The Advent Killer (31 page)

‘
Antonia?
’

The voice was distant and muffled, but it was definitely there.

‘
Wake up
.’

Her head rolled towards the sound as her lungs dragged in air. A dull ache filled her chest.

‘
I have something to show you.
’

Her eyelids lifted on dark colours and unfocused, murky shapes. But before she could make sense of anything, a wave of nausea hit, stronger than any she’d ever felt. Her vision blurred and she clamped her eyes shut, as her head filled with disorder.

She waited, breathing heavily, slowly concluding that she must have been asleep. As for where she was, or any information regarding the previous day,
any
day in fact …

She coughed and swallowed. Her throat felt so dry it was painful. The nausea had abated, though, so she braced for another onslaught and opened her eyes. There was no pain this time, but the darkness remained, and it took Hawkins a few seconds to recognize that the bed in which she lay was not her own. Neither was the room. Then she noticed the person looking down at her.

Her eyes moved first, then her head rolled slowly to face him. It took a second to make out his features in the dim light, and a few more for recognition to come.

Suddenly she was trying to sit up, to get away, as memories of the attack in her kitchen streamed back into her mind. But her body resisted, and pain flared in her chest. Then he was gripping her shoulders, locking her down, his face in hers.

Barclay’s breath was putrid. ‘Nice to have you back.’

She tried to shout for help, but the sound jammed in her throat. And when she attempted to push him away, her arms felt like they weighed a tonne each. She slumped, breathing hard.

‘Having trouble?’ Barclay released her. ‘You’re still under anaesthesia, apparently, but I do have something that’ll liven you up.’

He turned away, and immediately she moved her eyes, searching the room for anything she could use to her advantage.

‘Look who I found.’ Barclay’s voice came from the far side of the room. Lifting her head took Hawkins three attempts, and her eyes wouldn’t focus until …

Mike.

He sat crumpled in the corner. His head hung, and he didn’t react when Barclay nudged his shoulder.
Was he …?

Barclay caught her expression. ‘Oh, he’s alive, for the moment. Just feeling a little dazed after being woken up with the Taser, aren’t you, Mike?’

Hawkins’ neck muscles seized, and she couldn’t stop her head from dropping back onto the pillow.

‘No, you don’t.’ Barclay’s footsteps moved towards her. ‘You’re going to watch him die whether you like it or not.’

Hawkins forced herself to concentrate. There had to
be a way to save Mike. She turned her head, realizing that they were in a hospital room, and that she must have been here since he attacked her. She scanned the wall for a way to raise the alarm. But before she found one, Barclay reappeared above her.

He picked up a remote control attached by a cable to the bed, and pressed one of the switches. A motor whined, and the mattress began to lift. A few seconds later, Hawkins was sitting almost upright, staring straight at the corner where Maguire lay, still not moving. She groaned. Her torso felt like it had been run over by a truck.

‘Good.’ Barclay dropped the remote on the bed in front of her. ‘Here’s the plan. First you’re going to watch me kill your boyfriend, and then I’ll put you out of your misery, too.
Any questions?
’

Hawkins glanced at the door. Where was the hospital staff? Surely somebody would check on her soon? She and Mike had to survive. Right now, they were the only people who knew the Advent Killer’s identity.

She coughed again, clearing her throat. She had to stall him.

‘Why?’ she croaked.

‘
Why?
’ Barclay seemed surprised to hear her speak, but conviction rose in his voice as he continued. ‘All this time and you still haven’t worked that out?’

Suddenly, Hawkins’ attention was drawn past him. Had Mike just moved?

‘Sorry, John.’ She dragged her eyes off Maguire, desperate to hold Barclay’s attention. ‘I don’t … get it.’

‘Detective
Chief
Inspector,’ he mocked. ‘How the
fuck
?
You want me to justify my actions? You really think I would do these things to people who didn’t absolutely deserve every second of their pain?’

He brought a fist down onto the sheets, just missing her leg. ‘This is about fucking
respect
– is it really that hard to grasp? You fuckers have shown me nothing but contempt, but this time you picked the wrong man. I’m not one of those idiots who just takes it any more. If you cross me you’re going to pay, and if I teach everybody else a lesson in the process, then all the better.’

He paused, face reddening.

This was good, he obviously wanted her to understand, and the longer she kept him distracted …

‘You want details?’ Barclay leaned closer. ‘You want to hear that I almost drowned at school because Glenis Ward thought pushing a five-year-old into deep water was the best way to teach him to swim? That I was put into care when my mother killed herself, where Tess Underwood turned a blind eye to the bigger kids who beat the shit out of me every other day? Or Jessica Anderton, who humiliated me in front of the entire school because she didn’t want to date me?
Sad little motherless runt
.’

Suddenly everything began to make sense. The attacks had been impossible to connect because they related to disparate negative encounters spread throughout John Barclay’s life. And he’d killed each victim in the way he perceived her as having mistreated him. He had drowned Glenis Ward because she had almost let that happen to him, and beat Tess Underwood to death for the same reason. Jessica had broken his heart.

And so had she …

Barclay turned away, shaking.

‘John.’ Hawkins tried to grab his arm, desperate to keep him away from Mike. She risked a glance past him, and this time she saw Mike’s leg move.

He was definitely recovering. She had to keep it going.

‘What about … Summer Easton?’ Her speech was broken by the worsening pain in her chest.

Barclay spun back, tears in his eyes. ‘Summer Easton? The woman who said she was in spiritual contact with my mother? I threw away my father’s watch because of her, because she said it was conducting negative emotion.’

He reached inside his coat and produced a knife. The same weapon, Hawkins realized, he’d used to cut her before.

‘Enough talk.’ He brought the blade to her throat. ‘It’s time for your boyfriend to die.’

Hawkins turned her face away, feeling the same terror as she had during their last encounter. Her eyes came to rest on the bed’s remote control.

And its triangular emergency call button.

She looked back at Barclay, who stared at her for a second longer before he stepped backwards and started to turn.

Just as Mike crashed into him.

The two men sprawled noisily into the equipment to her right. Immediately, Hawkins reached out and jammed her thumb onto the button, seeing it light up in response. Somebody would be here within moments.

On the floor beside the bed, Barclay knelt above Maguire, who lay on his back with both hands clamped around the younger man’s wrist. But he was clearly still impeded
by the effects of the Taser blast, and Barclay was gaining the advantage. The knife was slowly moving nearer to Mike.

‘John,’ Hawkins shouted, gambling on his previous statement. ‘Your father wouldn’t have wanted this.’

Barclay ignored her, and continued driving the blade towards Mike’s throat.

A bleeping sound drew everyone’s attention to the door. Through the glass a man and a woman could be seen outside, obviously having released the electronic lock. For a second Hawkins thought they were saved, but then she realized the chair under the handle was preventing them from entering the room.

She looked back at Barclay, who was reaching with his free hand under his coat. She recoiled as he produced a gun and took aim at the people outside.

‘Get back!’ she gasped as Barclay fired twice, shattering the glass.

The faces disappeared, and Barclay turned the gun on Mike. But the distraction had allowed Maguire to recover strength. His fist crashed into the side of Barclay’s head, sending him skidding across the room on his back. The knife clattered to the floor and disappeared behind the grappling men, but the gun slid in the opposite direction.

Straight under her bed.

Mike clambered to his knees and launched himself on top of Barclay.

Hawkins summoned all her strength and lifted herself towards the edge of the bed, just in time to see Barclay land a punch in Mike’s face.

Her limbs shook and she was nearly sick, but she held it down.

This was their only chance.

The pain in her chest felt like fire now, and she was having trouble focusing. But after two juddering breaths she was ready. She concentrated everything into one absolute effort, and launched herself over the edge.

She tried to get an arm down to break her fall, but she landed heavily, hearing a sickening crunch from somewhere in her side.

She looked up, ignoring the conflict behind her, to see the gun wedged between the wheels of the bed.

Connor’s gun.

She reached out and grasped it before heaving herself onto her back, then elbowing over onto her right side, bringing the gun to bear on the two silhouettes still brawling in the shadows across the room.

A combination of blurred vision and lack of light made it impossible for her to distinguish between them, and she couldn’t risk hitting Mike. She closed her eyes and rubbed them desperately with her free hand.

Somewhere beyond the shattered window voices were screaming, although nobody reappeared in view.

But her vision had cleared, and she was able to make out detail on the two figures before her. One sat with his back to her, astride the other, and in the upper man’s hand the Taser hovered, its naked electrical light dancing, ready to strike.

The gun leapt in her hand as she fired two shots into the back of the upright figure, and a second later it slumped.

She waited for any indication that her aim might have been off, ready to fire further shots if necessary.

Then, suddenly, the only sound she could hear was of blood thumping through her veins, and the images being processed by her brain lost stability, before jagged black and white lines invaded her vision completely.

She clung to consciousness for a full ten seconds before passing out.

‘How are you feeling?’ the nurse asked. ‘Want more painkillers?’

‘I’m OK,’ Hawkins replied grimly, ‘but could you not use the word
killer
?’

She winced as he checked her latest damage, asking her to raise her left arm and keep still. Apparently, thanks to her fall off the bed, she could now add two fractured ribs to the multiple stab wounds on her injury list, even though the anaesthetic still in her system at the time had saved her from the immediate pain.

She was lucky, he said, not to have burst the stitches holding her recently operated-on torso together. She might even have agreed with him, had it not been for the intense, burning sensation now pervading her chest.

She waited as he poked about, and took her mind off the discomfort by studying her fresh, much busier surroundings. She’d been moved to a bed on a standard ward, apparently as the shots she had fired earlier in the day had ensured that John Barclay wouldn’t bother anyone ever again.

Hawkins had asked to authenticate this personally, but the polite doctor who assessed her insisted that he was qualified to identify a dead body. And besides, Barclay’s corpse had been removed from the hospital a long time
before Hawkins awoke from the twelve-hour sleep brought on by her exertions.

‘Hey, chief.’ Maguire’s voice precipitated her first genuine smile for two weeks, as her deputy was wheeled into view. ‘How’s our hero?’

‘Good, thanks. You’re not such a lousy sidekick yourself. How do you feel?’

‘Won’t complain about being woken up by my alarm clock any more, that’s for damn sure.’ Maguire glanced back at the nurse pushing him. ‘Don’t let the chair fool you, though – I’m fine and dandy.’

The nurse parked him by the bed and smiled at Hawkins. She’d obviously won the battle to keep Mike in a wheelchair, at least until the residual effects of the Taser had worn off. He had no serious injuries, so it probably wasn’t necessary, but then Maguire always had been a sucker for pretty girls.

In truth they were both alive thanks only to Barclay’s deteriorating mental state: Hawkins, because he’d been easily distracted during their final encounter; and Mike, because the Taser hadn’t been operating at full efficiency. It turned out that, because stun guns were designed to operate in short bursts, if you bypassed the timer as Barclay had, the unit’s generator soon wore out. After six prolonged uses, his was pretty much wrecked.

Mike’s joke also reassured her that their friendship was undamaged. They’d already spoken, six hours before, when Hawkins had come round for the first time since that morning’s drama.

Mike had explained his own experiences of the previous
night’s events. He described the text he’d received from her phone, and his ensuing mad dash across London; how he’d found Hawkins on her kitchen floor in a pool of blood, alone and close to death.

Fortunately, however, thanks to the same warped logic that precipitated his actions it seemed that Barclay hadn’t been trying to kill her directly. His aim appeared to have been exsanguination; a method of knifing around the vital organs to induce bloodletting, which allowed the victim time before their inevitable demise to rue whatever actions led to such a fate. It had been well on the way to working, too. Except that she’d been found just in time.

Mike’s call to the emergency services on the way to her house had saved her life: the medics estimated that her wounds were only around twenty minutes old by the time they arrived; the sole reason she was still breathing.

Despite their expertise, she’d been only a cigarette paper’s thickness from death, thanks to a nick in her right lung, and a punctured vein next to her heart. She’d beaten the odds by recovering at all, let alone without long-term damage.

The ensuing hours, Mike admitted, had been a living hell for him. In Maguire’s mind, it was
his
negligence that had placed her in such a vulnerable position, and therefore his fault that Nemesis had been able to catch her alone. He’d been so focused on saving the day that he’d completely overlooked the fact he’d left a potential primary target unprotected.

Ironically, however, it was Barclay who had delivered her back to him. The doctors said that being disconnected from the breathing apparatus had forced her system to
self-sustain. Had she stayed plugged in, the more likely alternative would have been a coma, where her body would have become reliant on life support. But because the chances of resuscitation following straight disconnection weren’t favourable, the professionals would never have risked it.

Fortunately, Barclay had had no legal concerns or Care Trust to satisfy, and had made the impossible decision for them.

Mike, of course, was a little way behind her in the enlightenment stakes. Things were still adjusting themselves in his mind, falling into place. He realized now that targeting the investigation team itself had never been Barclay’s intention. Instead, he’d seen Connor’s death as necessary to protect his identity, while his own disappearance
had
been due to Nemesis, but not in the way they’d assumed. And Hawkins had, of course, been marked right from the start. At least now they had an answer to why Eddie had frozen when Nemesis opened the door.

He hadn’t expected to recognize his killer.

Mike had also spoken to Lawrence Kirby-Jones and Tristan Vaughn. They were ecstatic that Nemesis had been stopped; less enamoured they’d now have to admit publicly that the killer was, until very recently, a serving Met officer.

The nurse finished his inspection and stepped back. ‘I think you’re going to be OK, Antonia, but you have to rest.’

‘Great.’ She looked up at him. ‘Can I go?’

‘I don’t think so.’

She turned to Mike. ‘Looks like I’ll be in here for a while.’

‘I’ll stick around.’ He grinned. ‘So, how about jacking in this detective garbage and getting a real job?’

‘After today?’ She caught the wink that told her he was joking. ‘Thanks, but I think I’ll stick at it a while longer.’