Marnie had gone quiet, but Mark could hear the heaviness of her breathing as she digested what he’d just said.
‘If you’re saying what I think you’re saying,’ she said after a moment, ‘I’ll kill him!’
‘Don’t go round there!’ Mark said sharply, guessing that that was exactly what she was about to do. ‘Just stay out of this or Cassie might get hurt.’
Already at her door, Marnie hesitated. ‘What you talking about?’
‘He took Cassie earlier,’ Mark explained, waving for Steve to follow him back down the stairs when his bleary-eyed friend came out of the bedroom. ‘He said he’d let me have her back when he saw Amy. We thought she’d done a runner, but if they’re in hers she must have found him. Just do me a favour and keep an eye on the house till I get there. Let me know if they leave.’
‘Why should I?’ Marnie protested. ‘He’s supposed to be with me now, so why shouldn’t I go and kick the pair of their heads in?’
‘Because he’s got a gun!’ Mark barked. ‘And if you kick off, my daughter might get hurt. Just stay out of it until I’ve got Cassie out, then you can do what the fuck you want.’
Mark cut the call now and turned to Steve.
‘They’re at the old house. Get your keys.’
Marnie couldn’t settle after talking to Mark. Her mind was reeling, and her stomach was so tightly clenched that she felt sicker than ever.
She was furious to think that Amy still had such a hold over Lenny, after everything he’d said to the contrary and everything Marnie had done to support him. But whatever she felt about Amy, she couldn’t get Mark’s words out of her head.
Lenny was about to be a father. How could he be so cruel as to snatch an innocent child and use it to force its mother to come back to him? That was disgusting.
And what if Mark was right about the gun? What if it went off and Cassie got hit?
Unable to bear the thought, Marnie reached for her phone.
Mark had told her not to interfere, but she would never forgive herself if something happened to that child and she’d done nothing to prevent it.
39
Tears trickled down Amy’s cheeks and soaked the pillow below her head. Yates had banged away at her for ages but he hadn’t been able to keep it up, so now he was pacing the bedroom floor, sucking angrily on a cigarette.
‘This is your fault,’ he said, kicking the bed as he passed and glaring at her in the dark. ‘You’ve fucked everything up.’
‘I didn’t mean to,’ Amy whimpered, desperate to get to her frightened child, who she’d heard crying a few minutes ago. ‘I swear on the kids’ lives I won’t run away again.’
‘That’s what they all say, but they all run in the end. ’Cos you’re a retard, and they can’t stand the fuckin’ sight of you . . .’
‘Shut up!’ Yates punched the side of his head in an effort to silence his mother’s voice.
‘Mongy little Lenny,’ she sneered. ‘Kissed the girls and made ’em cry, hung himself but wouldn’t die. . . .’
‘I’m warning you,’ Yates hissed, his hand involuntarily going to his throat as the memory of the belt cutting into his flesh washed over him. ‘Shut your mouth, or I’ll kill you!’
‘I didn’t say anything,’ Amy cried.
‘I’m not talking to you!’ Yates roared. ‘Stay out of this – it’s got nothing to do with you!’
Scared now, Amy eased herself up in the bed. ‘Lenny, come and sit down,’ she urged. ‘There’s no one here but us.’
‘She’s here,’ he snapped, his eyes glinting crazily as he turned and stared at her. ‘She’s always here. Don’t pretend you can’t hear her.’
‘I’m ignoring her,’ Amy said carefully, guessing that he had finally flipped. ‘She doesn’t matter. We’re all that matters – you and me.’
Yates gave a sharp, bitter laugh. ‘She won’t let us be together. She’s just gonna keep on pecking and pecking till there’s nothing left, can’t you see that?’
‘We’re stronger than her,’ Amy said, wondering who the hell he was talking about. ‘We can beat her if we stick together.’
‘No, we can’t,’ Yates said defeatedly. ‘I’ve tried, but you don’t know her, you don’t know what she’s like. She’s evil, and she won’t stop till she destroys us.’
He paced the floor from wall to wall and back again. Then, turning back to Amy, he reached out and grabbed her by the wrist.
‘What are you doing?’ she squealed when he pulled her off the bed. ‘Lenny, stop it! Talk to me!’
‘Too late for talking,’ he said through gritted teeth as he dragged her out onto the landing. ‘There’s only one way to get away from her. You want to be with me, don’t you?’
‘Yes, but not like this,’ Amy protested, tripping as he hauled her down the stairs. ‘You’re going to frighten Cassie.’
‘She’s coming with us,’ said Yates, pushing open the living-room door. ‘Sorry I couldn’t get the other one, but the three of us will be all right.’
Cassie was huddled on the couch, trying to stifle her sobs with the quilt. She took a fearful breath when Yates stalked into the room, but she stopped breathing altogether when she saw the hazy shape behind him.
‘Sit with her and keep her quiet while I get things ready,’ Yates said, hurling Amy towards the couch. ‘What do I need . . . what do I need?’
Amy pulled Cassie into her arms and held her tight, her gaze riveted on Yates as he walked in a circle, punching at his head. She’d always known that he had a screw loose, but this was real madness, and she was seriously scared.
‘It’s okay, baby, Mummy’s here,’ she whispered, her mouth against Cassie’s hair. ‘I won’t let him hurt you, I promise.’
Cassie was rigid in her arms, and the little girl’s young mind reeled. Her mummy was here: she could see her, hear her, smell her. But her mummy hated her, so it couldn’t be real. It had to be a dream – a bad, bad dream.
40
‘Whatever happens, just stay calm,’ Steve cautioned when he had parked up around the corner from Amy’s house.
‘Easy for you to say,’ said Mark, his legs shaking wildly as he climbed out of the car. ‘It’s not your kid in there with him. I could fucking kill Amy for taking off like that. Why didn’t she ring to let me know she’d found them? She knew how worried I was.’
‘He probably wouldn’t let her,’ Steve murmured, remembering what Amy had told him. ‘And I wouldn’t be too hard on her, ’cos it’s been a nightmare for her, all this.’
‘Whatever,’ Mark muttered, setting off down the road. Steve might have fallen for Amy’s sob story but Mark was having none of it. She’d had a row with Yates, but now they were back together she obviously thought she could keep Cassie and Mark would just roll over and accept it. Well, she was wrong. Mark had custody, and he wasn’t leaving until he got his daughter back.
‘What we gonna do?’ Steve asked as they neared the house.
‘Knock on the door and tell him I want Cassie back,’ said Mark. ‘He can’t say no – he knows I’ve got the law on my side. Anyhow, he’s got what he wanted.’
‘Didn’t you say Marnie said she’d already knocked and got no answer?’
‘Even better if they’re not there.’ Mark shrugged. ‘I’ve got my key. I’ll just let myself in and take her.’
The house was in darkness when they reached it. Mark went up the path ahead of Steve and cautiously approached the front door. He could physically feel the tension coming from within as he knocked. He waited for a moment, then knocked again. Getting no response, he flashed Steve a nervous look and slotted his key into the lock.
41
Yates was huddled in the far corner of the room with his arms over his head. Still on the couch shielding Cassie, Amy could feel her heart racing with terror at the thought of what he might do when he got up again.
He’d paced the floor and argued with the phantom woman for a while after bringing Amy downstairs, and it seemed to
have prevented him from getting his head together enough to carry out whatever crazy plan he’d dreamed up. Amy had a horrible feeling that he intended to kill them all, so the longer he stayed confused, the better chance she had of trying to talk him out of it. But, right now, she didn’t dare make a sound for fear of tipping him even further over the edge.
Already on a knife’s edge waiting for Yates to make his next move, she bit down hard on her lip to keep from crying out when the living-room door opened slowly. A wave of relief washed over her when she saw Mark’s silhouetted figure, and Steve’s taller, broader one immediately behind him. But it was a fleeting sensation, and when the fear returned it had intensified a thousandfold.
‘Go away . . .’ she mouthed, praying that Mark could see her as she surreptitiously shook her head. ‘Don’t come in.’
But Mark was blinded by the darkness, and he walked slowly into the room while Steve crept upstairs to check the bedrooms.
‘Len . . . are you here, mate? It’s me – Mark . . . I’ve come for Cassie. You said I could have her back when you saw Amy, and it’s past her bedtime.’
‘Get out,’ Yates said quietly from the corner. ‘You don’t belong here. This is holy ground.’
Mark stopped in his tracks and squinted into the gloom. The words were weird enough, but the way Yates had said them was even weirder. He caught a movement in the shadows out of the corner of his eye and jerked his head around. Amy was staring up at him from the couch.
‘Go . . .’ she hissed. ‘Let me talk to him. It’s me he wants.’
‘Not without Cassie,’ said Mark. ‘Hand her over, and I’m out of here.’
Steve came trotting down the stairs just then. ‘There’s no one up there,’ he said, walking into the room, unaware that Mark had already found them. ‘They must have gone before we—’
A shot rang out before he had a chance to finish what he was saying, and Amy squeezed her eyes shut and threw herself on top of Cassie as a body slumped heavily to the floor.
Still naked, having come downstairs straight from his unsuccessful attempt to have sex with Amy, Yates stood up and walked into the centre of the room with the gun held out in front of him.
‘Filth,’ he hissed. ‘You’ve intruded on holy ground, so now you must die.’
‘Mate, stop,’ said Steve, backing away with his hands out in front of him. ‘This has gone far enough. He was only trying to protect his kid – there was no need to shoot him. Just let me get them out of here, and no one will ever have to know it was you.’
‘Death to the filth,’ Yates replied, calmly aiming the gun at Steve now.
Amy cried out when another shot shattered the silence, and peeked out through her lashes. She could see the dark shapes of Mark lying in the middle of the floor and Steve slumped against the wall. Neither of them was moving, but one of them was moaning.
‘Lenny, stop this,’ she urged, thinking that, if she could just get him out of there, whichever of the men was still alive might be able to summon help. ‘Let’s just go. Just me and you. We can go away together, find somewhere to live where no one knows us.’
‘We are going away,’ said Yates, staring down at Mark. ‘But not till I’ve made sure he can’t follow us again.’
He squatted down beside Mark and placed the tip of the gun’s barrel against his forehead.
Mark groaned and opened his eyes, and the last thing he ever saw was Yates’s penis dangling limply between his legs.
Yates stood up and turned towards the couch. Under no illusion now that he might spare them, Amy sat up to shield her daughter. A cold calmness settling over her, she said, ‘You’re not hurting my child.’
‘It won’t hurt,’ Yates assured her. ‘I’ll make it fast, I promise.’
Before Amy could reply, several police vehicles screeched to a halt outside. Blue flashing lights strobed through the curtains, and an amplified voice called: ‘Armed police . . . You’re surrounded, so drop your weapon and come out with your hands in the air . . .’
Yates flicked a glance at the window. Then, sighing, as if it was nothing but an irritation, he turned back to Amy and gestured with the gun for her to move away from Cassie.
‘Hurry up – we haven’t got much time. Best if I do her first, ’cos she’ll only freak out if she has to watch you go.’
Amy leapt up off the couch and launched herself at him, screaming, ‘CASSIE, RUN!’ as she tore at his face with her nails and kicked and punched him with all her might. ‘RUUUN . . .!’
EPILOGUE
Amy put down her hairbrush when the bell rang and scrutinised her reflection in the mirror to check that nothing was out of place before she went to answer the door.
Ever since Yates had been sentenced to an indefinite term in Broadmoor, her life had been slowly but surely getting back on track.
Steve had been lucky. The bullet that Yates had fired at him had only skimmed his shoulder, and it had been the bang on the back of his head when he’d hit the wall that had felled him.
Mark hadn’t been so lucky, and his funeral had been traumatic. Not so much for Bobby, who had been so doped up on the sleeping pills that Jenny had been feeding him that he’d been hard pushed to remember his own name at the time, never mind understand what was going on. But Cassie had been inconsolable. Which was only to be expected, considering what the poor mite had been through. But it had filled Amy with guilt to see her daughter breaking her little heart.
Jenny hadn’t been invited to the funeral, and nobody had thought for one minute that she would dare to turn up since the truth had come out about the way she’d been mistreating the kids. When the police had gone round to tell her about Mark’s death, she had demanded that they get Bobby out of her flat there and then, even though it had been the middle of the night. So when she had brazenly walked into the chapel in the middle of the service, weeping and wailing like a grieving widow, Amy had had to be physically restrained from attacking her.
The kids were living with Amy’s mum and dad at the moment, and Amy had moved back home for a while, too. But it had torn her apart to watch her children accepting affection from her parents while shunning her own attempts to get close. Cassie had been the hardest to get through to. No matter how many times Amy told her that she had never stopped loving her, for some reason the child was convinced that Amy hated her.
‘You left her, so she’s bound to think you didn’t want her,’ Amy’s mum had reasoned when Amy had sobbed her fears to her one night. ‘She’ll get over it in time. You’ve got to stop just saying that you love her and prove it instead.’
It was hard to take a back seat when all she wanted to do was hold her children in her arms, but Amy had agreed that it was probably best if she moved out to give the kids space to come to terms with everything in their own time. So when the council had offered her this flat, she’d taken it without hesitation.
It was her birthday today, and she’d decided to use it as a double celebration, a kind of birthday party plus house-warming. Nothing spectacular; just a few close friends, her mum and dad, and, most important of all, the kids.
She opened the door now, and smiled when she saw Marnie.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ Marnie apologised, pushing the pram over the step and into the hall. ‘Mister Greedy wouldn’t let me get ready.’
‘Don’t worry, you’re the first,’ Amy assured her, leaning over to peek at the baby boy who was snuggled in the pram. ‘God, he looks more like his dad every time I see him,’ she said, reaching in to stroke the child’s silky jet-black hair. ‘Majid must be proud.’
‘Oh, he is.’ Marnie smiled. ‘He’s been great. Gets up in the middle of the night to do the nappies, and everything.’
‘I’m glad,’ Amy said quietly. ‘Could have been a lot worse.’
‘Don’t remind me.’ Marnie shuddered. She didn’t know how she’d managed to get her dates mixed up between sleeping with Majid and Lenny, but she would be eternally grateful for the way things had turned out.
The doorbell rang again. Telling Marnie to go into the living room, Amy answered it.
‘Please take this child away from me,’ Layla begged, thrusting the beautiful little girl she was carrying into Amy’s arms. ‘Steve’s parking up, and I’m about to wet myself.’
‘Toilet’s back there.’ Amy pointed the way. Then, chuckling softly as Steve’s pregnant wife waddled off down the hall, she kissed the little girl on the nose, and purred, ‘Hello, Isabella Rockerfella. Come to see Auntie Amy’s new flat, have you?’
Steve walked in just then, and grinned when he saw his daughter giggling at Amy. ‘How do you do that?’ he asked, giving Amy a peck on the cheek. ‘She was crying all the way here.’
‘I’ve got the magic touch,’ said Amy, handing the child over. ‘Go and make yourself comfortable while I get the drinks out. Beer or wine?’
‘Tea,’ said Steve, rolling his eyes. ‘Under orders from her majesty.’ He nodded towards Layla who was coming back from the bathroom. ‘Apparently, if she’s not allowed to drink, neither am I.’
‘Too right,’ said Layla, pushing him playfully. ‘You’re the one who wanted to have another baby without pausing for breath, so you can damn well suffer with me.’
Amused, Amy went into the kitchen to take the cling film off the plates of sandwiches and sausage rolls she’d prepared. When the doorbell rang again Steve answered it, and when she heard her father’s voice Amy wiped her hands on her jeans and rushed out into the hall to see the kids. Not wanting to make them feel awkward, she resisted the urge to leap on them and smiled down at them instead.
‘Don’t you look smart,’ she said to Bobby. ‘And that dress is beautiful,’ she added to Cassie. ‘And I love that hairband.’
‘What do you say?’ Their grandmother gave them each a little prod in the shoulder.
‘Happy birthday!’ yelled Bobby, rushing forward and wrapping his arms around Amy’s legs. Then, losing interest when he heard the sound of a baby in the living room, he ran off to investigate.
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