by Ricki Thomas
“Oh, like I’m going to leave you three up here to plan some kind of escape.”
“There’s some …”
The voice on the megaphone silenced them all. Keeping the weapon pointed at the captives, Darren began to pace, avoiding the area near the window.
The house was surrounded, the SWAT Team’s sniper rifles aimed at every window and doorway. The road had filled with squad cars, and a crowd of onlookers was building up around the edges, eager to see some bloody action on Christmas Day, far more fun than the tedious television programs.
“We have you surrounded, come out with your hands in the air, I repeat, we have you surrounded, come out with your hands in the air.”
Using the cover of the tall hedges that lined the immaculate back garden as protection, several armed officers were quietly and swiftly making their way towards the patio door, which led to the death scene that was once a homely living room. One tried the door and, as expected, it was locked. He spoke quietly into his radio. “No access at the back. Do you want me to blow the lock?”
The voice of Team Commander Officer James Ellis crackled through. “Negative. Stay there.”
The extensively trained Team Negotiator, Officer Rob Barnes, had set up camp on the roadside and he waited until James nodded to give him the go ahead with his skilled task. He held the megaphone to his mouth. “My name’s Rob Barnes, I want to discuss what’s going on. Can you open a window so we can talk?”
Darren sat on the carpet, he had no intention of opening a window, they’d blow his head off, but he hadn’t considered this scenario when he had planned the revenge, and he had to come up with some way of getting out of this.
Negotiator: “How many people are with you?”
Damn them! Why did they have to turn up and ruin things? His mind whirred, searching for a solution, but every option seemed to end with his death, and he had a good life ahead, an apartment in the sun, sex with holidaymakers whenever he felt like it, a well paid job, cheap booze. Booze. He could really do with a drink right now, and there was that second glass of Corvoisier waiting for him on the drinks cabinet. Why the hell hadn’t he grabbed it before coming upstairs? If he went down, they’d probably be at the back door and that would end in death.
Negotiator: “Like I said, I’m Rob, would you like to tell me your name?”
How on earth was he going to get that drink? If he sent one of his captives down, they’d probably let the police in. The amber liquid in the delicate crystal was all he could think of, the craving intense. Think! Find a solution.
Dora’s life was so tedious that the best part of her days were spent watching the neighbours at their business through the front window, and gleaning as much gossip as possible by eavesdropping on conversations held in the open. When the policeman had arrived on her doorstep asking for her knowledge of the neighbours, she had been pleased to impart the information she’d gained during the day, and the Christmas plans I had happily chatted about over the past few days. Harold and Mary lived next door, they weren’t married but were planning to be. She knew that they were hosting Christmas that year. Their two sons, Alan and Steve, and one daughter, sweet young lady, Sophie, and her baby Jaimee, were all coming to stay. Two men had arrived since, one was Sophie’s ex-husband, Darren Delaney, and he’d turned up before the gunshots. The other man, very handsome, she’d seen him before a couple of times, but didn’t know his name. She thought perhaps he was Sophie’s new man. Well, he’d arrived after the shots.
PC Goldsmith radioed the commander. “I think it’s a domestic, it’s likely that the aggressor is an ex-husband named Darren Delaney. There’s a possibility of eight hostages, one is a baby, about six or seven months old.”
Every time Darren tried to forget the drink, it reappeared in his thoughts seconds later. He had to find some way of getting it. “Harold, do you have any rope?”
“It’s in the garage. Do you want me to get it?”
“Don’t try and be smart, it doesn’t suit you.” Drink. Brandy. All that alcohol down there and he was stuck in the bedroom, thirsty and craving a hit.
Negotiator: “Darren Delaney?”
Drink. “I’m going to go out of the room and lock the door, Sophie, you’re coming with me, you can get your stupid brat. But if it keeps screaming, I’m popping it.” He took the key from inside the door, and Sophie followed him onto the landing. He locked the door and checked the handle, before they headed down the stairs.
Negotiator: “Darren, we know it’s you in there. What has happened to you to make you take such drastic action, you can tell me. We want to help you.”
Beside the door to the living room, he instructed Sophie that she was to go in, get the whiskey and the brandy, give them to him, and then she was to return to get the brat. At least that way, if anyone fired, she’d take the bullet, not him.
“I think I saw movement by the door.” The masked officer held the shield in front of his body and held his Glock 45 GAP against the glass, aiming towards the doorway, his adrenaline flowing. He watched the woman, who, on seeing him, instantly raised her hands, walk into the room and over to the cabinet, where she retrieved two bottles of alcohol. “Young woman in the living room, I think she’s a hostage. She’s taking some bottles of alcohol. She’s gone out. No, back in now, she’s taking the baby out of its seat. She’s gone again.”
As soon as Darren held the bottles, he unscrewed the lid of the brandy and took a long swig, and relief flowed through him. He followed Sophie up the stairs, gun trained on her back, and they went back into the bedroom. The police could stay there as long as they liked, now he had a drink in his hand, nothing else mattered.
Negotiator: “We can help you, Darren, but we need to communicate with you first.”
Darren stirred, the voice hadn’t sounded right, something was different. He scanned the window, the curtains partially open, and realised that a small window had been opened. “You stupid bastards. Now they bloody know what room we’re in. We’re going to have to move.” Every word he said was captured by the microphone, which had hastily been suspended under the windowsill. He trained the gun at each adult, then let it linger threateningly on Jaimee. Back to Juan. “Juan! Juan! What stupid fuck type of name is Juan?” He slugged several gulps from the bottle, the floating sensation trickling through his veins, relaxing him, and aimed the gun at Juan again. A shot rang out and Sophie screamed as Juan curled up on the floor, clasping his belly, moaning, a deep, guttural growl, with the pain.
The Team Commander wasted no time. “There’s been a shot. Blast the back door, storm the house.”
Sophie pressed hard on Juan’s wounded abdomen, keeping pressure high to stem the blood flow. “Get your hands off him unless you want one too. Get up, all of you, we’re going to the back bedroom, come on, move it, move it.”
The muted sound of another gunshot had Darren in a panic suddenly as he realised they’d probably just blown the lock on one of the external doors. “Get on your bloody feet quick.” Juan couldn’t stand though, the agony was too great, he tried all fours but collapsed back into a ball on the carpet, now stained crimson with his spillage. “Get on your fucking feet, now, I said.” But Juan remained in the foetal position. With the other three adults and the baby waiting outside on the landing, Darren waggled the gun at them, he had no choice. “Back bedroom, now. Keep away from the window.” He turned back to Juan and another shot rang out. Juan’s body relaxed.
As he ran after his captives into the room, barricading the door with a chest of drawers, he could hear the team of armed police running up the stairs. He tried to count how many were ascending, but the alcohol had dulled his senses and he gave up. In his earpiece, the leading officer had heard which bedroom they’d moved to, and he prepared to kick the door down if need be. “Darren, are you going to come out with your hands up, or do we storm the door and probably end up shooting you?”
“Go away.” Darren slugged from the bottle, almost past caring what happened now, b
ut an inspired idea dawned on him. “Sophie, give me the baby.”
She clenched her daughter tightly. “No.”
He moved forward and grabbed Sophie’s arm, and finally the opportunity Meena had waited for had arrived, he was off guard. She swept her leg high, kicking the gun from his hand, and in a blink-of-the-eye movement grasped his wrist, twisted his arm behind his back, and threw him on the floor, securing him in a stronghold. Darren was struggling with his free left had, trying to retrieve the spare gun. “Get the other gun before he does.”
Harry jumped across and felt underneath Darren, his hand grabbing in the tool belt, pulling out the Magnum out and throwing it across the room, just as the door, cracked from the kick, flew open, tipping the chest of drawers onto the carpet. The room was instantly stormed by six masked officers, guns poised and ready to fire. Within moments Darren was handcuffed and being led away, a life of alcohol free prison ahead of him. Safe now, Sophie swiftly passed Jaimee to her father and raced through to help Juan, desperately hoping he was still alive.
Everybody was leaving the smallest bedroom, still a decent size, but only having comfortable space for a single bed. Two officers led the prisoner away, down the stairs, a car waiting outside to take him into custody. Meena was excitedly speaking to the other four, explaining she was a policewoman, trained in firearms, and that she’d been the one who had disarmed the gunman.
In her old bedroom Sophie knelt over Juan’s lifeless body, sobs wrenching, twisting her insides, regretfully wishing they had handled their relationship differently as her tears mixed with his spent blood.
A shot rang out. The house fell silent, leaving the haunting echo in their ears.
Chapter 28
Jaimee’s Future
Sophie was seated on the comfortable armchair, legs crossed, with her hands loosely relaxed in her lap, and had finished relating the horrific details of the Christmas Day she was held at gunpoint by the soon-to-be ex-husband, who she’d believed to be dead. The traumatic day that saw her lose a second mother, two brothers, her fiancé, and finally, her father.
“Dad was a gentle man, he was so placid, so calm, and when he lost my adoptive mother, Beryl, in suspicious circumstances, although it was formally recorded by the police as a mugging, it hurt him to the core. Mary, my birth mother, she helped him a great deal, and as their relationship developed and we got to know my birth twin, Alan, who’d also been adopted, we sort of became a new family unit. Just as close, but with a couple of different members.” She swallowed hard, keeping the tears at bay, hardening herself to the facts that never left her mind.
“He was sixty years old, had already lost one wife, and then had to watch as the new lady in his life was killed, his two sons were killed. I think it took him over the edge. Once the police had left the room, he must have retrieved the gun Darren had tortured us with, and he shot himself through the temple. The autopsy result said he would have died immediately, without pain. That was a relief. If such a word exists any more.
“The only trouble is, he left me. I’d also lost everybody. My ex-husband was the lunatic who had committed these terrible murders, and my fiancé, the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, he was dead too. The only person I had left was my baby.” She paused for a while, composing herself and her mind.
“The funeral was dreadful. They were all cremated, well, my family, Juan’s family flew his body back to Mallorca for burial, and I never found the strength to visit his grave. I asked that they all be cremated together, but they couldn’t do it as the furnace wasn’t big enough, so I received four urns, and at home I mixed the ashes together, to keep my family united with each other in death as they had been in life.
“I tried. Believe me, I tried. I moved into Dad’s house, gave Jaimee my old bedroom, although I sealed off the door to the bedroom Dad killed himself in. But walking around the house, it brought flashbacks all the time of the deaths and the violence that had occurred there. They increased the dose of my medication…”
“Medication? They?” He had his finger on his lip, listening intently.
“Anti-depressants. My doctor doubled the dose. But in the end I contacted an estate agent, sold up, and moved to a remote village. Different area, different style of house, different furniture.”
“Why was it important to make everything different?”
“I wanted to block away the images, the nightmares, the flashbacks, eradicate the memories that were consuming my life. It didn’t work, though. They still haunted me. I returned to drinking heavily, which is ridiculous seeing as it was alcohol that caused so many problems with Darren, but it truly worked. I’d knock myself out with it, sleep, and when I woke up, I’d knock myself out again. It stopped me from being able to think.”
He shifted his giant frame in the chair and rested his chin into his hands, leaning on the desk. “Which, of course, negates the effect of the anti-depressants. You had Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, and realistically I think you’ll agree that with alcohol being so involved, you weren’t actually being effectively treated.”
She inwardly debated his theory for a moment, and agreed. “Jaimee had her first birthday, I did nothing for it, baked her a cake, but no party or anything, I didn’t know anyone where we lived as I barely went out of the house, I was too scared. I even ordered the alcohol online and had it delivered. I wasn’t looking after her properly, and it broke my heart. I’d wanted to be such a good mum, I’d had plans and dreams when I was pregnant with her, but everything, my whole world, had imploded.
“When Social Services turned up at my door following an anonymous phone call: apparently I had been asleep in the garden and Jaimee was left crawling around on the grass by herself, I was just too tired and too low to argue. They suggested they take her for a few days, and, well, I’ve never seen her again.”
“So in effect you lost your entire family. Why didn’t they bring her back, give you help to recover, I thought that was how they played it nowadays.”
“I don’t know, but I had no fight left in me. I felt so alone without my baby, she was the only thing I had to look forward to. The house was silent, no friends, no family, no career, no hope. I wanted out, so I took an overdose. I was sectioned, and the rest you know.” Sophie had said the words so many times she no longer felt embarrassed, just weary.
He glanced at the clock on the wall. “Well, the session’s over for today I’m afraid, Sophie, so I’ll see you tomorrow, same time, okay?”
She nodded, knowing the score of the coming events. On pressing a button a nurse, Katherine, entered the room. She helped Sophie, her anorexic body skeletal, out of the chair and into a wheelchair, and steered her into the bright corridor. At the furthest end, she keyed in an access code and they entered the secure unit. Moments later they were back in her solitary room, and Katherine helped Sophie onto the waiting bed.
The nurse busied herself by the sink. “How did your session go today?”
“It was okay. We got to the end of my story at last. Now Doctor Carr knows all the reasons why I’m so fucked up.”
“Now, now!” Katherine brought a syringe over and injected the drugs into Sophie’s waiting arm. “We’re here to make things better but you have to be positive.” Within moments, Sophie was asleep, the excitement, the only thing she had to look forward to any more, of the psychiatric session over for another day.
Harry and I, holding hands, always holding hands, with our sons, and with Beryl, would watch her from the clouds as we moaned through the trees to try and get her attention. Every night was the same. She would wake from the drugs in the peaceful early hours of each new day, and drag herself up the bed until she was seated. The task was clearly becoming harder, her refusal to eat making her weaker and weaker. They’d tried feeding her through a tube into her stomach, but she ripped it out every time. They’d tried re-hydrating her through an intra-venous drip, but she would pull the needles out, even to the point where she’d had to be restrained at one stage.
But, sitting in the crisp white bed, in the crisp white room, drug levels extreme to keep her sedated, it was the only part of her life now that she had any control of left.
She would silently climb from the bed, eager not to be disturbed by the night staff, and sit in the chair by the barred window, gazing out at the night skies, sometimes cloudy, sometimes oceanic and speckled with stars. An hour, maybe two, listening to the soothing silence, reflecting on her mistakes, on her loved ones, us, who now sailed free in those skies, our souls carried away into the atmosphere when she’d scattered our ashes into the wind. The serenity of the early hours.
For the guard who worked the gate at the high security mental home, every night was the same too. The haunting, wasted lady at the window, ghostlike, pale, contemplating the heavens. For one hour, sometimes two. He would often wonder why she repeated her visits each day, what she was seeing, her face so vulnerable and scared, yet also somehow at peace. And the day her face didn’t appear, he knew that if he were to gaze into the night as she had done, he would see her, flying through the skies, as free as a bird, no longer restrained, imprisoned in her mental condition. Just floating, tranquil and harmonious, and finally free of pain. With her family.
Biography
Author of Hope's Vengeance and Unlikely Killer, mother of four, and long time writer, Ricki continuously studies the 'mind', the psychology, of people with great interest, and writes to educate and involve.