‘You are out of your fucking mind.’ Heather swallowed hard. Standing up felt like the hardest thing in the world, and there was a ringing noise in her ears. Distantly she was aware of blood pooling inside her jeans, and every time she moved fresh lines of pain encircled her body. ‘All of you.’

Bert pursed his lips together. Now that he was looking at her dead on, she could see that one of his eyes was false; it looked dull under the fierce white lights.

‘Michael, he didn’t care who he took. He was always so primitive, that one. That little beast. But I was interested in the perfect victim, one bred for the very purpose of dying – and the longer we waited to reap our harvest, the sweeter it was. The power of knowing that there are lives out there that are owed to you, that you can take at any time. Don’t you see how fine that is? How apt? Livestock, ready for the culling. Ripe.’ He grinned, revealing his long teeth. ‘But then, we couldn’t wait forever. Time wears us all down in the end. We raised the boy to have more refined tastes than his father. And if the police started to think that perhaps they hadn’t got the real Red Wolf, all those years ago, well … The lad was keen to see his father again. A boy like Lyle, he can’t exactly go visiting people, as I’m sure you’ll agree.’

‘You mad old bastard. Haven’t you got it yet? This is the end of your nonsense. Your weapon is dead, and me and Nikki and Cathy are bloody walking out of here right now.’

He cocked his head to one side again. The dog sat up, its ears pricked.

‘You have to get through me, lass. You’ll have to kill me. And you don’t have what it takes to do that, because your blood is weak. Michael was a suggestible idiot, easily moulded into what I wanted him to be, and in the end Lyle was even worse, tainted by the blood of your mother. And what are you? Just some other little offshoot of a damaged, incestuous family.’ Seeing the look of surprise that passed over her face, he grinned a little wider. ‘You wouldn’t know, of course, but the woman Michael killed when he was a child wasn’t his real mother. Ask him some time about the woman in the red coat. Ask him what she did to him.’

‘Enough.’ Heather raised the knife. ‘Get out of my way. Now.’

‘I told you, you’ll have to kill me.’ He raised his hands up, palms flat. ‘And you don’t have it in you, little girl.’