Hanging Hill - Mo Hayder [61]
‘Think I’ve fucked my hand, Sally, if you’ll forgive the expression.’ His teeth were clenched. He jerked his head in the direction of his left hand, not raising his eyes to it. ‘Gun hit a knot, slipped. I’ve got to assume I’ve really fucked it. Would you have a look?’
She turned off the gas and hurried across to him. The hand looked normal at first glance, just as if it was resting there, the fingers pointing up to the ceiling, but, closer to it, she saw what had happened. He’d skewered himself to the wall. She stood on tiptoe and examined it.
‘What?’ he said tightly. ‘What can you see?’
She could see the steely gleam of a nail head poking out from the fleshy pad below his thumb. She could see a single, oily line of blood running from the site of the wound to the wrist, where it split into a delta that continued down through the hair on his arm. And she could picture more – she could imagine the musculature and bone structure inside, because it was what she’d seen almost thirty years ago on the X-ray of her own hand after the accident with Zoë. She closed her eyes for a moment and tried to get past that image. It always made her feel inescapably sad. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I don’t know about these things.’
‘OK.’ He wiped his face with his free hand. ‘See that hacksaw?’
She crouched and rummaged through the toolkit. ‘This?’
‘No. That one.’
‘What?’ She picked it up shakily. ‘What’ve I got to do?’
‘Cut the nail. Between my hand and the wall.’
‘Cut it?’
‘Yes. Please, Sally, just do it. I’m not asking you to cut my hand off.’
‘OK, OK.’ She went quickly to the cupboard under the sink and pulled out two rolls of kitchen towel. She got a chair, scraped it up to where he stood and climbed on it to inspect the wound. Tongue between her teeth, she pressed the area around it. Steve winced and sucked in a breath, rolled his head around once or twice as if he was trying to release a crick in his neck. The skin on his thumb was stretched sideways: the nail had only pierced the side of the muscle. It wasn’t as bad as she’d thought.
‘OK.’ Her heart was thumping. ‘I don’t think it’s too serious.’
‘Just do it.’
Her hands were slippery with sweat but she pushed her fingers between the wall and his flesh and gently pulled at it, pushing it along the nail away from the wall, until about a centimetre of the shaft was visible between skin and wall.
‘Jesus.’ He dropped his head, teeth clenched, and his foot kicked harder. ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’
Tentatively she raised the hacksaw, edging the blade into the space between the wall and the hand, lowering it until it bit into the shaft of the nail. Steve stopped talking and went still. His eyes rested on her face. She moved the saw back and forth experimentally once or twice. He’d gone curiously quiet. She adjusted the blade and felt it lock into the metal, knew it was right, and began to saw.
‘Sally,’ he whispered suddenly, while she worked, ‘I really need you.’
Her eyes shot to him and she saw something she’d never seen in them before – something naked and scared. When he had said ‘need’ he had meant more than just needing her to cut him away from the wall. It was a bigger ‘need’ than that. She opened her mouth to reply, but before she could the blade slipped through the metal and the nail came apart. Steve’s hand dropped and the head of the nail fell out of it. He took a couple of steps back and she jumped off the chair and caught him, lifted the hand and held wads of kitchen towels round it to stem the blood. She made him sit down, his hand positioned on his shoulder.
‘Take deep breaths.’
He shook his head. His T-shirt had dark circles of sweat at the neck and under the arms. There was a fine spatter of blood on the floor and the tools were scattered all over the place. After a minute or two, he spoke. ‘Yesterday was the most fucking awful day, Sally.’
‘Yes.’ She crouched, peering up into his grey face. ‘Something’s happened, hasn’t it?’
He looked up at the ceiling as if he was trying to find