Bloodline

24

Run, my body told me, flooding adrenalin into my bloodstream ready for the flight. But where to? The only way out was past Brendan.

Or was it? I dragged some fragment of memory back into my mind.

Fire escape.

Hadn’t I once been told that there was a way out over the roof in case of a fire?

I turned and ran the other way, away from him, sprinting down to the far end of the corridor and up the metal staircase towards the photo-finish box, and the door to the roof, rummaging madly to get my phone out of my pocket.

I could hear Brendan coming after me.

I wondered if he’d have a knife. I didn’t want to look.

I fumbled with the door and finally turned the lock, tripped over the step, and fell out onto the grandstand roof, dropping my phone in the process. I searched madly for it with my hands, but it had fallen through the metal grille of the walkway floor, and my fingers couldn’t reach.

I could now hear Brendan on the stairs, so I moved quickly away from the door, down the walkway towards the back of the roof, to the spot where I had watched the horses the previous week. I looked down at the now deserted parade ring. Where was a policeman when you needed him most?

The sky above was pitch black but there was enough light spillage from the racecourse floodlights for me to see across the roof quite well.

There was a junction in the walkway and I had to make a decision. Which way was the fire escape?

Surely, I thought, there should have been a sign.

I went right but quickly learned that it was wrong. The walkway came to an abrupt end after about fifteen yards, next to an electrical junction box.

I turned round and came face to face with Brendan.

He was standing about ten or so paces away and looking pretty pleased with himself. Something flashed in his right hand.

‘Is that the same knife you used to kill Toby Woodley?’ I had to shout over the continuous whirr of the air-conditioners.

If he was surprised by the question he didn’t show it.

He took a step towards me.

‘And did you murder Clare too?’ I shouted.

He took another step forward.

I threw my black leather bag at him then ducked under the walkway’s railings and ran over the corrugated steel roof.

Brendan followed.

The grandstand roof wasn’t flat, and I don’t just mean the corrugations.

The whole structure sloped up at the front like a giant ramp. And there was a lighting gantry, an enormous framework that extended some twenty feet outwards and upwards from the front edge, holding several banks of floodlights.

I clambered through the main spar that ran right across the middle of the roof. I was trying to double back to the fire escape, or return to the door, but Brendan cut me off and drove me on towards the front of the grandstand, towards the slope.

Twice he got so close that I could feel him grabbing for the collar of my coat but, each time, I managed to pull myself away.

I was thirty-one and Brendan was nearly ten years older, but I was hampered by my broken ribs that made scrambling over the large steel pipes of the structure exceedingly painful. He, meanwhile, seemed to skip over them with ease.

I reached one of the walkways, rolled myself through the railings, stood up, and ran.

But still it wasn’t the right way for the fire escape.

The walkway ended next to another junction box.

Dammit.

I turned round, kicking something loose on the floor. I looked down. There were several poles, like scaffolding poles but smaller in diameter. They appeared to be the same stuff that the railings round the walkways were made of, probably left behind after construction.

I quickly bent down and picked up one that was about six feet in length.

Brendan was facing me on the walkway.

I jabbed the end of the pole towards him and he stepped back a stride, so I did it again.

We stood like that for what seemed an age, but it was probably only a few seconds.

It was a stand-off — me with the pole and him with a knife.

I advanced a stride, jabbing the pole forward. He retreated slightly.

‘What are you doing?’ I shouted at him. ‘I’m your cousin.’

He didn’t reply. He just stared at me with no emotion visible on his face.

‘Did you kill Toby Woodley?’

No reply.

‘How about Clare?’ I shouted. ‘Did you kill her too?’

‘I loved Clare,’ Brendan said. ‘And she loved me.’

The mystery boyfriend, I thought. The wonderful lover who had made her happy.

Her own cousin.

My cousin.

My married cousin with two teenage children.

‘What happened in that hotel room?’ I shouted at him.

He said nothing.

‘Did you push her off the balcony?’

He continued to stare at me but, in spite of the dimness, I thought I could read some pain in his eyes.

‘Did you know she was pregnant?’ I shouted.

He went on staring at me.

‘She was six or seven weeks pregnant.’

Still nothing. He had known.

‘Was it yours?’

It had to be, but he went on saying nothing.

‘Was that why you killed her? Did she want an abortion?’

His head came up a bit. ‘Shut up.’

‘So was that it?’ I said. ‘You wanted the child and she didn’t?’

He slowly shook his head. ‘It was the other way round.’ He spoke quietly and I had to strain to hear him. ‘She did it on purpose, to trap me.’

It was not an excuse. There can be no excuse for murder.

I thought I could see tears on his face. Crocodile tears.

‘It’s no good crying now,’ I shouted at him. ‘You shouldn’t have killed her.’

‘It was an accident,’ he shouted back.

‘Oh, yeah,’ I said, mocking him. ‘Just like it was an accident in the pub car park on Sunday? You killed Clare, just like you killed Emily, and you nearly killed me, twice. Why don’t you admit it, you bastard?’

‘I told you,’ he screamed at me. ‘It was an accident. I just pushed her away and she...’ He tailed off. ‘She tripped. I didn’t mean her to fall.’

He was mad with anger, and with grief.

That made two of us.

‘Did you make her write the note?’ I shouted.

‘What note?’

‘The suicide note.’

‘There was no note. I told you, it was a bloody accident.’

‘And was sticking a knife into Toby Woodley’s back also a bloody accident?’

‘He deserved it,’ Brendan said with real menace in his voice. ‘The bastard was blackmailing me.’

‘He was blackmailing everyone,’ I said, ‘but no one else killed him.’

‘He knew about Clare and me. He said he’d put it in the paper.’

I wondered whether Toby had really known, or had just been guessing. Perhaps a blackmail note had given him the true answer. It had certainly condemned him to death.

‘But you blackmailed people too,’ I said. I thought back to the handwritten zeros added to the amounts. ‘And you were much greedier than Toby.’

‘It seemed like an opportunity not to be missed.’ He was suddenly smiling as if pleased with himself. I couldn’t think why. To continue the blackmail had been stupid and far too risky, and it had finally given him away.

‘And what about me?’ I said. ‘Why did you try to kill me?’

‘You said at the funeral that you were going to see the video from the hotel.’

‘And you thought I’d recognize you?’

He nodded.

He’d almost been right.

He suddenly lunged forward and grabbed the end of the pole with his left hand, pulling it sharply towards him, with me along with it.

He slashed at my hands with the knife and I had to let go or else I’d have lost my fingers.

Now the tables were turned and he jabbed the end of the pole towards my face, forcing me to duck wildly sideways.

This really isn’t funny, I thought, and, maybe for the first time, I was scared, very scared.

I tried to reach down to pick up another of the poles but Brendan swung the one he had in a great arc, bringing it down heavily on my back between my shoulder blades. It would have landed on my head and killed me if I hadn’t seen it at the last second and ducked.

Even so, the blow was bad enough, driving the air out of my lungs and causing me to drop to my knees. My broken ribs didn’t like it much either.

I sensed, rather than saw, the pole being lifted again for another blow. This time, I thought, it will be fatal.

I rolled to my left out through the railings of the walkway and onto the roof proper, as the pole smacked down into the place where I had just been.

I was not going to bloody die, I told myself. Not here. Not now.

I stood up, dragged some air into my aching and injured lungs, and ran.

I ran on the corrugated steel, towards the front of the grandstand, and I could hear Brendan running behind me. I didn’t have time to look back but I was sure he’d have the pole in his hands, ready to strike me down as soon as he got within range.

I ran up the slope of the roof and didn’t stop when I got to the brink. I didn’t even pause, I ran like a tightrope walker, straight out from the edge on one of the cylindrical spars of the lighting gantry.

Desperate situations necessitate desperate measures, and running as fast as I could along an eight-inch diameter metal spar with nothing but air beneath for more than a hundred feet was desperate indeed.

And the spar wasn’t horizontal. It sloped up at an ever-increasing angle as I moved away from the edge of the roof towards the floodlights. I was tightrope-walking uphill and my stability only came from the movement.

As the slope caused me to slow, I began to wobble.

I went down on my hands and knees, clutching with my fingers at the metal, trying to dig my nails into the smooth, hard paint.

Nevertheless, I began to slide backwards, down the spar, back towards the edge of the grandstand roof, and back towards Brendan and his pole.

It wouldn’t take much for him to push me off with it.

All there was below me was hard, unforgiving and deserted concrete, a hundred and twenty feet away, straight down. The fifteenth floor of the Hilton Hotel, or the roof of the Kempton Park grandstand — different distances, maybe, but the outcome would be much the same.

I could imagine what would be said: It’s such a shame — Mark never came to terms with his twin sister’s suicide, nor the loss of another close friend and the break-up of a long-term relationship. But he found a way out of his pain.

I managed to turn myself over so that I was now sitting on the spar with my ankles locked together beneath it, and my hands down in front of me on the cold metal.

But still I slid down, inch by inch.

Brendan was standing just short of the edge of the grandstand roof proper, holding the pole in both hands and watching me intently as I moved ever so slowly, but inexorably, towards him.

He stepped forward and swung the pole at me.

I had time to see it coming and, keeping my legs tight round the spar, I leaned right back flat against it as the pole whizzed past harmlessly just inches from my eyes.

But the sudden movement meant that I slid still further down the spar.

Next time I’d easily be in range. I knew it and so did Brendan.

I tried my best to climb away from him but, for all my efforts, I only managed to slide even closer.

Brendan was smiling again. He was sure he had me now.

But not if I could help it.

As he swung the metal pole at me I purposely leaned forward into it, taking a heavy blow on my left wrist, which made my whole left arm go numb.

However, at the same time, I grabbed the pole firmly with my right hand, and pulled hard.

Just as it had done with me earlier, it caught Brendan unawares.

He should have let go.

Even so, he would probably have been all right if the grandstand roof had been flat at the front edge, enabling him to have a steady stance. But it wasn’t. The slope meant that he was leaning forward slightly anyway, and now my sharp tug on the pole had him reeling over the abyss.

I could see the horror on his face as he pitched forward, grasping desperately for the wire stays that criss-crossed the framework to give it added stiffness.

But he didn’t fall.

The bulk of his body had come over the edge of the roof but it was still supported by the pole that lay underneath him, held up at one end by a wire stay.

The other end of the pole was still in my right hand, and Brendan’s weight was beginning to rotate me alarmingly around the spar.

I looked across at him and he stared back at me, terror deeply etched in his features, a dreadful realization apparent in his eyes — his zombie eyes.

I thought of my darling sister Clare, and also of the lovely Emily, and what might have been.

Maybe I could have saved him if I’d wanted to, or maybe I couldn’t.

I’d never know.

I let the pole slip through my fingers, and decided to look upwards at the black sky rather than downwards at the concrete.

I had no wish to witness another of Brendan’s ‘accidents’.