I swung round, the gun in my right hand, my forefinger tracing the trigger-guard and sliding towards the trigger itself. Naylor was above me, one leg out of the bath and one in. He stopped when he saw what I was holding, freezing in mid-movement. His face, distorted by the gashes and bruises Paul had inflicted, knotted into a frown. To lunge at me. Or not. To go for broke. Or play for time. The calculations traced their pictograms across his features as I stared up into them.
“Don’t move,” I said hoarsely, rising slowly and carefully to my feet, with the gun pointing straight at him all the time. And he didn’t move. Not so much as a muscle. “Sarah!” I called without taking my eyes from his. I could just make her out at the edge of my sight, a crouched figure in the doorway, arms clasped defensively around her shoulders. But I knew better than to look directly at her. Naylor would seize any chance I gave him, however slight. “Sarah!”
“Y-Yes?”
“Go and call the police.”
“But-”
“Go!”
“All… All right. I’ll be… as quick as I can.”
“Don’t come back here. Wait for them outside. They’ll need directions.”
“Outside? Surely-”
“Get out, Sarah. Get out now.”
She went without another word, perhaps guessing more of my meaning than I’d intended her to. I listened-and watched Naylor listening-to her footfalls as she ran down the passage. We heard the front door of the flat open and shut behind her. Then silence flooded through the empty rooms around us. It was just the two of us now. Just the confrontation-the decisive moment-we’d spent three and a half years feinting and circling and inching towards.
Naylor slowly lifted his other foot out of the bath and lowered it to the floor, his eyes daring me to tell him to stop. But if I told him and he didn’t stop, I had only one sanction. He was testing my resolve, judging what I did-or didn’t-have the nerve for. He didn’t know. He wasn’t sure. And neither was I.
“What happens now?” he asked, the challenge mounting as he spoke.
“We wait for the police.”
He shook his head. “Don’t think so.”
“I say we do. And I have the gun.”
“But you won’t use it. You haven’t got the bottle.”
“Can you be sure of that?”
His gaze narrowed. For a second or two, he weighed the question in his mind, seeking the certainty he needed. Then he said: “Tell you what. I’ll make a deal with you.”
“A deal?”
“Yeh. You let me climb through the window, with the tape in my pocket, before the Old Bill turn up… and we’ll call it quits.”
“Why should I?”
“’Cos if you don’t, when they do turn up, I’ll say you were in on it. I’ll say three people took me prisoner and tortured me and threatened to kill me-and you were one of ’em. Abduction. Assault. Conspiracy. Christ knows what. You could be looking at quite a few years inside.”
“They wouldn’t believe you.”
“Can you be sure of that?” He smirked. “Look at it this way. Why risk it? What’s it to you? The girl’s mother. This bloke’s wife. Some poxy old painter. What did they ever mean to you? Nothing, right?”
I almost wanted to smile. Naylor had just repeated my mistake. He’d fallen into the same fatal error. And taken my decision for me. “You’re right, of course,” I said. “They were nothing to me but strangers. Perfect strangers.”
“There you are, then.”
“Do you know why I told Sarah to wait outside? I didn’t. Until now.” I raised the gun and pressed the barrel against his forehead. His eyes widened. His mouth dropped open. He tried to step back, but, with the rim of the bath behind his knees, there was nowhere for him to go. “Can we really change anything, do you think?” Maybe we can, Louise. Maybe we can’t. I don’t know. I’m still not sure. But finishing things? That’s different. When the moment comes and you recognize it for what it is, that’s completely different. “There’s been a change of plan, Naylor. We aren’t going to wait for the police after all. Or, rather, you aren’t.”
“What?”
“You should be grateful. I’m actually doing you a favour. This way you don’t have to go back to prison. And you find out how Louise Paxton felt when she realized you weren’t going to spare her life.”
“Hold on, mate. You can’t be-”
“Serious? Oh yes. I’m serious.” The trees thinned before me as I ran. There was a clearing ahead, a sun-filled glade where Louise was waiting. And this time I knew she wouldn’t walk away. “Never more so.”
“Yeh, but-”
He didn’t finish his sentence. Although, in another sense, I suppose you could say he did. He paid the overdue penalty for what he’d done. There and then.
EPILOGUE
It began more than three years ago, on a golden evening of high summer. And it ended yesterday, as a winter’s night closed its shutters around me. Was it only yesterday? Sitting here, it seems so much longer ago and farther away. Time has stretched in the telling. But I’ve nearly finished now. Soon, you’ll have your statement. Then you’ll be free to type up your reports and draw your official conclusions. Then you really will know it all.
It’s hard to believe, but it’s true. Just twenty-four hours ago, I stood with the gun in my hand and stared down at Naylor’s body in the bath, listening to his blood slowly trickle away. I wasn’t sorry I’d killed him. I’m not sorry now. I don’t think I ever will be. But there were more powerful emotions than sorrow to contend with in the aftermath of what I’d done. Shock made me drop the gun and recoil as it clanged against the enamel of the bath. Horror made me smear the bloodstains across my shirt and coat in a vain effort to wipe them away. Fear made me lean helplessly against the hand-basin, trembling and panting as a wave of nausea swept over me. Disbelief made me gape at the reflection of my face in the mirror above the basin.
And only then did I see Sarah, standing in the doorway behind me. She came forward and put her arms around me, resting her head against my shoulder. We stood like that for several minutes, neither of us speaking. Then we made our way to another room, faintly lit by the glow from a lamp in the communal garden beyond the window. We sat on the floor near the door, our backs to the wall. Still we said nothing. I supposed-when I became capable of supposing anything-that we were waiting to hear a police siren wail towards us through the distant hum of the traffic. But when Sarah broke the silence between us, I realized we weren’t.
“I haven’t called the police, Robin. I never left the flat. When it came to the point, I couldn’t bring myself to. There was something strange in your voice when you told me to get out. Something… ominous. I stood in the hallway, trying to work out what it was, waiting and listening, quite what for I didn’t know. Then I heard the gunshot.”
“Well, you’d better call the police now, hadn’t you?”
“Are you sure you want me to? There’ll be no going back if I do.”
“There’s no going back anyway.”
“But there is. For you. If you left before I called the police, there’d be no need for them ever to know you’d been here. I could tell them Paul had shot Naylor, then himself. And I could tell them why.”
“It wouldn’t work. My fingerprints are on the gun.”
“We could wipe them off. And off anything else you’ve touched. Besides, they wouldn’t be looking for your fingerprints.”
“It still wouldn’t work.”
“As a matter of fact, I think it would. I think you could leave here now and fly out to Rio tomorrow with no questions asked.” She slipped her hand into mine. “Why not go, Robin? This was my idea, not yours. Why should you have to answer for it?”