He’d seen Flo, making her vain but impressive attempt at ramming the rat down Annie’s throat. Endearing as it was to watch his little girl’s efforts, he’d had to step in, for it was becoming pitiful.
Once the child was dead, the plan had unfurled naturally in his head.
Get Ross to the woods, and frame him.
Obviously, Ross hadn’t intended for Flo to get beaten the shit out of. It’d taken everything in every fibre of his being not to leap out from behind the tree where he hid and to throttle the prick.
But he’d had to bide his time.
He couldn’t let his emotions fuck things up.
*
The bright but pasty green lights in the hospital stung Stella’s eyes. She strode with a confident swagger down the corridors, the heels of her shoes clicking along the lino floor as she went. Her eyelids throbbed beneath the lashings of makeup that she knew she didn’t really need but still wore as a kind of armour. Although she would never say it out loud or outwardly show her true feelings, Stella felt terribly vulnerable. Every time she closed her eyes, she was transported back to that woods, naked and strung up from the tree, being tortured as a form of entertainment. And every time she relived it, she felt that huge wave of shame and sadness come crashing down on her all over again. She despised herself for being so weak.
Clearing her throat, Stella tried to force those thoughts to the back of her head. They could remain locked up until later, and then she’d release them when she was in the shower or curled up in her bed. Or perhaps using a blade to puncture somebody’s flesh, to try and drain her emotions. But for the moment, she was on a family mission. And it wasn’t about something dumb like robbing cash or killing some lowlife her parents had a history with.
This was about Flo.
Stella’s chest tightened as she entered the elevator and waited beside another couple of grey-faced people that filed in after her.
It hadn’t been too difficult to find Flo. Not when the police were almost as corrupt and twisted as the criminals of the country. There wasn’t much some newly qualified, underpaid constable wouldn’t divulge when corned at the pub by a pretty face in a short skirt and stilettos. After just one hour of pretending to be interested in going home with the stout, red-faced young officer, and with the help of her brother slyly spiking his beer when he wasn’t looking, Stella had gotten the information she’d needed. And all she’d had to do was tell him how impressive it was that he was in the police and express a minute bit of interest in the case of the little girls in the woods.
“It’s just awful,” Stella had moaned sadly, pouting so that her pink, glossed lips puckered slightly.
PC Retard had shrugged it off with a lazy smile that indicated the drugs were working, “at least one of ‘em is okay. Recovering at St. Jerome’s, she’ll be right as rain… “ he’d then begun to prattle on about something else, but Stella had what she needed. She’d cut the conversation short and marched out of there with a determination to get her sister back, not giving the blindest of fucks about the fact that PC Retard was due for a drugs test the following day.
The elevator dinged and rumbled to a stop. Stella stepped out onto an empty corridor as the doors creaked open, and shivered as the strong stench invaded her nostrils. She hurried down it, gooseflesh prickling up and down her legs as she approached the secured double doors. Glancing quickly around her, she dug the plastic card she’d stolen from a gormless-looking nurse in the café downstairs and swiped it on a control pad, releasing the entrance to the ward.
As she had hoped, the place was chaotic and overcrowded, a mixture of patients, visitors, and hospital staff walking and standing around, talking or staring worriedly into space, so involved in their own dramas that nobody even gave Stella a second look. Perfect. Discreetly, she dropped the card by the door, just before closing them behind her and briskly streaming through the din. As she went, her eyes flitted up towards the large whiteboard with a list of numbers and names scrawled over it.
Bed 28. Child R. In a sea of normal names, it stuck out like a sore thumb, which was clearly the opposite of what the intention was supposed to be.
In spite of how busy the place was, Stella navigated its narrow, heaving corridors like an expert maze runner, her eyes frantically flickering around, scanning the place for a sign. In the end, she didn’t need to look too far because Flo’s room was a private one and was also the only door that was guarded by a stern-looking police officer, his head buried into the pages of a newspaper.
For the first time in a while, everything went just to plan. Like a well-oiled engine, the family’s mission to extract their youngest member from her hospital bed unfolded so unbelievably smoothly that it almost felt like everything had finally returned to normal.
Stella batted her eyelashes and schmoozed the bored officer guarding Flo’s room, long enough so that he barely gave a nod of acknowledgement to the doctor that swept past them a few moments later. Ronnie, dressed in a shirt, tie, with a fake stethoscope around his neck and clipboard in his hands, slipped into his daughter’s hospital room, carefully closing the door behind him. Fighting back the pangs of guilt that struck him in the centre of his chest, he faced her small,
