Emma stared at him, her eyes wide, and nodded. He reached inside the pocket of his jacket and drew out a knife in a scabbard. She thought it looked like the kind of thing you’d go hunting with.
Holding one hand up still to make sure she kept her distance, he crept towards the stairs and began to climb them. Emma watched him go, fear rising in her and threatening to erupt into panic. Not daring to move her feet, Emma jammed a fist into her mouth.
At the top of the steps James paused, his ear to the door. The unsheathed knife in his left hand, he took hold of the doorknob with his right, hesitated a second, then twisted it and flung the door open.
Emma watched him step out, turn. She heard a rustle of movement, followed by a gritted gasp of pain.
Then fast footsteps, a thud followed by a crash as what sounded like a human body collided with a door, and the snarling sounds of fighting.
Emma released the breath she’d been suppressing, terrified by the sounds she could hear in the absence of any visual guide to put them in context. She stared about her, not knowing what she was looking for but desperate to find something that might be useful in some way. Apart from the chairs, and the bucket and mop James had used to clean the floor, there was nothing.
She couldn’t stay there, in the cellar, like some zoo animal or lab rat.
Emma started up the steps, her legs faltering like a foal’s. From above her she could hear a choked groaning, as though somebody was being throttled.
At the open door, she stopped. The sounds of struggle were coming from down the corridor, to her right.
The front door was on her left, a few feet away.
Coward, a voice told her.
But another voice, a more reasonable one, said: It’s the only way. You’d be no help to James. You’d just get yourself killed.
Terror and adrenaline reaching a peak within her — she couldn’t tell one from the other — Emma pushed through the door way and reached the front door.
From behind her a voice called, ‘Emma.’
She turned. It was an involuntary move, triggered by the familiarity of the voice.
At the end of the corridor, in the shadows, two shapes were locked together on the ground. She saw James’s white face turn to the side as if he were trying to look round at her. Beneath him, on the stone floor, was another man, his face obscured by a mask of some kind.
It was he who’d called her. And James had turned to see what she was doing.
The man beneath did something with his legs, a roar escaping his mouth through clenched teeth, and James was lifted up to sprawl backwards on his bottom.
Emma stood at the front door, petrified, knowing she needed to run, to get out into the street and get clear and try afterwards to make sense of it all; but she was unable to move her limbs.
The man in the mask rose to his knees and extended his arms. There was something in his hands, something that glinted in the thin light.
The explosions rocked Emma’s ears, claps of thunder that echoed through the corridor, two of them followed by a solitary third.
James was hurled back, his body jerking, a spray of something hot and black in the darkness lashing across the stone floor. He crashed hard, supine, one arm flung out at his side.
Emma clapped her hands to her ears and screamed, the sound choking off as her throat closed. The after-noise of the shots rang on and on, the air in the corridor rich with the stench of cordite and blood.
The other man rose, pulled off his mask. Despite the darkness Emma could see his face clearly.
‘Emma,’ he said quietly.
Brian.
Fifty-five
Tullivant drove, his route meandering but broadly purposeful, describing wide and irregular arcs away from the house in Fulham but staying this side of the river.
In the back, the only sound Emma made was a periodic, muffled sob.
Her wrists and ankle were bound with plastic ties from a supply he kept in his kit bag. In her mouth was a gag, secure enough to prevent most sound from seeping past but not so tight that she was in danger of suffocating. He kept his ears open for sounds of vomiting, which would put her in danger of aspiration.
When he’d been sure she wasn’t going to run out the front door, rooted as she was to the spot in shock, Tullivant had swiftly gone through Cromer’s pockets. He’d left the dead man’s own phone — it could have all sorts of alarms, bugs or traces built into it — but taken the one he’d recognised as Emma’s. Apart from the hunting knife, the man was unarmed.
Tullivant used a strip from the dead man’s shirt to bind the wound in his right arm. The man had thrown well. A few inches to the left and the blade would have penetrated Tullivant’s chest.
Tullivant’s blood was smeared on the floor, the walls, the living room door. In an ideal situation he’d have spent an hour scrubbing it off, and scoring the entire corridor to eliminate other traces of his DNA. In an ideal world, he’d also have taken time to remove Cromer’s body and dispose of it elsewhere, far away.
He’d used a suppressor on the Heckler amp; Koch, but the echo in the empty corridor had been loud enough to alert whoever lived next door, and probably others in the neighbourhood as well. And Emma’s scream would have put paid to anyone’s doubts that they’d heard something unusual in the house at the end of the terrace.
Tullivant left Cromer’s body where it was. He reached Emma in four rapid strides. She cowered against the closed front door, her arms crossed in front of her, her entire body shaking as though in the grip of a fever. She recoiled when he reached for her, but she didn’t try to run away.
Tullivant put his arms round her, held her close, feeling her face against his chest, her lips moving silently. He maintained the embrace for ten long seconds, feeling her juddering slow a fraction.
He took a quick look at her face. The frozen panic had been replaced by a dull caul of passivity.
Tullivant slipped the balaclava back on. Taking Emma gently but firmly by the upper arm, he pushed open the front door and led her down the short driveway, glancing about as he went. Lights blazed across the street and in the house next door. Silhouetted figures peered from behind slanting curtains.
Not breaking his stride, he marched Emma to the Mazda. Her eyes widened a little when she saw it, as if its stultifying familiarity brought home to her the horror of her situation.
She struggled only briefly, and weakly, as Tullivant bundled her into the back. He said, very soft and low: ‘Emma, no,’ and his tone was warning enough that he didn’t have to pull his leather jacket aside to reveal the grip of his gun or anything as melodramatic as that. She went limp, her face averted, her eyes closed, as he secured first the ties, then the gag.
He pulled away, leaving behind a house with a dead body, copious traces of his own recent presence, and a neighbourhood which had heard gunfire and witnessed a man and a woman fleeing the scene.
The situation was messy, that was for sure. But most messes could be cleaned up, given enough time and resources. And Tullivant had plenty of the latter to call upon.
It was the more immediate mess he was less optimistic about.
Tullivant said, ‘Emma, are you conscious? Can you hear me?’
A moan rose from the back seat.
‘In a little while, once we’re a safe distance away, I’m going to take the gag off you and ask you some questions. I’m telling you now because I want to give you the chance to think very, very carefully about how you answer.’
Silence.
He went on: ‘First of all, no matter how frightened you are now, no matter how confused, I want you to know that the children are completely safe. They’ll come to no harm at all, no matter what happens.’
Another low moan, and a sob.