I pulled my son closer to me so he couldn’t witness what was happening, not that he’d have been able to make any sense of it.
‘Shh, shh, it’s okay,’ I whispered into his ear, running my hand through his hair, but still he wailed.
However, instead of focusing all my attention on Henry, I couldn’t draw my eyes away from the chaos before me. Johnny’s arms and hands flailed by his side, making occasional contact with Tony’s body, but they were no match for my husband’s fury, strength and training. Pinkish-red spit bubbles seeped from Johnny’s mouth as he choked on the blood trickling down his throat from his nose and gums. His voice was distorted and unrecognisable.
‘I’m not . . .’ he croaked, but Tony had no intention of listening to him.
‘You lied to me to get to my daughter, you sick fuck! You terrorised my wife and you murdered Janine!’
He called me his wife! A euphoric rush of warmth spread throughout my body.
I could have pleaded with Tony to stop, told him he’d got the wrong man and that we’d let the police deal with it. But I didn’t. If Johnny was as tenacious as his brother, this would only continue, and I longed to get my life and my family back. Hatred like his would not disappear any time soon.
Meanwhile, the passion and the energy spilling from my husband’s rage was infectious and arousing. An unceasing tingling began around my pelvis, and the more animalistic Tony became, the more primal I felt. I craved him, I lusted after him, I wanted him inside me.
‘He told me he was going to drown Henry,’ I said, clutching our son tighter.
‘I wouldn’t . . .’ Johnny began, but again, he didn’t get to finish. Tony had hold of the back of Johnny’s hair, yanked his head upwards and slammed it back onto the path. Despite the dimming light, I could still make out his irises as they fluttered towards the back of his head, leaving milky white orbs in their place.
My stomach felt as if it was riding a rollercoaster, rising quickly and anxiously anticipating the descent. Tony had someone’s life in his hands and he was about to make the single most important decision that could alter everything. I clenched my fists into tight balls and with all my might I willed him to take that next, crucial step.
I’d never felt closer to – or more in love with – my husband as I was in the moment when he killed Johnny.
CHAPTER FIVE
LAURA – TWO MONTHS AFTER JOHNNY
I sat in my office hunched over a keyboard, glaring at a spreadsheet on the monitor, trying to make sense of next month’s work rota. With ninety-four volunteers all requesting hours that didn’t include the middle of the night, it was no mean feat trying to accommodate everyone’s wishes.
I glanced out from the open door of my office and across the room at the afternoon team. Kevin, Sanjay, Zoe and Joella sat in their booths, half of them on calls and the rest filling their downtime reading Kindles and magazines.
It had been more than a week since I’d last found time to join them in the trenches, and I was badly missing the anticipation of the next call. I’d been so busy and much more cautious since the whole Ryan and Johnny debacles, but now I was itching to find a new candidate. However, since the powers that be in our head office had offered me Janine’s job as branch manager, much of my time was taken up by tiresome administrative tasks.
My lips curled into a smile as I sat in Janine’s former seat, my elbows on her desk, distracting myself from rotas by picking out stubborn crumbs of gluten-free biscuits from her keyboard with eyebrow tweezers. If she could see me now, she’d be turning in the grave I’d sent her to.
The spotlight had been shining upon my branch brighter than it ever had before, and none of it for positive reasons. First came Janine’s murder on the premises, and then head office’s humiliation at discovering she’d shifted money from the charity’s accounts into her own and to an account she held for a gambling website. When the internal investigation began, the theft became public knowledge thanks to an ‘anonymous’ whistleblower. And soon, the eponymous plaque erected in her name was quietly unscrewed from the wall outside. With her reputation tarnished, I’d disposed of it myself.
End of the Line had lost the public’s trust and so calls to it fell sharply, along with local donations. So it was the sensible decision to ask me to take charge. I was the brave volunteer who’d survived two attacks from unhinged brothers who’d also targeted my daughter and disabled son. And in publicly forgiving them, my selflessness had made me the face of the charity and garnered it positive press.
The rest of the team were elated by my promotion, including Mary, our oldest volunteer and my former mentor. I’d informed her by phone, as she’d yet to return to the office following the shock of finding Janine’s body. She still blamed herself for failing to prevent the murder and for not monitoring Ryan’s fateful visit from the video room, even though it was me who’d told her he was Janine’s friend. I was quite happy to let her carry the burden of guilt for as long as she required.
The alarm sounded on my phone to remind me that my day there was coming to an end. An hour and a half later and I was walking up the street towards the house, recycling bags crammed with groceries and the handles digging into the palms of my hands.
Sometimes I’d catch myself absent-mindedly looking around the street, hoping to see Olly. He’d always felt intimidated by Tony, so rather than ring the doorbell, he’d hover for hours, waiting for me to enter or leave the house. I missed him, but Johnny’s words continued to haunt me.
I had been so sure that Olly and David were two completely different people – until now, because when I gave it more thought, their voices were the same and their circumstances similar. David had lost all hope when his wife had been killed by three men who broke into their house; Olly’s mum had died at his hands while three men she’d sold our bodies to hovered at the doorway. Or was that a lie, too? Had I remembered my life under Sylvia’s roof as different to the way it had actually been?
Perhaps my memory had been playing tricks on me lately again, creating mixed-up images and snapshots of what I thought to be true. I suddenly recalled a buried memory from a year and a half earlier, of a conversation I’d had with Olly. He’d had enough, he told me, he had no fight left him in him, and while he’d said the same thing many times before, I knew this time he meant it. He wanted my help to die but he was afraid and didn’t want to go alone, which is when Charlotte came into the picture.