Eeny Meeny (33 page)

Charlie lurched past as if she didn’t recognize her. Helen grabbed hold of her arm, hauling her back towards her. Charlie turned and with savage anger in her eyes tried to bite Helen on the face. Helen pushed her off, slapping her hard. The blow seemed to stun Charlie, who now sank to her knees. Bedraggled and unclothed, she was a nightmare version of the perky officer Helen had once known.

‘Where?’ Helen’s question was blunt and uncaring.

Charlie couldn’t look at her.

‘He did it. It wasn’t me. He did it to save me …’

‘WHERE?’ Helen roared.

Tears were now pouring down Charlie’s face. She lifted her right arm and pointed to Chatham Tower.

‘The basement,’ she said, her voice cracked and feeble.

Helen left her where she knelt, sprinting towards the tower. She released the safety catch on her gun as she ran through the unlocked site entrance. There was no place for strategy or caution here. She had to find Mark.

She pushed the possibility that he was already dead to the back of her mind – surely there was time to save him? There had to be. In an instant, Helen realized that she
had
had feelings for Mark. Not love yet, but something warm and good that could have grown. Maybe they’d been brought together for a reason. Maybe they were supposed to save each other and repair the damage of the past.

She burst through the entrance and scanned wildly about her. Then she was sprinting across the atrium, kicking open the door next to the lifts. Down, down, down she went, taking the stairs three at a time.

Now she was in the basement. She kicked open the first door to find … an empty cupboard. No, that wouldn’t be right, the door wasn’t strong enough to hold anyone inside, she would have needed … Then Helen saw it – the reinforced metal door that swung on its hinges. Helen raced down the corridor and hared inside.

As she entered her knees gave way and she collapsed to the ground. She had seen Mark. And she had seen the worst. Slowly she raised her head, but it was no better on second sight. Mark lay in a pool of his own blood. Mark was dead, the gun that killed him still clutched in his hand. Helen scrambled across the filthy floor to him, cradling his head in her arms. But he was cold and still.

A loud bang and Helen looked up. Who had she been expecting? Charlie? Bridges? It was Marianne, as she knew it must be.

‘Hello, Jodie.’

She smiled as she locked the door behind her.

‘Long time no see.’

113

There was no victory. No happiness. There wasn’t even a sense of relief. Charlie had survived. She would live. Her baby would live. But the old Charlie was dead and buried. There was no coming back from this.

She lay on the tarmac, the rain pouring down on her. Her brain was reeling. Shock mingled with loathing. Slowly exhaustion took hold. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth. The rain tumbled into her parched, bleeding mouth. A momentary sense of relief, of life flooding through her and then oblivion. Her eyes closed, her brain drifting, she felt herself being sucked underwater, pulled into a darkness that was comforting as well as debilitating.

Then a voice. A weird, distant mechanical voice. Charlie tried to pull herself out of the abyss, but exhaustion gripped her. There it was again. The voice, urgent and insistent. She managed to open one eye. But there was no one there.

‘Where are you? Please respond.’ The desperate voice was becoming clear now.

Charlie opened the other eye, managing to lift her head off the ground.

Helen’s police radio, lying on the floor by her discarded bike. And the voice … the voice was DC Bridges. Searching for her.

Perhaps it wasn’t all over. Perhaps Charlie did have a shot at redemption after all. She knew she had to try. She hauled herself up, then collapsed to her knees. Her body was shaking, her teeth chattering. She was seeing double. But she had to make it to the radio somehow.

114

‘How could you?’

Marianne laughed. There was a beautiful irony to Jodie’s question. It was exactly what Marianne had said to
her
all those years ago. A broad grin spread across Marianne’s face – who could have predicted it would all work out so perfectly?

‘It was simpler than you might think. The men were easy – you know what they’re like with a pretty face. And the girls, well they were very … trusting. I’d like to say it was hard work, but as you can see I got others to do the heavy lifting.’

She shot a glance towards Mark’s body.

‘Did you see Charlie by the way?’ she continued. ‘How is she doing? She ran straight past me when I opened the door, so I didn’t really get a proper look at her.’

‘You’ve destroyed her …’

‘Oh don’t be so melodramatic. She’ll be fine. She’ll get better, be with her boyfriend, have her baby. Whether she’ll be able to look the kid in the eye’s a different matter, but she won. She survived. I thought she was going to do it, but Mark took it out of her hands.’

‘Why didn’t you just come for me?’ Helen demanded.

‘Because I wanted you to suffer.’

There it was – bald and unadulterated.

‘I did the right thing. I’d do it again.’ Helen’s voice was getting louder, as her fury took hold. And for the first time, there was a flash of something – anger? – in Marianne’s eyes.

‘You never really cared how much I suffered, did you?’ she spat back.

‘That’s not true.’

‘It wasn’t that you wanted me to suffer. It’s just that you didn’t care if I did, which is worse.’

‘No, that was never what I felt or wan—’

‘I was inside for
twenty-five years.
They tried to break me in young offenders and then tried all over again in Holloway. I wrote to you, so don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. The bottlings, the abuse, the beatings. I told you all about it
and
how they paid for it. I ripped one girl’s eyeball right out of her fucking head in Holloway – do you remember? Course you do. But still you didn’t write, you didn’t visit. You didn’t help me
at all
, because you wanted me to rot. To shrivel up and die. Your own sister.’

‘You stopped being my sister a long time ago.’

‘Because of what I did to them? At least I had some fucking balls, you ungrateful little bitch.’

Finally the venom was seeping through.

‘I
saved
you. You were next in line. They would have
destroyed
a little girl like you.’

The truth of Marianne’s accusation scythed into Helen’s conscience.

‘I know that. I know you felt you were helping me –’

‘We
could
have been happy together, you and me. We could have gone somewhere, lived off the street, got something going. They would never have found us. If we’d’ve stuck together we’d still be fine now.’

‘Do you really believe that, Marianne? Because if you do, you’re more far gone than I thought –’

Suddenly Marianne was marching across the room towards Helen, fire in her eyes. Helen immediately raised her Glock and Marianne paused, checking her march. There was only three feet between the pair now.

Helen took in her sister’s face. So familiar in its shape and lines, but so alien in its expression. As if a monster had climbed inside her and was eating its way out.

‘Don’t you dare look down on me,’ Marianne hissed. ‘Don’t you dare … judge me. It’s you who’s on trial here, not me.’

‘Because I did the right thing? The
decent
thing? You murdered our parents, Marianne. You murdered them in cold blood.’

‘And did you miss them? Afterwards? Did you miss those rapists?’

For a moment, Helen was lost 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 followed 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 blonde 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 three-bar fire, leaving a strange and unattractive 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’re
not.
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 and 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 towards the building. SO19 were on their way in full SWAT 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 towards 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, however, 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.’

‘It’s too late to call off the dogs. He’s coming through. So make your choice.’

The door was starting to buckle. Bridges was making progress.

‘I don’t want to kill you, Marianne.’

‘Then the choice is made. Pity really – I thought you’d jump at the chance.’

The door creaked ominously – there were only seconds left now.

‘I want to help you. Put the gun down.’

‘You had your chance, Jodie. And you washed your hands of me. You saved all those people. All those
strangers
but you washed your hands of
me
.’

‘And don’t you think that I felt guilty for that? Look what you’ve done to me. What you still do to me.’

Helen had ripped off her shirt to reveal the scars on her back. For a moment, Marianne paused, shocked by what she saw.

‘I eat myself up with guilt every minute of every day. Of course I do. But I was thirteen years old. You’d killed two people. Killed my mum and dad in their bed, for God’s sake. You murdered our parents. What was I supposed to do?’

‘You were supposed to protect me. You were supposed to be pleased.’

‘I never
asked
you to kill them. I never
wanted
you to kill them. I never wanted any of this. Can’t you see that? You did this all to yourself.’

‘You really believe that? Do you
honestly
believe that?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Then there’s nothing more to say. Goodbye, Jodie.’

Just then Bridges burst through the door and a single shot rang out.

117

Through the driving rain, Charlie glimpsed two figures. A man leading a woman away from the tower. Charlie had never been a religious woman, but she’d been praying for the last ten minutes, hoping against hope for a miracle. And now she would have her answer.

Pushing the attending paramedic aside, she rushed forward. She only made ten yards before her legs gave way. She fell to her knees on the sodden ground. Shielding her eyes from the rain, she strained to see through the gloom – was Bridges helping the woman or restraining her?

Then suddenly the sun broke through and for a moment the gloom lifted.