In the Still of the Night

Johnny stood in the doorway to the kitchen, staring at her.

Her entire stomach seemed to sink down through her. Oh, no, she thought, tears beginning to burn behind her eyes. Not Johnny. Oh, God, no, not him.

Yet hadn’t she known, the minute she heard that Roger Keats was dead, had been dead for eight years? If Roger was dead, who had been sending her Valentines all that time? It had to be the man who killed Roger – and that meant he must have killed Derek, too.

‘I didn’t hear you come in,’ he said, sounding so normal that she got confused again, because how could he sound like that if he was a killer? ‘I just made myself some tea – I’m amazingly thirsty,’ he said, smiling. ‘Do you want some?’

She couldn’t pretend everything was normal. She couldn’t. ‘Johnny … what happened?’ she whispered. ‘Sean’s hurt, what happened?’

He gave Sean’s prone body an indifferent glance. ‘He asked for it. He was making a nuisance of himself, asking too many questions, following you about. But don’t worry, darling, he won’t make any more trouble for either of us.’

Her breathing hurt. She had never before felt such grief, even when they made her kill her baby, Johnny’s baby.

‘Oh, Johnny,’ she said brokenly. ‘Johnny, darling.’

‘It’s OK, Annie,’ he comforted her. ‘I’ll deal with it. I’ll take him away when it’s dark. He had his keys on him, I can take him home and leave him there. I know where he lives – I’d already reconnoitred the place. I knew I’d have to kill him sooner or later. He’s the only tenant in that block so far, isn’t he? And the builders working on it knock off around five. It might be days before anyone found him.’

A sob broke out of her and she put a hand up to her mouth to stifle the sound.

Johnny stared at her fingers, his face changing. ‘You’ve got blood on your hand,’ he said with a frown of distaste.

Annie looked at her hand and shivered. Sean’s blood. What was that phrase people used? His blood is on your head. Sean’s blood was on her hand. Was it all her fault, all of this? Wouldn’t anyone have died if it hadn’t been for her? Guilt welled up through her very skin.

In that matter-of-fact voice Johnny told her, ‘You’d better go and wash. Blood is always a problem, it’s so hard to clear up, but he wouldn’t drink his whisky, I suppose he guessed I’d put something in it. I had to hit him.’

She was fighting not to go mad, break down, cry her heart out. ‘Why, Johnny, why?’ she managed to ask and he stared at her as if it was her who was mad.

‘I just told you, he was a threat to you, to us. He was too nosy. Once a copper, always a copper. I found out all about them when I was six years old and they talked to me for hours, trying to get me to tell them what really happened to my father. They guessed we were lying to them and because I was just a little kid they thought they’d get it out of me if they leaned on me long enough.’ His mouth curled in contempt, his eyes that deep, dark, angry blue. ‘They tried everything – they gave me sweets and comics and patted me on the head, they made veiled threats about my mother, said I’d be taken away from her if I didn’t tell them everything, they tried to trip me up, tried to trick me into saying something, but they were stupid. They didn’t guess the truth at all. They thought my mother did it.’ He smiled at her in blazing triumph. ‘You see? They’re stupid, all policemen are stupid.’ His eyes slid to Sean. ‘He was stupid, too, walking in here – he thought he was a match for me, he thought he was bigger and stronger, and cleverer, too.’ His mouth twisted in triumph. ‘He was wrong.’

The room swam in front of her eyes; Annie staggered to an armchair and sat down.

Johnny was mad. He had to be. Completely out of his mind. Why hadn’t she seen it before? Had she been so blinded by love?

Johnny quickly came over, knelt down beside her, looking up i

nto her face with anxious eyes.

‘You look as if you’re going to faint – are you OK, darling? It’s shock. I’ll get you that tea, tea’s good for shock. Shall I put some brandy in it?’

She shook her head dumbly.

‘Just tea? Well, I’ll put in some extra sugar, then.’ He gave Sean another look, hesitated. ‘If the sight of him is upsetting you, I’d better just finish dealing with him, first.’

‘No!’ she burst out, and Johnny’s face altered, hardened.

‘Why not? What’s he to you?’

She saw jealousy in his eyes and quickly said, ‘It isn’t that, it’s just that I … Not here, Johnny, don’t do … anything … to him in front of me, please.’

His face cleared and he gave her a radiant smile. ‘Don’t worry, darling, I wasn’t going to kill him here. That would make it hard to move him later. You have to take rigor mortis into account. I’ll just gag him and tie his hands and feet for now.’

Out of his pocket he pulled a length of twine, knelt down and tied Sean’s feet together, then his hands, the twine pulled so tight that she could see it would be cutting into Sean’s flesh. Trussed up like a chicken for the pot, Sean stirred, his mouth parting in a low moan of pain, and Annie saw his lids flicker.

Johnny gagged him a second later with a white silk scarf Annie recognised as one of hers. He must have got it from a drawer in her bedroom. He had been exploring her house. Or had he explored it long ago? That was when it occurred to her how very wrong she had been all along. If Roger Keats had been dead for years, long enough for his body to reduce to a skeleton, which probably meant he had died eight years ago, then it hadn’t been him who broke into her house and left that rose and the Valentine.

She whispered, ‘Was it you who sent me those Valentines, Johnny?’

He looked round at her, those beautiful dark blue eyes brilliant, smiling. ‘Of course. I couldn’t believe it when you told me you thought that bastard Keats had sent them. I was sending you my love, Annie. I thought you would know that. It was a shock when I realised you’d never known.’