‘You think saying please is going to help you out of this? You aren’t going anywhere, Laura. You see that rope? It’s not me who’s going to be hanging from the beams tonight. It’s you.’
I stretched my arm out further, waving the knife at him. Only he edged closer to me, so he was just a couple of feet away. I stepped backwards again until I reached the wall.
‘Go on then, Laura, do your best. I’ve got nothing to lose because you have taken everything I had away from me already.’
It felt like someone had pressed pause on the moment; neither of us showing our hand or making the next move. Then suddenly Steven went to grab my wrist, his fingers digging in until they felt like they were going to break the bone. I yelled as he pulled me around and twisted my other arm behind my back and pushed me towards the rope. I struggled to break free, but he held me tighter and my fingers began to lose their grip on the knife until it fell to the floor.
‘Don’t worry, Laura. It’s not going to take long. The noose has been tied in exactly the way you told me to do it, at exactly the right height for a swift death.’
‘Please, Steven,’ I begged. ‘Whatever I’ve done to you, I’m sorry.’
‘It’s too late for that.’
‘I have children . . . I’m a mother . . .’
‘And they’d be better off without you.’
He grabbed the rope with his other hand and started to put it over my head. So I seized the opportunity to elbow him in the groin and kick his shin hard. The shock made him loosen his grip on my arm, just enough for me to shake completely free. I bent down, grabbed the knife, turned in his direction and thrust it blindly in front of me. It only stopped when I felt his hand grasp my wrist again and the knife went no further. But as I went to hit him with my free hand, he suddenly dropped to his knees. He looked up at me and then down at his stomach. My knife was embedded in him.
I froze – I had just stabbed the man I’d come to watch die. And while none of it had played out like it was supposed to, I had no desire to remain there any longer or even hear his last breath. Because what if he wasn’t alone? What if there were others waiting in the house? I needed to protect myself.
While Steven remained kneeling on the floor, groaning and clearly in pain, I bent over and, before he could prevent me, yanked the knife from his stomach. He screamed and fell to his side, shouting something but I couldn’t make out the words.
Then with all the strength I could muster, I ran from the room and along the landing. But without the torch lighting my way, in my panic I misjudged the first step on the staircase and hit the ridge of the second. I fell forward, head and body first, and my cheekbone smacked the base of the banister. Then I tumbled in a sideways motion, catching my forehead against the handrail as my body crumpled in a U-shape and came to a halt close to the bottom. Lying still, dazed and confused as to what had just happened, I only pulled myself together when I heard groaning and Steven dragging himself across the floorboards upstairs.
With all my remaining strength, I pulled myself to my feet with both hands gripping the handrail, and moved as quickly as I could towards the front door. Stumbling back into my car, I locked the doors and forced my key into the ignition. The wheels spun as I pulled away as fast as the Mini would allow.
RYAN
CHAPTER ONE
Drumming my fingers against the steering wheel in time with the beat of a song playing on the radio and singing at the top of my voice, I was pretty pleased I could still remember all the words to Justin Timberlake’s ‘SexyBack’ more than a decade after it played the night I met Charlotte at the student union bar.
She’d been dancing to it with a group of her friends when I saw her, then sparked up a drunken conversation. Lately, when she was going through one of her funks, I could still make her smile by dancing around the bedroom naked, miming along to the song, the irony being that bringing sexy back was pretty much the exact opposite of what I was doing.
I remembered her admitting on one of our first dates that she had a crush on Justin from his *NSYNC days. And after a few J?gerbombs, she confessed how, when she was a girl, she’d scribble out the face of his then-girlfriend Britney Spears in her mum’s gossip mags and pretend that she was dating him. I hoped her teenage self wouldn’t be too disappointed she was now Mrs Ryan Smith and not Mrs Timberlake.
I stopped the car at a red light and my eyes wandered uphill to Northampton’s skyline of new-build offices and high-rise flats. I’d been born and raised here and remembered how once, when it had felt so small and claustrophobic, I couldn’t wait to break out on my own. It only took a couple of terms at the University of Sunderland before I understood that once you strip away a town’s facade, they’re all the same underneath.
Charlotte’s willingness to laugh at the less cool aspects of herself was rare among the type of girls I’d hung out with back then. So was the way she looked. With her delicate features, chestnut curls, sky-blue stare and the androgynous clothes she wore, I knew early on that she was something special. Eleven years later and I was still right.
It was in our final year at uni when we decided to try to make it in London after graduation. We were fresh-faced, bursting with enthusiasm, and nothing could stop us from conquering the capital. Once we got there, the reality was that we were two anonymous little fish in a ginormous polluted pond. We shared a ridiculously overpriced flat above a Chinese takeaway, lived an hour’s commute from all the cool places we wanted to hang out at and barely had any spare cash to live the city life we’d imagined. But it served its purpose, and after a year of training it got me on the career ladder and we sucked it up without complaint.
Once we were married and had decided the time was right to start a family, I was adamant I didn’t want to do it in London. I landed a job back home before Charlotte did – she wasn’t so convinced it was the right place for us to be. However, she gave it a chance and started work as a graphic designer at an agency not far from the flat we bought together.
The traffic lights turned to green, and as January’s night began to fall I drove past Becket’s Park, just about making out the colourful moored canal boats in the marina. I couldn’t stop myself from grinning when I passed the Barratt maternity unit building, because in a little over two months, Charlotte and I would be waiting for a bed there. It hadn’t been easy: a combination of her polycystic ovaries and my low sperm count meant we’d had to rely on NHS-funded IVF to conceive. But on our second cycle, bingo! We were expectant parents.