A Twist of the Knife Read Online Free PDF

then climbed out and locked the car. Seven thirty-seven. Just late enough, hopefully, for Michael to have arrived first. Despite her nerves, she walked on air through the front entrance.
    To her disappointment, there was no sign of him. A couple of young salesmen types at a table. A solitary elderly man. And on the barstools, a plump, middle-aged woman with spiky red hair and a tarty skirt, who was joined by a tattooed, denim-clad gorilla who emerged from the gents’, nuzzled her neck greedily, making her giggle, then retrieved a smouldering cigarette from the ashtray.
    Michael, in his den, stared at the screen. ‘Bitch,’ he said. ‘What a bitch!’ With one click he dragged all Margaret’s emails to his trash bin. With another, he dragged her photograph to the same place. Then he emptied the trash.
    *
     
    Back home just before ten, Joe glanced up from a football game that looked like all the other football games Margaret had ever seen. ‘What happened to your night out with the girls?’ he asked.
    ‘I decided I’d been neglecting my husband too much recently.’ She put her arm around him, around her rock, and kissed his cheek. ‘I love you,’ she said.
    He actually took his eyes off the game to look at her, and then kissed her back. ‘I love you, too,’ he said.
    Then she went upstairs to her room, and checked her mailbox. There was nothing. ‘Michael, I waited two hours,’ she began typing.
    Then she stopped. It was cold in her den. Downstairs the television had given a cosy glow. And her rock had felt warm.
    Sod you, Michael.
    Just two clicks and he was gone from her life.

DEAD ON THE HOUR
     
    (originally published by the
Mail on Sunday
)

The hour before dawn is the deadliest. The silent, ethereal period when the air is filled with an indefinable stillness; the darkness is spent but the new day has not yet begun. It is the hour when human resistance is at its lowest, when the dying, exhausted from the sheer effort of clinging to life, are most likely to slip their moorings and drift quietly away into that good night.
    Sandra held her mother’s hand; it was no bigger than a child’s, soft and fragile with leathery creases. And sometimes she imagined there was still a pulse, but it was merely the beat of her own pulse coming back at her.
    A tear rolled down her cheek, chased by another as she reflected on her past, her memory in selective mode, retrieving and presenting to her only what was good. She delved back into her childhood, when it was she who had been weak and her mother who had been strong, and thought about how the wheel had turned, as relentless and impersonal as the cogs of the grandfather clock downstairs. Strong. Yes, she had been strong these past months, spoon-feeding her mother an increasingly infantile diet. Supper last night had been pineapple jelly and a glass of milk. At 7 p.m. precisely.
    The clock was quiet; it seemed a long time since it had last chimed. She looked at her watch. A whole hour had passed, gone. Like the hour that ceases to exist or vanishes during the night when the clocks go forward to British Summer Time. It was three o’clock in the morning and then suddenly it was four o’clock. Sandra’s mother was alive and suddenly she was not.
    And now, equally suddenly, there was no hurry. Sandra clung to the thought as the one consolation through her grief. No hurry at all. She could sit up here for hours if she wanted. Sure, she would have to call the doctor eventually, and – she shuddered – an undertaker. She would have to get the death certificate. The vicar would make an appearance. There were relatives to be phoned. Probate. Her mind whirred as she remembered all the arrangements when her sweet father had died six years back.
Escaped
, she had sometimes thought, and felt guilty about that as she stared at her mother’s pitifully atrophied body.
    It was Tony who always made that joke. He said it was the only way her father had been able to get safely away