‘What has to happen. Your husband’s friends need to account for what they’ve done. To Annie, and to others.’

She nodded slowly. ‘Good. Now tell me, is this gun loaded?’

‘It is. And I’d advise you to put it down.’

‘Yes, put it down, you brainless cow!’ Dudley bellowed at her.

But Clarissa Dudley didn’t put it down. Instead she turned towards her husband, raised the weapon and pointed it at him. Her grip on the gun was a little awkward, but at this short range nobody could have missed.

The fury evaporated from his face and he struggled wildly against his tape bonds. ‘Clarissa! No! I … I didn’t mean what I said!’

Still looking at her husband over the barrel of the gun she said calmly to Ben and Wolf, ‘You gentlemen came here tonight to murder my husband, for reasons that will never be known. Perhaps you were terrorists, or paid assassins, or simply opportunistic thugs. It doesn’t matter. You managed to defeat his security, and you used one of their weapons to kill him. Then you got away, and there were no witnesses to your escape. I was in bed asleep the whole time and knew nothing about what was happening. Does that sound like a story anyone would believe?’

Ben didn’t speak. Wolf replied, ‘Sounds all right to me.’

Dudley was contorting himself like a worm on the ground in his desperation to break free. ‘Clarissa! Someone! Please help me!’

‘Nobody can help you now,’ his wife told him. ‘Goodbye, Tristan. And I hope you rot in hell.’

She squeezed the trigger with a hesitant flinch.

Nothing happened.

‘Safety’s on,’ Wolf said. ‘The little turny thing there by your right thumb.’

‘Oh.’ She found the catch lever and flipped it. ‘What does this other switch do?’

‘Sets the weapon to fully automatic,’ Wolf told her. ‘Takatakatakatak.’

‘Does that make it better?’

‘It can only make him deader.’

‘Then it’s better.’ She flipped the select fire switch.

Ben said, ‘Maybe you don’t want to do this, Mrs Dudley.’

‘Listen to him, Clarissa!’ Dudley howled, frantic with panic, trying to wriggle away towards the bushes.

‘Oh, but I do,’ she replied to Ben.

‘Then it’s your choice.’

‘This is the only thing left in my life that I have any control over,’ she said. ‘Damn right it’s my choice.’

She squeezed the trigger again. This time there was no hesitation, no flinch. Dudley screamed. The gun rattled into action, the sound suppressor doing its efficient work to muffle the blast. Eight hundred and fifty rounds a minute. Thirty rounds gone in just over two seconds. She didn’t take her finger off the trigger until the weapon was empty, and by then Tristan Dudley wasn’t screaming any longer. His lifeless body twitched a couple of times, and then there was nothing left for it to do except leak blood into the moonlit lawn.