Halfway to the road, she rested against a rugby goalpost and dared to look back. They had not followed her.

A leather strap slapped against her side, and she remembered that at some point they had put a dog collar and lead around her neck. She tore them off and threw them aside.

A solitary car had stopped by the road, headlights on, engine running.

Someone had seen her.

She stumbled towards it, waving, calling, crying out for the car to please wait for her, don’t-go-don’t-go, running alongside a wire mesh fence, looking for a gap, the wet grass of the playing fields no longer under her bare feet, asphalt now, then through a hole in the fence and running on the road’s rough tarmac, crying oh please don’t go; and then the passenger door opened and the fat one got out, the one who had been the worst, his face not laughing now, but clenched with absolute murderous fury, and for the first time she knew with total certainty that she would die in this place tonight.

More of them were getting out of the car.

The fat one flipped open the boot and the black hole waited for her like an open grave.

Some part of her mind registered that someone was screaming in the back of the car, screaming about his eye.

The one she had hurt. The one she had blinded.

She wished she could have hurt them all. She wished she could have blinded them all. God knows they deserved it.

But it was too late. She was done now. She felt the weakness and exhaustion flood her body, overwhelming her. They had won.

Angry hands on her, touching her, squeezing the last juice out of her, and then the hands lifting her off the ground and forcing her into the boot of the car.

The lid slammed down on her and she was lost in darkness as the car drove slowly back to the grand old school where she would die on the mattress in the basement where she was never meant to die.

In her last moments she saw the family who would never see her again, and – beyond them, like a road briefly glimpsed but never taken – she saw quite clearly the husband she would never meet, and the children who would never be born, and the good life full of love that had been taken away.

And as her soul passed over, her last breath was a silent cry of rage and grief for everything they had stolen on the night she died.

October: #Killallpigs

Chapter 1

1

I WAS WAITING for a man who was planning to die.

I had parked the old BMW X5 just up the road from the entrance to the railway station and I drank a triple espresso as I watched the commuters rushing off to work. I drank quickly.

He would be here soon.