At first glance I assumed she was dead. She lay on her back. Her chest was a mess of blood. Two shots, close up. She’d probably answered the door and been hit straight away. Stumbled back as her heart stopped pumping, collapsed into the study as her muscles failed without the hydraulic support from the heart.
I felt her neck, making sure, and her eyes flickered open.
She looked at me, pleading. I touched her face.
She’d told me her boss would be disappointed, the last time we’d been in this room.
Her lips moved soundlessly. I leant in close, but I still couldn’t hear.
It wasn’t like in the movies, where the dying man gives a monologue, then gently closes his eyes. It doesn’t work likethat. The body has shut down. The lungs have expelled their last breath. No air to make the words.
I watched her lips. She brought her bottom lip to her teeth. It looked like an ‘f’, then her mouth went slack.
‘Fault,’ she said.
Another crash from the kitchen. I was crouching on the floor in the drawing room, my back to the door. Every fibre in my body screamed at me to turn, to face the threat.
I stayed with Kate for her last seconds, my hand on her cheek, my eyes locked on hers. I owed her that much.
People talk about the dying finding peace in their final seconds. It’s a comforting thought. It’s coming to us all, so we tell ourselves fairy tales about the experience. Kate wasn’t at peace. Her eyes widened in panic, her brain pleading with her lungs to breathe, refusing to believe the truth. I held her gaze. Even blinking would have been cowardice, allowing myself a respite. I kept my eyes locked on hers until the hundreds of muscles in her face slackened in death.
The back door slammed, and the house was quiet. I listened carefully. Nothing. No creaks of someone shifting because they’d had to hide. No quiet steps of somebody determined to deal with an unwelcome visitor. Just the distant call of wood pigeons in the trees.
‘Your fault,’ she’d said. She was right.
*
The kitchen was a mess. The younger son, his nose black from our fight, sat in his armchair by the fire. A cup of tea and half a slice of toast on the table next to him. A few minutes ago he’d been eating his breakfast, back from his overnight stay with the MPs. Now he was dead.
A slight breeze on my neck was the only warning I got. Displaced air, pushed in front of a fast-moving object. A fraction of a second that made the difference between victim and participant, from dead to still fighting. Something was swinging towards the back of my neck. A killing blow.
Instinct kicked in. I launched myself forwards, away from the threat, buying myself more time to assess the situation and plan my counter-attack. I hit the ground and rolled across the tiled floor, my boots clattering against the enamelled stove as I ran out of room. My assailant was already following. He had a knife in his hand, a short, double blade. A soldier’s knife.
I’d been expecting a German uniform, like the parachutists in the comic books Frankie read. But he was dressed in a Tommy’s uniform. Salt stains at chest level, from where he’d waded out into the sea, from the beach at Dunkirk.
It took me a second to recognise him. One of the deserters I’d found in my woods and given dinner. The sergeant. The back door was open behind him. He’d come back.
He paused. He had me cornered, he could allow himself a breather. A mistake, which told me I was dealing with someone who hadn’t yet become habituated to killing. Here was a man for whom the rules of society still held some sway. A fact I could use against him.
‘I don’t care what you did here,’ I said.
Not true, of course, I rather did care, but he had a knife and I didn’t.
In his hyper-alert state, his logical mind had to fight for resources. The expression on his face telegraphed the turmoil. Hard to think straight when your blood’s up and adrenaline has shut down everything apart from your fight-or-flight reflex.
The decision was telegraphed on his face. His jaw set, his eyes focused.
Above me, a rack of pans hung above the stove. Heavy, black, cast iron. I made a show of looking past him, to the back door, and feinted that way. He took the bait and shifted to his left, blocking my escape. But I wasn’t interested in escape. I’d given him a chance to run, and he’d made his choice. It was a decision that was going to work out badly for him if I had anything to do with it.
I reached up and grabbed a frying pan eighteen inches across. Its grey oak handle fitted my grip perfectly. I could have spent hours trying to design the perfect weapon to bring to a knife fight and not improved on this. Three feet from the tip of the handle to the end of the pan. A large mass, impervious to the knife and certain to do damage to any part of the human body it struck, if swung with force.
He made the same calculation. He backed away, pushing aside a chair with a screech of wood on stone.
He transferred the knife to his left hand, freeing up his right. My heart sank. I could only think of one good reason for that, and he proved me right. He reached behind his waist and came up with a Webley revolver, standard army issue.
I raised my hands. It was what you were meant to do in that situation, if you were to believe the movies. Your assailant would be duty-bound to treat you with grudging respect, take you prisoner, or leave you to fight again another day. Not massively realistic based on what I’d seen in Flanders, or the North-West Frontier. If it was you and another man, and one of you had a gun, there was only one way that encounter was going to end.
But my assailant was a young man. He hadn’t been at Flanders, or in the dusty mountains of Afghanistan. He thought he was dealing with a man of honour.
