roast lamb for Sunday lunch fresh rosemary from the garden girls can make do with cereal silly little disco liars finish knitting baby blankets more punishments tomorrow shed deserve it keep out of his way girls and me what’s that what’s that?

A sense of displaced air.

Mrs Carter was not allowed to roll over or switch on the light in case it disturbed Richard, but she could see the digital clock, her cheek pressed against the pillow. 4.06 a.m. She tensed, waiting to see if she had imagined it. Thirty seconds passed before she realized that something was very wrong – and by then, it was too late.

The scissor blades, pressed neatly together, struck her between the left and right scapula and missed her heart by a couple of centimetres. It didn’t hurt, not at first, just a feeling of pressure. Before she had a chance to react, to turn over, to even cry out, the scissors were pulled free and driven down again with such force that the blades pierced one of her lungs, collapsing it.

Blood leaked from the wounds, soaking the expensive Egyptian cotton bed linen, dyeing it a darkly rich shade of suffering.

Mrs Carter heard a gasping and sucking sound like a fish out of water. She knew all about fish. Her father used to take her and her older brother down to the river, threading maggots onto the curved steel and casting the line into green murk, sun glinting on the water. It took her a moment to understand the sound was coming from her.

The scissor blades impaled her again and again, in a frenzy, a bloodlust. The hollow at the base of her throat. A patch of freckled skin above her pancreas. The force of one blow ruptured her spleen. She could not make herself move, the effort too great, save for the lifting of her head and thudding it back down on the pillow.

She heard her youngest daughter say something, urgent and high-pitched, and there was a relief from the pressure on her back for a few seconds as the bedroom light was switched on.

Mrs Carter’s eyes hurt at the sudden assault of brightness and her manicured fingers twitched against her husband. She could not understand why he was not doing anything to halt this brutal attack on her, in the sanctity of their home, when she had given all of herself to him, although her thoughts were more muddied than that. With sheer force of will, she rotated the leaden weight of her head in his direction.

Dr Richard Carter was on the far side of the bed, throat exposed, head lolling over the edge of the mattress, his eyes glassy with surprise. It was clear, even as his wife lay bleeding out, even as the edges of her vision blackened and blurred, that he was dead.