Peter May - Runaway

The screaming and yelling all around me was deafening, drowning out even the pounding of the music that came from the living room and up the stairwell. Those people must have thought I was a madman, and in truth I felt possessed as I ran down the stairs, Luke and Dave right behind me, jumping over the sprawling bodies of the thugs from Leeds who lay in a tangle halfway down.

I heard someone shouting, ‘Call the police. For God’s sake, someone call the police.’

We got to the first landing and turned into the hallway, very nearly colliding with Simon Flet. I felt his open hand thump into my chest as he pushed me out of the way, and I saw the blood on his face and hands, and the terror in his eyes as he ran past, turning to sprint down the stairs to the ground floor, bellowing at partygoers to get out of his way.

Somehow, control of anything seemed to have slipped from my grasp. Everything was happening quickly and slowly at the same time. As if we were all starring in our own movie spooling in slow motion. I saw Maurie standing at the end of the hall, half in silhouette, half lit in outline by the lamp in Dr Robert’s study. He seemed transfixed, and turned towards us, his face a veil of confusion. Luke ran down the hall towards him, and Dave and I followed.

The door to Dr Robert’s study stood wide. Dr Robert himself was on the near side of his desk now, and standing over Andy’s body. Rachel’s one-time boyfriend lay in a twisted heap on the floor, blood pooling around his head. One side of it was split open, and I could see the grey-white of his brain marbled by the red that oozed through it. A large brass paperweight in the shape of an Oscar stood incongruously upright on the floor beside him, like a witness to murder, and yet clearly the murder weapon itself, blood trickling down the contours of the body from its bloody head.

Dr Robert stared down at the dead man at his feet, before looking up to see us standing in the hall.

His voice was little more than a whisper. ‘Simon... killed him.’ His voice rising in pitch now. ‘He’s killed him!’ He gazed down on Andy again. ‘I don’t even know who this man is.’ Then his head snapped up, accusation in his voice. ‘What did he want with you?’

And in his moment of helpless confusion, I very nearly felt sorry for him.

It took Luke’s cool head to wrest control of the situation. He grabbed Maurie by the arm, and Maurie turned, stupefied, to look at him.

‘We have to go!’ Luke said. And when Maurie didn’t respond, he yelled in his face. ‘Now, Maurie, now!’

And he virtually dragged him along the hall as we ran back towards the stairs.

It took hardly any time for us to get out of the house. People were escaping it like rats from a sewer, and we were simply carried along by the flow. Through the hall, out of the door, down the steps and into the street. All the time to the incongruous accompaniment of the Rolling Stones song ‘Pain in My Heart’.

It was almost fully dark now, street lamps casting pools of illumination broken by the flitting shadows of demented moths. Partygoers from the house spilled from the pavement into the road, forming a semicircle around the railing on which Jeff had fallen. We couldn’t see beyond them to where his body was skewered on the spikes. But I could hear sobbing, someone screaming, a girl staggering free of the crowd to double over on her knees in the warm night and empty the contents of her stomach all over the tarmac. And I realized it was the girl who had propositioned me in the hall just half an hour before.

Maurie seemed dazed, as though he were concussed.

I took him by the shoulders and shoved my face in his. ‘Where’s Rachel?’

He looked at me blankly.

‘Rachel. Maurie, where is she?’

He simply shook his head. ‘Gone.’

‘Gone? What do you mean? Gone where?’

‘Gone,’ he said. Then, almost as if realizing where he was for the first time, he found focus and glared back at me. ‘Where’s Jeff?’ And when I couldn’t meet his eye, it was he who grabbed me by the shoulders. ‘Jack, where’s Jeff?’ Sudden fear in his voice. ‘Jack?’

He let me go, then, looking around with wild eyes, as if only now aware of the mayhem in the street. I heard the distant sound of a police siren.

Luke said, ‘Maurie, we need to go.’

But Maurie wasn’t listening. He pushed past us and cleaved his way through the crowd on the pavement with such violence that he knocked one man over, and pushed a girl to her knees. The not so beautiful people parted in the face of his fury to let him through. And we saw, at the same moment he did, the prone form of poor Jeff impaled on the railings, blood dripping to form pools on the wall beneath him. His mouth was gaping and filled by the curl of his tongue, his eyes wide and staring as if in shock.

The most feral and frightening human sound I have ever heard issued from between Maurie’s lips, and raised goosebumps all over my arms and shoulders. It was followed by the strangest hush as the anguish in his voice communicated itself to everyone on the street. I shoved my way through to him, turning him by the shoulders to lead him away. He offered no resistance, his face a mask of misery and disbelief.

‘He thought he could fly,’ I said.

And Maurie’s head turned slowly. He looked at me with such incomprehension.

The police siren was very close now. And the Stones were singing something about being afraid of what they’d find.

Luke said, ‘Nothing we can do for him, Maurie. We should go. We really should go.’

‘What about our stuff?’ Dave said.

‘Doesn’t matter.’ Luke’s eyes were open so wide with stress, I could see the whites of them all around his irises. ‘If we don’t want to get caught up in all this, we have to go.’

I nodded, and we almost dragged Maurie away along the street out of the light of the street lamps. Dave tried the gate to the gardens and it opened into darkness. A darkness that swallowed us as we ran off across cut grass that felt soft beneath our feet, through the shadows of trees towards the distant light and the sounds of traffic in Old Brompton Road.

Behind us I heard the wail of the siren as the first police car arrived, its blue light strobing in the night.

At this time of night the waiting room at Euston was all but deserted. Out on the concourse passengers stood in desultory groups of twos and threes, smoking, watching the arrivals and departures boards, times and platforms, names of places only ever seen on railway timetables, destinations known only to those who lived there.

Maurie sat between Luke and me in the far corner, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, face buried in his hands. He had wept inconsolably on the tube, and now seemed overtaken by inertia. Almost catatonic, like JP’s naked lady in Ohio. Luke had his arm around Maurie’s shoulder. He leaned forward and spoke so softly that I could barely hear what he said.

‘What happened, Maurie? In Dr Robert’s study.’

Whatever he had seen, he was a witness to murder. But he wasn’t saying anything. Neither then, nor in all the years since. He gave the slightest shake of his head, before straightening up, to stare straight ahead into the smoky gloom of the waiting room. His face was still shiny wet with tears, but his eyes were dry now. Red and puffy.

‘Poor Jeff,’ he said. ‘Poor Jobby Jeff.’

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. ‘Maurie, you have to tell me what happened to Rachel.’

His head swung slowly round and the pain in his eyes was almost too great for me to bear. I struggled to maintain eye contact.

‘I don’t have to tell you anything.’

But I wasn’t going to give up that easily. ‘Where is she?’