Madeleine screams, stops to catch her breath then screams again as if she is in a screaming competition.
“Gavin…?” says Emmy, but she is wary of getting too close. “Gavin…?”
There is blood on the sofa. There is blood on the standard lamp. There is a growing pool of blood beneath the stranger’s body. It is viscous with a plump, rounded outline, the colour of good port. There is blood on three of the dining chairs. There is a thin lasso of blood across the dining table, bisecting the cheese plate exactly. There is a little marble of blood sinking very slowly in a glass of Sauternes. Sofie has blood in her hair. She is wiping it robotically with a napkin, keeping her eyes fixed on the light switch on the far wall.
Anya appears at the doorway. Granny is screaming. She sees two men lying on the floor. She sees oceanic amounts of blood. Her assumption is that the stranger is killing everyone in the house. She turns and runs, as quietly as she can, upstairs and into the guest bathroom on the second floor. She has imagined this happening many times. She thinks, often, about the car crashing, about bombs on the train, about tsunamis, about volcanoes, about ISIS, about Boko Haram. Whenever she finds herself in a new building she works out escape routes and hiding places. She finds it comforting, imagining the jackboots on the floorboards overhead and the sad cries of the foolish children who have failed to plan for this eventuality. It’s not comforting now that it is happening in real life but at least she is prepared. There is a panel beside the bath. She slides her fingernails under the rim, pulls it away and squeezes through the hole into the little loft above Granny and Grandpa’s bedroom, pulling the panel back into place behind her. The cramped, triangular space between the water tank and the roof is thick with cobwebs. It is also shockingly cold. She has only been in here once before, at the height of summer two years ago when she read an entire Tracy Beaker by torchlight. She had assumed it would be the same temperature all year round but she is sitting on the insulation which keeps the rest of the house warm. She should have grabbed a coat or a jumper. It is too late now. She hugs herself and starts to shiver.
Downstairs, Martin puts his hand on his wife’s shoulder. “You need to stop that now. Go into the kitchen and take some diazepam.”
She does not hear her husband. She hears a doctor talking. She stops screaming, gets automatically to her feet, walks into the kitchen and takes the foil pack from the shortbread tin behind the chutney. She pops out three 2mg tablets and swallows them with a glass of milk. She wonders if she has woken from a particularly vivid nightmare. She will sit and wait for someone to come and find her and tell her what is going on.
In the living room Gavin groans, rolls onto his side and contracts slowly into a foetal curl, nursing what will turn out to be two broken ribs. Emmy kneels beside him and rubs his shoulder, alternating between relief that her husband is still alive and horror at his having shot someone.
“Dad?” Leo pushes the abandoned gun to the skirting board with the tip of his right shoe. “You’re a doctor. You need to do something.”
Martin is looking down at his older son. His older son has killed someone.
“Not for Gavin,” says Leo. “For him.” He points at the stranger but can’t look at the body directly.
Martin walks over to the stranger. He stands beside what remains of the man, hands in the pockets of his racing-green cardigan. The man’s chest cavity has been hollowed out and is now a rough bowl of red mush, torn membranes and the jagged ends of shattered bone. Martin hasn’t seen anything like this since he was a junior doctor, perhaps not even then. He remembers a motorcyclist who’d gone under a lorry but that was just a crushed pelvis and a missing leg. What was the point of showing anyone in this state to a doctor?
“Can’t you do CPR?” asks Leo.
“No C, no P,” says Martin. “Which makes the R impossible.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” says Leo.
“No heart, no lungs,” says Martin. “Cardiopulmonary. CP.”
Emmy vomits into her cupped hands. Leo hands her a napkin and she runs to the toilet in the hallway.
Gavin puts the flat of his hand on the floor and pushes himself slowly up into a sitting position. He rubs his eyes with the thumb and forefinger of his free hand. He has the fuzzy, pained look of someone waking to a heavy-duty hangover. He looks over at the stranger’s body. He says, “It just went off.”
“You killed him,” says Sarah. “You’ve fucking killed him.”
“That’s not going to help anyone,” says Martin.
“I’m not thinking about helping anyone,” says Sarah. “The only person who needs help is fucking dead. I’m just getting it off my chest that my fucking brother acted like an arrogant fuckwit, as per usual, except this time he actually ended up murdering someone.”
Robert touches her arm. “Hey, hey, come on.”
“Get the fuck off me,” says Sarah. “I’m right. He knows I’m right. Everyone knows I’m right. So don’t you dare try and shut me up.”
Robert makes the universal gesture of surrender and sits back in his chair.
Sofie is trying to hustle David out of the room but he is refusing to go, shaking her hand off his shoulder. He is pretty sure now that the man was not one of Emmy’s friends. He feels sick and frightened but he wants to be able to say, “My sister ran away, but I didn’t.”
“He was an intruder,” says Gavin slowly. “He had a gun. We got into a fight. The gun went off.”
“Shut the fuck up, Gavin,” says Sarah. “You picked up the gun. You were told to put it down. You refused to put it down. You shoved it into his chest. You shot him.”
“It was a mistake,” says Gavin.
“Oh well, that’s fine then,” says Sarah.
Martin sits down and rubs his face. He would so much rather be buried in a car overnight.
Emmy appears in the doorway, drying her ashen face with the little purple towel from the handrail by the sink, remaining just beyond the threshold like a member of the public behind the crime-scene tape.
Upstairs, in the little loft above her grandparents’ bedroom, Anya cannot stop herself shaking from the cold. She is not afraid. The possibility that her entire family may now be dead has induced a terrible calm. Slowly but steadily her core temperature falls.
Her mother is not worried about where her daughter is. Her daughter has not crossed her mind. At the moment, for Sofie, the world beyond this room simply does not exist.
“I’m calling the police,” says Sarah. She walks towards the door. Emmy steps back to let her through.
“Wait,” says her father.
She stops in her tracks. It’s one of the things which angers her most about her father, the hotline he has to some primitive part of her brain, the way she has to override her knee-jerk subservience.
“I think you’re very probably right,” says her father carefully, because he, in turn, has had to learn how to override his own automatic response to his daughter’s periodic outbursts, “but perhaps we should consider the consequences of irreversible actions.”
“Are you seriously suggesting that we don’t call the police?” says Sarah. She does the words-fail-me face where she blows up her cheeks and shakes her head. “His insides are all over the fucking ceiling.”
The last time he told his daughter to calm down she threw a dinner plate at him. He says, “Give me two minutes.”
“One,” says Sarah.
“Your brother could go to prison for a very long time.”
Gavin shakes his head. “That is not going to happen.”
His sister says, “I don’t want to fucking hear from you right now.”
He clenches his teeth and presses his hand to his pained ribs to excuse his failure to think of a decent reply.