Glenys Knocks Zlenko Down

Glenys Knocks Zlenko Down is the turning point in the confrontation at which Glenys emerges from hiding and kills Zlenko with a steel exercise weight. The approach of the police has made Zlenko pause, but it is Glenys’s intervention that ends the immediate threat to Don and reveals why she was at the scene.

The confrontation

As Don reaches the doorway, Zlenko knocks him down. From the floor, Don sees Zlenko look first toward Amos French and then toward the safe. A police siren sounds in the distance. Zlenko hears it too and points his gun at Don, signalling that he should remain still and silent while he assesses the approaching police. Don judges from the sound that the sirens are getting closer and that more than one vehicle may be coming. Zlenko lowers his hand as if deciding what to do, but does not get the chance to act.

Glenys intervenes

Don sees movement behind Zlenko and hears an impact; Zlenko falls and remains motionless. Glenys is standing where he had been. She holds a large steel exercise weight taken from the gym, with blood on one end. Her familiar casual clothes—a T-shirt commemorating the total solar eclipse in Cornwall on 11 August 1999, denim shorts and boots—make her sudden arrival all the more striking against the armed confrontation. She asks Don whether she has killed Zlenko in an almost matter-of-fact way. Don, still on the floor, can offer only an uncertain answer before she checks whether he is all right.

Why Glenys was there

Glenys explains that she had hidden in the basement when the others arrived because she did not trust the two men. She had just called the police after finding Mike Coleman's body and had nowhere else she felt she could go. Taking the exercise weight was a precaution; she came upstairs when she heard the sirens. Her account connects the confrontation to the discovery of Coleman's body and makes her intervention a deliberate response to an immediate danger, rather than an unexplained entrance. With the police expected within moments, the scene closes on the changed balance of power: Don is no longer facing Zlenko alone, and Glenys has made the arrival of the authorities imminent.