‘No, we could never replace him,’ snapped Pat.
‘Then what? Because from what his nurse told me, you never go and visit him. You pay for his care but you’ve had nothing else to do with him since before you met me.’
‘It’s too hard,’ said Chloe. ‘To see someone who was so full of life, drained of everything that made him exist. It’s just too bloody hard.’
‘Oh, poor you. What about your brother? He’s the one who’s all alone up there. You’ve even banned his friends from seeing him.’
‘Don’t you dare judge us,’ Pat said, making her way up the stairs towards Mandy. ‘You’re lucky you’ve only seen him the way he is now – that body in bed who needs a ventilator to breathe, a pipe down his throat to feed him and a catheter to piss through. You have no idea how fortunate you are not to have known him back then, because you havenothingto compare him to now. That boy is not my son anymore. Thatbodyis not him, so don’t tell me what I should and shouldn’t be doing, because you are clueless.’
‘Mum, Mandy, please calm down,’ said Chloe, but she was ignored again.
‘So what am I to you then? Just a vessel to carry his baby?’
‘No, of course you’re not. If we’d just wanted that, we’d have found a surrogate.’
‘But that’s what you wanted from Michelle, wasn’t it? You asked her first.’
‘We weren’t thinking clearly back then,’ added Chloe. ‘We were grieving and still in shock. We understand that now, don’t we, Mum? That’s why we sent Rich’s DNA swab to find his correct Match, to find the person to have his child with. And that’s you.’
‘What?’ Mandy lost her grip on the suitcase handle and it fell to the floor. ‘You did the test for him?’
Chloe hesitated. ‘You make it sound worse than it is,’ she said, and lowered her head. ‘Mum was just doing what she thought best. Please, Mandy, just leave your cases there and come downstairs and let’s talk about this. You’re part of our family, just like the baby will be.’
Mandy shook her head and laughed. ‘You’re wrong. I am not part of this family and I’ll be damned if my baby will be either. You’ve lied to me from the word go,so how can I ever trust you? I need to go home and start putting my life back together, without you two in it.’ Mandy grabbed her suitcases and pulled them towards her and started making her way down the stairs.
‘Like hell you are,’ yelled Pat and ran up the last few stairs until she was face to face with her. ‘You aren’t taking my grandchild away from me.’ As she said this she yanked at her arm, which made Mandy lose her balance.
Mandy fell forwards. She managed to grip the handrail just before her legs gave way, but with the force of her giant body falling, she didn’t catch herself in time to stop her forehead from cracking into the spindles. She felt the warm trickle of blood run down her face. She held herself steady with one hand and with the other Mandy reached to touch her wound. When she realised it was a deep cut, she immediately felt faint.
‘I’ll call for an ambulance,’ yelled Chloe, and ran into the lounge for her phone.
‘Don’t move, you stupid girl,’ said Pat. She pulled a tissue from her sleeve and placed it on Mandy’s injured head. ‘How could you put my grandchild at risk like this?’
‘You and your lies did this,’ Mandy wept.
‘We could have been happy, just the four of us. You were honestly like another daughter to me, but you shouldn’t have gone sticking your nose into business that didn’t concern you. Whether you like it or not, I am going to be a part of this baby’s life. Nobody – not you or any court in this land – is going to keep me from my grandson.’
Scared and disorientated, Mandy wanted to get as far away from Pat as possible. She pushed away Pat’s arm, which was supporting her, and once again reached for her suitcase. But as she tried to descend the staircase her legs buckled and she tumbled, cracking her already injured head against the bannisters and spindles, before falling down the remaining steps and landing in a crumpled, unconscious heap, face down on the floor.
Chapter 82
CHRISTOPHER
The odorous molecules of Number Twenty-Nine’s auburn hair charged up Christopher’s nostrils and dissolved in his mucus, creating a signal to his brain.
But there was something about the fruit-infused ingredients in her generic brand of shampoo that repelled him and, to the best of his recollection, it was the first time a smell had ever had a negative effect on him.
Christopher wanted to get through this as briskly and efficiently as possible, but the skin around her neck was thin and he’d wrapped the wire around it too tightly, causing it to penetrate. He loosened the slack a little, concerned that it might pierce her jugular and release a jet of blood across the room. Cleaning up each microscopic droplet would be far too time consuming and Christopher wasn’t in the mood.
His partly released grip meant he had to wait an agonising eight minutes – he had counted – for her to finally lose full consciousness and slip to the floor. She’d put up a brave fight, he conceded, with her futile attempts to kick, scratch and bite him. But he’d learned from the thumb incident of Number Nine not to be that careless again. And in the end, experience and theelement of surprise were on his side, and the duel was weighted in his favour.
Christopher followed the unconscious girl to the ground and wrapped the wire around her neck again, using just enough pressure to completely starve her brain of oxygen. For a moment, in the reflection of the bi-fold doors, he watched the hunter take down his prey in an ill-fated tango, before turning away. He no longer resembled or recognised his old self.
The squelch emitting from Number Twenty-Nine’s throat as she slowly died was just as unpleasant as the odour from her hair, and he chose to ignore the mucus dripping from her nose and the frothy white bubbles pooling in the corners of her mouth.
With her life finally expunged, Christopher released his grip and lay by her side, shattered, staring at the ceiling as images of another woman on his list flooded his head. Number Twenty-Seven had haunted him for days and had been a turning point for him; between her and Amy, the psychopath was developing empathy and a conscience.
Twenty-Seven had been dead for the best part of three days when he’d returned to her kitchen to leave a Polaroid snapshot of Number Twenty-Eight. And it became the one and only time in Christopher’s life that he’d been truly shocked and mesmerised by what he saw.
