Snakehead

I

It was twilight by the time she got to Conroe. The last of the day filtered through the trees, and the lake lay still, like glass, reflecting a sky where the first stars were already appearing in a pale blue shading to dark. The blood had drained out of the western horizon, and the flat Texan landscape stretched away into a shimmering eternity.

Margaret’s Chevy bumped up the long dirt track to the Mendez ranch, raising a cloud of orange dust in its wake. She had nowhere else to go. All her things were here, and she could not face a night alone in a hotel room. She felt safe enough in light of Mendez’s remorse, and whatever uneasiness she had about facing him was nothing compared to the aching hollow space that filled her heart. The Bronco was parked opposite the garage, and as she punched in the access code to open the door to the house, she heard Clara barking on the other side of it, a scrabble of claws on floorboards.

Clara danced around her legs, jumping up, her paws punching into Margaret’s chest. Margaret pushed the dog away and realised she could barely see. The house was in darkness. She caught her knee on the hard edge of the gun rack and cursed as she fumbled to find a light switch. Finally, her fingers stumbled on a panel of switches on the wall. The gun room and kitchen flickered into sharp fluorescence.

Nothing had changed. The kitchen was still piled with unwashed dishes. The smell of stale food and cooking oil hung in the air. Clara’s food bowl was empty, and by her agitation Margaret reckoned she was probably hungry. Her water dish was also empty. Margaret had no idea where Mendez kept the dog food, but she filled the water dish at the sink and put it back on the floor. Clara slurped noisily, one eye on constant alert in case there was food to follow.

Margaret called out, ‘Hello? Felipe, are you at home?’ Her voice was soaked up by the house and there was no response. She went through to the sitting room and turned on the lights there. The ceiling fan stirred hot air. The door to the smoking porch stood open, the air laden with the smell of fresh cigar smoke, but there was nobody in there either. She passed through the dining room and out into the front hall. She switched on the stair lights and called up, ‘Felipe?’ Still no response.

She went back through to the kitchen and into the bar. She was tired and dry, and needed a drink. She took a bottle of tonic from the refrigerator, cut some lemon and put ice into a tall glass. The vodka bottle was already in her hand before she realised that there was somebody else to think about other than herself now. She hesitated for only a second, before pushing the bottle back on the shelf and pouring herself a plain tonic water over ice and lemon. It tasted good, sharp and refreshing.

She carried the glass with her as she went up the stairs to her room. In the hall, she stopped. The door to Mendez’s study stood ajar and she could see the light of a desk lamp burning softly somewhere inside. Previously the door had always been closed. Curious, she pushed it open and walked in. It was a small room, smaller than she had been expecting. The walls were lined with bookshelves, and the shelves were groaning with books piled one on top of the other. The floor was strewn with papers and maps and open books with pages folded to mark the place. A battle-scarred old mahogany desk was pushed up against the wall below a window with its blind pulled down. Layer upon layer of papers drifted across the landscape of its obscured leather top. Haphazard stacks of files rose in columns like cliffs. An old Macintosh computer was half buried in a gorge between them. A captain’s chair was turned toward the door, as if Mendez had left it only moments before. A passport lay across the computer keyboard, pushed back from the front edge of the desk. It was the green-blue colour of a sullen tropical sea, with gold lettering, and an eagle crest. A number was punched, like Braille, along its bottom edge beneath the word PASAPORTE. Margaret picked up the passport, puzzled, and frowned. She opened it and saw a younger Mendez staring back at her, like a still from an old movie. She looked at it for some time, lost in thought and consternation, before dropping the passport back on the desk. She flipped idly through some of the papers strewn across the desktop. Scientific stuff mostly. Notes and articles, several of them in Spanish.

A wicker bin was overflowing. Anything up to a dozen sheets of paper had been scrumpled up and thrown on the floor. Margaret stooped to pick one up and flatten it out. Her stomach turned over. It was an unfinished letter addressed to her. Handwritten. Dear Margaret, I don’t know where to begin, or how to express my apologies…She started unfolding others. They were all addressed to her. Pathetic, inept attempts at apology. For a brief moment she almost felt sorry for him. She wondered if he had managed to complete one, if it was waiting for her in an envelope somewhere.

She heard a sound behind her and turned, startled. Clara stood panting in the doorway, looking up at her with mournful eyes, as if attempting to ape her master’s contrition. Margaret smiled at her own foolishness and went through to her room, Clara padding at her heels. She looked around, checking in her suitcases, and the boxes of her stuff, for any sign that Mendez might have gone through them. But everything appeared exactly as she had left it.

She picked out some clean clothes and underwear and went in for a shower, locking the door behind her this time. She stood for a long while, letting the water wash away her misery, comforting herself with the thought that even if she never saw Li again, he had left a little of himself with her forever. And there was a powerful element of succour in the thought of the life that was growing inside her.

Towelling herself dry, she slipped into her fresh clothes and immediately felt better. Clara was waiting for her out in the bedroom and followed her downstairs to the kitchen. The back door was unlocked, and Margaret wandered out to a paved patio, moonlight reflecting now in the still waters of a small swimming pool. A security lamp, activated by a motion detector, flooded the back of the house with light. Margaret was momentarily discomfited, and wondered why she was so jumpy. As she went around the side of the house, and the open garage, another light snapped on, reflecting harshly off the metallic paintwork of Mendez’s Bronco. Margaret frowned. He had to be around somewhere if the Bronco was there and the back door unlocked.

The meadow in which the two mares still grazed was washed in the colourless light of the moon. Beyond that, a path led around the side of a pond, a deep, dark pool of water choked by lilies. And beyond that, in a black stand of trees, a light shone in an outbuilding she had only vaguely been aware of in the daytime. It was an old wooden barn with an empty hayloft, and a tractor glinting darkly beyond a half-open door. She could not tell exactly where the light was coming from, or what was its source. She was uncertain if there was a window there. She hesitated to make the walk in the dark. It was, perhaps, four or five hundred yards. But the path shone pale in the moonlight. She could hardly lose her footing or her way.

It took her several minutes to cross the meadow, watched with interest by the horses, which seemed frozen in their dark-eyed curiosity. They returned to their grazing as she skirted the perimeter of the pond. The air smelled damp here, and was filled with the gentle screech of cicadas. As she got closer to the barn, sheltering in the shadow of its small clutch of trees, she saw that the light was coming from an unglazed window at the far end of it. But it was a feeble, reflected light, that appeared to be shining into the barn rather than out of it.

She slipped in the open door, squeezing past the tractor, with its smells of diesel and dried cattle dung, and saw that the light was coming up through a large trap door lying open at the rear of the barn, its wooden lid propped against the back wall. She crossed the dusty stretch of floor, compacted earth and dry, brittle straw, and saw a wide, wooden ladder leading down into a square pit lined with stout wooden planking. An electric light was screwed to the wall on one side. On the other, a deep, studded metal door set in a thick frame was not fully shut. From beyond it she heard the faint sound of music. She recognised the Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana, a sad, bittersweet melody that raised goosebumps on the back of her neck and along her arms. She climbed carefully down the steps and stood on the concrete floor of the pit. Mascagni’s Intermezzo died into stillness, and a sweet, plaintive soprano sang Puccini, O mio bambino caro from Gianni Schicchi. A haunting piece of infinite sadness. She reached out and pushed the door with the tips of her fingers. Although it was heavy, it swung open easily, and she blinked in the bright fluorescent light of a small underground chamber, concrete walls and low, slabbed roof, painted white. There was a wooden-topped bench in the centre of the room cluttered with all kinds of equipment; a couple of gel electrophoresis machines, a digital camera with UV light for scanning gels, an iMac and flatbed scanner. Two walls were lined with worktops set with stainless steel sinks, a small electric oven for doing blots, a couple more iMacs, a scanning electron microscope, a rack of test tubes, jars and bottles, piles of papers, books, a coffee maker, an ashtray overflowing with cigar butts. Against the third wall stood a couple of incubators, a home refrigerator and an ultracold freezer. A portable stereo next to a small centrifuge was playing the Puccini. Louder now.

Mendez had his back to her. He was wearing a stained white lab coat, and as he moved away from the sink she saw half-moon spectacles perched on the end of his nose, attached to him by a cord around his neck. He was wearing latex gloves and swirling a small quantity of blue fluid in the bottom of a test tube. He reached up and took something down from the shelf above his head, and then slipped the tube into a rack and wrote in a large notebook open on the worktop in front of him. The voice of the soprano fell away into quiet melancholy and Margaret said, ‘Felipe?’

He was so startled, turning quickly, that he knocked the test tube from its holder and the glass smashed on the counter, spilling its blue liquid content across the top of it. Wide-eyed, barely able to believe what he was seeing, he took in the vision of Margaret standing in the doorway. And then, ‘Shit!’ he said, spinning around to pull paper from a roll and mop up the spillage. He looked back at Margaret, consternation in his face now, and a tenor began singing an aria from La Bohème. He crossed to the stereo and turned it off, and its sweetness was replaced by the deep hum of electrical equipment. He frowned. ‘Margaret,’ he said, as if waiting for her to speak and confirm that she was not some figment of his imagination.

‘I didn’t know you had your own lab out here,’ she said.

He shrugged and looked around, as if trying to see it through her eyes. ‘The previous owner was convinced there would be a nuclear holocaust. He intended to survive it in here. I had it fitted out as a lab when we first bought the place. It’s pretty limited. Just for my own personal research. Any serious work has to be done at Baylor.’ He paused, turning his eyes on her again, drinking her in. ‘I wasn’t expecting you.’

‘I’m sorry about last night,’ she said.

He shook his head vigorously. ‘No, no, my dear. Please don’t be sorry. It was entirely my fault. My behaviour was unforgivable.’ He hesitated. ‘Have you come to collect your things?’

‘I was going to stay over, if that’s all right. Tonight anyway.’

‘Of course, of course,’ he said quickly. ‘Margaret, you have no idea how miserable I have been these past twenty-four hours. I can’t apologise enough.’

‘You’ve apologised more than enough,’ Margaret said. She raised the flats of her hands toward him. ‘No more. Please.’

He nodded, beaming, almost unable to contain his delight. ‘Of course.’ He snapped off his latex gloves. ‘I hear the ringleader of the snakeheads has been arrested. Your Chinese friend has done well.’

Even the mention of Li clouded Margaret’s thoughts. ‘Yes,’ she said.

‘We should eat, and you can tell me all about it.’ Mendez slipped out of his lab coat. As he hung it on the back of the door, the tail of it swept a pack of cigars off a gurney pushed against the wall. Margaret stooped to pick it up. She looked at the brand. It was unfamiliar to her.

‘Mexican,’ she said.

‘Yes, I have them sent to me.’ He took them from her and slipped the pack in his pocket. ‘I prefer Cuban, of course, but they are still illegal here. American cigars are too sweet, so I have these sent up from Mexico.’

She said, ‘I don’t think you ever told me whereabouts in Mexico you were from, originally.’

‘No, I probably didn’t,’ he said. ‘You would never have heard of it. A small town called Hermosillo, in the northwest, near the border with Arizona.’ He laughed. ‘But, of course, I was a perfectly legal immigrant. I didn’t cross the border in the back of a truck. I came on a bus, with a scholarship to Cal Tech.’

‘A long bus trip.’

‘It certainly was.’ He ushered her out, turning off the lights behind them. ‘Come, my dear, I’m sure I have some pizza in the freezer that we can put in the microwave, and some good Chilean wine to wash it down with.’

‘I’ve given up alcohol, Felipe,’ she said.

He followed her up the steps into the barn and looked at her in astonishment. ‘But the consumption of fine wine is one of life’s great pleasures, my dear.’ He dropped the trap door, raising a cloud of dust.

‘Yeah, well, I think maybe I liked it just a little too much,’ she said. She was not about to tell him that she did not want to damage her unborn child.

As they walked past the pond and across the meadow, he told her about his progress, or lack of it, in identifying the proteins that triggered the flu virus. ‘The list of things that do not do it is growing by the day, but compared to those that might, it is still just a drop in the ocean. Currently, I am looking at fruits. In particular, those indigenous to North America.’

She let him talk, let the words float over her. She was tired, and although she would probably not admit it, even to herself, she was almost beyond caring. The chestnut mares broke from their grazing to stare at them. One of them whinnied, an apparent signal for them both to go skittering off into the darkness, shaking their heads and snorting their derision.

In the kitchen, Mendez surveyed the mess as if seeing it for the first time. ‘Every so often I have a blitz,’ he said. ‘I spend a weekend clearing the dishes, cleaning the place. Then I turn around, and it’s like this again.’

‘You need a maid,’ Margaret said.

‘I have tried, believe me,’ Mendez said. ‘You have no idea how difficult it is to get someone to come all the way out here.’ He cleared a space on a worktop and dug a frozen pizza out of the freezer and got it out of its wrapping. ‘Ham and pineapple. Is that okay for you?’ he asked. She nodded and he said, ‘Go through and relax. I’ll feed the dog and bring this in when it’s ready. If you’re not having wine, what’ll you drink? I’ve got some apple juice in the refrigerator.’

‘That’ll be fine,’ Margaret said. She left him to it, and heard Clara barking excitedly as he filled her food bowl. She sank into the recliner in the living room and watched the shadow of the fan circling the ceiling. She daren’t close her eyes, or she knew she would simply drift away. It was only twenty-four hours since Mendez had made his clumsy pass at her. Only twenty hours since she had last made love to Li Yan. The events of the previous night at Minute Maid Park seemed like a lifetime away — someone else’s lifetime. She could remember running along the track above the baseball field, the huge replica locomotive looming over her in the dark, the roof shutting out the stars, the vision of the blood-crusted Li staggering down between the rows of seating. But it was as if they were not her memories, as if she had perhaps borrowed them from someone else, or seen them in some movie. She folded her hands over her belly. The only thing that felt real now was her baby, the life she carried inside her. Strangely it seemed to give her, almost for the first time in her life, a sense of purpose. And then she remembered the passport, and something else, something she had seen in the lab, and she came back down to earth with a jolt.

‘Here we are, my dear,’ Mendez said. He was carrying a tray with the pizza cut into wedges on a big round plate. There was a tall glass of apple juice and a bottle of Chilean wine and a crystal goblet. He placed it on a coffee table which he dragged to sit between the recliner and the settee so they could both reach it. The hot smell of the pizza was savoury and enticing. Margaret lifted a wedge, pulling it free of its trailing strands of cheese and took a large bite.

‘It’s good,’ she said, and she reached for her glass and washed it down with a mouthful of apple juice. She looked up to find Mendez sitting on the settee watching her, his face slightly flushed. He was smiling oddly.

Margaret woke to moonlight flooding through her bedroom window. It was inordinately bright, and she had no recollection of coming to bed. She had a sense of breathing in slow motion, her chest rising and falling in slow, gentle undulations. She knew from the feel of the cotton sheet on her skin that she was naked, but could not remember undressing. But there was no alarm in it. She felt relaxed, her limbs heavy. So heavy she could barely move them. She fought hard to grasp conscious thoughts that seemed to slip through her fingers like the fluttering feathers of a bird in panic. She was scared to squeeze too tightly in case she damaged it. She frowned in confusion. There was no bird. Start again. She remembered eating pizza with Mendez in the sitting room. He had turned on the television and was chatting to her brightly, endlessly. Words following words. Words she couldn’t recall. When had she come to bed? With great difficulty she turned her head and saw figures burning red lines in the dark. She blinked, eyelids like camera shutters set for long exposure, trying to make sense of what she saw. Two. One. Six. Revelation. It was two-sixteen in the morning. Hours since she had sat eating pizza with Mendez. There was something she had meant to do. What was it? Something important. When Mendez was sleeping. She had wanted to go back out to the lab. Why?

A shadow fell across her, and with a great effort she turned her eyes up to see what it was. Felipe was smiling. He was fully dressed, and she wondered, stupidly, why he had gone to bed in his clothes. And then, from somewhere deep in her subconscious, a tiny bubble of fear came fizzing to the surface, and she knew that somehow she had not undressed herself and come to bed, that Mendez was fully dressed because he had not yet been to bed. And that if she had not undressed herself, then he must have done it. More bubbles broke the surface. Something of it must have shown in her eyes, because his smile widened and he said softly, ‘My dear, don’t fight the Rohypnol. You know you won’t win.’

Rohypnol. Rohypnol? The word meant something to her. There was a bird in her hands again, wings flapping, heart fluttering. This time she clenched her fists. Rohypnol. Clear. Tasteless. The classic date rape drug. Apple juice. Her mouth felt dry now, very dry, a strange bitterness in it. She wanted to touch herself. Down there. To know what he had done to her, but it was as if she had no arms, no hands. She could not move them, could not feel them. Instead, she heard his voice again, soft and hypnotic.

‘I knew when I went into my study that you had been there,’ he said. She forced her head around so that she could see him more clearly. She tried to focus on his lips. Important that she could understand what he was saying. He smiled. ‘You saw my feeble attempts at writing you an apology. The trouble is, that to make an apology convincing it has to come from the heart.’ He shrugged. ‘Then I saw the passport, and knew it was not where I had left it. And I remembered you asking me in the lab where in Mexico I came from.’ He shook his head. ‘Not very subtle, Margaret.’

He moved around the foot of the bed to her left side, and the moonlight lay over her, unbroken, like a shroud. She tilted her head with difficulty so that she could follow him. He sat down on the edge of the bed and ran his fingers lightly over her forehead, and then with his forefinger traced the line of her nose and lips and chin. ‘When I first came to the States, I had no reason to conceal the fact that I was a Colombian. I never have. But people always made assumptions. My Latin looks, my accent, my name. A spic. A Mexican. Only when all this blew up did it become convenient for me to go along with it. To put as much distance between myself and my roots as possible. I am, after all, a naturalised American citizen now. So no one who did not know that I still retain my Colombian citizenship would be any the wiser. No one would have any reason to make the connection.’

He slowly drew back the sheet to look at Margaret’s naked form in the bed and trail the back of his hand down from her neck and between her breasts. He sighed. ‘Such beauty,’ he said. ‘Such a shame to waste it.’

Margaret could only watch, and feel very distantly beneath the surface calm, a rising panic. Her breathing came a little faster. She made a small grunting noise. He said, ‘Margaret, Margaret. I told you not to fight it.’ He cupped one of her breasts in his hand and grazed the nipple with his thumb. He leaned over and kissed her softly on the lips, and then sat looking at her for a very long time before covering her with the sheet once more. ‘Such a waste,’ he said again.

He stood up and crossed to the dressing table. She could hear him opening something, laying things out on the polished surface. Hard things. Metal and glass. But she could not see. He said, ‘A name like Mendez. An accent I could never quite get rid of, no matter how hard I tried. You cannot know what a handicap they have been in this great country of ours. Always a Hispanic. Always a foreigner. Never an American. Even when I got a passport. Everything I have achieved was in spite of my background, Margaret, in spite of the prejudice I encountered with every job application I made, with each board I faced. And then, of course, finally, they got their revenge. Some piddling bureaucratic oversight — not even mine — and I am forced into early retirement. Forced to abandon my career at the peak of my powers.’ He turned around, and she could see the lights in his eyes, fuelled by anger and hatred. ‘And then what do they do? This government of yours, this great country with its precious ideals of liberty and equality. They start dumping poison on my people. Spraying disease and genetic disorder on innocent women and children, poor Colombian peasants scratching to make a living. And why? In a futile attempt to stop the trade in a designer drug that your own President has confessed to taking.’

Even through her confusion, Margaret was aware that Mendez’s ‘we’ had become a reference to himself and the Colombian people, and that his ‘you’ now applied to Margaret and the Americans, among whose number he apparently no longer counted himself.

Again, she heard him speaking and had to force herself to concentrate. ‘No longer could I just stand by doing nothing,’ he was saying. ‘It was time to do something. Time to teach America a lesson. Time to show its politicians that they could not just stomp around the world trampling over other people’s rights and sovereignty. Time to teach white Anglo-Saxon Americans that they could die just as easily as the rest of us.’

From somewhere Margaret found the strength to speak. The words bubbled out of her throat. ‘You…’ she said. And with another great effort. ‘…you engineered the virus.’

He smiled. ‘Of course. And don’t you just love the irony? Spanish flu. A Colombian revenge. Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot. Americans don’t understand irony.’ Slowly, very slowly, the fog was lifting from Margaret’s brain. Mendez said, ‘When one of my students came to me with soft tissue, it was as if he had been sent by God. He was a volunteer with the expedition to recover the Seadragon from the Arctic. It was about eighteen months ago. You probably read about it. The submarine crew who died from the Spanish flu in 1918. Their vessel became trapped under the ice pack, eventually coming to rest on the polar continental shelf. The boat was never holed. A couple of divers looking for another wreck found it, and some scientists figured that the crew had probably been preserved inside by the cold, and that if they could raise the sub they might be able to recover soft tissue and culture live virus. They failed, of course. Sure, they got the soft tissue, but they couldn’t culture live virus. Wasn’t cold enough, even down there.’

He turned back to whatever he was doing on the dressing table. ‘My student managed to secrete a little of it away. He thought I might succeed where others had failed. I was flattered by his faith in me and sad to disappoint him. I told him it was a waste of time. It couldn’t be done. Which was true. What I did not tell him was that I could clone the virus from the viral RNA in the tissue he had given me. It was almost intact. As near to perfect as you could hope for. And then, of course, it was easy for me to engineer it to my own particular specifications.’

Margaret fought for breath to speak. ‘You’re…insane.’

He swung around. One eyebrow cocked. ‘No, Margaret. Just smarter than the rest of you.’

‘You won’t…just kill white…Anglo-Saxon Americans.’ The very effort of forcing herself to speak was clearing her mind. ‘You’ll kill Americans…of every race…every colour. And people…all over the world. Even…Colombians.’

He shook his head and smiled, as if saddened by her wretched stupidity. ‘You don’t really think I would create a virus without also producing the vaccine?’ he said. ‘After all, that’s what made me able to sell the idea to the Colombians who’ve been bringing in the Chinese. Once the flu is out there, they can sell the vaccine to the highest bidder. Lot of money to be made. And, of course, the people of Colombia might just get preferential treatment. Naturally, I have already vaccinated myself.’

Margaret coughed the phlegm out of her throat. Her tongue was so dry it was sticking to the roof of her mouth. ‘Can’t work,’ she gasped. ‘You know it. No one…could produce enough vaccine…in time. Once the flu is…rampant…it will be…too late.’

He shrugged and turned away again, and when he turned back a few moments later, he had a syringe in his hand, needle pointed at the ceiling. He squeezed it gently until a spurt of clear liquid shot into the air, flashing in the moonlight, then he approached Margaret around the bed. Panic was feeding strength to her lungs and heart, and her breathing became rapid and erratic. She found movement in her arms and legs, but not enough to resist. She heard her own voice scratching in her throat with each breath, whimpering like a dog.

‘Just relax, Margaret,’ Mendez told her softly. ‘I want you to know how it feels. To live with death hanging over you. To wonder when and where it will come from.’

She felt the cold dab of disinfectant on her arm, and the sharp bite of the needle. There was nothing she could do to stop him squeezing the syringe, forcing the virus through the needle and into her bloodstream. And with a start she realised that her baby, too, would be infected. An icy despair broke over her, like a wave in a frozen sea.

‘Unless, of course,’ she heard Mendez saying, ‘you’re smart enough to figure out what it is I programmed to trigger the virus.’

He withdrew the needle, dabbed her arm again and stood up. He returned to the dressing table and started clearing away his things. She lay, under sentence of death, and saw poor Steve’s haunted face in that moment when his resistance finally ended. And in her mind’s eye she saw also the faceless faces of all those who would die just like him, just like her. Hundreds of millions of them. A tear forced its way out of the corner of her eye and ran down on to the pillow.

His shadow fell across her again, and she saw him silhouetted against the window. ‘Goodbye, Margaret,’ he said. ‘Time for me to go home.’

When she awoke, she was not certain how long she had slept. Minutes. Hours. Moonlight still streamed in through the window, but the angle of it had changed, and half the room was now in deep shadow. She turned her head and found that it moved quite easily. The digital display on the bedside clock told her it was just after four. With consciousness came recollection, and an involuntary moan slipped past her lips. A deep, heartfelt moan of distress. She grieved more for her unborn child than for herself, a revelation to her that she could consider another life more important than her own. And she knew that it was only nature, what had been programmed into her. It was just that she had always thought that her conscious mind would always make decisions over her evolutionary one.

She figured that Mendez must be long gone, and she was lying attempting to summon the strength to try to get out of the bed when she heard a crash from somewhere downstairs, and a man’s voice cursing. Then Clara started barking, and the voice shouted again and she stopped. Margaret lay still and listened for a long time hearing nothing. And then a car door slammed outside. Maybe he was still packing his stuff into the Bronco. Maybe his decision to run had not been taken until tonight, triggered by Margaret. Why had he not just killed her? And as soon as the question formed in her head she knew the answer. Because he loved her. Because he knew he could never have her. Because he wanted her to suffer as he had suffered with her rejection. She closed her eyes and was aware that she was breathing almost normally. But her mind was still fuzzy, not fully in control of her body. She turned her head and lifted her arm and saw the needlepoint where the virus had entered her. It gave her fresh impetus, and with an enormous effort she forced herself up into a sitting position, the cotton top sheet falling away to the floor.

It took another great effort to swing her legs over the edge of the bed, but when she tried to put her weight on them, they offered no resistance and folded under her. She collapsed into the thick piled carpet like a house of cards. Part of her wanted simply to close her eyes, but another, larger, part of her fought the impulse. Her muscles were like jelly. She had to put steel into them with her mind, and it took several minutes for her to drag herself, on her knees, to the door. She fell into the landing and found herself staring straight down the stairs to the entrance hall. She lay, listening, for a long time, but heard nothing. Even if she made it down there, she had no idea what she could do. She had no strength. But she could speak, she was sure. If she could get to a phone…She let herself go and half slid, half tumbled, to the foot of the stairs, carpet burning her legs and arms and chest.

As she lay in the hall, breathing hard, she heard the cough of a motor starting, and then the roar of it as Mendez gunned the engine. Suddenly she no longer wanted just to make a phone call. She wanted to stop him. Any way she could. Margaret had never suspected just how powerful a fuel adrenalin could be. A rush of it came with her anger and despair and powered her struggle to her feet, pulling herself up on the coat stand. She almost fell again as it tipped away from the wall and crashed to the floor. The door jamb saved her. She clung to it desperately, steadying herself before staggering off through the dining room, clutching at anything that offered support, and making it, finally to the kitchen. The lights had all been switched off, but the moonlight still poured in through the back window. She used the central island to support her progress around the kitchen and into the gun room. The gun cabinet, which had earlier bruised her leg, was there to keep her on her feet. Outside, probably no more than twenty feet away through the open garage, she could hear the Bronco’s engine idling. Why had he not gone? And suddenly she was afraid he would come back and find her there, naked and helpless. How on earth could she have thought there was any way she could stop him? She heard him calling to Clara, the dog barking distantly at first, and then closer. A car door slammed. After several seconds, another.

It was in that moment Margaret realised what it was she was leaning against. She felt for the light switch, and blinked in the painful brightness of it crashing through the darkness in her brain. Six shotguns were neatly stacked along the rack. She snatched one down and broke it open on top of the chest, and with thick, fumbling fingers, pulled open the top drawer. The first box of cartridges she pulled out split open and spilled its contents across the floor. As she dropped to her knees, cartridges rolling across the floorboards away from her scrabbling fingers, she heard the whine of the Bronco reversing into the turning circle opposite the entrance to the garage. She let out a tiny cry, and her fingers closed around a cartridge. And then another. Using the gun to prop herself up, she dropped them one after the other into the two barrels and snapped it shut. She was on her knees then, swaying behind the door. She reached up and pulled the handle down, using it to lever herself to her feet and draw it open at the same time. It almost tipped her backwards to send her crashing to the floor again. But she caught the architrave and held her balance. She stood reeling there for an eternity, hearing the Bronco slipping into forward gear, its headlights swinging into the garage as it made its turn. She staggered out and was immediately blinded by them, caught in their full glare, stark naked and barely able to stand. Beyond the blaze of them she saw, palely reflected, the astonishment on Mendez’s face as he jammed on the brakes. She swung the gun to her shoulder and pulled the first trigger, firing straight into the light. The force of it propelled her backwards, and the involuntary reflex of her finger emptied the second barrel. She heard the scream of the Bronco’s engine and the blaring of the horn as she fell.