I stopped again before I entered John’s bedroom.
Glancing back towards the front door I’d left open, I could see the faint glow and flicker of flames.
When I turned frontwards again, the vertebrae in my neck creaked and crunched.
I raised a hand up and cupped it over my mouth, stifling a cough.
I readied the hammer.
It felt for a moment as if even the house itself was listening to me. As if my breathing would give me away.
Then I took one large stride into the room.
The first thing that struck me was the odour.
There was the stale, fuggy scent of bed sheets and sleep.
But also something else.
A trace of ammonia. A sweaty back note of something sour and dismal.
John was sitting on the hospital bed with his back to me, facing the old disused fireplace. His shoulders were hunched, his head bowed, his hands in his lap.
He moaned again.
I didn’t think he knew I was here. I got the impression he was moaning to himself.
‘John?’ I whispered.
He hunched up tighter without turning around.
I blinked, my eyes feeling gritty and sore from the smoke, my throat parched and hot.
I checked all about me, but if Sam was here, he wasn’t in this room.
John was alone with whatever jumbled thoughts were keeping him company in his head.
‘John, what’s wrong?’
He quivered but he didn’t reply.
I checked the doorway behind me, then took a step to my side, venturing carefully around the end of the bed and moving closer to John.
‘John, will you look at me? I need to get you out of here.’
‘John mustn’t look,’ he muttered, shying away. ‘John has to stay in his room.’
A squeamish sensation as I stared at the way he was huddled and cowed. As if he’d adopted this position and pose before.
‘Oh, John, no.’
A rush of heat blazed up from my toes to my hairline as I thought of all the evenings when Sam had come next door to check on John. All the times when he’d told me how they’d spent their evenings together.
Sam had told me he’d read books or the newspaper to John.
He’d said he’d marked essays while John had watched TV.
But now I suspected it hadn’t been true.
Or only part of it had been true.
Because John’s hunched posture, his soft, sad moaning, spoke of a wholly different experience.
‘Oh, John, I’m sorry. I am so sorry.’
I reached for his hands but he withdrew from me, moaning louder.
I froze and cast a look towards the door, listening hard for a response.
When none came, I was careful to lower my voice.
‘Do you know where Sam is?’
‘John won’t look. John can’t look.’
A sudden, desperate cramping.
My greased fingers slipped on the handle of the hammer.
‘John, what is it you’re not supposed to look at?’
But instead of answering me, he just shook his head and gazed down at a spot on the floor.
I raised my palm to my chest, my aching lungs.
‘I won’t go upstairs,’ he whispered.
‘Upstairs?’
Taking three jolting steps backwards, I leaned out into the hallway, craning my neck to look up.
I felt as if I understood several things all at once, then.
Whatever Sam had come here for – whatever had lured him inside – could be upstairs in this house.
Did it also explain why Sam had moved John’s bedroom down to the ground floor? I suspected it was about more than simply keeping John safe.
‘Mary went upstairs,’ John muttered. ‘She shouldn’t have gone upstairs.’
I spun back.
No.
Sam had been the one who’d found Mary after her fall.
It was Sam who’d called for the ambulance.
But it was also Sam who’d pushed Oliver from the roof of his apartment building.
It was Sam who’d shoved me down the steps to the basement.
And with Mary out of the way, the only person living next door to us in this house was John. He was alone and he had dementia.
Had Mary heard something that had made her suspicious, I wondered? Had I screamed? Banged on the basement walls? Had she confronted Sam?
Another flush of anger.
I needed to get John outside but I didn’t want him to become agitated or shout if I tried.
I drifted further out into the hallway, staring up the staircase towards the landing, feeling my spine pull so taut it seemed to lengthen, picturing Mary and the distance she would have fallen, how hard she’d hit the bottom, the pain she would have been in.
She’d been unconscious when Sam had called me in to help. I’d held her hand as the paramedics had wheeled her out on a stretcher.
I reached the bottom of the stairs and rested my leading foot on the lowest riser, taking hold of the banister in my hand, clenching the hammer next to me.
Was I really going to go up there?
A soft click behind me.
I swivelled to see Sam pressing his back against the front door he’d closed behind him.
He was sweating, wincing, leaning all his weight onto his good leg, his bad leg propped lightly on his toes.
‘Look at us,’ he said. ‘Alone again.’