I remember a confused blur; hands reaching for me, grasping and clutching. There was a hoarse shout of my name and then a piercing scream that could only have been mine but somehow seemed to come from somewhere else entirely. I hit out. I must have connected because he spat an oath but then he drew back and suddenly I was flung cruelly backwards to fall hard against the house wall. My head hit stone, painfully, then he was on me and I went down beneath him with a panicked cry and a disorientating flurry of dirt and stunted shrubbery. His grip hurt and there seemed to be a bitter sort of twisted irony that this story would begin and end with a man’s strength easily imprisoning my hands.
I screamed again, uselessly, only to be sharply silenced as his fingers finally moved to my throat. I twisted frantically, desperately, but it was no use. The hand shifted, found its grip, and then with devastatingly practised skill, determinedly, agonisingly tightened.
An angry bellow from a gun penetrated the roaring by my ear. It was the sound of his breathing and the excruciating throbbing abruptly eased as an impossible pressure was dragged clear from my throat. My world span and my limbs were leaden, and for a moment it was all I could do to lie there, gasping painfully while grime and gutter water was thrown up in coarse clouds to crunch and splatter around me. It smelled of lavender.
A lump of mud, or a twig perhaps, struck my face, jerking me back to some sort of consciousness. Twisting, finding the boiling light clearing from my eyes, I saw the Colonel snatch the gun from Sir William’s hands to throw it violently to the ground. Looking utterly and genuinely aghast, Sir William did nothing to stop him and as the black glint of falling metal drew my eye, I realised that the expanse of dappled window light that ran cascading down the steps behind them was empty. Entirely empty.
The sharp hiss of an ugly curse snapped my attention to the booted feet that had been scraping and straining unnoticed by my head for some time, and it finally dawned on me with a crushing surge of realisation that somehow Matthew had found the strength after all.
With the careful deliberation that comes from shock, I deduced that the gun had gone off instinctively, accidentally, at the very same instant that Matthew had plunged up the slope to crash bodily past Sir William and onwards to tackle John. With the same dazed stupidity, I noticed that fresh marks had streaked the stone stabs near my head from the spray of lead pellets. They almost made a pattern.
I came back to life with a jolt when the blur of wrestling men crashed noisily into the stone frame of the window above me. As a foot slipped in the wet to pass within inches, it actually tangled a little in the spread of my hair. The sudden unexpected sting of pain was the stimulus I needed and I managed to roll aside just as a clipped cry of pain overhead was followed by the tinkling crash of breaking glass.
Slithering back into my shelter of the creeper, I saw to my horror that it was Matthew who was being pressed painfully back against the buckling panes of the latticed window. But then his grip on the other’s body shifted and then shifted again, and John was sent backwards into a stagger that very nearly left him sprawling on the terrace.
I heard Matthew’s breathing, rough and laboured in the cold night air as he lingered above me for a brief moment, fighting desperation and fatigue before thrusting forwards to meet the other’s attack across the running surface. A knee lifted gruesomely, connected; John was fighting brutally and it was clear that he was perfectly determined to kill his opponent in any way he could. A fist swung for Matthew’s jaw but the blow fell short to glance harmlessly off a shoulder and then John's foot slipped so that he had to flail desperately for balance and grip the person he was trying to destroy. In an instant Matthew closed on him and they both went crashing down in a rough scattering of mud and water so that for a moment I couldn’t tell who it was that had the other held in a savage grip. But then Matthew managed to twist free and John’s head snapped back and he fell away with a sharp animal cry of pain.
Matthew took a while to get up – too long, and I saw a flicker of triumph pass across John’s clouded face as, muttering a lurid threat woven about my name, he stepped in to prepare another punishingly brutal blow. I screamed a warning, fingers tearing shreds out of the creeper as I dragged myself to my feet. It was only as I drew in another gasping breath that I realised that I had made no sound at all.
But whether by instinct or by luck, Matthew twisted aside in mid-rise so that I saw the kick cut a sodden arc to glide harmlessly past him and then he was on his feet again, stepping forwards into a determined lunge so that they disappeared together in another chaos of disturbed evergreens and straining limbs. They crashed down again, this time into one of the tall sculpted yews to carve a grotesque hole in the side before dislodging one of the stone urns in an uncontrollable dive that sent them both tumbling to the foot of the stone steps. Again, it was John who was first to stagger drunkenly to his feet.
Staggering myself as I took those first urgent steps away from the support of the sagging creeper, I saw that man, snarling, reach for his opponent’s throat. His fingers worked with the same ugly confidence that had grasped at mine but he was not so bold when Matthew only stepped in and broke his hold with all the fluidity of experience. John gave ground, limping now as he slithered backwards down the slope of the mud smeared lawn and he seemed suddenly aware that as he tired, the distinction between murderer and victim became considerably less well defined. But then I noticed a black line in the rain-soaked grass behind his feet and as light burst from the house to cast their shadows long across the blackened hillside, I realised what he was doing. I set my dogged course towards it.
Light flickered again. It swung in a dizzying lurch across the bowing flowerbeds before fixing into a narrow wavering beam. Another joined it, swaying crazily from the other end of the terrace, and I realised that the lights were not coming from the house at all, but beyond from the sweeping driveway as, running with torches, the police finally arrived.
Hands touched me, gripping me as I reached the top of the steps and hung there briefly, gasping for breath and gripping the newly vacated plinth in my turn. They were patting me – the Colonel beside me with his brother just behind, checking I was unhurt I think – but their presence faded to nothing in my consciousness when beyond I saw John abandon the gun and break away to lift his head, listening. He took another clumsy step backwards, dodging Matthew’s reach with a desperate snarl and then turned his head to listen again. Craning my aching neck past the old men, I tried to peer into the flickering darkness and it was only when a great shape detached itself from the shadows that I finally understood.
Spooked and maddened by the crush of approaching men who ran along behind her, Beechnut must have been sent on a frantic charge out of the driveway and around the far side of the house towards us. She jinked right, stirrups flapping and hooves scrabbling wildly for purchase on the slippery terrace before launching herself in a scattering of wind-ravaged buddleias over a flowerbed and down onto the greasy surface of the mud-scarred lawn.
Caught in mid-lunge, Matthew let out a cry as she crashed past him, sending him spinning aside from the force of her impact to land sprawling in the mud. John was more fortunate. Forewarned and already making a side-stepping evasion, John threw up his arms to ward her off and as she veered away I saw his hands stretch out and reach for the reins. She flung her head wildly, trying to tear away from him, but somehow he held her and even as Matthew scrambled into a desperate dive, he jumped and swung himself up onto her back.
The horse plunged and kicked savagely and I thought that he would fall but somehow he managed to force her up into the bridle to take her prisoner between hand and leg. He turned her in a spinning circle. It was very nearly a rear and as she shied from the spreading line of policemen, he dragged on a rein and at last released her to send her at a pounding gallop away from us down the slope.
She went at a maddened race. Her flying hooves sent up great clumps of earth as she charged across the slanting lawn towards the low hedge on its crumbling boundary that overlooked the great lake. It stretched black in the distance and suddenly I realised with a sense of numbing horror what was about to happen.
John was crouching low over her neck with all the precarious perfection of a racing jockey as he urged her ever onwards, and in that position he never stood a chance. As before she threw out her legs at the last possible moment and once again she crashed to a slithering halt so that her chest pressed brutally against the sharp evergreen of the box hedge and her muscles strained hard to hold her back. Her head dropped and then he was airborne, soaring high and far over the steep slopes of the black wooded valley. He seemed to hang there for an eternity, an unnatural creature snatching greedily at the sky. But then, suddenly, he lost his battle with gravity and at last, gracelessly, with terrible and devastating finality, he fell.