Peter Robinson: Aftermath

“Come on,” Dennis called again. “Hurry up.”

Janet took one last look at the prone figure and walked toward the back of the house. The kitchen was in darkness.

“Down here.”

She couldn’t see Dennis, but she knew that his voice came from downstairs. Through an open door to her right, three steps led down to a landing lit by a bare bulb. There was another door, most likely to the garage, she thought, and around the corner were the steps down to the cellar.

Dennis was standing there, near the bottom, in front of a third door. On it was pinned a poster of a naked woman. She lay back on a brass bed with her legs wide open, fingers tugging at the edges of her vagina, smiling down over her large breasts at the viewer, inviting, beckoning him inside. Dennis stood before it, grinning.

“Bastard,” Janet hissed.

“Where’s your sense of humor?”

“It’s not funny.”

“What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know.” Janet could see light under the door, faint and flickering, as if from a faulty bulb. She also noticed a peculiar odor. “What’s that smell?” she asked.

“How should I know? Rising damp? Drains?”

But it smelled like decay to Janet. Decay and sandalwood incense. She gave a little shudder.

“Shall we go in?” She was whispering without knowing why.

“I think we’d better.”

Janet walked ahead of him, almost on tiptoe, down the final few steps. The adrenaline was really pumping in her veins now. Slowly, she reached out and tried the door. Locked. She moved aside, and Dennis used his foot this time. The lock splintered, and the door swung open. Dennis stood aside, bowed from the waist in a parody of gentlemanly courtesy, and said, “Ladies first.”

With Dennis only inches behind her, Janet stepped into the cellar.

She barely had time to register her first impressions of the small room – mirrors; dozens of lit candles surrounding a mattress on the floor; a girl on the mattress, naked and bound, something yellow around her neck; the terrible smell stronger, despite the incense, like blocked drains and rotten meat; crude charcoal drawings on the whitewashed walls – before it happened.

He came from somewhere behind them, from one of the cellar’s dark corners. Dennis turned to meet him, reaching for his baton, but he was too slow. The machete slashed first across his cheek, slicing it open from the eye to the lips. Before Dennis had time to put his hand up to stanch the blood or register the pain, the man slashed again, this time across the side of his throat. Dennis made a gurgling sound and went to his knees, eyes wide open. Warm blood gushed across Janet’s face and sprayed on to the whitewashed walls in swirling abstract patterns. The hot stink of it made her gag.

She had no time to think. You never did when it really happened. All she knew was that she couldn’t do anything for Dennis. Not yet. There was still the man with the knife to deal with. Hang on, Dennis, she pleaded silently. Hang on .

The man still seemed intent on hacking at Dennis, not finished yet, and that gave Janet enough time to slip out her side-handled baton. She had just managed to grip the handle so that the baton ran protectively along the outside of her arm, when he made his first lunge at her. He seemed shocked and surprised when his blade didn’t sink into flesh and bone but was instead deflected by the hard baton.

That gave Janet the opening she needed. Bugger technique and training. She swung out and caught him on the temple. His eyes rolled back and he slumped against the wall, but he didn’t go down. She moved in closer and cracked down on the wrist of his knife hand. She heard something break. He cried out and the machete fell to the floor. Janet kicked it away into a far corner, then she took the fully extended baton with both hands, swung and caught him on the side of the head again. He tried to go after his machete, but she hit him again as hard as she could on the back of his head and then again on his cheek and once more at the base of his skull. He reared up, still on his knees, spouting obscenities at her, and she lashed out one more time, cracking his temple. He fell against the wall, where the back of his head left a long dark smear on the whitewash as he slid down and rested there, legs extended. Pink foam bubbled at the side of his mouth, then stopped. Janet hit him once more, a two-handed blow on the top of his skull, then she took out her handcuffs and secured him to one of the pipes running along the bottom of the wall. He groaned and stirred, so she hit him once more, two-handed, on the top of the skull. When he fell silent, she went over to Dennis.

He was still twitching, but the spurts of blood from his wound were getting weaker. Janet struggled to remember her first aid training. She made a compress from her handkerchief and pressed it tight against the severed artery, trying to nip the ends together. Next she tried to make the 10-9 call on her personal radio: Officer in urgent need of assistance. But it was no good. All she got was static. A black spot . Nothing to do now but sit and wait for the ambulance to arrive. She could hardly move, go outside, not with Dennis like this. She couldn’t leave him.

So Janet sat cross-legged and rested Dennis’s head on her lap, cradling him and muttering nonsense in his ear. The ambulance would come soon, she told him. He would be fine, just wait and see. But it seemed that no matter how tightly she held the compress, blood leaked through to her uniform. She could feel its warmth on her fingers, her belly and thighs. Please, Dennis, she prayed, please hang on.

Above Lucy’s house, Maggie could see the crescent sliver of a new moon and the faint silver thread it drew around the old moon’s darkness. The old moon in the new moon’s arms . An ill omen. Sailors believed that the sight of it, especially through glass, presaged a storm and much loss of life. Maggie shivered. She wasn’t superstitious, but there was something chilling about the sight, something that reached out and touched her from way back in time, when people paid more attention to cosmic events such as the cycles of the moon.

She looked back down at the house and saw the police car arrive, heard the woman officer knock and call out, then saw her male partner charge the door.

After that, Maggie heard nothing for a while – perhaps five or ten minutes – until she fancied she heard a heartrending, keening wail from deep inside the bowels of house. But it could have been her imagination. The sky was a lighter blue now and the dawn chorus had struck up. Maybe it was a bird? But she knew that no bird sounded so desolate or godforsaken as that cry, not even the loon on a lake or the curlew up on the moors.

Maggie rubbed the back of her neck and kept watching. Seconds later, an ambulance pulled up. Then another police car. Then paramedics. The ambulance attendants left the front door open, and Maggie could see them kneeling by someone in the hall. Someone covered with a fawn blanket. They lifted the figure on to a wheeled stretcher and pushed her down the path to the ambulance, back doors open and waiting. It all happened so quickly that Maggie couldn’t see clearly who it was, but she thought she could glimpse Lucy’s jet-black hair spread out against a white pillow.

So it was as she had thought. She gnawed at her thumbnail. Should she have done something sooner? She had certainly had her suspicions, but could she somehow have prevented this? What could she have done?

Next to arrive looked like a plainclothes police officer. He was soon followed by five or six men who put on disposable white overalls before they went inside the house. Someone also put up white and blue tape across the front gate and blocked off a long stretch of the pavement, including the nearest bus stop, and the entire side of the road number 35 stood on, reducing The Hill to one lane of traffic in order to make room for police vehicles and ambulances.