Authors: Michael Robotham
There is a creaking sound above me.
“Grievous?”
Nothing.
From across the street, I hear a burst of laughter and the sound of Christmas crackers being pulled. Cheers. Applause.
I climb to the first landing, moving from room to room. Tiptoeing. Trying not to make a sound. Even before I finish the search, I know where I’ll find him. Mounting the final staircase, I nudge the door with my foot.
Grievous is sitting on the bed with his back to the wall. His arms and legs are wrapped around Piper, hugging her against his chest. She’s a human shield, asleep with her head on his shoulder.
“I thought you’d run away,” he says.
“Ditto,” I reply.
His hair is plastered down one side of his face and his eyes are like dark holes full of shadow and menace. He motions towards the end of the bed. There is a pistol lying on the bedspread, closer to me than to him. Polymer-framed, black as pitch. The ammunition clip has been placed alongside the weapon.
“That’s for you,” he says.
I stare at the gun, trying to make sense of the offer.
“Pick it up. It won’t bite.”
Piper is like a rag doll in his arms, her head slumped to one side, her eyes closed, her breathing shallow.
“What did you give her?”
He motions to the empty pill bottle on the table to his left. “Diazepam. She won’t feel a thing.”
“What isn’t she supposed to feel?”
“Dying, of course.”
“You don’t have to kill her.”
“It’s a bit late now. She swallowed the lot. We’re going to die together.”
He raises his left wrist and shows me how they are handcuffed together. His other hand, hidden until now, has a knife pressed flat against her body, the point roughly over her heart.
“There must have been thirty pills in that bottle. I don’t think she’ll survive even if they pump out her stomach. No time to waste, really. If you shoot me, you might save her.”
“I’m not going to shoot you.”
He looks at me sadly and kisses her forehead. “Then we’ll both watch her die.” He twirls her hair with his fingertips. “It’s such a pity. She’s been a dear, dear thing.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“You’re the psychologist, you tell me.”
Stepping closer, I crouch and take the pistol and ammunition clip.
“It slides in and clicks into place,” he says. “Now release the safety.”
I have never fired a gun. I hate them. I know some people who argue they’re just a tool, like a shifting spanner or a ballpoint hammer, but let’s be honest and accept that guns are designed to be lethal weapons. There are a lot of things I haven’t done. I haven’t had a body piercing or jumped out of a plane or tried to tip a cow. All of these things seem preferable at the moment to holding a pistol in both hands, trying not to shake.
“Careful, you might shoot someone,” he says, smiling.
“Let Piper go?”
“Shoot me and you can have her.”
I point the gun at his head.
“That’s the way.”
“I’m not going to shoot you. Nobody has to die.”
He smiles. He smells almost perfumed, as though he’s showered and shaved and doused himself in cologne.
“You weren’t in the service, were you?” he asks.
“Neither were you.”
“I got close.”
“That’s like saying you nearly had sex, Grievous. You either did or you didn’t—anything else is wanking.”
Anger lights up his eyes. I haven’t seen his temper before. He’s learned to hide it well.
“Should I call you Gerald or George?”
“Call me what you like.”
“Piper and Natasha called you George. It suits you.” I take a step closer. “I’m going to undo the handcuffs.”
He shows me the knife again. “I can flick my wrist and reach her heart before you take another step. How good a doctor are you? Can you patch a broken heart?”
I step back and find a straight-backed chair. I straddle it, resting my outstretched forearms on the top spar. I can hold the gun steadier now.
“This crime of mine,” says Grievous. “Kidnapping the girls, raping them—in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t mean very much. A thousand years from now nobody is going to care about the Bingham Girls or what I did to them. Not in a hundred years. Let’s face it, Professor, men have been penetrating women since our species began. It’s how we survive. So what if we don’t say please beforehand and thank you afterwards. It doesn’t alter the act. We penetrate. We procreate.”
“That’s an interesting philosophy, George. Your mother would be very proud.”
“Leave my mother out of it.”
“Is that who you’re trying to punish?”
“Oh, dear me, how disappointing,” he sighs. “Is that the best you can do—Freudian hostility, a mummy fixation? Please. I expected more.”
“You don’t have a fiancée, Grievous. She’s another fiction. That’s your problem, isn’t it? You can’t find anyone to love. It’s always been that way, ever since puberty when all those hormones were playing havoc with your thinking. You wanted a girlfriend, but you had a problem. You were deaf in one ear and couldn’t quite tune into what people were saying. Nobody knew about the brain tumor slowly growing, benign.
“You refused to wear a hearing aid or to sit up front in class. You didn’t want anyone to know, particularly the girls. You wanted to be one of the cool group sitting up the back, passing notes to each other.
“Do you know, Grievous, there is a correlation between deafness and paranoid thinking? If you can’t hear particularly well, it’s easy to think people might be talking about you, laughing and joking at your expense, putting you down. Isn’t that true?”
He doesn’t answer me, but seems to be pressing the knife tighter against Piper’s chest.
“Even the teachers thought you were slow and stupid, even your family. And every time someone laughed or behaved a little differently, you were sure they were making fun of you, whispering behind your back, sharing a private joke.
“You wanted a girlfriend, you were desperate for one, but girls rejected your pathetic attempts to woo them. I’m not criticizing you or being patronizing. It wasn’t your fault. You adored those girls. You would have treated them like goddesses. Showered them with love. Written them poetry. Sung them love songs. But they didn’t choose you, did they? They chose the arm-candy, the boys who made them look good and gave them status, the ones they swooned over.
“You fantasized about those unattainable girls. You pictured them as you worked out in weight rooms, shedding those pounds. You starved yourself. And then one day they discovered the tumor in your head and the surgeons cut it out and suddenly you could hear. You were whole. Nothing would stop you now.”
I pause, watching him, sensing how close I am to the truth. He has a lock of Piper’s hair in his mouth.
“So what happened?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer.
“Let me guess. You asked one of the unattainable girls to go out with you and she said yes. She was nice. Friendly. Pretty. She didn’t tease you. She didn’t call you names. She didn’t make fun of your hearing problems. You were over the moon. You walked on air. You had never been happier in your entire life.
“It’s not that you wanted to have sex with this girl—not straight away—you wanted to talk, to romance her, to show her what you had to offer. But then you froze. You got tongue-tied. Being able to hear didn’t make any difference because you’d grown up being nervous and slow. You didn’t know how to relax and just be yourself. Instead of being a new man, you were the same old Gerald—the slow Gerald, the paranoid Gerald.
“Did she laugh at your first crude attempt to kiss her? Or was the whole date a joke? Maybe her pretty friends put her up to it. Is that why you chose Natasha? She reminded you of those girls who laughed at you. She was provocative, flirtatious, vain, out of your league…”
His eyes flash open, full of hatred. Violence. “You think I cared about that slut?”
“I think that answers my question.”
“She got what she deserved.”
“That’s why you mutilated Natasha. It was hatred, not love. Your desire had become twisted. Corrupted. Violent. It demanded you step aside. It negated the rights of others. It cleansed. It poisoned. It dictated your beliefs. You must have dragged that hatred around with you for years. It was gnawing away inside you while you watched other lads get the pretty girls, walking them home, getting invited inside, despoiling those sweet young bodies and then boasting about it afterwards.”
“Keep talking, Professor, it’s
her
time you’re wasting.”
I glance at Piper. Her breathing has grown ragged. The sedatives are being absorbed into her bloodstream.
“Why is it so important that I kill you?” I ask.
“It’s over for me. There’s nowhere else to go.”
“Give me Piper and I’ll leave you the gun.”
He shakes his head. “I want you to pull the trigger.”
“Why?”
He smiles. “It’s like I told you that first day I drove you to Bingham—killers and kidnappers know when they cross a line. They can’t expect sympathy or understanding. Gideon Tyler took your wife and child. He did terrible things to them, but you said you wouldn’t have pulled the trigger to stop him.”
“I lied.”
“Show me. Shoot me now. Prove you can do it, Professor. Learn how it feels.”
“I don’t want to know how it feels.”
He runs his finger along Piper’s cheek. “Maybe if she were your daughter, you’d think differently. Perhaps Piper doesn’t mean enough to you.”
“That’s not true.”
He smiles. “You think you can read people, Professor. You pick apart their motives and peer inside their heads, but I wonder if you ever look at yourself. I think you’re a coward. I’m going to make you brave.”
“I live with a disease that makes me brave.”
“It gives you an excuse.” He spits the words. “You couldn’t stop the man who kidnapped your wife and daughter and now you’re balking at this. You’re making excuses. Stop me. She’s dying. Just do it!”
He lifts Piper’s eyelids. Her pupils have rolled back into her head and white foam is leaking from one corner of her mouth. Every minute gives the pills longer to dissolve in her stomach and enter her bloodstream. Five minutes after ingestion she has a 90 per cent chance of survival. By sixty minutes it falls to less than 15 per cent.
The pistol has grown hot in my hands. I stare along the barrel with a mixture of loathing and awe.
“Let her go.”
“Shoot me. It’s not difficult. You walk over here. Point the gun at my head and pull the trigger. Don’t go trying to miss. I don’t want to be left a vegetable. And don’t try shooting me in the leg or shoulder. This knife is very sharp. It won’t take much to slice into her chest.”
The pistol is growing heavier. I look at Piper and imagine her heartbeat slowing and her organs failing. In the next breath I can picture Charlie lying on a filthy mattress, chained to a radiator with masking tape wrapped around her head, breathing through a hose. I would have pulled a trigger a dozen times over to save her and Julianne. I would have emptied the magazine and reloaded. I would have done anything… given anything… if only…
“If I hear sirens, I will kill her, Professor. You’re running out of time.” He is rocking Piper in his arms. “Pull the trigger. People take lives all the time. You might even enjoy it. It could be cathartic. I mean, you’re separated, your wife left you, you’re riddled with disease, so much for ‘in sickness and in health.’ ”
“That’s not why she left me.”
“You must really hate her.”
“No.”
“Liar!”
I scream at him then. Aiming the gun at his head. Stepping closer.
“PUT DOWN THE KNIFE!”
“No.”
“LET HER GO!”
“Shoot me.”
“NO!”
“Tick tock, tick tock.”
“LET HER GO!”
“Pull the trigger.”
“SHE’S DYING!”
Grievous begins screaming back at me. “SAVE HER! JUST DO IT! PULL THE TRIGGER! DO IT. SHOOT ME! PULL THE FUCKING TRIG—”
The gun recoils and a noise seems to detonate directly inside my head. Echoing. Drawn out. Groaning like a turntable on the wrong speed. I stare at the gun and smell the cordite.
My finger is still on the trigger. I’m locked in place as though turned to stone, while the Earth has turned ten thousand revolutions. Nothing stirs or shifts until Piper slides sideways, her hair plastered to the back of her head, slick with blood.
For a moment I think I must have shot her. Somehow the bullet must have ricocheted off the wall. I put my hand over the back of her head and discover the blood isn’t hers.
Grievous is staring at me with his lips peeled back and mouth open, his last sentence cut short. The entry wound in his forehead is smaller than a five pence piece, while the exit wound has sprayed blood and brain matter across the painted wall.
Fumbling with the key, I remove the handcuffs and reach under Piper, lifting her easily and carrying her to the door and down two flights of stairs.