‘Please do what he says,’ Laura urges.
‘Laura’s right.’ It’s the first time I’ve spoken directly to Beth since the day I broke the glass. ‘It won’t hold any legal sway. You won’t be in trouble in court.’ I come close to saying, do it to save your lives, but some instinct in me knows that to verbalise what is so obvious would be a mistake; it would pop the fragile bubble that separates reality from denial.
‘I can’t,’ says Beth. ‘I can’t lie.’ Something in her has become untethered, even since I got here. ‘You raped me,’ she says, and the simple three-word fact of it stops everything. It swells to fill our little kitchen. The only sound is the cement mixer churning in next-door’s front garden. ‘You followed me somewhere quiet, you held me down and you raped me. You did it again in court and you did it again on the internet and you’ve been fucking me over ever since. You’ve done it to your wife and you’ve done it to that girl and you’ve done it to God knows how many other people.’
‘Beth, please just do what he wants,’ says Laura. The tiny part of me not consumed with survival wonders about the girl, and the wife. But Beth only has eyes for Jamie. Suddenly, it hits me what she’s doing. She’s burning up everything she’s got left, like a rocket on re-entry; she doesn’t need it where she’s going.
‘You raped me.’ The words come out in sharp jags.
It seems that I alone notice that Jamie’s knife is travelling, unsteadily but surely, like a compass needle, away from Laura and towards Beth.
‘I couldn’t write what you want even if I knew you were going to set this paper on fire.’
I calculate fast; if I grab his upper arm rather than his hand, I can force the knife away. There are three of us and only one of him. But I have always been able to think faster than I move, and I’m still a stride away when Jamie pulls his arm back and jabs the knife into Beth’s side. It bounces off in a way that suggests he has hit a rib, but he lunges again and this time the top two inches of the blade disappear.
I don’t know who the scream comes from.
He withdraws the knife; blood stains the steel. Beth is a dead weight, hitting the floor.
I am fast but my wife is faster. Laura gets there before me; she knocks, rather than wrestles, my Sabatier from Jamie’s hands. It somersaults in the air; the dull shaft up, the shiny blade down, shaft down, blade up, and for a sickening moment it looks like Laura’s going to catch the cutting edge in her open palms. But she only brushes the end of the handle with her fingertips.
‘You bitch!’ Jamie is already halfway to the knife block. Laura’s face is blank with panic as it bounces from her grip to land on the table, where only I can reach it.
The knife is both familiar and uncanny in my hand as I charge across the kitchen and thrust its sharpened tip into his throat. There is a split second of resistance, which I guess is the knot of his Adam’s apple, and the blade slips sideways, missing the spine; the rest is like cutting ice cream in comparison, and a second later, the tip is a shark’s fin protruding from the nape of his neck. I withdraw with futile haste; it is done. The knife clatters from my hand to the floor at the same moment Jamie hits the tiles with a thud. His body lies next to Beth’s. You can’t tell whose blood is whose. Everywhere is red, the kitchen floor a glossy sea. Jamie gargles, then vomits a crimson geyser that coats everything – me, Laura, the walls, the furniture – in a fine pink spray. I watch, transfixed, as his blue eyes turn to marbles.
And then I freeze.
Laura steps over Jamie’s body and crouches in the puddle of blood.
‘Beth?’
‘Laura, I—’
‘Call a fucking ambulance!’ she screams up at me. And only now do I manage, reaching for the phone that’s closest, a BlackBerry, and punching in the numbers, and telling them that we need an ambulance because there’s been a double stabbing, two casualties. I give my address and I’ve even remembered the phonetic alphabet and I ask them, foolishly, if they’ll need a parking permit and they reassure me that they won’t.
While I say all this, Laura is on her hands and knees, cradling Beth. With calmness and foresight, she has taken the spare tea-towels from the drawer and folded them into little pads to try to stem the bleeding. The first is already saturated.
‘They’re on their way,’ I tell her. ‘How’s she doing?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t fucking know,’ she says, and then to Beth, ‘Keep your eyes open, for fuck’s sake, keep awake.’ With bloodied fingers she pushes a damp wad of hair away from Beth’s face. Beth’s breath is coming in short sharp bursts now. She’s trying to say something and she’s looking at me. ‘I didn’t—’ she says.
‘Don’t talk,’ Laura’s saying. ‘It’s ok. The paramedics are coming. It’s ok. We’ve got you.’ I can’t read how Laura feels about Beth but there’s no mistaking the look she gives me now: I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. ‘It’s definitely slowing down. We just need to keep her warm. Take off your coat.’
To do this, I must put down the knife: Exhibit A.
I pull my arms out of my sleeves and lay the heavy coat down over Beth, as gently as I can. It’s impossible to tell how much blood she’s losing; her clothes are sopping. My coat is smeared with mud from the mountainside at Tórshavn. I tuck her in and send her a silent apology for everything that has happened as her lips turn white.