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‘Stop this!’ Erin screams. ‘I’m calling the police! Right now!’
Joseph tries to warn her off, can’t find his voice through the stranglehold. He tries to prise Enoch’s fingers from his throat but the grip is impossible to break. It feels like his brain is swelling in his skull, his eyeballs bulging in their sockets. He flails with his fists, hoping to strike Enoch’s face, but his reach is too short.
Shocking how quickly this has turned around. He’s spasming from lack of air, knows he has mere seconds before he passes out. He can’t get to the hammer wedged beneath him. Sweeping his hands back and forth, he searches for a weapon, something he can use as one, anything.
His fingers scrape the kickboard beneath the cabinets. They hook a door, yank it open. He touches cereal boxes, a bag of rice, bottles of olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
Around him the kitchen darkens, as if a shroud has fallen over the day. Joseph uses the last of his strength to snag an oil bottle. He shatters its base against the floor tiles and stabs the jagged edges into Enoch’s arm.
Enoch shrieks, pitching on to his side. Joseph crabs backwards. He gets one leg under him, takes a whistling lungful of air, drags himself up.
Erin is hunched over her phone, fingers busy on the screen.
‘No!’ Joseph shouts, slapping it out of her hands. It ricochets off a cabinet and clatters towards the bi-fold doors.
Spider-like, Enoch flips into a crouch. He dives forward, all his weight behind one shoulder. This time Joseph is punched into a wall, demolishing a framed print behind him. Glass shards and wood splinters rain down.
Leaning over, grabbing the back of Enoch’s belt, he uses it as a pivot to swing the man into the wall. It wins him hardly any respite – Enoch straightens and lurches forward again, fists swinging. He connects with a left, then a right. They’re devastating blows, rattling Joseph’s brain inside his skull.
Erin screams again, yells at them to stop.
Joseph stumbles backwards, slips on oil, nearly goes down a second time. He snatches at the knife block beside him, tips it off the worktop instead. When it hits the floor five blades flash out, spinning like silver fish across the tiles.
Joseph gasps, his balance all wrong, his head still not clear. He tries to blink away his dizziness, feels the colours in the room smear around him.
‘No!’ Erin cries. ‘Don’t you dare!’
And through his confusion Joseph realizes that Enoch has snatched up one of the knives. He backs towards the sink, passes the espresso machine, sees the coffee Erin just made him on the drip tray. Grabbing it, he tosses the contents in Enoch’s face, then throws the cup, which misses by a yard and shatters against the wall.
Enoch bellows in agony. Scalding coffee runs down his cheeks. Joseph backs into the kitchen island, feels the sharp angles of the hammer head press into his spine. He reaches behind him, tries to get his fingers around it. Enoch walks him down, slashes with the knife, misses, thrusts with it instead. Joseph sidesteps, the hammer still trapped in hisbelt. Finally he wrenches it free, but his grip is awkward, the head inside his fist, the shaft emerging from his fingers. It’s not even a stout piece of wood. Certainly no good as a weapon. It blocks Enoch’s second knife slash but not the third, which opens Joseph’s shirt at the bicep. He feels the cut even though there’s no pain, senses it’s deep.
And now Enoch is pressing against him, his forearm wedged under Joseph’s chin, his face so close that the pores in his skin look like craters, his beard stubble like thick black spears. Pearls of blood cling to his yellow teeth. He smells ripe: vinegar sweat and rank breath. ‘Tell me,’ he hisses, spittle flying from his lips. ‘Tell me where she is. What you’ve done with her.Tell me.’
And Joseph sees, in that moment, not an assailant but a fellow father, a man plainly terrified for his child. Enoch’s eyes, poached in booze though they may be, are filled not with rage but an awful, desperate need.
‘She’s gone,’ Joseph whispers.
And with that admission everything stops.
The pressure of Enoch’s forearm against his chin ceases, as does the pressure of Enoch’s chest against his own.
There’s no more movement, only sound: the steady drip of blood and coffee; Joseph’s laboured breathing; the tick of the kitchen clock, counting off the seconds.
Enoch’s pupils dilate. The muscles in his face slacken.
Joseph places a hand on the man’s chest and gently pushes him back. And then, because he’s known how this must end since the very moment he saw that phone in Enoch’s hand, even if he hadn’t wanted to believe it, he reverses his grip on the hammer and swings it with all his strength into the side of Enoch’s head.
There’s a crunch like breaking glass. A sound of kinetic energy transferring from metal to bone – and the bone not surviving intact. A spray of something wet hits Joseph’s face.
Time freezes once more, as if the entire universe has ground to a halt. And then Enoch drops, instantly lifeless, his head sucking free of the hammer. He crumples into an awkward sprawl at Joseph’s feet.
FORTY-FIVE
Sitting behind the wheel of his late grandmother’s Honda, Max Carver pulls into a rest spot on one of the quieter roads through Jack-O’-Lantern Woods. His phone is ringing, and he knows who’s calling. When he answers, he activates the speaker.
‘Where are you?’ his father asks. ‘Where’d you go? Where’s the car?’
‘Slow down. What’s wrong? I’m in town, helping Tilly put up posters,’ Max says, staring through the windscreen at the trees.