John Harvey: Cutting Edge

“Yes,” Sarah said.

Ian Carew smiled and sank himself down.

Sarah braced the fingers of both hands against his forehead, found his eyes with her thumbs and pressed as hard as she could. Carew screamed and arched back and she continued to squeeze her thumbs into the sockets, rocking him off balance without slackening her grip and managing, almost, to roll him over, till he punched her in the stomach and she couldn’t prevent one of her hands from jerking away and then the other. He screamed at her and this time she hooked her thumbs into the corners of his mouth and pulled. Carew swung up and knocked her clear, forcing her away with his legs; stumbling to his feet then, jeans around his thighs, unable to keep his hands from rubbing at his eyes.

Sarah pushed at him hard, stiff-armed, and as he fell backwards she raced for the door. She had the top bolt back and was working on the second, the one that always stuck, when Carew staggered into the hall. For a moment she froze, thinking he was going to come for her, but instead he went in the other direction, towards the scullery where he had broken in; a wave of relief swept through her and she ran back into the front room for the phone.

He hadn’t gone away: he had gone to the kitchen for a knife.

His words came with difficulty, jagged spaces in between.

“You bitch … fucking stupid … bitch … I’m going to … kill you for that.”

Sarah screamed.

She grabbed at a cushion and held it out in front of herself as Carew closed in with the knife. She continued to scream, loud enough to be heard in the street.

Resnick charged the front door with his shoulder and very little happened. He and Lynn barged it together and it shifted against its hinges but wasn’t about to give. Resnick lifted the green dustbin from the front yard and yelled a warning just before putting it through the glass of the front window.

The screaming stopped.

Lynn Kellogg was in the room first, in and racing towards the back of the house, following Carew. “Lynn!” Resnick called. “Let him go!” He knew Divine and Naylor were out there somewhere, covering the back alley. To his right, Sarah Leonard swayed and Resnick moved swiftly to her, fearing she might fall. “Are you all right?” he asked, sensing the emptiness of the words as he spoke them. Sarah nodded once and shivered as she pulled the cushion close against herself and hugged it tight. Resnick picked up the phone to call for a doctor, the ambulance.

As he ran, Carew clawed at the jeans that were slipping back down his legs. He couldn’t properly see where he was going and he was rocking from side to side, scraping himself against the chain-link fence, grazing his leg against the brickwork of the wall.

Lynn saw the discarded pram in time and hurdled over it, cursing herself for being so unfit, aware that by rights Divine and Naylor were waiting to pick Carew up but knowing how much she wanted him herself.

Thirty yards ahead of her, Carew’s toe caught the edge of a sodden mattress and he lost his footing and that was all she needed. When she took hold of him, one arm in a choke hold round his neck, her free hand tightening on his right wrist, Carew still had the kitchen knife gripped tight. Lynn shifted her balance so that one of her knees was pressing hard into the small of Carew’s back and then, as she would say later in her report, she applied the necessary pressure to the prisoner’s arm to make him drop the weapon he was carrying.

The flicker of light came from Divine’s torch as he and Naylor hurried towards her.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yes. Yes. Thank you. I’ll be fine.”

Resnick stood over her, hesitating. The sound of the ambulance siren could be heard as it approached along the main road heading into the city.

Sarah Leonard had refastened her dressing gown and sat the cushion in her lap; she had only looked at Resnick once in the past few moments. She looked up again now as Kevin Naylor came into the room from the rear of the house. “We’ve got him, sir. Lynn got him. And a knife. He’s on his way back to the station.”

“Good work.”

Sarah started to shake then, cry tears of relief. Resnick knelt alongside her and held her until the ambulance arrived and the paramedics helped her away.

“Make sure nothing gets moved till forensic are through. Just in case we can’t prove what he did to Fletcher, I want to make this one stick.”

“The woman, sir. No danger she won’t, like, give evidence?”

“No danger at all.”

Resnick unbolted the front door and let himself out on to the street as the ambulance pulled clear. In the space before the next police vehicles arrived it was quiet. Neighbors had retreated back into their own lives, the News at Ten . Above the upward slope of houses he could see the amber light that hung over the center of the city. He thought about Ridgemount about to spend his first night in a police cell and the things he’d felt driven to do to find peace. He thought about Sarah Leonard, the next time she was in her house alone, the response to every unfamiliar sound, each opening of the door. And somewhere, in some small hotel or rented room, Elaine. He left the car where it was and began to walk, hands in his pockets, wanting something to clear the air, wanting rain.