Peter May - Snakehead

She said simply, ‘Steve’s dead.’

Straight away his expression softened, and without a word he took her in his arms, almost squeezing the breath from her, and they stood in the open doorway for what must have been minutes. She clung to him and let the tears finally fall, silently, staining the front of his tee-shirt before she stepped back, wiping her face dry. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me in?’

He stood aside to let her into the hall and closed the door behind her, and then she followed him through to the kitchen where he prepared a vodka tonic in a tall glass filled with ice. She sat at the table, picking at a shred of skin which had peeled away from a cuticle. He drained his beer, opened another bottle and handed her the vodka. Still they had not spoken. Finally, when she had taken her first drink, he said, ‘Was it bad?’

She nodded. ‘Worse than you can imagine.’

He sat down opposite her. ‘Then that is what waits for Xiao Ling.’

‘Not if she sticks to the diet,’ Margaret said, and for a moment was overwhelmed by the enormity of her ignorance. How could she know that for certain? How could she guarantee it for life? She looked around suddenly. ‘Where is she?’

Li lifted his eyes toward the ceiling. ‘Upstairs. Not speaking to me.’

Margaret frowned. ‘Why?’

‘Because I did not tell her that Xinxin was here. Because I made her face up to something she would probably have done almost anything in the world to avoid.’

Margaret was shocked. In all the angst about Steve, she had forgotten that Xinxin was here, and in her imagination she could picture the moment. ‘What happened?’ she asked.

He described to her the scene in the hall and her heart ached for the little girl. She saw, now that she looked, the red, raised handprint on the side of his face, but could find no sympathy for Xiao Ling, and as she thought about it grew angry at him also for springing the mother on the child without warning.

‘What in God’s name did you think was going to happen?’ she said, then immediately felt sorry for him when his head sank into his chest.

‘What else could I do? If I had told Xiao Ling she would have refused to come. I did not ask for this, Margaret. Not for any of it.’ He pleaded for her understanding and got it. She reached a hand across the table to grasp his. He squeezed it. If ever there was a moment, through their long and turbulent history, that each needed the other, this was it. A moment recognised by both of them.

He stood and led her upstairs to the room at the front where two days previously she had spent the night alone. Her choice. Her mistake. But not tonight. She had no idea where Xiao Ling was, and she didn’t care. They undressed in the dark and fell together between the cool cotton sheets of his bed and found comfort in each other, simply touching and holding and letting time steal them off into sleep.

Li had no idea how long he had been sleeping, or what it was that woke him. But his heart was thumping, and he knew that his subconscious self was telling the barely conscious one that something was wrong. He sat up, listening intently. Margaret was still asleep, lying on one side, her arm flung across his pillow, hair tangled around her face and neck, breathing heavily. He heard nothing else and lay back down, staring up at the ceiling. The red glowing numerals of his digital clock on the bedside table told him it was 4:25. He remembered that Xiao Ling was in his house. And Xinxin. And that there was a threshold of pain still to be crossed. He closed his eyes and tried to shut out the thought. His heart rate was returning to normal. Perhaps it had been a dream.

And then there it was again. He sat bolt upright, aware this time of what he had heard. A loud creak, sharp and penetrating, like a nail being pulled from dense wood. Maybe it was just a floorboard. Xiao Ling or Xinxin or Meiping up to the toilet in the night. But he didn’t think so. As he waited for it to come again, he heard the distant sound of breaking glass, so faint that he would not have heard it had he not been awake and listening. But of one thing he was certain; it had come from somewhere inside the house. Downstairs, he thought. Towards the back. He leapt out of bed and pulled on his jeans, and Margaret rolled over sleepily.

‘What is it?’ she asked, barely awake, and then was startled by his hand clamping itself over her mouth. Eyes wide, she stared at him in fright and tried to sit up. But he held her firmly in place and raised a finger to his lips.

‘Intruders,’ he whispered, his voice little more than a breath. And slowly he removed his hand from her mouth. ‘Downstairs.’ He looked around the room, searching for something he could use to defend himself. A weapon. And then he spotted in the corner the baseball bat and glove they had given him at the Embassy. Someone had come up with the bright idea that it would be good for international relations if they put together a baseball team to play in an interembassy league. There had been a few practice games. Li had made it to one of them and acquired the bat and glove in the process. But neither the team nor the league had come to anything. He lifted the bat and felt the comforting weight of it swing from his hand and was thankful for that bright idea. It had found its time.

Margaret had pulled on her tee-shirt and jeans and was slipping her feet into her sneakers. She was wide awake now and breathing rapidly. ‘What about the others?’ she whispered.

He nodded, and indicated that she should follow him. Very gingerly he opened the door and looked out along the upper landing. A night light glowed at the far end, casting deep shadows. But there was no movement, no sound. He moved quickly, cat-like along the landing, Margaret following in his slipstream, past the top of the stairs and along the hall. There were three doors at the far end. One, Margaret knew, was Xinxin’s room, the other Meiping’s. She assumed that Xiao Ling was in the third.

Li drifted past the doors to a window that looked out on to the flat roof of a terraced dining area that had been built out from the back of the house and into the yard years before. Moonlight cast the long shadow of a large lime tree across the bitumen, and Li caught the movement of a figure drifting across it to drop down into the narrow alleyway that ran between this house and its neighbour. He pulled back from the window and turned quickly into the third room. Xiao Ling was sitting up in her bed. She, too, had heard something. ‘Get Xinxin,’ he hissed at her. ‘Take her into Meiping’s room with Margaret.’

She was frightened and confused. ‘What…?’

‘Just do it! Now. There are people in the house.’ And he ran back into the hall where Margaret stood looking pale and scared. ‘Get them all into Meiping’s room,’ he said, and he started back along the hall to the top of the stairs. There he hesitated, glancing back to see Xiao Ling and Margaret together in the hall. Margaret opened the door to Xinxin’s room and hurried inside.

Li took a deep breath and took the bat in both hands, crooking his arms, ready to swing at a split-second’s notice, and started down the stairs, one careful step at a time.

Nothing moved in the downstairs hall. He stiffened at the sound of a creaking floorboard. But it came from up the stairs, the girls moving into Meiping’s room. He crept past his bicycle, laying each bare foot, one after the other, carefully on the polished floor, toes first, then heel, planting them flat and steady. At the end of the hall, the door to the dining terrace lay ajar, and the light of a distantly reflected moon fell silver and insubstantial through the gap. Very slowly, Li pushed the door inwards. He felt cool air on his face, as if from an open window, and saw shards of broken glass lying on the carpet. His breath came to him rapidly in shallow trembling gasps and seemed inordinately loud. He could hear nothing else above it. He backed up along the hall and, leaning across, pushed open the door to the living room. He had a very powerful urge to switch on as many lights as he could reach. But he knew that in order to make the intruders visible to him, he would make himself a very visible target to them. They would be more disoriented by the dark. After all, he knew the house and they didn’t.