‘Patrick, Patrick, wake up, Patrick!’ she said, shaking him.
But he didn’t move, just remained motionless, eyes closed. She pressed her hand against his chest, relieved to feel it rising and falling against the skin of her palm.
The kids remained motionless, though, still gawping down at the prone figure of their dad. Sandy padded over to Patrick and lay down next to him, his paws in his owner’s blood.
‘Are any of you hurt?’ Melissa asked her children.
Grace shook her head, wordless, her large oval eyes impossibly wide. Lewis was rocking back and forth slightly and Lilly’s gaze was focused on her bare feet, staring at the blood on her carefully painted toenails.
‘Come on, phone!’ Melissa said, clapping her hands like she did in the mornings to catapult them into getting ready. Lewis blinked then stumbled towards it.
‘Patrick, Patrick!’ Melissa shouted at her husband as she stretched over to yank a tea towel hanging from the oven handle. She pressed it against the wound on his head, shocked to see how quickly the fabric turned crimson.
Lilly let out a sob.
My poor darlings, she thought to herself.
She grasped her elder daughter’s hand. ‘Can you take Grace into the living room, Lils? She’s too young for all this.’ Grace could actually handle things better than Lilly. Even at ten, she had a stoicism about her that her older sister lacked. So it was more about getting Lilly away from the horror of this scene. Though she exuded this aura of being strong and confident, Melissa knew how quickly Lilly could crumble. ‘Lewis, give me the phone, sweetheart.’
Lilly grabbed her younger sister’s arm and tried to steer her away but Grace refused to move, staring at her father. Lewis stepped around Patrick, flinching when his bare toes made contact with blood, and handed the phone to Melissa with a trembling hand.
‘It’ll be okay, Lewis,’ she said to him, looking her son in the eye and trying to convince him of something she hadn’t even convinced herself of yet. ‘Dad’ll be okay, you hear me?’
He nodded, his face pale with shock as he raked his shaking fingers through the dark hair he’d inherited from his father.
Melissa dialled 999, bloody fingers fumbling over the buttons.
‘So you found him like this?’ she asked the kids as she waited for someone to answer. ‘Just lying on the floor?’ They all nodded, wordless. ‘What time did you get back from walking Sandy?’ She peered at the clock. ‘How long did the walk take? Was anyone here when you left?’
Lilly went to open her mouth but Lewis put a hand carefully on her arm.
‘The walk took about half an hour,’ he said. ‘No one was here when we left. We came back about ten minutes ago.’
Ten minutes?
Melissa had been outside talking to Daphne ten minutes ago. That was plenty of time to have called for an ambulance. Why hadn’t they called for one?
Those were questions for later, though. Now, she needed to focus on Patrick.
Melissa looked towards the counter to see more blood there, and some strands of dark hair too. Yes, that must be it, Patrick slipped. Slipped and hit his head on the side. She’d always been so worried about the end of that wooden counter, so damn sharp. She’d told Patrick time and again to smooth it out. ‘If one of us were to slip . . .’ she would say, voice trailing off, unable to say the words.
Well, now the thing that was unsayable was lying right in front of her.
Sandy stood up and padded away from Patrick across the kitchen, leaving bloody paw prints all over the floor.
‘Jesus. Sandy!’ she shouted. ‘Lilly, can you grab him and—’ She paused, noticing something lying by Patrick’s slippered foot.
A knife.
It was one of their large kitchen knives, the blade slick with blood. She’d only been slicing grapefruits with it that morning!
Her eyes darted from the knife to a pool of blood by Patrick’s hip. She leaned over him, letting out a gasp as she saw the bloody slit in the side of his stomach.
‘Is – is that a stab wound?’ She looked at the kids in shock. ‘Did you notice?’
‘We didn’t notice,’ Lilly said in a whimper, wrapping her arms around herself.
‘Emergency services,’ a female voice snapped into Melissa’s ear, interrupting her panicked thoughts. ‘Which service do you require?’
‘My husband’s been stabbed!’ Melissa said, the words seeming so surreal and horrific as she uttered them.