GRAHAME COATS WAS MOST OF THE WAY THROUGH A HALF BOTTLE of rum he had found in the kitchen. He had opened the rum because he had no desire to go down into the wine cellar, and because he imagined it would get him drunk faster than wine would. Unfortunately, it didn’t. It did not seem to be doing much of anything, let alone providing the emotional off-switch he felt he needed. He walked around the house with a bottle in one hand and a half-full glass in the other, and sometimes he took a swig from one, and sometimes from the other. He caught sight of his reflection in the mirror, hangdog and sweaty. “Cheer up,” he said aloud. “Might never happen. Cloud silver lining. Life rain mus’ fall. Too many cooks. ‘S an ill wind.” The rum was pretty much gone.
He went back into the kitchen. He opened several cupboards before he noticed a bottle of sherry toward the back. Grahame picked it up and cradled it gratefully, as if it were a very small old friend who had just returned after years at sea.
He unscrewed the top of the bottle. It was a sweet cooking sherry, but he drank it down like lemonade.
There were other things Grahame Coats had noticed while looking for alcohol in the kitchen. There were, for example, knives. Some of them were very sharp. In a drawer, there was even a small stainless steel hacksaw. Grahame Coats approved. It would be the very simple solution to the problem in the basement.
“Habeas corpus,” he said. “Or habeas delicti. One of those. If there is no body, then there was no crime. Ergo. Quod erat demonstrandum.”
He took his gun out of his jacket pocket, put it on the kitchen table. He arranged the knives around it in a pattern, like the spokes of a wheel. “Well,” he said, in the same tones he had once used to persuade innocent boy bands that it was time to sign their contract with him and to say hello to fame if not actually fortune, “no time like the present.”
He pushed three kitchen knives blade-down through his belt, placed the hacksaw in his jacket pocket, and then, gun in hand, he went down the cellar stairs. He turned on the lights, blinked at the wine bottles on their side, each in their rack, each covered with a thin layer of dust, and then he was standing beside the iron meat locker door.
“Right,” he shouted. “You’ll be pleased to hear that I’m not going to hurt you. I’ll be letting you both go now. All a bit of a mistake. Still, no hard feelings. No use crying over spilt. Stand by the far wall. Assume the position. No funny stuff.”
It was, he reflected, as he pulled back the bolts, almost comforting how many clichés already exist for people holding guns. It made Grahame Coats feel like one of a brotherhood: Bogart stood beside him, and Cagney, and all the people who shout at each other on COPS.
He turned the light on and pulled open the door. Rosie’s mother stood against the far wall, with her back to him. As he came in, she flipped up her skirt and waggled an astonishingly bony brown bottom.
His jaw dropped open. That was when Rosie slammed down a length of rusty chain onto Grahame Coats’s wrist, sending the gun flying across the room.
With the enthusiasm and accuracy of a much younger woman, Rosie’s mother kicked Grahame Coats in the groin, and as he clutched his crotch and doubled up, making noises pitched at a level that only dogs and bats could hear, Rosie and her mother stumbled out of the meat locker.
They pushed the door closed and Rosie pushed shut one of the bolts. They hugged.
They were still in the wine cellar when all the lights went off.
“It’s just the fuses,” said Rosie, to reassure her mother. She was not certain that she believed it, but she had no other explanation.
“You should have locked both bolts,” said her mother. And then, “Ow,” as she stubbed her toe on something, and cursed.
“On the bright side,” said Rosie, “He can’t see in the dark either. Just hold my hand. I think the stairs are up this way.”
Grahame Coats was down on all fours on the concrete floor of the meat cellar, in the darkness, when the lights went out. There was something hot dripping down his leg. He thought for one uncomfortable moment that he had wet himself, before he understood that the blade of one of the knives he had pushed into his belt had cut deeply into the top of his leg.
He stopped moving and lay on the floor. He decided that he had been very sensible to have drunk so much: it was practically an anaesthetic. He decided to go to sleep.
He was not alone in the meat locker. There was someone in there with him. Something that moved on four legs.
Somebody growled, “Get up.”
“Can’t get up. I’m hurt. Want to go to bed.”
“You’re a pitiful little creature and you destroy everything you touch. Now get up.”