Snapshot

49

The darkness was fully settled, an evening full of mist and hazy shapes, the crisp air laden with the stew of odours from the mangroves. Tessa, unlocking her front door, was thinking only about Hal Challis and why she should accede to his request not to pursue Robert McQuarrie and the sex party angle. She removed the key, stepped into her front hallway, and something punched her hard in the back, propelling her onto her knees. She heard the door slam. Someone straddled her; he smelt of the chilly blackness outside and of sweaty agitation. His fingers were twisted cruelly in her hair, jerking her head back. Then the tip of something long and metallic, creepily warm from his body, was grinding under the hinge of her jaw.

A gun, she realised, fitted with a silencer.

‘Not a sound, bitch, okay?’

She choked her assent.

He kept pulling on her hair, stepping back, pulling her upright, the object on the end of the gun barrel travelling down her spine now, probing between her buttocks. ‘You want this? I’ll give it to you, you give me any grief, okay, bitch?’

The words were banal, but the heat behind them, and the man’s turmoil and disorder, the rankness of his body, made her limp.

‘Stand up.’

She tried to straighten her back, strengthen her knees. She said what she assumed everyone said: ‘Please don’t hurt me.’

‘Shut up!’

‘What do you want?’

He probed deeper with the gun. ‘What did I just say? Shut up.’

She complied.

His free hand snaked around to her stomach and indifferently explored her breasts and groin. It was a gloved hand. It parodied foreplay and she felt herself floating free, observing things from a great distance. She turned her head, glimpsing a dark coat, a dark woollen cap and narrow features, but his thick black leather fingers pinched a tuft of her pubic hair and pulled hard. ‘Eyes front.’

She averted her gaze, looked down her cold, unlit hallway.

‘Move.’

‘Where?’

‘Shut up. Back door.’

He followed hard on her heels, one hand clasping the hair at the back of her head, the other pressing the gun against her coccyx, propelling her through to the back door.

‘Open it.’

She tried to sort and assess her impressions of him. Wiry build, thin face, dark clothing, about her height, a harsh voice full of strain. She’d never identify him outside of this particular conjunction of time, place and circumstances.

Then they were through the back door and crossing her sodden lawn to the gate at the rear of the garden. Her mind raced. He was going to kill her out on the mudflats and dump her in a drainage channel. There were stagnant pools out there, covered in scum. She’d never be found and the fish and birds would strip her to the bone.

‘Which one hired you? Lowry or Robert McQuarrie?’

‘Shut up.’

He shoved and she stumbled. He jerked back hard, her hair coming out in his hand. Grass and bracken trailed wetly over her shoes and pants. Behind her he cursed softly.

‘Who are you?’

‘Shut up.’

She turned her head slightly. Up and down the fence line were the back walls of her neighbours, lights here and there: laundries, kitchens, porches, loos. She could hear ‘Extreme Makeover’ at full volume.

‘Is it something I published?’

This time he slammed the gun against her temple and the pain was blinding. She began to cry. He’d destroyed her nerve and she had to cry.

‘Stop snivelling.’

Now they’d met the serpentine path through the wetland: the raised gravel bed, the little treated pine bridges, the boardwalk itself. Tessa knew that Challis liked to walk here; she’d never seen the appeal of it. Then, curiously, someone was calling her name. Not Challis, but someone close to him.