019
4.32 p.m.
Belinda Bell
Does anybody know what’s happening on New Pine Road? Rather a lot of sirens and police cars heading that way.
Rebecca Feine
I was just walking the dog down there! I thought I heard sirens but assumed it was coming from Ashbridge.
Peter Mileham
Hope it’s nothing serious, know lots of people who live on that road :-( Tommy Mileham, have you seen this, Dad?
Ellie Mileham
I was at the park with the kids, Peter. One ambulance, two police cars. Definitely heading to New Pine Road area. Really worried. Hope everyone’s okay.
Tommy Mileham
Yep, lots of sirens, the hounds are going mental.
Belinda Bell
I’ve headed upstairs so I can see it all from my window. I’m afraid to say the police are outside the Byatts’ house.
Graham Cane
You should work for the Daily Express, Belinda Bell.
Belinda Bell
Oh, give over, you.
Andrea Cooper
Oh gosh! I only just saw Melissa cycling past. There are an awful lot of police there. Patrick Byatt, is everything okay?!
Rebecca Feine
Not the Byatts! Lovely Melissa saved a baby hedgehog we found in our garden last summer, the care and attention she put into keeping the little thing alive was quite something.
Kitty Fletcher
Oh no! Such a lovely family, hope it’s nothing serious, especially after all they went through with little Joel.
Rebecca Feine
Not to mention Melissa’s mother all those years ago. Tragedy never seems far from the poor girl.
Jackie Shillingford
Please don’t let it be the wonderful Byatts! Rosemary Byatt, have you seen this? Hope they’re all okay.
Belinda Bell
Rosemary won’t be looking on Facebook, Jackie. I’ve just seen her and Bill rushing out of their house.
Pauline Sharpe
Oh dear. I used to go to school with Melissa. As Rebecca said, she seems to have nothing but bad luck, just like her lovely mum.
Graham Cane
‘Lovely’?! Not sure that’s how I’d describe Ruby ‘Quazy’ Quail . . . !!!
Jackie Shillingford
What a ridiculous thing to say, Graham Cane!
Kitty Fletcher
Yes, not to mention prejudiced against those who struggle with mental illness.
Graham Cane
Oh, here we go, the Snowflake Brigade and their leader, Kitty Fletcher, have arrived.
Rebecca Feine
Andrea Cooper, can we delete these comments about Melissa and her mum, please!
Pauline Sharpe
OMG, my husband just came back from having a look. Patrick was on the floor in the kitchen being tended to by paramedics. He said it looked really bad. How awful!
Tommy Mileham
I can confirm Patrick has been injured. I just spoke to Bill.
Kitty Fletcher
Oh no! Not Patrick! Could it be related to the elections coming up?
Rebecca Feine
They’re just local parish elections, Kitty. It can’t be related to that! And it’s not like Patrick is controversial, is he?
Graham Can
e
Always knew trouble would come find the Quails again . . .
Andrew Blake
Speaking of trouble, anyone know where our trusty forest ranger Ryan Day was when this all happened?
Rebecca Feine
Andrea Cooper, where are you?! These posts need to be deleted.
Chapter Five
Thursday 18th April, 2019
4.43 p.m.
We messed up. We didn’t think about the knife and the DNA all over it – my DNA. We had to hide it, quick. I’m pretty sure Mum noticed. She’s sitting on the sofa now, jogging her leg up and down as she looks at each of us. She catches my eye. I know she’s thinking about the knife, trying to find an explanation other than the possibility that one of us hid it. But Big Foot didn’t walk in from the woods and hide it, did he?
She looks towards the kitchen and I follow her gaze. Two paramedics are carefully lifting Dad on to a stretcher. They told Mum he was stable, he’d be okay, and my head is all mashed up because I can’t decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing and I seriously want to barf right here and now, even blurt out to Mum it was me, it was me, it was me!
But the other two are eyeballing me and I need to hold it together. Mum can’t know. We talked about it. We all agreed: we found him like that. We don’t know who did it.
But the knife – the flipping knife!
And the fact that Dad’s alive . . . just. So it’s all going to unravel anyway when he wakes up. If he wakes up. But we’ve started this now and we have to continue.
I look at Mum again. Has she got there yet? Has she figured out one of us hurt Dad?
No. No way, she just wouldn’t even allow herself to think it.
‘So just to confirm, you found Patrick – your dad – injured on the floor?’ Adrian Cooper asks. He’s a police officer but he’s also Dad’s friend. His face is all white and sweaty, like never in his life did he imagine he’d be asking questions like this in the very living room where he sits watching football and drinking beer with Dad. I like him. He’s a bit of a sap, I suppose, that’s what Grandad says. It’s true his wife, Andrea, acts more like a police officer than he does, especially the way she lords it over her son, Carter . . . I mean, really, he doesn’t have a mobile phone and he’s fifteen?! But I like Adrian, he’s kind and funny too sometimes, especially when he’s drunk.
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