The Darkest Hour Read Online Free PDF Page A

Control. Surely they would have someone on their way to check on them by now, once they realised they couldn’t raise her on the air. Surely this would not be the place of their deaths. But it was too easy to make a mental amalgam of the murder scenes she’d been to – the slumped bodies, the cut throats, the finger marks in the blood proof of the final struggle.
    Joe’s back towered over hers, and when she leaned her head back it rested at the nape of his neck. She only did it for a second before realising it would interfere with his arm movements, but was aware even in that short period of time that they fitted together like they were moulded.
    The man stood up. ‘Devils!’ he gasped, looking down at something in the street. The cops?
    Lauren felt Joe work faster. The heat between their backs was intense. She could feel sweat beading on her face. She thought of the long blade of the man’s knife. A patient had once described how it felt to be stabbed, how you felt a blow like a punch rather than the sharp pain of the knife going in and out.
    The man was muttering, making thrusting movements with the knife. Lauren tried to swallow. Her mouth and throat were dry. The air was hot to breathe. She and Joe didn’t deserve this. They only wanted to help. She wasn’t a religious person, and she didn’t believe in karma, but she wondered now if being stuck here with this psycho was what she got for letting Thomas go free then lying about it in court.
    No. She wouldn’t think that way. She
knew
life didn’t work that way. How many good people had she seen hurt or killed just from being in the wrong place at the wrong time? What about drink-drivers (
like Kristi
– but she shied away from that thought) – how many had she seen stumbling out of wrecks without a scratch on them while the family coming the other way lay screaming in their mashed car? She needed no more proof than that to understand that they were here simply because they happened to be on duty and nearby when somebody happened to call. She shut her eyes.
They call, we fall. That’s all.
    A siren sounded a short half-wail outside. Lauren pictured a cop making somebody move their damned car. How would this work? Cops kick the door down and stream on in? She strained for sounds of bodies massing in the stairwell, the soft shuffle of black boots and body armour, the smell of leather belts and gun oil and rescue.
    The man’s attention was caught by something across the street, higher than them. He crouched, then darted to the side, then slammed the foil-covered window shut. He pressed against the wall facing them, looking at the ceiling and muttering. Lauren hoped he’d spotted police across the street, spying from a window to see what was happening. She hoped they’d seen her and Joe strapped to each other on the floor, knew where in the room they were, how far away the man was, at that moment anyway.
    Joe changed angle. His movements felt increasingly desperate. The corners of the buckle dug into Lauren’s palms and she could feel the tension of the tape against it, as firm as ever. The tongue was cutting nothing.
    The man seized the front of his own shirt and slashed at it with the knife. ‘Devils!’ His skin underneath was fish-belly pale in the gloom. The air was growing hotter and harder to breathe. Lauren flexed her biceps, testing the tape on her arms, but her sweat had made no difference.
    Joe stopped trying to cut. His fingers took the buckle from her hands, then he put his palms on her lower back, curving around her hips. His skin was warm, his fingers spread wide. She pressed her shoulders against him. He adjusted his hands, as if taking a better grip, then pushed her to the left. Instinct made her resist for an instant then she felt his body going that way too and she let herself fall with him.
    They thudded onto their sides on the cracked lino floor.
    The man said, ‘What?’, and a second later a crowd of police in navy jumpsuits crashed