Shooting in the Dark

out as they toppled into the black water.
    Geordie was torn between running to the house to find Janet and staying to see if Sam and the blind woman could be saved. His mind was working at a hundred miles an hour and getting nowhere.
    He put Echo down on the frozen grass and told her to wait. He raced back to the pool and ran around to the spot where Angeles and Sam had disappeared. There was no sign of them for a moment and then suddenly the surface was broken by the appearance of Angeles’ head. She reached out and Geordie grabbed her and began dragging her out of the water. Sam’s head appeared behind her and Geordie could see that he was pushing her as Geordie was pulling. The water was so cold that Geordie lost all feeling in his fingers after only a few seconds’ contact.
    He hauled her up and out of the water and she lay coughing and spluttering on the side of the pool. Geordie turned back to Sam and was barely in time to see the older man’s head disappearing below the surface again. Sam’s eyes were dead. Geordie watched his boss going down, but there was no returning glance from Sam. He was not going to come up again.
    Geordie stopped thinking. He took the rope that was around Angeles’ neck and tied it around his wrist. The other end he tied around the wrist of the blind woman. ‘I’m going after Sam,’ he said. ‘When you feel me tug, pull us up.’
    And he jumped in.
    Jesus Christ. The water was like a vice. He was completely blind down there. It was like being immersed in pitch. He could not see his own hands and was rapidly losing all feeling in them. His lungs were bursting and the surface of his body was like a fire.
    He crawled along the bottom and found an object. Something heavy. He made out clothing, the leg of a pair of trousers, a shoe. He tugged on the rope and felt his body being pulled back to the surface. He hung on to Sam’s leg.
    ‘There’s a ladder,’ Angeles said. ‘Over here, in the corner.’ She dragged on the rope and Geordie let himself be led. He listened to the sound of police sirens in the distance.
    Together they pulled Sam’s inert body out of the water. His face and lips were livid. A fine froth lay around his mouth and nostrils. Geordie went to work on him like he’d learned in the classes. He opened Sam’s mouth and looked inside for obstructions. He gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, alternating external heart compressions with the heel of his hand. After a few moments Sam coughed and spat water from his mouth.
    The police arrived but Geordie carried on working until a pair of paramedics took over. He watched while Sam and Angeles were both loaded on to stretchers and taken away. Then he found Echo and took her into the house. A policeman had just finished untying Janet and taken the gag from her mouth. She was sitting on the floor rubbing her wrists, a piece of her skirt had been cut away but she didn’t look as though she was injured.
    She reached out her arms for Echo, and Geordie handed his daughter over. He crouched down beside them and put his arms around them and he would have cried if he could have stayed conscious for long enough. As it was all he could remember later was that everything, the whole world, slewed over to the left and his mind went racing down a helter-skelter of incomprehension. He didn’t mind, though; he knew at the end of it he’d still have his family.
     

57
     
    Sam was blind. Images tumbled over in his mind like the garments in a washing machine. Voices belonging to forgotten and forbidden memories played at the edge of consciousness. He could hear his daughter, Bronte, and his first wife, Donna, strangely freed from the hit-and-run that had taken their lives so many years before. Gus, his old partner, not talking but laughing, like he’d just heard the joke of the century.
    There was the clinking of glasses and bottles as all the booze he’d ever poured down his throat was lined up on a mahogany bar for another round.
    In the far distance the princely voices of childhood friends came and went, and all the women were there, barefoot, silently watching.
    There was nothing substantial. All was ethereal. Pieces of moonlight.
     
    She was there when he opened his eyes, sitting quietly by the bed. He didn’t speak or move but she knew he’d come back. She lifted her head and smiled and reached for his hand, came to sit on the edge of the bed.
    ‘How’re you doing?’ he asked.
    ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘We’ve