‘Socks and underpants,’ Henry said.
The night air was cold, very cold. Cloud rolled in with a harsh wind. Rain began to fall, getting progressively heavier. It was turning into a horrible night.
The sniper did not notice the weather in as much as it affected him personally. He had lain in fields before, in far worse conditions than rain. Often lain for days on end when he was younger and did this sort of thing more regularly.
This was easy — and he was certain he would be there for this one night only.
Tonight his victim would die.
It was also a relief for Henry to see that Jake Coulton’s penis was no great shakes. It was certainly not in proportion to the rest of his body, so shrivelled up and insignificant it seemed. Terror, though, Henry conceded, could have had some bearing on that. A display of his privates was not enhanced by the presence of a shotgun-wielding mad woman.
Coulton stood there, shoulders drooping, not covering himself.
‘Now what?’ he asked. The shape of his mouth was a mirror of his anger.
‘Now, Jake, I want you to tell me what you’ve done.’
‘Can he sit down?’ Henry said.
Tara shook her head. ‘No, I want him to stand there. . actually, no I don’t.’ She changed her mind abruptly. ‘What I want him to do is get down on his knees and I want him to admit what he’s done and then I want him to beg for mercy.’
‘Tara!’ John Lloyd Wickson said. ‘This has gone far enough. At least let him sit down, for God’s sake.’
She spun on him and growled, ‘Then it’s your turn.’
‘Tara,’ said Henry. ‘Come on, love, this is getting silly.’
‘No, it’s not,’ she said, looking at Henry, but keeping the shotgun pointed at her husband. Henry knew straight away he had said the wrong thing. ‘If the rape of my daughter is silly, then I’ve called the wrong person, haven’t I, Henry?’
‘You know what I mean,’ he insisted.
The shotgun arced back to Jake Coulton, naked, pale, spotty and withered.
‘All right, you can sit down,’ Tara relented. ‘Then admit what you did.’
He sat.
‘Come on, then.’
Henry closed his eyes in hopelessness, feeling he had lost what little control he’d had; maybe he had never been in control and maybe the cops were right about him. Maybe he was guilty of what he was accused of, maybe he was a man who misjudged things and, worst of all, maybe he didn’t deserve to be a cop.
‘Tara, don’t do this,’ he tried. ‘It will weaken the case against him.’
She gave him a withering look and he knew she did not care now. He could see it in her eyes that she was going to kill him now — whatever he said. Her primal instincts had been broken open and she was reacting in a very extreme way to protect her child.
‘Speak,’ she said to Coulton.
She crossed the kitchen and lifted Coulton’s chin with the muzzle of the shotgun, then pushed the gun into his throat.
‘For fuck’s sake, Tara,’ Henry protested. ‘I’ve come to get you out of this and you’re not listening to me.’
It was as if she hadn’t heard a word he said.
‘Speak,’ she repeated. She raised his chin even higher so he could look at her along the barrel, eye to eye.
He swallowed a big dollop of fear.
‘Did you rape my daughter?’
‘I. . I. .’ he stammered.
‘Not good enough.’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I raped her.’
‘Tell me more. . admit it all, you bastard.’
‘I. . picked her up from the disco like you asked me to do. . and I drove her home.’ In spite of his nakedness, he was sweating. Rivulets poured down the back of his neck, down his face, under his nose. One drop of sweat rolled on to the barrel of the gun.
‘Tara, that’s enough,’ Henry said.
‘No, actually, it’s not, because I want him to tell me everything, every last detail.’
‘There is no victory in this, Tara.’ Henry was desperate. ‘Can’t you see?’
‘It’s not about victory, Henry, it’s about truth and justice. . So, go on, Jake, tell me about how you raped a fourteen-year-old girl.’
‘I did it on the back seat of the Bentley,’ he said shakily. ‘I forced her down and forced myself on to her.’
‘Did she resist?’
He nodded as much as the barrel of the gun would allow.
‘And yet you still did it?’
‘Yeah,’ he gasped.
‘Did she enjoy it?’
‘No.’
‘Did you enjoy it?’
Coulton did not reply.
‘Did you? Did it give you a feeling of great power?’
Coulton closed his eyes. ‘Please, take the gun away.’
Henry watched the scene, feeling powerless to intervene. The well-built, strong figure of Jake Coulton seemed to be shrinking with each second. He had become small, insignificant and pathetic. Whilst part of Henry’s mind liked this, another bigger part hated what he was witnessing. He hoped it would end soon. Without bloodshed.
‘Now you know what it’s like to be degraded, don’t you Jake?’
Tears streamed down his face. ‘Yes.’
‘To be powerless, to have all your dignity stripped away.’
‘Yes,’ he squeaked.
‘Why did you do it? What gave you the right to think you could do this to my daughter?’ commanded Tara.
Coulton’s tear-filled, frightened eyes looked across at his boss, John Lloyd Wickson.
‘Because he said he didn’t care if she got raped because she wasn’t his daughter, not his flesh and blood.’
Silence hit the room with the speed of a lightning strike.
Henry felt a chilly draught from the kitchen door as though someone had come in through the front door and let the night in.
Please cops, get here soon, he prayed.
No one moved. Jake sat there, chin resting on the barrel of the gun, stricken by fear into immobility, having realized he had said the wrong thing, in the wrong situation, as Tara’s head revolved slowly to look directly at her husband.
Henry knew in that instant just how John Lloyd Wickson must have felt. It was that single occasion when something dark is revealed, some inner secret outed, when your stomach churns over and a frozen prickle runs over your body, and every square millimetre of skin contracts tighter than cat-gut strung across a tennis racket.
Wickson shook his head. ‘I didn’t,’ he croaked, wilting under Tara’s eyes. ‘It’s not true,’ he back-pedalled, sensing the imminent danger to himself.
‘You are as much a bastard as him,’ she said. Her chest rose and fell as she struggled to maintain control. Henry recognized the moment: she had lost it.
Everything then slowed down. Every infinitesimal detail of what took place in the following seconds was seen and analysed microscopically in Henry’s head and, he had no doubt, in the heads of the people fortunate enough to stay alive.
He was watching the shotgun and Tara’s fingers on it.
The forefinger that was wrapped around the trigger.
The trigger being pulled back at the same time as the muzzle was pushed harder into the soft skin underneath Coulton’s chin, the shotgun angled upwards.
Henry heard himself roar: ‘Nooooo!’
He flung himself towards the gun, like a goalkeeper diving for the low, hard-struck penalty. Both feet left the ground. His hands were outstretched, but he knew he could not stop it happening.
The trigger went back.
There was a massive blast.
There was recoil.
And Henry would never forget what happened to Jake Coulton’s head.
The blast went in below the chin, diagonally up and through his head.
Henry’s ears pounded with the shock wave.
He was still in mid-air.
The cartridge blasted a hole in Coulton’s chin no bigger than the diameter of the muzzle.
The shot burst through his skin up through the ‘V’ in his jaw, expanding and widening all the time as it travelled, destroying bone, tissue, skin and organs, until it emerged, ten times bigger than it had entered, from the roof of his head, completely removing the top third of Coulton’s skull, taking with it brain, blood and membrane, covering the wall and cupboards. At the same time, Couton’s body was lifted completely from his chair and thrown back against the wall with a thud.