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Max – or Not-Max – lifts his gaze to the worktop, blinks. ‘Is that an axe?’
‘A tomahawk.’
‘Jesus, Dad.’
‘Erin woke me. Said she could hear someone poking around downstairs. We thought you were stay—’
‘What were you going to do?’
‘Get my phone, call the police. The tomahawk was just a deterrent. But it was a stupid—’
‘I’ve never seen it before.’
‘I keep it hidden.’
‘Where?’
‘Back of the wardrobe,’ Joseph says, and wishes, instantly, that he hadn’t. ‘Look, that’s not important. What—’
‘Does Erin know?’
‘Max, listen to me. You’re down here in pitch darkness, in the middle of the night, covered in someone else’s blood. I don’t want to talk about the tomahawk. I don’t want to talk about anything other than whose blood it is, what’s happened, and whether you’re both OK.’
His son – or perhaps it’s still the stranger – shakes his head. ‘I can’t talk about it.’
‘You don’t have a choice. I’m not—’
‘Dad,’ he says softly. ‘What you need to do is go back upstairs, pretend this never happened. That means you tell no one about what you saw, not even Erin.EspeciallyErin. It’s the only way this ends well.’
Max must know that no responsible parent in the world would agree to what he’s asking. The idea that Joseph could climb into bed and go back to sleep is absurd. Joseph glances at the wall clock, sees it’s well past three. He has the sense of time running down, running out – the window for fixing this shrinking by the minute.
He leans forward, searching Max’s face. ‘Why did you grab a knife?’ he asks. ‘That might have been Erin walkingin on you. It might have been Tilly, getting a glass of water. Swinging out like you did – you could’ve slashed her throat.’
Max’s face creases in pain as he considers that. ‘I don’t know what to tell you. I just wasn’t thinking straight. First thing I heard was whatever you kicked over in the hall. And when the door burst open, and that torch beam shone in my face, I … I guess it took me back to …’
Max’s words peter out, but he doesn’t have to finish the sentence. Clearly Joseph’s not the only one, these days, to see danger in what should be the safest of places.
‘What happened tonight?’
The boy shakes his head.
‘Max, you’ve got to tell me.’
‘I can’t.’
Joseph’s heart thumps. He knows he can’t walk away from this, which means his only option is escalation – raising the stakes and hoping it works.
He stands, grimacing as the wound across his abdomen reopens. Crossing the kitchen, he opens the door. The rest of the house is still dark, but there’s enough light to see the hall. He steps over Erin’s ballet flat, pauses at the base of the stairs. No way of knowing if his wife has gone back to sleep unless he goes up there, but at least she hasn’t come down again.
He retrieves his phone from the living room and returns to the kitchen. He doesn’t like what he’s about to do. If he were a better parent – wiser and more emotionally literate – maybe he’d devise a better plan. But this is all he has.
He sits opposite Max, places the phone on the table between them, tries to control his breathing. ‘Here’s the deal. And there really isn’t another. You tell me, right now, exactly what’s happened tonight. No lies, no evasions. The truth. If you do that, this conversation – everything we talkabout – remains strictly between you and me. And I mean for ever. No one else will ever know, not even Erin. I give you my word on that. From there, if it’s bad, we figure a way out. Together.’
Joseph pauses, forces a calmness into his voice he doesn’t feel. ‘But if you won’t talk to me, Max – if you insist on silence – then I’ll phone the police right now and tell them what I know. Because that blood came from someone’s son, or someone’s daughter.’
Max blinks. ‘You wouldn’t do that.’
‘I would. And I will. I’ll give you to the count of five. Then I’m picking up that phone and calling.’