She wasn’t sure how long she’d been silent when she heard him speak again.
‘Ella, I know you’re confused, but I’m asking you, just for one moment, to ignore everything you’ve heard or been told, everything you’ve imagined. Forget all of it. Just . . . Just look into your heart.’
Her heart. What did he know of her heart?
She turned to Dan and said, ‘Kill the kids.’ Lucy produced a muffled scream and Simon started to beg; she could hear her name being repeated, more desperate each time.
She concentrated her attention on Dan but he looked troubled, as though he hadn’t heard her properly, sounding apologetic as he finally said, ‘I don’t do kids.’
Ella was thrown by the comment, saying, ‘Why not?’
‘Nobody ever asked me. You know it isn’t right; they’re kids.’
She looked at them. The last time she’d seen them she’d loved them but she didn’t anymore, and not because of anything they’d done, but because her capacity to love anyone had been slowly crushed and was gone.
She had to kill them. If she let them live, then one day they’d no longer be innocents but people like her, seeking to avenge the deaths of their parents. And she wanted to kill them for the pain their deaths would inflict on Simon in the final few minutes of his life. That was her vengeance, to return that pain to him.
‘Okay, take all their gags off.’ She reached out and took the gun off him again, and he walked over and removed the gags. There was too much noise then and not enough air—the kids’ crying and Lucy’s desperate pleas added to Simon’s.
Dan came back over and said, ‘What now?’
She looked at Simon as she said, ‘This is for Ben.’ She lifted the gun, deaf to the pleas. She found Harry first, let his face slip out of focus beyond the end of the barrel, pulled the trigger.
Even with the silencer, the shot was loud enough to cause a momentary hiatus. It was broken by Simon’s animal wail, George’s high-pitched scream. She looked at Lucy but she’d fainted, lying slumped back on the seat now. Harry had been thrown onto the floor; she’d been aiming for his forehead but had hit his face and left it unrecognizable with chopped blood.
Without giving herself time to think she turned her aim on George and fired again. There was no hiatus this time, just the summary silencing of his terrified scream. She fired another shot at Lucy where she lay unconscious but missed, hitting the seat. On the second attempt she put a bullet right into the side of her head.
Simon’s wail descended slowly into a punch-drunk silence. She surveyed the wreckage—Lucy, the children’s bodies, their thin little legs sticking out of knee-length shorts, matching shirts because they’d been coming to dinner.
She’d lost all sense of Dan still being there but then she heard him speak.
‘Bloody hell! Why did you have to go and do that, Ella?’
She looked at him, his expression one of total bafflement, and scorn perhaps, and she said, ‘It was the least I could do.’ She turned back to Simon and said, ‘Look at your children, Simon, look at your wife. You did this to them. Innocent children, and you killed them just like you killed Ben, his whole life still ahead of him.’
He didn’t look at them, making eye contact with her instead, fixing her, unblinking. She was expecting him to say something, to abuse her, throw curses, but he remained silent, a lack of response that unnerved her.
‘Well, don’t you have anything to say for yourself?’ He still didn’t speak and it angered her. He didn’t deserve this now, to suddenly adopt a mantle of dignified silence. It wasn’t his right. She lifted the gun and shot at his body, the bullet hitting the side of his stomach, the blood soaking quickly into his shirt. Simon didn’t flinch, though, as though he hadn’t even felt it and wasn’t aware of the wound.
He continued to stare at her in silence. It crossed her mind that it wasn’t intentional, that he was simply too traumatized to say anything, but looking into his eyes, she knew that he was defying her, denying her the satisfaction of seeing him broken.
‘No last words at all?’ Nothing. There was a stillness and remoteness about him that infuriated her. Her arm felt tired but she lifted it one more time and shot him in the head, a good shot, the blood spurting out of him.
Fatigued, she held out the gun to Dan. The scene in front of her made no visual sense. Her feelings were confused, too, a strange mix of completeness and emptiness.
She produced a weak smile for Dan. He was staring down at George and Harry, though, and when he finally met her gaze all he could do was shake his head, his eyes swimming with a dulled contempt.