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She is still staring, horrified, mesmerized, when her phone rings, making her jump convulsively.
“Who’s that, the police?” Will says. His voice is ice-cold, goading, cruel.
November’s voice flickers through Hannah’s memory again—Please, don’t do anything about this until you’ve spoken to the police.
Oh God, she has been so stupid.
“Hannah?” Will says. He takes a step towards her. She takes a step back. The phone is still ringing. It’s on the counter, within hand’s reach. “Aren’t you going to answer it?”
Hannah’s heart is beating so fast and hard she can feel it in her wrists, in her neck. The baby writhes inside her.
Will is between her and the door.
She has been so, so stupid…
She takes another step back towards the window, not breaking eye contact with Will, and with her free hand she gropes blindly for the phone, never losing Will’s gaze as she grabs it. He takes a step forwards. She takes another step back. He takes another step forwards.
She is backing into a corner, and she knows it, but if she can just get him to take one more step forwards…
She takes one more step back.
He takes one more step forwards.
And Hannah runs.
Will swears, but that last step has put the kitchen table between him and the door, while giving Hannah a clear line.
She runs, barefoot, out of the kitchen, down the hallway and down the stairs, hearing a thumping clatter as Will tries to follow and trips over one of their kitchen chairs. Out in the street the cobbles are bitterly cold under her feet and wet from the night’s rain, and she slips, but then rights herself and runs towards the open end of the mews. Behind her she can hear Will’s feet pounding down the stairs.
Her heart feels like it’s going to burst. She holds her stomach with one hand, as if she can protect her unborn child. She forces herself to run just a little faster down the last few meters of Stockbridge Mews… and then she is out, onto the main road, skidding around the corner, the asphalt of the council-owned pavement biting into the soles of her feet. She looks wildly up and down the road. A car passes. Then another. They are going too fast for her to stop, and they don’t spare a glance for the wild-eyed pregnant woman running barefoot down the street. Can she flag someone down? Run into a cafe? The nearest one is closed and she draws a shuddering breath and runs on, towards the park.
“Hannah!” she hears from behind her, Will’s roar of a kind of fury she has never heard from him before. He has rounded the corner onto the main road and is gaining on her. “Hannah, what are you doing?”
She makes her legs work harder—runs across a junction without looking, and then another and then—
There is a screech of tires and the sound of swearing.
“Jesus Christ! You trying to get yourself killed?”
It’s a taxi driver. He’s leaning out of the window of his cab, his face red with annoyance.
“You coulda killed yourself—and the bairn!”
Hannah just stands for a moment, panting hopelessly, her hands resting on the bonnet of the car. Will can’t do anything in front of a taxi driver, surely? But the man is going to drive away—he’s going to leave her—and then she looks up, and she feels a huge, drenching wash of relief.
The yellow light on top of the cab is on. The taxi is for hire.
She doesn’t wait. She runs around to the side, wrenches open the door, just as Will comes pounding up to the junction.
“Drive,” she says urgently to the cabbie. “That’s my husband, he—we just had a row.”
A row. The word comes out like a sob, and yet it’s so pathetically understated. “A row” barely even starts to cover it. I have just found out my husband might be a killer.
And yet she can’t say it. She can’t bring herself to say the words, to make them real.
Will is a killer.
Will murdered April.
