come to believe the tale he'd constructed that night or she wouldn't. Regardless, the weight of the repression, or the horror of the truth, would burden her. His poisoned past had infected his innocent girls. He could never forgive himself. They'd probably have a better life without him.
A gentle rain smeared the world outside the car. Joss wished they could stay in here forever, that he could just drive with his family to another place, another time, where none of this had happened, and his girls were shiny and smiling again. He glanced into the rear-view mirror. The shoosh of the tyres on the night-wet road had lulled Charlie into a fitful sleep. Isobel's forehead rested on the passenger window, her breath a frosty ghost on the glass. What did she see out there with that thousand-mile stare, he wondered.
Joss accelerated carefully. He hunched forward over the wheel, staring intently through the drizzle. Nearly there. He had to get back to the house in Mosman. The ghouls in his mind were impatient, and the bourbon was waiting.
It's taking forever to get there, thought Jill.
Night roadworks had snarled the traffic, and Gabe kept the siren on until they hit Mosman.
When they finally arrived, Jill climbed carefully out of the car. The dirt-tang of the rain on the road filled her nostrils, all senses acute. Joss's phone had rung out five times on the trip over, and her neck was taut with tension. If Cutter was coming after this family, she thought, it could well be tonight. She and Gabriel had been out here until late last night finalising the statements. The police presence would've kept him away yesterday. In the car, speeding over here, Jill had tried to reason that it was more likely that Nguyen had done a runner – figured his luck had run out and gone to ground. But the intensity of Gabriel next to her as he negotiated the vehicle through the city traffic had chased the thought from her mind.
Gabriel believed Cutter was coming here.
She took several deep breaths to flood her bloodstream with oxygen and moved around the car to his side.
The mansion squatted in the darkness. If there was any moon, tonight it was obscured by the mist that hung above them. The drizzle had stopped for now, but it draped, poised, waiting to fall.
Jill led Gabriel in through the heavy iron gates, her radio in hand. The overgrown vegetation around them shifted and breathed in the dark; the garden of a madwoman. There were hiding spots everywhere, and Jill kept her other hand near her gun. The house ahead lay completely silent, but she'd expected that. There were obviously no nursing staff on tonight. The nurse, or Joss or Isobel, would've answered the phone if they were in there. If they'd been able to. She swallowed the thought, and moved closer to the house.
On the threshold of the ornate entryway, Gabriel touched her elbow, pointed with two fingers to his eyes, and then to the right of the house. Jill nodded and walked left; Gabriel moved to the right. She debated whether to call for backup. She'd wait, she decided, until they'd determined whether the perimeter was secure. She hooked her radio back onto her gunbelt, took her gun from its holster and unclipped her torch.
Most of the gravel path that must've once surrounded the house had been reclaimed by the garden; the sound of her footfalls was absorbed by wet vegetation. Jill smelled rot with each step.
She'd not reached the back of the sprawling house when her tread crunched. Broken glass glinted at her feet in the torchlight. She directed the beam upwards. The small white-framed window probably opened onto a laundry or small study; the glass had been shattered, and the window hung ajar.
Jill signalled Gabriel's radio with her own, and stepped away from the window, into the grass. She made a quiet call for police assistance and waited for her partner. She watched him jog silently from around the back of the building.
'I've called for backup,' she whispered, playing the torch beam over the window and back down to the glass below to show him what she'd found.
He nodded.
It was not difficult to gain a toehold in the red brick wall for the one step-up needed to reach the window. The frame was clear of glass. Jill pulled herself in after Gabriel. As she'd guessed, the room was a laundry. A tiny one. These houses were all designed by men, Jill couldn't help but think, in the days when a male would never wash a shirt or cook a meal. She and Gabriel stood face to face in the darkness. Their breathing was the only sound she could hear.
'We should do this together,' he whispered.
'No time,' she said. The blood-spattered walls from the house in Capitol Hill filled her vision, and she felt compelled to move quickly. What if he's in here? What if they're still alive?
She couldn't decide whether the look Gabriel gave her was of relief or doubt, but he nodded, and they moved out of the room.
'I'll take downstairs,' he whispered.
Jill kept her back to the wall as she made her way to the grand staircase in the centre of the loungeroom. Cutter had no firearm offences on his sheet, but that meant nothing – he had access to the nine guns from the Capitol Hill robbery. She ran lightly up the stairs with her heart in her mouth, bolted to the cover of a wall and squatted in a crouch.
That window could've been broken ages ago, she told herself, as she slid along the cold plaster wall. No one really looked after this place. She used the reasoning to temper the panic that always built when she couldn't see anything.
The hallway that led away from the stairs was windowless, and the darkness was built of shadows and blacker voids behind them that could conceal anything.
They'd kept her blindfolded in the basement when she was twelve, and she knew that terror grew so quickly in the absence of light that it could push all vestiges of sanity from the mind. She waited for the numbness to kick in. The sensor that tripped when she experienced any emotion too strongly should have engaged by now. But her anxiety continued to climb.
Jill decided to take control of her feelings by tuning in carefully to all of her other senses. The house creaked and moaned in the quiet way that old houses complained as they aged.
She steeled herself to enter the doorway on her left. The master bedroom, she remembered, pushing the door backwards with her left hand and then following her gun into the room. She swept through quickly, back flat against the walls when possible, listening for breathing or movement in the dark. Nothing.
Back in the hallway, Jill froze. There. A sound, behind her. Footsteps. She squatted, and then crawled back towards the noise. Peering over the balustrade of the balcony, she spotted Gabriel patrolling. She let go of her breath. He'd heard her too, and signalled. She moved back into the hallway, and made her way into the second room. A bathroom. Tiny. She checked the possible hiding places and made her way to the third room along the hallway. Joss's room, she remembered, as she pushed the door back.
Jill heard the woof of the knife as it sliced through the darkness, but didn't feel it when it bit into her gun hand. Pain or not, her gun clattered to the ground, and she screamed into the mask in front of her. Panic detonated behind her eyes as she struggled to get her left hand up to strike, but he had the momentum and he used it to pull her to him, towards the knife. When she stopped screaming to breathe, she thought she heard him giggle. She pulled backwards with everything she had, but he had hold of her jacket.
Every millisecond of the next few moments seemed to register. She saw his eyes widen and at the same instant, she detected movement behind her. He heaved her towards him with the force that still reverberated from his original strike, and smacked his forearm across her throat.
Gabriel stood in the doorway. His gun pointed at them.
Cutter chortled in her ear and she felt his arms and chest tense to pull the machete sideways, to slice her throat. She absorbed his madness, and the physical power that accompanied it, through the skin of his arm on her neck.
Gabriel's eyes met hers.
Yes, she told him, without a word.
Then there was just white. No sound.
The blast blew them backwards and Jill flew through the air with Cutter, landing merged with him on the floor at the base of the bed. Her cheek rested against his neck. Above his nose was purple-red, wet. His right eye and the top of his skull were pulverised.
Her mouth filled with the smell of singed wool, cordite, and vaporised blood.
