The Wrong Man on the Stairs

The kitchen had gone the colour of charcoal. Gladys stood with her hand on the front door and her wineglass in the other and listened to a footstep on the porch that had no business being there. She put her eye to the peephole. The face on the other side of it belonged to Detective Karl Jenkins, dressed in the black of a man who did not intend to knock, and she stepped back into the dark of her own hallway with her heart in her throat and her wineglass shaking and the small final understanding that the silence she had been keeping for Luke had just stopped being enough.

Across the road, in a line of native scrub on the same boundary, Detective Sarah Lahey was crouched in damp leaves with a knee that had stopped working and a hand that was bleeding through its bandage and the unwelcome certainty that the man she had followed up the hill in his black running kit was her own partner. She did not know what he was doing here.

Karl, who did not know either of them was watching him, found what he was looking for at the back of the property: a bedroom window he himself had broken on a previous unauthorised visit, never repaired, the jagged glass still glinting in the moonlight like a dare. He pulled on a pair of black leather gloves and climbed through.

Below him, Gladys retreated down the stairs to the lower living room with her shoes off in her hand and her empty wineglass still in the other for reasons she could not have explained. She heard the small careful sounds of a man moving through the house above her where no man had any right to be.

The Portal opened on the far wall of the lower living room with the prismatic spill of colour associated with the arrival of a Guardian. Outside the great glass sliding door, in the scrub, Sarah Lahey saw a flash of impossible light resolve into a man who had not been in the room a moment earlier and could not assemble what her eyes had reported into anything her mind would accept.

Cody dropped his Portal Key in surprise as Gladys stumbled into him from the staircase. His arms came around her by reflex. She told him in a single hissed whisper that there was an intruder upstairs and that the intruder was Detective Karl Jenkins. He bent and retrieved the Portal Key from the carpet. He walked her four steps to the small unobtrusive door of the storage cupboard tucked beneath the staircase and he opened it and put her inside it. He told her to wait. He told her he would deal with Karl. The cupboard door closed, and a click that was very small and very final went through the bones of her face, and she was alone in the dark with her wineglass and the slow understanding that whatever was about to happen above her was no longer in her power to stop.

Cody came up the stairs with his Portal Key in his hand and the beginning of an idea he had not entirely thought through, which was that he could put the man in the upstairs through the wall of the world entirely and the problem would simply cease to exist on this side of the threshold. Karl, in the dark of the kitchen, saw him for half a second silhouetted against the moonlight from the upstairs window and assumed, with the hard final clarity that had been waiting in him all day, that he was looking at Luke Smith. He charged.

The fight was very short and very ugly. Karl drove his head into the other man's chest and they went down in a tangle of limbs in the dining room. Cody got his hands on Karl's ankle as Karl scrambled for the hallway and dragged him backward. Karl, on the carpet with his face in the pile, executed a desperate flailing kick that caught Cody harder and luckier than either of them had bargained for. Cody, who had been bracing himself on the very landing he had meant to use as a threshold, lost his footing on it. He reached out as he went. Karl reached out to catch him. Their hands met for a small intimate moment in the middle of the worst kind of violence, and then the weight of the falling man pulled the standing man down with him, and they tumbled together in a single tangled cascade that hammered holes through the plaster of the stairwell on the way down.

At the bottom of the stairs, Cody Jennings's skull found the edge of the doorframe with a sound that travelled through the floor of the cupboard and into the bones of the woman crouched inside it. Whatever last thoughts he had time for were not for the man lying on top of him. They were for a woman in Belkeep and a child whose face he had been carrying with him all afternoon and the warm vague shape of a future he had been assembling for the woman ten paces from where he now lay.

Karl rolled off the body and was sick into his own gloved hand. When he looked at the face on the floor he understood, in the kind of slow horrible coldness that arrives in stages, that the face was not the face he had come to find. He went through the dead man's pockets with hands that were not behaving like his hands and found a small piece of blank plastic in the lining of an inner trouser pocket and pocketed it without looking at it. He looked around for somewhere to put a body and his eye fell on the small unobtrusive door of the storage cupboard tucked beneath the stairs.

Inside the cupboard, Gladys had her hand pressed so hard against her mouth that her teeth had cut the inside of her lip. She had heard the fight. She had heard the fall. She had heard, very clearly through the thin door of the cupboard and in the unmistakable voice of the man she had earlier seen through her own peephole, the muttered words Shit, this isn't Luke Smith. The cupboard door opened. The body of Cody Jennings was shoved in beside her, heavy and limp and uncooperative in the way that only the dead are heavy. His head lolled against his shoulder. He was still warm. The cupboard door slammed shut, and the man on the other side walked away on footsteps that were nothing she recognised as Karl Jenkins's gait, and she did not weep yet because there was not enough air in her chest for weeping yet.

Karl climbed the stairs back toward the broken window with his ankle screaming and his hands shaking and one purpose left in him. He moved down the upstairs hallway in the dark and could not have seen — because the doorway he passed was a black rectangle inside a black house — that his own partner was at that moment standing flat against the inside wall of the master bedroom watching his silhouette pass. She had come in through the same broken window five minutes after he had used it, on instinct alone, hunting for him. He did not turn his head. She did not breathe. He went out through the window and over the back fence the way he had come, and ran.

She waited until she could not hear him anymore, and then she came down the stairs.

The blood at the bottom of them was the first thing her boot found. She crossed the empty downstairs living room with tacky red prints unspooling behind her and tried the sliding door and found it locked from the inside, and her eye fell on the small unobtrusive door of a cupboard tucked beneath the stairs, and she opened it. The body of a man fell out at her with the boneless heaviness of the dead. Her scream tore out of her into the empty room before she could stop it. She did not look further into the cupboard than the body. The body filled the small space, and the deeper darkness behind it was not a place her eye thought to interrogate, and she did not see the woman crouched against the back wall with her face turned toward her and her eyes very wide.

She did then what only a person who had already chosen sides could do. She got her arms under the dead man's shoulders and pushed him back into the cupboard, and as she pushed, fresh blood from her own bleeding hand soaked through onto the dead man's jacket and mingled with what was already there. A small device slid out of his inner pocket and fell soundlessly onto the carpet at her feet. She picked it up without looking at it. She closed the cupboard door and pressed her back against it with her whole weight until the body shifted and settled on the inside, and then she walked through into the kitchen and lifted a phone off the bench and put it in her pocket and went back out through the broken window into the cold of the backyard.

Inside the cupboard, in a darkness that no longer had any moonlight in it at all, Gladys took her hand away from her mouth. The first sound she made was very small. The second was less small. Cody's body had settled against her side again from the second pushing and the warmth of him had begun, very gradually, to leave him. She put one hand against his chest where she could not feel a heart any longer, and let her face come down against the top of his head, and wept the way a person weeps when there is no longer any reason to be quiet and no possible way for the weeping to be heard.