The wooden steps creaked, one by one by one. Click. Not fast, not slow. Click. Click. Steady, measured, even steps getting nearer and nearer. Hard shoes on old wood, like the ticking of some huge clock.

‘Hide,’ I whispered to Beth, but she was already disappearing around the other side of the super-king-sized double bed.

I went towards the footsteps, taking up a position to one side of the door into the study.

Click.

Click.

Click.

The footsteps reached the top of the staircase and I tightened my grip on the jagged shard in my hand. Silence. Then more steps, muffled by thick carpet now, getting closer. Closer.

I raised the makeshift dagger. This was where the madness was going to stop. Right here, right now. I would do what I had to do, to protect what was mine.

The footsteps were in the study, calm and even, just a few feet away . . .

A figure appeared in the doorway.

Chapter 79

79

‘Hello, Joe,’ my wife said.

Mel.

I opened my mouth to speak, but no sound came out.

Indicating the weapon gripped in my right hand, she said: ‘You’re not going to stab me with that, are you?’

I lowered the piece of broken mirror, still staring at her. Everything coming together, all at once. Here is my wife. Not Alex Kolnik. Not Ben. My wife.

Mel held her hands up, to demonstrate she wasn’t armed. There was no weapon, just a mobile. A white iPhone I’d never seen before.

‘You,’ I said at last.

‘Me,’ she said, lowering her hands.

I took a step towards her.

Beth’s voice from behind me: ‘Don’t go any closer, Joe.’

I turned and saw that she had come out from behind the bed, and was on her feet. All the fear had gone from her face. She wasn’t wide-eyed or near to tears now. Instead, she looked energised, jubilant, like the female lead about to take a bow at the end of a show.

She was pointing a shotgun at me. The gun was long and black, its two barrels like twin black holes sucking all the light from the room.

‘Drop the broken glass.’ She thumbed back the hammers on the shotgun with a loud click-clack. She looked thoroughly at ease with the weapon, as if she was used to handling it.

I dropped the broken piece of mirror at my feet and noticed, for the first time, how different Beth looked today. Calm and in control. I remembered, with a sudden clarity, what she had studied at university. Another piece of the jigsaw slotting into place.

‘Your phone,’ she said. ‘Put it on the dressing table.’

I did as I was told.

‘Sit down in the chair,’ she said, gesturing with the gun towards an armchair by the side of the dressing table. ‘Put your hands on the arms of the chair.’

The barrels of the shotgun followed me as I sat down.