The Unkindest Cut

  TWENTY-TWO

  Jane was jerked awake an hour later by a hubbub on the landing. The second that it took for consciousness to dawn allowed the confrontation to develop. Jane’s eyes opened on an appalling scene. A gibbering madwoman was arriving at the foot of the bed. Her hair, threaded with leaves, was flying wildly and she was screeching threats beyond comprehension. A subsequent enquiry tracked her route through the downstairs lavatory window and up what had once been the shaft for a dumb waiter to the upstairs landing before her presence had been detected, but Jane knew nothing of that. Of Roland, who had gone to answer a call of nature, there was no sign.

  Helen was still brandishing the knife clotted with dried blood, completing a spectacle that was awe-inspiring enough to cause the few officers present to hesitate for what might have been a fatal second. To Jane, in those first fraught seconds, they seemed a crowd but not a useful crowd. In an instant of panic she clutched the shotgun, lifting the muzzles and pulling both triggers.

  The consequences followed a predestined path. The hammers came down on the strikers which in turn struck the percussion caps. The styphnate in the percussion caps fired small spurts of flame into the nitro powder. About fifty grains of nitro powder sent just over two ounces of lead shot on its way. The shot passed close over Helen’s head and blew a hole in the wall just below the ceiling. Her head was below the line of the shot but it was in the path of the sound and shock wave.

  Stunned by the blast, she nearly poked her own eye out as she brought up her hands in a defensive gesture. Instead, she jabbed herself in the forehead. Any lingering clarity of thought went by the way. In a monumental explosion of fury she hurled down the knife, pinning her own left foot to the floor by the web between the first and second toes.

  Now that she was no longer holding the knife, the four policemen who had been hampering each other by crowding with Roland through the bedroom door were encouraged to grab her by the wrists. Before taking any further action, however, they were frozen to the floor by the final outcome of the two shots. The amount of gas generated by those two shots was not great. Cold, it would have been of no great significance. Propulsive powders when fired expand, cold, by a factor of at least six thousand, but they leave the muzzles at a very high temperature. Thus the volume was very much increased, quite enough to fill the space beneath the sheet. The single sheet was wafted well on its way towards the ceiling where it hovered, much like a giant stingray in a sub-ocean film.

  Jane rolled over on to her face and, not for the first time, prayed for the gift of invisibility. She could only give thanks that, this time, there were no cameras clicking and flashing as they recorded her shame for posterity.

  EPILOGUE

  A few months later, around the time of Helen Maple’s court case, Jane and Roland welcomed a little baby girl into Whinmount after a particularly long and arduous labour. The run-up to the trial and the necessary rehashing of witness statements and evidence had been rather eclipsed by this happy event, but on the day when Jane was expected to give her evidence in person, she was there, with special permission to leave the courtroom every three hours during her testimony – should it last that long – and go and feed her ravenous daughter. Roland had come into his own since the birth of Gilda and taken over the general day-to-day caring for her during the trial. There were even discussions between Jane and Roland that he would become the full-time carer and stay-at-home father …

  The trial over, Helen found guilty of murder and several counts of aggravated burglary and in prison for the next ten years at least (surely her anger wouldn’t allow her to be released early for good behaviour) life could try and get back to some semblance of normality once again. Jane’s veterinary practice was flourishing, Roland’s novel was on hold whilst he spent most of his time looking after his daughter and taking on other roles to do with the running of their household – all very much to everyone’s surprise, including his own!

  Ian Fellowes got over his injury fairly swiftly and sent everyone at the station on a self-defence course in case they should be faced with a mad knife-wielding woman ever again. And poor Alistair Ledbetter continued to pursue and refine his gambling habit and never did learn his lesson in either the women he chose as partners nor how to live within his means.