“What I want,” Carew grinned, “the same as you.”
Sarah kicked out with her bare leg, fast but not quite fast enough, her shin catching him high inside the thigh, and as he hopped back she aimed her elbow at his face, felt it strike something and barged past him towards the front room and the phone.
He caught her below the waist and flung her round, the knuckles at the back of one hand grazed against the iron of the fireplace and her head and shoulder thumped against the side of the easy chair. He jerked her again and lost his grip and she fell heavily on the base of her spine and cried out with the sharpness of the pain.
“Now,” Carew said, not unpleasantly, “why don’t we stop all this silly pretending?”
“When exactly was it,” Resnick asked, “that you realized what you had to do?”
Ridgemount’s gaze lifted from the table. “When I read it in the paper, what bad been done to that young doctor, the way they described how he’d been cut, with a scalpel, cut about the legs so’s likely he’d never walk again. That’s when I knew. Joseph, I said to myself, that’s what you have to do.”
Resnick’s pulse was beginning to race. He had to be sure. “This young doctor, what was his name?”
Ridgemount looked surprised. “Fletcher. Tim Fletcher.”
“You weren’t responsible for that attack?”
Ridgemount glanced over towards Patel, shook his head. “Haven’t I been telling you?”
“Wait,” said Resnick, on his feet, keeping his voice as calm as he was able, “with Mr. Ridgemount. Let him continue with his statement. I’ll send someone else along.”
He closed the door firmly and then began to run towards the CID room.
“Now isn’t this better,” Carew was saying, “instead of all that fighting? And over what?”
He was lying next to her, part on top of her, one leg and the weight of his chest pinning her down, pressing her back against the front of the settee. The roughness of the cheap carpet was rubbing against her leg, against her hip, and her other leg was going numb. Carew was playing with her breast, pausing every now and then to kiss her mouth, the side of her face, to slide his tongue inside her ear.
“And just wait,” he smiled, “it’ll get a good deal better.” He lowered his mouth to her face and licked a line from below her ear around towards her chin. “That’s what I could never understand about Karen. Silly little cow! Didn’t know a good thing when she felt one. Dumping me for Fletcher. Pathetic!” Carew slid his tongue inside Sarah’s ear and slowly out again. “Still,” he grinned, “soon cut him down to size.”
The two cars cornered too quickly, almost colliding with one another as they swung into Carew’s street. A third was pulling up in the road at the rear, not wanting to get caught out the same way a second time. Divine hammered hard at the door and when a sleepy medical student opened it warily, he barged him aside and went in, Naylor close behind.
Sitting in the second car next to Lynn Kellogg, Resnick thought, he isn’t going to be there, eating a take-away and watching television, it isn’t going to be that easy.
“When we picked Carew up,” Resnick said, “he was chatting up one of the nurses, Sarah Leonard …”
“You think he might be out with her?”
“I don’t think we should wait around on the off chance they come wandering back, hand in hand. Get through to the station, see if her address is on file. If not, check with the hospital. Don’t let them give you no for an answer.”
Resnick got out of the car and walked along the pavement to where Divine and Naylor were now standing.
Carew readjusted his weight, used his knees to ease Sarah’s legs further apart.
“Aah,” he breathed, closing his eyes. “This is going to be beautiful.” Opening them again, face so close to hers, “Don’t you think?”
“Yes,” Sarah said.
Ian Carew smiled and sank himself down.
Sarah braced the fingers of both hands against his forehead, found his eyes with her thumbs and pressed as hard as she could. Carew screamed and arched back and she continued to squeeze her thumbs into the sockets, rocking him off balance without slackening her grip and managing, almost, to roll him over, till he punched her in the stomach and she couldn’t prevent one of her hands from jerking away and then the other. He screamed at her and this time she hooked her thumbs into the corners of his mouth and pulled. Carew swung up and knocked her clear, forcing her away with his legs; stumbling to his feet then, jeans around his thighs, unable to keep his hands from rubbing at his eyes.
Sarah pushed at him hard, stiff-armed, and as he fell backwards she raced for the door. She had the top bolt back and was working on the second, the one that always stuck, when Carew staggered into the hall. For a moment she froze, thinking he was going to come for her, but instead he went in the other direction, towards the scullery where he had broken in; a wave of relief swept through her and she ran back into the front room for the phone.
He hadn’t gone away: he had gone to the kitchen for a knife.
His words came with difficulty, jagged spaces in between.
“You bitch … fucking stupid … bitch … I’m going to … kill you for that.”
Sarah screamed.
She grabbed at a cushion and held it out in front of herself as Carew closed in with the knife. She continued to scream, loud enough to be heard in the street.
Resnick charged the front door with his shoulder and very little happened. He and Lynn barged it together and it shifted against its hinges but wasn’t about to give. Resnick lifted the green dustbin from the front yard and yelled a warning just before putting it through the glass of the front window.
The screaming stopped.
Lynn Kellogg was in the room first, in and racing towards the back of the house, following Carew. “Lynn!” Resnick called. “Let him go!” He knew Divine and Naylor were out there somewhere, covering the back alley. To his right, Sarah Leonard swayed and Resnick moved swiftly to her, fearing she might fall. “Are you all right?” he asked, sensing the emptiness of the words as he spoke them. Sarah nodded once and shivered as she pulled the cushion close against herself and hugged it tight. Resnick picked up the phone to call for a doctor, the ambulance.
As he ran, Carew clawed at the jeans that were slipping back down his legs. He couldn’t properly see where he was going and he was rocking from side to side, scraping himself against the chain-link fence, grazing his leg against the brickwork of the wall.
Lynn saw the discarded pram in time and hurdled over it, cursing herself for being so unfit, aware that by rights Divine and Naylor were waiting to pick Carew up but knowing how much she wanted him herself.
Thirty yards ahead of her, Carew’s toe caught the edge of a sodden mattress and he lost his footing and that was all she needed. When she took hold of him, one arm in a choke hold round his neck, her free hand tightening on his right wrist, Carew still had the kitchen knife gripped tight. Lynn shifted her balance so that one of her knees was pressing hard into the small of Carew’s back and then, as she would say later in her report, she applied the necessary pressure to the prisoner’s arm to make him drop the weapon he was carrying.
The flicker of light came from Divine’s torch as he and Naylor hurried towards her.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yes. Yes. Thank you. I’ll be fine.”
Resnick stood over her, hesitating. The sound of the ambulance siren could be heard as it approached along the main road heading into the city.
Sarah Leonard had refastened her dressing gown and sat the cushion in her lap; she had only looked at Resnick once in the past few moments. She looked up again now as Kevin Naylor came into the room from the rear of the house. “We’ve got him, sir. Lynn got him. And a knife. He’s on his way back to the station.”
“Good work.”
Sarah started to shake then, cry tears of relief. Resnick knelt alongside her and held her until the ambulance arrived and the paramedics helped her away.