Breen was trembling like a kitten.
“You OK?” she said again. She had managed to steer the front of the car out of the path of the oncoming vehicle, leaving the rear of the Zephyr still in the middle of the road. The speeding car had smashed into their tail panel, jerking the car’s chassis back round so that it stopped halfway across the lane.
“I think so,” he said. As he shook, small pieces of glass clattered off his clothes into the footwell of the car.
“Stay still,” she said. “Don’t move a muscle.” She reached round to the back of the car and picked her handbag off the backseat. Rummaging through it, she pulled out a pair of tweezers and a pack of tissues. Leaning forward, she placed one hand on his shoulder and carefully picked a lump of glass out of his cheek. He felt the blood start to trickle down his face from where she’d pulled it out.
She dabbed her face with the tissue, then gave it to him.
He asked, “Did you see the car?”
“Only just. I mean. Christ.”
“Was that a Jaguar?”
“They almost buggering killed us, Paddy.”
“Yes.”
“Do you think he meant to?”
Glass was everywhere. Carefully he picked it out from his sling with his good hand and threw the fragments onto the bonnet in front of them.
“This thing still drive?”
She put it into reverse and maneuvered the car back around. “Should I follow them?”
“Drive to their house. That’s the nearest phone,” he said.
“Your voice is sort of shaky.”
She crunched the car into first and drove, one hand on the wheel, the other pushing out pieces of the broken windscreen so she could see better. The rear wheel arch, crushed against the tire, made a grinding noise as they drove. Fortunately they were only a few hundred yards away from the house. As they pulled into the gravel driveway Breen noted that the Sullivans’ car was not there.
“It was them, wasn’t it?” said Tozer.
Unable to open his stoved-in door, he clambered out awkwardly over the driver’s seat. Looking back at the car he saw that one headlight had gone completely, the windscreen was shattered and the rear panel fin on the driver’s side had been torn off.
He went to the front door and twisted the handle. It was locked. “Hello?” he called, thumping on the door.
No answer.
“Hello? Anyone there?”
He left the door and walked around the house. The back door into the kitchen was locked too.
“Here,” said Tozer. One of the sash windows in the living room was loose. She pulled a penknife out of her handbag and ran it between the frames, dislodging the newspaper that had been stuffed there to stop it rattling. Freed, the latch moved aside easily. Together they heaved the lower frame up.
In the hallway, he picked up the Sullivans’ telephone, an old, heavy Bakelite job, dialed 999 and gave his warrant number and a description of the major’s Jaguar. Afterwards, he lowered himself into the chair by the grandfather clock, where Mrs. Sullivan had sat sobbing last night.
“We should find some sticking plasters. Your face is still bleeding.”
“I’m fine,” he said.
“He almost killed us. We were almost dead there. I mean…God. He was going bloody fast, wasn’t he?”
“Did you see him?”
“No,” she said. “Not really.”
“How many were in the car?”
“I didn’t have time to count, precisely. Do you think he did it, then?”
“If he’s run, it doesn’t look good.”
“My God. Think of that. A father killing his own daughter. That’s something dark.”
Breen looked down at his hands. They were still trembling. The grandfather clock seemed to tick absurdly loudly.
“Six inches to the right and they’d have smashed straight into us.” She looked up. “What was that?”
He touched his face with his hand. “Has it stopped bleeding yet?”
“That. What was it?”
“What do you mean?”
“That.”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“A kind of noise.”
Breen listened. Nothing.
“Can’t you hear it?”
“No.”
“Hello?” called Tozer.
This time it was there, above their heads. A slight creaking of wood.
“And again-listen.”
Unmistakably, a slight banging sound.
Breen set off up the stairs, taking them two at a time, Tozer close behind. There was a landing with carpet, a corridor with doors off it. The main bedroom was at the top of the stairs, facing the front of the house.
Through the open door, Breen saw bedsheets pulled off the mattress onto the floor. The next thing he noticed, from where he stood at the top of the stairs, were two pallid, naked legs lying on the floor; the rest of whoever it was lay behind the bed.
“Hello?”
The legs were not moving. He walked slowly through the doorway and into the bedroom, more slowly still towards the farthest of the room’s twin beds, until he could peer over and see who lay there.
It was not the major driving the car, that was certain. He lay on his front. His face, surrounded by an oval of blood, seemed to have melted into the floorboards, his head like half an orange on a plate. The shotgun must have been fired at close range. It had simply disintegrated the front of the major’s head. All that was left was the back of his skull, which had hit the ground as he fell forwards.
“Oh,” said Tozer, hand in front of her mouth.
He had a pajama shirt on but, for some reason, no trousers. The shirt had soaked up some of the blood from the floor, turning almost black. For a few seconds, Breen was able to remain separate from what he was seeing. The physics of the major’s position, for instance, made no sense to him; the gun had been fired at him at close range, and yet he had fallen forwards. A blast that severe would knock a man back right off his feet. But then he turned to the wallpapered wall and there was a perfect silhouette of the major’s head picked out in shot. He had been executed close to the wall, his body slamming against it so hard that he had rebounded forwards to where he now lay. Still oddly calm and no longer shaking, Breen knelt down and felt the man’s wrist. It was warm but, unsurprisingly, there was not the faintest quiver of a pulse.
At the touch of dead flesh though, the calm deserted him. He dropped the arm back down into the congealing blood, left the room quickly and was sick in a flowerpot on the landing. Mrs. Tozer’s bacon and eggs.
“Oh, Christ,” said Tozer, right behind him.
When he’d finished, he sat down on the stairs. Tozer took the stair above his and put her hand on his shoulder. He could feel her shaking with shock almost as badly as he was.
“Fine pair we make.”
“Poor man.” He retched again.
“It’s amazing you keep any food down at all.”
There were small framed woodcuts on the stairs. A tree, climbing boys stealing eggs from a nest. A fish on a plate. “Shall we call…” He stopped.
“What?”
“That noise again,” he whispered.
“I’m not sure.”
He put his hand to his lips. They listened.
“Oh my God. Do you think it’s her?”
Another louder noise.
A whisper: “If that was her, who was in the car?”
He stood, took a deep breath and felt his stomach churn again. He turned to go back into the bedroom.
There were two beds, side by side, his and hers. Hers had been slept in. By it were two black-and-white photos in frames: one of the dead girl, Morwenna, serious-faced in school uniform, the other of a boy, presumably her dead brother.
He stopped his tiptoeing and looked around. There was a huge black-and-white photograph of Julia Sullivan on the wall opposite the bed; in it she was dressed in a large white floppy hat and a white lace dress. The lace dress was open, showing a single breast. Her dressing table was set between the beds; a large mirror with two silver candlesticks on either side. More framed photographs: a boy, beaming, clutching the tiller of a sailing dinghy; a small girl looking down from a slide. She had a Jane Austen and a copy of Wide Sargasso Sea on her bedside table; he had an Agatha Christie and an Ian Fleming.