But the slog had been worth it. It had been hard and emotional at times. There had been occasions when she would gladly have walked away, but her drive and determination had turned a failed business into a resounding success.
All the while she had kept men at arms’ length.
There had been a couple of weak moments, but nothing serious until Henry Christie came along and changed everything. Not that he had been the one to make the running. It had been her doing, but that said, if Henry’s wife Kate had still been alive, Alison would not have been with him. She wasn’t a marriage-wrecker. But it was her who had made the first, tentative approach a few months after she’d learned of Kate’s death. Things took off slowly from there, going from strength to strength.
What she hadn’t bargained for were the horrendous hours that Henry worked, nor his passion for the job and his inability not to get involved. But she loved those things about him, too. And especially the way he often spoke with such feeling about seeing it as his job to fight for the dead, because they had no one else to do it for them.
She was thinking about Henry that morning after getting up slightly later than him and spending a grim hour in the cellar, playing a form of chess with the beer barrels.
She emerged into the bar area — where she and Henry had made love at midnight — and then went into the kitchen to fire up the cooker and grill for breakfast.
There were only two guests in overnight (she had fibbed to Henry, knowing that he definitely would not have got intimate in front of the fire had he known that people were staying) and she thought they would be last-minuters. She made herself a coffee and some crusty toast which she took out and ate whilst leaning on the bar and surveying her domain, working through the day ahead.
The front door of the premises was unlocked and a man entered.
Alison smiled and greeted him, unperturbed. People came and went at all hours and a visitor at this time of day was not unusual.
‘Good morning,’ she said and placed down her coffee.
‘Good morning,’ the man replied and Alison picked up an accent of sorts in the words.
‘Can I help you?’
The man was in his mid-forties, slim, extremely handsome in a chiselled, harsh sort of way. He had black hair and a nicely trimmed moustache, a hook nose and dark complexion.
‘Yes, I think so.’ The accent again. Think said as ‘zinc’. ‘You are Alison Marsh?’
‘Yes,’ she said brightly.
‘Good.’
He stepped towards her. He was wearing jeans, a black leather jacket, a T-shirt, black trainers and black leather gloves. There was no warning of it. He smiled. His teeth were beautiful and white and even. Obviously he had a good dentist. He pulled up each glove in turn at the wrist, tightening them on his fingers.
Then he hit Alison once. A driving, powerful blow of his right fist, into the centre of her face. She did not see it coming, but it landed with the force of a sledgehammer, crushing her nose and cheekbones, breaking them. It felt as though her whole face had imploded as she staggered back, shocked, disorientated, clutching at her face as blood flooded out of her broken nose.
She swooned.
The man stepped towards her again and delivered a second blow on the exact same spot, equally forceful.
Then her knees buckled and she collapsed on the spot like she was falling into a hole that had suddenly appeared beneath her feet, unconscious before she hit the floor.
Henry lurched to the window, the palms of his hands on the glass panes, unsure initially what he was looking at, then horror-struck by the realization.
A large black Mercedes saloon car had drawn up on the road outside.
For a moment it looked as though a decapitated head was being held up against the window at the back nearside passenger door, a terrible, bloody, and distorted mess, being displayed triumphantly by the man in the back seat whose tightly fisted hand had wrapped the long hair of the head around it and he was holding it pushed against the window, smearing the glass with blood like some sort of medieval war trophy.
Except it wasn’t a decapitated head.
Nor was it some gruesome toy bought at the gift shop of a medieval torture museum.
It was a real head, attached to a real body, and it belonged to Alison Marsh, the woman Henry Christie loved.
Her features had been pounded almost beyond recognition. Nose flattened, both eyes black and swollen, lips cut and bleeding, and looking dead. Then just to reinforce the message, the man smashed Alison’s head against the window again, making the glass vibrate with the impact.
Henry roared with rage, spun away from the window and stepped dangerously towards Barlow, fists clenched, his face a vision of fury.
Barlow had been anticipating the reaction. The gun came up and he aimed it directly at Henry’s forehead, stopping him dead.
‘What the fuck?’ Henry growled, his anger rising beyond anything he had ever known, and way beyond the fear he had felt at being confronted by Barlow and a gun. Now he realized he had walked stupidly into a trap manufactured by Barlow and Sunderland, two men desperate to save their own skins by any means possible, having used Melanie Speakman as bait. He took another menacing step, but Barlow flicked the gun, his finger tightening on the trigger.
‘I’ll tell you what the fuck is, Henry… this is deadly serious stuff… No, no,’ Barlow warned him as Henry’s body language telegraphed another move, ‘I’ll shoot you dead here and now and think of another way through this if you do anything stupid.’
At Barlow’s feet, the blood must have worked its way back to Melanie’s brain. She stirred and opened her eyes, uncomprehendingly. Then they focused, she realized where she was, and they closed again.
Barlow took a pace back. ‘Now then, Henry old son, I want you to drag this nice lady into the kitchen and lay her out there. Don’t want any nosy postman peering in, do we.’ Barlow waited. Henry did not move. ‘Do it, Henry.’ He stepped back further and Henry moved behind Melanie, hooked his hands under her armpits and slid her gently backwards out of the living room, into the hallway, then into the kitchen.
Reversing in, Henry didn’t at first notice the other body by the back door, but as he laid Melanie out, he turned and saw another woman, shot in the head, her body crumpled up on the floor, lying in a large pool of deep, red, almost black, blood, obviously dead.
‘Oh, Jeez! What the hell are you doing, you complete…’ Henry guessed this was the body of Melanie’s friend, the owner of the house.
‘Stand back,’ Barlow warned and waved the gun, then straddled Melanie and shot her in the head, twice.
Henry staggered back against the sink, dumbstruck by the excessive and casual violence, noticing that the bottom half of his trousers had been splattered by Melanie’s blood. It was as if everything had been squeezed out of him.
Barlow stood upright, but still standing over Melanie. ‘Now then, Henry, where were we?’
‘You murdering bastard. What has she ever done to you? You utter cunt!’
‘Words, Henry… now then,’ he said as though he was simply changing the subject of discussion about world affairs or pop music. ‘Ahh, yes, property… it was very sneaky of you to make sure only you could access it.’ Henry waited, boiling inside, wanting to leap at Barlow and take his chance, but knowing that was a stupid move. He had to stay with this for Alison as he realized that this lack of concern for human life would also apply to her and the image of her dead tore at Henry. He could not shake the sight of her battered head being held against the car window outside. Suddenly hot rage was replaced by ice-cold calculation.
‘So what do you want?’ Henry asked.
‘That’s better,’ Barlow said triumphantly. ‘We need to go for a little ride and retrieve it. All nice and friendly, like, and when you’ve given it to me, we’ll see where we are with things.’