The last thing she’d ever see from her left eye was a screaming witch with a pointy fist: that so nearly came true, it haunted Louisa’s sleep for weeks. But she jerked her head aside in time and stepped backwards, her left foot coming down on one of Ho’s discarded mugs, which broke beneath her heel and sent her pitching to the floor. She shouted as she fell, and saw from a crazy angle, like a fragment of jigsaw puzzle, River appear in the bedroom doorway.
There was no time for strategy, only for action. The woman who’d opened the wardrobe door was out of the game; the following second, a man had joined her. Kim had hit him full tilt: her head, his stomach. He was lean enough – it wasn’t like butting a pillow – but her head was harder, and full of bad thoughts. He staggered back and Kim whipped under his outstretched arm and took the stairs four at a time; more of a controlled fall than a mannered descent, but even so another figure materialised before she’d reached the bottom and grabbed her collar so her feet left the floor. The pair collapsed in a heap, and Kim slashed wildly behind with her makeshift weapon, catching flesh and hearing an outraged squawk from the barrel-shaped creature who’d caught her. The grip loosened. Kim was on her feet immediately, opening the front door. From overhead there was noise, numbers one and two getting upright and coming after her, but she was outside now, on the street, and here was another one: a man in a hoodie, a dangerous odour coming off him. He was reaching into his pouch and Kim couldn’t have that, she knew what men like this reached for, and she slashed again, the wire hanger a diagonal flash in the night air. He jerked back but she caught his chin: a few drops of blood kissed her face. No time to worry about that, because he’d recovered already, had grabbed her arm, and for a moment it was over; the three in the house were regrouping now, and this one had her in his grip, but it required no thought for Kim to do what she did next, which was knee him in the balls: a traditional move but it still had legs, and he folded immediately. Free from his grasp, she headed down the street at speed.
Without slowing she wriggled her hand from the hanger, which fell to the pavement like a discarded Easter crown. She crossed the road, ran past a line of parked vehicles to the junction, and was about make a sharp left when a car door swung open in front of her. Kim smacked into it, bounced back, and hit the ground so hard that all the bones in her body lit up like fairy lights.
Something heavy emerged and stood over her; an awful beast about to shatter its prey.
‘I’m strictly anti-chauvinist, as you know,’ it said. ‘But I do like to open a door for a lady.’
But Kim had stopped listening by then.
WHELAN MADE SOME PHONE calls, and while he spoke, while he listened, watched the boys and girls on the hub. One young woman in particular he kept an eye on; purely paternal – she resembled a young Claire – but his gaze tightened if she leaned across her desk to address a colleague, or bent to a drawer. There was a blank space in Claude Whelan’s memory. He kept it that way. If someone had taxed him with the details of that long-ago night, the conversation with the girl on the corner, the appearance of the plain-clothes officer, the hours in custody before it was all made to go away, he’d have been genuinely puzzled for a moment, unable to remember whether it had happened to him or been something he’d read about, so hard had he tamped the episode down. A blip, he’d have said, if pressed. A regrettable lapse, long behind him. He was content with Claire, with their perfect marriage, and if her interest in the physical side had waned from not very to nothing, that was a small price to pay for her constant support.
Jackson Lamb, of course, had ferreted out the details; had dangled them in front of Claude like a dog with a kill, its mouth full of feathers, but all he appeared to want was that Claude leave him and his alone.
For the time being, that would have to do.
