Dancing Towards the Blade and Other Stories by Mark Billingham Read Free Book Online

had a chance to open her mouth.
    He saw her check her watch.
    It’s time, he thought.
    ‘Rachel!’
    He looked up and saw the shape of a big man moving fast towards them. She looked at the shape, then back to him, her mouth open and something unreadable in her eyes.
    He dug out a smile. ‘Nice to see you again,’ he said.
    With the blade of the knife flat against his wrist, he turned and jogged away along the path that ran at right-angles to the one they’d been on.
    ‘Was that him? Was that him?’
    ‘He was a jogger. He just… ’
    Lee’s hand squeezed her neck, choked off the end of the sentence. He raised his other hand slowly, held the phone aloft in triumph. ‘I know all about it,’ he said. ‘So don’t try and fucking lie to me.’
    There were distant voices coming from somewhere. People leaving. Laughter. Words that were impossible to make out and quickly faded to silence.
    Lee tossed the phone to the ground and the free hand reached up to claw at her chest. Thick fingers pushed aside material, found a nipple and squeezed.
    She couldn’t make a sound. The tears ran down her face and neck and on to the back of his hand as she beat at it, as she snatched in breaths through her nose. Just as she felt her legs go, he released her neck and breast and raised both hands up to the side of her neck.
    ‘Lee, nothing happened. Lee…’
    He pressed the heels of his hands against her ears and leaned in close as though he might kiss, or bite her.
    ‘What’s his name?’
    She tried to shake her head but he held it hard.
    ‘Or so help me I’ll dig a hole for you with my bare hands. I’ll leave your carcass here for the foxes.’
    So she told him, and he let her go, and he shouted over his shoulder to her as he walked further into the woods.
    ‘Now, run home.’
    Alan had given it one more minute ten minutes ago, but it was clear to him now that she wasn’t coming. She’d sounded like she was really going to try, so he decided that she hadn’t been able to get away.
    He hoped it was only fear that had restrained her.
    He stood up, pressed the redial button on his phone one last time. Got her message again.
    There were no more than a couple of minutes before the exits were sealed. He just had time to retrieve the bracelet, to reach up and unhook it from the branch on which it hung.
    He’d give it to her another day.
    Standing alone in the dark, wondering how she was, he decided that he might not draw her attention to the newest charm on the bracelet. A pair of dice had seemed so right, so appropriate in light of what had happened, of everything they’d talked about. Suddenly he felt every bit as clumsy as his father. It seemed tasteless.
    Luck was something they were pushing.
    He stepped out on to the path, turned when he heard a man’s voice say his name.
    The footwork and the swing were spot on.
    The first blow smashed Alan’s phone into a dozen or more pieces, the second did much the same to his skull and those that came after were about nothing so much as exercise.
    It took half a minute for the growl to die in Lee’s throat.
    The blood on the branch, on the grass to either side of the path, on his training shoes, looked black in the near total darkness.
    Lee bent down and picked up the dead man’s arm. He wondered if his team had managed to hold on to their one goal lead as he began dragging the body into the undergrowth.
    Graham had run until he felt his lungs about to give up the ghost. He was no fitter than many of those he treated. Those whose hearts were marbled with creamy lines of fat, like cheap off-cuts.
    He dropped down on to a bench to recover, to reflect on what had happened in the woods. To consider his rotten luck. If that man hadn’t come along when he had.
    A young woman with Mediterranean features was waiting to cross the road a few feet from where he was sitting. She was taking keys from her bag, probably heading towards the flats opposite.
    She glanced in his direction and he