The Assassin King

Small comfort for Anna that she now had compelling evidence of her innocence to show the obnoxious Detective Elias, what with one of her uncle’s likely killers racing towards her across the yard. Exoneration would be of little use if he found her already dead. She kicked off the gumboots, therefore, and slipped out of the waterproofs, then snatched up her keyring from the cobbles and splashed barefoot to the front door. The man was almost upon her. One fumble and she’d be done. Thankfully the latchkey was distinctive enough that she found it instantly. She fitted it in, turned it, slipped inside and slammed the door closed a moment before he crashed into it with his shoulder. She cried out as it shuddered, but it held well enough for her to shoot the top and bottom bolts before he could try again.

She hurried through to the sitting room for the phone. She started dialling the emergency services only for the window behind her to explode as a brick was hurled through it to come rolling across the carpet and stop by her feet. She dropped the phone and ran upstairs. She reached her bedroom, closed its door and wedged her chair beneath its handle. She flipped on the lights for just long enough to find her bag. Crunching noises from downstairs as the men trod over broken glass. She turned on her phone. Her hands were trembling wildly. She had to tap in the number with her thumb.

A creak upon the stairs. Then another. The passage lights came on, laying a thin yellow line beneath her door. A woman answered the phone in a disconcertingly calm voice. She asked which service she required. Anna whispered for the police. Doors opened and closed as the two men came hunting. Her own handle began to turn. She watched in horror as the door opened an inch or so before the chair legs bit into her fitted carpet. One of the men called out to his companion in an incongruously posh voice. The two of them then pushed against the door, forcing the chair back inch by inch.

Anna went to help in its defence, phone clamped between shoulder and ear. A new woman came on, asked the nature of her emergency. ‘I need help,’ Anna yelled, there being no further point in whispers. ‘Two men are breaking into my bedroom right now. They murdered my uncle. Hurry! Hurry!’ She shouted out her address even as the door opened wide enough for one of the men to squeeze his hand through, feeling for the chair to pull it aside.

Two years before, while walking back to her flat after a late shift at the Nottingham pub where she’d tended bar, Anna had been abducted by a bank clerk named Harry Kidd who’d been stalking her for months, despite her three separate complaints to the police, who’d done precisely nothing, other than for one of them to use her contact details to ask her out for a drink. She had no memory of the attack itself, for Kidd had coshed her from behind, so that the first she’d known of it had been on waking up with a splitting headache locked inside the boot of a moving car, her ankles and wrists taped together behind her back, with another strip of tape over her mouth to stop her from screaming.

Perversely, this had quite plausibly saved her life, by preventing her from thrashing and yelling and alerting him to her revival. She’d had to think instead. He’d bound her feet and wrists behind her back with a single long strip of tape. She managed to pick up one end of it with a fingernail, after which it had only been a matter of time before she’d pulled it loose enough to free her hands and then her feet, and peel the tape off her mouth too.

One of Anna’s duties at the pub had been to host its quiz night. By bizarre good fortune, they’d had a question several weeks earlier about emergency release levers in car boots. She’d looked everywhere for it, had been on the verge of despair when she’d found it beneath a flap of carpet. She’d forced herself to wait until they slowed for a junction. Then she’d pulled it to pop the boot and throw herself out, breaking her left wrist in the fall. To her despair, the road had been empty of other traffic. Kidd had screeched to a halt and reversed back up, his rear lights illuminating the road, and her upon it. She’d jumped a ditch then had fled blindly into some woods, before throwing herself down and hiding for hours beneath a bush while waiting terrified for dawn.

Never again, she’d vowed. Never again. As part of her defences, she’d bought herself a chunky keyring fob equipped with both a rape alarm and a razor sharp box-cutter blade. She removed its safety cap and stabbed it down at the man’s hand, only for his black leather glove to prove tougher than she’d expected. He snatched back his hand before she could do him any proper damage, then he and his companion hurled themselves so violently at the door that they knocked the chair backwards and sent her sprawling to the carpet, banging her elbows so that she dropped both her key fob and her phone.

The shorter and burlier of the two came in first. He looked terrifying. An Olympic weightlifter, with tree-trunk legs and a barrel chest that pushed his arms out wide, like a gunslinger on the draw. He turned on the light to check that the room was clear of threat, then stepped aside for his companion, tall enough that he had to duck his head slightly beneath the lintel. Beads of rain dripped from his black acrylic sweater and trousers as he walked towards her. They looked brand new, as though he’d bought them specially. He was so gaunt that his balaclava hung slightly baggily on him, giving her a glimpse of sunken cheek. She scrambled back across the carpet until she reached the wall and could go no further. She pushed herself to her feet and looked around. But the weightlifter was blocking the door and the window was painted shut, meaning that her brass Statue of Liberty bedside lamp was her only remaining resource.

She ripped its plug from the wall, tore off its shade. She turned it around in her hands to use its weighted base for hitting with. Her phone was still on. The emergency services woman was shouting that two cars were on their way and would be with her in a minute. Bullshit. The nearest station was eight miles away down twisting country lanes. Ten minutes would be a miracle. She was simply trying to spook these men into leaving. It might even work, too, for the weightlifter tapped his companion on his arm. ‘Let’s go,’ he grunted.

‘Not yet,’ said the other, in his creepy patrician drawl. He took another step towards her then pointed his torch into her eyes, dazzling her and making her squint. He raised the blade in his other hand for her to see. Not a stiletto after all, but rather a large, flat-tipped screwdriver. He drew circles in the air with it, a wizard with his wand. Her heart pounded like a steam hammer. Her brain buzzed like a maddened hive. She tasted that ugly sharp metal at the back of her mouth, so that for a moment she was back in those woods again, her face pressed into the earth as Harry Kidd walked by. The memory paralysed her for a moment but then it gave her strength. Harry Kidd had meant to rape and kill her. But she was still alive while he was long dead, having hanged himself in his own stairwell to spare himself a trial, after writing her a despicably self-pitying note of apology too.