by Mark Pearson
He waited for two of the armed officers to position themselves either side of the door and hammered on it with a fist as heavy as his heart.
Ashley Bradley's grandmother peered out. 'Can I help you?'
Duncton took her by the arms and moved her outside. 'Is he here?'
'Ashley?'
'Yes, Mrs Bradley. Is your son here?'
'No, he's not in right now. And he's my grandson.'
Duncton gestured and the armed men piled into the house. A few seconds later they emerged shaking their heads.
'I told you,' said Mrs Bradley.
Duncton sighed. 'Where is he, then?'
'He's gone to the cinema. Some film he wanted to see. He loves romantic films.'
Delaney jogged painfully back the way he had come and had to stop by a bus shelter to catch his breath. He leaned against it as he pulled out his packet of cigarettes, cursing at the awkwardness of only having one arm to use as he fumbled one into his mouth. A handsomely dressed middle-aged couple walked past, putting as much room between him and them as possible. Delaney didn't blame them. He used the flat of his hand to brush some of the dust from his trousers. He sneezed. He lit his cigarette and sneezed again. And then he realised, the cigarette almost falling from his mouth, but not quite. 'Idiot!' He almost shouted it.
The middle-aged couple ahead looked back, but Delaney didn't even register them. He began running back towards the house he had left just five minutes previously. Running in real earnest now.
Ashley did like romantic films. Quite often in the early screenings it meant there was a fair scattering of women in the audience. Single women who didn't want to come later and feel jealous of the happy couples sitting all around them. Ashley could relate to that. He settled back and enjoyed the trailers. His overcoat was pulled lightly together, his jeans were unbuttoned beneath it and with a hole already cut in his right-hand pocket he was good to go.
While he had been sat there she had already eaten a hot dog and was now munching her way through a bin-sized bucket of popcorn. Not that he was objecting, he liked to hear women eat. He enjoyed listening to the wet sounds her lips made as they slapped together, the little, almost inaudible groans of pleasure as she swallowed.
He gave himself a little preparatory stroke. The next trailer was for a Sandra Bullock film. Ashley Bradley was a big fan of Sandra Bullock. Had been ever since Demolition Man, when she ran around in her tight black pants and futuristic cop outfit. Ashley had had a really bad couple of days and he figured he deserved a treat. And treats didn't come much better than Sandra Bullock in tight clothing. He closed his eyes for a moment, picturing her in her uniform, when the sound of men running loudly down the gently sloping aisle made him snap them open again.
Robert Duncton and four of his men stopped opposite Bradley's seat, fanning out, two of them training semi-automatic pistols at him.
'Get him.'
The other two leaned in and yanked him up. His coat flew open, his jeans dropped, and his penis, semi-priapic, twisted and scarred, wagged in the direction of the woman sitting next to him.
She looked at it, screamed and promptly threw up.
Ashley's day wasn't getting any better.
Nor was Detective Inspector Robert Duncton from Paddington Green's. 'Get him out of here,' he shouted, stepping back and wiping some of the splatter from his once immaculate trousers.
Delaney pushed open the front door that he had earlier forced and walked in again, listening for any sounds, but there were none. He flicked the light on and walked down to the kitchen. He turned the light on in the kitchen and looked at the floor. It was as clean as he remembered it. Too clean. There was no dust on it. He walked across to the dresser that was positioned in the far corner opposite the sink and leaned against the wall at a diagonal. He put his hands either side of the base unit and pulled. It was sitting on a rug and came away surprisingly easy. He pulled it a little further out and looked behind it. There was a trap door.
Bingo.
He bent down, put his finger through the ring and pulled it open and called out.
'Sally.'
'Sir, you can't come down here.'
'It's all right, Sally, it's just me.'
Delaney took off his jacket and walked down the stairs.
'You can't see me like this.'
'I can't see a thing,' said Delaney. 'It's like the black hole of Calcutta down here.'
'Don't mention Indian restaurants.'
Delaney could hear the fragility behind her laugh, he reached out with his jacket and she managed to drape it around her shoulders. Delaney went back to the bottom of the stairs and fumbled for the light switch. He found and turned it on; a bare bulb flared up overhead. It was a small wine cellar. Empty apart from a side table, a mirror and his young assistant who was manacled to the wall, her arm raised like an overeager child with the answer to a difficult question in class.
'Did he hurt you, Sally?'
She shook her head. 'He took me to another bar for a drink. He must have slipped something in it, because I remember feeling suddenly woozy and I hadn't drunk that much. He said he'd drive me home. The last thing I can remember is getting into his car. And then I passed out.'
Delaney took a hold of the ring set into the wall with his one good hand and tried pulling it. It wouldn't budge. He managed to loosen the manacle a little, but not enough for Sally to free her hand.
'Don't worry, Sally, we'll get you out.'
'Michael Hill, sir. Did he hurt anyone else?'
'No, and he's not going to hurt anyone again. He's dead.'
'Good!'
Delaney nodded. She was right. He headed back to the steps. 'I'm going upstairs to find something to get you free with.'
Delaney walked up the stairs and into the kitchen and stopped dead as he saw the rifle pointing at him.
He looked at the person holding it and held his hands up. She looked familiar to him but he couldn't place her at first. And then he did. She was the receptionist at the South Hampstead Hospital. She wasn't smiling.
'Put the rifle down,' he said.
The woman smiled and there was poison in it. 'I don't think so.'
'Who are you?'
'Not that it's going to matter to you, but my name is Audrey Hill.'
Delaney nodded. 'Michael Hill, he's your husband?'
'No, Detective Delaney. He's my baby brother. I brought him up.'
'You know who I am then?'
'I know exactly who you are.'
'And you knew what your brother was doing?'
'He didn't do anything, Detective. He never does without my permission . . .' She looked at Delaney with flat eyes, and he felt a chill run up his spine. 'Not any more.'
Delaney swallowed drily, his mind racing, running through the options. He wasn't thinking so much about himself, he was thinking about the young, near-naked detective constable chained to the wall in the cellar beneath them. He had to keep her talking, he had to keep this madwoman away from her. He didn't know what he was going to do but he knew this much, she stopped talking and it was over for him. Over for both of them.
'Why then, Audrey?'
She moved closer to Delaney, her unblinking eyes staring at him like a entomologist might examine a newly discovered specimen. 'Neither of them suffered. They were all painless deaths. Anaesthetised and then a simple cut to the jugular. They died in their sleep.'
'And the surgeon?'
The woman shrugged. 'We were disturbed. I'll get back to him later.'
'What had they done to you?'
Delaney tried to edge closer to her but she raised the rifle and shook her head very slightly. 'This is a tranquilliser rifle, but it's loaded for very large animals. It's hard to describe the damage it would do to a human central nervous system.'
Delaney held up his hands, calming. 'Why did you kill them, Audrey?'
'Because of what they did to me.'
'What?'
'Were you aware that one in seven hund
red people wake up during an operation under general anaesthetic, Detective?' she said.
Delaney wasn't. 'No,' he replied.
'You're paralysed, immobile, you can't move. Not even an eyelid. But you can feel. Feel the cold steel of the scalpel slicing into you. Feel your flesh parting as they open you up.'
Delaney didn't respond, it was putting it mildly to say that he already had a very bad feeling about this woman, he knew what she was capable of, after all. He could feel the anger and sickness radiating off her like the shimmering haze of a tarmac road in a heatwave.
Audrey Hill took another step closer to him. 'You can hear too, Detective Inspector. And that's the worst part of it. They were talking, the two sluts whispering to each other about clients they'd fucked. The surgeon talking about football to the vapid nurse. Talk, talk talk, When they should have been concentrating on what they were doing. The anaesthetist spotted something was wrong and put me under again, but by then it was too late.'
'I can understand it must have been a terrible experience—'
'You understand nothing!' She spat the words at him, the rifle shaking in her hands for the first time as her hands shook with fury.'
'They killed our baby.'
'What do you mean?'
'What do you think I mean? Our baby died!'
'Yours and Michael's?'
'We were a family. We were supposed to be a family. They took that away from us.'
Delaney looked at the rifle trembling in her hands, and held his hand up again, trying to keep the disgust from his face and voice. 'It's okay.'
'Nothing is okay. It was supposed to be routine but they made a mistake with the anaesthetic and had to deliver my baby by Caesarean section. I heard them!'
Delaney could see the madness and rage still dancing in her eyes. 'That must have been terrible for you.'
'He died because of their butchery. Then they performed a hysterectomy. Performed it without my consent.'
'They were trying to help you.'
'No.' Her voice was quiet now and Delaney didn't feel more reassured by it, in fact he felt the opposite. 'I am a trained veterinary nurse by trade, not a receptionist. I took that job just to get close to them, Detective. So I understand surgery. I heard them admit their mistakes. They murdered my baby and then they cut out my womb. So that's why, Detective. A life for a life.'
'And the mutilations? Did they deserve that?'
She smiled joylessly again. 'It's what they did to me.' Her eyes dropped to her stomach and the smile fell from her lips. 'They mutilated me.'
Delaney could hear the change in the tone of her voice. As if their conversation was at an end. He had to say something. Do something.
Audrey Hill raised the rifle a fraction, pointing at his heart now, as if she had come to a decision. 'Do you believe in God, Inspector?'
Delaney shrugged. 'Yeah I do. Someone has to be responsible for all this shite.'
She didn't smile this time. 'Now that we know how big the universe really is . . .' She shook her head puzzled. 'How can you believe in God? We're not ants. Were not even germs. So if there is no justice from God, we have to make our own, don't we?'
'It doesn't have to be like this.'
'It already is, Detective Inspector Delaney.'
Delaney heart thudded in his chest as he heard a familiar voice shout out.
'Jack,' Kate called from the front door. 'Are you in there?'
'Stay back!' Delaney shouted, almost screamed it. 'Just stay where you are.'
'Jack!'
Kate walked into the room and as Audrey Hill spun round and pointed the rifle at her, she froze in place.
'Maybe I'll just shoot her then.'
Delaney saw her hand trembling on the trigger, the madness in her eyes and stepped forward. Kate Walker was the woman he loved. He knew that now more than ever. He loved her and she was carrying his child. He wasn't going to lose another one. 'Jessica Tam isn't dead and Michael isn't bringing her here,' he said.
'What are you talking about?'
'I killed him. Michael's dead.'
The woman shook her head, shocked, as she spun round and trained the rifle back on him. 'You're lying!'
Delaney took another step towards her. 'I put a bullet in his diseased brain, Audrey. He's dead, it's over. Now put down the rifle.'
Delaney watched her hands tremble. He didn't know if it was a deliberate tightening of her finger on the trigger as the rifle fired, or if it was accidental. He didn't register the sound of Kate screaming, he didn't know that Sally Cartwright had come charging into the room and was throwing herself at Audrey Hill.
Falling to the floor, he didn't know anything at all.
He was already dead.
EPILOGUE
When she was seven years old Kate Walker had attended her grandmother's funeral. It was a bitterly cold day in October, and, as she had stood in the rain in her black coat and her black skirt with a black hat on her head that did nothing to stop the swirling bite of the wind, she had decided she didn't like funerals or cemeteries. Why couldn't people live for ever? Why couldn't she be seven for ever? Why do people have to grow up and die?
Maybe, at heart, that was why she had become a pathologist. Maybe she chose her career to answer that question. As a young boy will break apart a favourite toy to try and see how it works, maybe she had been breaking apart human bodies. Dissecting and disassembling them to their component parts, flesh, tissue, sinew and blood, to answer the question that, outside religion, had no answer. She had learned that as a child Michael Hill had killed and tortured animals, for the same reason, before his sickness had been identified and he had been put on medication. Medication his abusive sister had later withheld from him. Had she, herself, been doing the same thing all this time, Kate wondered, only with dead human bodies? Maybe she was a lot more like him than she realised. She shivered. She was nothing like Michael Hill. She was alive, for one thing.
She shivered because it was cold that day as well. Not as bitterly cold as the day of her grandmother's funeral, but the wind had an edge like a scalpel and Kate put her right hand around the folds of her scarf and pulled it tight to her throat. It was a cashmere scarf, white, and she found comfort in the warmth of its touch. She never thought she would buy a coloured scarf ever again.
She looked down at the gravestones. At the surname DELANEY carved twice in bold chisel strokes.
She still didn't know why people had to die. In all her years of medical training she hadn't even come close to knowing. She only knew that people did. The important thing to do, she had decided, if you were living, was to live.
Jack Delaney had come back to life in more ways than one. She took her hand from her scarf, took his hand in her own and squeezed it.
He looked at her and smiled sadly and she had never felt more alive. She remembered the confusion of that evening. Delaney collapsing to the floor. His body in such a bad state, after the battering he had taken over the previous few days, that his heart had literally given out at the massive dose of tranquilliser shot into him. He claimed that he knew that Kate would have her medical bag with her in the car, and, moreover, as he knew that the surgical registrar James Collins had survived over night, after being shot with the same drug, he was going to be fine. But Kate didn't believe him. He knew the risk he had been taking, but he took it anyway. He deliberately goaded the woman into shooting him because she was threatening me, Kate thought, and threatening the life of our unborn baby. Kate couldn't remember the words she mumbled as she stabbed the adrenalin shot into his lifeless heart, but it was a prayer of some kind. And in those few moments between life and death her own heart almost stopped itself as the world tilted on its axis once more for Delaney and he breathed again. Opening his eyes and smiling with them at her as though reborn.