asked.
Brendan Ferres looked at me. The colour had come back into his face now. He was flushed with it. A dark angry red.
‘Fuck this!’ he said and charged at me.
Like I said, he was quick.
I swung the baseball bat, but he got to me before I could finish the swing. Grabbing me in a bear hug and pushing me backwards to smash against the wall.
He locked his arms around me and I held back just as tightly. He was grunting with fury and I couldn’t shake him loose.
‘You sure you want to do this?’ Del Rio asked me, gesturing with his gun to let me know he could put an end to things.
I couldn’t speak. Damn it, I couldn’t breathe, let alone speak. I shook my head and rammed my knee upwards into Ferres’s crotch. He moved sideways as I did, grunted but didn’t loosen his grip. I dipped my head and then butted upwards, catching him under the chin. His grip loosened. I stepped back and drove the end of the baseball bat hard into his solar plexus.
He doubled over, making a painful gurgling sound. I stepped back to take a breath or two into my own pained chest, then swung the baseball bat as hard as I could into his left knee.
Ferres crashed to the floor. His face purple now as he sucked in air, trying to hold his hands to his shattered knee as if he could piece the fractured pieces back together. He looked up at me, a squealing sound issuing from between his clenched teeth.
‘Why don’t you finish him?’
I turned round. Rebecca Allen was standing behind me, watching her fiance writhe on the floor in agony.
‘I’m done here,’ I said.
‘You don’t finish him, he’s going to come find you and kill you,’ said Del Rio.
He was right. I had killed before, God knew. I had killed that very night. Put a round of high-velocity ammunition into the forehead of a beautiful woman. There was nothing beautiful about Brendan Ferres. Nothing redeemable about him as a human being. The world would be a far better place without his breath in it. I pictured him swinging the same bat that I was now holding into Chloe’s head. And I pictured myself doing the same to his. Cracking it open like a coconut.
Instead I let my arm go limp, resting the head of the baseball bat on the floor.
I turned to Del Rio. ‘I’m done here,’ I said.
‘I’m not,’ said Rebecca Allen, and took the baseball bat from me.
I looked over at her father. ‘We good?’ I asked.
‘We’re good,’ he said.
I nodded to Del Rio who touched his fingers to his forehead, tipped them as a kind of salute to Rebecca, and then followed me out of the door.
The door closed mercifully before the screaming started up in earnest again.
I didn’t think we would be seeing Brendan Ferres any more. I didn’t think I’d lose much sleep over it, either.
An hour and half later I was having three broken ribs checked over in the hospital.
As the doctor stepped away Chloe came into the treatment room and into my arms.
If there were tears in my eyes it was probably because she hugged me a little too hard.
Chapter 112
Morning. One week later.
Detective Inspector Kirsty Webb closed her car door behind her.
She ducked under the police-cordon tape that had once again been put up to keep the public away from the lock-up in King’s Cross. The same lock-up where the gruesome discovery had been made by the hapless Jason Kendrick just a week before.
Two lock-ups were open now. The one that Kirsty had already seen and the one beside it. The serious-crime squad had worked through the numerous files and boxes of paper that the deceased surgeon Alistair Lloyd had kept in his garage and had made a connection between him and Edward Morrison, the owner of the original lock-up.
Morrison had been part of the ring with the surgeon and a few others, it transpired. They were still compiling a list. Adriana Kisslinger only knew some of the contacts the surgeon had.
Kirsty nodded to Adrian Tuttle as he came out of the building, his camera bag slung over his shoulder.
The inside of the lock-up had been turned into a child’s bedroom. A young child’s, with a cartoon bedspread on the adult-sized bed, stuffed toys everywhere, including an enormous giant panda. There was a video camera mounted on a tripod facing the bed.
Doctor Wendy Lee was handing some paperwork to Kirsty’s boss, DSI Andrew Harrington, for him to sign. She nodded briefly to Kirsty as she passed, clearly in a hurry to get out of the place. Kirsty didn’t blame her. Just being there made her skin itch, made her want to turn around and stand in a hot shower for thirty minutes.
Instead, she reached into her pocket and drew out an envelope with her letter of resignation inside and looked across at her boss.
DSI Harrington was a slightly built man in his mid-forties. He was of average height with a sallow complexion and a receding hairline. His teeth were slightly nicotine-stained and his eyes could not hold her gaze for long. She had never liked the man.
‘I’m sorry you didn’t get the job, Kirsty,’ he said.
‘Most likely the better man did.’
‘You’re a field operative. It’s what you’re good at. Do you really see yourself behind a desk, juggling phones and computer files?’
‘No, I don’t, sir. Which is why, as I said, I’m resigning.’
She held out the envelope.
‘You absolutely sure about this?’
‘Yeah, I am.’
‘I’ll keep it in my drawer for a week or so. You’re due the leave anyway.’
‘Won’t make any difference.’
‘Still.’
Kirsty nodded, then looked around the ‘set’ that had been constructed in the lock-up. She didn’t care to think about what had taken place there and was heartily glad she didn’t have to view the DVDs they had found, or try to identify the victims.
‘So this just about wraps it up?’ she said.
‘I guess it does.’
Kirsty knew that her failure to get the job was partly down to Harrington and the testimonial he had written. She wasn’t supposed to have seen it but she had. She had access to resources of her own. Maybe it was flattering that he had been careful enough to praise her, but Harrington had left enough between the lines to edge her out. He wanted to keep her on his team. Keep her on his terms. And she’d had enough of that.
Which was why she walked out of the lock-up and didn’t tell him how wrong he had been.
Wrong about everything.
This didn’t wrap it up at all.
Chapter 113
The Surgeon knelt down and removed the wilted flowers from the vases on the left and right of the small
