And the girl in the boot spun round to point the shaking gun that she held in her small, perfectly formed hand at her rescuer from thirteen years earlier.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said.
*
Bennett had parked his car further up the beach. He walked across the sand carefully. The sky overhead was dark with rain and the visibility was poor. He was dressed in a black overcoat with a Black Watch cap on his head. If somebody had been standing twenty yards away they probably wouldn’t have seen him coming. Which was just as Bennett liked it. Moving unseen. Coming up on people unexpectedly. It was what he was trained for after all. It was what he was good at.
That, and killing people.
*
Delaney held his hand up, placating, putting himself between Sally and Gloria. Gloria’s eyes were dancing. Wild with anger. With pain.
‘I remembered, Jack. I remembered what he did to me. Peter Garnier appearing on television was like a key turning. Stuff that I had been holding back for so very long came flooding back to me.’
‘I know,’ said Delaney. Tears pricking in his own eyes as he saw the pain in the young woman’s as her mind took in again the horror of what had happened to her.
‘And not just him, but Peter Garnier and the priest and Graham Harper and the young one who had the camera and took the pictures and filmed it as it was happening.’
‘I know,’ said Delaney once more. ‘But this is not the way. Look at him. He’s helpless.’
Delaney pointed at the frail old man lying on the floor, his right side twitching, the left half of his face slack and unmoving, drool running from the corner of that lip onto his chin. His one watery eye, pleading and pathetic.
‘Why did you have to kill them, Gloria? Why kill the woman?’
‘She didn’t,’ said a voice behind him and Delaney looked round shocked to see a single-barrelled shotgun pointing straight at him. Shocked even more to see who was holding it.
*
‘Jack Delaney, saviour of little girls, and here you are, finally, in the flesh.’
‘I’m sorry – I don’t know who you are,’ Delaney said, clearly puzzled.
‘Oh yes, you do,’ said the blonde woman, who had big wide innocent blue eyes. ‘I waited for you, but you never came. All these years and you never came for me like you did for Gloria.’
‘Who are you?’
‘She’s Alice Peters, sir,’ said Sally Cartwright. The thought that had been niggling at the back of her mind during the car journey suddenly came clear to her. ‘She’s Maureen Gallagher’s daughter.’
The woman smiled, and her face softened. Her voice became that of a child. A seven-year-old girl. ‘That’s right. I’m Alice Peters,’ she said and Delaney felt the hairs on his arms and on the back of his neck rise. ‘I’m a good girl.’
‘Why don’t you put the gun down, Gloria?’ said Delaney. ‘You don’t have to be part of this.’
‘I didn’t remember. Not all of it,’ said Gloria, her voice trembling. ‘Even after you came to see me and Mary. I had flashes of it after Garnier started appearing on television. But then you led Alice to me – she’d been following you, Jack. And she showed me the photo and told me their names, and then I remembered.’ Tears sprang into her eyes. ‘I remembered it all. They hurt me, Jack. They hurt me so badly.’
Delaney felt like telling her to go ahead and pull the trigger but he knew that his cousin would never forgive him if he did. It struck Delaney that this was the real therapy that most victims of abuse needed. Revenge. But he looked again at the seemingly angelic face of Alice Peters and changed his mind. There were all kinds of madness in the world. Not all of it could be cured the same way.
But he didn’t have to say anything.
Gloria looked down at the sick man, who was twitching on the floor like a crab that had had its back stepped on, and let the gun slip from her fingers.
Delaney could see now that the gun was only in fact a taser, but he wouldn’t have been surprised if the shock of it would have killed the man anyway. He didn’t look like he had many days of breath left in him and Delaney felt no sorrow at the fact. Gloria crossed to him and Delaney held her in his arms, mindful of the shotgun still trained on him and Sally.
‘You don’t look strong enough to cut off your mother’s head. Did you have help?’ he asked Alice as he kissed the top of Gloria’s head and hugged her to him, making reassuring sounds as best he could. He was trying to keep Alice talking.
‘Yeah. She had help killing the whore,’ said a deep voice.
Delaney looked up, surprised once more.
*
Alice seemed to have grown taller, her shoulders thrown back, her eyes full of knowledge now, full of anger.
‘I look after little Alice when that old pervert,’ she pointed at Bill Thompson, ‘doesn’t keep me locked up with drugs and tasers and ropes.’
‘And what’s your name?’ asked Delaney, fighting to keep his voice level, the hairs on his neck standing up again, his mind whirling. He looked across to the taser lying at Thompson’s feet and knew that he wouldn’t have time to reach it before she pulled the trigger.
