‘Marco,’ I said as I shut the door behind me.
He turned round. Behind him, Sheridan was retreating with his hands raised.
‘This is for the girl,’ I said, and shot him right between the eyes.
Marco tottered, wearing an expression of surprise as a thin line of blood ran down the centre of his face and off the end of his nose. Then he collapsed straight to the floor.
The pistol was a .22 so the retort wasn’t loud enough to be heard in the gatehouse, and I knew there wouldn’t be a camera in here, not with the kind of thing Sheridan had been planning.
‘Oh God,’ said Sheridan, hands outstretched in supplication. ‘Please. I’ll give you money. Anything. Don’t hurt me.’ He continued his retreat into a large living room done out in dark woods and dominated by a huge, ornate stone fireplace until a large chaise longue blocked his passage. He stood against it, literally shaking with fear, tears running down his face.
I stopped ten feet from him. Raised the still-smoking pistol.
‘Please, Mr Mason. Ray. Don’t do this. I am rich. I can give you anything you want. I swear to God I will never hurt another soul. I will be a force for good. I’m sick. I need help.’
Fair play to him, he was trying every potential angle that might result in mercy. I let him continue, my face impassive, and I think he knew then that he had no chance. His knees began to shake uncontrollably and it looked like he might collapse.
‘Did you enjoy killing Dana Brennan?’ I asked him. ‘A thirteen-year-old girl who was going shopping for her mother. Did it make you feel good ending her life?’
‘It wasn’t … I didn’t … I didn’t know what I was doing.’ His face crumpled and he dissolved into loud sobs.
I thought of Dana. Of her parents. Hollowed-out versions of their former selves. A family utterly destroyed.
‘I’ve got no mercy for you,’ I told him, wanting to make him squirm in his last few seconds. It’s a terrible thing to say, but I was actually enjoying watching another human being suffer.
And it was for that reason that I didn’t hear the guards coming through the back of the house until it was almost too late.
I caught a brief glance of one of them through the open lounge doors as he crept through the dining room towards us. He was armed with a shotgun, and I could just make out a second figure behind him.
I swung round fast, firing immediately, but at least one of them fired too and I felt myself being blown backwards by an intense, unstoppable force. I went down hard, the gun flying away out of sight, and lay on the floor, my head down, suddenly finding it very hard to move.
I let out a low moan and rolled over. Both guards were lying injured on the floor, clearly out of action. But unfortunately so was I.
For a few moments I didn’t move, the shock of my injury knocking me temporarily off-kilter. Then I looked down and saw blood seeping through my shirt in a rough circle, a few inches below my heart. It hurt. It hurt bad. I felt round my back, looking for the exit hole, and found a big hunk of flesh missing. It was hard to know how seriously I’d been wounded. There was plenty of blood, but I was still conscious.
From my prone position, I saw a pair of patent leather loafers coming towards me and then I was grabbed by the hair and yanked round so that I was staring up at Alastair Sheridan’s face as he crouched down beside me, pushing the pistol into my face.
But this time his tears were gone and he was grinning intensely, his eyes alive with a dark, manic joy. ‘Now I’ve got you, you fuck. Just you and me. I’m going to let you bleed for a bit then, when you’re nice and weak, I’m going to cut you slowly into little pieces, and while I do it, I’m going to tell you all about how we killed your little friend Dana.’ His grin grew wider. ‘How we listened to her scream and scream until we’d snuffed out her worthless little life. Because that’s what her life was to us. Worthless. Like all the others.’ He pushed the gun into my face harder, barely able to suppress his intense excitement as he revelled in who he really was, free from the gaze of the outside world.
In this small space, deep in a forest, I too saw him as he truly was. A monster. And he saw me as just one more victim in a long, long line.
We stared at each other, my teeth clenched against the hot pain that was coursing through my body. I suddenly felt terribly tired.
‘You failed, Mason,’ he said, taking a deep breath, his smile calmer now. ‘After all this time, and at the last hurdle, you failed. How does that feel?’
‘It feels …’ I said slowly, my voice little more than a croak. ‘It feels …’
He leaned in closer, the smile widening. ‘It feels what, Mason?’
‘It feels … like success.’ And as I spoke the words, I brought up the switchblade, flicked it open, and shoved it straight up through his rib cage and into his heart.
The gun went off close to my ear but then dropped from Sheridan’s hand as he wavered in his crouch, an expression of utter shock on his face as if he couldn’t believe that I’d had the audacity to harm him. He fell back onto his behind, staring down at the switchblade, buried to the hilt inside him. His fingers fluttered close to the handle, touching it almost daintily, but then the hand dropped to his side, his mouth formed a small, perfectly round O, and
