“And did you miss them? Afterward? Did you miss those rapists?”
For a moment, Helen was at a loss for words. She had never asked herself that question. She had been so caught up with Marianne in the aftermath, so involved in her own bewildering journey through foster homes and Social Services that she’d never really had space to grieve.
“Well, did you?” Marianne demanded. A long silence, and then:
“No.”
Marianne broke into a smile. A smile of victory.
“There you are, then. They were nobodies, worse than nobodies. And they deserved a worse fate than they got. I was kind to them. Or have you forgotten what they did?”
She tugged off the blond wig she was wearing to reveal her scalp. The hair had never grown back on the spot where her father had held her head to the space heater, leaving a strange and disfiguring bald patch on her crown.
“These are just the scars you can see. He would have killed us in the end. So I did what had to be done. You should be bloody grateful.”
Helen watched her sister—the same defiance, the same anger that she’d displayed during her trial was still there all these years later. There was truth in what she said, but it still sounded like the ravings of a madwoman. Helen suddenly felt a strong desire to be out of this awful room and away from this burning hatred.
“How does this end, Marianne?”
Marianne smiled, as if she’d been waiting for this, and then: “It ends as it started. With a choice.”
And now it all started to make sense.
“You made a choice all those years ago,” Marianne continued. “You chose to betray your sister. Your sister who’d helped you. Who’d killed for you. You chose to save yourself and throw me to the wolves.”
“And all your victims faced a choice,” Helen countered, as the horror of Marianne’s scheme became perfectly clear.
“You think people are good, Jodie. You’re one of life’s optimists. But they’renot.They are mean and selfish and cruel. You proved that. And so did every one of the selfish little shits I abducted. In the end, we are all just animals scratching each other’s eyes out to survive.”
Marianne took a step closer—instinctively Helen gripped the trigger of her gun. Marianne paused and smiled, then raised a Smith & Wesson to Helen’s eye level.
“And now you have another choice to make, Helen. Will you kill or be killed?”
So that was it. Helen and Marianne were to be the last players in her deadly game.
115
DC Bridges left Charlie where she lay and sprinted toward the building. SWAT was on its way in full flak gear and the paramedics were racing to the scene, but he didn’t have time to wait. Helen was in there with the killer—Suzanne, Marianne, whatever the hell she was called—and he didn’t fancy her chances of survival. This was a scheme that was always designed to end in bloodshed.
He burst through the lobby. The lifts were dead, but the door to the basement was ajar, so he ran toward it. Down the stairs and along the corridor. He wasn’t armed but what the hell? Every second was crucial now.
And there it was. The locked metal door. He hammered at it and Helen’s voice rang out clear, telling him to back off.
Bugger that,he thought, scanning around desperately for a tool of some kind.
The corridor was empty, but the last door at the end was a store cupboard, still littered with half-used bottles of bleach and disinfectant. Lying discarded on the floor was a fire extinguisher. One of the old-fashioned seventies ones, heavy and thick. Bridges hauled it off the floor.
Sprinting down the corridor, he was back in front of the metal door in seconds. He paused, gritted his teeth, then launched the fire extinguisher at the lock.
116
The door shuddered with the impact, a roaring metallic scream echoing down the corridor, but Marianne didn’t blink. Her eyes were trained on her sister, her finger caressing the trigger of her gun.
Crash.Another heavy blow to the lock. Whoever was outside was obviously determined. The door moaned under the sustained assault.
“It’s decision time, Jodie.” Marianne smiled as she spoke. “I will fire the second that door opens.”
“Don’t do this, Marianne. It doesn’t have to be this way.”
