Shooting in the Dark

asked.
    ‘There’s someone in the garden.’
    ‘Go back to the bedroom,’ he said. ‘Lock the door.’ Sam stood in the shadow of the back porch and cocked his ears. He scanned the garden. It was dark with a light breeze; clouds almost obscured the moon. There was a grey slate paved area, flat and recently constructed, and there was the oblong patch that represented the swimming pool. Then the land began to rise. A path of limestone slabs led a winding way through shrubs and ferns towards a stone wall and a quaint shed with a shingle roof. In the foreground there were three mature trees, a sumach, an ash and a stunted beech. Between the beech and the swimming pool there was a long, low bench which could have been carved from a single stone. Nothing moved. There was no sound.
    The stars, the constellations in the sky winked and fluttered in a silent void.
    Sam waited for two, three minutes, all his senses straining before taking one step forward and down on to the paved area. Immediately there was the sound of an intake of breath and the silhouette of a figure appeared from behind the ash. Sam moved quickly, but the man was already in full flight, legging it along the limestone path. He stepped up on to a pile of bricks and was over the wall and out of sight before Sam was half-way along the path. By the time Sam got over the wall and ran along the back passage round to the street, the man was already disappearing around the corner on a bicycle.
    There was the possibility of getting the car and giving chase, but Sam thought he should check on Angeles, make sure there wasn’t an accomplice walking up the stairs to her bedroom.
    He tapped on her door and she asked, ‘Did you get him?’
    ‘No.’ He wanted her to open the bedroom door, wanted to engage with her eyes. Wanted to see her face framed in that wreath of dark hair. Talking through a closed door, you couldn’t see what she was thinking, assess her reactions.
    ‘Did you see him?’
    ‘Yeah, but it’s dark out there. I got some idea of him, his height, build, age, but I wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a line-up.’
    ‘I would,’ she said quietly. He heard her move away from the door. The next time she spoke her words came from the other side of the room: ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’
    He went downstairs and found a perch by the kitchen table. The guy had been six feet tall, slim and fast, no more than thirty years old. He’d been playing cat and mouse with Sam in the garden, hiding behind that tree. Maybe had some kind of military training, to remain quiet and hidden for that long. You couldn’t be sure, though, some people simply had a talent for concealing themselves.
    The bike was a stroke of genius. No number plates, nothing to distinguish it from other bicycles. Except it was a mountain bike. Blue? Green? Hard to tell in the dark. In the dark you were blind.
    Not a lot to go on, then. More than before, but it was all as vague as the mayor’s morals.
    He heard her bedroom door close and listened to her steps on the upper landing.
    When she came down she was wearing a rainbow-striped shiver of a dress, which was not one of the ones she’d shown him upstairs. It was so simple and fitted so well you could’ve cried.
    ‘Changed my mind,’ she said, as if there was a way to explain it.
     
    *
     
    When Angeles was at the opera and Sam was in the bar outside not drinking alcohol, Quintin Reeves stood up in his living room and switched off the television after watching an episode of EastEnders.
    The news of Isabel’s death had not really penetrated his consciousness. He knew she was dead, but the plethora of causes and effects, the multiplicity of the event as it ricocheted around his settled life had not been given space enough to alter his routine.
    He kept it at bay, instinctively knowing that once he gave it credence and began to accept its implications, he would be swamped by it.
    His body, however, coped with the shock and horror of Isabel’s death in its own chaotic way. The ability to see with his left eye disappeared. He blinked several times and it returned. But a few moments later he lost it again. A thrombus formed in one of the large arteries in his neck and was sent spinning along in the white-water river of his bloodstream.
    As he pressed the off button on the remote control the thrombus hit his brain at the speed of a very fast car. The impact took out the mechanisms whereby his brain communicated with the motor