M. Arlidge - Eeny Meeny

‘You’ve destroyed her…’

‘Oh don’t be so melodramatic. She’ll be fine. She’ll get better, be with her boyfriend, have her baby. Whether she’ll be able to look the kid in the eye’s a different matter, but she won. She survived. I thought she was going to do it, but Mark took it out of her hands.’

‘Why didn’t you just come for me?’ Helen demanded.

‘Because I wanted you to suffer.’

There it was – bald and unadulterated.

‘I did the right thing. I’d do it again.’ Helen’s voice was getting louder, as her fury took hold. And for the first time, there was a flash of something – anger? – in Marianne’s eyes.

‘You never really cared how much I suffered, did you?’ she spat back.

‘That’s not true.’

‘It wasn’t that you wanted me to suffer. It’s just that you didn’t care if I did, which is worse.’

‘No, that was never what I felt or wan-’

‘I was inside for twenty-five years. They tried to break me in young offenders and then tried all over again in Holloway. I wrote to you, so don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. The bottlings, the abuse, the beatings. I told you all about it and how they paid for it. I ripped one girl’s eyeball right out of her fucking head in Holloway – do you remember? Course you do. But still you didn’t write, you didn’t visit. You didn’t help me at all , because you wanted me to rot. To shrivel up and die. Your own sister.’

‘You stopped being my sister a long time ago.’

‘Because of what I did to them? At least I had some fucking balls, you ungrateful little bitch.’

Finally the venom was seeping through.

‘I saved you. You were next in line. They would have destroyed a little girl like you.’

The truth of Marianne’s accusation scythed into Helen’s conscience.

‘I know that. I know you felt you were helping me -’

‘We could have been happy together, you and me. We could have gone somewhere, lived off the street, got something going. They would never have found us. If we’d’ve stuck together we’d still be fine now.’

‘Do you really believe that, Marianne? Because if you do, you’re more far gone than I thought -’

Suddenly Marianne was marching across the room towards Helen, fire in her eyes. Helen immediately raised her Glock and Marianne paused, checking her march. There was only three feet between the pair now.

Helen took in her sister’s face. So familiar in its shape and lines, but so alien in its expression. As if a monster had climbed inside her and was eating its way out.

‘Don’t you dare look down on me,’ Marianne hissed. ‘Don’t you dare… judge me. It’s you who’s on trial here, not me.’

‘Because I did the right thing? The decent thing? You murdered our parents, Marianne. You murdered them in cold blood.’

‘And did you miss them? Afterwards? Did you miss those rapists?’

For a moment, Helen was lost for words. She had never asked herself that question. She had been so caught up with Marianne in the aftermath, so involved in her own bewildering journey through foster homes and Social Services that she’d never really had space to grieve.

‘Well, did you?’ Marianne demanded. A long silence followed and then:

‘No.’

Marianne broke into a smile. A smile of victory.

‘There you are then. They were nobodies, worse than nobodies. And they deserved a worse fate than they got. I was kind to them. Or have you forgotten what they did?’

She tugged off the blonde wig she was wearing to reveal her scalp. The hair had never grown back on the spot where her father had held her head to the three-bar fire, leaving a strange and unattractive bald patch on her crown.

‘These are just the scars you can see. He would have killed us in the end. So I did what had to be done. You should be bloody grateful.’

Helen watched her sister – the same defiance, the same anger that she’d displayed during her trial was still there all these years later. There was truth in what she said, but it still sounded like the ravings of a madwoman. Helen suddenly felt a strong desire to be out of this awful room and away from this burning hatred.

‘How does this end, Marianne?’

Marianne smiled, as if she’d been waiting for this, and then:

‘It ends as it started. With a choice.’

And now it all started to make sense.

‘You made a choice all those years ago,’ Marianne continued. ‘You chose to betray your sister. Your sister who’d helped you. Who’d killed for you. You chose to save yourself and throw me to the wolves.’

‘And all your victims faced a choice,’ Helen countered, as the horror of Marianne’s scheme became perfectly clear.

‘You think people are good, Jodie. You’re one of life’s optimists. But they’re not. They are mean and selfish and cruel. You proved that. And so did every one of the selfish little shits I abducted. In the end, we are all just animals scratching each other’s eyes out to survive.’

Marianne took a step closer – instinctively Helen gripped the trigger of her gun. Marianne paused and smiled, then raised a Smith and Wesson to Helen’s eye level.

‘And now you have another choice to make, Helen. Will you kill or be killed?’

So that was it. Helen and Marianne were to be the last players in her deadly game.

DC Bridges left Charlie where she lay and sprinted towards the building. SO19 were on their way in full SWAT gear and the paramedics were racing to the scene, but he didn’t have time to wait. Helen was in there with the killer – Suzanne, Marianne, whatever the hell she was called – and he didn’t fancy her chances of survival. This was a scheme that was always designed to end in bloodshed.

He burst through the lobby. The lifts were dead, but the door to the basement was ajar, so he ran towards it. Down the stairs and along the corridor. He wasn’t armed but what the hell. Every second was crucial now.

And there it was. The locked metal door. He hammered at it and Helen’s voice rang out clear, telling him to back off. ‘Bugger that,’ he thought, scanning around desperately for a tool of some kind.

The corridor was empty, but the last door at the end was a store cupboard, still littered with half-used bottles of bleach and disinfectant. Lying discarded on the floor, however, was a fire extinguisher. One of the old-fashioned seventies ones, heavy and thick. Bridges hauled it off the floor.

Sprinting down the corridor, he was back in front of the metal door in seconds. He paused, gritted his teeth, then launched the fire extinguisher at the lock.

The door shuddered with the impact, a roaring metallic scream echoing down the corridor, but Marianne didn’t blink. Her eyes were trained on her sister, her finger caressing the trigger of her gun.

Crash. Another heavy blow to the lock. Whoever was outside was obviously determined. The door moaned under the sustained assault.

‘It’s decision time, Jodie.’ Marianne smiled as she spoke. ‘I will fire the second that door opens.’

‘Don’t do this, Marianne. It doesn’t have to be this way.’

‘It’s too late to call off the dogs. He’s coming through. So make your choice.’

The door was starting to buckle. Bridges was making progress.

‘I don’t want to kill you, Marianne.’

‘Then the choice is made. Pity really – I thought you’d jump at the chance.’

The door creaked ominously – there were only seconds left now.

‘I want to help you. Put the gun down.’

‘You had your chance, Jodie. And you washed your hands of me. You saved all those people. All those strangers but you washed your hands of me .’