Simon Pritchard realised that she was badly concussed and that he was unlikely to get any sense out of her. “Oh well,” he said reaching for the Finnish skinning knife, “I haven’t got time to get to the bottom of this, so you’ll just have to die without revealing your secrets.” He advanced towards the whore, realising that she had no idea of the danger she was in. “This shouldn’t take a second,” he said, moving behind her so that he wouldn’t be caught in the arterial bleed. Pritchard yanked her hair back roughly and raised the knife to slit her throat. It was a pity he didn’t have the time to establish which sign of the Zodiac she had been born under. Ah well, those were the breaks.
As he was about to slice open her throat, he became aware of people running towards him, panting from their exertions. “What now?” he snarled, pulling her close to him, in case he needed to use her as a shield. “Stay where you are,” he shouted at the two figures that had just appeared out of the mist. “If you come any closer, I will kill her.”
The figures slowed down, but they continued to walk forward, warily. As they stepped into the light, Pritchard immediately recognised the first as his nemesis and the second as his oversized colleague.
As battered as they looked, it was pretty obvious that there was still plenty of fight left in them. “What have I got to do to make you stay dead?” he asked Tyler.
“It’s over, Pritchard,” Jack growled. “Put down the knife.”
Pritchard grinned nastily, exposing blood stained teeth. “Oh, I’m only just warming up,” he promised. As he spoke, he began backing away, dragging Flowers with him. He needed to get to the main road and flag down a car.
“Let the girl go, Simon,” Jack said. “If you do, we won’t pursue you from here. If you kill her there’s no way you’ll get away. You know that.”
“What? You’re just going to let me walk away, are you?” The Disciple smirked. “You must think I was born yesterday.”
Jack shook his head emphatically. “We’ll catch you, whether it’s today or tomorrow. All I’m offering you is a chance for it to not be today. What do you say?”
Pritchard considered the offer, and he was sorely tempted. Tyler was right, if he killed the girl there was very little chance that he would get away. But, if he let her live, and if Tyler kept his word, there was still a chance that he would be able to complete the ritual. If he did that, it wouldn’t matter that they knew his name – he would be invincible. They would never be able to find him, and after things died down, he would be able to come back for the third bitch responsible for ruining his life. He licked his lips nervously. “How do I know I can trust you?” he asked.
As Jack was about to speak, the sound of approaching sirens reached their ears. From the sound of it, there were a lot of emergency vehicles en route.
Pritchard sneered. “I knew it was a trick,” he snarled. “You were just biding your time until reinforcements arrived. You have no intention of letting me go, do you?” He yanked Kelly’s hair back, causing her to scream out in pain. The blade of the knife moved towards her throat, and Jack could tell from the look in the madman’s eyes that he was going to kill her out of spite.
“No! Please!” he begged, raising his hands in surrender. “They’ll do what I tell them to,” he said, taking a step forward. Beside him, Dillon crouched, ready to pounce.
Pritchard’s face darkened as he came to a conclusion. “I’ll take my chances without your help,” he hissed. Taking a deep breath, his grip tightened on the engraved handle of his favourite knife and he pressed the blade against Kelly’s flesh. “Say goodbye to the whore,” he told them.
The sound of the rock smashing into the back of Simon Pritchard’s head reminded Jack of the noise a dropped egg makes. Pritchard’s eyes went wide with pain and shock, and then they flickered and closed. The knife slipped out of his limp hand, falling on the floor with a clank. Pritchard followed it down, sinking to his knees and then falling face forward into the dirt.
As he released her, Kelly staggered forward, falling onto her knees.
Sarah Pritchard stepped out of the shadows, holding the bloodstained rock in her left hand. “I had to do it,” she cried. “He was going to kill her.” She stared at the rock as though it would bite her, and then, with a tearful shudder, released it, allowing it to join Pritchard and his knife on the floor.
Ignoring the killer, Tyler ran over to Kelly Flowers, pulling her close to his chest. Then he held her at arm’s length and checked her over for injuries. She had cuts and bruises, and a nasty bump on the right side of her forehead, but her pupils were evenly dilated and her throat was in one piece. To his enormous relief, it looked like she was going to be okay.
Tyler looked over to Dillon, who was kneeling beside Simon Pritchard, taking his pulse.
“How is he?” Tyler asked.
Dillon shook his head. “Not good, Jack.” Pritchard’s skull was caved in. Mass and velocity equals kinetic energy, and in this case, the rapid deceleration of the rock had left the kinetic energy with nowhere else to go, other than into the back of the killer’s skull.
The sirens were getting louder. “Either Kelly managed to get through to the Yard or someone’s called the explosion in,” Tyler speculated.
“Not me,” Kelly told him, groggily. “I couldn’t get a signal.”
“It must be Trumpton,” Dillon said. An explosion as powerful as the one at the warehouse would have been seen and heard for miles around. The entire London Fire Brigade was probably
