it was Ben’s turn to want to change the subject. That was a part of his life he definitely didn’t wish to discuss and he regretted having raised it.
‘Let’s have another drink.’ He held up the bottle. There was surprisingly little left. He was a fairly hardened whisky drinker and it took a lot to make his head spin. He’d have been lying if he’d said it wasn’t spinning now. Lottie seemed more or less unaffected, apart from maybe a very slight thickening of her tongue and the very fact that she’d brought up the subject of her mysterious secret. He suspected that she was itching to tell, but wasn’t yet drunk enough. Maybe he should have bought two bottles from Elmo instead of just the one.
‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve never known a woman who could knock back the scotch the way you can,’ he said as he emptied the last of the Glenmorangie into their glasses.
‘Fulla surprises, ain’t I?’
‘I’ll drink to that.’
When at last the whisky was finished, Ben was ready for bed. He thanked her for a wonderful dinner and a pleasant evening. She said, ‘Why don’t you stay a week or two longer?’ and they both laughed.
He gave her a hug and then trudged up to his room. He thought about retracting the pull-down staircase behind him, then decided against it. The combination of the white wine and the scotch was kicking in harder now, everything whirling a little. There seemed to be two beds in the room, both of them gently swirling around in circles in front of his eyes, and for a moment it was hard to decide which one to crash into fully clothed, jeans, boots and all.
‘I’m getting too old for this kind of nonsense,’ he muttered to himself. Then his head hit the pillow and he closed his eyes and was instantly asleep.
He dreamed fitfully, the kind of ethereal reverie that seems vivid at the time but is burst like a bubble in the morning, forever lost to memory. It was through his dreaming that he heard the strange sounds that some more focused part of his mind told him weren’t imaginary. His eyes snapped open and he sat upright.
He definitely hadn’t dreamed it. A thump that had seemed to resonate through the floor beneath him. Followed by the crash and tinkle of breaking glass. Some kind of commotion. And it had come not from outside, but from somewhere in the house. From downstairs.
And then he heard another sound that blew away the last fog of sleep and whisky, and had him jackknifing out of bed in alarm.
The sound of a woman’s scream of terror.
Followed a moment later by another cry. A much worse sound, of a very different nature, the kind of wailing shriek that can only be caused by the most unspeakable kind of agony.
Ben ran for the bedroom door.
He crossed the pitch blackness of the attic bedroom in two long strides and tore open the door. The little landing outside his room was every bit as dark. The world of the blind. And the deaf, too, because now all he could hear from below was dead silence.
He called out, ‘Lottie?’ Heard the tension in his own voice. Trying to understand where the screams had come from. It was a big house. They could have come from anywhere on the two floors below him.
No reply.
He hurried down the drop-down stairs to the first-floor landing, which was dimly illuminated by a narrow chink of light escaping from Lottie’s part-open bedroom door. He hesitated, then ran along the landing to the door and peered inside. The room was large and cosy, and empty. The light was coming from a little wall lamp above the double bed. The covers were rumpled aside, as though she must have got out of bed in a rush. Ben’s pulse was quickening as he ran back along the landing. The luminous green skeleton hands of his watch told him it was 4.13 a.m. He stopped again at the head of the stairs, listening hard.
Still total silence from below. Too quiet, even for the middle of the night. The kind of silence that hangs heavy, like a dumbstruck witness in the immediate aftermath of something bad, really bad. Another light was on in the downstairs hallway, its glow reaching around the twist in the winding staircase.
He was trying to compute what could have happened. Had she gone downstairs for some reason, maybe to get a drink of water or visit the ground floor bathroom, and fallen and hurt herself? Was the tinkle of breaking glass the smashing of something like a glass or a lamp? He was about to call her name again, but instinct made him stay quiet. There were other ways to interpret the sounds he’d heard. Ways that were beginning to paint a worse picture in his mind.
He rushed down the first few steps as far as the twist in the staircase, to meet the glow of light that shone up from the hallway below.
The hallway wasn’t empty. A shape lay on the floor. The shape of a large body. A woman’s body.
Lottie’s body.
She was wearing a fluffy pink towel bathrobe hastily pulled on over a long satin nightdress and tied around her middle with a cord belt. She was lying on her back with her arms outflung to her sides and her face turned away from him. She wasn’t moving. Blood showed shocking red on the pink of her bathrobe and the creamy material of her nightdress. A lot of blood. It glistened on the brown skin of her legs where the nightdress had ridden up to her knees as she fell. It was soaking into the carpet under her, steadily spreading outwards in a dark stain.
But Ben wasn’t looking at the blood. He was staring in bewildered horror at the curved, glinting length of steel blade that was protruding from her sternum, right below the ribs, sticking straight up in the air like a flag that had been planted on her.
Not a knife blade. A sword, long and wicked and stuck deep through her body to pin her to the floorboards.
Ben leaped down the last few steps to the hall, calling her name again, hearing his voice in his ears as though it were someone else’s, knowing that nothing could save her from this terrible injury, his mind whirling to comprehend what he was seeing, and why.
At the end of the hall the front door was hanging ajar a few inches, and beyond that the screen door was wide open and letting in the night air and insects. The inner door had a window consisting of four little dappled opaque square panels. Lottie hadn’t dropped a glass, or knocked over a lamp, or anything else. The window panel nearest the lock was smashed and lying in fragments on the entrance mat, as if someone had punched it through to pass their arm inside and unfasten the lock and security chain from inside and let themselves into the hall.
Which, Ben realised, was exactly what had happened. Lottie, a floor closer to the hall than Ben up in the attic, must have heard the sound of breaking glass. She must have got out of bed to investigate, wrapping the gown around herself as she trod downstairs, clicking on the hall light from the switch at the foot of the staircase. That must have been when she came upon the intruder, or intruders. Hence, the first scream Ben had heard.
And that must also have been when the intruder, or intruders, had attacked her with the sword, knocked her to the floor, stood over her and stabbed her brutally through the body. Hence, the terrible wail of agony that had followed soon after the first scream.
Everything had happened in the space of a few moments. And it had ended only moments ago. Which had to mean that whoever had done this couldn’t be far away.
