Free Divorcing Jack by Colin Bateman Page A

again and the tears began to roll down my cheeks. I scurried away across the floor and into the bathroom.
    I was sick in the washbasin, retched until there was nothing left to come up, then washed my face. I sat down on the toilet seat to stop myself shaking. Margaret was dead in the other room. Dead in the other room. Dead. Dead. And then I heard it.
    A soft, stealthy creaking from the stairs; soft, but not soft, like a dormouse in jackboots. In my rush to be sick I hadn't turned the bathroom light on and the hall was still in darkness. The bathroom door was three quarters closed. The only light came faintly from Margaret's room. I could barely make out a small shadowy figure making its way cautiously up the stairs.
    I tried desperately to control the vibrations that were racking my body, my leg was tapping against the cool ceramic of the toilet bowl like some kind of spastic Morse code, shouting out, HEY, I'M IN HERE. My breath only came in rasping flurries, welcomed on each occasion by a manic waving of my arms like a mime artist on acid.
    The figure drew nearer. Margaret was dead. Margaret was dead and I knew in every inch of my shuddering body that I was next, this dumb spinning top of a body was going to die on a toilet seat in his lover's house.
    And then I was up from the seat, possessed of a madness born of desperation, determined to go out fighting, a last gasp at life that was about to be taken from me for a reason I would never know. I felt the hot blood course in my veins, all that vibrating shock distilled now into a surge of vengeful violence. I flung the door open and with arms flailing like Chinese table tennis bats plunged into the darkness.
    We collided at the top of the stairs, he with a high-pitched wail of shock, me screaming a death scream, and we tumbled together, his taut body cushioning me down to the bottom steps where I bounced off him and thumped against the door.
    I lay there for a moment in stunned silence, then pulled myself into a crouch ready to plunge back into the fray. But there was only silence.
    I hissed into the darkness, 'Come on then, you fucker!' All the time waiting for the flash of a gun and the searing heat of a bullet that would finish me the way it had finished Margaret, but the only response was a low growl from the kitchen.
    After a few moments I stood up and carefully crossed to the lounge door and pushed it fully open; the light blinded me and it took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust.
    A dark form lay motionless at the bottom of the stairs, folded uncomfortably, like a widower's sandwich.
    I approached cautiously. Prodded. Poked. Got a look at the face. Dead. It looked like a broken neck.
    I walked into the lounge and sat amongst the chaos in the chair by the record player. The smell of the pizza made me feel sick again.
    My head was pounding. I was soaked in sweat and I could feel the dull throb of panic creeping into my body. Visions from the last few days flashed through my mind: fucking up my interview, meeting Margaret in the park, getting beaten up by my wife, making love to Margaret. Upstairs Margaret was dead, shot, murdered in the space of a few minutes while I was out buying food.
    I sat and thought of lovely Margaret. I had heard the last words she would ever speak, she had died in my arms. I wondered what she would think of me now, would she still love me now that I had pushed her mother down the stairs and broken her neck?

8
    I woke up in a room with two corpses and a radio alarm which almost delivered a third.
    Seven or eight times during the night I lifted up the phone to call the police, only to put it down again. What could I say? Uh, my girlfriend has been murdered and I've killed her mother by mistake? I knew that every minute I put off phoning them I was getting myself into deeper water, but I could see no way out. If I admitted one I'd be a dead cert for the other. There was no way they would accept her mother's death as an accident. I'd reported