Snapshot

50

Ellen parked two blocks away and cut through a side street that she recognised from a burglary she’d attended a month earlier. She stopped in the next street, her stomach fluttering with nerves, fluttering so badly that she thought she’d need to squat behind a bush and relieve herself. The air was still and very dark. She couldn’t see Challis’s car anywhere: maybe they hadn’t returned yet, or maybe they’d gone to his house. She burned with jealousy and shame.

She crossed to Tessa Kane’s house and heard voices, but there were no lights on inside, and so she went down the side of the house, feeling a little shabby about her motives now, ready to creep away again if she found proof that Challis and Kane had rekindled their affair.

There was a rainwater tank at the rear of her house and she barked her shins on the tap. She hobbled around in circles, silently screaming, and knew from the dampness that she’d broken the skin and blood had formed. She rounded the corner, limping and distracted, in time to hear the rattle of Kane’s gate and then see her, a bulky shape in the light spilling across the back gardens of the neighbouring houses. For some reason, Kane was hurrying towards the mangroves.

Something was wrong. Kane’s shadow split into two figures, then reformed, and Ellen read urgency in it. Then she heard a squawk, abruptly abbreviated.

Was the other figure Challis? Surely they weren’t headed into the mangroves to have sex?

The figures were hurrying now, full of noise and panic, and so Ellen was able to track them. ‘Hal? Tessa?’ she called. ‘Is that you?’

The figures paused, there was a flash and she heard a faint spitting sound. Something tugged at her coat sleeve. She’d been shot at. The coat was a burden suddenly. She shrugged it off, took out her gun, and stepped onto the spongy path edge, among the reeds and mangroves that would silence her footsteps and swallow her shape in the night. For good measure the gunman fired twice more and Ellen uttered a brief ‘Oh’ of pain. Her neck. A couple of centimetres to the left and she’d be choking on her own blood now. She fumbled for her handkerchief. Her hands shook. She tried to find her mobile and scarcely knew if she’d lost or forgotten it or if shock was closing her down.

Then Tessa Kane cried ‘Help me!’ and the man with her cursed, as if she’d torn free of his grasp.

Ellen cried ‘Run!’-but had she cried it? There was another muted shot and she ducked, her movements very slow now. She tried to straighten and go after the gunman but collapsed slowly onto the muddy ground where the shallow tidal water rose and spread in a primeval stink around her. She began to pat it like a child in a bath, looking for her gun and her phone.

There was the killer coming for her. Ellen tipped her head back to fix the man’s shape but the night was full of hazy shapes. She lifted her hand to say stop or to beg for help and discovered that her.38 was still there. It bucked once, numbing her fingers.