“Charlie?” she murmured, her voice thready. “You're all covered in blood.”
“I know,” I croaked. I reached up tentatively to my throbbing neck, suddenly realising that I could still breathe and talk. My fingers touched ragged ends of flesh and I dropped them away. If it wasn't that bad, I didn't need to worry about it, and if it was, I didn't want to know.
Besides, my left arm and my face were yelling at me through the central nervous system equivalent of a megaphone. I felt light-headed, and freezing cold. I couldn't stop my teeth clattering together like a flamenco dancers' convention. In a detached way I registered that my body was shutting down, going in to shock. I knew if I didn't do something soon, I was in big trouble.
One-handed, I couldn't manage to undo the zip-ties round Clare's wrists and had to give up trying. “I'll get help,” I muttered.
It seemed a hell of a long way across the dance floor to the bar, where the nearest phone was, but I managed to get there by sheer bloody determination.
I had to dial the number of the police station three times before I got it right, and when they answered I asked them to put me straight through to MacMillan. There was only a short pause before he came on the line.
“Superintendent, it's Charlie Fox,” I said, my voice wavering.
“Charlie! What the hell do you think you're up to?” he demanded.
“Angelo didn't kill Susie and Joy,” I told him, launching straight in without preamble. “It was Dave Clemmens and I missed it, all along. He raped and killed them, and he's just tried to kill me.”
“Charlie, listen to me. Stay right where you are.” His voice became terse, persuasive. “I'll send a car to pick you up straight away. I give you my word that you'll be quite safe.”
“OK,” I said meekly, “I'm at the New Adelphi Club.” He relayed the information to someone alongside him. I suddenly felt unutterably tired. I slid to the floor, cradling the phone with my good hand. When he spoke again I said, “There's no need to rush – the bastard's dead.”
Epilogue
In the end I didn't go to trial for the murder of Dave Clemmens. They didn't even charge me with his manslaughter, which was a bit of a surprise really, considering the technique I'd used. I suppose if I'd waited until later and stabbed him to death with a pair of pinking shears, they would have sent me down for life.
Ironically perhaps, the only charges I did face were for assaulting a police officer. I think WPC Wilks's ego had been more bruised than her jaw. They let me off with a caution, though. MacMillan delivered my stern lecture himself, with only the barest hint of a smile.
The thing I regret most about this whole business is the effect it's had on my friends. Physically, Clare emerged from the encounter relatively unscathed, but the road back from the mental trauma she'd suffered looked like being a long and tortuous one.
Any attempts I made to offer comfort seemed to make things worse. Eventually I just had to leave her be and hope that, when she'd recovered enough to view things with a clearer perspective, she didn't hold me entirely responsible for what had happened.
It's bad enough that I blame myself.
Ailsa sent me a short little note telling me she didn't feel it was appropriate for me to continue my classes at the Lodge. She was divorcing Tris on the grounds of gross mental cruelty and, with the facts as they were, I doubted there was a judge this side of senility who wouldn't come down heavily in her favour. She had already announced her intention of selling the house to a local property developer and moving the refuge to somewhere on the north Wales coast.
I had a feeling Tris would mourn the loss of his family home more than the disintegration of his marriage, but I don't know for sure how he took the news. He never contacted me again.
The police picked up Angelo a couple of days after the raid on the New Adelphi. He'd gone to ground with an old mate of his from Liverpool. I couldn't ignore the possibility that the man was probably one of the pair who'd ransacked my flat, but there wasn't the evidence to pursue it. There was enough forensic to bind Angelo to Terry's killing, though, and that was the main thing.
When it came to Dave, after reviewing all the facts, the powers that be decided my claim of self-defence was justified. They judged that I didn't have a case to answer, and I walked away free. The police were able to lay the three recent attacks firmly at Dave's feet without question. It looked like I'd done everyone a favour.
But that doesn't make it any easier to forget.
The doctors at the hospital told me I'd been lucky, that wrenching my head away had caused the knife blade to slice into the side of my neck rather than across my throat, missing by fractions the trachea and vital arteries, which had slid back behind my neck muscles. They stitched me up again and set and plastered my arm. The ribs and the cheekbone, so they told me, were best left to sort themselves out, given time.
They sent me to see a community psychiatric nurse for counselling about coming to terms with what I'd done, but I have a feeling the bones will be mended long before my conscience.
Like I said, the worst part is knowing that, if I was ever in the same situation, I'd do exactly the same thing again. No doubt about it.
It doesn't sit well with me, that – the realisation that I have not only the knowledge, but the instinct to kill. It sets you apart from the other people you pass in the street, makes you feel alone, less human than they are.
I proved Dave wrong, though. Given a straight fight between a man and a woman, neither with any particular advantage in skill over the other, it isn't a foregone conclusion that the man will always win. I suppose then, right at the end, I could have said to him, “I told you so.”
Just as long as I'd said it fast enough.
Afterword
This Afterword was originally written for the Busted Flush Press US trade paperback edition of KILLER INSTINCT, published in 2010. Publisher David Thompson planned similar editions of RIOT ACT, HARD KNOCKS and ROAD KILL, but he tragically died, suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of thirty-eight, shortly before the second book was due to go to print. This was a huge loss to everyone who knew him – one from which we are all still reeling.
When David asked me to write an afterword for the new edition of KILLER INSTINCT, it made me think afresh about this, the very first Charlie Fox book, and why I chose to join her story at this point.
This is not, after all, the beginning of Charlie’s journey, but I look back on it as the major turning point in her life. The events covered during the course of the book change her forever from having been a victim, to not only fighting back on her own behalf, but as a protector for others. It sets her out, whether she is aware of it at the time, on the path she will subsequently follow into the world of close protection.
Ironically enough, it was Charlie’s first official job as a bodyguard, in the events of book four in the series, FIRST DROP, that brought her to US shores for the first time in more ways than one. Setting FIRST DROP in Daytona Beach, Florida over the Spring Break weekend caught the eye of a New York editor, who decided that’s where the story should start for American readers, and the title mistakenly gave the impression there was no history to Charlie before then.
But there is, and KILLER INSTINCT is the first instalment.
I wrote this story at a time when I had just been the target of a number of death-threat letters through my work, and I probably identified with Charlie more closely during the course of this book than any other. Of course, those letters never escalated to anything like the level of threat that my protagonist faces here, but they planted the germ of the idea. And it did inspire me to go out and learn a lot of self-defence techniques, which have stood me in very good stead ever since.