He called out, ‘Lottie?’ Heard the tension in his own voice. Trying to understand where the screams had come from. It was a big house. They could have come from anywhere on the two floors below him.
No reply.
He hurried down the drop-down stairs to the first-floor landing, which was dimly illuminated by a narrow chink of light escaping from Lottie’s part-open bedroom door. He hesitated, then ran along the landing to the door and peered inside. The room was large and cosy, and empty. The light was coming from a little wall lamp above the double bed. The covers were rumpled aside, as though she must have got out of bed in a rush. Ben’s pulse was quickening as he ran back along the landing. The luminous green skeleton hands of his watch told him it was 4.13 a.m. He stopped again at the head of the stairs, listening hard.
Still total silence from below. Too quiet, even for the middle of the night. The kind of silence that hangs heavy, like a dumbstruck witness in the immediate aftermath of something bad, really bad. Another light was on in the downstairs hallway, its glow reaching around the twist in the winding staircase.
He was trying to compute what could have happened. Had she gone downstairs for some reason, maybe to get a drink of water or visit the ground floor bathroom, and fallen and hurt herself? Was the tinkle of breaking glass the smashing of something like a glass or a lamp? He was about to call her name again, but instinct made him stay quiet. There were other ways to interpret the sounds he’d heard. Ways that were beginning to paint a worse picture in his mind.
He rushed down the first few steps as far as the twist in the staircase, to meet the glow of light that shone up from the hallway below.
The hallway wasn’t empty. A shape lay on the floor. The shape of a large body. A woman’s body.
Lottie’s body.
She was wearing a fluffy pink towel bathrobe hastily pulled on over a long satin nightdress and tied around her middle with a cord belt. She was lying on her back with her arms outflung to her sides and her face turned away from him. She wasn’t moving. Blood showed shocking red on the pink of her bathrobe and the creamy material of her nightdress. A lot of blood. It glistened on the brown skin of her legs where the nightdress had ridden up to her knees as she fell. It was soaking into the carpet under her, steadily spreading outwards in a dark stain.
But Ben wasn’t looking at the blood. He was staring in bewildered horror at the curved, glinting length of steel blade that was protruding from her sternum, right below the ribs, sticking straight up in the air like a flag that had been planted on her.
Not a knife blade. A sword, long and wicked and stuck deep through her body to pin her to the floorboards.
Ben leaped down the last few steps to the hall, calling her name again, hearing his voice in his ears as though it were someone else’s, knowing that nothing could save her from this terrible injury, his mind whirling to comprehend what he was seeing, and why.
At the end of the hall the front door was hanging ajar a few inches, and beyond that the screen door was wide open and letting in the night air and insects. The inner door had a window consisting of four little dappled opaque square panels. Lottie hadn’t dropped a glass, or knocked over a lamp, or anything else. The window panel nearest the lock was smashed and lying in fragments on the entrance mat, as if someone had punched it through to pass their arm inside and unfasten the lock and security chain from inside and let themselves into the hall.
Which, Ben realised, was exactly what had happened. Lottie, a floor closer to the hall than Ben up in the attic, must have heard the sound of breaking glass. She must have got out of bed to investigate, wrapping the gown around herself as she trod downstairs, clicking on the hall light from the switch at the foot of the staircase. That must have been when she came upon the intruder, or intruders. Hence, the first scream Ben had heard.
And that must also have been when the intruder, or intruders, had attacked her with the sword, knocked her to the floor, stood over her and stabbed her brutally through the body. Hence, the terrible wail of agony that had followed soon after the first scream.
Everything had happened in the space of a few moments. And it had ended only moments ago. Which had to mean that whoever had done this couldn’t be far away.
Even as he stood there thinking it, Ben heard a revving car engine from outside in the street. Someone in a hurry. Someone in the process of fleeing from the scene.
Choices. He needed to stay with Lottie and do whatever he could to help her. At the same time, if he didn’t act instantly to go after her assailant, right now, that chance would be gone.
In a perfect world, you wouldn’t have to choose. Back when he was heading up his SAS troop, he’d have been able to deploy one guy to stay with her and more to go after the enemy. But he was on his own now, and this wasn’t a perfect world. It was a world in which armed attackers burst into the homes of innocent and defenceless people and hurt them. And you had to do something about that.
Ben made his choice. He jumped over Lottie’s body and raced for the half-open front door. Burst outside, leaped down the steps and onto the path.
There were no lights on in any of the neighbouring homes, but the street was full of the hard white glare that blazed from the headlamps of a black car in the middle of the road, double-parked beside his Tahoe with the driver’s door facing Lottie’s entrance gate. It was too dark to see what kind of car it was. Some kind of long, wide, old-style American saloon. Its engine note was the deep, rumbling clatter of a V8. A big, powerful, thirsty engine, harking back to the distant days when gasoline was as cheap as water. The tang of exhaust fumes cut through the sweetness of the night air. The unseen driver was impatiently gunning the throttle, as though urgently waiting before he could take off.
As Ben ran down the path towards the gate, he realised why. The running figure of the person the driver was waiting for had just cleared Lottie’s entrance gate and was sprinting towards the waiting car. The driver’s accomplice. Lottie’s attacker. A classic two-man team, perp and getaway driver. Ben heard the clap of the guy’s running footsteps on the sidewalk, echoed by his own as he gave chase. He saw the dark figure flit across the white glare of the headlights, crossing the front of the car to make it to the passenger side.
Ben ran faster. He reached the gate and vaulted over it and raced towards the car. The escaping figure wrenched open the passenger door, and for a brief moment the car’s interior was lit by the flare of its courtesy light, and as he ran Ben caught a glimpse of its two occupants. Both male, both white, both around the same age, older than their twenties and younger than their forties. The driver had long reddish hair tied back, the passenger had short reddish hair and wore a dark jacket over a white T-shirt.
That was all Ben was able to take in before the door closed and the car’s interior went dark again. By then, the driver was already slamming the transmission into drive and booting the gas. The V8 roared and smoke poured from the rear wheels as the tyres spun and screeched on the road.
Ben reached the edge of the sidewalk and ran out in front of the car, dazzled by its headlights which were suddenly veering right towards him and forcing him to dance back out of its path. The car roared by him, almost running over his toes. Because he’d gone to bed wearing his jeans, the Tahoe key was still in his pocket.
More choices. And it still wasn’t a perfect world. By the time he’d run to the Tahoe, got it fired up and into drive and away, the attackers would be gone. Chasing after the escaping car on foot seemed crazy, but he couldn’t afford a moment’s hesitation.
He sprinted after the car for all he was worth. It was still accelerating, the driver’s foot right down on the floor. Giving it so much gas that the power delivery of the big V8, designed for pure brute muscle back in the days long before US automotive engineers conceived of anything as sanitised and wimpy as traction control, was losing its grip on the road and