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hardly saw each other. Last night was the first I’d seen of her in a couple of years.’
    â€˜But the spark’s still there, eh?’
    He shrugged.
    â€˜And did you… did you ever sleep together while we were seeing each other?’ I asked, wondering why I always had to be so masochistic.
    â€˜Of course I didn’t,’ he said, but I spotted the lie in his eyes. He had.
    The bitch. I hated Marla then. Always thinking she could get any man. Messing with people’s feelings. Just like Rachel had when she was alive. What was it about these bloody women?
    We talked some more – mainly about him and his travels; a little about my life too – and smoked the rest of the cigarettes. But to be honest I’d lost the appetite for the conversation. Too much water had passed under the bridge between us. We were no longer two former lovers reminiscing. We were just two individuals trying to take our minds off the bloody reality of our situation.
    And at some point during the night I made a terrible mistake.
    I closed my eyes.

11
    I opened my eyes slowly and the first thing I noticed was daylight behind the drawn curtains.
    I frowned. Our plan was to get ready half an hour before dawn at 5.30 a.m. I looked at my watch. It was now almost 7.30.
    I’d fallen asleep sitting against a wall and my body was at an uncomfortable angle, so I propped myself up and looked around. Luke and Marla were still asleep on opposite sofas but there was no sign of Crispin and I couldn’t hear him anywhere.
    I noticed something else too.
    My knife was gone.
    Slowly I got to my feet and checked on Luke and Marla. Luke was snoring lightly so there was nothing wrong with him, and Marla was breathing softly, a peaceful expression on her face. I couldn’t see their knives either.
    I thought about waking them up but instead I crept into the hallway, listening out for Crispin. I wasn’t unduly worried. No one could get in the house and, even if by some mischance they’d managed to, they would have killed us by now. We were safe. We were fine. We’d just overslept.
    But where was Crispin? The house was totally silent, the doors still locked. Nothing moved. There was no sign of him.
    Yawning, I realized I needed to pee. I needed coffee as well if I was going to function, but peeing came first.
    As soon as I started to open the downstairs toilet door, the odour hit me like a slap. My heart leaped and I began shaking as the full realization of what lay beyond the door dawned on me. I didn’t want to look. Oh God, I didn’t want to look. But it was as if my body was operating independently of my brain and, almost in spite of myself, I put my head round the door, inch by bitter inch.
    The killer had sat Crispin on the toilet in a final act of humiliation, with his head propped back against the windowsill. A clear plastic bag had been forced over his head, sticking to his face like a second skin as he’d sucked the air out of it, and his mouth was wide open, as were his eyes, in a classic expression of desperation. It was debatable whether asphyxiation had killed him, though, because his throat had been torn right open along its entire length, emptying its contents all over his shirt, which was now almost entirely crimson. Protruding from his groin, like a thin metallic dick, was my knife.
    My poor, poor Crispin. Ruined and mutilated. Gone for ever.
    I cried out then and backed into the hallway, a hand covering my mouth as I tried to work out the logic of what I’d just seen. Someone had taken and killed Crispin without him having a chance to make a sound, then come into the lounge and stolen each of our knives, yet without making any attempt to kill any of us. It didn’t make sense. None of it did. And how on earth had the killer got in here?
    A hand grabbed me roughly on the shoulder and I swung round fast.
    It was Marla, looking concerned and alert. ‘What’s going on?’ she