She turns to her father. “Fifty seconds.”
“He was an intruder—”
“He was a guest.”
“With a gun.”
“Which he wasn’t even holding.”
If Martin were a lawyer he might be able to see a way out of this particularly impenetrable thicket but God alone knows what form it might take.
David wonders if he can take his phone out and get a photo of the corpse. He does not know if it would be considered more than usually insensitive because of it being a dead person or whether the extraordinariness of the situation would give him some moral wiggle room.
“You’re asking nine people to lie,” says Sarah. “And you’re asking them to tell exactly the same lie, down to the last detail, for the rest of their lives. How is that going to work exactly?”
His daughter should have been a lawyer, thinks Martin. And his son is going to prison. What a bizarre and wholly unexpected turn of events. His job will be to minimise the effect this has on Madeleine. It will be a difficult job and not one he relishes. He will start by sealing off this room and getting it cleaned and redecorated.
“Any other objections?” Sarah revolves slowly, making eye contact with all the adults in turn. They know she is right. They are also mightily relieved that she is the one who is planning to set the inevitable process in motion. But Sarah does not call the police, because the silence is broken by a loud, sucking gurgle coming from the stranger’s body. Emmy screams and does a little dance, running on the spot and flapping her hands in front of her face, which would be very funny in almost any other context.
“Emmy…?” says Martin. “Emmy?” He waits for her to calm down a little. “It’s trapped gases being released.” Also, very possibly, the man’s bowels emptying beneath him, though it seems unnecessary to add this clarification. He wonders how Madeleine is doing in the kitchen. Perhaps he ought to go and check on her.
The stranger sits up and opens his eyes.
Emmy sits down, slumps forward, headbutts her coffee cup then rolls sideways off her chair, too swiftly for Robert to catch her. Gavin makes a noise that can only be described as a dog-whimper. David is bedazzled. It is, by a country mile, the most amazing thing he has ever seen. Perhaps it was a magic trick after all.
Apart from the fact that he is missing most of his internal organs, the stranger seems in better condition than Gavin. He strokes his bloody beard back into shape and gets to his feet as if he had merely stumbled in the street. He walks across the room and as he does so everyone can hear the soles of his boots alternately sticking to and becoming unstuck from the bloody floor. He retrieves his sawn-off shotgun. He walks over to Gavin and stands looking down at him. Gavin’s whimper becomes a low keening. The stranger smiles. He has the contented look of a man who has downed a good meal in fine company.
Gavin is certain that these are the last few seconds of his life and he wishes he were able to act in a more manly fashion but the pain of his broken ribs and the emotional roller coaster of the last twenty minutes have left him too drained to do anything but close his eyes and wait for the lights to go out.
The lights do not go out. The stranger says, “I will see you next Christmas.” He slips the gun into his poacher’s pocket and buttons his greatcoat over the carnage of his chest. “Then it will be my turn.” He straightens his back and turns so that he can address his last words to everyone in the room. “I bid you all good night and a merry Christmas.”
He strides to the French windows, swings them open and walks through the resulting gust of flakes into the dark.
Gavin sits with his head in his hands, staring into the woodgrain of the kitchen tabletop, waiting for his mother’s codeine to take effect. Sarah has made a pot of tea and put out a plate of biscuits and most of them seem comforted in some small degree by a custard cream and a hot mug they can wrap their hands around. Emmy has a livid bruise on her temple.
David is finally beginning to understand the enormity of the situation. For a while he rang with excitement like a beaten gong, having sailed through a test of manhood the like of which his friends would never undertake. Disappointed that he had failed to get a photograph of the dead man, however, he sneaked into the off-limits dining room with his phone. The bloodstains themselves did not affect him, but his photograph of the bloodstains looked undeniably like the photograph of a murder scene, sad and sordid and profoundly unglamorous, and he realised for the first time that he had just watched his uncle kill someone. This fact was made no more acceptable by having watched the dead man get up afterwards and announce that he would kill his uncle next year.
Upstairs, Sofie moves from room to room in a rising panic. “Anya…?” Is it possible that her daughter was so frightened that she left the house and ran into the night? In the little loft her daughter is unconscious and unable to hear her mother calling. Eventually Sofie returns to the kitchen. “I can’t find Anya.”
“She can’t have gone far,” says Leo.
“No,” says Sofie. “Listen to me. Anya is not here.”
It takes a long moment for the penny to drop. “She ran out of the room.”
“She ran out of the house,” says Sofie.
“Oh fuck.” Leo is on his feet. “Dad. Find me a torch.”
Leo and Robert scour the garden. They check inside the shed and behind the climbing roses which cover the long wooden trellis. They look in the compost bin. They take bamboo canes from the pot beside the kitchen door and push them into drifts. Leo tries not to think that if he finds his daughter using this method then she will almost certainly be dead.
Ten minutes later, sitting in the kitchen, David says, casually, “There’s a place you can hide. In the top bathroom. There’s a kind of hatch in the wall.”
Sofie runs upstairs. At her lowest point, in a couple of years’ time, she will slap her son viciously across the face and call him an “evil little shit” for not revealing this information earlier. And when her marriage to Leo falls apart she will know, deep down, that it was her son’s fault for sitting eating biscuits, untroubled by the fact that his sister was dying upstairs.
She kicks open the bathroom door, tears the panel from the wall and pulls her daughter out through the hatch. Anya’s limbs are limp, her face grey, her flesh cold and damp. Sofie carries her daughter along the corridor to the bedroom. Martin takes charge. They undress Anya and put her into her dry rabbit onesie and lie her under the duvet. Sarah is made to sit with the hairdryer feeding hot air into the space around her shaking body. Emmy fetches her a bobble hat.
Sofie says, “She needs to be in a hospital.”
“And how would she get there?” says Martin. “This is what they would do for her in a hospital.”
Sofie says, “Will she be all right?”
Martin says, “I honestly don’t know,” and this is what Sofie will remember, not that her father-in-law helped saved her daughter’s life but his cool acceptance of the fact that he might not be able to.
Madeleine arrives with a mug of hot sweet tea in one of the spouted beakers she has saved from when the grandchildren were small. Sofie works it between Anya’s lips and says, “Come on, darling, drink.”
They call Leo and Robert. Leo returns, relieved that his daughter is alive then terrified all over again when he sees how unresponsive she is, the distance in her eyes. He leans down and kisses her. “Hey, little one.”
It is a small bedroom and filling it with useless people is no help to anyone, so Sarah and Emmy retreat downstairs and wash up while Robert does what can be done in the dining room. He wipes down the clock. He rolls and bags the blood-soaked rug and puts it in the garden. He removes the map of Bedfordshire from its soiled frame and lays it in a drawer so that the frame and the glass can be soaped clean. He sponges bodily matter from pitted wallpaper. He takes down the curtains and leaves them to soak in a bucket of water. He turns off the light, closes the door and puts a symbolic chair in front of it.