Someone was in the living room. The lights were still off. Still shaking his benumbed arm, Silver was heading for the switch when someone pushed past him. The front door came open and whoever it was crashed down the stairs. Silver put the light on. I gasped. There was blood on the carpet, not spilled blood but stains and smears as if someone had wiped it off his shoes. Liv’s bedroom door was shut. From behind it came whimpers and sobs.

Silver, his hand on the doorknob, said, “Don’t come in.”

“I thought he’d killed her,” I said. “But that’s her, isn’t it? Those noises?”

This time I didn’t take his advice. I followed him into the room. I put the light on and saw blood all over the bed and the walls and the floor. Not Liv but Wim had been attacked. He had passed out but came back to consciousness as we approached the bed. I thought I wasn’t squeamish but when I saw his right leg I had to go out of there, ashamed of myself as I was, and vomit into the bathroom sink.

It took a tremendous effort of will to go back. Wim lay still, moaning, half on his side, half on his front, blood pumping from the back of his leg. He had been struck with something sharp and heavy some six inches above the heel where the Achilles tendon passes.

“It was Jonny,” Liv sobbed. “We were sleeping. He came in and pulled off the sheet and the blanket and hit Wim’s leg with a—a—”

“An ax by the look of it,” said Silver.

Chapter 30

30

I DIALED 999, MY hand shaking. When the woman’s voice answered and asked me which service I wanted, I said an ambulance. Perhaps I should have said the police. Silver, sitting on that bloodied bed, was trying to staunch the flow. He had made a tourniquet with a pair of tights and at last it seemed as if that awful pumping was restricted. Liv had collapsed. She lay spread out on her back, stark naked, her arms wide and her hands open, her whole body splashed with Wim’s blood. I did my best to control a fresh need to retch. Wim was speechless by now, silent, even the moaning had stopped. He lay open-mouthed, his neck stretched and his head back, the shaven crown almost touching his spine. He was pale as the sheet and looked as if he had died. In all my life I had only ever seen one dead person and that was Daniel lying at the foot of the pylon. I thought Wim was dead.