Cold Hands (18 page)

It was worse for Stephen. He tried to cope more like a man. He kept working and tried to compartmentalise. Drink was involved for him right away. Not for you until later. You found the bottle of Whyte & Mackay in the boot of the car. The half-bottle in his briefcase. You blamed Stephen of course. The school fees argument replayed all the time in your head. If only. We should have. If and should and if and should on and on in a loop.

And then that morning, the week before Easter 1984, the second Easter without Craig (he’d have been fifteen), when you woke early and Stephen wasn’t in bed. But that wasn’t so unusual because he was sleeping so little by that point. You went downstairs into the kitchen, where the kettle was still slightly warm but the tea was going cold in the pot, like he’d made it and forgotten about it. There was a stillness to the house, even though it was much too early for him to have left for work.

Then you noticed the door that led through the utility room and out to the garage was open. Twelve footsteps – all
it took for you to reach the garage door. You opened it and there he was, Stephen Docherty, your husband, twisting gently in a slow circle, his feet just a few inches off the ground, the little white stepladder on its side. The puddle of urine beneath him. He had no shoes on and he’d used a length of blue nylon clothes line, tied it around one of the beams. You didn’t cry right away, just stood there with your pupils widening and widening in the murky wooden light, listening to the gentle creak, creak, creak, the sound of rope against beam, reminding you of a hammock, of sailing ships. His face as purple as a raw heart, his mad tongue.

You’d been married eighteen years.

You thought you might be OK because Stephen had taken out fresh life insurance just before Craig died. You remembered that night – the insurance agent’s aftershave sweet and coconutty in the front room, Stephen bending over the papers, wearing his glasses as he signed with a flourish, as men often do. You didn’t know – why would you? – that suicide within two years of taking out the policy automatically invalidates it. If he had just stuck with the old policy everything would have been fine. This wasn’t even irony, just another scene in the horror film that your life had become. Your lawyers argued your case with the insurance company – the extreme stress and trauma you’d been through – and finally they relented and agreed to a compromise payment, issuing a cheque for £1,048.00. ‘Without prejudice.’ It didn’t even cover the lawyers’ and undertakers’ bills.

You had to sell the home you loved so much.

And that was how, in 1987, you found yourself turning forty alone in a two-bedroom council flat near the harbour.
You discovered drink yourself then. Wine was the first thing. You found you could scrape through the day until around five o’clock before uncorking a bottle of sweet white wine. You’d never been much of a drinker and just two or three glasses of musky Riesling, or sugary Liebfraumilch, would make the shabby little flat seem warmer, homelier. The bottle would see you through until ten, when you fell asleep on the sofa, running eagerly into the dreams where Craig and Stephen were waiting for you, your arms flung wide and love pouring out of them like light. Then five o’clock became four o’clock. One bottle became two. Soon enough you were drinking from noon till bedtime. It was taking a bottle to have the effect a glass used to have.

Such a revelation when you discovered spirits. That a half-glass of vodka had the same effect as half a bottle of wine! And in an instant! You felt like you’d split the atom. Found penicillin in the gunk at the bottom of the Petri dish. Pretty soon it was taking a bottle of Smirnoff to get you through the day. At your bedroom window you could just see the sea, the mouth of the river, before it snaked inland, where Craig’s body had been found. (‘Full fathom five thy son lies . . .’) You’d sit there for hours, sipping neat vodka, the fumes tearing your eyes, watching the sea, the drifting white cauliflower clouds against the grey sky, singing little songs to yourself. You found yourself sitting inside your wardrobe one morning, already drunk at ten o’clock, giggling with Craig’s red sweater draped over your face, inhaling him in your red tent, and you realised you were going mad, that you had gone mad, but there was a quiet detachment about it, the alcohol like a liquid pane of double-glazing, keeping you apart from the blue rage in your soul.

I CAME ROUND.
I had no idea how long I’d been unconscious but she’d bandaged Walt’s hand in that time: a thick white dressing covering most of it, a dark patch of black blood visible where his pinkie used to be. She’d wiped up most of the blood. I started retching again, dry racking heaves. There was nothing left to come up.

‘Now, William,’ she said, moving in front of me. Walt’s head was lolling, I wasn’t sure if he was conscious or not. ‘What are we going to do with you? I’m still not sure that you’re telling me the whole truth. I thought you would have, given the display we’ve just had . . .’ She gestured to Walt with the knife, gouts of dried blood were caught between the serrated teeth. ‘In court you all blamed each other, didn’t you? No one ever came right out and said, “I did it.” The other two blamed you, didn’t they? And I always wondered about you. You always struck me as clever. Slippery.’

‘It was Banny.’

‘Hmmm. Maybe we can incentivise you further . . .’ She moved towards her bag and then stopped, her head tilting upwards, towards the wooden ceiling. It came again and I heard it too, a faint pinging, like a microwave.

The doorbell.

She turned and looked at me as it came again. She bent down, speaking right into my face as she tied the gag back into place. ‘If you’re thinking of doing anything stupid on the basis that it can’t get any worse for you . . .’ She stepped back and brought the knife up, pressing the tip against my nose. ‘Believe me it can. Do you understand me, William?’

I nodded.

‘Good. And try not to be sick again while you’re gagged. Don’t want you dying on me.’

She slipped the knife into its sheath and shoved it down the back of her jeans. She picked up a big, chromed revolver from one of the workbenches – Danko’s, or Hudson’s, I guessed – and stuck it down the front, covering it with the baggy sweater. Before she started up the stairs she checked her reflection in a small mirror hanging on the bare brick wall. She tutted and, with the air of a woman in evening dress fixing a stray hair before heading out to the opera, wiped a streak of Walt’s dried blood from her cheek. Her boots clattered up the wooden steps, a bar of light spilled briefly down the stairs, and she was gone.

Walt’s mutilated right hand was still untied.

‘MMMMFF!’ I STRAINED
against the gag. ‘UNNNN!’ Slowly Walt looked up at me, confused, drugged-looking, in shock. His eyes were just . . . rinsed with tears, raw, terrified. I jerked my head, nodding frantically towards the table, begging him to follow me. Finally he turned and looked.

The tiny silver scalpel, right there on the table, near the edge.

‘UNNNN!’
Please, Walt, understand.
It was only a couple of feet away from his bandaged right hand. Upstairs I could hear her footsteps clacking away across wooden boards. I rocked my chair from side to side, managing to inch it a fraction closer to Walt’s, watching the baby monitor. ‘UNNNN!’ Finally he understood, his eyes going from mine to the scalpel. He reached out. As he did so a spasm of pain seemed to shoot through him and he cried out behind his gag. The bloodstain on the bandage seemed to spread, Walt crying, shaking his head. I looked him in the eye and tried to say everything with only my eyes –
please, son, I know this hurts, but if we don’t get out of here, we will die.

He tried again, his shoulders shaking as he cried, blood from his wound smearing across the wooden arm of the
chair as his trembling fingertips inched closer to the silver blade. I could faintly hear voices from upstairs, from where she was talking to someone at the front door.

Walt got the scalpel. He brought it back and held it upright in his bloody, trembling fist. I strained and pushed and pulled and rocked my chair from side to side, squeaking and jolting and moving it closer to Walt’s, my tethered left wrist now just inches from the blade. Sweat was pouring down my face, sweat and blood running salty into my eyes and my mouth. I kept glancing towards the baby monitor. How close could she be to the listening unit? Just an inch or two more . . .

I felt a calf muscle strain and then tear as, with a loud squeak of wood against concrete, I managed to push my chair the final inch or two and the scalpel touched against the rope. Walt moved the blade back and forth and – thankfully – it was as sharp as it looked. The twine of the grey rope came apart instantly and in a couple of seconds my arm sprang free. I grabbed the scalpel from Walt and started slashing at the ropes binding my ankles to the chair, my other arm, cutting myself a couple of times in the process, but frantic, beyond caring.

I had Walt’s legs free and was sawing through the rope around his left arm when a single loud report cracked through the house above us, followed a half-second later by the bang of something heavy hitting the floor. I tore Walt out of the chair and pulled his gag off. ‘Daddy! My hand!’ I plastered my palm across his mouth and nodded towards the baby monitor. Carrying Walt I stumbled across the room to the tiny, shoulder-high casement window. Outside, snow was piled halfway up the pane; black night sky filled the
other half, studded with slanting snow. I grabbed the handles and tried to force the window up but it wouldn’t budge an inch, jammed tight, maybe fifteen coats of paint, thirty-odd years’ worth, sealing it up. I heard her footsteps somewhere above us, getting louder, and I clutched the tiny scalpel in my fist, looking towards the steps. Then the footsteps receded again, growing fainter, and I heard a smooth, slithering sound – something heavy being dragged across wooden floorboards.

I turned back to the window and jammed the scalpel into thick paint sealing up the bottom edge. I began drawing it across from left to right, working it into the cut I was making, pushing hard. Decades of gummy cream paint cracked and flaked off. Walt hugged into my leg, shaking, terrified. I had the scalpel a little over halfway across and could feel movement, some give in the left-hand side of the window, when there was a twanging
CRACK!
I looked down at the stump of the scalpel handle I was holding, the blade snapped off, lost inside the window. ‘Shit!’ I strained with both hands, trying to push it up, but the right-hand side was still gummed, stuck solid. I rammed my shoulder hard, one, two, three times against the frame. I looked at the baby monitor.

Fuck it.

I took a step back and threw myself up at the frame. Glass smashed and wood splintered as it came free, cold air hitting my face as I slid it up.

From upstairs we heard her breaking into a run.

‘Hurry, Daddy!’ Walt screamed.

I lifted Walt up and pushed him through the gap, out into the freezing, stinging night. Behind me I heard wood
smashing against brick as she kicked the cellar door open. A split second to decide.

Stay and try and fight her?

If she shoots you, she gets Walt.

As her feet came clattering down the wooden steps I grabbed both sides of the window casement, looking like a man launching himself on a bobsleigh run, and hurled myself at the narrow gap as, behind me, I heard her enraged scream, the boom of the gun and a windowpane beside my head exploding.

Then I was picking Walt up and trying to run through knee-deep snow, the black air freezing, wind whipping our faces, and my mind still giving its own detached commentary –
She won’t be able to get through that gap. She’ll have to go back upstairs and through the house, buying you maybe sixty seconds. Your house, that gun in your desk drawer, is nearly half a mile away, through
– as another loud crack rang out and I turned to see her; half hanging out of the tiny window, her gun arm flailing as she fired wildly and then she disappeared inside, yellow light spilling out across the snow.

We had come to the front corner of the house. A porch ran all the way round the building at shoulder height and the area for about ten feet all around her property was brightly lit by the porch lights. Beyond that it was blackness. In the distance I could see the lights of our house glowing softly: my office. The desk. The gun. ‘Walt, jump on my back and hold on.’ I grabbed the railings and pulled the two of us up onto the porch. The porch was covered, there was no snow, nothing to leave tracks in. I crawled round the corner of the house, keeping below window level, looking up through the window of her sitting room and seeing her
coming charging down the hallway, heading for the front door. I clutched Walt to me and pressed against the side of the house as we heard the front door slamming open, her feet banging down the steps. I turned and carried Walt in a low crouch, running along the side of the building and round the corner to the back. I peeked around and saw her running back and forth in front of the house, frantic, confused, pointing the gun off into the night.

Going against every instinct in my being I pushed the back door open and crept back into the house, into the kitchen. The lights were off and in the darkness I felt my trainer splash in something thick and sticky. There, on the linoleum floor, in a pool of black blood, was a body. Edging closer, pressing Walt’s face to my chest, I saw it was Jan Franklin, part of her face missing.
She must have popped into ours to find out what had been going on with the helicopter. Had she seen the bodies there? Why had she come here? The phone?
‘Don’t look, Walt.’ I stepped around the blood, scanning the room, part of me hoping to see a gun rack, a shotgun on the table. Nothing. Just an ordinary, tired, old suburban kitchen. I could hear her shouting our names now from the front. I looked out the kitchen window. That pool of light extending ten feet or so into the snow, darkness beyond it, a big pine just on the edge of the darkness. If we ran into the snow she’d see our tracks right away. I looked up at the roof of the porch, trying to think, trying to remember the layout of her house from the few times I had been there. I made a decision.