He gasped and choked as she started to garrotte him, pulling at the cord with every last ounce of her strength. He kicked and flailed wildly, blindly waving the gun, trying to get the barrel in her face.

She wound the lead around her fists, clenching her teeth as she pulled it tighter.

He dropped the gun with a clunk on the bathroom floor as he brought both hands to bear on the rubber cord biting into his neck, trying in vain to get his fingers beneath it.

Almost there. She could feel him weakening. He was almost done.

Then he suddenly rammed his head backwards into her face, knocking her head back into the hard wall. Stunned, she momentarily lost her hold on the garrotte. He whipped it from his neck, twisted around and punched her hard in the face, the blow slamming the back of her head into the wall a second time. She gasped and blinked. And before she knew it, he had his knee on her chest and had wrapped the hairdryer cord around her neck and suddenly he was garrotting her.

‘You stupid fucking whore.’ He spat the words into her face with a guttural snarl. ‘I’ll fucking kill you with my bare hands.’

She gasped and choked, feeling herself going dizzy. She batted at the lead, but it was no good. He was too strong. She knew she only had a few seconds left before she lost consciousness. Her life counting down in seconds. Five, four…

He had won.

Three…

‘Get out of here, Isabel!’ she tried to cry. But her voice was too weak, coming out as an inaudible slur.

Two…

Blackness coming down. The end.

Then, through her fading vision, she caught a movement behind him. She must have summoned some expression of disbelief, for he glanced over his shoulder.

And froze.

Isabel was standing there, holding the large handgun in both hands, pointing it directly at him.

‘You have got to be fucking joking,’ he said.

WHUMPF.

Dale’s handsome face ruptured apart as the last bullet in the gun punched through his head. A shower of hot wet blood and brains spattered across Bailey.

Yanking the rubber lead away from her neck, Bailey sucked in a deep mouthful of air. She felt the blood rushing back to her brain. Blinking Dale’s gore out of her eyes, she looked up at Isabel in amazement.

The little girl lowered the empty smoking gun and smiled at her. ‘Can we go downstairs now?’ she asked in a small voice.

76

Nancy Molloy sat at the table in the restaurant brooding darkly, whilst the rest of the gang looked on in silence. Before them lay the detritus of their earlier celebration, the appetisers now cold and the beer now flat.

They’d cleaned up the restaurant, removing any traces of the altercation that had occurred just a short while earlier. Archie’s body had been rolled up in the plastic sheeting and was already in the process of being disposed of. Apart from the broken paper screen, it would seem that nothing particularly amiss had taken place here.