Nancy Molloy huddled a little deeper into the furry collar of her long mink coat and looked down at Jennifer Morgan with a sadistic smile.

‘You should really be wearing a hard hat and a hi-viz jacket. Health and safety, you know. All kinds of nasty accidents can happen on a building site.’

Jennifer scowled back at her defiantly, shivering and gritting her teeth against the icy breeze. She was clad in just the thin cotton skirt and blouse she’d been wearing when they’d kidnapped her. Since then, they’d largely been keeping her tied up in the back of the transit van that they’d used to transport her from her apartment to this building site. Apart from briefly putting her on the phone to Bailey, they’d mostly kept her gagged, but now Nancy had ordered the gag to be removed as she wanted the opportunity to talk to Jennifer properly, for that was all part of the fun.

‘If you’re expecting me to plead for my life,’ said Jennifer, ‘you’ve got another think coming.’

‘Ooh. Big words,’ Nancy replied mockingly. Her face twisted into a cruel sneer. ‘Well, you’ll soon find out what real pain feels like.’

‘You don’t scare me, you old hag,’ spat Jennifer. ‘Nothing you can do scares me, not even death. I’ve been through way too much for that.’

‘Yeah well, we’ll see about that when I drill a big fucking hole in your head. It’ll be my supreme pleasure to watch you turn into a twitching vegetable right before my very eyes.’

That was the reason Nancy had ordered Jennifer’s physical mistreatment be kept to a minimum prior to execution. She didn’t want Jennifer to be desensitised in any way that might deprive her of the full horror of what Nancy was planning to inflict on her.

Nancy withdrew a hand from the pocket of her fur coat, taking out the Ancient Egyptian snake pendant. She dropped it on the concrete floor in front of Jennifer’s face.

‘I believe this belongs to you,’ she said. ‘Your dumb sister was stupid enough to leave it in her handbag for me to find. And that’s how I worked out who you were. That and some other stuff she was careless enough to tell me. So you’ve really just got her to blame for this predicament you find yourself in.’

Jennifer glanced at the pendant, then up at Nancy with a look of stony hatred. Nancy examined her with interest, a smidgen of admiration in her expression.

‘Clever plan with all that blackmail sex video stuff. Getting control of all those powerful men. I respect a woman with ambition. Sadly, though, you made the mistake of murdering my son.’

‘From what I’ve been able to gather, he sounded like a fucking idiot.’

Nancy’s eyes flared in fury. ‘I carried him for nine months,’ she hissed, ‘and I loved him for over forty years. And you took it all away. Just like that.’ She snapped her fingers with a sharp click. ‘He might have had his faults, but you had no right to kill him.’