'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 hundred 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!'
