'Were you aware that one in seven hundred people wake up during an operation under general anaesthetic, Detective?' she said.

Delaney wasn't. 'No,' he replied.

'You're paralysed, immobile, you can't move. Not even an eyelid. But you can feel. Feel the cold steel of the scalpel slicing into you. Feel your flesh parting as they open you up.'

Delaney didn't respond, it was putting it mildly to say that he already had a very bad feeling about this woman, he knew what she was capable of, after all. He could feel the anger and sickness radiating off her like the shimmering haze of a tarmac road in a heatwave.

Audrey Hill took another step closer to him. 'You can hear too, Detective Inspector. And that's the worst part of it. They were talking, the two s.l.u.ts whispering to each other about clients they'd f.u.c.ked. The surgeon talking about football to the vapid nurse. Talk, talk talk, When they should have been concentrating on what they were doing. The anaesthetist spotted something was wrong and put me under again, but by then it was too late.'

'I can understand it must have been a terrible experience-'

'You understand nothing!' She spat the words at him, the rifle shaking in her hands for the first time as her hands shook with fury.'

'They killed our baby.'

'What do you mean?'

'What do you think I mean? Our baby died!'

'Yours and Michael's?'

'We were a family. We were supposed to be a family. They took that away from us.'

Delaney looked at the rifle trembling in her hands, and held his hand up again, trying to keep the disgust from his face and voice. 'It's okay.'

'Nothing is okay. It was supposed to be routine but they made a mistake with the anaesthetic and had to deliver my baby by Caesarean section. I heard them!'

Delaney could see the madness and rage still dancing in her eyes. 'That must have been terrible for you.'

'He died because of their butchery. Then they performed a hysterectomy. Performed it without my consent.'

'They were trying to help you.'

'No.' Her voice was quiet now and Delaney didn't feel more rea.s.sured by it, in fact he felt the opposite. 'I am a trained veterinary nurse by trade, not a receptionist. I took that job just to get close to them, Detective. So I understand surgery. I heard them admit their mistakes. They murdered my baby and then they cut out my womb. So that's why, Detective. A life for a life.'

'And the mutilations? Did they deserve that?'

She smiled joylessly again. 'It's what they did to me.' Her eyes dropped to her stomach and the smile fell from her lips. 'They mutilated me.'

Delaney could hear the change in the tone of her voice. As if their conversation was at an end. He had to say something. Do something.

Audrey Hill raised the rifle a fraction, pointing at his heart now, as if she had come to a decision. 'Do you believe in G.o.d, Inspector?'

Delaney shrugged. 'Yeah I do. Someone has to be responsible for all this s.h.i.te.'

She didn't smile this time. 'Now that we know how big the universe really is . . .' She shook her head puzzled. 'How can you believe in G.o.d? We're not ants. Were not even germs. So if there is no justice from G.o.d, we have to make our own, don't we?'

'It doesn't have to be like this.'

'It already is, Detective Inspector Delaney.'

Delaney heart thudded in his chest as he heard a familiar voice shout out.

'Jack,' Kate called from the front door. 'Are you in there?'

'Stay back!' Delaney shouted, almost screamed it. 'Just stay where you are.'

'Jack!'

Kate walked into the room and as Audrey Hill spun round and pointed the rifle at her, she froze in place.

'Maybe I'll just shoot her then.'

Delaney saw her hand trembling on the trigger, the madness in her eyes and stepped forward. Kate Walker was the woman he loved. He knew that now more than ever. He loved her and she was carrying his child. He wasn't going to lose another one. 'Jessica Tam isn't dead and Michael isn't bringing her here,' he said.

'What are you talking about?'

'I killed him. Michael's dead.'

The woman shook her head, shocked, as she spun round and trained the rifle back on him. 'You're lying!'

Delaney took another step towards her. 'I put a bullet in his diseased brain, Audrey. He's dead, it's over. Now put down the rifle.'

Delaney watched her hands tremble. He didn't know if it was a deliberate tightening of her finger on the trigger as the rifle fired, or if it was accidental. He didn't register the sound of Kate screaming, he didn't know that Sally Cartwright had come charging into the room and was throwing herself at Audrey Hill.

Falling to the floor, he didn't know anything at all.

He was already dead.

EPILOGUE.

When she was seven years old Kate Walker had attended her grandmother's funeral. It was a bitterly cold day in October, and, as she had stood in the rain in her black coat and her black skirt with a black hat on her head that did nothing to stop the swirling bite of the wind, she had decided she didn't like funerals or cemeteries. Why couldn't people live for ever? Why couldn't she be seven for ever? Why do people have to grow up and die?

Maybe, at heart, that was why she had become a pathologist. Maybe she chose her career to answer that question. As a young boy will break apart a favourite toy to try and see how it works, maybe she had been breaking apart human bodies. Dissecting and disa.s.sembling them to their component parts, flesh, tissue, sinew and blood, to answer the question that, outside religion, had no answer. She had learned that as a child Michael Hill had killed and tortured animals, for the same reason, before his sickness had been identified and he had been put on medication. Medication his abusive sister had later withheld from him. Had she, herself, been doing the same thing all this time, Kate wondered, only with dead human bodies? Maybe she was a lot more like him than she realised. She shivered. She was nothing like Michael Hill. She was alive, for one thing.

She shivered because it was cold that day as well. Not as bitterly cold as the day of her grandmother's funeral, but the wind had an edge like a scalpel and Kate put her right hand around the folds of her scarf and pulled it tight to her throat. It was a cashmere scarf, white, and she found comfort in the warmth of its touch. She never thought she would buy a coloured scarf ever again.

She looked down at the gravestones. At the surname DELANEY carved twice in bold chisel strokes.

She still didn't know why people had to die. In all her years of medical training she hadn't even come close to knowing. She only knew that people did. The important thing to do, she had decided, if you were living, was to live.

Jack Delaney had come back to life in more ways than one. She took her hand from her scarf, took his hand in her own and squeezed it.

He looked at her and smiled sadly and she had never felt more alive. She remembered the confusion of that evening. Delaney collapsing to the floor. His body in such a bad state, after the battering he had taken over the previous few days, that his heart had literally given out at the ma.s.sive dose of tranquilliser shot into him. He claimed that he knew that Kate would have her medical bag with her in the car, and, moreover, as he knew that the surgical registrar James Collins had survived over night, after being shot with the same drug, he was going to be fine. But Kate didn't believe him. He knew the risk he had been taking, but he took it anyway. He deliberately goaded the woman into shooting him because she was threatening me, Kate thought, and threatening the life of our unborn baby. Kate couldn't remember the words she mumbled as she stabbed the adrenalin shot into his lifeless heart, but it was a prayer of some kind. And in those few moments between life and death her own heart almost stopped itself as the world tilted on its axis once more for Delaney and he breathed again. Opening his eyes and smiling with them at her as though reborn.

She looked back down at the gravestones of his wife and son and realised she could never tell Jack the terrible truth about the boy. That when the baby had been born it had needed blood; the surgical team had checked automatically but Jack Delaney was not a match.

He wasn't a match because he hadn't been the father.

Jack knelt down on one knee, laid some flowers on his wife's grave, stayed there for a moment, then stood up and put his arm around Kate's waist. 'Let's go.'

They walked back towards the cemetery gates. Jack had told her that the man responsible for his wife's death was dead. He didn't provide any more details, nor yet did she ask for them. What she knew was that Jack Delaney was a new man. There was still a darkness at the heart of him but he had closed a chapter on his life and was ready to start a new one. A new one with her.

For the first time in her life she truly felt protected and she truly felt loved, the barriers she had fought so long to build were coming down.

That night they made love for the first time. It seemed.

It was three o'clock in the morning. Kate murmured drowsily, half awake, half asleep. She settled into her pillow and put her arm around Delaney's waist and then started, flashing to the morning she woke up with Paul Archer in her bed. But as she lay back on her pillow she remembered more; lowering her barriers had let Delaney truly into her life, but it also brought back memories, as though it was only now that she was strong enough to deal with them.

She was quite drunk. Goodness knows how many vodkas she had had. She was dancing to another female singer now. She sang along and wobbled a bit. She sat down on the sofa.

'Ooops.'

Paul Archer stood up and reached for his jacket. 'I'd better be getting home.'

'Where do you live?'

'Finchley. I used to live down the road. My soon-to-be ex-wife has the house.' He shrugged with a smile. 'The b.i.t.c.h.'

She looked at her watch. 'It's too late. You'll never catch a taxi. Not at this time of night.'

'Then I'll walk.'

'To Finchley?! No!' She wagged a finger and was aware her words were slurred. And the more she tried to concentrate, the more slurred they seemed to become. 'You'll stay here. No funny business. But you might as well stay.'

Paul Archer smiled. He was a good-looking man, and she reckoned that smile had charmed the pants off plenty of women in the past. But all she wanted to do was go to bed and sleep for a week. She stood up and stumbled her way to the hall closet where she pulled out a duvet and handed it to him. 'The sofa is large enough to sleep on.' She knew that, because the last man she had given the duvet to was Jack b.l.o.o.d.y Delaney. 'You sleep here and I'll see you in the morning.'

She went to her own bedroom, left her pile of clothes on the floor and climbed into bed. She looked at the ceiling for a moment or two, at least the room wasn't spinning. She turned off the light and a short while later she heard Paul Archer come into the room.

'It's cold out there. Can't I sleep with you? Like you say, no funny business, I promise.'

She couldn't remember speaking but she remembered shaking her head. And she remembered the sound of him taking off his clothes and climbing into bed and thinking what the h.e.l.l, as long as he just went to sleep.

'You try anything,' she said, 'and you're out the door.' She remembered him leaning over her. Showing his left wrist which had a Celtic tattoo of a chain. He turned it around so she could see the chain was broken. 'See this. I had it done the day after my wife made me leave my house. It's a symbol of freedom. I used to have a watch on this wrist which she bought me. I sold that the same day as well. Ten thousand pounds. She was a pa.s.sive b.i.t.c.h as well, but she warmed up when I taught her how.'

Kate's eyelids drooped. 'What are you saying?'

His voice was hard now. 'I'm saying it would be no fun f.u.c.king you like this. Like a drunken s.l.u.t. But I want you to know that when I am ready . . . I will f.u.c.k you. And what you want will have nothing to do with it.'

She struggled, trying to tell him to get out, but she couldn't seem to speak and his voice became soft and soothing like melted mola.s.ses as he stroked her forehead.

He spoke some more but she couldn't remember the words, she couldn't make them out. It was like nonsense he was speaking. And she couldn't keep her eyes open. She felt herself falling as if into a deep chasm of sleep and then she remembered no more.

Kate sat bolt upright in bed and reached for the telephone on the bedside cabinet, hurriedly dialling a number.

Delaney stirred and rubbed his eyes. 'What's going on?'

'Shush.'

The phone rang a few times and was picked up. The voice on the other end of the line far from pleased.

'This had better be good. Have you any idea what b.l.o.o.d.y time it is?'

'Jane, it's Kate.'

'Kate.' The sleepy voice on the other end of the line became more alert. 'What the h.e.l.l's going on? Are you all right?'

'I'm fine. Just tell me . . . Paul Archer. He worked with children, you said?'

'Yes.'

'What specialty?'

'Paediatric psychology. Mainly in the area of trauma counselling.'

'Does he use hypnosis?'

'Yes, I think he does.'

'Son of a b.i.t.c.h.'

'Has something happened?'

Kate smiled. 'No. Nothing happened. That's exactly the point. I'll speak to you later.' She hung up the phone and smiled broadly at Jack. Then she realised something else.

'Oh, s.h.i.t.' She almost whispered it.

Helen Archer looked up a little startled as Kate came into one of the rooms for witnesses at the courthouse. Her hand flew involuntarily to her mouth like a wounded bird as she bit on a fingernail. She willed her hand down. 'Sorry, I'm a bundle of nerves today.'

'I can understand,' said Kate.

'I nearly felt like not turning up. I'm not sure, when I see him, how I'm going to react. I'm not sure I can do it.'

'He's a forceful man. I don't blame you, Helen.'

'But he deserves to pay for what he's done, doesn't he?'

Kate looked at the woman, could see the nerves running through her body like electricity, making her twitch and fidget. 'When we talked earlier this week, you said he was wearing a watch. That night, when he attacked you . . . you said he was wearing the watch you bought him as an anniversary present?'

Helen Archer nodded, a little puzzled by the question. 'That's right. He always wore it. He didn't care about scratching me. About hurting me.'