Mark Pearson - Blood Work

'Put the rifle down,' he said.

The woman smiled and there was poison in it. 'I don't think so.'

'Who are you?'

'Not that it's going to matter to you, but my name is Audrey Hill.'

Delaney nodded. 'Michael Hill, he's your husband?'

'No, Detective Delaney. He's my baby brother. I brought him up.'

'You know who I am then?'

'I know exactly who you are.'

'And you knew what your brother was doing?'

'He didn't do anything, Detective. He never does without my permission…' She looked at Delaney with flat eyes, and he felt a chill run up his spine. 'Not any more.'

Delaney swallowed drily, his mind racing, running through the options. He wasn't thinking so much about himself, he was thinking about the young, near-naked detective constable chained to the wall in the cellar beneath them. He had to keep her talking, he had to keep this madwoman away from her. He didn't know what he was going to do but he knew this much, she stopped talking and it was over for him. Over for both of them.

'Why then, Audrey?'

She moved closer to Delaney, her unblinking eyes staring at him like a entomologist might examine a newly discovered specimen. 'Neither of them suffered. They were all painless deaths. Anaesthetised and then a simple cut to the jugular. They died in their sleep.'

'And the surgeon?'

The woman shrugged. 'We were disturbed. I'll get back to him later.'

'What had they done to you?'

Delaney tried to edge closer to her but she raised the rifle and shook her head very slightly. 'This is a tranquilliser rifle, but it's loaded for very large animals. It's hard to describe the damage it would do to a human central nervous system.'

Delaney held up his hands, calming. 'Why did you kill them, Audrey?'

'Because of what they did to me.'

'What?'

'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 sluts whispering to each other about clients they'd fucked. 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 reassured 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 God, Inspector?'

Delaney shrugged. 'Yeah I do. Someone has to be responsible for all this shite.'

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 God? We're not ants. Were not even germs. So if there is no justice from God, 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.

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 disassembling 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.