Fast Fiction: How Crest Fell
Crest was looking out of the window of his flat when he saw a woman stab a man in the chest... In this short story Richard Mallinson builds up a large amount of tension with a sparing allowance of words.
Crest looked out of the window of his flat and saw a man and a woman arguing on the pavement. Passers-by ignored them.
The man was tall, with grey hair. The woman was shorter and had glossy dark hair. She was perhaps in her mid-twenties.
Suddenly the woman stabbed the man in the chest with a knife.
Then she turned and saw Crest watching from his window. She slipped the knife into her pocket and hurried away.
The man staggered and fell. A few people stopped and gaped.
Crest went out. ‘Quick, call an ambulance,’ he said and somebody used a mobile. A policeman arrived and said, ‘Did anybody see anything?’
The ambulance came and took the man away.
Back in his flat, Crest told himself that the man had threatened the woman and she had acted in self-defence.
On that basis, she would receive a fair trial and he, Crest, would tell the court that she was a person of integrity, as if he knew.
A week later his doorbell rang and there she was.
‘Please come in,’ he said. ‘I’ve been expecting you.’
He began to talk and went on talking.
‘Finally,’ he said, ‘we come to the episode on the pavement which, in my view, did not constitute murd-’ but that was as far as he got because the woman stabbed him in the chest.
As he fell, the woman slipped the knife into her pocket and hurried away.
‘Quick, call an ambulance,’ Crest heard himself saying.
