‘Well…’ she said.
He’d have her in the bushes in seconds, the knife pressed to her throat before she had a chance to open her mouth.
He saw her check her watch.
It’s time, he thought.
‘Rachel!’
He looked up and saw the shape of a big man moving fast towards them. She looked at the shape, then back to him, her mouth open and something unreadable in her eyes.
He dug out a smile. ‘Nice to see you again…’ he said.
With the blade of the knife flat against his wrist, he turned and jogged away along the path that ran at right angles to the one they’d been on.
‘Was that him? Was that him?’
‘He was a jogger. He just…’ Lee’s hand squeezed her neck, choked off the end of the sentence. He raised his other hand slowly, held the phone aloft in triumph. ‘I know all about it,’ he said. ‘So don’t try and fucking lie to me.’
There were distant voices coming from somewhere. People leaving. Laughter. Words that were impossible to make out and quickly faded to silence.
Lee tossed the phone to the ground and the free hand reached up to claw at her chest. Thick fingers pushed aside material, found a nipple and squeezed.
She couldn’t make a sound. The tears ran down her face and neck and on to the back of his hand as she beat at it, as she snatched in breaths through her nose. Just as she felt her legs go, he released her neck and breast and raised both hands up to the side of her neck.
‘Lee, nothing happened. Lee…’
He pressed the heels of his hands against her ears and leaned in close as though he might kiss or bite her.
‘What’s his name?’
She tried to shake her head but he held it hard.
‘Or so help me I’ll dig a hole for you with my bare hands. I’ll leave your cunt’s carcass here for the foxes…’
So she told him, and he let her go, and he shouted over his shoulder to her as he walked further into the woods.
‘Now, run home.’
Alan had given it one more minute ten minutes ago, but it was clear to him now that she wasn’t coming. She’d sounded like she was really going to try, so he decided that she hadn’t been able to get away.
He hoped it was only fear that had restrained her.
He stood up, pressed the redial button on his phone one last time. Got her message again.
There were no more than a couple of minutes before the exits were sealed. He just had time to retrieve the bracelet, to reach up and unhook it from the branch on which it hung.
He’d give it to her another day.
Standing alone in the dark, wondering how she was, he decided that he might not draw her attention to the newest charm on the bracelet. A pair of dice had seemed so right, so appropriate in light of what had happened, of everything they’d talked about. Suddenly he felt every bit as clumsy as his father. It seemed tasteless.
Luck was something they were pushing.
He stepped out on to the path, turned when he heard a man’s voice say his name.
The footwork and the swing were spot on.
The first blow smashed Alan’s phone into a dozen or more pieces, the second did much the same to his skull, and those that came after were about nothing so much as exercise.
It took half a minute for the growl to die in Lee’s throat.
The blood on the branch, on the grass to either side of the path, on his training shoes looked black in the near total darkness.
Lee bent down and picked up the dead man’s arm. He wondered if his team had managed to hold on to their one-goal lead as he began dragging the body into the undergrowth.
Graham had run until he felt his lungs about to give up the ghost. He was no fitter than many of those he treated. Those whose hearts were marbled with creamy lines of fat, like cheap off-cuts.
He dropped down on to a bench to recover, to reflect on what had happened in the woods. To consider his rotten luck. If that man hadn’t come along when he had… A young woman with Mediterranean features was waiting to cross the road a few feet from where he was sitting. She was taking keys from her bag, probably heading towards the flats opposite.
She glanced in his direction and he dropped his elbows to his knees almost immediately. Looked at the pavement. Made sure she didn’t get a good look at his face.
The next High Barnet train was still eight minutes away.
Rachel stood on the platform, her legs still shaking, the burning in her breast a little less fierce with every minute that passed. The pain had been good. It had stopped her thinking too much; stopped her wondering. She sought a little more of it, thrusting her hand into her pocket until she found her wedding ring, then driving the edge of it hard against the fingernail until she felt it split.
Alan had thought it odd that she still took the ring off even after she’d told him the truth, but it made perfect sense to her. Its removal had always been more about freedom than deceit.
An old woman standing next to her nudged her arm and nodded towards the electronic display.
Correction. High Barnet. 1 min.
‘There’s a stroke of luck,’ the woman said.
Rachel looked at the floor. She didn’t raise her head again until she heard the train coming.
Ten Lords A-Leaping by Jake Arnott
A discrepancy which often struck me in the character of my friend was that, although in his method of thought he was among the most well ordered of all mankind and in his manner of presenting an argument or pursuing an argument or pursuing a case or theory he was impeccably efficient, he was nonetheless in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a colleague to distraction. His disorderly study was strewn with manuscripts, books and periodicals. Scattered about the room were knives, forks, cups with broken rims, Dutch clay pipes, discarded pens, even an upturned inkpot. He kept his cigars in the coal scuttle and his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper. His unanswered correspondence was transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece. Everything was, one might say, ‘topsyturvy’.
His rooms reeked with the odour of the cheap tobacco that he had purchased from a small shop in Holborn, in the spirit of one of his more obscure economic inspirations. He had been taken by the slogan in the shop front that promised that ‘the more you smoke the more you save’ and had pointed out to me that by switching to this inferior brand he could save one shilling and sixpence a pound and, if he forced himself to smoke enough of the wretched stuff he might one day be able to live on his ‘savings’. I had long since given up trying to point out the absurdity of the ‘logic’ to one of the greatest materialist thinkers in Europe, just as I had also given up complaining about the downright untidiness of his domestic affairs. I have become familiar enough with them to no longer take much notice of these strange habits and idiosyncrasies, but in the process of introducing the young Lord Beckworth to him on that fateful afternoon (the intercession of a complete stranger forces you to renew what the first impressions are of an old friend), I confess that there was a brief moment of embarrassment on his behalf.
Yet if the young nobleman was at all taken aback by the odd circumstances of the great man, he showed it not one jot. Perhaps in deference to my colleague’s reputation for mental prowess, he simply overlooked this disordered clutter, or quietly acknowledged it as one of the vagaries of genius. I do not mind admitting my own deference to my old friend as a thinker, and resent not that his powers of reasoning and deduction far outstrip my own. I am resigned to the obvious fact that he is the dominant one in our partnership and see it as my duty to assist and support his great mind without complaint or jealousy, or even much thanks from the possessor of it. Indeed, it merely falls to me to facilitate, from time to time, the practicalities needed for this prodigious consciousness to bear fruit and to keep a sober eye on the mundane matters that he all too often neglects, his thoughts, as they say, being on higher things.