by T. M. Logan
“Not enough for him to win—everyone else had to lose, right?”
“Exactly. He was going to screw me over completely, either way—it made it worse for him that it was another woman, rather than a man. I would have been left with barely a fraction of what should have been mine. Scorched earth, he called it. All the sacrifices I’d made for him: my degree, my body, my freedom, my career. My life. All those sacrifices, to get screwed again at the end of it. But this way, my way, we get everything.”
“He found you out, didn’t he? He found out about the two of you.”
“He was way ahead of you, Joe.”
“It seems like most people are,” I said, mostly to myself.
Mel added, “He asked to meet me that Thursday night supposedly for some off-the-books HR advice. But when I got there, he just showed me a picture of me and Beth together, said he knew everything, and gave me an ultimatum.”
“Which was?”
“End it. End the affair and admit in writing to everything that had gone on. Apologize in person and in writing, to him and to you, apologize to his daughter, to his mother. Like Bee said, complete humiliation.”
Beth cut in. “And I would then have to agree to dissolve our prenuptial agreement and sign a postnup in its place, with various clauses covering total forfeiture of assets and guardianship of Alice in case of further adultery.”
“Using Mel as the messenger,” I said.
“Yes. To show who was the boss.”
“But you knew what he was planning anyway, because you were monitoring his calls, texts, and emails.”
Beth said, “We knew it was coming; we just didn’t know when. Turned out it was one boring average Thursday evening at a shitty little hotel off the North Circular.”
No wonder Ben didn’t want to talk when I saw him in that underground parking lot. He already had a lot on his mind.
I realized something else. “When he gave that ultimatum, you were listening in to the conversation, weren’t you?”
She nodded.
“Every word, sitting in my car one floor below.” She gestured at me with the shotgun again, the twin black barrels pointed at my head. “And then who should walk in at the end, right into the middle of everything?”
“Me.”
“Good old Joe, walking into the game without even realizing it was already in play. But you came so close this past week to figuring it all out. There were a few times I thought you’d caught us, but you were never quite ready to make the mental leap.”
“I got there in the end.”
She looked amused by that. “So what was it that finally clicked for you?”
“The selfie on Mel’s secret phone—the one with her topless in the kitchen. The one you showed me at the pub on Sunday. Something about it bothered me, and I couldn’t work out what. It was only on the train back here today that I realized.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t where it was taken, it was when. All the date and time data had been deleted from the image, but the kitchen noticeboard was in the background of the shot, and William’s Superstar certificate from school was on it. He didn’t bring that home until Thursday evening, which meant that picture had to have been taken after she’d supposedly had this massive fight with Ben that sent him over the edge. So I knew Mel was involved in something, that she was still lying to me. I hadn’t put you two together yet, but I knew the picture was a lie.”
“Indeed,” she said with a half smile. “Like all the rest of those naughty pictures. Pictures lie better than words, most of the time anyway.”
“Then there was the escort agency. They were keen to get their repeat booking.”
“Ah yes. Young Jules.”
“They sent me his picture, just a head and shoulders. But as soon I saw it, I knew.”
“You knew what?”
“He was the man I saw at the country park on Monday morning. Not Ben, but his double. Same height, same build, same hair. Put Ben’s jacket on him and he’s a dead ringer for your husband, or at least he was from fifty yards away.”
“We were worried that he might not keep quiet after the police started searching the park,” she said in the same matter-of-fact tone. “But it turns out that prostitutes are more easily bribed than most, and young Jules was no exception. Not really a surprise, is it?”
“All right,” I said. “You win.”
Beth shifted her grip on the shotgun slightly but kept it trained on me. “I could tell you were getting close this morning, that the penny was finally going to drop. I just knew it. So I had to get you here one more time, and I knew you’d do the full white-knight routine for Alice if you thought young Mr. Kolnik had turned up.”
“So what happens now?”
“The finale,” Beth replied. “Mel—you know what to do.”
From a pocket, Mel produced a pair of surgical gloves and proceeded to put them on, the tight rubber snapping into place. From her handbag, she took a black-handled kitchen knife, a length of clothesline, duct tape, black leather gloves, and a black balaclava. I recognized it. All of it. The winter gloves I’d gotten last Christmas, the balaclava from a pre-William skiing holiday. The tape and clothesline had been in the bottom of my toolbox for years.
“What are you doing?” I said to my wife, a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Mel didn’t answer me. The knife in her hand, she drew up Beth’s sleeve to expose the skin. Hesitated.
“Do it,” Beth urged her. “Go on.”
Mel ran the blade down Beth’s forearm, not hard enough to break the skin.
“I can’t,” she said quietly.
“Yes, you can. Harder.”
Mel tried again, and this time Beth pushed her arm against the blade. A bright line of blood appeared as the knife cut a groove in her forearm.
“That’s more like it,” she said, blood starting to flow freely from the wound.
“Doesn’t it hurt?” Mel said, her voice shaking.
“It’s fine. Carry on with what you’re doing.”
Mel dropped the duct tape and the clothesline on the floor by the bed and the bloody knife on the floor about six feet from me. Maybe I could dive for the knife before Beth shot me.
I inched my feet wider apart on the floor.
Beth said, “A terrible thing happened here today, Joe. You broke into my house.”
“I came to protect you. I thought you were in danger.”
“Sweet. What actually happened was that you broke in downstairs, carrying that knife.”
She indicated the black-handled boning knife on the floor. It looked familiar, and I realized why: it was from our kitchen at home. I used it to cut up lemons for Mel’s G&T.
“You were looking to finish what you started a week ago,” she continued, blood dripping steadily from her arm onto the cream carpet. “To get revenge on Ben for sleeping with your wife and ruining your career. And when killing Ben wasn’t enough, you decided to get revenge in another way. By having his wife, just like he had yours.”
“You’re crazy, Beth.”
“You tried to rape me.”
“Of course I didn’t.” I sat up straighter, shifted my weight forward in the chair slightly. “What the hell are you saying?”
“You came at me with that knife—which only has your fingerprints on it, by the way—and tried to attack me. You cut me, tried to grab the shotgun to take it away from me, turn it on me. More nice clear fingerprints.”
“I haven’t touched the gun.”
“You will have, in a minute.”
“This is madness. Pure and simple.”
“Is it? I think you’ll find it makes a certain kind of sense.”
“Stop it now. It’s gone far enough. You’ve made your point.”
Her eyes narrowed, and she took another step nearer, still leveling the shotgun at me. Her voice, when she spoke, was as taut as piano wire.
“Don’t. Tell me. What. To do.” Blood from her arm continued to drip i
n deep red drops onto the cream carpet.
I held my hands up, palms out.
“OK, OK.” I put my hands down on the front of the chair arms, for leverage. Ready to make my move. Protect the boy. “You’re the boss, Beth.”
“That’s right—for the first time in my life. I had eighteen years of my father telling me what to do. Who I should be friends with. Who I was and who I should fall in love with. Then another sixteen of Ben doing exactly the same. Telling me we didn’t need to be careful, then telling me I couldn’t have an abortion when he got me pregnant in our final year of college. Telling me to stay home and look after Alice full-time instead of pursuing my acting career. Then telling me he didn’t want me working until Alice went to college. And then you, you, thinking you could take over from where Ben left off. Well, today it stops. For good.”
I nodded toward the open door onto the landing. “And what about him?”
They both half turned toward the empty doorway, and I launched myself out of the chair, reaching for Beth, for the gun, for anything I could get ahold of to push those twin black barrels away from me. There was a split second when everything seemed to slow down: Mel let out a little shriek of surprise, Beth turned back, and I was lunging toward her, grabbing for the gun, my hand almost on it, the barrels dipping away out of my grasp, empty air, but I was almost on her, almost—
And that was when she shot me.
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The blast hit like a sledgehammer and spun me face-first onto the carpet. I groaned and clutched my thigh, blood oozing stickily through my jeans. Mel threw herself on me, which was pretty much the last thing I was expecting to happen.
“No, Bee!” she said, using her body to shield me. “It was never supposed to end like this!”
“Your husband didn’t give us any choice, Mel.”
“No! He was just supposed to be a distraction for the police while we got everything sorted. That was what we agreed.”
“He’s our fall guy.”
“But I thought that meant in court, with the police, lawyers, and everything! Not like this!”
“He took that choice away from us when he turned detective. As soon as he found your second phone and told the police about it, he was signing his own death warrant—you knew that. We both knew it.”
In a small voice, Mel said, “I never wanted him hurt.”
“We don’t have any choice now,” Beth said. “We have to play this out. All the way.”
Mel didn’t move.
“Melissa? It’s time.”
My wife turned to me, tears on her face.
“I didn’t mean this to happen,” she said to me. “Not like this.”
“It hasn’t happened yet,” I said, my voice hoarse. The pain was excruciating, like a red-hot branding iron held against my leg. “You can still stop it. Stop her.”
She shook her head, a tiny movement. “I can’t,” she whispered.
There was a dull void in my chest in counterpoint to the burning agony of my leg. My wife was here, next to me, protecting me, touching me, and I felt nothing for her.
It was clear that she had not loved me for months, or years. And now I finally understood, and the bond was broken. William and I were on our own now. I was his only hope. Beth snapped the shotgun open and dropped the spent cartridge, still smoking, to the floor. Blood from her arm continued to drip onto the carpet, the bedsheet, her dressing gown.
“Remember your choice, Mel. You know you’ve already made it.”
“Mel, don’t do this,” I said. “It’ll follow you forever.”
Beth took two pink shotgun cartridges from her pocket—Eley Hi-Power, I noticed, trying to remember why this was significant—and reloaded the gun smoothly.
“Get up, Mel,” she said.
Slowly, without looking at me, Mel got to her feet.
“Step away from him,” Beth said.
Mel did as she was told, and Beth snapped the shotgun shut. “What you’ve got in your leg is bird shot,” she said to me calmly. “This load I’ve got here, though, is a double-zero weight. For big game.” She leveled the twelve-gauge at me again. “Enough for a deer, or a big cat. Or a man.”
“Enough for murder,” I said through gritted teeth.
“It’ll be self-defense, Joe. You’re twice my size.”
We stared at each other for a moment in silence, the only sound the faint clicking of a bedside alarm clock.
“Where is he?” I said, trying to keep my voice level. “Where’s Ben?”
She ignored my question. “You know our favorite topic of conversation, me and your beautiful wife, these last few months?”
“Apart from murder?”
“Our favorite thing was to invent stories about how we could be together. Without any men in the picture. But with our children, and our houses, our money. Without having a couple of messy, complicated divorces. And one night, we were both drunk, egging each other on, and I said maybe the best outcome would be if one of you died and the other one went to prison for it. It solved everything in one go. We would get everything, and you two would both be gone, and people would feel sorry for us all the time. The sympathy would be fabulous. Then a week ago—Christ almighty—you had your chance. I’m sitting in my car, watching you, thinking, Yes, he’s actually going to do it right here in this shitty underground parking lot. This is literally our dream come true. But you couldn’t even get that right.”
“Where is he now?” I asked again.
“Same place he’s been since Thursday night.”
“At the country park?”
She laughed.
“No! We did drive out there, but there were too many people around, and he was just too bloody heavy to carry into the woods, even with the two of us. So we just left your phone there instead. Then I had a better idea. We brought him home.”
“Home?”
“He posted a picture of his own final resting place on Facebook a couple of weeks ago. Spooky or what?”
I frowned, thinking back to all the posts on Ben’s account from the last few weeks.
Building work. Excavation. Foundations.
“The new summerhouse in your back garden.”
She raised the shotgun to her shoulder. “He loved this house. And now he’ll always be a part of it.”
“You’ll never get away with this.”
“We’ve been getting away with it right from the word go.”
Got to keep her talking. Think of something. Think.
“That picture downstairs, of you at the end of a school show? The one that Mark Ruddington posted on Facebook?”
“What about it?”
“You played Lady Macbeth, didn’t you?”
She nodded, lowering the shotgun for a moment as she recalled the lines. “‘What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’”
“And what about Ben’s blood?”
“What about it?”
“Do you think you’ll ever be able to wash that off your hands?”
She frowned, summoning another line from memory. “‘What’s done cannot be undone.’”
I dragged myself toward her, my shattered leg trailing blood. Fear and pain. This is it. You have to disarm her or kill her, for William to have a chance. Can you do it? Can you kill her with your bare hands?
Yes. No choice. Bring her close.
“You don’t have to do this, Beth.”
She took a step forward and raised the gun to point at my head again. “Sorry, Joe. But I do.”
“It’ll be my word against yours, and you’ll win hands down,” I said quickly. “You’re much better at this than I am; you’ve shown that this week. You win.”
“It’s the final act, Joe.” She stared down the barrel at me.
“My word against yours, Beth. Think about it. Who in their right mind is going to believe me? No one.”
She opened her mouth to reply but was in
terrupted.
A new voice—young, unsteady, fighting sobs—cut in from the landing beyond the door.
“Yes, they will, Joe. They will believe you.”
This time there was someone standing in the doorway. Alice.
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She was crying.
“Mum,” Alice said, fighting back a sob. “How could you?”
Keeping an eye on me, Beth turned her head slightly to talk to her daughter.
“Go downstairs, sweetie. I’ll be there in a minute. It’s not safe up here just now.”
“How could you do it?” Alice screamed from the doorway, pink cell phone in her hand.
Beth was unmoved. “You don’t know what’s going on here, Alice. Go downstairs now, please. I’m not going to ask nicely again.”
“I do know what’s going on.”
“No,” Beth said firmly. “You really don’t.”
“I know everything.”
“How long have you been listening?”
“The whole time.”
“That’s not true, is it, Alice? Auntie Mel checked the landing a minute ago and you weren’t there.”
“I was in my room.”
“So you’ve not heard anything, then.”
“I heard what you said about Dad!” Alice screamed back, her voice cracking. “What you did to him!”
“I don’t know what you think you heard, Alice, but you’re confused.”
“It’s in your own words, Mum!”
“What are you talking about, sweetie?”
“You think you’re so clever, don’t you? So clever with your plans and your acting and, like, pretending to be Dad online? Well, you’re not.”
Alice came farther into the room, her face streaked with tears. She seemed to see my injury for the first time, the carpet around me stained dark with blood.
“She shot you,” she said.
“Why will people believe me, Alice?”
Beth swung the shotgun back toward me. “Shut up.”
Alice said, “Because of the recording.”
Mel looked at her blankly. “What recording?”
“The recording I just made on your phone. And yours, Mum.”
Beth was frowning, spots of color in her cheeks. The shotgun wavered slightly away from me as she turned toward her daughter.
