He Said/She Said(111)

‘Beth. If we could just finish up, please,’ he says. Is it my imagination or is his voice losing its previous conviction? ‘If you could just remind me of the last sentence you wrote and we can carry on from there.’

The pen skips in her hand but she doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t even look up from the page.

‘Fine, I’ll dictate it, then.’ He clears his throat. ‘I am profoundly sorry that I took something perfectly natural and enjoyable and twisted it around. I apologise to Jamie and Antonia Balcombe and their extended family for the distress caused by my false allegation. I am willing to make a statement in court, and –’ the tip of the knife traces tiny patterns, as though Jamie were carving his words in the air – ‘face up to any criminal or civil actions that come my way as a result of this retraction of my original statement.’ He turns his head to me. ‘To be honest, we can end Laura’s statement the same way.’

Beth’s hand has stopped moving.

‘Write it down,’ says Jamie. The knife in his hand trembles dangerously. Laura’s tears glisten in the notch at the base of her neck as Beth sets down the pen.

‘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.