The police should be on their way. Although… on a Saturday night they probably had their hands full with drinkers spilling out of city center pubs and bars. The thought brings me up short. What if the police took ten minutes to respond? Twenty? What then?
I had to get the lights back on.
The cellar door is already ajar, and I pull it open further, put out a tentative foot to find the top step. The staircase is dusty cold stone, edges worn smooth with time; the walls are bare flaking brick in this subterranean part of the house that feels untouched, unchanged since the house was first built more than a century ago.
Dank, stale air greets me as I descend. The damp smells of old earth and rust and rot, but also the faintest note of—what? Something sweet, musky, like aftershave. Or perfume? At the bottom of the short flight of steps, I have to hunch over to avoid the cross-beams at head height. The three pitch-black compartments of the old cellar are creepy enough with the lights on but with only the pale jumping shadows thrown by my torch, they look like something out of a horror movie. I shine the light into each one as I pass anyway, the rolling pin gripped tightly in my right hand. But there’s only cobwebbed junk, old boxes, tins of paint, rusting metal garden chairs.
The circuit box is in the third compartment, a two-foot panel on the wall enclosed in a clear plastic cover. I flinchas something drops onto my shoulder and runstick-tick-tickdown my bare arm.
A spider. Just a spider, scuttling off into the dark.
The master circuit breaker on the panel has been flipped down to the “off” setting. I flick it back up with a solidclickto switch the power back on, then reset all other switches one by one, still hunched over to avoid banging my head on the low beams. Everything is still in darkness: the nearest light switch is at the top of the cellar stairs.
I’m halfway up the steps when I hear the scuff of a foot above me, the creak of a hinge.
I shine the torch toward the half-open door at the top of the stairs. In the second before a blindingly bright light shines right in my eyes I can just make out a figure, a mask, a balaclava with only a pale slit for the eyes before the sole of a heavy boot kicks the air from my chest and then I’m falling, a flash of spinning light as the phone tumbles from my hand and the hard brick floor of the cellar rushes up to meet—
PART III
There is so much the so-called experts get wrong. They say we live on the margins, that we all come from broken homes, that we can’t manage in day-to-day life. That we will eventually spiral and break under the pressure of what we do, so we can be singled out from the crowd and caught.
Wrong.
Why? Because those theories don’t take in the whole picture. They’re based purely on a particular subset of people like us: the ones who got caught.
48
SUNDAY
The paramedic is shining a light in my eyes.
I do what she tells me, following the movement of the penlight as it swings from left to right and back again. I’m on a kitchen chair, dressing gown bunched at my waist for an examination of the cuts and bruises on my forearms, the sprain of my left wrist, bruising to my chest and angry red abrasions to the skin on my back.
Her main concern, however, is the head injury.
The pain at the back of my skull is a furious, relentless throb that feels as if something is ready to burst. I can remember falling backward—beingkickedbackward—down the cellar steps, the sick sensation of being in mid-air with nothing to break my fall, nothing to grab onto, a brief explosion of pain as I hit the solid brick floor and then… nothing. Opening my eyes to agonizing bright light, dirt and blood sticky against my cheek, all the pain in the world radiating in hot red waves from the back of my head. Jess’s desperate voice cutting through everything as she knelt beside me.
There had been no sign of the masked intruder by the time she ventured downstairs, turning on lights and calling my name as she went. Just me, knocked out cold and flat on my back in the cellar. Slowly coming to as she said my name over and over, feeling as if I’d been clubbed with a cricket bat.
The police have already been and gone, two harassed-looking officers arriving in a blur of blue lights and crackling radios, checking the house and garden for signs that anyone was still lurking around. The paramedics were only cleared to come in once the police had told them it was safe to do so, before the officers had been called away again to some kind of incident in the city center. One of their colleagues from the day shift would return in the next forty-eight hours, they said, to take a statement. In lieu of a police car outside the house, Jess had switched on every single light downstairs—all the rooms ablaze as if illumination alone might frighten away a return visit from the night-time attacker.
Callum stares at the two paramedics, working steadily in their green jumpsuits, as if they are aliens arrived from another planet. Leah sits at the kitchen table beside him, her forehead creased with concern. She was so surprised to be woken that she even forgot to bring her phone downstairs with her. Weirdly, Daisy is the only one of us who seems to have slept through it all; through the arrival and departure of the police; the paramedics hefting their bulky treatment bags into the kitchen; the kettle boiling as Jess made cups of tea, coffee, and hot chocolate for everyone.
The paramedic, whose name is Farida, switches off her penlight and stows it in a pocket of her equipment vest.
“Adam?” she says, moving a blue-gloved hand carefully over the side of my head. “What day is it today?”
“Err… Saturday.” I glance up at the calendar on the fridge, the movement sending more sharp skewers of agony through my head. “No. Wait. No, it’s Sunday. Must be Sunday morning now.”
Her colleague is behind me, cleaning the head wound with a brisk efficiency and apologizing each time I tense with pain.He winds overlapping strips of bandage over the wound like a headband, securing it with medical tape.
When he’s finished with the dressing, Farida checks the other side of my head, applying gentle pressure with her fingertips. “And what’s the name of the street where you live?”
I blink, groping for the right answer. “Regency… Place.”
She feels behind my ears, looking—I assume—for injury sites other than the gash at the back of my head. Finally, she lowers her hands and sits back in the chair.
“You’ve had a pretty nasty bang on the head, Adam. I’ve given you a preliminary examination and we’ve dressed the external wound but I’d like to get you properly checked at Queen’s Medical Centre, all right? So if you want to take a minute to get a few clothes, something to wear on your feet, and we’ll take you down—”
