Mice by Gordon Reece Page B

call the police?’
    She smiled sadly and shook her head. ‘That’s what I’ve been sitting here trying to work out, darling.’
    I didn’t understand what she meant and thought she was in some kind of shock. ‘We have to call the police, Mum,’ I said gently. ‘We’ve got to tell them what’s happened. They’ll call an ambulance. I need to go to hospital – my neck – it’s killing me.’
    But she didn’t go to the phone. She remained seated at the kitchen table, her bare feet perched on the struts of the chair to keep them out of the pool of congealing blood. With the right side of her face swollen, her eye puffy and half-closed and ringed by black and purple bruising, she didn’t look like herself any more – it was almost like looking at a completely different person.
    ‘Mum?’ I prompted her again. ‘The police? I need to go to hospital.’
    But still she didn’t move towards the phone.
    ‘Shelley . . .’
    ‘Hm?’
    ‘What happened when you ran into the garden? I couldn’t see – I was still struggling to untie my legs. I saw you take the knife. What happened then?’
    ‘I stabbed him,’ I replied.
    ‘Where?’
    ‘In his back.’
    ‘Did he have a weapon?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘How many times did you stab him before I found you in the kitchen?’
    ‘I don’t know . . . lots . . . lots. Mum,’ I groaned, ‘when are you going to call the police?’
    Her reply took me completely by surprise.
    ‘I don’t want to go to prison, Shelley.’
    ‘What are you talking about?’ I croaked. ‘What do you mean, prison ?’
    ‘I don’t want to go to prison,’ she repeated coldly, flatly. ‘And I don’t want you to go to prison either.’
    ‘What are you talking about, Mum? You’re not going to go to prison. He broke into our house. He had a knife. We were defending ourselves, for God’s sake. He was strangling me – if you hadn’t come along when you did, he would have killed me!’
    I thought she was being completely pathetic. I wanted help to come. I wanted to go to hospital and have the pain in my throat taken away. I wanted to have all the sticky sour blood washed off me and to be clean again, to smell of soap and talcum powder and to lie in a crisp cool hospital bed and be fussed over by nurses. Above all, I wanted to sleep, to sleep for hours and hours, and to forget the horror I’d just lived through . . .
    To my amazement, when I looked at Mum again she was laughing – not a happy laugh, but a morbid, bitter laugh.
    ‘If only it were that simple, Shelley . . . but it isn’t.’ She patiently collected her thoughts before she spoke again. ‘He was leaving the house when you chased after him. He was unarmed—’
    ‘ Unarmed! ’ I exclaimed in disbelief. ‘He’s a man. I’m just a girl.’
    ‘It makes no difference! He was leaving the house. You had the knife and he didn’t.’
    ‘Mum, you’re being ridiculous. It was self-defence. He tied us up. He hit you in the face. I didn’t know whether he’d really gone, or if he was about to come back and kill us both. He’d already come back once – I couldn’t take any chances. The police would never take his side against us . . .’
    ‘Shelley, I’m a lawyer. I know what I’m talking about. If we call the police, their forensic people will search every inch of this house. They’ll quickly work out that he was outside the house when you attacked him. We’ll have to admit that you had the knife then and he was unarmed. They’ll have no choice but to prosecute us—’
    ‘Prosecute us? Prosecute us for what?’
    ‘For murder.’
    ‘For murder ?’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Surely she was in shock, surely she was just talking nonsense . . .
    ‘There’ll be a trial. Three or four court appearances beforehand, perhaps as long as a year to wait before the trial itself. There’ll be publicity, lots of publicity, the press will have a field day – this is just the kind of thing they love. I’ll lose my