‘Jeff!’ I positively screamed at him.
His head came around. He smiled when he saw us, and we began shoving our way through the bodies to get to him.
‘I can fly,’ he called over their heads.
‘Jesus!’ Dave’s voice exploded from his lips.
‘No, you can’t!’ Luke shouted.
But Jeff just grinned that big stupid grin of his. ‘Yes, I can.’
Before we could get to him, he had flexed his knees and swung his arms straight out in front, as if he thought he was Superman. And he launched himself into space.
I heard the echo of my own voice yelling back at me from the rooftops. And then others. Those nearest the balustrade who saw him go. And the shockwave swept back through the dancers like a tsunami. Those who got to the balustrade first began screaming.
I was still numbed by an overwhelming sense of disbelief. That what I had just seen could not possibly have happened. I wanted to get to the balustrade and look down to find Jeff smiling in the street below and waving back up at us.
But all such illusions were dispelled in a millisecond when we reached the spot where Jeff had jumped, to be replaced by the most gut-wrenching feeling I have ever experienced in my life, before or since.
Jeff was spreadeagled on the wrought-iron railings below, face up, skewered by half a dozen spikes which had punctured his back and exited through his torso and neck. I could see his eyes wide and staring back at us, and I knew that he was dead. But his body was still twitching, lost in the convulsions of some awful death throes.
I turned away, blinded by tears, and threw up on the bitumen, gasping for air and thinking that my insides were about to drop out of me. I felt Luke’s hand on my arm, strong, reassuring.
‘We’ve got to go.’
And I looked up at him to see the shock on his face.
It was chaos all around. Girls screaming, people running inside. I straightened up and Luke pushed me towards the door, Dave at my side, and we somehow managed to force our way through the lounge and into the hall.
People inside still had no idea what had happened, and music blasted up the stairs from below. We had reached the top of the staircase when I saw Andy’s friends running up towards us, faces upturned and contorted by the scent of revenge. And all the shock and loss that I felt in the wake of what I had just witnessed converted itself somehow into pure, distilled fury.
I swung round and saw a fire extinguisher fixed to the wall. I cannot even begin to describe the thought processes that led me to rip it from its bracket and slam the release valve into the wall. I was simply incandescent. Foam exploded from the short length of rubber hose that I turned on the thugs as they reached the top of the stairs. Into the face of one, then the other, before I swung the canister full into the chest of the nearer of the two. The force of it sent him cannoning into his friend, and they fell backwards down the staircase.
The screaming and yelling all around me was deafening, drowning out even the pounding of the music that came from the living room and up the stairwell. Those people must have thought I was a madman, and in truth I felt possessed as I ran down the stairs, Luke and Dave right behind me, jumping over the sprawling bodies of the thugs from Leeds who lay in a tangle halfway down.
I heard someone shouting, ‘Call the police. For God’s sake, someone call the police.’
We got to the first landing and turned into the hallway, very nearly colliding with Simon Flet. I felt his open hand thump into my chest as he pushed me out of the way, and I saw the blood on his face and hands, and the terror in his eyes as he ran past, turning to sprint down the stairs to the ground floor, bellowing at partygoers to get out of his way.
Somehow, control of anything seemed to have slipped from my grasp. Everything was happening quickly and slowly at the same time. As if we were all starring in our own movie spooling in slow motion. I saw Maurie standing at the end of the hall, half in silhouette, half lit in outline by the lamp in Dr Robert’s study. He seemed transfixed, and turned towards us, his face a veil of confusion. Luke ran down the hall towards him, and Dave and I followed.
The door to Dr Robert’s study stood wide. Dr Robert himself was on the near side of his desk now, and standing over Andy’s body. Rachel’s one-time boyfriend lay in a twisted heap on the floor, blood pooling around his head. One side of it was split open, and I could see the grey-white of his brain marbled by the red that oozed through it. A large brass paperweight in the shape of an Oscar stood incongruously upright on the floor beside him, like a witness to murder, and yet clearly the murder weapon itself, blood trickling down the contours of the body from its bloody head.
Dr Robert stared down at the dead man at his feet, before looking up to see us standing in the hall.
His voice was little more than a whisper. ‘Simon... killed him.’ His voice rising in pitch now. ‘He’s killed him!’ He gazed down on Andy again. ‘I don’t even know who this man is.’ Then his head snapped up, accusation in his voice. ‘What did he want with you?’
And in his moment of helpless confusion, I very nearly felt sorry for him.
It took Luke’s cool head to wrest control of the situation. He grabbed Maurie by the arm, and Maurie turned, stupefied, to look at him.
‘We have to go!’ Luke said. And when Maurie didn’t respond, he yelled in his face. ‘Now, Maurie, now!’
And he virtually dragged him along the hall as we ran back towards the stairs.
It took hardly any time for us to get out of the house. People were escaping it like rats from a sewer, and we were simply carried along by the flow. Through the hall, out of the door, down the steps and into the street. All the time to the incongruous accompaniment of the Rolling Stones song ‘Pain in My Heart’.
It was almost fully dark now, street lamps casting pools of illumination broken by the flitting shadows of demented moths. Partygoers from the house spilled from the pavement into the road, forming a semicircle around the railing on which Jeff had fallen. We couldn’t see beyond them to where his body was skewered on the spikes. But I could hear sobbing, someone screaming, a girl staggering free of the crowd to double over on her knees in the warm night and empty the contents of her stomach all over the tarmac. And I realized it was the girl who had propositioned me in the hall just half an hour before.
Maurie seemed dazed, as though he were concussed.
I took him by the shoulders and shoved my face in his. ‘Where’s Rachel?’
He looked at me blankly.
‘Rachel. Maurie, where is she?’
He simply shook his head. ‘Gone.’
‘Gone? What do you mean? Gone where?’
‘Gone,’ he said. Then, almost as if realizing where he was for the first time, he found focus and glared back at me. ‘Where’s Jeff?’ And when I couldn’t meet his eye, it was he who grabbed me by the shoulders. ‘Jack, where’s Jeff?’ Sudden fear in his voice. ‘Jack?’
He let me go, then, looking around with wild eyes, as if only now aware of the mayhem in the street. I heard the distant sound of a police siren.
Luke said, ‘Maurie, we need to go.’
But Maurie wasn’t listening. He pushed past us and cleaved his way through the crowd on the pavement with such violence that he knocked one man over, and pushed a girl to her knees. The not so beautiful people parted in the face of his fury to let him through. And we saw, at the same moment he did, the prone form of poor Jeff impaled on the railings, blood dripping to form pools on the wall beneath him. His mouth was gaping and filled by the curl of his tongue, his eyes wide and staring as if in shock.