Annaliese watched Shawcross cross the tiles with the mallet clutched tightly in his bony fists. “What the hell are you doing?” she asked him incredulously.
“What does it bloody well look like? We have to kill him.”
Bradley’s eyes went wide and he started trying to get up. He couldn’t manage it, though, and flopped down onto his side again.
Annaliese stood over her colleague protectively. “Are you insane?” she said. “You’re not killing anybody, you lunatic.”
“He’s serious,” said a nearby woman. It was the one who had opened up the doors for Annaliese and let her inside the kitchen. She seemed anxious, but there was also a steely determination in her misty blue eyes. “Have you not seen what happens when someone gets bitten?”
Annaliese shook her head and held out a hand to Shawcross to keep him from advancing any further. “No, I haven’t. I have no clue what is going on here. All I know is that there’s a dead woman in the gardens and people keep attacking me. Can somebody here explain that to me, please?”
Shawcross sighed and leant himself up against one of the kitchen counters. He lowered the meat tenderiser so that it hung less-threateningly down by his thigh. “It started in the middle of the night,” he said. “Everything went to hell.”
Chapter Thirteen
Annaliese managed to get Bradley back onto the swivel chair and fetched him a glass of water. He was unable to take more than a couple of sips. She couldn’t help but notice the way everybody in the room kept eyeballing him suspiciously, like he was a bomb ready to go off. There was only a handful of people in the room, but they all looked terrified.
What happened to these people?
“Okay,” she said to Shawcross, moving over to the aluminium counter in the centre of the room. “Let’s hear it, then. I want to know exactly what is going on.”
Shawcross shrugged. “Well, I’m afraid I will have to disappoint you there. None of us can tell you exactly what is going on. We can only tell you what we know.”
“Good enough,” she said.
“Firstly, though, how come you’re even here, Anna?”
“I was on call. Bradley needed assistance with a birth.”
Shawcross nodded but seemed uninterested. The zoo and amusement park outside were never any of his concern; he was only in charge of the manor and its use as a private venue and hotel. He didn’t care about anything else. The guy was a tool.
“Everything went okay, by the way,” she told him, on the off chance he was interested. “I was just heading for my car to go home when I encountered a pair of strangers in the gardens.”
Shawcross seemed interested again. He leaned forward. “Oh? What happened?”
“It was a man and a woman. The woman was dead – ripped apart by the man. The guy came at me like a lunatic. If it wasn’t for Bradley coming to my rescue, I would be a goner.”
“And Bradley got bit?”
Annaliese nodded. “Yes. But I thought you were going to be the one explaining things, so why am I the one doing all the talking?”
Shawcross sighed. “Okay, fine. It started out as a night like any other. I was hosting a corporate function just like I have a million times before. Drinks were flowing, bar tabs were rising, and not a single person had started a fight. It was as smooth as ever. But a few people were under the weather.”
Annaliese frowned. “Under the weather?”
“Not everyone was ill,” added the woman who had let her into the kitchen. “Just a couple people. Jeff Danks and Bob Foster from the Southampton branch were the worst-off.”
“Yes,” Shawcross agreed. “Just a couple of people were sick at first. I assumed they just had the sniffles. There were about three or four of them in total, all sneezing and sweating. None of them were getting involved with the rest of the party. They didn’t dance; they barely drank. They just sat there looking like death warmed up.”