Barry Maitland - The Malcontenta

She pulled to a halt. There was no way that he could have got further than his front door in the time since he had left her. Whoever had turned off the kitchen light must have heard his key in the lock, the door pushed shut, his footsteps begin the weary climb up the stairs.

‘Oh no.’

She switched off the engine and thought fast. She had no phone in the car. The nearest public phone would be in the High Street, but that would mean driving away. Which was what she should do. Except she still had the front door key Brock had given her.

She snatched it from her bag and hurled herself across the courtyard and round the corner to his front door. She bent down and opened the letter flap. A light was on in the stairway. She was just about to call out and warn him, when she heard the crash of breaking glass and splintering timber. Then total silence.

She thought again about leaving and getting help, or at least finding something to use as a weapon. What? The tyre lever? She slid the key into the lock as quietly as she could and carefully eased the door open. Still no sound. She closed the door and began to climb the stairs, the way she had learned as a teenager coming home late and not wanting to wake her aunt and uncle, by clinging to the wall, where the timber treads were less likely to creak. Half-way up, the light went off.

She froze.

In the silence she put her hand into her coat pocket and took hold of her bunch of keys, gripping a key between each of her knuckles. Not a lot of use, but still … She carefully slipped the long coat off her shoulders, laid it on the stairs and started to move forward again.

The darkness inside the house was relieved only by the faint glimmer of dawn which spread from the study across the landing and drew her into the room. It was light enough to see that there was no one standing waiting for her. Light enough, too, to see the chaos in the centre of the room, where Brock’s body was a dark mound in the middle of a shattered coffee-table.

Kathy looked carefully around the room, then a second time, then over her shoulder at the landing. No sign of anyone else. Was there a back door the intruder could have left by? A window, perhaps?

She stepped forward cautiously and knelt beside Brock, reaching to feel the pulse in his throat, still making no sound, as if the slightest noise might start the furies. The smell of whisky was overpowering, and she guessed that the broken bottle that lay beside his head must have been close to full. There was a pulse, but no signs of consciousness. His laptop computer was lying beside him like a faithful dog, waiting for its master to wake up and give it instructions.

She picked it up and straightened, trying to remember where the phone was, turned round and nearly jumped out of her skin when she saw Tanner’s dark figure standing a few paces away in the doorway.

‘Hello, Kathy.’

His voice was low and hoarse and probably the most frightening thing she’d ever heard.

‘Hello, Rie,’ she heard herself say, calm as anything. ‘You didn’t need to do that to Brock. You’ve hurt him. I think we should get an ambulance.’

He looked her over slowly before replying. ‘Too late for that, Kathy. Thieves are getting more and more violent these days. I don’t think he’s going to make it, to be perfectly honest.’

‘No, Ric. No one will buy that.’

‘Oh, really? Why’s that, now?’

She hesitated. ‘Too much of a coincidence, don’t you think?’

He was looking keenly at her. ‘Come on, Kathy, what have you got up your sleeve?’

He took a step towards her.

‘They know, Ric. Long has told them everything.’

‘Ah.’ He halted, a little smile frozen on his lips while his mind worked. ‘Well, it was always on the cards. I’ve had time to make other arrangements. I do have some family business to attend to overseas, as it happens. It makes it easier to deal with you two, anyway. No need to pretend. In fact, I can positively show off. Enjoy myself. It would be poetic having you and Brock end up exactly the same way as the other two, wouldn’t you say? Brock on the end of a rope like Petrou, and you with your throat sliced open like Rose. Couldn’t have a plainer way of telling them all to get fucked than that, now, could you?’

He slipped his hand into his trouser pocket. When he withdrew it he was holding something, and Kathy watched as it clicked and sprung a long silver blade.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said, her voice sounding implausibly relaxed to her own ears, ‘why you killed Petrou at all. What did he say to you that made you so angry?’

Tanner stared at her balefully for a long, silent moment. ‘It wasn’t what he said, it’s what he wouldn’t say.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I wanted the stuff he had on Long, didn’t I. Photographs and a letter. Very indiscreet stuff. Stuff you’d spend a lifetime to keep hidden. Especially if you were Assistant Comissioner of the Metropolitan Police.’

Kathy was chilled by Tanner’s voice, so detached, so quiet and unemphatic, as if he had already set aside all the feelings that modulate the way we speak.

‘But eventually he told you where it was?’

‘Eventually. I persuaded him.’

‘How did you do that?’

‘I sat on his chest and stuck a needle in his eyeball.’ Tanner sniffed and rubbed the back of his hand across his nose, as if he was developing a cold. ‘Then he told me. He kept them in a plastic wallet taped under the seat of his motor bike, together with his passport and a stack of money. His insurance — always ready for a fast getaway. That’s probably the way you think if you’ve lived in Beirut. Well, then I had to kill him, didn’t I?’

‘What sort of needle was it?’

‘What does it matter? It was on a trolley I passed on my way in. I was looking for something else to use — a scalpel or something. There were lots of needles sticking in a sponge and I reckoned that might do. My first thought was to stick it in his balls, but the eye was better. I could watch his face while I did it.’

He began to move towards her again, the blade poised. Instead of backing away she came at him, swinging the laptop towards his head. But it was just a little too heavy, the case a little too smooth to hold properly, and he raised his left hand and stopped her in mid-flight without any apparent effort. Then he brought up the blade in a graceful arc and sliced her right arm.

She recoiled, stumbling backwards over Brock’s body, arterial blood spurting from her arm, and fell in a clatter against the gas fireplace, scattering the elements and almost knocking herself out with the impact of her head against the tiled surround. She could hear herself making some kind of noise, snuffling in panic, then her scalp was seized with pain. She opened her eyes and realized he was gripping her hair and forcing her head back She stared at his eyes, wide, excited, only inches away, studying her fear and then, as his head drew back, fixing on her throat.

‘Goodbye, Kathy,’ he whispered.

She had no way of calculating the blow, left-handed, as she tried to thrust the toasting fork up and into him somewhere, anywhere, before he could bring the knife down. Afterwards she would tell her friends — especially the men, who seemed very troubled by it — that she hadn’t aimed there particularly: it just happened to be the spot that the long steel prongs met as she stabbed upwards. And at first she didn’t think she’d done him any damage, for he just froze, kneeling over her, open-mouthed and wide-eyed. While he seemed to hesitate, she frantically pulled the fork away and tried to target his upper body in case he struck at her. And then his whole frame suddenly convulsed, and she thought in panic of that glittering razor-edged blade. She cried out and turned her head. She gripped the fork that Gordon Dowling had toasted crumpets with just a month before, and jammed it into his throat.