We Know You Know by Erin Kelly

Author:Erin Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

34

“No!” Jesse shouted into the stairwell. The tiled walls concentrated the light: all we could see of Clay’s broken body was a pale face, paper in ink, suspended for a few seconds and then sinking without bubbles. “I’ll go down to the basement, see if I can get in that way.”

I tried to take his hand but his skin was as wet and cold as mine and my fingers slithered on his wrist. “Jesse, it’s flooded. You’ll kill yourself.”

“He’s my brother,” said Jesse. He’d lost the color in his cheeks; his eyes and lips had gone silent-movie-star dark.

Greenlaw stepped in front of him, her small hand on his chest. He flinched at her touch but the only way past would have been to throw her down the stairs.

“He’s gone.” Her clinical tone made it all the more final.

Jesse slid down the wall, leaving a vertical smear on the dirty tiles. I opened my hand to show him Clay’s keys—the huge Nazareth door key, a Yale and a Harley-Davidson key on a leather and metal fob—and gave them to Jesse. He twisted them in his hands, black eyes staring blankly up at the clockwork as though he wished it would fall on us.

“What do we do?” I asked Greenlaw. I was a child desperate for a grown-up to help me.

She steepled her fingers and pressed them to her forehead. “It’s clear that our immediate concern must be to retreat to a place of safety,” she said.

“What?”

She could barely conceal her impatience at my idiocy. “We need to go down the stairs.”

I squatted level with Jesse. “Did you hear that? We’ll go back down now, and then we’ll find a way to make it all right. OK? Come on.” This time he did take my hand. He carried the bag; I took the big torch. Greenlaw carried herself upright as a ballerina. We used our hands on the old brickwork for balance. It was a miracle we had all climbed the tower at all: the stairs were steep, deeper than they were wide. The descent took us twice, three times as long as it had to climb up. One false footing and we would all go down. To stop myself from screaming I counted the steps. Ten, eleven, past the spray of blood flowers where Clay’s head had hit the tiles. Twenty, twenty-one, past the bar that had cracked his spine. Thirty-two, thirty-three, every tread bringing us closer to the moment where she would tell us we must call the police. She probably had a car phone in that Jaguar. Thirty-nine, forty. I replayed the moments before Clay had fallen. It seemed to me that after the initial grab, everyone was reacting to Clay and his whirling rage. I remembered my hands on his collar, trying to wrench him off Jesse. Every time I had seen Greenlaw she had been either cowering or reaching for the bag. Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine, and we were back in the atrium.

We faced each other, three sides of a square.

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