When Keisha Ceylon saw the pink sash drop past her eyes, she reached up instinctively to get her fingers between it and her neck. But she wasn’t quick enough. Wendell Garfield wrapped it tightly around her throat and began to twist.
‘I swear, I don’t know how you know, but you’re not going to tell anyone,’ he said.
Keisha clawed at the sash, her fingernails ripping into her own skin as she tried to loosen his hold on her. The satiny ribbon was already cutting deep into her neck and there wasn’t a hope of getting her fingers underneath it.
Garfield was leaning down over her, his mouth close to her right ear. His breath was hot against her cheek.
She tried to say something, to scream, but with her windpipe being squeezed, nothing came out, not a sound. She felt her eyes bulging. She kicked at the floor, digging into the carpet with her heels.
Keisha Ceylon knew that she was going to die. She didn’t need any vision for that glimpse into the future.
Any second now, she thought, it’s going to be over. Maybe I had it coming. I’ve been ripping people off, taking advantage of them when they were at their most vulnerable. I’m getting what I deserve.
It didn’t make her feel any better about it, though.
She gave up clawing at her throat and dropped her hands to her side.
‘You must have been there,’ Garfield said through gritted teeth. ‘You had to be watching. That’s the only way I can understand it. You were up there, you saw me put the car on the ice, you saw it go under, and then you thought you could blackmail me. You’d ask for a thousand today, another thousand next week, and then another the week after that, until I had nothing left.’
He had the ends of the sash twisted several times around his palms and kept pulling. Keisha could feel herself starting to faint, to black out. She wondered what he would do with her body. He hoped he wouldn’t put her in the lake along with Mrs Garfield.
She didn’t like water.
In the seconds just before it seemed to her that she was going to lose consciousness, her fingers dug into the seat of her chair.
Her right hand brushed up against something.
Something soft, almost furry.
Knitting yarn.
And as her fingers fumbled across the ball of wool, they landed on something else. It was long, and narrow, and pointed, like a stick, or a needle.
A knitting needle.
In the last second Keisha had before she blacked out, she grabbed hold of the knitting needle with her right hand and swung her hand up and over her shoulder. She swung it as hard as she could.
The scream was only an inch from her ear. It was horrific.
As the grip on Keisha’s neck slackened, she tumbled forward out of the chair. She collapsed on to the floor, gasping for breath. She was on her knees, one hand on the floor supporting her, the other on her neck. Air rushed into her lungs so quickly that it hurt. Her gasps would have been loud enough to hear from anywhere in the house, were it not for Wendell Garfield’s cries of agony.
Keisha, even as she struggled to get her breath back, had to turn and see what she had done.
The knitting needle was sticking straight out of Garfield’s right eye. Blood poured from the socket, covering the right side of his face. Judging by how much of the needle remained exposed, Keisha thought that a good four to five inches of it was buried in his head.
However, he could see her with his left eye and, still screaming, he started coming around the chair after her.
Keisha struggled to her feet and started moving towards the door. She hit her knee going around the corner of the coffee table and stumbled, allowing Garfield to get close enough to clamp his hand on to her arm.
‘You bitch!’ Garfield said, although there was so much blood in his throat it sounded as though he was gargling.
Garfield yanked so hard on her arm that Keisha went down on to the floor again. She ended up sprawled on her back. Before she had a chance to roll away, he landed on top of her, straddling her middle.
He didn’t have the sash any more. He was going to have to make do with his hands.
He leaned forward, the knitting needle still sticking out of his eye socket, blood dripping on to Keisha, and got his fingers and thumbs around her neck. She flailed about, but his hands had her neck pinned to the floor.
She started passing out all over again. With her last ounce of strength, she took the heel of her hand and shot it straight up against the end of the knitting needle.
She drove it into Garfield’s head another three inches.
There was another scream, and then, for a moment, he seemed to freeze above her. His grip on her neck relaxed, his arms went weak, and his body collapsed on top of her.
Keisha didn’t even take a second to get her breath back this time. She pushed frantically at his dead body until she had flung it off her and crawled a few feet away. Only then, once she was able to breathe normally again, did she decide she was entitled to take a moment and break down in hysterics.
Twelve
Melissa
‘You’re sure you don’t want a lawyer?’ Detective Marshall asked.