

As the Flies Crow

Martin Price

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Martin Price

© Martin Price 2013

Smashwords Edition

The right of Martin Price to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988

All rights reserved. Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, no part of this e-book publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the purchaser

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents and events are all from the author's mind. Any resemblance to persons either living or dead is purely coincidental

© Cover design by Carmine Trip

Also by this author:

Becoming Hugo Forst

The Reason I'm Still Here

Marsha's Bag

Luvya Getcha

Flowers from a Different Summer

Sad's Place

Steam

Short Stories:

Africar

Bad Return

For Katie

"For summer has burned brightly, and for too long, and so winter puts a frosty claw and a cold, heartless maw, around the last of summer's flagging glow, to turn off the tap that has run with treasured gold aplenty. Alas, summer sinks and fades into glades of a memory in which children's cries doth go, and with it we watch...as the flies crow."

Excerpt from "The Day The Wind Spoke" by Moina Furneaux
Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Mistaken Identity

Chapter 2: Mrs Twee

Chapter 3: Old Railway Line

Chapter 4: Just A Puppet

Chapter 5: Red Telephone-Box

Chapter 6: Alarm

Chapter 7: Minty-Green River

Chapter 8: Greg Halpern & The Hospital

Chapter 9: Guns & Lazarus

Chapter 10: Farmhouse

Chapter 11: A World Gone Grey

Chapter 12: As The Flies Crow

Chapter 13: Lifetime Debt

Epilogue # 1: Marsha Dunbar

Epilogue # 2: Man In The Woods

The End ~ Back To Top

Chapter 1: Mistaken Identity

The mad woman came out of the snow.

And my life changed forever.

I'd been a fool that morning to even _think_ about driving, let alone do it. Yet I did, and five miles into the journey and there I was, stuck in snow so deep, I had to shoulder the driver's door open to get out.

Dressed in a heavy wool coat, warm boots, and with thick tights under my skirt, I had at least gotten something right. Even had mittens in my coat pocket. But those would have to wait; I had a phone-call to make.

I took out my i-phone and scrolled down to my mother's number. Pressed call, and waited. The wind picked up the snow and flung it in my eyes. I blinked away the flakes that were stuck to my lashes. Buttoned up my coat and knotted the belt around my middle. My hair whipped crazily across my face.

There was no horizon, not anymore. Just white above, white below, and in between, the vague, smudgy impression of trees in the distance. I was standing in snow that came up to my shins. Pretty soon it was going to be up to my knees, maybe even my thighs!

I glanced into the car, wanting to be back in there, but the snow was piling up so quick, that if I hadn't gotten out when I did, I'd probably have become trapped.

I could see my handbag on the passenger seat, and my work-files next to it. No work for me today. But of course the rest of Clifton & Sway's workforce would have understood that the moment they'd gotten out of bed and seen the snowstorm. Not me, though, good old reliable Sonia Rowntree, the backbone of the HR department. No, I had disobeyed my eyes and let the full, bad experience confirm what a mistake I'd made.

The mistake that almost cost me my life.

*****

My mother answered her phone. 'Hi, babe. Isn't the weather awful? Hope you're safe indoors.'

'I'm not!' I said, having to shout above the noise of the storm. 'I made one silly mistake and went into work today! Tried to, anyway! Now I'm trapped somewhere between Gartley and White Mist!'

'Oh, Sonia, no! What the hell's wrong with you? Sometimes you don't have the sense you were born with!'

'Let's leave the ticking-off for now, can we? How's Mitzi?'

'She's fine. In the warm, safe, where her mother should be. So what are you going to do?'

'Call the breakdown service! Not sure they'll get out here, though! Not right away! I'll just have to wait, and when they arrive, hope they can dig the car out!'

'This isn't going to change for a while, Sonia. The forecast is bleak. The breakdown service won't reach you for ages! Are you dressed appropriately, or are you standing there, buck-naked? God's sake, I just don't know with you!'

'Mother, please, I'll be fine! Stop flapping! I'm sure there'll be a house around here somewhere! Bound to be! This isn't the middle of nowhere! Before you know it, I'll be sitting in front of a crackling fire, sipping hot chocolate! But I've got to go, I can barely hear you!'

'Okay then. Make sure you call me, though, the moment you're out of this.'

'I will! And give my love to Mitzi! Tell her I'll see her - '

*****

That was when the mad woman came out of the storm, her arms held out like those of a zombie. She was wearing one of those knitted, gaily-patterned hats with a pom-pom on top, and there were thick string ties hanging down the sides of her face, undone. Her big orange coat floated around her. Her teeth were gritted. Her eyes looked like those of a hungry wolf.

I had just enough time to realise I had no time at all in which to tell my mother I was about to be attacked. I pressed the "home" button, ending the call, and slipped the phone in my pocket. Then the mad woman was on me.

'Gotcha, at last, you murdering bitch!'

'What?'

'You're going back to Pengarrett!'

'I don't know what you're talking about! My name's Sonia Rowntree! I'm a single-mother on my way to work!'

'Yeah, and my name's Lizzie McGee and I ride a horse named Dennis!'

'Please, I'm telling the truth! I don't know what you're talking about!'

But then suddenly she had a double handful of my coat in her gloved hands, and I was bent backwards over my car - my light-green 1970's Lancia I'd paid a small fortune for - with her snarling down into my face.

'The truth! You wouldn't know the truth if it took a shit in your handbag, lovey! Your name's Anna Turpin! Although sometimes you like to become your dead sister, Mary, especially when you're up for a little murder!'

'Anna, Mary! What the fu - '

She slapped me then, and so hard, that my head was flung to the side. I cried out. My cheek burned. The cold air tore in and out of my lungs, turning my teeth into frozen pegs. My legs jittered against hers, hers which were thick and domineeringly muscly, while mine were nothing but sticks. Just eight stone, I weighed back then, and these days, I weigh even less.

Her eyes, which were light blue, were set in pouches of pasty, slouching flesh. The whites were yellow in places. Her skin was cracked and patchy. Her lips were like chewed twine. Her left nostril dripped. Even in the wailing, madcap grip of the storm, she smelled of stale sweat and piss. She looked like someone on which death constantly tugged at her shirt-tail. She was big, bigger than me, anyhow. But I got the feeling that at one point she had been even bigger; her belly drooped with loose, clammy fat that spread across my hips like jelly.

Her big orange coat snapped and flapped. The string ties of her hat lashed against my face. Her hand was poised to slap again above me. 'Don't play games with me, Anna! I've waited a long time for this moment! This moment when I can take you into a police-station and show those smarmy coppers that I was right and they were wrong!'

'Wrong? Wrong about what?'

'That every time I saw you, I was making it up! I saw you six-months ago in this very car here, driving up Starcross Hill! The lights were red in my lane! By the time I got moving, and spun my car around, you were gone! Then, two months ago, I saw you driving towards Gartley! I found a place to turn around, I gave chase, although once again I lost you! But today, finally, I got lucky! I suddenly found myself behind you, heading towards White Mist! Now, here we are, trapped in the snow! _You're_ trapped in the snow! And with nowhere to go this time! Nowhere to go but with me to a police-station!'

'How do you know I'm this woman Anna Turpin? How can you be sure?'

'The stringy body, the long red hair, the freckles, and the mean little pointy features! It's you, all right! God, I had to sit in the same courtroom as you, didn't I, with you grinning that evil little grin of yours, trying to deny that you ran down and killed my husband and son that day, eight years ago? But the judge didn't swallow any of your nonsense, did he? No, he put you away for life!'

'For life? So how come I'm here?'

'Because you escaped! But pretty soon you'll be back behind bars, where you belong!'

I might have been offended at this mad woman describing my features as mean and pointy, but then I suddenly felt the gun in her left pocket pressing against my hip, and I found I could live with mean and pointy. What I could not live with was the idea that she had a gun.

I turned my head to the side, and could just make out the shape of her vehicle someway behind mine. It was big, most likely a four-by-four, so almost certainly she'd be able to get out of the snow the way my little Lancia couldn't. My head spun and my brain had become a foggy thing that I couldn't make a good connection with. Nonetheless, I understood right then that she probably had no intention of taking me to the nearest police-station, that once we were off the main road, she'd likely pop a bullet in my head. Why not? After all, in her mind, I had killed her husband and son. And justice had failed her previously. Why trust it the second time around, when I had escaped once, and could do it again?

*****

I suddenly pulled out my phone, managed to do this, even though that belly of hers was a dead weight on me. 'Here, take this! You'll find photos, lots of photos, of me and my daughter, Mitzi! Photos of her father, too! His name's Greg Halpern! We're not together anymore, but for Mitzi's sake, we're still civil to each other!'

The mad woman took my phone, but kept me pressed down on the car with one hand placed agonisingly firm in the centre of my chest. She raised the phone to her eyes. 'You got a missed call from your mother! She must be worried about you! Why would anyone worry about you, Anna?'

'I'm not Anna! I'm Sonia Rowntree!'

'Anyone can make up a name!'

'Look at the photos! The passcode is eighty-two-oh-eight! A combination of my birthday and Mitzi's!'

'So your daughter's five, is she? Well, that makes sense! You escaped in the summer of oh-seven, and got yourself up the spout in no time at all, so it seems! Strange, but I thought you liked fanny, not cock!'

'Christ, what are you talking about?'

She slapped me again, only harder, given that my phone was in her hand. My jaw made a snapping sound that was cartilage popping, not bone, thank God. But for a moment, I thought the lower part of my face was going to find a new home just below my left ear. I cried out once more. What I believed was a situation that could be rectified with a little common-sense was fast-becoming a situation in which my life was at risk. My heart pounded. My mouth tasted salty. It seemed like a heavy stone had been placed in the pit of my stomach. All at once I felt like the loneliest person on the planet.

Using her teeth \- her dingy, yellow teeth - the mad woman removed one of her gloves. She gained access to my phone with the passcode I'd given her. Then: 'Yeah, photos, I see them! Lots of photos, of your daughter, and of her father, too. God, but he's handsome! Why would a man like him fuck an ugly, cold-hearted bitch like you? Must be a madness in him, hiding in there, that I can't see!' She glared down at me. 'But all of this means nothing! Just photos, that's all!'

'Then check my handbag! You'll find my credit cards in there, and my driver's license with my photo and name on it! Sonia Rowntree, you'll see!'

'Never mind any of that! A stinking bitch of a killer like you could forge a whole different life and make it look like the real thing! I'm not interested in any handbag! Let's get going!'

'Wait! If I _was_ Anna Turpin, wouldn't I wear a disguise?'

She laughed. 'What, like a wig, or maybe dye your hair? Most of the time wigs look like wigs, and pretty much _all_ of the time dyed hair looks like dyed hair! No, disguises draw attention, they don't deflect it! Anyhow, no disguise could hide your ugly mug! A Turpin looks like a Turpin, no matter how you dress her up! Just like a turnip looks like a turnip!' She laughed again, but this time with her head thrown back, like she'd just cracked the funniest joke in the world. Then finally: 'Let's get moving, shall we?'

She re-gloved her bare hand. Dumped my phone in the pocket of that big, ludicrous orange coat of hers. Then she hauled me off my car, one handed, my knees gave way, and I went down in the snow. She began to pull me along by the front of my coat like a sledge, my legs and feet making two thin trails behind me. The wind screeched in my ears. Snow spat in my face like nails. I screamed up at her: 'Stop this, please! I don't even know your name!'

'It's Helen Davenport, just to jog your memory! The same Helen Davenport who became the Widow Davenport eight years ago, on a warm, summer's day when there was no snow on the ground to stop you from running down my husband, Paul, and my son, Elliot!'

'I've never heard of them! Wouldn't know them from Adam!'

'Don't bring Adam into this, or any other Biblical figure, for that matter! Any Bible would surely burst into flames in your wicked hands!'

'God's sake! I don't have a wicked bone in my body! Just give my mother a call! She's the sweetest thing in the world! You'd understand that before she barely got a word out of her mouth! You'd understand, too, that she could never be the mother of a daughter who could coldly run people down in the road!'

'Oh, don't fuck with me, Anna! I saw your mother in court! She was sweet, all right, but underneath, I saw the snakes slithering there! The snakes that slither inside all the Turpins!'

There I was, gazing up the length of Helen Davenport's meaty, unsparing arm, whose hand, in turn, had a clump of my coat in its grip. As we neared her vehicle - which indeed was a four-by-four - I knew I had to do something before she pulled out that gun of hers.

If that happened, I'd be done for.

At the moment there was nothing I could do, though. My arms dangled at my sides. I had deliberately kept my hands off her arm, even though that would have steadied me as she hauled me along. But I _needed_ to keep my hands off her in order to remain submissive. Any physical contact would only make her wary, whereas, at the moment, she believed she had full control over me. She did, too, even in my mind.

But -

There was Mrs Twee, who lived at the back of my throat. The problem, however, was that Mrs Twee had a soft, well-spoken accent that would not be heard out here in the chaotic, relentless screech of the storm. So the way I saw it, I might have to let this go a lot further to have any chance of wriggling off the hook on which the deeply-confused - and deeply-violent - Helen Davenport had hung me.

'Still, fury knows no woman like hell, does it, Anna?' Helen Davenport shouted down at me, and then, once more she laughed. It was a short, contemptuous laugh. 'God, but you're such a fucking _dimwit_ , aren't you? Couldn't even get a simple proverb correct when you were led out of the court that day, after being sentenced and put in the back of the cop van! The newspapers had a hay-day with that little corker, didn't they? The whole country soon discovered what a total thicky you were!'

'I know the proverb!' I yelled up at her. 'Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned! Anna Turpin may not have known how to correctly recite it, but Sonia Rowntree does!'

'No! Anna Turpin must have learned how to correctly recite it in prison, after being humiliated like that!'

'Christ, I can't win, can I?'

'You can...in God's eyes, at least, by admitting who you are instead of pretending you're this Sonia woman!'

'I _am_ this Sonia woman! I've got nothing to admit to God or anyone else, not even to you!'

'We'll see about that, when you're looking down the...!' She stopped right there.

... _barrel of a gun_ , I finished for her in my head, and then thought: _Oh, Mitzi, I love you, I love you so very much. I'm sorry for getting in my car this morning, my darling. I'm just so, so sorry_.

But Mitzi loved Mrs Twee.

And I hoped, I _dearly_ hoped, that Helen Davenport would love her, too.

*****

She grabbed me up onto my feet, now that we were at the driver's door of her big, dark-blue four-by-four. She grabbed me up like I was nothing but a bag of groceries. I could have lashed out right then, by cuffing her around the face, hard as I could, but no, I resisted. She was too big for me to knock off-balance that way. One shot, that's all I'd get, and it would have to be one hell of a good shot. A _lifesaving_ shot! I'd had no time to come up with a plan, but I'm a single-mother, of course, and we are an imaginative, sharp-witted bunch. Have to be when help can sometimes be a little thin on the ground.

I started to cry, when crying wasn't my game, when the well of tears had all but dried up during the hurt, lonely days that followed Greg Halpern's brisk departure out of my life. Yes, I started to cry, all right, all the time begging Helen Davenport to please believe me that I was not Anna Turpin.

It wouldn't work. I knew it wouldn't work ( hadn't I begged enough already? ), but the tears did at least provide a distraction long enough for me to plunge a hand into my pocket and wriggle my fingers into one of the mittens in there.

'Oh, we've got tears now, have we?' Helen Davenport said. 'Well, that's a first, seeing as you never shed one droplet during the whole of that court-case! Not even for yourself, never mind for the two dead men in my life!'

'Please, it wasn't me who _made_ them dead, it was Anna Turpin! How many times do I have to tell you that I am not Anna Turpin?'

'Get in the car! I think you'll find your memory will improve greatly once we're nice and cosy together!'

Holding me with one hand, she opened the door with the other, and then tossed me into the cab, so that I became laid out across the driver's seat. My hair was wet with snow. My heart pounded in my ears. The cab smelled like Helen Davenport, of stale sweat and piss. There was rubbish everywhere: mud, used tissues, food wrappers, empty cans of drink, newspapers. My legs were apart, but only slightly. She suddenly pulled them _wide_ apart, and roughly, and then moved in between them, like a man about to commit rape. My knees trembled either side of her. Tears stung my cheeks. Helen Davenport's big orange coat snapped and flapped. The left string of her knitted, snow-spattered hat, lay across her face, just under her snotty nose, blown there, and kept there, by the unstinting thrash of the wind.

I looked into her eyes and saw a monster.

I looked into her eyes and saw murder.

I looked into her eyes and saw death.

I looked into her eyes and saw _my_ death!

I screamed.

She told me to shut up, to move over into the passenger seat. To do it now, and to stop the whining, woman! She reached inside her coat then, to her jeans pocket, just as I knew she would.

Reached in there for the gun.

That was when I revealed my ventriloquist's grin, my teeth pressed together but not bared.

I raised my mittened right hand, and Helen Davenport's eyes went straight to the mitten, the way I hoped they would; it was my guess she would have a child's fascination for anything that took her away from the real world.

I formed a mouth in the mitten using arched fingers and a bent thumb, and then, I jerked Mrs Twee out from her hiding place at the back of my throat. In that soft, well-spoken accent of hers, she said, 'Oh, really, Helen, what are you doing out here in this snowstorm, you _silly_ girl?'

Puzzled, Helen Davenport's gaze suddenly went from the mitten to me - to me with that tight-lipped but broad grin on my face. Her brow furrowed. She gazed at the mitten again. I waggled the mitten's mouth. 'Yes, I'm talking to you, you fat, bitter-and-twisted cow! What the hell are you doing?'

'I know what I'm doing!' Helen Davenport screeched at the mitten. 'I'm doing what the law should have done a long time ago! I'm ending this evil bitch's - '

That was when I drew back my legs. My knees together, almost touching my chin, I kicked both feet into the centre of Helen Davenport's chest, letting out a scream as I did. The force, powered by a woman half her weight, drove her backwards, her arms pin-wheeling. The look on her face - not just startled but utterly shell-shocked - was one I could have taken great delight in.

But my life depended on what I did next, and on how quickly I could do it.

No time for taking delight.

I watched as Helen Davenport went down in the snow like a felled tree, _whump!_ I saw a great plume of breath shoot out of her mouth like steam out of a blast-pipe. She lay there in her big orange coat, thrashing her arms, and paddling her legs. Then the thrashing and the paddling stopped. The wind had been knocked out of her, I realised, as I jumped down out of the cab. She lay there, pale as cheese, gasping for air.

_'Just leave me alone!'_ I bawled at her. _'How many times do I have to tell you that I am_ not _Anna Turpin?'_

She couldn't respond. Had to concentrate fully on getting her breath back.

My immediate urge was to pounce on her, straddle her, and beat her unconscious with a blunt, heavy object. But even if I found something that fit that description, like a tyre-spanner, I knew I'd be doing something that might come back and bite me. After all, I thought that trying to beat someone unconscious would most likely result in beating them to death!

I did not want to be responsible for Helen Davenport's death. Also, it was just me and her out here. No witnesses. If Helen Davenport survived the beating, it would be her word against mine. I could well end up being the mad woman, not her! So I gave up on that idea as a bad one.

Then I saw she was recovering, little by little. Capable now of drawing in small, strained sips of air. Straight away, her hand went to her jeans pocket, to the gun there, which might not be a gun but an asthma inhaler. Still, I wasn't going to hang around only to find out I'd been right in the first place.

I turned and ran, sobbing, weeping, frightened.

I raised my mittened hand in front of my face. 'Let's get out of here, Mrs Twee! You did a great job back there!'

Mrs Twee said, 'I did. But I've got the feeling you're not out of the woods yet!'

And of course Mrs Twee was right.

This was only the start of it.

Chapter 2: Mrs Twee

I began to run towards that vague, smudgy impression of trees in the distance. No, I wasn't out of the woods yet. But, to get closer to that goal, I needed to be _in_ the woods. Haycott Wood, to be precise, which was around here somewhere, but as you know, the landscape changes dramatically in heavy snowfall. The world you're so familiar with becomes buried.

My sense of direction was good, though. I did not have the whirling compass that is traditionally wired in a woman's brain. According to most men, anyhow. Still, today my life was not about men, it was about women, namely Helen Davenport, along with my mother and my daughter.

My mittened hand abruptly went up to my eyes again. 'And me! You have me in your life, too!'

'Of course I do!' I said, still having to shout above the shrill howl of the wind. 'And where would I be without you, Mrs Twee? All of a sudden you've been elevated from Mitzi's bedtime-storyteller to the hero of the day!'

'Darling, don't get ahead of yourself!' She shouted back at me in a voice too loud for me to be accustomed to as yet. 'Helen Davenport needs to be in police custody before you can breathe a sigh of relief! And she's not just going to lie there for much longer! The moment she gets her breath back, she'll come after you, tracking your footsteps! That woman believes you killed her husband and son! She's not going to let this go! She's just going to keep on coming!'

'You're right!' I said. 'I need to call the police! But...she's got my phone! Not that the police will be able to get out here just yet! What do I do?'

'You keep on running!' Mrs Twee said. 'For the time being, it's all you've got!'

*****

She was right, and so I kept on running. My breath broke over my face in wind-torn clouds. My skin felt hot and cold at the same time. My eyes were like two large hailstones lodged in my head. Advancing uphill slightly, I was heading in a south-easterly direction, which meant that Haycott Wood was dead-ahead. I was certain of that...although Helen Davenport would be certain of that, too; she was not a woman in a strange place. The only strange place, it seemed to me, was up in her head, where the innocent Sonia Rowntree had somehow become the killer Anna Turpin.

Already I was struggling for breath, and my heart seemed to bounce off the walls of my chest. The deepening snow sucked at my feet like quicksand. I became concerned about what might be lurking beneath the snow. Some rusty but deadly piece of farming equipment, for example, that I could become impaled upon.

Worse, though, was my concern that all at once a bullet would whack in between my shoulder-blades, I'd go down in the snow, and there would be Helen Davenport, the string ties of her knitted hat snapping around her face, her big orange coat billowing in the wind. Her, grinning down at me, before finally finishing me off with a bullet to the head.

I glanced around, couldn't see her. Couldn't see much at all, in actual fact. Just a great sheet of churning, rippling white. My car was down there somewhere, inside of which was my handbag. I had nothing but some loose change in my pocket. Though in truth my handbag wouldn't have done me much good, anyhow. Would just have held me back. And I was not the wildly-brave and cunningly-inventive Marsha Dunbar. Even without her bag, that woman would have come up with a way of getting Helen Davenport out of her hair. No doubt about it.

But then -

'Don't underestimate yourself, honey-bunch!' Mrs Twee said, once more bobbing up in front of me. 'Remember, you're the one who invented me! If you hadn't, you'd probably be dead by now!'

'That's true!' I said. 'Maybe there's a little of Marsha Dunbar in me after all!'

'No!' Mrs Twee said. 'Actually, I think there's _more_ than just a little of Marsha Dunbar in you!'

*****

Like some huge, convoluted spider's web, Haycott Wood was suddenly there before me, a snow-draped mesh of spikes and treacherous tangles. I was a woman in a white, blinding darkness, fighting against the buffeting wind, my legs wading, my arms pumping. My breath ripped in and out of me. My hair was weighted down with snow. The tip of my nose had gone numb. My ears burned.

I managed to avoid injury, and went around the back of a tree wide enough to hide behind. It didn't need to be _that_ wide, believe me! I was not Big Bertha, not by anyone's stretch of the imagination. Helen Davenport was big, though. Hiding would not be her specialty. She was also wearing that huge orange coat of hers. As my coat was pale-brown, I would see her long before she saw me.

Still, she had a gun, not an asthma inhaler. I kept telling myself that in order to keep the worst of this situation in the front of my mind. If I let my guard down by believing that woman was really nothing but a sheep in wolf's clothing, with only an inhaler as a weapon, then I'd be in huge trouble. The mind, I have found, can be a right old joker when it comes to filling you up with positivity, when in truth your life is in tatters. I only had to recall how positive I had been, even when Greg Halpern grabbed my face, shunted me up against the fridge, and told me that Daisy Hemmings was a much better fuck than me. Furthermore, that she could cook a lasagne without burning it to a cinder!

Yes, even then, I had remained positive.

Like a pet-dog you kick but still it wags its tail and looks at you like you are God in heaven.

*****

I stayed low behind that tree, crouched down, and peering around it, waiting for Helen Davenport. I'd wept all the way up to Haycott Wood, but now the tears had dried, and I was in a state of shock. My only mistake had been to go to work, and even then, I could have frozen to death due to my misjudgement. That alone could have cost me my life. Now, Helen Davenport had been thrown into the mix, when the mix was deadly enough: the snow, the blasting wind, the tricky conditions. Out of the blue I was in a predicament that a hardened soldier would find daunting.

I'd told my mother there was bound to be a house around here somewhere, but now I was struggling to remember even a _single_ house in the area! Either my mind had drawn a blank, or there really wasn't much between Gartley and White Mist but fields and trees. I thought that was the case, too, that somehow I had simply _assumed_ there would be houses, when in fact there was pretty much bugger-all!

Still, that's me for you. I'm one of those motorist's who, on many occasions, can't recall even _driving_ into work, let alone remember houses ( or no houses! ), like somehow I got there by stepping through a magic portal.

Miserably, I began to realise this was just as much my fault as Helen Davenport's. Our paths had crossed because one idiot was destined to bump into another on a day like this.

Mrs Twee did not bob up in front of my face to tell me otherwise, either. Clearly she agreed and stayed silent on the matter, rather than rub salt into my wounds.

However, in spite of the shock I was in, I could at least think, for the time being at least. Although God only knew how well the contacts in my brain would be working once the low temperatures bit more deeply into me. For now, though, yes I could think, and what I thought was that Helen Davenport was not going to follow my footprints up here into these woods. She was driving a four-by-four in which it was possible, for now, anyhow, to still reach White Mist. Moreover, to still reach my mother's house. After she'd gotten my mother's number from my phone, I pictured her using her own phone to call my mother. I imagined her saying something along the lines of: _Hi, there. I came across your daughter in her car that's stuck in the snow. Not to worry, though, I'm driving a four-by-four. I offered her a lift to your place and she accepted. At the moment she's calling the breakdown service, but as soon as she's done, we'll be on our way. I just need your address, and in no time at all, I can have her safely over to you_.

My mother would give Helen Davenport the address, too. Would _gladly_ give it to her; right now, she'd be chewing her fingernails down to the quick, worrying about me out in this storm. The fact she'd already left one missed-call - and probably another by now - would have doubled the intensity of her worry. Helen Davenport's call would have saved my mother's fingers from being chewed right down to the bone!

I pictured Helen Davenport driving over to my mother's place. She'd park on the grassy bank out the front that thronged with daffodils in the spring, but today, it would be a snow-drifted hump outside the front gate. The front gate that Helen Davenport would have to push her way through to make it up the path.

By then, she'd have pulled out her gun, and by the time my mother opened the front door - with Mitzi right behind her, no doubt - Helen Davenport would have secured her slot on the front page of every daily paper. My mother dead, my daughter dead, Helen Davenport's business would be done. She hadn't gotten me, Anna Turpin, but she'd gotten my mother and daughter, and that would do just fine, given that I had taken away her husband and son eight years back. We'd both be even-stevens.

Oh God no! I had put together a scene so believable that right away I stood and decided to go back down to my car, hoping that Helen Davenport would still be there, that she hadn't as yet departed for my mother's place. Better my death than my mother and daughter's. Better they lived without me than me without them.

They would have each other.

I would have no one.

I stepped out from behind the tree.

Helen Davenport shot me in the leg.

*****

I screamed. Of course I did! Who the hell wouldn't? I grabbed my leg, my thigh in actual fact. Blood bloomed through a tattered hole in my coat and skirt. The back of my thigh, I discovered, had a wound in it the size of a baby's open mouth. I wanted to reach in there, pull the bullet out, and once again my leg would be mine, not something in which the crime committed against me still lingered. But in truth my hand was clamped over the exit wound. There was no bullet. There was just me, minus a chunk of my leg, crying out in agony in this maddening, hazy snowstorm.

I looked up. I saw that big orange coat of Helen Davenport's, with her seeming to float in it, her head bent into the driving wind, the string ties of her hat flailing. The gun joggled in her hand like it was attached to a pet dog that pulled it this way and that. She had spied me, _somehow_ she had spied me!

Then it dawned on me that any advantage I had by wearing a pale-brown coat was cancelled out by the fact that my hair was red - bright-red! - and so in truth, I'd pretty much been a sitting duck.

I turned and ran. Turned and ran, and _bawled_ , as a matter of fact. Bawled as the pain bit into me every time I slammed my right foot down. I thrashed my way into Haycott Wood, _deeper_ into Haycott Wood, gripping my thigh for support, and helping my leg along that way. Blood ran warmly, and freely, over my clasped together hands, one of which was still wearing Mrs Twee - Mrs Twee who had been no help to me this time around.

She had not saved me from being shot.

Still, the truth was, Mrs Twee was me, my alter-ego. She was not my guardian angel. And the mitten that was Mrs Twee - the stand-in Mrs Twee - was now soaked with blood. The real Mrs Twee - the glove-puppet Mrs Twee - was at home in Mitzi's bedroom. At the end of the long row of children's books, she was perched on the shelf above Mitzi's bed, wearing her neat, sensible dress, her white, lacy apron, and smiling warmly. Her gold-rimmed spectacles sitting squarely on her button nose. Her hands clasped reverently in her lap. Her legs dangling over the edge of the shelf. None of this mad woman-in-the-snowstorm-Anna-Turpin-bullet-in-the-leg shit for her.

Mrs Twee was safe.

I was not safe.

In was in fact the most unsafe woman in Hampshire.

Surely.

My path hindered by all kinds of traps, snags, and obstacles, I slammed my way through the trees and the snow-laden undergrowth. My breath tore in and out of me, my mouth was agape, but from it no scream escaped. Not now. Not with Helen Davenport behind me, not just following my tracks, but listening out, too, for the wounded screech of my voice.

She'd hear it, as well, of that I had no doubt. In the howling wind she'd hear it because even the wildest storm will face stern competition from the wails of an injured woman. And she'd follow those wails. She'd cross-reference those wails with my blood-spattered footprints, and that would give her my precise location.

Oh God. In the jumbled mish-mash of my brain, I wondered how I could get out of this...and couldn't see a way. I was trailing far too much evidence, for one: the footprints and the leaking blood. And two: I was apt to scream whether I wanted to or not; the pain at times would simply get the better of me, unavoidable. And three: my hair, which I'd hated as a child, accepted as a teenager, and fell in love with as a woman. Now I was back to hating it because Helen Davenport had enough evidence already to keep up a gainful pursuit, without having the added bonus of my long, red mane, which flowed out behind me like flames.

I had to do something about that. Had to do something about _everything_ that was giving that fat mad Davenport bitch the upper-edge. She already had a gun. She had two fully-mobile legs, as well! How much more of an upper-edge did she need?

I understood then, as I battled my way further into the death-trap that was Haycott Wood, that I would need all of my wits, and all of my energy, if I was going to have any chance of getting out of this alive. I would need to dig deep.

But truth be told I knew all about "digging deep". Greg Halpern had torn out my heart when he left me for Daisy Hemmings, she of the better fuck than me. Still, hearts either grow back, or they don't. Mine did. Mine grew back stronger.

It was a heart that _knew_ how to dig deep.

*****

So I dug deep and ran faster, even though my wounded, dripping leg was already sending out burning ripples of excruciating pain. This was all I had, though, the ability to put some distance between me and Helen Davenport. I was fit. She was not. Even with my damaged leg, I thought I could outrun that woman because she was a mess of a thing who'd almost certainly neglected herself since the death of her husband and son.

I had smelled her stale sweat, and her pissy pants. I had seen her snotty nose, and the horde of food wrappers and empty drinks cans in her four-by-four. This was not a woman with a proclivity for brisk exercise in the mornings, along with a light jog in the evenings. This was a woman, I guessed, who only got the urge to use her leg muscles between the armchair and the fridge. And the fall she'd taken back there had knocked the stuffing right out of her. She'd still be recovering from that, even now. The last thing she'd need was a gallop, or even a gentle canter, through these snow-covered woods, with the wind cutting into her face like a saw. No, she'd plod. Would just keep on plodding, until the wounded animal that was me went down in an exhausted, pain-wracked heap. That would be her plan.

If a woman as random as her could make such plans.

Had there been plans? I thought not. She was random, all right, I was sure of that. Take me to a police-station or shoot me down a country lane? It was my belief Helen Davenport no more knew the answer to that than I did. Everything hinged on the roll of that woman's mind.

Or what remained of her mind.

Nevertheless, I was sure of one thing: that I was her fixation. For the past few months I, Sonia Rowntree, had been Helen Davenport's Anna Turpin. I'd no doubt kept her awake at night, me in my Lancia, racing through her mind like evil behind the wheel. Evil behind the wheel with long, red hair and mean little pointy features. And I'd be laughing, of course. _Bound_ to be laughing as I whizzed through the Hampshire countryside. Laughing that I had escaped from what should have been a lifetime of punishment in Pengarrett. Laughing that I was free while she was not free, that her mind, her heart, her soul, was forever imprisoned by the murder of her husband and son. Me, laughing. Her, lying in bed, her face wet with hot, stinging tears, wishing me dead for what I'd done that day.

That day when her life had ended, and a living hell began.

I felt sorry for her right then. Hand on heart. How could I not? I knew how it felt to lose the man you loved. But...Greg Halpern was still alive, and Paul Davenport was not. While Paul Davenport was pushing up daises, Greg Halpern was pushing it into Daisy. Quite funny that, I suppose. Even in my distress, I laughed, when laughter was the furthest thing from my mind.

Then again, we all know that laughter and tears are never far away from each other. One brings about the other, more often than not. And right then, as I limped onwards, they shared equal room on my face.

The way that pain and urgency shared equal room on my injured leg.

*****

I'd been running downhill, notwithstanding the occasional dip-and-hump hidden under the snow, waiting to trick me. Waiting to flip me on my backside, or hurl me down on my face. The trees had been far enough apart for me to snake my way through them without too much of a problem, although every now and then, I'd catch the whip of a low branch. I'd feel the slap of it across my arms, my middle, my legs, and mutter a fuck to it.

That reminded me of something my grandfather used to say: _As a mutter of fuck, my dear, I don't give a damn!_

He was always careful not to use that around my grandmother, though. If he did, he knew there'd be no dinner on the table for him at six o' clock. Just the vase of decorative paper flowers still set there in the centre.

I came to a wide clearing, but I did not stop before it. Just kept on going, having to make my decisions on the run. The wind raked across this clearing so ferociously that the snow, coming in from right to left, was almost horizontal. The view was sketchy to say the least, and from most angles, almost impossible.

From what I could make out, though, the trees on the left were thin and sparse, while the ones on the right were broad and crammed together. It made sense to head to the right. Once in there, I could set to work on finding a tree, or better still, a _group_ of trees, in whose cover I could shelter for a moment. Set to work on repairing the damage to my leg. Set to work on doing something about my red hair, too. Stop it looking like a brazier burning in the night.

However, I wasn't sure I'd put enough distance between myself and Helen Davenport. Not yet. But even then I was heading towards the broad trees. Helen Davenport would expect me to go that way, knowing I'd need to make repairs. That I couldn't do that in a place where the trees where thin and sparse. So already I was thinking of ways to lose her.

Or at least to stall her progress.

*****

I went across the clearing. The snow here was even deeper because above there was no canopy - as bare of leaves as it was - to inhibit the snowfall.

I glanced up. To my right I saw fuzzy, bent shapes that were branches fading up into the wild wheeling whiteness. I saw upturned limbs like claws in which snow had become trapped. I saw wind-blasted prongs poking down at me, and then they were wrenched back into the grim, powdery darkness. The wind sliced across my face like a cutter. My hair lashed across my clenched eyes and my screwed-up mouth. I felt like someone wading out into a strange, white sea, and below there'd be tentacles, icy tentacles, waiting to coil themselves around me and pull me under.

The hem of my coat flackered like a sail. Laughing, weeping, screaming - that was me. Screaming when I didn't want to scream but couldn't help myself. Oh God help me, the pain in my leg was up there with childbirth when I'd believed, all along, that there was no pain to match that!

Still, if nothing else, life is good at giving you a slap when you think you've received all the slaps a life can give. The pain in my leg was an extra slap I didn't expect. And Helen Davenport? She was not an extra slap but a thunderbolt out of nowhere!

I knew she couldn't possibly be right behind me, that in fact, by now, she'd be way back, just had to be. All the same I got a horrid feeling she was hot on my tail. Furthermore, that she was not human, never had been. That she would not be plodding patiently away in the rear, waiting for me to keel over in a pain I could no longer go on with. No, I suddenly pictured an altogether different Helen Davenport. A Helen Davenport who'd be skimming above the snow like a ghost, the tips of her boots slicing marks in the thick, white fluff. Her big orange coat billowing. The string ties of her knitted hat wavering like kelp in a gentle current.

Her face would be the colour of tripe. Her lips would be a duck-egg blue. Her eyes would be bloodshot, and the pouched, flaccid skin underneath would be bruise-purple. Her hands, bearing long, crooked fingers, would be reaching out for me in preparation for when she'd clasp them around my throat ( I'd feel the sudden, icy-cold pop as her fingernails punctured my neck ), and then, she'd pull me down into the snow: my deep, floury grave.

I glanced around anxiously, my breath foggy.

I did not see Helen Davenport floating behind me.

Nonetheless, those dreadful thoughts kept me plugging away to the very best of my restricted ability. Kept me plugging away when already my hips, my pelvis, my lower-spine, all felt like they were about to part company with my legs. The suck of the snow was like a big, greedy mouth that wanted feeding.

Jerking my leg along, and panting harshly, I made it into the cover of the broader trees. No time to stop running, though, or for even slowing down. I weaved my way through these trees, taking the most complicated route I could find. After a while of going this way and that, I finally stopped. Went behind a tree as wide as a shed. Pressed my back against it. Oh, the joy! Even the shortest of breaks can bring about such a huge, agreeable relief!

No time to savour it, though. I simply needed the break for as long as I could take it. I took it for all of about ten seconds, which was not enough time to even get my breath back.

Then I raised Mrs Twee to my eyes. She was filthy with blood. The wind still screeched, the snow still blasted, but behind this tree, I could at least speak without shouting.

'How are you, Mrs Twee?'

'Angry! That bitch shot you!'

'She did. But I'm alive.'

'Just about. You're leaking blood like a tap!'

'I know. I'll deal with it. And you're bloody, too.'

'I am indeed,' Mrs Twee said. I bent my fingers inside the mitten, as if Mrs Twee were looking down at her own sorry state. 'I can't wait to get home and dress in my regular outfit!'

'I'm sure you can't. But I have a fresh mitten in my pocket. Once I've patched myself up, and sorted out my hair, I'll dress you in it. It will have to do for now. And for a short while you'll be naked.'

'Me? Naked? Oh no, darling, I don't do naked!'

'A first time for everything,' I said. 'The thing is, I need to leave this bloody mitten here. It'll be something for Helen Davenport to think about. You know, to _ponder_ on?'

'I get it,' Mrs Twee said. 'It'll stall her. She'll think you're around here somewhere, either patching yourself up, or better for her, that you've given up the ghost.'

'Exactly. So you understand, then?'

'About being naked?'

'Yes.'

'I do,' Mrs Twee said. 'But don't leave me bollock-y for too long, not in this weather!'

'I won't. But listen, I've got to go. We'll talk again soon. Okay?'

'Okay. And you're doing great, honey-bunch. Mitzi, and your mother, would be proud.'

'Thank you.' I stripped off the bloody mitten and impaled it on a thin, sharp branch that was still sturdy enough to hold it in the wind. It flapped there, visibly red in all the white.

I looked back at all the bloody trails and tracks I'd left, which went this way and that. Then I took off along the back of the clearing, heading towards the thin, sparse trees. Blood continued to gush out of my leg. I couldn't keep this up for much longer. My life was draining out of me. But I was sure I still hadn't put enough distance between me and Helen Davenport to do what I needed to.

And thank God she hadn't closed the distance between us to do what she needed to, either.

Chapter 3: Old Railway Line

Hell exists. I know. I spent time in it that day. Too much time. It was a hell that let me know my fate hung in the balance, that after agonising pain and torture, I would most likely die in this snowstorm that God had whipped up and then turned His back on.

Am I being melodramatic? Probably. Then again, up until that day, the most courageous thing I'd ever done was a charity bungee-jump at Barford Green Summer Fair, and even then, I thought I was going to have a heart-attack!

I am not known for my devil-may-care approach to life. Like most mothers, I'm pretty much a realist who likes to see bread on the table first, and if there's enough left for a good book, a new skirt, and a bottle of wine, then I accept my lot. And when you have a child you love with all of your heart, it's easy to put away your personal dreams for the time being, hoping that life will be kind in the future and allow you to re-visit those dreams.

And my dreams were simple enough: that I'd meet a man I loved, that he would love me back, and when we were old, we'd be able to reflect on our life together with more happiness than sorrow. Yes, simple enough as dreams go. Still, as I went through Haycott Wood that day, nursing my throbbing leg through the snow and the bandsaw-shriek of the wind, I wondered if even those dreams would end up becoming too much to wish for.

Melodramatic? No, not really. Helen Davenport had put a bullet in a single-mother who'd been on her way to work to put bread on the table. However, the only table I could picture right then was the operating table I hoped I'd reach before it became the mortician's slab.

It felt like death was washing over me all too suddenly. All too _unreasonably!_ I could feel a sickly chill settling into my bones, and a kind of falling away in my chest, like my body was dropping into a hole. My mind was becoming hollow. My thoughts seemed to float outside of me like balloons on strings. I tried to focus on Mitzi, on her warm, green eyes, the angled slant of her cheeky smile, and the sweet, addictive smell of her skin.

I couldn't do it. I could not bring her to the front of my mind. Mitzi, my daughter, the one good thing that Greg Halpern had given me. Although in truth that was a lie. He had given me many good things during our six years together. But a woman betrayed is a woman with a forgetful mind. A _conveniently_ forgetful mind. For it was Greg Halpern's face I saw right then. Him, the man who had left me for Daisy Hemmings, and yet I wanted him so much right then, because I knew he could give me one more good thing: my life. That if he were here now, he would save that life, undoubtedly, and never mind all the bitterness of our break-up.

He wasn't here, though, no more than he had been in our relationship once Daisy Hemmings had cast her spell on him. And the reality was I still loved him, as I hauled myself through that blustery, snow-choked wood. Still loved him even though he had turned my heaven into hell. Still loved him no matter that Daisy Hemmings was a better fuck than me.

But yes, a woman betrayed is a woman with a forgetful mind. No doubt about it. Yet a forgetful mind can be a gift the moment one hell replaces another. Especially if that hell is an even greater hell.

Greg Halpern would find that out in the hospital.

*****

I pushed my way forward, my teeth gritted, my body stooped into the merciless, violent slap of the wind. Running was becoming harder. The strength in my legs had all but drained away. I screamed at myself to keep on going, to keep at it, even though the pain begged me to put the brakes on, now, now, now!

My heart thrashed as the blood flowed away from it, down to the leaking wound. My one source of optimism lay in the words I'd already uttered to my mother: that this was not the middle of nowhere. It wasn't, either. There was life to be found around here. Roads for a start. I had driven on those roads - roads that led to towns like Upperlands, Portercross, Battenford, Rosewater, Saddlecombe, Drum Tower, Settle Cove, Templeton, Barford Green, Wentworth, Birdhouse, Linkwater, and Unity Gate. Naturally, those roads would be thickly laid with snow. However, I would not be the only one who had left all common-sense at the front door this morning and climbed into their vehicle. There would be others like me. Other _idiots_ like me!

But even an idiot would be a welcome sight if they drove a vehicle that could get me out of here.

I glanced up. There was no sky, just a whirling, demented madness. In the helter-skelter void of my mind, I wondered if the sky had been sucked out into space, and now the Earth was wrapped in snow that would eventually turn to ice, and that would be the end of it all. One day, when the ice began to thaw, perhaps thousands of years from now, another species would arrive on Earth, and they'd find a frozen Helen Davenport still chasing after a frozen Sonia Rowntree.

Their conclusion would be that such a violent race deserved to die, if all they could do in their spare time was hunt each other down.

*****

Then all of a sudden my legs went out from under me.

I'd been concentrating so fiercely on simply plugging onwards, thinking not a jot about how visibility was pretty much no visibility, when all sorts of danger could be laying in wait for me. My one piece of help had been that the thin, sparse trees had allowed me to advance without having to swerve too much off course. That being the case, I had mostly put my head down. Had just kept on going, hoping I was putting more distance between myself and old Happy Helen back there so that finally I could stop to make those much-needed repairs and amendments.

But...there I went.

A large clump of snow abruptly slid away from under me, and my legs followed it. My backside went down straight after - my skinny, unpadded backside \- and then it, too, was following my legs down a steep bank that thankfully had nothing more threatening than a few straggly bushes growing out of it that were more or less two-thirds deep in snow, anyway. Even with my lungs giving vent to a terrified, ear-shattering scream, my main concern - apart from my damaged leg \- was what lay at the bottom of this bank.

A river, and I'd be sunk ( no pun intended ). I had almost no strength left in me, anyhow. Finding the strength to swim my way out of an icy river, wearing boots and a winter coat, and further hampered by a badly-wounded leg, would have been a no-no. A proper no-no.

Thankfully, there was no river. No water of any such kind. What I found after I stood and patted the snow off me, which was a useless act, anyhow; the patted off snow was soon replaced by more snow. Still, what I found was that I was standing next to an old railway line. Not a road. A road I may have found a little assistance on. Perhaps even _more_ than a little assistance; I may have found someone who would have instantly recognised a woman in serious trouble and gotten her out of there. No questions asked, either, for if they had, Helen Davenport would no doubt have appeared and put a bullet in both of us.

I looked around at the slope down which I had plunged. It was streaked with my blood. Even in the crazy whisk of the storm, I could see it there, plain as day. I was a tracker's dream. I'd been trailing blood the whole time, of course: a bright-red come-and-get-me invitation. I needed to do something about that, and swiftly. Not just because it was indisputable evidence. More importantly, I was fading, becoming light-headed, and getting colder by the minute. My body's natural store of warmth and energy was flowing out of me. If I didn't stem that flow, then my days as a mother, a daughter, and a mostly secretive ventriloquist were numbered.

I turned back to the old railway line. No rails, not anymore. This, I recognised, was the Wentworth-to-White Mist Army Barracks line. It had been closed since World War II, after the Victorian viaduct over which the trains ran had been bombed. It was never repaired, although, just recently, I read somewhere that private funding had been secured to do just that. This funding was part of a financial package that also included the conservation of the old barracks into luxury apartments. A museum would be integrated into the deal to keep the conservationists happy, and also, the railway line would be re-opened. Not to run a regular service, but during the summer months, the steam enthusiasts would be able to use the line on a commercial basis that would see the takings shared between themselves and the investors. Pen had been put to paper, too, so I understood.

But all of that seemed a long way off when I looked at the railway line now, bare of rails. Just an overgrown cutting, it was, that snaked through the Hampshire countryside, the raised railway bed drifted with snow, making it look like a long, white spine.

To my left, on this side of the cutting, something grey and angular loomed out of the snow. I recognised it immediately from my frequent rail-travels to Clifton & Sway's head office in London: a rail-workers' hut. That almost certainly was the wrong name for it, but in spite of that, its function was apparent: it was a dry place in which the maintenance workers could store their equipment. Not that any repairs to either the railway line, or to this hut here, had been made since Churchill was in power.

I headed over to it. It was made of rough, weathered concrete. The window that faced the railway, the only window, was smashed out. The doorway, minus the timber door - which no doubt had rotted away years ago - was around the opposite side, facing the direction of the old army barracks. The barracks were a long way off, I was sure. No help there, either, except for the ghosts of long-dead soldiers. And travelling that way with a vengeful gun-woman on my tail, here, out in the open, would make me as mad as her. If she got close enough, and if the storm dropped for a moment, she'd get a clear shot at me. _Wham!_ I'd get a bullet in the back. So, as soon as I'd patched myself up, I would be heading into the woods on the opposite side of the railway line. That was a decision I did not need to deliberate.

I limped into the hut. The doorway was clear, aside from three rusty T-hinges attached to which was one rotted, woodworm-y door transom, along with three busted mullions. But, the main bulk of the door had turned to dust, just as I'd thought. Had just been scattered to the four corners.

The moment I stepped into the hut - my face burning with the cold, my hands shaking - the wind was instantly cut off, on that side of the hut at least. My ears rang with the sudden drop in noise. Snow blew past the window, making the hut feel like it was moving. The floor was nothing but dirt and compressed shingle. Propped against a wall was a rusty shovel that looked like it would fall apart if I so much as brushed against it. I saw a pickaxe head on the floor. Empty grease tins and oil cans were littered here and there. The place smelled of animal piss. There were droppings scattered about. Cobwebs quivered.

I undid my coat, both the buttons and the belt, on which there was no buckle. The belt was simple, like that on a dressing-gown. I glanced up at the window in which only a few brittle, discoloured fragments of glass remained.

I expected to see Helen Davenport's big balloon face to suddenly be floating there in the blasting snow. Grinning at me with those chewed-twine lips of hers. _Didn't get far there, did you, Anna?_ she'd say, and then _blam!_ She'd put a bullet in my face.

That thought, that _frightful_ thought, made me focus and work as quick as I could. I took off my skirt, a black practical knee-length job. It was stuck to my leg at the place where the bullet had passed through it. Gingerly, I peeled it away from the wound. After that, I slipped the skirt down my legs with great care, letting it fall around my feet in a wrinkled hoop.

That done, I removed the belt from my coat. Tied it around my leg, just above the wound. Pulled it tight in order to staunch the flow of blood.

And I screamed, of course. Couldn't _help_ but scream. It sounded so loud in the hollowness of the hut, that even with the storm howling away outside, I thought there was a high chance Helen Davenport would hear it, if she was close by.

Tears squirted down my cheeks. Melted snow ran off my hair, down the back of my neck. I tied a knot in the belt, then another. It looked like the most un-sexiest garter in the world. However, that aside, I wondered how the bullet had travelled all the way through my leg without touching bone, or even shattering it!

In some way or another, I've already alluded to the fact that I am not the biggest woman around. Ah, what a shame, I can hear many of you ladies saying who know the endless, hopeless plight of trying to lose weight and mostly failing. But right then, I would have paid any amount of money to instantly gain forty-pounds of warm, thick fat. It's no fun trying on a size 6 skirt and finding even _that_ needs a belt to stop it falling off! Let me tell you that shopping for someone like me can be just as frustrating as it can for a size 16 who can at least find something that fits her. You might think it gives you hips as wide as a tractor, but at least you have the body of a woman, not a boy.

I think, in fact, that my size played no small part in Greg Halpern's gaze shifting from me to Daisy Hemmings. She has tits, I don't. She has a defined waist, I don't. She has a round backside, I don't. She has _everything_ , in truth, that I don't. I'm just this scrawny bird with mean pointy features whose only attribute is her flame-red hair, but even then it almost got me killed. Still could! My body was helping to kill me, too. A little more padding and the cold would not have bitten into me so deeply, so acutely. I stood there, screaming, crying, and shivering - shivering so badly I thought I'd simply fall apart as if made of matchwood.

I stepped out of my skirt, there on the ground. Picked it up. Tore it in half. Tried to, anyway, but alas, my hands had no strength in them. Just icy trembling useless things. What I did was slice the waistband open on one of those brittle fragments of glass jutting up from the broken window. I was able to rip the skirt all the way through then. After that, I found the rough centre of the skirt, and did the same thing, so that now I was clutching two halves. One half had a bloody and tattered bullet-hole through it. I folded that part lengthways, then did that again, and again, until I was holding what looked like a bandage of sorts.

I wrapped it around my leg, over the wound, and tied it there as securely as I could. It was tied directly below my coat-belt: the makeshift tourniquet. Following that, I reached back and wound my hair up into a ponytail, a loose, unclasped ponytail, which I then tucked down the back of my coat. I then used the other half of my skirt as a scarf, managing somehow to knot it under my chin, once my hair was settled inside it. No mirror to look in, but I thought my features probably looked even more mean and pointy without my hair to flatter my face.

I looked down. My coat hung open. I was wearing a top, a cardigan over that, and pretty much nothing else. Just knickers, tights, and boots. I buttoned up my coat, shutting away the protruding ribcage, the sunken stomach, and the stick legs.

I thought I was going to faint then. I thrust out a hand, and steadied myself against one of the hut's filthy walls. My mind seemed to billow in and out. I could hear my heart running thinly in my ears like a sewing-machine. My joints felt like someone had stuck a firecracker in every one of them. My coat was burdened with snow, and damp with melted snow. It all of a sudden seemed twice as heavy as it should, and the weight of it did all it could to push me down to the ground.

I wondered how much blood I had lost. A pint? Two? Possibly three? No, surely not that much. A loss as heavy as that would result in death, or coma at the very least!

But what the hell did I know? I was no doctor. All I knew was that I had left a trail of blood noticeable enough, even in these unholy conditions, for Helen Davenport to follow with comparative ease.

That thought did not get me moving, either. In fact, even though I knew the clock was ticking, and that I had used up enough time already, I all at once dropped into a haze of self-pity. A swift, demotivated depression. I didn't want to carry on. My body, acknowledging this state of surrender, threw in the towel, and I sank to my knees. Began to sob like a child, my left hand over my eyes.

I could hear the wind-and-snow whistling past the hut like a ghost train. I could hear branches slapping on the hut's roof. I could feel cold snatches of air playing around the back of my neck. The rusty T-hinges across the doorway squealed. The wind gave out a long, deep sigh. Goose-pimples rose on my skin.

I suddenly sensed my right hand floating before me, like I no longer owned it.

I gazed through my grubby, splayed fingers.

My right hand, I saw, was wearing a fresh mitten. I was sure I had not done that. Sure it had not been me who had dressed my hand in the woolly thing. The upper part of the mitten leaned into me. 'So, you would have left me bollick-y, would you, had I not dressed myself in the end? You forgot, that's the truth of it!'

'I didn't forget!' I said, lowering my left hand. 'I would have gotten around to it. Just that I was somewhat busy trying to stop myself from bleeding to death. Or did _you_ forget that?'

'No,' Mrs Twee said. 'But I did forget how mousy and insecure you can be. Even when you and Greg Halpern were together, you spent much of your time in self-doubt. I think that's the reason, in fact, why he left you for Daisy Hemmings. It had little to do with your small tits and her big ones. If there was any kind of competition going on at the time, then it was between your smiles.'

'Smiles?' I asked, confused.

'Yes, smiles,' Mrs Twee said. 'Your small smile and Daisy Hemmings's big smile. Her big, pleased-to-see-you smile. Her big smile that is always on, never off. Her big bewitching smile that says "I want you, Greg, and I want you to want me." '

'Stop right there!' I said, offended. 'Why are you _talking_ to me like this? You're a glove-puppet who reads bedtime stories to Mitzi. How come you're all of a sudden some kind of an expert on my personality?'

'That's because you've only ever _used_ me as a glove-puppet who reads bedtime stories to Mitzi. I'm no expert on your personality, but I _am_ someone who knows you better than even Mitzi or your mother. I'm your hidden side, Sonia. Your _buried_ side. The side you push away and don't face up to. You gave me the name Mrs Twee. I'm happy to be Mrs Twee, as well; reading to Mitzi every night is my greatest pleasure.

'But, when you take me off your hand and sit me back on the shelf above Mitzi's bed, do you think I just sit there, doing nothing until you return the following night? No, I don't. I _think_ , Sonia. I think about your kindness, your sweetness, and your devotion to Mitzi. I think about your beauty, too, the beauty you deny and turn away from. How many times did Greg Halpern tell you how beautiful you were? How much he loved your body, too, the body you hate? Yet you rarely accepted his comments. You brushed them off as male bullshit. You want to know how that makes a man feel, Sonia?'

'Oh yes please, oh wise one, do tell.'

'It makes him feel every bit as worthless as you. It makes him feel dejected and rejected.'

'Oh, how sad!' I said, not without some bitterness. 'So what you're telling me is that, dejected and rejected, his only way out was to tumble into another woman's bed, is that it? Oh yeah, well, that's facing up to the situation, isn't it? That's dealing with it in the appropriate manner!'

'I'm not _saying_ he dealt with it in the appropriate manner. What happened was that Daisy Hemmings came along with her big, inviting smile, and Greg saw sunshine in that. Sunshine he could walk towards and leave the shadows behind.'

'And I'm the shadows, am I?'

'Unfortunately, yes. But now's your chance to turn shadows into sunshine, honey-bunch. You read Marsha Dunbar's book, "Lucky Break", didn't you? You watched all the TV shows she appeared on, too. That being the case, you know that she suffered terribly from confidence and low self-esteem issues, just like you. Marsha _Dumb_ -bar, she was often called. But she worked a miracle that day, didn't she? She worked a miracle, and with a busted foot, too, the way you can work a miracle with a wounded leg...'

Mrs Twee suddenly glanced over at the open doorway. Her woolly mouth began to open and close in fast, worried chatter. 'You need to get moving, Sonia. Time is slipping away. I have the feeling that Helen Davenport is closing in on you!'

'I think you might be right,' I said, and right then, I heard a scream, one of those sharp, taken-by-surprise screams. It came ripping through the storm like the bullet Helen Davenport had nailed me with. I stood, if a little woozily, and went outside. Not before glancing behind me, though, just to check on the blood situation.

There was no blood.

I had finally ceased leaving a trail.

*****

'Wait!' Mrs Twee said. 'Pick that up by your feet there!'

I looked down. Just outside the doorway was a sharp stick roughly the size and thickness of a cigar-tube. 'This?'

'Yes, that. It's no kind of weapon to match a gun. But be prepared for anything, honey-bunch. At close-quarters, that stick might be the difference between life and death.'

'There's a pickaxe head on the floor behind me,' I said. 'As weapons go, that's got to be more lethal than a stubby old stick.'

'True,' Mrs Twee said. 'But I think I'd rather carry a stubby old stick than a heavy pickaxe head. You've got enough problems, Sonia: this blizzard you're trapped in, and your wounded leg to lug around. Take my advice, choose the stick.'

I did. I slipped it into my pocket, and then went out into the snowstorm once more. I peeped around the hut, the wind clawing at my cobbled-together headscarf, making it ripple around my head.

No Helen Davenport.

I started across the raised railway bed, able to move more freely now. No need to support my leg and haul it along. I made it halfway across...and there she was. That sharp, taken-by-surprise scream had clearly come from Helen Davenport the moment she'd unexpectedly begun to slide down the same bank I'd slid down.

Even though my vision was impaired almost to the point of blindness, I could see that old Happy Helen had somehow travelled down that bank on her front, and now she lay at the bottom. Dead still, too, her face buried in snow. The wind caught her big orange coat, and it threshed around her. The string ties of her knitted hat were splayed out in the snow like two dead slow-worms.

I couldn't see the gun - her gun-toting hand was behind her, not out in front. Also, her big orange coat, along with the thick, slanting snow, obscured any hope I had of establishing if she'd dropped the gun, still had a hold of it, or if it was in one of her pockets.

I stood there, hesitant. My breath puffed around me, and was then stolen by the wind. The bitter cold held my face like a clamp. I moved towards her, just one short step, and then she moved, too. She raised her head out of the snow, and for a moment, I thought she'd incurred some damage to her face. I realised, however, that her face hadn't been damaged.

It was simply coated in the blood-trail I'd left behind.

She looked over at me, dazed. Her eyes once again reminded me of those of a hungry wolf. But now I saw exasperation in those eyes, too. I'd knocked the wind out of her back at her four-by-four. By hanging the previous version of Mrs Twee - the bloody mitten - on that tree back there, I'd clearly bought myself enough time to patch up my leg, as well. And now, Helen Davenport had taken an unexpected ride down that bank, and that, no doubt, had further messed-up any plans she'd had. She looked even more pissed-off than she had at the beginning of all this. Plainly, I was the fly she thought she'd be able to swat easily enough, but instead, I had become the wasp that had stung her.

_Poisoned_ her!

She moved both her arms then. Planted her hands in the snow. They sank all the way in up to her elbows. I still couldn't see the gun, though. It had to be in one of her pockets, or maybe she'd dropped it. She began to push herself up on all fours. She was still dazed, though, not fully in the here and now. She shook her head like a dog that had whammed into a tree, but her eyes still stayed firmly on me.

Her face covered in snow, along with my blood, she finally shouted out: 'I got you, didn't I? Oh yes I did indeed! Does it hurt? I fucking hope so! I hope it's slowly killing you, you ugly slut! Shame I didn't get you straight between those pokey little eyes of yours! If I had, I would have pulled down my drawers and taken a hot, steamy piss all over your plug-ugly face! And what's with the headscarf? Trying to hide that repulsive ginger mop of yours, are you? Well, you can't hide ugly, bitch! The only way you wouldn't look ugly is in a box, six-feet under!

'Still, you've got all the tricks, I must say! No wonder you escaped from Pengarrett! And the mitten on the tree? That was a good'un! It certainly blew me off course for a while! No matter! Those are just the tricks of a slippery rum-cove like you! But throwing your voice? Now that was _impressive!_ Clearly prison life taught you more than just how to get yourself a little girl-on-girl action!'

I cupped my hands around my face. 'Do I have to keep repeating myself? I am _not_ Anna Turpin! You shot the wrong woman! You might even end up _killing_ the wrong woman! Can you live with that for the rest of your life? You'll be the one in Pengarrett, then!'

'That won't matter to me! I don't _have_ a life! Haven't since you took away my husband and son!'

'I _didn't_ take them away! Anna Turpin did! Fuck, all I'm doing here is going around in circles! Can't you get it into your thick skull that I am not her?'

Nothing, no response. Old Happy Helen began to heave herself up out of the snow. If I'd known for sure that she'd dropped the gun, I would have gone over there. As a last resort, I would have stuck that short, sharp stick into her. Into one of her legs, perhaps, just to immobilise her ( I still couldn't kill her, in spite of what she'd done to me ). Once she'd been immobilised, I would have searched for the gun myself. It had to be close by, and still visible, even in the ever-thickening snow. The moment I had a hold of it, the situation would be in my control, not in hers. I would tell her to move it, to get inside that rail-workers' hut there. Then she and I would have a good old chat to get this dreadful misunderstanding ironed out. Probably that would fail, though; Helen Davenport's confusion and pain was almost certainly too deep for any chat to iron out.

No matter, though. We'd wait until the storm died down, then I'd call the police, the emergency medical services, too. Either way, this ordeal would be over. But, if the gun was in one of her pockets, then my choice was simple. I needed to get moving again. Which was just what I did; in my view, taking chances is only for those who know the odds are stacked in their favour. At the moment, the odds were still stacked in hers.

_Heavily_ in hers.

Chapter 4: Just A Puppet

I made the right choice. The moment she was up on her feet, she began to dig around in her coat pocket. She was still dazed, though, and looked like a drunk trying to find a door key; she staggered, here and there, and had to replant her feet every time she wobbled off balance.

It gave me time, though. Time to get moving again, given that she wasn't going to listen to me, no matter what. So off I went towards the bank on the other side of the old railway line. I clambered my way up it. Not exactly lithesome, either. My injured leg was stiff, and if I bent it too far, or put too much pressure on it, it came back at me, protesting like mad. It was still a whole lot better, though, and easier, with a leg that no longer bore an exposed hole through which the biting wind had blown, and out of which blood had poured.

I made it to the top of the bank, using my hands as well as my legs, spider-fashion. I began to think that a stick might help, and that I would have to get myself one, once I was out of Helen Davenport's way. Out of her range, too. I stood. Turned around. It would have been impossible to see her in these conditions, had she not been wearing that big orange coat of hers. She was, though, and I thanked my lucky stars for that, when my lucky stars were nothing but cursed stars.

*****

Here she came, heading this way, her head ducked down against the driving snow. She could have fired a shot blindly, aimed approximately in my direction. After all, that's pretty much what she'd done earlier...although, in truth, she'd had the advantage of my shocking red hair to lend a little accuracy to the event. Now that my hair was covered, though, old Happy Helen had been robbed of that plus point.

I wondered right then how a woman like her had even gotten hold of a gun. I doubted she had a license for it. Also, she was mad. Maybe even _clinically_ mad. But if I stuck to just plain old mad ( if there was such a thing ), then I thought there was a high chance she'd been in and out of the mental-heath facilities these past eight years. Quite a lot, too. Probably the main one being the Green Lodge over in Portercross. So the gun just had to be illegal...unless licenses were approved for any old fruitcake these days.

But I was out of my depth. I knew nothing about guns, licenses, or how mentally ill someone needed to be before they were put under lock-and-key. I was just little old Sonia Rowntree, no one special, apart from the fact I had a job that paid the bills, and a daughter who could make me feel special even when I wasn't.

I thought of her, then. I thought of my darling Mitzi, who'd be worried that her grandmother hadn't gotten through to me on my mobile phone. That I was stuck out in this horrible blizzard, too. But thank God she had no idea of what was really going on.

That her mother had been shot.

And was being pursued in the bitter wind and the blinding snow by a lunatic!

*****

She did not fire the gun. Not this time. It seemed that hiding my hair had worked; it had not given her a target to shoot at. So now, with the wound bandaged, I was able to move much faster. My leg still hurt, though. There was a numbness there, too, creeping into it that I didn't much like. It made me think that already my leg was dying, albeit slowly. That eventually, with the blood supply restricted by the tourniquet, my leg would wither and die like a plant without water.

I tried to tell myself that wouldn't happen, that in the severe, disabling cold, my mind was simply wandering. It almost certainly was, too. Still, when you haven't been shot in the leg before, you're apt to think the worst, and my worst thoughts were that, if I got out of this alive, then I might have to spend the rest of my days without my right leg. I liked my right leg, too. Liked it even though the foot on that leg was prone to fungal infections in the summer months, and the kneecap clicked now and again, like the heavy, clunking tick of a grandfather clock.

I did my best not to think about such things, though. Things that might drag me down. I have already mentioned that I have never exactly brimmed with derring-do or even with mild adventure. My idea of recklessness is to wear a dress so short you can almost see my bum-cheeks, drink large amounts of vodka and Red Bull, and dance until my ridiculously high-heels are crippling me. The idea that I might one day be shot in a snowstorm while being chased by a mad, gun-slinging woman never really occurred to me.

Well, it wouldn't...would it?

*****

As I went through the woods, still making tracks that Helen Davenport would be able to follow ( although they'd be harder to detect without my blood to enhance them ), I began to build up a picture of Anna Turpin. She was ugly for one - according to old Happy Helen, at least - and she was a slut, too. Those two opinions were debatable, of course. There was a large helping of animosity on Helen Davenport's part. Naturally there would be because Anna Turpin had killed her husband and son.

However, even the most embittered person will try to stay within the boundaries of actuality, even if it pains them to do so. That Anna Turpin was a killer was an indisputable fact; she had been tried and found guilty of that. Nonetheless, I did not believe for one moment that she was ugly. I came to that conclusion because _I_ am not ugly. My looks might not be to everyone's taste, and Mrs Twee was right, that many times I had brushed off Greg Halpern's kind comments as male bullshit. That probably I hadn't smiled around him as much as I should have might be true, as well.

But I'm the first to admit I have my problems. None of us are perfect, and my insecurities dogged me as much as they must have dogged Greg Halpern. They still do. But ugly? No, I am not ugly. The days when I feel good about myself are few and far between. My eyes are blue but I see no warmth in them. My freckles are like a nasty rash that I want to scrub and disinfect. My teeth are somewhat straggly, although they are bright and clean. My lips are full but my mouth is just a mite too small. I could run myself down a treat when the clouds in my head are low and fat with rain. But I won't because sometimes I see the beautiful me. The woman who is lucky to have such lush, red hair, and a body that can soak up the calories without any visits to the gym. I see what I am, and see what I could be, in some place ahead of me. The outlook can't be all bleak for a woman who can glimpse, on occasions, the lovelier side of herself.

So what's the point I'm making? Well, the point is, I didn't believe Anna Turpin had run down Helen Davenport's husband and son randomly. That she'd had a bad headache that day, the voices were speaking to her again, and so she'd jumped into her car and just mown down any-old-body in the road. What I believed, and completely, was that Anna Turpin had had an affair with Paul Davenport, he'd almost certainly called it off, and she had taken the most awful revenge.

The _ultimate_ revenge.

And that's why Helen Davenport had called me - and was still calling me - an ugly slut. A random killer was not an ugly slut...at least not first and foremost. A random killer was absolutely mad. But a killer who was a spurned ex-lover was undoubtedly an ugly slut. Anna Turpin had slept with old Happy Helen's husband, I was sure of that now, and when things were _that_ personal, the comments became personal, too. Anna Turpin had come between Helen Davenport and her husband not just fatally, but romantically, as well. She had lain down with him.

And had then made sure he'd stayed down.

*****

Back then, Helen Davenport had most likely been half the size she was now, and had no doubt taken much better care of herself. In her case, though, death had not just taken away, it had given, too. It had given her a backside the size of a barn-door, and the predisposition to accuse an innocent person of being her husband and son's killer. Not only that, but she'd gone one step further and had wounded that innocent person.

As I write this, with a sparkling April sunlight pouring into my eyes, I look back over the pages I have written, still not sure if I have conveyed just how horrific my ordeal was that day. I'm sure I don't need to add that at times I almost wet myself and puked up, all in sheer terror, and thought my heart was simply going to burst in my chest.

But there, I've written it, and so I will keep it in. And it's the truth, anyhow! When your life is in grave danger, you don't just scream and clap your hands to your face like they do in the movies. Your body seems to want to get rid of itself before your attacker gets the job done. A kind of suicide, I suppose you might call it, without any consultation with the brain. There were times when I thought my body would just pull the plug on everything inside me, and then finally, it would pull the plug on me.

Still, in spite of that, I kept ploughing onwards.

And I found a stick.

Or maybe the stick found me.

It was there, poking up out of the snow at an angle. About five-feet long, straight as can be. I drew it up, and it came up easily enough, like it was made for me and I for it. Given its length, I was able to grip it with both hands like a staff, and use it to pull myself through the snow whenever it was too deep for me to run through. Or rather march through, in a sort of awkward, high-legged step. I can't say I ever built up enough speed for a run. But I certainly burned the energy, and used the effort, of someone running...although I had no idea just where I was running to. All I'd been doing so far was running _from_. A good idea, initially. Undoubtedly the best idea. However, now I needed to think about where I was running to. If I didn't, my body would begin to flag, that numbness in my leg would turn to total deadness, and old Happy Helen back there would become old _Really_ Happy Helen, as she stood right over me, aiming that gun of hers at my head.

I wondered where she was. Nothing new there. On reflection, thirty per cent of my time that morning had pretty much been spent on just that, on wondering where old Happy Helen was. I spent another thirty per cent on thinking about the cold and the pain. And the final, biggest chunk, the forty per cent, on trying to assess how this would end. When the day finally pulled down the blinds, bolted the doors, and hung the CLOSED sign in the window, would the world's death count include me, or would I still be around when the CLOSED sign in the window was flipped back over to OPEN?

I had no answer to that. But I can tell you this: reducing the outcome to the simple toss of a coin - heads or tails, life or death - would end up becoming nothing but an imaginative shortfall on my part.

I know the world harbours monsters, both those in our minds and those which are real. But Helen Davenport? No, she was not the monster that day. Her role became that of a shepherd driving her lone sheep into a pen into which she would drive herself. She and I, heading straight into the mouth of a _real_ monster whose jaws would bite deep into the hearts of two women who would find that death can come in different ways, and from that death, strange, miraculous shoots can spring and flourish.

*****

The woods here were even more tangled, more complicated, more hazardous. Finding places to pass that weren't clogged with barbed bushes, choked with spiny, scratching limbs, and blocked by fallen, crumbling trees, was becoming more of a challenge than the wind and the snow. My body felt like delicate glass that would crack at the slightest knock. The storm seemed to have found its way into my head, chilling my brain into an icy, stupid lump. Thinking straight had become something I needed to reach for, to stretch for. No longer a function I took for granted.

My perception of time became wonky, too. I stopped. Resting the stick in the crook of an elbow, I cupped a trembling, wind-reddened hand around the face of my wristwatch. 11:30. I took another step forward. Stopped again. Once more cupped my hand around the face of my watch, this time peering closely, my nose almost touching the glass. 11:30. My watch assured me that it was definitely 11:30. Notwithstanding my time in that rail-workers' hut, I had been running away from Helen Davenport for three hours? That couldn't be right. Just couldn't be. I thought it would be 10:00, perhaps 10:30 at a push, but no later; 11:30 seemed like a time which had incorporated the possibility that I'd passed-out for a while somewhere along the way.

Clearly time gets away from a girl when she's having so much wintertime fun!

I suddenly thought that maybe old Happy Helen and I could bury the hatchet and have a snowball fight instead. Now _there_ was an idea guaranteed to have only one supporter. Me! For old Happy Helen to change her mind, her snowballs would have to be bombs that she could pelt me with! And she already had a gun. So I decided right then that all the wintertime fun I'd need would be in trying to stay alive.

That being so, my mind turned back to the problem of not running away but trying to run to...and I was a long way from where I needed to run to.

Too long. The heavy, drifting snowfall showed no signs of thinning out, either, let alone stopping. The sky felt like it was crushing me, it hung so low. The white, tumbling tempest was at times torn apart, and in the transitory let-up, I saw faces, laughing at me. Teasing me that I was a woman in trouble, and what was more, they intended to offer no help to get me out of that trouble.

My head down, my shoulders hunched, I pushed myself into the pummelling wind, using my stick like a paddle. At times I gripped it for dear life during the wind's fiercest moments, when it seemed to want to rip me off the face of the Earth and hurl me out into deep space. The hem of my coat blew open every once in a while, and my legs, bare except for tights, were clamped by frosty, heartless hands. My face felt like it was being stripped of its flesh. My feet slogged tiredly. The hole in my thigh wanted all of my attention, _pleaded_ for it, but I turned away from it, knowing that if I gave it that attention, it would take it all and leave nothing to spare.

I found myself traipsing up slopes where the snow was either knee-deep, or suddenly, it would be ankle-deep, but the ground underneath would fall away dangerously, and if I didn't mind my step, I'd find myself tipping over into sharp, jumbled undergrowth. Then, all at once, I'd be heading downhill, the impetus pulling me along too fast for my injured leg to catch up with. To counter this, I would drive my stick into the snow, at an angle, like a brake. It did the trick, but all of this work, this _arduous_ work, was sapping my strength when altogether I was low on that, anyway.

I was still moving fast enough, though, even jogging in the places that would allow me to. Those places occurred more often than you'd think, but still not enough for me to feel I was putting ample space between me and old Happy Helen back there.

So I turned to that compass in my head, centred on it, allowed it to fall upon the spots in my mind where I believed habitation would be. This was not the middle of nowhere - that was true - but it was not exactly the middle of _somewhere_ , either. There were towns nearby, but nearby on a clear, warm day is a lot more nearby than it is on a day when you can't see much further than the tip of your outstretched arm.

Nonetheless, the closest town was Unity Gate, of that I was sure. Although, come to think of it, that was not strictly true. The closet town was White Mist, where my mother lived. Trouble was, I'd have to double back, and then head in a north-easterly direction. Old Happy Helen was coming at me from the north-west. Chances were, we wouldn't meet. However, I was not prepared to take that chance. Taking a chance, I thought, was for those who knew, one-hundred per cent, that chance could not be tricked by fate.

So for me the closest town was Unity Gate. My inner, and my most reliable compass, told me that Unity Gate was in a south-easterly direction and roughly three miles away, a distance that was doable even in my less-than-healthy state. To reach that town, all I needed was to simply keep on going. Sooner or later I'd come across a road. It would be snowed-under, of course, with all traffic at a standstill. Even four-by-fours would be struggling by now. But a road was a road, not an old railway line that led into an abandoned military barracks. There'd be life around. There'd be life around even before I reached the outskirts of Unity Gate. If I could get inside a house, _any_ house, then my chances of survival would increase, and a hundred-fold; in a built-up area, footprints would overlay footprints, and that would leave old Happy Helen up a gum-tree. She'd wander around, perplexed, with her hand in her pocket, wrapped around the butt of her gun, knowing her chances of pulling out that gun and finally nailing Anna Turpin were fading by the second. There'd be no solace, either - let alone any triumph - in going to the main police-station in Unity Gate. The cops had not believed her before that she'd seen Anna Turpin. No reason to think they'd believe her this time around. And she'd shot Anna Turpin in the leg, hadn't she? If she disclosed _that_ to the police, she'd be in deep shit!

The only one who'd be arrested would be old Happy Helen herself!

Still, my mind was racing ahead of me, and furthermore, I was imagining an outcome that was nothing but a daydream. Right now, I was up to my tits - or rather my no-tits - in snow. The woods around me were a sleekit, chilling trap waiting to gobble me up. The wind blew in and around my makeshift headscarf, turning it into a windsock that puffed out behind me. My left hand, clutching the stick, blazed with the cold. My right, meanwhile, was fairly snug and warm, stuck as it was up Mrs Twee's backside. Really nothing but a woolly mitten, and yet, as strange as this must sound, the old girl was a comfort to me, despite the fact she only existed as part of me.

_Was_ me!

But then, as the ground began to rise again, forcing me into yet another difficult climb, I turned my head around to glance behind me. To check out if I could glimpse that big orange coat of Helen Davenport's sailing towards me.

But my head stopped in mid-turn. Mrs Twee was all of a sudden staring me in the face. My mittened hand began to open and close. 'You keep on moving, honey-bunch!' She shouted above the yawl of the wind. 'I'll keep an eye on what's happening behind you!'

I was drained from the pain, the cold, and my limbs ached from doing a kind of run-walk that the snow reduced to a crawl at times. I'd lost a lot of blood, too. I may already have hit a wall of delirium I was not aware of, even though I mostly felt okay. I struggled, every now and then, to make a trustworthy connection with my brain, but I guessed that was normal under the circumstances. Perfectly normal; the cold paralyses, the galling, non-stop fall of the snow disorientates. No wonder some of those explorers of old went mad before the snow took them and then buried them.

However, if I _was_ going mad, then I thought it better to die with someone than alone with no one, even if that someone was nothing but a talking mitten. Nonetheless, I gave Mrs Twee a ratty look. 'What's happening here, Mrs Twee? You're me, not you! You're just a puppet! You don't have a mind of your own! You have _my_ mind!'

Momentarily, Mrs Twee lowered her head, as if upset. Humiliated. Put in her place. Then she sprang back up again, and two large snowflakes, I saw, were suddenly stuck to the mitten in the place where eyes would be, the way someone might sew two white buttons there to give the impression of eyes. I gasped. I laughed. Mrs Twee laughed, too. She yelled out: 'Can we talk about this some other time, darling? Right now, I need to be the eyes in the back of your head, just in case Helen Davenport should suddenly appear! Are you all right with that?'

'I suppose so!' I said.

Right then Mrs Twee spun around so that she was looking over my right shoulder. Sitting there like a periscope. I thought it would be impossible to walk this way, given how nigh-on impossible it was to walk, anyhow. Yet somehow I found myself making headway, and acceptable headway, at that. I moved up the steep incline before me at a good, steady pace, digging my stick into the snow with my left hand whenever I needed assistance. Once at the top, puffing and panting, my breath clouding around me, I consulted with Mrs Twee. 'Can you see anything back there?'

'Nothing!' Mrs Twee answered in that newfound loud voice of hers which I still found hard to adjust to. 'But she's out there somewhere, Sonia! I can sense her, still hot on your tail!'

'I agree!' I said. 'That woman is not going to give up! I need to find a road that leads into Unity Gate! Now that I've stopped the flow of blood, I think I can make it there! I think _we_ can make it there! After all, we're a team, aren't we?'

'We are!' Mrs Twee said, delighted that I had included her. 'And we're a _formidable_ team, at that! All the same, honey-bunch, I'd be careful if I were you! I'm beginning to get the feeling that Helen Davenport isn't our only enemy out here! In fact, she might become just as much of a victim as you, the way I see it! The way I _feel_ it!'

'You're not making sense!' I said. 'Are you saying we've got company? _Bad_ company? Don't tell me that! I've got enough bad company on my plate already!'

'I know you have!' Mrs Twee said. 'I'm not trying to add to that, either, just to unsettle you! However, the truth is, I knew all along that Greg Halpern would leave you! I knew he was seeing Daisy Hemmings behind your back, and way before you did! But I couldn't tell you because you and I are rarely alone! Usually Mitzi is there!'

'Thanks for telling me that after the horse has bolted! What else do you know? That he fucked her big, fat arse in my bed while I was at work, earning a crust?'

'No, he didn't do that! And don't take umbrage, Sonia! All I'm saying is that I know things! You remember when Mitzi was three, she somehow got her neck tangled in the bed-sheets, turned over a couple of times, but that only helped to tighten the stranglehold? You remember how you heard a bang on the ceiling downstairs, you thought Mitzi had tumbled out of bed, and so you ran up to her room, only to find that she hadn't tumbled out of bed? That in fact she was being strangled?'

'Yes, I remember!' I said, shuddering at the memory of that. 'So what are you saying, that it was you who alerted me?'

'Yes!' Mrs Twee said. 'I fell off the shelf above Mitzi's bed! _Deliberately_ fell off! You didn't know that because I hit the floor, and then bounced under her bed. It was Mitzi who found me in the morning, and put me back in place!'

'My God!' I said. 'Am I going mad here? I'm talking to myself, and yet I'm _not_ talking to myself! Christ, Mrs Twee, I don't need this head-fucking shit at the moment!'

'I'm sure you don't! But I'm here to help, Sonia! I'm here to help you out of this mess you wouldn't be in, if you hadn't gotten into your car this morning! Use that help, too! If you don't, you might regret it!'

I inhaled a large, and shaky, gulp of freezing-cold air. 'Don't you _dare_ try to bend my arm up my back! All of a sudden you're talking about another enemy being out here in this blizzard! Then there's Mitzi's life you apparently saved when she was three! Then we have Greg Halpern's affair with Daisy-Fat-Arse-Hemmings! You're talking about things that I just don't want to hear while I'm trying to get the hell out of this shit I'm in!'

'I know, and I'm sorry about that! But all I'm trying to do is convince you there are things in this world that can't always be explained! You're not going mad, Sonia! Does that matter, though, given that your life comes first? That it _must_ come first? Surely, under the circumstances, it's better to simply accept that I'm here, and that I can help? What happens afterwards is entirely up to you! So let's be a team, can we? Let's beat this despicable situation together? After all, two birds in the bush are better than a bird in the hand!'

I laughed, sucking in great, chilly flakes of snow that melted on my tongue. 'God, but you got _that_ around the wrong way, Mrs Twee! You're not the font of wisdom you think you are! Still, the fact we're in a whole heap of trouble probably means that two birds in the bush are indeed better than a bird in the hand! I don't know why that sounds right...but it does! Somehow!'

*****

I ran, I ran, I ran. I ran when it was out of the question to run. My legs high-stepping, wading, blundering, I ran when I could so easily have bashed into a tree and knocked myself out. Or simply have fallen down, whack, in the snow. I didn't. Even with my stiff, sore leg, I somehow covered an amount of ground others would have seen as highly unlikely, especially when you united all that to the strength of the wind and the evil, sideways blast of the snow.

With Mrs Twee watching my back, I was able to devote all of my energy to moving forward. The hem of my coat was wet, but even that, along with the weight of snow that clung to me all over, did not slow me down. I somehow found another, faster gear, and used it to full effect. Sometimes I had to swing my right leg in a semi-circle whenever the snow became too deep for me to push it through. But I couldn't afford to put too much pressure on it, or bend it in an awkward way that would ignite fresh blasts of agony in my thigh.

I looked into the storm, _peered_ into it, my eyes squeezed together, my lids caked in snow. Looked and hoped that at some point soon a figure would appear before me. The figure of a big, brawny male, preferably dressed in a policeman's uniform. He'd sweep me up into his arms, gently brush the snow off my face, and say, _It's okay, Miss Rowntree, you're safe now. We found yours and Mrs Davenport's cars. We noted signs of a struggle. Some of the men went up into Haycott Wood and found blood. They radioed back. We managed to get a vehicle over to this side of the wood. Damn difficult - the roads are choked with trapped vehicles, slewed this way and that - but thankfully we got through. We got another call a moment ago. You'll be relieved to hear that Mrs Davenport has been apprehended...although, truth to tell, shots were fired. One of our men has been wounded, I believe. If that's the case, then Mrs Davenport is in a whole heap of trouble!_

But, I kept on running...and no policeman appeared. What appeared, whenever there was a temporary lull in this wicked weather, were those heckling faces again, laughing at me and at the terrible dilemma I'd gotten myself into. Reminding me there was no help. Just me. All alone.

Apart from a woolly mitten that brought me a strange and welcome comfort.

A woolly mitten that also made me begin to doubt my own sanity.

Chapter 5: Red Telephone-Box

I suddenly saw red...down below me.

Not blood, though, thank God. Not my leg issuing a fresh spout.

I reached the rim of a ledge which was rocky and split with crooked, thrusting trees. I held onto one of these trees, first to stop myself from running straight off the ledge, and two, my legs were all but useless. No strength left in them. I clung to that tree, breathing fast, in-out, in-out, in-out, like a small, frightened animal. My eyes felt as if they'd shrunk and no longer fit their sockets. My chest was so tight, my heart began to drum nervously against it.

I stood there with my arms wrapped around that tree, hugging it like a lover. I looked up and saw a squirrels' drey, and outside it, one of the squirrel's whose home it was, its eyes squinched against the wind-driven snow. I realised I was stopping the poor, snow-dusted mite from descending down the tree to search for food, or to seek out its concealed stores.

I looked back down below me. Through the constant, brutal sweep of the snow, I glimpsed a car, and beyond that, what looked like an old telephone box.

I was sure right then that I was dreaming while awake. That would account, too, for the conversations I'd had with Mrs Twee.

They had never taken place.

Just part of a waking dream.

Nonetheless, after resting for the shortest of moments, I went down a slope that was shallow enough not to trick me and yank me down on my bony excuse for a backside. My stick as support was a godsend. Mrs Twee as support was silent.

The car was there.

The old telephone box, too.

Both red.

My scarf had tipped back a little. I pulled it to the front, re-tied it, then went over to the car. As you'd expect, snow covered eighty-per cent of it. A thick duvet lay over the bonnet, the roof, the boot. A deep valance was ruffled around it. A thin sheet clung to its windows. Using my mittened hand ( the two snowflakes which had formed Mrs Twee's eyes were now gone, melted ), I wiped a window and gazed into the car. I'm sure I'm not alone in having an imagination that can get away from you, but given the situation, it was no surprise that I expected to see frozen occupants in there.

Icy eyes staring out at me.

The car was empty, though. Of course it was. I went to try a door-handle, then decided not to; the last thing I needed was an alarm going off that would give away my location to my hunter, the one and only mad gunslinger, Helen Davenport. She already had my footprints and my stick-prints to follow. I didn't need to switch on a neon arrow, as well.

I looked up the road, which was really nothing but a slim, country lane flanked by woods. I saw footprints, three sets, all adult. They tentatively overlapped one another around the car, then finally, decisively, they went off towards what had to be Unity Gate, before eventually fading into the storm.

I could see an old, bullnose truck across the road, loaded with timber. Its offside wheels had become stuck in the ditch alongside the road, and now the truck was leaning heavily to one side. Behind the red car, on the faintest, blurred edges of my vision, I could see the front grille, the headlights, and the bumper of another vehicle, once again abandoned.

I peeped at my watch, yet again needing to cup a hand around it. 12:45. It was not yet lunchtime, there was still plenty of daytime left. I wondered how the landscape would look by teatime if this continued. Like the Antarctic, I thought. The forecast had been for snow all right. But this? No, not this. How had _this_ gotten passed all those meteorologists with their fancy-dan equipment? I felt like someone who had tumbled far back in time, and the chances were, I'd see a woolly mammoth lumbering towards me before I saw another vehicle gliding freely along.

I stood there, uncertain. Three miles to Unity Gate. Horrified at the way the snow was deepening at such a fast rate, I wondered if I wanted to walk that far, out in the open, with the chance that old Happy Helen might just come bursting out of the woods and shoot me dead in the middle of the road.

I was wasting time, a lot of time. I looked at the telephone box, knowing already what I had in mind. Knowing, too, that what I had in mind appealed to a kind-hearted woman who believed that anything could be resolved by talking, and knowing, further still, that it was unlikely to work on a woman who just wanted to kill and probably ask no questions later.

But I _was_ a kind-hearted woman who even then, maimed and in a huge amount of pain, only wanted to reach out to old Happy Helen and make things better somehow. Or at least bearable enough so that killing me no longer seemed like a priority to her.

I went around the red car. Stick in hand, I swung my way over to the telephone box, whose roof wore a thick, snow hat. There were footprints here, too, although my mind was almost exclusively on the phone - that it wouldn't work. I thought for some reason that the red, vintage box was just a mock-up, a reminder of a bygone age that ought to be in a museum somewhere, but was, somewhat strangely, sitting on the edge of an unexceptional stretch of narrow Hampshire lane.

I opened the door. Went inside. Placed my stick against one of the box's sides. Mrs Twee did not bob up to ask what I was doing. I found the loose change in my coat pocket with fingers as dead as cigar stubs. Fumbled it out onto the metal shelf that was there beside the phone. Two-pounds-sixty. Enough, surely, to pay for at least ten minutes' worth of conversation with the nuttiest, and the most deadliest, woman who was still allowed to walk where she wanted without handcuffs and ankle-chains.

It smelled of stale cigarette smoke in here, and of teenage heat, the kind that is all unsophisticated gropes, and wet messy kisses, and purple love-bites, and dirty carefree laughter. That solid gold easy action that means nothing then, but means everything when the world has chewed too many times on your funny bone and life is slowly fading to grey. I suddenly felt old thinking that way. Old when I wasn't old. Still, what with Greg Halpern's sudden exit, and now, a bullet in my leg, old seemed good compared to death snapping at my heels.

I pumped the two-pounds-sixty into the slot and picked up the phone. If I'd wanted to call any other number but my own, I couldn't have done it. Nowadays, numbers are committed to a mobile phone's contact list, and then forgotten; you click on a name, not a number. Even my mother uses her mobile phone all the time. She only keeps the landline open because her broadband runs through it.

I dialled my number; I knew that one by heart at least. The chances of Helen Davenport answering, though, were probably slender because despite the fact the ringtone was set to on - as was the vibration mode - what the hell would she hear, or feel, out in these dire conditions? My only hope was that she would be regularly checking my phone. I thought there was some chance of that, too - she'd want to know how concerned my family, friends, and work colleagues would be. More precisely, how close someone might be to calling the police. My mother was in the driving seat for that one, of course, and knowing her, she'd almost certainly made that call already. Would have made it even though the police would have told her they could do little at the moment, that they simply had to sit this out just like the rest of us. _But not to worry, Mrs Rowntree, your daughter's probably fine. Her phone likely conked out, and she's sitting in some farmer's barn right now, waiting for this storm to clear, as we all are_.

Yep, the call would have roughly gone along those lines, I thought. So it seemed Helen Davenport had little to worry about. A case of everyone being in the same boat. Even if she'd replied to one of my calls or texts, and openly admitted she was not me but someone else who was going to put me in an early grave, no one would have been able to do anything, anyhow. We were all in the grip of a Snow Monster.

And a big bad Snow Monster, at that!

I wondered, though. I wondered what Helen Davenport would make of all those calls and texts. I would have received many, too, of that, I had no doubt. Work colleagues such as Sarah Locke, Amy Taylor, Kerry Bleasdale, Emily Saunders, and Daphne Robertson, all of them wanting to know if I'd stayed at home or been daft enough to try and get into work.

Then there was my best friend, Ellie Gladstone. That girl would have sent a dozen texts by now, and made just as many calls. It would be driving her mad that I hadn't responded to either of those forms of contact; she knew I was generally prompt, apart from the times when I was giving Mitzi a bath, then Ellie would have to wait. And where am I going with this, anyway? Well, it's obvious, really. Would Anna Turpin, an escaped convict, have this many people - _friends_ is what I mean - trying to get in touch with her? No, of course she wouldn't. The less people that woman knew the better. So why was it that Helen Davenport couldn't see that? Surely the penny should have dropped by now, after my phone had take that many hits?

But of course old Happy Helen was not thinking straight. Had clearly not been thinking straight since the death of her husband and son. Eight years' worth of pain would have put a lot of kinks in her brain, and some of those kinks would not be kinks, or even bends, but knots so complicated, it would likely take a further eight years to untie them. And for what she'd done to me, she was going to jail, anyway, the length of sentence determined by whether I survived or ended up dead.

Most certainly, though, it would not be jail as such, but the secure wing of some mental facility. That's where people like Helen Davenport were sent, to those places where the brain was switched off like a light that could no longer illuminate the darkest corners of their minds. And the bars in the windows and the locks on the doors didn't matter so much. You couldn't even escape from your own hazy, heavily-medicated mind, let alone out into the big wide world.

*****

My phone began to ring when I thought it wouldn't. I imagined it ringing in some Alaskan ice-station back in 1957, and a guy named Hank, or maybe Chuck, would pick up and ask if the Russians had started bombing the world yet. That's how absurd all of this was becoming in my mind. At the end of this, I could also write that I returned to the site of the telephone box and say that it wasn't there, that according to the locals, it had _never_ been there! Why not? It would make more sense than this did! Here I was, calling my own phone number because some mad bird had seized my phone, she had shot me in the leg believing I was the murderer, Anna Turpin, and fuck it, my life was in the kind of danger that previously I'd only seen in movies and read about in books! I certainly didn't need any more proof that life could pick you up, on a whim, and throw you down the darkest alley.

Right then, a blast of wind so shockingly powerful hit the old telephone-box, and I swear it rocked a little to one side, even though it was made of cast-iron and was bolted to deep concrete. The door was sucked open a few inches, and then _wham!_ it smacked back against the jamb so hard that I thought two or three panes of the narrow glass in the door would shatter. They didn't. But my nerves were shattered, all right, and I screamed with a hand up to my throat.

I was still screaming when Helen Davenport answered my phone.

'Hello, who's this? Whoever you are, you don't need to _scream_ , for Christ's sake! Turn down the volume, eh?'

I couldn't say anything. All of a sudden my throat just locked-up. I gathered that old Happy Helen had answered my phone only because the number had come up as "unknown", whereas all the others would have come up with a name. Old Happy Helen wouldn't need names - names would ask questions, awkward questions. Questions like: _Who are you? Where's Sonia?_ And: _Hello, is that you, Sonia? You don't_ sound _like Sonia._

So I was in luck. Calling from an unfamiliar number had obviously pressed all of Helen Davenport's curiosity buttons. Now here she was, available to talk, and I could hear her, too, even though the Snow Monster was doing all it could to drown her out.

Nevertheless, if I didn't say something soon, she'd hit the "end" button, and my chance would be gone. So I forced an 'uh' out of my throat, then followed it up with a string of words so faint, they made me sound weak and apologetic. 'Oh, hello, Helen. It's Sonia Rowntree here - '

'Who the _fuck's_ Sonia Rowntree?' she barked right back at me. 'Never heard of her! Unless you're Anna Turpin playing silly games again! If you are, then at least have the decency to be her and not someone else you made up!'

'Okay,' I said, immediately, and my voice found a little more strength. A _lot_ more strength, in fact. 'If that's the way you want it, then fine! I'm Anna Turpin! Yes, it's me, the woman who's made your life a misery these past eight years! So let's talk about that, shall we? Let's get a few things off our chests before you finally catch up with me and shoot me dead!'

'You're damn right I'm going to shoot you dead! I'm going to shoot you dead, then empty every last bullet in your ugly, freckly phiz! So, yeah, we can talk! Why not? Call it your final testimony, your final sick and twisted testimony! Because that's all it'll be! The chances of you mouthing anything that'll even come _close_ to shame will be remote, I'm sure! Still, get talking, Anna Turpin! You'd better! I'm hot on your trail and hopefully just ten minutes behind you!'

'All right, then!' I said, covering an ear so I could hear, and speak, more clearly. The wind went on screeching, and great handfuls of snow were flung against the telephone box, splattering there. 'First of all, you said you saw me in my car six months ago, and again two months ago! Well, I'm fine with two months ago... but six? No, there's just no _way_ you saw me six months ago! I only bought that car four months ago! So what do you say to that, eh?'

'That you're lying! That's what I'm saying to that! Anyhow, what does it matter? You're Anna Turpin! Doesn't mean a thing if I said I saw you buck-naked in a horse-and-buggy, does it? You're still the ginger bitch who killed my husband and son!'

I wanted to say, _But I'm not the ginger bitch who killed your husband and son!_

If I did say that, though, she would hang up, and that would be that. She'd press the"end" button, and if I called again, she wouldn't answer. And I needed her on the line. She wouldn't listen, at least not enough to understand that I wasn't Anna Turpin, but all the time we were talking, so the more chance I had of upsetting her. She had a broken mind, and my claims of innocence had so far fallen on deaf ears. They'd continue to fall on deaf ears, too, of that I was sure.

But...I could rattle her up. I'd already rattled her up by knocking the wind out of her. She'd been further rattled up by that tumble she'd taken back at the rail-workers' hut, and what was more, her face had gotten smeared with my blood, with Anna Turpin's blood! If I could keep turning the screw, then she'd snap, I was certain - this was a woman who was suffering. For me, it was a case of trying to draw out that suffering, and then use it. Use it as a stick to beat her with.

No more Mrs Nice Guy.

It was time to get as lowdown and dirty as old Happy Helen.

*****

I said, 'You know what, you fat bitch? I'm glad I killed your husband and son! Your son would have ended up as sour-faced as you! And your husband? Well, he was no kind of fuck! I'd have gotten more pleasure from a fly flapping its wings against me!'

Silence. From Helen Davenport, anyhow. But the wind went on roaring, both at this end, and at Helen Davenport's.

I heard her scream then. Not into the phone. She must have put her hand over it, maybe even lowered it to her side. I could still hear that scream, though. Even then, I could _easily_ hear it, the kind of scream that was laced with deep-rooted pain and anger.

I felt bad for her, terribly bad. I had never spoken to someone like that in my life! But any thoughts I had of getting out of this alive by being my usual decent self had completely fallen by the wayside. This was a fight. A dirty fight. And at the moment, it was a dirty, unbalanced fight. It was Helen Davenport who had the gun. She had a phone, too. _Two_ phones, most likely: mine and hers. Furthermore, I was injured and she was not. To have any hope, I needed to rattle her up so severely that she'd begin to make mistakes.

'What's up, pissy knickers?' I said. 'Tongue-tied all of a sudden?'

I heard a loud sucking sound at her end, and I thought it was the wind. It wasn't. It was old Happy Helen drawing in a huge, outraged breath. _'How fucking_ dare _you! My son was the loveliest, sweetest boy in the world! He was happy, too, until you came along and mowed him down like an innocent little flower!'_

'And your husband?' I said, pushing hard. 'How about him, the loser that he was? You think _he_ was happy? Couldn't have been! Not with a big old saggy sack like you!'

That loud sucking sound again, but fiercer, and, I thought, with a faint chesty wheeze to it. 'Of course he was happy!' she said. 'He soon gave _you_ up as a waste of time, didn't he? That man, he got down on his _knees_ to beg for my forgiveness! And I forgave him! I forgave him for the sake of little Elliot, and because I knew he'd been taken for a ride! Easy meat, wasn't he, for someone like you? Someone with previous convictions?'

'Oh, do fucking _tell!'_ I said, cackling the way I thought Anna Turpin would. 'You know it'll make a slut like me as moist and warm as a bath-time flannel!'

'Oh God but you're so fucking _sick!'_ Helen Davenport snapped straight back at me. 'Even though you've been shot in the leg, and you're not exactly dressed for these conditions, you're still the same brazen harlot! Male or female, it doesn't matter to you! You just take what you want and leave a trail of suffering behind you! Well, I'm here to put an end to that, you bag of ginger shit! Your days of blackmailing are over!'

'Oh, I don't think so!' I said. 'Since I broke out of Pengarrett, I've done very well for myself! After all, you saw my car, didn't you, the handsomely refurbished Lancia? Hardly the transport of someone on the bones of their arse now, is it?'

'Well, pretty soon that's all you'll be, just the bones of your arse, by the time I've finished with you! Can you hear me coming for you, Anna? Can you hear the sound of your own approaching death?'

'No, I can't!' I said. 'All I can hear is some fat old stinky pig snorting her way through the snow like she's about to have a massive heart attack! How's it going, snort, snort? Go on, little pig! Keep dragging that sorry pork-and-bacon backside of yours! Like a fucking plough back there, isn't it, making furrows in the snow behind you?'

No answer, not this time. Up until now, I'd heard her walking and talking at the same time. But now she stopped. I could hear her chest. The faint wheezing was now a deep, gravelly sound with a thick, liquid undercurrent. She coughed to clear her throat, and then began to pant like an old, knackered dog. I could hear that, and plainly, in spite of the raucous wind at this end as well as hers. Once again I felt bad for her. She was just a rusty shell not being driven by a healthy engine but by stubborn, obsessive need. She made me think of something falling apart, of something _dying_ , but somehow it just kept on coming.

Finally, and in calm, reasonable tones ( although she still had to shout to be heard above the storm), she said, 'You know something, Anna? A man's weak-spots can be his undoing, but they can also be the places from which true love springs and then grows! If I'm honest, I don't think I was my husband's dream girl! I wasn't back then - even though I was much slimmer in those days - and I certainly wouldn't be his dream girl now! But I won him over, that's what I did! And after his affair with you - which, let's face it, was just a couple of cheap shags in the back-room of his shop in Upperlands \- his weak-spot became a place of regret that I was able to take advantage of! In a nice way, of course! I would never have hurt him! I just knew that I could turn that place of regret into a place of love! Love for me! And it worked! I saw it in his eyes, and felt it in the way he kissed me! You'll never know that, Anna! I'm sure there have always been men who've wanted to fuck you, and if they didn't, then you always made sure they did! But love? Oh no! You have never known love, not even the kind of love that came in through the backdoor instead of the front, the way it came to me! The only love you've ever known is the love you had for your sister! But you even killed _that_ , didn't you? You took Mary on that horse of yours, but the horse tripped, and she fell off and broke her neck! That's why you're the cold-hearted cow you are now! But no matter! Soon I'll be with you, and thank God, we'll be able to end the pain at your end! At my end, too!'

'Ooo, is that so?' I said, as another harsh gust of wind slammed into the telephone-box. 'Well, we'll see about that, won't we? And my sister, Mary? Don't think I lie awake thinking about that poor soul because I don't! Accidents happen all the time, just the way that murder happens all the time! You ought to know that better than anyone!'

Helen Davenport gasped. 'But during the court case your lawyer made a big deal out of how you'd been affected by your sister's death! You know, the guilt that haunted you?'

I laughed, once more cackling, Anna Turpin style. 'Christ, you didn't believe that old hogwash, did you? I was fighting for my _freedom_ , you silly mare! Lawyers are nothing but actors out to convince an audience! Fuck, and you had the cheek to call _me_ a total thicky!'

I heard her beginning to trudge through the snow again. 'Oh, but I am so going to rip you apart when I get hold of you! How my husband put himself anywhere near you is a mystery to me! He must have been - '

'Oh, but he did! And he loved it! He rode me hell-for-leather, that man, in the back of that cheap old crappy shop of his!'

'It was no cheap old crappy shop, and you know it!' she squawked. 'He sold the best outdoor clothing in Hampshire! That's why you went in there, because you knew my husband had money! That he wasn't some rag-and-bone merchant down on his luck! You went in there to try on some waterproofs, and came out of the dressing-room wearing nothing but that brainless grin of yours!'

'Brainless?' I asked. 'Are you talking about the same woman who's bled dozens of men bone-dry over the years? I wouldn't call that brainless, would you? The only brainless thing I did was fall in love with that dozy husband of yours!'

'What? Well, _that_ never came up in court! You ran him down because he wouldn't pay up! No one said anything about love!'

'Oh come on!' I said. 'Did you really think I ran him down for the sake of a few-thousand quid? I loved him, and he loved me! But he told me he could never leave you because of his son! He loved that boy! But he didn't love you! He said you had cold, clammy arms, and smelled of fish!'

I was heading out into territory that was all guesswork and full of traps I could so easily fall in. But old Happy Helen had been cut to ribbons these past eight years, flayed open, in truth, so that she was really nothing but a weeping wound that could be infected by anything. I had absolutely no doubt she had forgotten many of the facts, and replaced them with her own skew-whiff memories. And I was gathering ammunition the whole time, was I not? Building a picture, too. The shop which I now knew had sold outdoor clothing. The fact that Anna Turpin went in there to try on some waterproofs. Then we had the confession that Paul Davenport only really began to show old Happy Helen some devotion after his affair with Anna Turpin. Helen Davenport's insecurities had been there long before Anna Turpin came along, so for me to say her husband didn't love her because of her cold, clammy arms, along with her smelling of fish, would be more than just plausible.

It would be _awfully_ plausible.

'He said that? He told you he didn't love me due to my cold, clammy arms and that I smelled of fish?' She began to cry then, and suddenly, without warning, she released great pain-wracked sobs that made me feel ashamed to the core. All at once _I_ felt like the hunter, not the hunted. Felt like I _deserved_ to be out here in the freezing cold with a bullet-wound in my leg.

Still, I had no choice. Beneath the heartache, the _understandable_ heartache, Helen Davenport was terribly ill and needed help. Long-term help. What I wanted was to put my arms around her and tell her I was a hurt woman, too. That I knew the pain of giving love, only for it to be thrown back in my face. Still...we were too far down the line for that. I needed to fuck her over...and never mind love.

Love doesn't come into it when someone wants you dead in the road.

*****

'Oh yeah!' I said, about to turn the screw deeper. 'The cold, clammy arms, the fishy smell, and the fact you were a lousy fuck, of course! We mustn't forget _that!'_

She let out another agonising cry, and I could picture the tears splashing down her chubby face, mixing with my blood that was no doubt still there. The blood she had skidded through, face-down, back at that railway cutting. The wind would be beating at her cracked, neglected skin, and the string ties of her hat would be swinging this way and that. My phone would be up to her ear, held there by a warm, gloved hand that nonetheless would still be shaking, not with the cold but with rage. By the time she came gunning for me in earnest again, my hope was that she'd be so distracted, she'd make enough mistakes to send herself off in the wrong direction.

That was the plan I'd had in mind when I entered the telephone-box, after seeing all those footprints. But it had been a secondary plan even then. The primary plan had been to try and talk old Happy Helen out of this madness, enough to at least dissuade her from popping a fatal slug in me.

However, plans change like the wind. The conversation had not gone my way because, just a short way into it, and it had been clear that Helen Davenport was never going to accept the reality that I was Sonia Rowntree. In her mind I was Anna Turpin, through and through. The stringy body, the long red hair, the freckles, and the mean little pointy features. I was her, all right.

I turned the screw again, even deeper. 'Are you still there, snort, snort? Or are you busy snapping the icicles off your droopy old tits?'

When she finally spoke, she laughed, but there was no mirth it. Just one of those short, cynical laughs that barely masked the sheer disbelief that had now filled her up to boiling point. 'Oh, but we are _done_ here, Anna Turpin! You made me cry when I've spent too long crying, anyway! Enjoy the snow, why don't you! Enjoy it like the Christmases you never got to share with your sister past the age of eighteen! I'm coming for you, Anna! And so help me, _I'm going to fuck that scrawny little arse of yours!'_

But I didn't bite on any of that. Instead, in a steady voice that still needed to be loud, throat-achingly loud, to be heard above the wail of the wind, I said, 'How many, Helen?'

And she said, 'What?'

And I said, 'How many times?'

And she said, 'How many times what?'

And I said, 'How many times have you seen me? At a bus-stop, perhaps, in Barford Green? Or shopping at the Wakefield Centre down in Drake's Common? Or on the ferry across Boaters Pond? Or getting off a train in Wentworth? Or at the races in Battenford? How many times, eh, Helen?'

'I...I...I...'

'Ay-Ay-Ay-Ay Moosey?' I taunted. 'That's a song from the eighties, isn't it? And a pretty shit song, at that! So how many times?'

'I...I...I've seen you... _twice_ , that's all! The third time would be today!'

'Liar! You see me everywhere! Ay-Ay-Ay-Ay Moosey, Helen! That's the sound inside your piggy, snort, snort brain!'

'Don't talk to me like that! I don't like it!'

'Or maybe you saw me sunbathing nude on the beach at Settle Cove! Or having a picnic on the downs above White Mist! Or being fucked by a big farmhand behind a barn in Rosewater!'

'I told you, don't talk to me like that, I don't like it!'

'And I don't like being shot by a mad woman who thinks I'm someone I'm not!'

'Stop it! You're making me feel dizzy?'

'And you're making me feel, and act, like a woman...' I looked down at the phone's small, oblong display, and saw that my money was running out. Just thirty pence to go.

'Like a woman who's a murdering, ginger bitch?' Helen Davenport finished. Her voice was tear-clotted. I could hear her chest going up and down. 'Where are you, anyway? In a house you broke into? Or maybe a telephone-box?'

My right hand suddenly flew away from me, and I had to grab the phone, switch it to my left hand, and henceforth, hold it to my left ear. Mrs Twee was all at once back in attendance. She flung herself against a frosty-cold pane of glass in front of me ( my mittened hand was now pressed helplessly against it ), and there she was, looking out at the red car and at the bank out of which grew those crooked, thrusting trees. 'She's coming, honey-bunch! You haven't got long, you haven't got long at all!'

'Who's coming?' Helen Davenport enquired.

'Two birds in the bush!' I said, and for no reason I understood. I grabbed my stick. I let the phone fall out of my hand. It clattered against the phone's housing, then swung there on its cord, back and forth.

I went outside.

As did Mrs Twee.

Chapter 6: Alarm

When I was small, my grandfather read to me out of a book that seemed outlandishly grown-up, just full of words that ran through my mind, and soon dropped out of it, undigested. Apart from one line, which went something like this: "Give man the earth, old and tired, and save the snow for children who know the joy of footprints that melt and leave no sorrow."

Now that I'm a woman, my interpretation is that children know how to live - the brevity of life is of no consequence to them, no more than a melted footprint - and that grown-ups only wait, old and tired, for life to end. Children are here and now. Grown-ups are yesterday and gone. It doesn't have to be that way, of course. I think the past is a curse to us grown-ups, and the future always seems closer to death than any long, bright stretch of time. The grown-up mind has deeper, darker places in which to fall, while the child's mind is pitted with the occasional pothole that can trip but rarely swallow.

It doesn't matter, though, either way. What matters is how we value the here and now, how little we pay to a past that has gone, and what we devote to a future that hasn't yet happened. It's simple, really, as concepts go...and yet, it is just so _hard!_ Snow is as good a metaphor as any to illustrate the brevity of life. But death is the unequivocal champion. I faced both that day. And both made me yearn for the past and the future in equal, depressing measure.

And the here and now?

That was nothing but a fucking nightmare!

*****

I burst out of that telephone-box and headed up the road towards Unity Gate, joining the other footprints that led away from the abandoned vehicles there, including that red car in which I still pictured frozen-to-death people sitting inside, behind the snow-drizzled windows. The snow now came up to the crescent moons of my no butt-cheeks, and the fall of it - the idiotic, blustery mass - had not lessened, never mind stopped.

The idea of making it to Unity Gate was a no idea at all. I'd be shot in the back, even though old Happy Helen's concentration would now be critically impaired...or so I hoped. She had been a nailed-on killer before the phone-call; there had been a kind of wild composure running through her, a force bubbling with tension but sealed with a lid secure enough to keep the out-of-control fury from spilling out.

Would that still be in place when she finally appeared? No, I was sure it wouldn't be, not anymore. But the gun, her gun, it was still a gun. The phone-call had not made that any less deadly. Shooting me in the back as I ran, waded, slogged, up a wide-open lane, would still be well within her capabilities. So now I had a plan which had begun to ferment before I'd entered the telephone-box.

Footprints.

The footprints of others.

My own footprints at last were not alone.

*****

When I reached the end of the old, bullnose truck, tilted there, I wasted no time. Thinking not of my injured leg, but thinking completely of my own quite-possible death, I took one huge bound towards the ditch in which the truck was sunk. I gripped the stick, which was long, as you know, like a staff. Gripped it with both hands, thus using it to propel myself. It worked, too. I sailed across the snow, leaving no footprints, and landed on my backside in a soft, thick cushion of snow. Easy.

No pain, either, and I laughed with relief....but with premature relief; all of a sudden there _was_ pain, the most terrific excruciating unreasonable pain. Bombs of torture exploded, _pow, pow, pow!_ from the bullet-wound all the way down to my foot, which abruptly went into spasm. Think of cramp, but worse, much worse. My right foot stiffened like a plank, and I thrust the meat of my left thumb into my mouth and bit down on it, hard enough in which to leave an oval of teeth marks, each mark glowing an almost incandescent red. It prevented the screams, though. With Helen Davenport's soon-to-be-upon-me arrival, the last thing I needed was to draw her to my exact location.

The pain abated, my foot relaxed, but the bullet-wound went on sending out flashes of pain, the pinnacle of each flash printing black, red-frilled stars in my eyes. I wanted to grip my leg just above my knee, keeping well away from the tourniquet and the bandage which, of course, was my coat belt and half my skirt, rolled-up.

But I was scared to grip my leg. It was now a dead-weight that pretty much just swung there like a pendulum. I pictured amputation, then sent that picture on its way before it could worm its way inside me. No amputation ever took place on a dead body to the best of my knowledge. That's just what I'd become if I didn't get moving.

Using my stick to help me up, I stood...and almost fell back down. My lower half wobbled queasily from side to side, like my middle had lost almost all of its rigidity. My upper half felt twice as heavy all of a sudden, and gravity just wanted to jerk it, face down, into the snow. My face felt clutched with a cold, green sickness. My stomach was an empty space in which no fuel remained to drive me along anymore. All gone. All burned up. My eyelids fluttered as if I were about to go into some kind of seizure.

I stuck my stick in the snow and slapped myself, hard, on the face. So hard, in fact, that I swear I felt the specks of snow there melting in the heat, and then trickling down my throat. Still, I was squared-up now, or thereabouts. I pulled my stick out of the snow. Glanced over at the road. I could see tracks there heading towards Unity Gate, but no tracks here, heading to where I was. That was good. That was, as a mutter of fuck, about as wonderful as anything I had accomplished so far.

Apart from keeping myself alive, of course.

I went behind the tilted truck. Peered through the gap between the cab and the flatbed on which all that timber was stacked, secured tightly enough with rope. I could smell the rope, and the timber, as well. Aromatic. Sweet-smelling. A smell all too pleasant and remindful of comfortable, country living. A setting too far away for me to imagine myself in at the moment. A setting, in truth, that might as well have been on Mars!

And now...here she was.

I thought, for the smallest moment that I'd actually had that seizure, and within its immobilising depths, I dreamed I saw brilliant orange light spraying into my eyes.

That was not the case, though. What I saw was the orange of Helen Davenport's coat appearing so gradually, it made me think of sunlight burning its way through thick cloud. Then I saw red, which I recognised as my blood, still smeared in streaks up her face. Her face that was bunched into a strange arrangement of childlike sadness and deep, frustrated ire. Now I saw a film of wide-eyed awakening settle over that, her eyes flicking here and there, above, below, and from side to side. She all at once understood she was at the place out of which had sprung all the reasons why she now felt the way she did.

This was where the Anna Turpin bitch had been, albeit for a short while.

She brightened then. Her version of brightening, anyhow; it was really no more than a twitch of her mouth, partnered with a faint, cold gleam in her eyes. When she first appeared on the edge of that rocky bank below the mostly-white spread of those crooked, thrusting trees, I'd seen a scrim of tiredness in the stoop of her shape, and in the sag of her limbs.

But now that had been banished. She flung back her big, beefy shoulders, wiped her nose with the back of a hand in whose grip was not my phone anymore but the gun, and began to descend down the shallow slope that would lead her to where the red, snow-encased car was.

Her breath chugged out of her like smoke. I saw her cough into her free hand. She wiped her nose again. Her cheeks were not a healthy, rosy red, but purple tinged with yellow. Her chewed-twine lips were pulled back against her grotty, uneven teeth. The string ties of her gaily-pattered wool hat were weighted with snow.

Mrs Twee bobbed up beside me like a parrot on my shoulder. 'Set off the alarm!' she whispered keenly, pushing eagerly against my right cheek, urging me to focus on the red car. 'Set off that car's alarm, fat bitch! Go on, set it the fuck off!'

I gave Mrs Twee a surprised look, eyebrows arched, my face pulled back into my neck. 'My God, Mrs Twee! You're getting rather coarse in your old age, aren't you? You keep that up and you won't be reading anymore bedtime stories to Mitzi for a while, I can tell you!'

'Sorry, but if she sets off the alarm, it'll add a distraction that we could do with!'

I agreed, and what was more, I thought that distraction was odds-on to happen. Old Happy Helen came bustling down that shallow slope, her arms swinging, and she went straight over to the red car. I couldn't understand, at first, why she did this - the place from which those phone-calls had been made was across the road, in the shape of the telephone-box. But then again, it was evident that I was no longer in there. Evident also that our nasty little call had ended just a short time ago, and so, to Helen Davenport, there was every chance I was still in the area.

In the car, perhaps?

With great, high-arched sweeps of a hand, she cleared the snow off the car's far-side windows. She made me think of some short-tempered artist disappointed with what she'd created and wanted it struck from the world, immediately.

She peered in the car, and in both windows, taking her time to survey every inch of space in there. Still not convinced, though. So now she tugged on both door handles, and hard enough to make the car rock from side to side, dislodging a fair portion of snow in the process. It sifted down off the bonnet, the roof, the boot. I could now see fifty-per cent red instead of eighty-per cent. And still she did not set off the alarm. Not even when she kicked the offside tyre in irritation. It was clear to me now that the car was not alarmed, either that, or the alarm had been disabled.

'Fuck it!' she yelled. 'Where are you, you scabby, brain-dead slut?' She stalked over to the telephone-box, stamping her podgy, shapeless legs in and out of the deep snow. The disturbance caused the snow to puff up around her in clouds, only for it to be snatched away by the hearty and zealous power of the wind. Still, I had never been so glad of the conditions right then. The noise of the wind attached to the poor visibility was a blessing at that moment for which I was grateful.

She wrenched the telephone-box's door open, saw the handset hanging on its cord, and kicked it, making it smack against the inside of the box. Nothing like a little adult vandalism, I thought. Still, I could see all of her now: the hulking shape of her rounded shoulders, the broad slab of her back, and the ample bulge of her backside pushing out against her stupid, orange coat. If she turned and leaned to her right a little, then she would see me crouched behind that truck like a woman urinating.

I needed to urinate, too. Suddenly I was bursting!

Then it receded, due to the flames that seemed to be burning in my bullet-torn leg, and the extreme cold that made my teeth chatter. My nerves were shredded to bits, just tattered and flapping uselessly like the string ties of old Happy Helen's hat. Fear gripped me again in that way I mentioned earlier, as if my body wanted to get rid of itself before my attacker got the job done. Once more I was beset by thoughts that my body would simply pull the plug on everything inside me, and then, ultimately, it would pull the plug on me.

'Hold it together,' Mrs Twee said gently in my ear. 'She's about to move off.'

She did, too. Old Happy Helen suddenly turned around, and began to walk towards the gap between the red car and the truck. She took only a few steps, though, before turning her attention back on the telephone box. 'I'll find you, Anna!' she called out. 'I'll find you, I'll kill you, then I'll hang you on a tree, naked, for the animals to feast on! Not that they'd get much meat off your rotten bones!'

Out of nowhere, without warning, she suddenly snapped off six bullets, _Blam-blam-blam! Blam-blam-blam!_ They tore into the telephone-box, shattering a great deal of glass, and likely cutting off the connection between the phone and any other phone someone might wish to communicate with. Adult vandalism indeed! Fragments of glass landed in the snow and twinkled there. Flakes of red paint filled the air like bloody confetti. The sound of those six bullets, and the destruction they caused, echoed around this lonely section of country lane, filling the spaces between the wind's whipping howl.

'Fucking ugly bastard, talking to me that way! How very dare you! You'll pay even more than I'd planned for you to pay! You loved my husband? Don't make me _laugh!_ And my son, my beautiful son? You'll wish you never raised his name by the time I've finished with you! You hear me, cunt? _You fucking hear me?'_

She began to cry again. It was a horrible, heart-wrenching sound mixed in with the noise of her gasping, phlegmy chest. Even above the wind, I could hear it all. And you know something? I began to cry, too, in sympathy for that poor woman. It might seem absurd, I know, but I am a woman with a woman's love to give. I couldn't imagine a life without my darling Mitzi. To die in her place would be a decision as easy to make as clicking my fingers.

But I was sweating now, that cold, clammy sweat that often indicates the spreading of sickness, like scum on a pond. To feel sympathy for Helen Davenport was like feeling sympathy for a field surgeon who was about to saw off your leg.

I heard her growl then, like a big, angry dog, and then end that growl with a loud _'Yaaaaah!'_ Obviously her way of bringing herself back under control, or what passed as control, anyhow. She came over to the truck, and I stayed where I was, crouched low behind it. I could hear her wiping snow off the driver's window, and then trying the door. The heavy truck rocked even then, despite all that timber on the back. 'There's a bottle of spring water in there!' I heard her say. 'Bastard, I could do with that!'

I held my breath, fearing she'd hear me, in spite of the wind's almost endless shriek. Mrs Twee was kind enough to thoughtfully dab the tears from my eyes and cheeks. After pushing my scarf aside just a touch, she even massaged my right temple for a short while, using a soft, circular motion. Then she lay against the side of my face, comforting me. I began to breathe again, fairly evenly, too. After that, I heard the rustle of old Happy Helen's coat, as if she were checking her phone. No doubt mine, too. Or maybe shoving up a sleeve to read the time on her watch.

I ended up being right about that, as well. 'Ten minutes!' I heard her say. 'That ginger bitch can only be ten minutes ahead of me!'

I thought I heard something rip, then. But the ripping noise took on both low, grumbling notes, and high, flutelike notes, and I realised it was Helen Davenport tearing off a fart every bit as impressive as I imagined the exhaust might sound on this truck here I was hid behind.

'Ah, that's better!' she said. 'Now let's find that skanky bag of hair, teeth, and bones before she makes it into Unity Gate!'

She moved off then, but from me there was no sigh of relief. She'd only make it so far, perhaps as little as a hundred yards, and realise my footprints and stick-holes no longer existed. On the other hand, the other three sets of footprints would still be there, if a little faded by now, and they might keep old Happy Helen marching in that direction a good deal longer.

She was still distraught, too. Mustn't forget that. Our chat had upset her to the core. _Stunned_ her to the core! My hope was that she'd plod along, her mind going over every single thing I'd said - every little diabolical detail - and before she knew it, she'd be halfway to Unity Gate before realising she'd been led up the garden path.

The very stormy garden path.

*****

The wait seemed to go on forever before she eventually appeared at a place where I could see her. Leaning back a little, I looked up the length of the canted truck, peering into the crazy, incessant stew of wind and snow. The trees either side of the road shuddered like unsteady old men. The ditch on whose edge I was crouched was almost filled level with snow now. Just a slight smooth hollow there to indicate its existence.

I saw her coat first, as you'd expect. Saw the sleeve, in point of fact, in which her right arm swung against the wind, the gun poking casually down out of her fist, as if it were no more threatening than a carrot or a banana.

Then her broad, solid back came into view, along with the rest of her. Her chunky legs stomped, and in their wake, two great ragged trenches were left. She made me think of some mightily pissed-off dinosaur that would happily spend the rest of its day chewing off heads and tearing body parts to pieces and still it would not be content when it laid up for the night. Her big orange coat ballooned out behind her. Her hat, peppered with snow, made me think of a bear's head, just a dumb, unthinking block. I watched the snow close around her like a hazy, hungry mouth, until she was gone.

I waited for a moment. Sensible. Very sensible. My bladder began to nag at me again, until I reached a point where waiting any longer might have resulted in my wetting myself. I reached around to pull down my tights and knickers. However, my coat was tightly scooped around my backside. Also, the tourniquet and bandage were high up my right leg, over my tights. It would be a puzzle trying to move everything out of the way in order to expose the vital part.

So, no messing around, I parted my legs. Using my left hand, not my right - which was Mrs Twee, of course - I sank my fingernails into the crotch of my tights and tore it open. Jerked my knickers to one side, then sprinkled all over the snow. Steam rose around me. I shivered. Dabbed myself dry with the edge of my coat. Not exactly hygienic, I know, but needs must when the devil drives. And my devil was Helen Davenport...and she was driving me to the edge, to the very edge, of everything I thought I'd never face or have to deal with.

*****

But now at last I had choices, two of those, in fact. There would have been a third, had old Happy Helen not destroyed it: the telephone-box. More importantly, the phone itself, which I could see in there, blown to bits. Wouldn't even be worth the effort of trying to dial 999 on that! Not that the police would be able to get out here, anyway...although I would have been able to warn them that an armed woman was on her way into Unity Gate. Big orange coat, gaily-patterned wool hat, along with the not exactly trifling matter of a gun hanging from her hand. However, Helen Davenport was not even remotely interested in shooting up Unity Gate, or anyone in it. Anna Turpin, and Anna Turpin alone, was the centre of Helen Davenport's world.

The whole centre and nothing but the centre.

I stood up, keeping a wary eye on the place into which she had disappeared, just in case that place decided to spit her back out. My two choices were not exactly any kind of choices, really. More like Hobson's choice, in that I could take the broken-down horse or walk.

Did I head past the telephone-box down a snowed-in road that would eventually take me back into Gartley, my home town? Nice idea...on the face of it. But if I made that choice, I had a good six-mile walk ahead of me. There was always the possibility I might run into other trapped motorists, maybe even some walking this way, after abandoning their vehicles. But none had come this way so far. Also, after old Happy Helen had unleashed that noisy volley of shots into the telephone-box, smashing it to smithereens, I thought that if anyone approaching had heard that, then they'd almost certainly pull their heads into their shoulders and slink off back the other way, rather than come across a potential headcase with a gun.

My other choice was to head into the woods behind me, on this side of the road. I favoured that choice, if only slightly, simply because the chase so far had already taken place in such a large, uninhabited chunk of woods, that the chances were, I was about to hit a place where someone lived.

At the risk of repeating myself, this was not the middle of nowhere. I had to be getting closer to somewhere...and someone - someone who would be able, hopefully, to take in one badly-injured single mother, clean her up, apply fresh medication, give her a hot drink, and generally make her comfortable until an ambulance could finally make it through.

But in the end the choice was made for me...

*****

You remember that squirrel? Yes, of course you do. It was, after all, the only animal I'd seen out here...apart from that other animal, Helen Davenport.

Through the gap between the truck's cab and its freight of leaning timber, I suddenly saw that squirrel leap out of those crooked, thrusting trees across the road. It flew through the slanting fall of the snow, the wind riffling through its grey, sleek fur, its eyes sparkling, its tiny front claws splayed.

And guess where it landed? Yep, you've got it. Smack-dab in the centre of that red car's roof. That red car which either didn't have an alarm, or it had been disabled. So I'd believed. But of course _anyone_ would have believed that, if they'd seen old Happy Helen pulling away like crazy on those door handles, hard enough to dislodge thirty per cent of the snow piled up on that car.

I winced in a kind of ironic, deflated clench. The minuscule jolt of one small squirrel landing on that car compared to some big, lunatic woman tipping it back and forth like she'd been trying to roll it over would be insignificant...wouldn't it?

Well, yes, you'd think so. But of course we all know that physics, or even simple common-sense, means little in a world that just loves to turn everything on its head.

The alarm went off, just as I knew it would. It was one of those alarms, shrill, ear-piercing, that sounded like aliens attacking. Just to add to the din, the alarm was also wired to the car's horn. _BEEEEEP! BEEEEEP! BEEEEEP! BEEEEEP! BEEEEEP!_

Still wincing, I threw my gaze up the road right then, to the place it was compelled to go. Waited for that big orange coat to come flapping out of the storm, heading back this way.

I watched. I waited. I watched. I waited.

My eyes stung. My head pounded. My teeth chattered. My blood felt like it had turned to ice. My face was greasy with that sickly, cold sweat.

No big orange coat.

I heard a tree crack behind me then, like someone had chopped it with an axe, delivering a blow so fatal with one mighty swipe, it sounded like it was about to topple over. A branch, roughly six-foot up the tree, swung loosely out like an arm hailing a bus, and then clattered down in the snow. The end which had been severed threw up a puff of smoke that briefly curled there.

I jumped.

Screamed.

That was the result of the first bullet which had come whistling out of the storm. The second bullet whacked into the rear of the truck with a distorted, and deafening, _ka-ping-ying!_ sound.

I saw the big orange coat then...the sleeve first...and of course I saw the gun.

That was it. I was gone.

Into the woods.

Chapter 7: Minty-Green River

Up until then death had been an option but not a certainty. My spirit was still strong, not on the wane. My instinct to survive was entirely intact, too. How could it not be, when I had my darling Mitzi on whom to direct my focus?

It was just that my body was failing. Previously, in spite of my injury, I'd seen myself as the fittest out of me and Helen Davenport. Something of a no-contest in actuality. However, I was weakening now, slipping back so as to be on a par with her fitness levels, which were really no fitness levels whatsoever. My wounded leg swung dumbly, and slowly. My heart laboured. My body was frozen to its very foundation. The traditional view of hell wreathed in fire - in boiling-hot fire - was a place I wanted to go, please take me, should death finally claim me.

I simply could not take the cold anymore.

Once more, I toiled through the snow. My eyelids began to flutter again. Red shapes pulsed in my eyes like small, palpitating hearts. My head didn't just pound anymore, it roared like the sound of buildings falling all around me. The trees were no longer trees but crowds of tall, twisted people, all staring down at me, curious yet unhelpful. Some snatched at me with their branch-y, twiggy fingers, tugging at my coat, my headscarf, and clawing at my tights. I staggered drunkenly.

Fell

Picked myself up.

Fell.

Picked myself up.

In the distance, through the gauzy net of snowfall, I saw a man standing next to an old green Jaguar. His hair was damp and swept back. He wore a white, open-necked shirt which exposed his deeply-suntanned throat and chest. His feet were bare and there was sand between his toes. He was very handsome. I went towards him, not just eagerly, but passionately. I would have let him take me in the back of his Jag, even though I am not so impetuously disposed. I called out to him, and what came out of my mouth was the name Gray, as if I knew him. He smiled at me. He was not a vampire; I saw no pointed, razor-sharp teeth.

I hesitated all the same, the passion beginning to recede, when I saw him produce a length of rope. It hung in a drooping arc between his fists, which were maybe three-feet apart, held at sternum level.

He suddenly jerked the rope, and it stiffened. He meant to strangle me with it, I realised. I screamed. I veered away from him, and off I went in another direction.

I heard him laugh.

Or maybe it was me who laughed.

By then, I had no idea; I could feel myself slipping away into all the wrong places.

Soon after that, a man stepped out from behind a tree. He was wearing a dark, snow-spotted coat which was tied around his middle with a length of grubby, tatty rope. In his late-fifties, I judged. His hair was long and silver-grey, and it clasped the edges of his gaunt, weather-beaten face like a helmet. _Jesus!_ he seemed to say, looking briefly behind me, his eyes growing wide. Then he made a grab for me...but I whacked him with my stick.

Jabbed him with it, too, in the eyes.

Then he was gone.

Fading behind a tree.

Following that, I saw two boys sitting at a kitchen table: two sweet brothers who loved each other dearly. The older one had a kind, patient face, and a smile so warm, it brightened the dewy underside of his eyes like footlights. The younger brother had a wonky leg and a face that was sloughed to one side. Out loud, he was reading from John Steinbeck's "Of Mice And Men", but he was struggling with the complications of it, and when he spoke, he did so much too fast, and his words came out in one long, babbling string.

They weren't there, though, those two boys. I knew that already. I knew they were simply ghosts of my own construction. The heavy blood loss, the spreading sickness, the cold, the fear: all of those had now conspired to bring about aberrations of which I was aware but could do nothing to dispel.

'Help me, Mrs Twee!' I said, still having to shout above the wind's infernal racket. 'Help me to see what I should see, and not what I shouldn't!'

'Will do, honey-bunch!' Mrs Twee said, suddenly there beside me, hovering around my right shoulder. 'What you've got here is great tiredness bringing about great creativity! That's what you're seeing there, Sonia, your brain, under stress, throwing out images that have been dug out from the darkest, and the brightest, corners of your mind! Just ignore them, they can't harm you! Told you to use my help, didn't I? If you don't, then you won't get out of this otherwise!'

'Thanks for the reminder!' I said. 'You're a legend in your own tea-break!'

'Funny!' Mrs Twee said. 'You may mock, but right now, Helen Davenport is gaining on you. Not by much, she's still some way behind! Trouble is, you're getting tired, Sonia, and soon enough the gap is going close so that she'll get a clear sight of you! Then bang, you'll be dead! So will I!'

'So what do you suggest?'

'There's an old shed up here! Just over that hill there, between that tree that's shaped like a big coat-hook, and those bushes that look like tall, foaming waves rolling in! You see?'

'Yes, I see! But how do you know about this shed?'

'It's not me who knows, it's you! I'm simply plugged into the side of your brain that can still recall the things you've forgotten, or let slip, anyhow!'

'I don't understand!'

'Okay then, so here goes! When you were three, your grandfather brought you up here, one time, to the shed that we're about to come across! He used to shoot pheasants and other game! The shed is a store in which hunters keep their gear! Or used to be! It's no longer in use! It's now fallen into disrepair!'

'That's great! I thought you were going to tell me it's got walls as thick as rail-sleepers, and you've got the key that'll let us in there, and all at once, we'll be nice and safe!'

'I'm afraid not! But we're not heading into that shed, anyhow! We're heading _past_ it, towards a bridge over a river! Again, on that same day, when you were just a little girl, your grandfather took you down to that river!'

Mrs Twee stopped right there. Abruptly fell quiet.

'So what happens then?' I pressed.

Nothing from Mrs Twee.

'Speak up, woman! What happens then?'

Mrs Twee eventually said, 'You remember when I told you I was beginning to get the feeling that Helen Davenport wasn't our only enemy out here? And that there are things in this world that can't always be explained?'

'Yes, of course!' I said, becoming crotchety. 'Come on, Mrs Twee, just spit it out, whatever it is!'

'Very well!' She took a deep breath, and as I went on slogging tiredly through the snow, towards that shed, I watched as the mitten stretched open, and then slowly relaxed. That was Mrs Twee taking her deep, and steadying, breath. She looked over at me after that, and then spat out what she needed to say. 'Sometimes, in order to get out of the trouble we're in, we need to get into _bigger_ trouble! That's about to happen, honey-bunch...if you let it, that is! If you don't...then...!'

Mrs Twee glanced back over my shoulder, worriedly.

'Then Helen Davenport will catch up with me...and I'll be dead? That's what you're telling me, isn't it?'

'Yes! The truth is, Sonia, you're finished! You're running on empty! If Helen Davenport doesn't claim you, then this terrible weather, along with your injury, will! So you need to trust me on this! We're about to head into the teeth of another storm, but it's a different kind of storm this time around...and one in which the advantage will swing your way, and out of Helen Davenport's. It's not without its risks, though. But...you just need to remember that there are two birds in the bush, and one bird in the hand! And I'm the bird in the hand. Tah-Dah!'

The mitten waggled.

'Hilarious!' I said, not laughing. Frowning, in fact. 'So we get to this bridge, and then... _what_ , exactly?'

Obscurely, Mrs Twee said, 'As the flies crow, honey-bunch! As the flies crow!'

Then she fell silent.

The next time she spoke, I didn't recognise her.

*****

I made it to the shed when I thought it wouldn't be there, when Mrs Twee - nothing but part of that tired, creative side of me - had no doubt been pulling as many fast ones as my mind had.

No, I didn't believe she existed, not even then. How could she? She was right when she said she was plugged into the side of my brain that could still recall the things I'd forgotten, or let slip. But that was still me, not her. However, to trivialise the help she gave me that day would not just be wrong but outrageous! You don't tell a child, tormented by restless nights or even by nightmares, that the piece of rag it takes to bed for comfort is just a useless crutch. That they can get to sleep without it, if they really wanted to. If they _tried_ , for Christ's sake!

No, you let them take that rag to bed because it helps them, because it is there for them, unlike the adults who place them so uncaringly in the dark. If there is comfort in a rag, then so be it. The way there was comfort for me in that mitten of mine; without it, my nightmares would have been so much worse. In fact, they would have killed me! Truly. And Mrs Twee? Those of you who like their drama firmly planted in reality are missing a trick here. To me, reality's light is bent by shadows, and shadows lie, like the tongues of unbelievers. But I believe, I believe _everything!_ I have to because that is who I am.

And being who I am is better than being who I am not.

Greg Halpern loved me, I believed he loved me, but he took off with Daisy Hemmings, who could never love that man the way I did. That is a reality I wish to have no part in. My reality is a daughter who will love me all my life, I know she will, no matter what lies ahead of us. But as I trudged towards that broken-down shed, holding onto a stick that now cut into my hand, my reality, my _only_ reality, was that I had Mrs Twee. She was my light bent by shadows. If she was a lie, then she was a lie I needed.

Like the rag that brings comfort to a child.

*****

The shed no longer looked like a shed but a big, sunken heap in the woods. Trees grew in it and around it, branches clenching it like throttling hands. Moss clung to it in squelchy, green-yellow clumps that were capped with snow. I could see no doors or windows, just skewed openings and caved-in holes. Boards, twisted, rotten, crumbling, poked this way and that. It sat there in the snow, grimacing, waiting for nature to swallow the last of its shameful remains.

I couldn't remember it, not even in its glory. I could remember my grandfather taking me to see the greyhounds race. I could remember him knotting a tie in front of the hallway mirror. I could remember being with him when he changed a wheel on the old white Vauxhall he drove back then. I could remember the time we flew a kite on Cathcart Hill, and how he tickled my belly while singing the Batman theme-tune ( a strange selection of tune to tickle to, on reflection ) and how we shared hot, buttered crumpets on the back step of his bungalow, with him grinning bravely through the cancer that was eating him up. Not sharing _that_ with me like the crumpets. Just keeping that little dark treat to himself.

Not muttering a fuck, in fact.

The shed, though? No, I could not remember that. But Mrs Twee had. Mrs Twee had remembered it, and led me to it. It was there...minus the memory of my being here with my grandfather.

'I love you, Grandad,' I said, speaking normally, but in the roar of the wind, it sounded like a whisper. 'And it mutters a fuck, believe me.'

I saw the river, then. Even through the pelting sideswipe of the snow, I saw it: a cold green watercourse which broke around rocks and splashed lustily between frosty, white banks.

And the bridge.

The bridge was there, too.

I went down to it.

*****

But of course I _ran_ down to it. I was always running, there was barely a moment of respite. My run that was mainly reduced to a desperate hobble-cum-slog that drained my energy and sapped my strength. And drank ravenously from my soul. The make-do headscarf drummed annoyingly against my ears. The hem of my coat was weighted down with limpets of snow. Blood ran down my wrist into my sleeve, all thanks to my stick which had been a friend but was fast becoming a foe. And oh, how it cut into the base of my fingers, my palm, too! My coat flipped up and I glimpsed the blood there, surrounding the bullet-hole, like a blooming rose. Then my coat settled back over my stick legs around which there was no skirt, only a pair of tights that were torn open at the crotch and badly laddered.

But women's lives are often about the holes they have, and the holes they fall into. Mostly we are only romanticised by men, anyhow, who find things in us that we don't even know we have. If there's a mystery to be found, then you will find it in a man, long before you find it in a woman. Men are the killers. Women are what's left behind after the killings are done.

That's how it is, ordinarily. That's what the statistics tell you. But Helen Davenport was a defiant straggler amongst those statistics, the loose, female cannon. She hadn't killed yet, but she was heading that way, like the approaching storm that needed battening against. Her approach was looming. I could feel it, every bit as imminent as the sickness that was keen to take me over.

_Begging_ to take me over!

My leg swinging awkwardly like a dead weight, I came to the bridge, the snow still swiping across my face, and poking at it, too, as if with cold, needle-sharp tines. The bridge was a hazy clump of stone and cobbles. Old. Ancient, in fact. I could see that parts of it had crumbled into the river. The bridge was not the destination I needed to reach, however. I knew that, the way I knew my grandfather had taken me down to the river, even though I had no recollection.

There was a steep, snow-drifted slope at the side of the bridge. No way around it. I sat down in the snow and, using my stick like a gondola pole, I pushed and shuffled my way down that slope until I was at the river's edge. I looked back up the bank. My skinny arse-cheeks, my feet, the stick: all had made their imprints in the snow.

I limped under the bridge. I could do that because there was a muddy but icy-firm base, roughly four-feet wide, between the arched underside of the bridge and the edge of the river. I placed my back against the arch to support myself, in spite of how cold and damp the stonework was. My breath tore in and out of me like a ripsaw. The river ran past me making delicious gurgling noises that made me thirsty. I could feel the sickness working deeper into my bones and flesh. Working deeper into my mind, too - once again I saw those things that were not real, those visions, and I pushed them away. _Physically_ pushed them away with an outstretched, lacerated hand from which blood dripped. I needed to see what I knew would soon be here - old Happy Helen herself - not something conjured up by my ailing, deceptive brain.

But she was coming. I couldn't hear her, not in the cutting slice of the wind. Nor could I see her. Not yet. I could feel her, though: a low precursive rumble tramping across the bedrock of my mind. She was close. She was now between the folds of my personal space, like a louse. She was here. She was now. And what came to me right then was this: I was Anna Turpin after all. Of course I was. That's how books and movies like this generally panned-out. The victim at the beginning was almost always the offender at the end.

Predictable!

But of course, what other outcome _could_ there be? You couldn't have old Happy Helen simply shooting me dead, and that was it, hello, the end. Don't ask for a refund on the way out. There had to be a twist, even if you could guess that twist early on.

So here I was, Anna Turpin, under this bridge here. There was no Greg Halpern. That was just a name plucked arbitrarily from the credits of some Australian soap that Anna had watched one afternoon. There was no daughter named Mitzi, either. Mitzi had been the name of Anna Turpin's grandmother's Yorkshire terrier. And Sonia Rowntree? That had come out of some Scandinavian furniture catalogue in which the name of a chair had been the "Sonia" chair, and whose designer had been Sunhild Rowntree Torstein.

Yes, it all made sense...of a kind. _I_ was the mad woman, not Helen Davenport. She had been right all along.

I was Anna Turpin.

And I deserved the fate she had in store for me.

*****

I could sense her standing at the top of that slope, mulling over how she was going to tackle this. Clearly I had not gone over the bridge and into the field on the other side: no footprints. No, I had gone down the slope in front of her: _loads_ of footprints...and bony buttock prints...and stick prints. The Turpin bitch, the wounded Turpin bitch, was at the bottom of that slope, and almost certainly under the bridge. No prints leading out from the other side of the river, either, and heading up the bank there. The Turpin bitch had at last been cornered.

Tired, sick, bleeding, she was now there for the taking.

I pictured Helen Davenport nodding her head then. Grinning conceitedly, too. Her eyes would be twinkling darkly. I could see nothing and hear nothing. She was there, though, her left nostril dripping, her face still bruise-purple, and still smeared in places with my blood. Her big, saggy bosom would be heaving under her silly, orange coat. The string ties of her hat would be waving back and forth. And she'd be covered from head to toe in snow, of course. The snow-woman...with a gun.

The gun would be there.

Jutting. Ready.

With nothing left to give, I gave what I had, anyway. I braced my feet. I raised my stick. Swung it over my left shoulder. Held it there, poised, like a shinai.

I could feel her coming.

And I could feel myself dying.

Oh...God...help me!

Chapter 8: Greg Halpern & The Hospital

The girls came to the hospital: Sarah Locke, Amy Taylor, Kerry Bleasdale, Emily Saunders, Daphne Robertson, along with my best friend, Ellie Gladstone, the whole mad babbling bunch of them. They brought gifts, flowers, get-well-soon cards. When they left, my eyes had been photo-flashed to a blur, and my ears rang with their chatter.

Then Greg Halpern turned up. I was looking at the gifts, the flowers, and re-reading the cards while smiling to myself...and yet weeping as well. Not knowing why as such, but watching the tears drip, all the same, down onto the bedclothes. Watching with a kind of puzzled, aloof disconnection.

Outside it was cold.

There was no snow. The sky was a dull raft of cloud, and yet occasionally the sun appeared, throwing a warm, yellow sheet across my bed, like an extra blanket. There was a bandage around my left hand. My right arm was bruised with holes made by the insertion of drips and by the IV which had replenished my blood. I ached, but in a strange, comfortable way. My repaired right leg seemed to hum, high up, like low-voltage electricity was being passed through it. My body was loaded with a concoction of drugs that made me feel both high and drowsy.

Greg poked his head around the door. He was smiling, but it was one of those halfway smiles, the smile of one unsure of the reception he'll receive. Cold or warm? Well, I decided to make it warm, with the option of turning down the thermostat, should I suddenly feel that way. That was my prerogative. My right! As long as Greg Halpern stuck to the middle-ground, then I'd remain warm, maybe even affable.

'Hi.'

'Hi.'

'May I come in?'

'You may.'

He closed the door softly, respectfully, behind him. Gazed around at all the flowers. 'Wow! Looks like a superstar's dressing-room in here!'

'That's me, the old superstar,' I said, smiling tautly. 'My mother will have her arms full tonight when she takes all these flowers home.'

He nodded. Dug into his pocket, then held out a clean tissue for me to take.

'What's that for?'

'Your tears.'

'Oh.' I took the tissue. Used it. Handed it back to him. He dropped it into the wastepaper basket beside my bed.

He pulled up a chair. Sat in it with his hands clasped together across his slim, belted waist. He hadn't shaved, and for at least three days, I reckoned, knowing his beard growth the way I did. This was my third day in hospital. Merely a coincidence, of course. His eyelids were red-ringed. His hair was tidy enough at the front but there were spikes jabbing up at the back. There was a mark on his left cheek, a _glowing_ mark. My gaze went to it, only briefly, but right then, he unlaced his fingers and self-consciously touched it. Gingerly, too. Almost winced, in fact.

'Are you okay?'

Greg laughed, but nervously, and much too loudly. 'Yes, yes, of course! On top of the world! Spangly!'

'Good.'

'Although I was searched.'

'Searched?'

'And ID'd. By the policewoman outside. If your mother hadn't been there, I wouldn't have been allowed in. Probably not, anyhow. Weird, given that I'm Mitzi's father. They've got this place locked-down like a prison. Only one way into this room.'

'Precautions, that's all, Greg. And we're not married. Never have been.' I gave him an impatient look. 'Are you trying to annoy me already?'

'No!' He laughed again, and just as nervously. 'No, of course not. I'm sorry.'

I nodded. 'So where's my mother?'

'Having lunch in the canteen with Mitzi. She thought I might like to be alone. You know, with you?'

'Nice.'

'So how are you?'

'In pain. But alive. Not dead.'

'You were lucky. And brave. Both. I've been watching the reports on the TV. The police haven't given much away, though. Mostly that you were attacked, there was a chase, and it came to an end in that old farmhouse. Not many details other than that. And the doctors have been telling the reporters you're... _recuperating_. Stable.'

'What else _is_ there to say? Do they tell them what my view is on the current economic climate? Who I think will win X-Factor?'

'No.' He looked down then, and I felt sorry for him, even though he had grabbed my face that day. Had shunted me up against the fridge, hard enough to scatter several colourful fridge magnets all over the kitchen floor. Told me, of course, that Daisy Hemmings was a much better fuck than me, and that she could cook a lasagne without burning it to a cinder.

I was being hard on him. Obstructive. Unreachable. But there were tears in my eyes, and for no reason I could get to the bottom of. Just feeling weepy, I suppose. No need for me to examine it all. I was tired, simple as that. And my life had changed. My _feelings_ had changed! If I was looking for an excuse to be weepy, then I didn't need one.

'Look, Greg,' I said, pushing the get-well-soon cards off my lap. 'The policewoman is out there in case there are repercussions. There are two of them, actually; there's another at the reception desk. There are four in total, though. They take it in turns to keep an eye on me. And to keep their eyes on other people. Just in case something happens that shouldn't.'

He looked up. 'Do they think you could be attacked?' There was horror in his eyes.

'Perhaps. After all, what happened at the farmhouse could inflame certain people. Certain _unsavoury_ people?'

'What _did_ happen?' Greg asked bluntly. But then he backtracked by softening his approach. 'If you don't mind telling, that is.'

'I can't tell you. This is an on-going investigation. And probably the truth won't be made public, anyway. Not the _detailed_ truth. And I don't _want_ the detailed truth to be made public. I did what I did to save my life, and to save Helen Davenport's. It's my business. The police want it to remain my business, too. I have found them supportive in that way. Very supportive. So at the moment they are pouring all of this into a bottle they can cork, and mostly it will taste like the genuine article. Which it will be. Just that certain microscopic particles need to be removed.'

'So they're running it through a fine filter, are they?'

'You make it sound like they're up to something. They're not. Like I said, the police have been very supportive. I simply don't want certain things to be made public because I'm a decent woman. A mother, too. Is that so hard to understand?'

'No, of course not. All the same, you're adding an element of intrigue that's making me even more curious.'

'I think it would make _anyone_ curious. Which is why it will not even be alluded to in the final report. At least, that's what the police are hoping for. They haven't made any promises, though. They can't. And there are lawyers jumping all over this. The police are working with them so that an agreement can be reached that will suit all parties.'

Greg sighed. 'It looks like I won't be getting too many answers here today, will I?'

'Is that what you came here for, answers? I thought you came here for me.'

'I did.'

'Well, try and make it look that way.'

'I apologise. It's just there's been so little _information_. Even your mother hasn't said much. Unusual for her.'

'That's because she doesn't know any more than you. I've spoken to no one but the police. What I can tell you, though, is that it's unlikely any charges will be brought against Helen Davenport. The police made that known to me this morning. They said that Helen's been moved to a secure facility in which there'll be a police presence. Temporarily, at least. Probably they'll assign a couple of female officers, like the ones outside here. It's a mental-health facility, of course. Most likely the Green Lodge over in Portercross, although I'm only surmising.'

'So what happens then? Not that I care. That woman can go to hell, as far as I'm concerned. Christ, no charges? You've got to be kidding! That woman shot you, and with an illegal firearm! She could have killed you! Almost did!'

At last I saw emotion, other than the emotion that was chewing him up in some other place outside of this. I glanced once again at the glowing mark on his left cheek, and again he touched it, sheepishly. Tears now bled across the surface of his eyes, although none dripped. He clenched his jaw so tightly that I heard his teeth grind and saw stiff, thick cords standing out on his neck. His throat reddened, around which was a tartan scarf. He swiped a trembling hand through his hair.

'So what would _you_ do then, Greg? Just throw the book at that poor woman, and put her behind bars, pronto? For eight years she's been tormented by this. She's been in and out of mental-health facilities like a jack-in-the-box. I can't imagine how terrible her life has been. To have your husband and son run down, and then left dead in the middle of the road like slaughtered animals? Have a heart, eh? If I'm okay with that, then why can't you be?'

He said nothing. Wanted to. His mouth opened, but closed again.

I said, 'She would have killed me, Greg, and then killed herself. Two women dead. In the snow. In the _bloody_ snow. But we're alive. I don't know how, but we are. I'm grateful for that. I think Helen will be, too...eventually. In the end there'll be sunshine after the rain. Or after the snow, in this case. I _hope_ there'll be sunshine, anyhow. Therefore, what would be the point of dragging that poor woman through a court? She won't be put in prison, anyhow. The police told me that. What judge would be happy to commit her that way? There'd be an outcry! And I'd be seen as the most cold-hearted woman on the planet, in spite of what happened to me! I don't want that, nor should you, for Mitzi's sake, if not for mine. Come on, Greg, show a little compassion. The police don't crack a nut with a sledgehammer, not these days. Common-sense along with a little sensitivity needs to prevail.'

Greg nodded. 'I guess they'd deem her unfit for a trial, anyhow. So yeah, it would all be a waste of time in the end. Not to mention the financial burden on the tax-payer.'

'Correct. And she voluntarily put herself in that facility, according to the police. Depending on how her assessment goes, as well as her willingness to cooperate with what ever treatment is recommended, she could be in there for years, even then. I'd say that's a prison sentence in itself, wouldn't you?'

'I guess so.' Greg looked passed me towards the window then. Six floors up, we were. All I could see was the low, uninspiring cloud. What little sunlight there was shone through the flowers the girls had bought me, and turned the wall behind Greg Halpern into a mural of jungle-like shadows. I scooped up the get-well cards and formed them into a neat bundle. I could still feel tears gently trickling down my face like a leak I couldn't stop.

I said, 'So what's happening with the snow out there?'

'Hmmm?'

I clicked my fingers in front of his gaze, which he finally directed at me, if a little slowly. 'The snow, Greg? Hanging around, is it? The girls said it's beginning to melt now.'

'It is, but it's still below zero out there. The snow's receding, all right...but it's gradual. The motorways are finally open, though. Most of the A roads, too. But I imagine it'll still be a couple of days before the B roads are cleared.' He brightened then. Smiled. 'Oh, I forgot to tell you: the police dropped your car off at your mother's place. About an hour ago, that was. It's in her driveway. They returned your valuables, as well. You know, your handbag, etcetera? Everything's in there, so your mother said. Not your phone, though.'

'That's with the police. Evidence. Helen Davenport took it off me.'

' _Stole_ it off you, you mean.'

'Whatever.' I put the bundle of get-well-soon cards on the bedside cabinet, which was loaded with gifts: a hair-dryer, makeup, pyjamas, slippers. The girls had spoiled me.

'The police took photos of your car, as well, so I believe. In situ? Took photos of her vehicle, too. Undertook a thorough search, all in all.'

I shrugged. 'Bound to, weren't they? Part of the crime-scene. Anyway, I saw a news report the night before last on the BBC. I saw my car, and Helen's, still trapped in the snow. Police were everywhere. The road was cordoned off with yellow tape. Not that any car could get through. It felt very strange.'

'I'm sure it did.' He nodded at the window. 'There are reporters outside the main entrance as we speak. I'm sure, once all this has been buttoned-up - legally, I mean - that you'll be offered a small fortune for your story. "Sonia And Her Snowy Hell", they might call it. Or maybe you'll be known as "Sonia the Spunky Snow-Woman." '

'I'd rather not. Spunky is a yucky word. And I won't be giving them a story, anyhow, no matter how much I'm offered. They'd want to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I wouldn't be able to give them that, not for any sum of money. And talking to a newspaper reporter who wants plenty of bang for his buck would be a hell of a lot different to talking to a sympathetic detective. Little by little, because I felt comfortable with how the police were dealing with me, I was able to tell them everything. It wasn't easy, though, even then. I had to tell them one thing that was absurd, and another that was humiliating. Put together, those two things saved my life along with Helen Davenport's. But there's no way I'd divulge them to any newspaper. Or on any TV show, come to think of it. Not to anyone. Not even to you. As it stands, though, the police have enough straightforward material to not include any of that. But it's...it's... _her_.'

'The other woman, you mean?' Greg raised his eyebrows and shook his head. Even whistled through his teeth. 'That was unreal!'

'It was. And it's her lawyer who's causing the stink at the moment. In some respects, I'm not surprised, either. He's got a job to do, I know. But the police think he's just being arse-y for the sake of publicity. Nevertheless, Helen did what she did. I don't blame her for that, either; I would have done the same. In fact, she did it with my blessing. I confessed that to the police.'

'Christ, I have no idea what you're talking about. All of this just makes me even more baffled.' He smiled, but feebly. 'Maybe we should just talk about things outside of this.' Again, he touched that mark on his cheek, which, I now realised, was the imprint of fingers. He'd been slapped! Scratched, too, I saw. And I smiled. Didn't mean to. It just... _revealed_ itself, and slyly. I understood how sly it must have looked, so I adjusted it, and swiftly. Made it as breezy and warm-hearted as I could. But still the tears dripped...and still I did not understand why.'

I would, though.

And soon.

*****

I looked at his eyes. Tears still floated there, although they were not weighty enough, thus far, to spill down his face. His hands were in his lap, and they looked vulnerable, somehow. Weak. Incapable of even popping open a can of drink. Nothing like the hands that had grabbed me that day and slammed me up against that fridge. Good old me. The positive me, the _stupidly_ positive me, who'd believed our relationship could still be saved, even when he'd snarled at me that Daisy Hemmings was a much better fuck.

I saw that his hands were still trembling, too. And now he was licking his lips, and sucking on them, as well, like an old man. He suddenly _looked_ old! I could see lines around his mouth, and at the sides of his eyes, like crumpled brown paper. This, I realised, was a man who was slowly, painfully, being hollowed out until he would be a husk. A man whose confidence ( which at times had spiralled into cockiness ) was being sucked out of him. _Drained_ out of him.

'So how are things with you and Mitzi?' I asked, concerned. 'Everything okay?'

'Everything's great,' Greg said, and for the first time he gave me a smile that was not weighted down at the edges by whatever it was that preoccupied him. 'And she's been really brave throughout all of this. Hasn't thought of herself at all. Her only concern has been for you. I love her for that.'

He laughed, but he choked it short, exchanging it for a corny roll of his eyes. His face flushed. He rubbed that mark - that slap mark! - on his face yet again. 'God, I stayed at your mother's last night. Slept on her sofa. It was a proper ordeal getting over to her place, seeing as some of the roads were still impassable. Your mother's been great, though. She made me a beef stew. I love your mother's food. God, I really didn't appreciate it back then, did I? Probably didn't appreciate a lot of things.' He rolled his eyes again. 'God, what am I like, eh?'

'Yes, what are you like?' I said, rolling my own eyes. 'God, eh?'

He wedged his hands between his knees then, like a small, excited boy. Drew his head into his shoulders, too, and grinned stupidly. But once more a hand strayed up to that mark on his left cheek. 'God, yes, so last night, while me and Mitzi were watching TV together, and your mother was in the kitchen, washing the dishes...well, Mitzi suddenly turned to me and asked if I was going to stay and welcome mummy back, when she gets out of the hospital. God, I thought, how sweet of her _that_ was! Sitting there next to her made me realise - '

'Greg.'

\- 'you know, how lovely that was, and - '

'Greg.'

\- 'how much I miss, God, the - '

'Greg! For goodness' sake, listen!'

'God, yes, what is it, Sonia? I was just saying that - '

'Greg! Just give over for a moment, would you?' And this time I stared directly at that mark on his face, which must have been slapped there twelve hours ago, minimum, before he left his cottage in Boaters Pond to drive over to my mother's place. Yet the force - the _shocking_ force - of that slap had branded it there like a tattoo. Even now it looked recently applied, and still burned hotly. Finally I pointed to it. 'Who did that?'

'God, who did what?'

'Who made that mark on your face? Was it Daisy? And before you make some miserable effort at lying to me, don't. I'm not in the mood. I'm tired. My leg hurts, my hand hurts, my whole _body_ hurts. Plus I've got an erratic mixture of drugs inside me that could either make me laugh like a lunatic or cry like a baby. I'm crying now, for God's sake, and I don't even know why. So please...don't lie.'

'I won't,' he said smartly. 'God, yes, it was Daisy.'

Silence.

I lowered my head. Pressed my hands against my temples. They pulsed evilly against my palms. I rolled my lips into my mouth and bit down hard. My eyes were directed at my legs - legs that seemed insanely skeletal under the bedclothes. Like a pair of golf clubs. I wondered if I could do this, if I could bear to ask, and bear to listen. Furthermore, I knew where this was going: to a place it wouldn't have gone prior to me and Helen Davenport's set-to that day. And I hated Greg Halpern for that. Hated him...and yet felt pity for him. An emotional reversal is fine, nothing wrong with that. Just as long as it's done while the sun still shines, not when the rain starts to fall. And clearly the rain _had_ fallen, and clearly Greg Halpern had realised his mistake. Fuck him for that! Fuck him, fuck him, fuck him!

And fuck that woman he'd gone off with!

I said, and placidly enough: 'So why did she hit you?'

'God, I don't know. At least - '

'Greg.'

'Yes?'

'Stop saying God.'

'Right, I will. Anyhow, I couldn't work out why she hit me, not even after she left to stay at her father's place down in Drake's Common. She took that dog of hers, too. Good riddance to that little snappy bag of ears and eyes. Fucking Papier-Mâché, or whatever it's called.'

'Papillon,' I said. 'So why did she hit you?'

'I worked it out on the way over to your mother's. It's you. She unquestionably doesn't like the attention you're getting. After all, it's on the TV the whole time. The radio, the Internet - those, too. No newspapers, of course, not in Boaters Pond, all thanks to the snow. But finally, yesterday morning, the ferry made it over with a delivery. I bought one straight away. And I've been on the phone to your mother quite a bit. Not just to your mother, but to Mitzi, as well. So I suppose it eventually got to her. To Daisy, you know? Still, you're my daughter's mother! My thoughts were _bound_ to be with you!' He lowered his voice then, which had begun to crack. 'My feelings, too.'

I suddenly realised the tears in his eyes, somehow suspended there, had now begun to flow down his face. To _burst_ down his face, running either side of his nose, into his mouth. He swabbed them with the back of a sleeve. I had never witnessed such a heavy - and emotional - outpouring from him. It took me aback in a way that made me gasp, and rather noisily. Not that Greg noticed; by then, he was sobbing, and helplessly, into his hands. His body shook. His knees jittered up and down. I could hear his shoes shuffling and squeaking clumsily on the floor. The scarf knotted around his neck made me think of a hangman's noose.

I stared at him, bewildered, my hands in my lap, perfectly still. Perhaps even perfectly _heartlessly_ still. Looking at him like that, so wrought with pain, did not make me feel satisfied in any way. I just felt numb...and sleepy...and achy in a way that was almost soothing. His tearful outbreak was loud, _manly_ loud, and there was a brutality to it as well, as if, not just his heart was breaking, but his ribs, too, _snap, snap, snap!_ His lungs sounded like they were exploding. I thought his tears would, in the end, simply kill him. And then, to horribly amplify this thought, he slumped forward all of a sudden, onto my bed.

I gasped again.

But then he extended a hand out to me, and, reflexively - for I did not do it on purpose - I shrank back from that hand.

He gazed up at me, his hair hanging limply over his eyes. His eyes which looked like some kind of dark, watery hell. In beseeching, almost crawling tones that I'd never heard him use before, he said, 'Oh God, Sonia, take me back, would you? I'm sorry, I'm just so, so sorry. My life is miserable with that woman. Has been for a while now. She's as shallow as a village pond. I can't stand it! Please, give me a chance, won't you? I promise I won't let you down! Or Mitzi. God, I'll be there for you both, always. God, I'll make sure I - '

I reached out then, and placed a hand over his. He looked at that hand with a hope so excruciating, I could barely bring myself to look at him directly. But I did. Even smiled, and it was a real drug-dozy smile, if ever there was one. My eyelids drooped. My head seemed to have doubled in weight. My hair hung down my chest - my no-chest - smelling fragrantly, and wonderfully cleanly, of shampoo.

My voice still placid, I said, 'I thought I knew what hell was when you left me, Greg. But while I was being chased through those woods, cold and in pain, it came to me that a woman betrayed is a woman with a forgetful mind. Yet a forgetful mind can be a gift the moment one hell replaces another. Especially if that hell is an even greater hell.'

He looked at me, puzzled.

'What I'm saying is that I've forgotten I loved you. I now realise that's why I've been crying for most of this morning. I've just...'

'Forgotten you loved me,' Greg Halpern finished.

'Yes.' I dried my eyes.

Then the door wheezed opened on its pneumatic arm, and in came a nurse, black and beautiful and cocking a suspicious eye at Greg Halpern. 'Is everything okay, Sonia?'

'Everything's fine,' I said. 'Mr Halpern here was just leaving, weren't you, Greg?'

And he did, he left. Staggering. Hands up to his face. Shattered.

Ten minutes later, I fell asleep. I dreamed of hundreds of animals lying dead in a field of bloody snow. A man was knelt among them. He had no eyes, just two empty, bleeding sockets. I heard myself say, _Oh God, where there is hatred, please, please, please, let me sow those kindly seeds of love_.

Chapter 9: Guns & Lazarus

I saw the gun. And her hand. Then her arm extended within the sleeve of her big, orange coat. The wind channelled the snow under the bridge and into my eyes. The river's sound seemed to change from a gentle enough gurgle to a pounding, rasping torrent that was unbearably clamorous in my head. My head that now felt like one big glassy lump of ice.

I took one step forward, the icy mud crackling underfoot, my stick flung back over my shoulder, clutched double-handed. My world was now just the underside of a small, stone bridge, a short span of chilly river, and the endless, hateful assault of snow-and-wind.

And the gun.

Yes, there was that - that more than anything. But it could only end my life a little quicker than the terrible conditions, which, along with my wounded leg, were killing me, anyhow. Even if I performed a miracle and somehow disabled Helen Davenport, it was still going to take a further miracle to save me altogether.

But my life...

It muttered a fuck

On her fat backside, she had come down that slope beside the bridge the way I had. And now I saw her plump, snow-dappled legs and the sag of her belly, rumpled under that tent-like coat of hers. She went to push herself up with her left hand. The gun wavered in her right.

Yes, it muttered a fuck, all right, and so I jumped out on her, screaming my face off, and _whack!_ I brought my stick down hard on her wrist. _Thought_ it was hard, anyway. But her wrist responded by merely dropping a little, like a lever made to be pushed down but will spring back in place, once you let it go.

And the gun remained in her grip.

_Wholly_ in her grip.

The tip of my stick then jabbed into the icy mud, there by the edge of the river, and I followed it by stumbling hopelessly forward. I saw myself hurtling past Helen Davenport's snow-caked boots, my hands outstretched, my fingers fanned.

My stick toppled sideways into the river, and the river bore it away, it was the river's now, never to be mine again. My support had gone. And with it my only chance, which was my predominant, dismaying thought as I crashed down beside the river. That my only chance had gone...but of course it had never really been much of a chance, anyhow. When you are at the end of the line, when you are in bits, and your life is on a thread, your chances are nothing but desperate snatches and pickle-brained exploits, anyway. I did not think what a fool I'd been because even the fool in me had departed. I was just a dumb old bag of flesh-and-bone that fell there beside that river, a raggedy thing of no ideas, and no good things to come out of it.

And she was on me, of course, in a discouraging trice. There I was, face down at the ice-frilled edge of that river, my head turned to the side, squelched in crispy, stinking mud, watching the cold, cold flow of all that minty-green water. And then she had a fistful of my coat in one hand. After that, she spun me over on my back, and easily, like a sack of feathers, so that I was staring up at her snow-clouded face.

Her angry and yet happy snow-clouded face.

Old Happy Helen.

She was breathing like a bull. _Smelled_ like a bull, too, an animal fragrance that was rank, even with the wind blowing the way it was. Her chest went up and down monstrously. Her shoulders flanked her head like snow-capped mountains. Her left nostril still dripped, although the fluid was not clear but a thick, putrid green. It ran down over those chewed-twine lips of hers. Her face glowed that sickly, unhealthy purple shade. And yes, there were still streaks of my blood there, mainly on her nose and chin, if a little faded now. Unattractive coils of wiry dark hair poked out from the inner depths of her hat. The hat's string ties blew hither and thither. Her breath fogged out of her as if she were a boiling tea-kettle. Her eyes bulged with a terrifyingly bright, contented evil.

She stood over me with the gun aimed at my face. There was a mark on her wrist, I saw, where I'd slapped it with my stick. She paid it no attention, though, as if I'd merely tapped her there with a feather. Her lips were drawn back over those murky teeth of hers in a smile that expressed nothing but cheerful hate.

She shouted down at me through the screech of the wind: 'So here we are, you carrot-topped whore! It took a while, but I got you eventually, didn't I? Yes, I fucking did! And why aren't you wagging your mitten and throwing your voice now, eh? But of course that was just a one-trick pony! Use once and then get rid of! Which is just what I'm about to do with you! I'm not even going to prolong the agony, either, the way I thought I would! You're not worth it, never have been, never will be! You're nothing but a piece of shit squeezed out of the arsehole of hell! An insult to the memory of my lovely husband and son!'

She leaned forward and pressed the gun against my forehead. There was nothing left in me. Not even a burst of tears, or a final declaration of innocence, or a prayer murmured on the cold, unfeeling strips of my mouth. I simply pictured my death every bit as clear as a child will picture its future: as one long sunshine-y road. It was over. I knew it. And when you know it, there is no fight to fight over. You are nothing but a done-for thing in a done-for world.

I thought it muttered a fuck.

It didn't.

Not anymore.

*****

Her arm tensed as she went to pull the trigger.

I closed my eyes.

I thought I was dead already, and my first dream in heaven ( or maybe it was in hell ) was of a horse's head, dark as night and disembodied, looming out of a thick, misty snowfall. Its eyes bulged with apprehension. There was a bit in its mouth upon which it champed. I heard the clink of the bit, attached as it was to the bridle around its sleek, handsome head. Its nostrils were flared and steamed cloudily. I could see its body then, revealed as a dark, muscly bulk in the shady back end of the snowfall. Saw legs, too, human legs, the knees clamped firmly around the horse's withers - withers that sweated a creamy-white lather.

Then I heard a voice, shouting, and gruffly, too, but its sound travelled to me as if on a dampened cushion. _'Put down that gun there, woman, and now! Yah don't, and I'll blow yah feckin brains out!'_

Clutching the gun doubled-handed, Helen Davenport straightened, although in reality she jerked as she straightened, not just amazed but awed at the sound of that commanding voice as it cut through the storm. She turned her head towards it...as did I, but languidly because I was so very tired, and so unreasonably cold. Furthermore, my pain was death into which, as yet, the final nail had not been driven.

Heavy-eyed, I stared over at the horse's legs, which were hock-deep in the river. This was no dream after all; its front hooves pranced, splashing bitterly cold water over my face. Its knees pistoned up and down. I gazed higher, and saw the horse's rider, a female. She was of a slight build and wore knee-high leather boots into which faded, grubby jeans were tucked. She was bundled up in a thick, dark-brown coat, and her face poked out of a balaclava on top of which was a red baseball cap.

She had frosty, mistrustful eyes and a voice that could penetrate concrete. Or maybe scythe its way through thick undergrowth. She might even be able to set whole cornfields alight, I thought, with that voice of hers, such was its harsh, almost daemonic quality. She was wearing black, leather gloves. In her left hand were the reins, while in her right was a gun. A shotgun, to be precise, double-barrelled. The butt, and a good deal of the stock, was shunted up under her armpit. The trigger-guard rested on her middle finger, her thumb keeping the gun steady. Her forefinger rested all too dangerously on the trigger.

She leaned forward, her chin jutting, her mouth hooked up in a feral snarl. _'I'm up to ninety on this, yah gobdaw bitch? Drop that gun! Now!'_

Up to ninety? Gobdaw? Some kind of slang, for sure, but I'd never heard it before.

Then my gaze, fuzzy and slight, switched to Helen Davenport, who was standing there like someone had turned off her power. Her mouth hung open, and green snot flowed down into it. The arch of the stone bridge in the background, coupled with the storm swirling around her, made her look like a figure trapped in a snow-globe. Not for one moment did I think she didn't understand the order she'd been given. I just think the sudden, enforced change in her plans had caused an impasse which had brought her to a dead, dim-witted stop. Unable to think, she was now standing there with the gun, which, although no longer pressed against my skull, was still aimed at me, as if she were caught in a dream in which she'd won the jackpot, but somehow the damn machine was refusing to pay out. Something was jammed in the mechanism, and Helen Davenport was bemused as to how, or why, this was happening.

So there she was, frozen, neither in one place nor the other. Which might be fine in a game of "statues". But in this game, the only prize old Happy Helen was going to win was one she'd take no delight in receiving. I was sure of that.

I switched my gaze back to the woman astride that dark, jouncing horse, and I understood, even in my own fragile state, that she was not a woman to be messed with. In the world of hard-nuts, I thought old Happy Helen had just come across one that would be extremely hard to crack.

And to cause a crack, a blow needed to be struck, anyhow.

The first blow would be struck by the woman on the horse.

The blows that followed would be struck by the fate to which all three of us were soon to be tied.

*****

I was right - that woman was not to be messed with. No further warnings. The horse lunged forward, and as it did, so the woman flipped her shotgun up in the air, it performed a half-turn, and she deftly caught it by the barrel. She raised it like a spear over her snow-peppered right shoulder.

The butt was now turned towards Helen Davenport's upturned, sag-jawed face.

The woman suddenly socked it against old Happy Helen's forehead, but low enough so that it smashed into the upper part of her nose. There was a sound - _ker-atch!_ \- that made me think of timber being split by an axe. I heard it, even in the brouhaha of the storm. Even heard it despite the fact my ears felt stuffed with cotton-wool. Which they were, in a way; my head-scarf was like a muffler against my ears.

I watched, looking down the length of my wrecked, horizontal body, as Helen Davenport fell backwards like a sack of shit: her third fall of the day. Her third...and her most debilitating. The first had knocked the stuffing out of her. The second had been a more-or-less innocuous, if embarrassing, tumble down that slope beside the rail-workers' hut. But the third? The third had fully put her out of action. She lay there, motionless. Her arms were thick, limp slabs. Her fingers produced not even a vague, spidery twitch. The gun sat there in the shallow cup of her open palm. Blood streamed down her face and flowered in the snow. Her big orange coat flipped and flapped. The string ties of her hat danced crazily around her head.

She was dead to the world.

Or maybe even dead, full-stop!

*****

Still, whatever. Dead or alive, I'd been saved! My pity for Helen Davenport ( which I'd felt in varying degrees throughout this terrible ordeal ) was at the thin end now...or should have been. But when the woman dismounted from her horse, I suddenly remembered what Mrs Twee had said: that sometimes, in order to get out of the trouble we're in, we need to get into bigger trouble! And yes, I could see that bigger trouble, all right. It was in the way that woman had gotten off her horse, with a cocksure, almost hostile, leap. No simple, professional dismount for her. She'd gotten down like an acrobat - and a punchy, ill-tempered acrobat, at that - and landed on the river's edge with both booted feet faultlessly planted.

After that, she swaggered over to Helen Davenport and, much to my disenchantment, she gave her a kick. In the ribs. Not a particularly hard kick, but a kick all the same. Helen Davenport did not stir. Just went on lying there, nothing but a bloody, snow-speckled lump.

The woman broke her shotgun. Hung it over the crook of her right arm. She bent down, then. Plucked the handgun out of old Happy Helen's palm. That done, she went through a series of checks that told me she knew her way around firearms, by clicking this, punching that, thumbing that, sliding this, all of it done as deftly as the way she had flipped her shotgun.

Following that, she put the gun in her coat pocket. Patted her pocket, satisfied. She crouched down after that. Conducted a search of old Happy Helen, by going through her pockets, although she seemed to find nothing that gave away old Happy Helen's identity. She even took out my phone, and yes, old Happy Helen's as well. But she paid them little notice. Indifferent, really. Then again, what good would a phone-call be in this weather? No one was coming for anyone. She put them back.

I watched this through the non-stop slant of the snow, my view sometimes obscured, but then the wind would drive a momentary gap in the downfall, and I'd be able to see everything quite clearly. But none of it was encouraging.

The horse waited in the river, patient.

I lay beside the river, dying.

As days went, I'd known better.

*****

I saw the woman remove one of her gloves, then take hold of Helen Davenport's left wrist to check her pulse. She also placed two fingers against the side of her neck to check there, too. I presumed Helen Davenport was still alive because the woman slipped her shotgun into a long, tan-coloured holster which lay against the horse's sweaty withers.

She returned to Helen Davenport after that, and did something I thought would be impossible for a woman of such a frail build. She bent down, picked Helen Davenport up, and tossed her over her shoulder. Gave her a fireman's lift. The woman's legs didn't even buckle a little. Rod-straight, they were. She carted Helen Davenport's dead-weight over to the patiently waiting horse, and flopped her body over its back. There it was, her bloody face - and what had to be her broken nose - now pointing down at the river. On a clear day, and in a still river, had she been awake, not zonked-out, Helen Davenport would have been able to see her own horribly-ruined reflection. Her arms dangled down the horse's side. Her big orange coat went on rippling. The string ties of her gaily-pattered hat did likewise.

*****

After that the woman came over to me, pulling on her glove, and then gripping the peak of her cap to tug it down against the driving snow. There was no strength left in me. My tank was altogether empty. I lay there fading, my heart issuing nothing but a faint, thready beat in my ears. My body was a frozen stick. The cold seemed to have set my face into a permanent sneer of pain. I could hear the minty-green river flowing by, full of a life that I no longer seemed to have. The wind bit into me, callously. The snow fell into my eyes like sharp tacks.

She stood over me. I thought she would shoot me dead with Helen Davenport's gun...and that would be fine. That would, in fact, be merciful, in the light of how much of my life had already run out of me.

She would only be doing me a favour.

She didn't shoot me dead. She squatted to look at the bullet-hole in my coat, then opened my coat to look at the patched-up wound. She stood then. Picked me up all of a sudden. I screamed because my leg protested rustily, turning my lower half into broken glass. But the woman paid no attention. She held me close. Hugged me, in fact, transferring her heat into me. I gasped as the warmth radiated into my body. It was not enough. Not nearly enough. And the woman was as ribby and as sunken-bellied as me.

It was warmth all the same, though, and it helped. A little.

*****

She spoke not a word. She nodded down at her shoulder, indicating that I should put a hand there to steady myself. I did. Then we went over to her horse, over which, of course, was slung the unconscious Helen Davenport.

We made it across the river. Then once again the snow was knee-deep, and we were heading across a field in which only a few trees poked up out of the snow. Weak, spindly trees, they were, that looked held together with tape and string. Trees that appeared briefly, like grasping, arthritic fingers, and were then once more enfolded by the cruel, cruel storm.

As I walked beside her with my mittened hand ( which of course was the now silent Mrs Twee ) gripping her shoulder for support, I heard Mrs Twee's voice in my head saying that Helen Davenport wasn't our only enemy out here. And that there are things in this world that can't always be explained. Had I not been on the very teetering rim of just blacking out altogether, I would have paid more than just a fleeting regard to that. But at the moment the woman did not seem like my enemy. Not my friend, either, true enough. She was there for me, though...and in a way that Helen Davenport hadn't been.

But soon enough I would understand that Helen Davenport had been a breeze compared to this woman.

Chapter 10: Farmhouse

We came to a farmhouse when houses, even after this short time, had become almost foreign to me. It was suddenly there, exposed, like a magic trick I could barely believe. A slim, muddy lane topped off with snow ran in front of it. I could see a well, too, in the front yard, and outbuildings that were nothing but grey, disjointed sketches in the storm. Two vehicles, as well: a low, two-seater sports car, and a Toyota four-by-four. Both were heaped in snow.

We went through an open gate, me, the woman, the horse, with old Happy Helen draped over its back, her arms beating loosely against its sides. There was a light in a downstairs room that turned a small square of the snowfall a glowing, almost ethereal, yellow. It looked warm in that room. The kind of warm I could only dream about, and maybe even cry over. And I think I did cry. Just wasn't aware of it. Silent tears slipping down my numb, ice-block face.

The woman tied the horse to the well's winch. She un-holstered the shotgun, broke it, hung it over her right arm, just as before. That done, she grabbed old Happy Helen, put her over her shoulder, and carried her towards the house. Once again she did this like lugging overweight women was an everyday occurrence.

She elbowed the front door open, which was one of those made of plain, timber boards with no fancy, glass aperture or jangly doorbell on it. A door that simply shut one world out from another. I followed her inside, dragging my injured leg behind me. Closed the door, snipping the storm off like the tail of a wild animal.

And oh God, it was then that the warmth hit me, so hard, it nearly knocked me back against the door through which I'd only just walked. My head swam. My hands tingled. My face was still locked in that permanent sneer of pain. But now it began to slowly melt, making the skin there feel like it was slipping off my skull. In a moment I'd look down at the boarded floor, and I'd see the inside of my own face, like a mask, lying there. A hideous party trick if ever there was one! And the thought of that was so persuasive, I clapped my hands - the left hand bare and bloody, the right enclosed in the mitten - to my face to stop that from happening. Talk about dramatic! But of course to the woman whose farmhouse I was now in, I probably looked like someone who was relieved to be out of that horrible snowstorm, and my hands up to my face was simply confirmation of that.

Then I dropped my hands. I was in a room, I saw, that looked like a junk shop. In the centre of all this junk was a dining-table which had one solitary dining-chair. The table was crammed with framed photos, ashtrays, packets of cigarettes, lighters, cereal packets, newspapers, magazines, a radio, cups, plates, glasses, coasters, bills, a can of oil, a clock, a tube of hand cream, a wilted plant, and a variety of other knick-knacks. Old, faded pictures hung askew on the walls - walls that were decorated in a rose-patterned wallpaper which was so ancient, and worn so thin, you could probably spit through it. A rickety, varnish-peeled chest of drawers was standing immediately behind the table. A TV that looked roughly fifteen years old squatted in one corner, thick with dust, and with a busted front panel from which spewed a tangle of wires. On top was a fake, stumpy Christmas tree adorned with tinsel that looked about as cheerfully festive as rusty barbed-wire. Four unrelated armchairs in various states of dilapidation were plonked here and there, either stained, torn, sunken, or a combination of all the aforementioned. One actually looked capable of growing legs and walking off, ashamed!

The woman flopped old Happy Helen down on a couch that looked about as inviting and comfy as a wooden pallet. Its arms were threadbare, and its cushions were stained and out of shape, like dirty marshmallows. She then went over to the chest of drawers. Dropped the shotgun on top of it with a loud clunk.

Right then I saw a dog, only noticing it when its ears pricked up listlessly, and it looked around, awakened by the noise. That dog, it was so silvery-grey, it looked like a ghost floating on the filthy rug on which it was settled. The open fire it was sitting in front of, blazed and crackled, but the fire's timber surround was sooty-black, as was much of the mantle. Even the ceiling above the fire was black. There were more framed photos on the mantle, although they were crammed together untidily, jostling for space with more junk and stuff.

The dog turned to look up at me then, but only briefly, before resting its head back on its folded paws, out of which grew bent, horny claws. Its eyes were rheumy and yellow. Its inner ears were clogged with orange-brown wax. Its nose was dry, and a thin, discoloured gunk dripped from its nostrils. A pink, hairy lump bulged from its right side, roughly the size, and shape, of a coconut. Horrible. It had once been a sheepdog, judging by the line of its jaw - now slack and barren of all but a few teeth - and the length of its tail. But now it just looked like a dead dog. Getting there, anyhow. And quickly, too. I thought if it didn't die soon, then it would just fade away, the poor mutt.

The woman gave the dog a cursory glance, then went over to the front window, underneath which was the couch that Helen Davenport was spread out on, her arms and legs lolling. Her eyes were puffed and bruised. Her nose looked like a smashed walnut. The shotgun's butt was stamped into the centre of her forehead. Her face was a crimson mask of blood, and that blood, it had now leaked down onto the collar of her big, orange coat. Smarmed there. Was now on the soggy, string ties of her woolly hat, as well.

I thought the woman would have headed my way. There'd be no alarm in her eyes. Nothing much in the way of concern, either. No, of course not; this woman was as hard as the nails she no doubt used to repair her fences with.

However, she knew I'd been shot, and when you added in the exposure, too...well, it was quite obvious I was in need of _some_ attention, even if it was only of the basic variety, like a blanket around my shoulders, a cup of hot, sweet tea, and maybe a little warm broth to go with it. A bowl of hot water to clean up my wound, as well, and fresh dressings that would make-do until the emergency services could make it out here. All, or even some, of the above would be fine for the time being.

There was none of that, though. The woman went over to the window without any thought for me. Didn't even invite me to sit in one of her filthy armchairs. Just stood there looking out at the snow that swirled outside like a plague of white locusts.

My joints were rusty hinges. My bones were burning sticks. My tongue was a dry, balled-up chamois in my mouth. The hole in my thigh was a raw, screaming tunnel. My teeth chattered. Melting snow ran down my face. Dust-balls skated eerily around my feet, propelled by the frosty draft blowing under the front door.

I looked down at that ghost dog and resented it for the way it hogged that fire like it owned it. I felt almost outraged. I even pointed towards that fire with a slack, shaking finger, silently indicating that surely anyone with half a heart would want to place me in front of it.

But then the woman spoke. She sounded Irish, but only mildly; I heard a smattering of Geordie in there, topped off with maybe a thin glaze of North American, on the New England side. A strange accent if ever I'd heard one. She lit a cigarette. Her voice, just to add a further twist, was smoke-roughened, which was probably why she had sounded so dominantly gruff back at that minty-green river.

She said, 'You've got to keep at it in this line o' work, yah nah? Fences can blow down in this kind o' weather. Feckin animals will wander off like shit for brains, and get themselves dead in a ditch, or caught in the wiring. That's how come I found yous two mental mammies by that river there. On the lookout for me eejit animals, I was.' She turned then, and gave me an impatient, slit-eyed look. 'And yah can drop that finger there, lass. That bag o' shite by the fire there would snap it off, and for the fun of it, by chance yah get anywhere near the heat it soaks up like a feckin sponge.'

'Then can I sit?' I asked, dropping my finger. 'Can I do that at least?'

The woman nodded, although reluctantly. 'But don't go making yourself all settled and that - we got a problem here...and I've got a way of fixing it. But for now, yes, you can sit. Better never than late.'

*****

So I sat. Light as I am, dust plumed all around me: further evidence of the midden this place was, from top to bottom. Just sitting in that chair made me itch, and if I hadn't been so tired, in so much discomfort, too, I would have been happy to stand by the draughty front door, which clattered every so often in the wind. Sudden pressure was exerted on my wound as I sat. I almost cried out, and went about delicately adjusting my position until I could bear to sit without yelping. Or just bursting into another round of tears.

To my left was a kitchen. It was so dark in there, all I could see were blocky, bulky shapes, like silent robots stored side by side. A curtain of some kind flapped in there, and was then sucked back into the darkness. I could see the lower half of a broom, resting up against the open door. Its bristles were worn and mucky. The open door - an old ledge & brace contraption - was rotted out at the bottom by damp. Coats, hats, and a thick hoop of rope, hung from paint-chipped hooks on this side of the door. The stone threshold over which the door hung was worn down in the middle by the years, maybe even by a hundred years, of to-ing and fro-ing. And the _smells_ that wafted out of there! Like a garbage dump in high summer, although, even then, my belly rumbled, yearning for food. My head swam again. A greasy queasiness clenched my face. I had to grip the burst, frayed arms of the chair to stop myself from sliding off the edge of the world.

I closed my eyes. I fell straight into a dream in which Mrs Twee - the real Mrs Twee, the one perched on that shelf above Mitzi's bed - was on all fours, being taken from behind by a horse, and breathily, she was chirruping: _You just need to remember that there are two birds in the bush, and one bird in the hand! And I'm the bird in the hand. Tah-Dah!_

My eyes sprang open.

The woman was goggling at me through the curling smoke of her cigarette. She laughed. It was a horrible, gravelly laugh. 'Yah snored, yah fecker! Only the once, but it sounded like yah were trying to rip the lid off a can!'

'Sorry,' I said, reverting to type, which was that of a weak, apologetic woman grateful for the smallest of mercies. 'I must have dozed off.'

'I guess yah feckin did! No matter. We'll get this done and dusted, and then we'll be good to go.' She looked down at old Happy Helen, reclined there on that sagging, threadbare couch. Pointed at her with the glowing tip of her cigarette. 'How well do yah know this fat mound o' shite here?'

'I _don't_ know her,' I said. 'That's to say, I didn't know her until she attacked me.'

The woman flashed a crafty leer out of that balaclava of hers, her eyes partly hidden in the shade of her baseball cap. 'Oh, attacked yah, did she now? Like... _waylaid_ yah?'

'Yes. On the road between Gartley and White Mist, which is where my mother lives. She has my daughter, Mitzi, over to stay most Sunday nights. Takes her to school, as well, on the Monday morning. I pick her up from school on my way home from work.'

'What's that to me?'

'Probably nothing.'

'You're right, probably nothing. On the road between Gartley and White Mist, yah say? Feck! Yah mean yous two silly mares have been running about all that way in this weather? That road is feckin donkeys miles away! What time was this?'

'Eight-thirty, or thereabouts.'

She glanced around at the clock on her overcrowded dining-table. 'So you've been at it for more than six hours? Six feckin _hours?_ No wonder yah look like death's been grabbing onto yah shirttail, and yanking hard for the Christ of it!'

'Yes, yes!' I said...and then, I laughed. Loudly. Nodded my head, as well, like an ingratiating fool who had no hope of ingratiating herself with this hard-nosed wench. She was out there, this one: an object spinning in her own black, heartless universe. Me, laughing and nodding, when it was obvious to her that I was wilting, and dangerously.

Still, in her eyes I was nothing but an animal that could simply suffer, just like that ghostly old pooch with that nasty tumour bagging out of its side. No chance of her taking it to a vet...although it looked way past any treatment a vet could offer. Save for one: putting it down with a lethal injection. However, I guessed even that wasn't an option in this woman's less than merciful world. The suffering of others seemed a pleasure to her. Perhaps even a hobby in which she collected pain rather than stamps, or records, or books, or antique dolls.

'Whatcha laughing for there, woman? This tubby bag of lard blasted yah leg there with her cheap old flyapart. Would've killed yah with it, had me and Lazarus not come along when we did.'

'Yes, you're right. I'm grateful for that, as well. You don't know _how_ grateful. I just can't thank you enough. Lazarus, too. And he's a handsome fellow, isn't he? Did you raise him from a foal? I imagine you did...'

'Don't try to butter me up, woman.' Perfectly disdainful, her warning delivered coldly from within the shadows of her balaclava-baseball cap combo. She smoked the last of her cigarette. Stubbed it out in one of the many overflowing ashtrays on the table there.

I wanted a cigarette, too, even though I'd quit three years back. But of course the craving never really goes away. It just sits there in your mind like the love of your life you can never forget, despite the fact you're now married to another lifestyle.

'So yous two were driving, were yah...and what? Yah got stuck in the snow, is that it?'

'Yes. Although only I got stuck because I drive a Lancia sports. A Flavia 2000. Low, you know? But' - I pointed to old Happy Helen there, who did not look in the least bit happy - 'she drives a four-by-four that could still make it through the snow. A four-by-four that pulled in behind me...and then it all kicked off.'

'Kicked off?'

I nodded, lowering my arm. 'I was on my phone to my mother, and then all at once, she was on me. Began to accuse me of being the woman who killed her husband and son eight years back. Fuck! Mad as a hatter! She stole my phone, too! It's in her pocket, along with her own. You already know that, of course. Anyhow, I managed to get away from her, but she shot me...and...'

With my bloody left hand, and my mittened right hand, I hugged my knees like a small child. '...I found myself at the old army camp railway line. I went into a rail-workers' hut and used my coat belt as a tourniquet. I tore my skirt up after that. Used half of it for a bandage, the other half as a scarf. I think she found it easy to shoot me because she could see my hair, even in the storm. It really is quite red.'

I slipped the scarf off my head, and shook out my hair, so that it fell around my shoulders. It smelled strangely of ice and sweat...but maybe that sweat smell was really fear, now uncapped.

'Yep, no mistaking it's red, all right,' the woman said. 'Red as a post-box! Must've been like a red bull to a gate!'

I began to rock back and forth.

The front door rattled.

The terminally-ill ghost-dog by the fire whimpered.

'Since then, it feels like I've tramped halfway across Hampshire trying to get away from her before she could end my life altogether. I was lucky, though. You came along. You and Lazarus.'

The woman slowly broke her gaze with mine. Looked down at the floor then...and furtively. She took off her leather riding gloves, and slung them on the already crowded table. Unbuttoned her coat after that, the shoulders and arms still stippled with snow. Then she levelled her gaze at me once more, a gaze that was all suspicious, brooding eyes.

Here I was, sick and in pain ( and still baffled as to how another human being could offer me not so much as a hot drink ), and so only then did it dawn on me that she was... _formulating_. Not a recent addition to her thoughts, I understood. She had no doubt been formulating since she'd happened across me and old Happy Helen down there by that river. But yes, to me it was a new twist in this already twisted state of affairs.

'Lucky?' she said, and snorted a blunt half-laugh. 'No, the last thing yah are is lucky, woman. Still, yah already know that, don't yah? Or you're _beginning_ to know it. Trouble is, you're a nice woman, and sick, too. Feck, yah look as green as snot!' She issued another half-laugh, which was no more genial. 'What I'm saying is that, because you're cold and sick, it's taken yah a while to catch on that you've tumbled out of one barrel o' shite and straight into another. Am I right?'

I closed my eyes, very slowly. Opened them just as slowly, like an owl. Which was my way of telling her that yes, she was right. About the barrels of shite, anyhow. But as to why _specifically_ I had been unlucky, and for a second time, still eluded me.

However, she glanced around at old Happy Helen right then, and I realised things were beginning to tie in here that had no _right_ to tie in. That they would, in fact, be the nastiest, and the most bizarre, of all the stings in the tail.

Nonetheless, all I could do was let it play out like an accident waiting to happen. We were here, the three of us, in this stinking, draughty farmhouse. The storm was still cranked up outside, full tilt, and pouring all of its cold, white scorn on this part of the world. Us: three women in different but inexorably joined, predicaments. An ill-starred trio of afflicted and dysfunctional females. It was a horribly potent mix. Two many cooks in a kitchen that would, I had no doubt, explode. All of a sudden, without as yet any confirmation of my worst, and my most far-fetched fears, I could see that this would only end in tears. And blood. And the very real possibility of death.

As if that had not been a very real possibility to begin with.

In my mind I heard her say, _But don't go making yourself all settled and that \- we got a problem here...and I've got a way of fixing it._

Chapter 11: A World Gone Grey

I looked over at old Happy Helen on that mouldy, disgraceful couch, still out cold. I said, 'You know her, don't you.'

It was not a question.

The woman nodded, as I knew she would. She scratched her crotch, and unabashed, too. Even flexed open her legs to give herself a little more breathing space down there. She said, 'Yeah, I know her, all right. Helen Davenport - that's her name. Yep, mad as a feckin hat-stand, all right. I had a far-off thought it was her when I came across yous two down by the river. That's why I dug around in her pockets to see if I could find anything that would say aye or nay to that. But she had nothing on her that told me either way. I tried to get into her phone, but it's locked with a password. Still, it didn't matter. I realised it was her by the curly, frizzy hair poking out of her silly hat, and by those daft-looking eyes of hers. Like puddles of washy-blue soapsuds, they are. She's gotten fatter, though, by the feckin cringe! Big as a feckin barn door!'

She laughed in that same blunt, hollow way, her head thrown back. 'So, she's still at it, is she?'

'Still at it?' I asked, rocking away. My face blazed. The rest of me hadn't even _begun_ to thaw, let alone warm.

'Yeah, still chasing anything female with so much as a red highlight in its hair. Bastard mad cow, she is! So much as gets a sniff of red barnet, and she's off, bang, after it. She's been pulled in by the cops more times than that for harassing some poor lass or another. Been sent off to that funny farm over in Portercross, too, more times than a cat can be shaken at her. But this? What she's done to you? God, she's bitten off the hard end this time around. Feckin _chewed_ the hard end right off, by the look of it!'

I thought she'd bray another snatch of cold, humourless laughter. She didn't. She fell quiet. The fire crackled. The old ghost-dog whined in its thin, loveless sleep. The curtain in the kitchen flapped into the light, and was then dragged back into shadow. The front door rattled again like a nagging headache. Snow blasted fervently against the window. More dust-balls swirled around my feet. I could feel the river-mud on my face drying there like a gruesome, crackled face-mask. Her head hung slightly, and sounding somehow both heavy-hearted and bemused at the same time, the woman said, 'Anna Turpin...even now, eh? Just Anna Turpin, no matter what. That's her life, you see? Must be, I suppose. But what a sad way to be. Good lord.'

'Yes, Anna Turpin,' I said softly. 'That's who she thinks I am. And she'd shoot me dead right now, if she suddenly came out of that daze she's in.'

But the woman remarked not on that. She reached up to her face instead. Scratched her ruddy, country-weathered nose with dirty fingernails. After that, she tugged on her bottom lip, then gazed around at me from under her drawn-together brow. Her lip was pulled down so far, I could see her gums as well as a row of teeth besmirched with nicotine. Within the dark clasp of her balaclava, her eyelids fluttered affectedly, and briskly, like small, beating wings.

Then she released her bottom lip and it relaxed back in place. She shuddered from head to toe then, her shoulders jiggling. Her hands began to tremble in a way that looked so curiously vulnerable for a woman like her, that my mouth fell open in surprise.

I unlocked my hands from around my knees, and on a forward swing of my body, I was suddenly ready to smash her skull in with that solitary dining-chair of hers, if she so much as gave the slightest sign that she might drop, like a stone, on the spot.

Then all at once she was back from her brief, powerless excursion. The moment - which in truth had been no moment at all - was gone.

She was smiling now.

Like a witch.

The fire didn't just crackle this time, it banged, and the silver ghost-dog yelped, its pale, floppy jaw quivering. But its eyes stayed shut as if the strength to open them was not available, at least for the time being.

I saw a photo then, framed like the others, at this end of the mantle.

The car in the photo was a Lancia Flavia 2000.

It was the same light-green colour as mine...although its sills were rusty, its tyres were mud-splashed, and one of its headlights was busted. No, not mine. Couldn't be. Even if I could read the registration number from where I was perched on that armchair from hell, it wouldn't match mine.

Surely wouldn't.

In the photo, the woman, dressed in nothing but a man's shirt ( and even then it was parted between her tiny breasts ), was standing beside that car, just to add verification that it was hers. Or that she had _some_ kind of connection with it. Possibly the car's owner was the man from whom she had borrowed the shirt, the same man who had undoubtedly taken the photo. Nevertheless, it reminded me of what Helen Davenport had said back at the place where all this had started: that she had seen me in my car two months ago, and again six months ago. Two months ago, maybe; I hadn't been able to argue about the chance of that. But not six. Oh no. I'd told her during our telephone-box conversation that I only bought that car four months ago, that she _couldn't_ have seen me in it then!

Still, even that became by-the-by compared to what was beginning to bloom, and disquietly, in my brain. It was all I'd known down by that minty-green river, but hadn't been able to fully comprehend: that the line between Helen Davenport and I had sprung two upward sloping sides, and the crowning point that now made this a darkly fated triangle was the woman standing before me, grinning.

She took off her baseball cap and slung it on the table. It dropped over a tall salt-shaker and a bottle of vinegar, like prizes she'd laid claim to at a fairground stall. That done, she reached up and grasped the top of her balaclava. Slowly pulled it up until it reached the point of resistance, that point at which the material becomes stretched like gum out of a child's mouth.

Then her chin, her mouth, her nose, her eyes were exposed, and now I could see all of her face.

Her face which, I was not surprised to see, resembled mine.

But without any of the softness, or the more gentler lines and shapes of friendliness.

Her eyes were hard balls of frost. There was no plumpness to her nose, just a blade. Her mouth was a blunt scissor cut. Her cheekbones jutted. The severe hollows beneath her cheeks gave her a leering, almost depraved look. Her skin was pale, but a washed-out pale, not a healthy, creamy pale.

Then she pulled the balaclava all the way off, tossed it likewise on the scungy, cluttered table...and oh my God, the hair that tumbled out of there was truly a beautiful, eye-popping dream! Such a lush mesmeric carrot-y colour, it hurt my eyes just to look at it.

It cascaded around her snow-dusted shoulders in bouncing, almost abnormal curls. Wave after wave flowed around her, seeming not to just fill this room here, but to set it alight like the curtain-raiser to a religious vision. The blazing fire the dog was sitting in front of filled that hair with secret, depthless shadows, along with seductive golden-red layers.

I now understood, even as a woman, why a married man, or _any_ man, would throw everything away just to plunge his hands into that hair...and his body into the rest of her, that meatless, bony frame. Not that _I_ was in a position to make any undermining comment about that!

But on my hair I could. My hair suddenly seemed like a dull, shoddy thatch compared to hers. It almost made me want to pull up that makeshift scarf of mine, which lay in a black, damp ruffle around my shoulders, and hide my hair in shame. Her compliments on how red it was had clearly been insincere.

I looked over at that framed photo again: her stood next to that Lancia Flavia 2000 that she must have sold to the garage from which I'd bought it four months ago. That photo, it did not do her hair much, if any, justice. But all the same, I'd known it was her, and all along.

The balaclava reveal had simply sealed the belief.

I clasped my hands around my knees and began, once more, to rock back and forth, staring up at her with tired, beleaguered acceptance.

'Yah knew, did yah not?' she said. 'I think yah knew before yah clocked that photo on the mantle up there. Think yah may even have known back at the river there, when I came over and looked down into your eyes. Am I right there, lass?'

'I think you might be,' I said, nodding like a submissive child. 'But things are just... _things_ in a world gone grey. If that makes any sense. Don't think it does, but I know what I mean.'

'I get the rub o' the green,' she said, meaning that she got the "nub of it." The "rub of the green" was something entirely different, of course...but then again she had that, too. So maybe she hadn't been that far off the mark in the first place. 'I'm no eejit. Nor are you. We know what we mean. Just that we can't always get all the right words together and line them up in a neat little row. But yeah, you're right: things are just things in a world gone grey. And those things don't mean much when you're dying, do they? That's what you're saying, ain't it? That's the way the bread crumbles on the sunny side up, is it not?'

'It is,' I said.

Outside, I heard Lazarus bray a deep, masculine whinny, and in response, the old silver-ghost hogging the fire there like a hairy, flea-bitten clamp, whimpered again.

I suddenly wanted to go over there, put my hands around its scraggy throat, and finish the job the disease eating into it was taking its time over. Then I could sling its miserable corpse out into the snow and get a little of that fire for myself. My teeth went on chattering like joke-shop teeth. The hole in my leg bitched, non-stop. My knees knocked, but I kept them together as best I could - the view down there would be X-rated, otherwise.

The door bashed.

Snow blitzed the window.

The curtain in the kitchen puffed out and then back in.

Old Happy Helen began to snore like she was tearing lumps out of the air. Green snot, mixed with blood, ran over her mouth. She let out a long, trumpeting fart that, in all honesty, wouldn't have made much of a noticeable difference to the pollution in here, anyway.

As this went on, I began to feel like I was in the madhouse that both these women should be locked-up in.

*****

Anna Turpin glanced at the window when Lazarus whinnied. 'I ought to put a blanket over the harse out there' -

( harse? )

\- 'but it ain't like we're going be in here like people waiting for a bus, anyhow. We've got things to do...things that are just things in a world gone grey, to use those words o' yours.'

'What things?' I asked, like I didn't know all this was going to end horribly, anyway.

'Well, I'm in a jam, am I not?' Anna Turpin said. 'Surely yah can see that, can yah not? And if yah don't like the plan I got in mind...well, you can poke it, frankly. Blame her.' She pointed down at Helen Davenport. 'Blame that big snoring heap o' shite there. She's the one who drove yah here. I'm just the poor sod caught in the middle.'

'No, you're not!' I said, suddenly finding my voice, and it not only startled me, it startled my heart, too, which banged hard in my chest. 'You're the one caught in the middle because _you are middle!_ You're the reason, and the only reason, why that woman's here! Me, too! Fuck, whatever happened to taking ownership?'

All at once, she whipped out Helen Davenport's gun, which I knew she would, as all bullies do when they've got no viable defence and guns can solve all the problems bullies can't fix with their mouths.

She jabbed it at me, but didn't take a step towards me ( not then, anyhow ), probably because she had Helen Davenport to consider who, at the moment, was still soundly out cold. But you didn't take chances all the same. And Helen Davenport, who would not be much of a physical challenge, given the mess she was in, would still be able to cause enough of a rumpus, should she suddenly wake up and discover she was in the company of the real Anna Turpin.

Yes, quite a rumpus, I would have thought. Most likely the kind of rumpus that could throw a fair old spanner into Anna Turpin's can of worms, which, no doubt, would be her way of putting those two proverbs together to make a kind of wacky sense.

'Now, you listen here,' she said, keeping her voice low because she didn't want to wake the snoring, dead-to-the-world battle-axe down there on the couch. 'No need to get your panties back-to-front with me. All I was doing down by that river was checking on me animals, making sure they hadn't drifted off course, as animals often can when snow comes in to confuse them. I was doing just feckin dandy, thanks very much, the saints be praised. Then all of a sudden yous two mad mammies turn up, rare as rocking-harse teeth. Her with a gun, and you with a wound as big as a fanny-hole in yah leg.'

'You killed her husband and son,' I said, simply and calmly. 'You were put in jail for that, too. Which is where you should still be, serving the life sentence the judge handed out to you. The fact she and I ended up by that river is a twist of fate that's absurd...but maybe not. Maybe it's how it should be, anyhow. Kismet. Maybe the anguish that woman's been through was meant to come to a stop right here.'

'Believe what yah feckin like. Fate or not, yous two bastards have fecked everything up for me, and I've got to deal with that. Me name's Clare Mansfield these days, has been since I escaped from Pengarrett. Clare Mansfield, the _real_ Clare Mansfield, died in Pengarrett while I was in there, the poor lass. She came from the south but lived up north for much of the time. She was only inside for some thievery and a bit of tomfoolery. Still, they found a lump under her breast, and three weeks later, she kicked the bucket. Feckin tough luck, eh? Me and Clare, we had a...relationship. I'll say no more on that, not on the details. But she told me about her granny's place, which is this place here. Told me her old granny was as daft as a beard, smelled of piss, of wintergreen, and carbolic soap. Still, she loved Clare. Wrote her a letter that stated this place was hers when she came out of Pengarrett, that all the pens had been put to all the papers. But of course she never came out. She died in there. But...I came out, did I not? And I came out the wrong end, for sure.'

Anna Turpin changed tack right then. 'What's your name?'

'Sonia. Sonia Rowntree.'

'Sonia, eh? I like that name. I could get down with that name myself. Well, Sonia, do yah have any idea how many prisoners escape each year?'

'Surely not that many, not in this day and age. They've got high-tech security systems, along with doors that need special codes. I imagine they have, anyway. And state of the art cameras and monitoring equipment, too. Haven't they?'

Anna Turpin nodded. 'So how many escapes are made, would yah say, based on what you've just said there?'

'Per year? A couple of hundred, perhaps.'

'No, you're way off. There are seventy-to-eighty-thousand prisoners in the British Isles. Each year, about a thousand of those either escape or abscond. Some years the figure's even higher. Hard to feckin believe, eh? But it's true. On top of that, no one plays ball by revealing how many prisoners are recaptured. The Home Office even put out a statement once, stating that the cost of working-out the number of prisoners at large would be too expensive. That's the kind of penal system yah can only feckin laugh at, ain't it? Of course, the Home Office is always quick to point out that these escapees are mostly low-category. Yah know, carjackers, thieves, smugglers, embezzlers, fraudsters? If they escaped, they'd be no danger to the public. Not physically, anyway. Category A prisoners would be, though. Those are held in maximum security because, if they escaped, they'd almost certainly wreak feckin havoc.'

'So what category were you?'

'I was a C. Categories are mainly based not on the crime yah commit, but on the risk yah pose as an escapee. Of course, if yah slaughtered half your village, you'd be deemed a feckin head-banger and likely be marched off to Broadmoor, which is another basket of frogs altogether. Although maybe I'm being a little unfair. Broadmoor's certainly got its fair share of bad bastards who've got no chance of being released, but the majority are shorter term patients with severe mental illness and psychiatric disorders. You've got another couple of facilities like that, too: Ashworth and Rampton. But I was never considered for any places like that, thank the jack-rabbits!'

'So what's a Category C?'

'Category C's can't be trusted in open conditions, but they're unlikely to try and escape. How wrong they were, eh? I thought I'd be made a Category B, but after an assessment, they made me a C. Some kind of half-arsed assessment, wouldn't yah say, for the hell of it? I mean, it was made clear during the trial that I was an open wound for me sister, Mary. That I'd see her at night, or even in the day. There she'd be, large as life, at the foot of me bed, or lurking behind a dark hedgerow, or in the shadows of a barn. Always urging me on to get up to no good. God, I loved that girl to the bones, so I did, why aye man. But she had the bad in her, all right. Still does...and I'm still bewitched by her, so I am. Can't help it. She tells me to jump and I jump!'

'Was none of this taken into account during the trial?'

'Was it feck! I was declared a cold-bloodied killer who knew what she was doing when she ran down' - she pointed at the snoring, smashed-up whale on the couch there that was Helen Davenport - 'her man and boy. And maybe I am, that's the complications of it all. Maybe I am a cold-bloodied killer, and all I've ever done is blame Mary for it all. Who knows who we are when it's raining or shining. We all argue when there's no trouble, and laugh when there's no joke. We're a strange feckin bunch, the lot of us, when yah get right down to it.'

She jabbed the gun at me then, to reassert her power, probably because she felt she'd given too much away. Had shown me too much of her vulnerable side. 'Yah see, I've got weaknesses, anyhow. I'll have sex with anything that's got a pulse, I admit that. Why not? If it's a swan, then it quacks, and we all know that, so why try to hide it, eh? But me life was no ordinary life. It was all beat-up caravans-and-trucks, and muddy trailer camps, and rainy, wind-scruffy stop-offs in the middle o' nowhere, and savage dogs, and wild harses, and men who'd put their hands on yah like they were doing nothing worse than taking sweeties out of a bag. Are yah with me on that? Are yah feckin with me, darling?'

I nodded.

She tossed her hair around, so that it swished, either side of her face, in an amazing golden-red deluge. After that, she once again grabbed her crotch. Bowed her legs, too, like a cowboy adjusting his nuts. She gave me a dirty, cupidinous look then, which was all smoky eyes, and a tongue that poked between her lips. 'But you're making me warm here, lass. Every now and then, I'm catching a gander of your pale, silky thighs, and your dainty little ham sandwich down there. I know you're not comfy on that chair there, and your hurt leg is probably bitching like hell. But best yah try to adjust your position with a little more elegance. If not, I might be over there with me tongue, along with a handful of greedy fingers.'

I crossed my legs...and carefully. Slow-motion carefully. This was the last thing I wanted to do - I knew it would pull on the bullet-wound, and it did. It set off fresh bombs of pain that blasted up and down my leg, agonisingly. I clamped my teeth together and squinched my eyes shut. Even yelped a little like one of those super-small, teacup dogs whose paw had been trod on.

But even then, Anna Turpin began to pant. Bright colour jumped into that pale, drawn face of hers, like blood splashed in a toilet bowl. I set about steering the subject back to her sister. Had to. The last thing I needed was a lesbian encounter foisted on me, what with my leg in screaming tatters, and with the silver-ghost on the fireside rug there, watching, and with Helen Davenport snoring her bloody chops off, and with the wind bashing away at the front door. Not forgetting old Lazarus out there in the storm, whinnying away in his bitter-cold loneliness, and that curtain in the kitchen, puffing in and out, and the dust-balls skimming around my feet on the draughty floor.

No, it all seemed a little...inappropriate?

Not that much here was appropriate, anyhow.

I asked: 'What happened to Mary?' ( like I didn't already know ).

'Hmmm?'

'What happened to your sister?'

'She died.'

'How?'

'She fell off the back of me harse. All the Turpins blamed it on me because I was two years older than her, and I should've known better than to take her on that harse that could just gallop off like its backside was on fire. Yeah, everyone blamed me, all right. Apart from me mammy. She knew what Mary was like, a little harpy who never listened to anyone.'

'And you?'

'And me, what?'

'What happened to you after Mary died?'

'A feckin outcast, that's what I became! Just about, anyhow. Me family still talked to me, but only when they had to. The rest of the time I was treated like a feckin leopard! Me mammie bothered, of course. But even between me and her it became difficult. Strained, yah know? In the end, I mostly went me own way. Began treating men the way they treated me, like I was simply taking sweeties out of a bag. Feckin easy money, all that, if yah don't care who yah fuck to get it. Ain't no way you're going to be stacking shelves and pushing brooms if yah got eejits happy enough to cough up a small fortune for what's between yah legs.'

I jabbed a finger at Helen Davenport. _Two_ fingers, in truth. The one on my hand, and the long, stretched-out one on the floor; the light was fading, afternoon was now blending into evening, and the shadows were growing thicker. 'So what happened between you and her husband?'

'That ain't none of your business! But I had feelings for him. Some, anyway. More than I had for most. Still, I woke up one boiling-hot morning with what felt like nails bashed in me head, and I got in me car, and I ran him down. Ran his boy down, too, as they crossed the road to go into the field where the boy's football practice was held. I ain't proud of it. And I never killed before and ain't since. But there yah have it, what's done is done, I can't take it back. So now me life is here.

'After escaping Pengarrett, I came to this place, which was me plan, anyhow, given that Clare Mansfield told me about how she was inheriting this farm here after her granny died. But Clare died before any of that could happen, of course. So along I came in her place. By then, Clare's granny was no longer as daft as a beard. She'd progressed to barely knowing the difference between a road and a rowing boat. Still, I think she knew I wasn't Clare; she got the letter from HM Prison Services telling her that Clare was dead. I know because I saw it in her writing-desk. And the funeral was held up north, anyway, put together by friends, mostly. Clare didn't have much of a family. Her granny never went to the funeral, either; she still believed Clare was alive, so when I turned up, there I was, Clare come back from the dead, like feckin magic! In her old granny's mind, anyhow.'

'How _did_ you escape?'

Her gaze turned up to the ceiling, Anna Turpin considered my question, but not for long. I gathered she'd be quite happy to answer it because it wasn't like I'd be around for much longer, anyway. Yes, I knew where this was heading. Of course I did. Towards my death, that's where; once she got her past off her chest, her future would be the next big weight pressing down on her. No future with me and Helen Davenport around to tell tales. A future for Anna Turpin meant no future for the other two women in this stuffy, messy room.

'Yah know something?' she said, lowering her gaze, dropping it back on me. 'That's another set of details the Home Office like to keep to themselves: how prisoners escape. Of course, I understand why they prefer to keep those details. If they made them public, the prisoners would soon get hold of them, and before you knew it, there'd be breakouts all over the feckin place! Mayhem, or what! But would-be escapees stay quiet, yah see. They don't go telling others their plans. If they did, someone else would try out that plan before they could. Just stab yah in the back, they would. The only thing yah can rely on, for sure, is yourself, three square meals a day, along with the hour's worth of fresh air you're entitled to by law.

'Of course, fresh air's the key. That's where most of your chances come from, just about. Category D and you're laughing! Category D's could just about walk out the gate with a daily paper under one arm and blowing fag smoke in the faces of the screws. But Category D's are mostly short-term, anyhow, and on top of that, their time in there's all roses around the pantry for the most part. But Category C - which I was, of course - is another feckin kettle of snakes. The screws have still got their beady eyes on yah, and closely. Not like they have on A's and B's, of course. A's and B's are guarded like God's own treasure. Been years since an A escaped, I believe. In this country, anyhow. But yeah, even as a C, the screws have got their eyes on yah like eejit robots.

'Still, escaping ain't impossible as a C, just as long as yah want it bad enough. You've got to want it bad enough, otherwise it ain't worth the aggro, should yah get caught. Solitary ain't no fun, that's why, even nowadays. Also, they'll likely stick more time on your sentence, just to pour a little salt on your parade. So you've got to want it bad enough, all right. Then you've got to have a plan, and a plan that you've turned inside-out and upside-down, a hundred times over. Feck, that plan's got to be so good that you're free before yah even made the escape! You catch me on that?'

I nodded.

'But that ain't all of it, even then. After all, what good's escaping if you've got nowhere to go? You've got to have somewhere to go. And I did. Right here.' She looked around the room to indicate she meant this old, decaying farmhouse. 'I knew I'd be welcome, too, because Clare gave me enough info on her dear old granny to make me feel like a relative before I even stepped over that threshold there.'

She nodded down at the threshold, over which blew that chilly draught which, in turn, blew those dust-balls around my feet, and then up against the curled edge of the flea-chatty carpet her dining-table was standing on. No carpet for me up this end of the room. Just bare floorboards. But it was a "luxury" I was more than happy to be deprived of; just looking at that carpet made my skin crawl. My skin that was still coldly-numb, even now.

'See that gap under that door there, lass? I ain't kidding when I say I got through a gap not much bigger than that. Tore the skin off me ribs, I did, and put me head through what felt like a feckin mangle. But there's always a gap, yah know. Even in prison there's always a gap, no matter that it'll rip yah to shreds and scalp your feckin arse off yah back! Still, like I said, you've got to want it bad enough. And it helps to be my feckin size, so it does, why aye. The same as you there, lass, the stringy strip of bacon that yah are! Yep, I reckon you'd have made it out of there, all right. Like feckin sisters, we are! No wonder that snoring tub o' blubber mistook yah for me!'

'The car didn't help,' I said, matter-of-factly, looking over at that framed photo on the mantle there. I glanced over at old Happy Helen, still fast-asleep and snoring away, her lips smacking every so often in between. 'She saw you in it six-months ago, and me in it two-months ago. I bought it four-months ago. It was fully-refurbished after you sold it. But of course it still has the same registration number. So now I'm in this position because of that car. Great! I wish I'd never laid eyes on it, never mind bought it!'

'Well, yah did. So now you'll have to bite the bullet.'

_Bite the bullet!_ I thought, and laughed. It was one of those tart, cackling laughs that all of a sudden broke free of me. At last Anna Turpin had gotten a saying correct. She hadn't dovetailed two entirely different sayings together somehow, and I found it bleakly humorous.

'Whatcha laughing at there, yah silly bat?'

'Just at the fact I bought a murderer's car, and an _escaped_ murderer's car, at that!' This was a lie, of course, to cover up the real reason for my laughter. But then: 'There's got to be a joke in there somewhere, don't you think? Like I bought a cursed Egyptian artefact, and now here I am, trapped in the tomb of Anak Turpin-Kamun!'

I laughed harder, and this time there was even a spark of biting joy in it. It hurt to laugh. The bullet-wound pleaded with me to stop, and the aching, frozen bags that were my lungs pressed sorely against my chest.

However, that laughter, it made me feel human again, like I was part of life, not death. And I hadn't felt that way since before Helen Davenport attacked me back at my car. My car which had gotten me into all of this trouble in the first place. That, and my hair, which was nothing but a pallid, limp mop compared to Anna Turpin's dazzling blaze of glory. God, I thought old Happy Helen needed her eyes testing after mistaking me for the undisputed queen of redheads, Anna Turpin!

'Anak Turpin-Kamun, eh? That's actually quite funny. And I'm glad yah can see the funny side o' this...because I can't. Not enough to throw in a right ole belly-laugh, anyhow.'

She took a step towards me, but only the one, and cautiously. She glanced down at the blissfully-contented snoring lump on the couch there, saw that she was still deeply asleep, and likely she wouldn't wake even if a bomb went off.

Still, she was taking no chances - the closer Anna Turpin stepped towards me, so the further away she stepped from old Happy Helen. She needed to cover both points of danger. Difficult. But not so difficult in the light that she had a gun. Also, if Helen Davenport _did_ wake up, she'd be confused. Undoubtedly. On the spur of the moment, if she had to make a decision, she'd almost certainly attack me, anyhow, as opposed to the real Anna Turpin. After all, she'd spent the day chasing me down. It would be almost impossible for her to make a mental switch at this stage.

As she took that step towards me, so Anna Turpin underlined her dominance by once again poking the gun in my direction. In her coarse, smoke-roughened voice, she said, 'Yah see, laughing ain't me game, not when I got so much to lose. Squeezing me skinny arse through that gap to get out of Pengarrett played only a very small part in what I achieved that day. I worked a feckin miracle, so I did. I made sure the sun was shining in the right direction...that all the guards were suitably distracted...that all the security cameras were looking everywhere but at me...that the sub-contractors working on the new extension had parked their trucks exactly where I hoped they'd be parked. I had all of about ten-seconds to work that miracle, and I made it work, God bless me little cotton socks!'

She gave me a hard, emphatic look then. 'And I ain't going to let that miracle go so easily. Not on your nelly. On top of that, when I made it to this place, I had to make sure I played me cards right with old Granny Mansfield. That wasn't easy, let me tell yah. She may have lost just about all of her marbles by then, but the ones she still had, she could roll accurately enough. Hard enough, too, when they needed a little weight behind them. A fly old girl, she was. She may have believed I was Clare...but maybe not. I was never quite sure. But by then, because she was losing more and more of her marbles, she needed me as much as I needed her.

'But of course there are ways of needing and not losing your dignity at the same time. She did that perfectly. Always playing out the slack line of need, and then jerking in the hook of dignity, when it needed to be jerked. So what she did was play the game that I was Clare, just as long as I played the game of keeping her best interests at heart. Which I did. Had to. By the time I came along, the roof on this place was leaking, the animals were only getting fed in fits and starts, and the bills were stacking up. I got it all sorted, though. Me, and only me. And it was feckin hard work, let me tell yah. But I'm a hard-working lass, if nothing else.'

A gust of wind slapped the door hard.

The old silver-ghost howled weakly on the fireside rug.

Lazarus once again whinnied as if he'd been tied up and forgotten.

I jumped.

Anna Turpin jumped.

'Getting jittery here, aren't we?' she said. She laughed, but lowly, and always with a watchful, sideways eye on Helen Davenport. Then she went on with her story. 'But even though I worked hard, I knew I was onto a winner, anyhow, just as long as I kept me nose clean and me head down. And no one cared about old Granny Mansfield, ain't that the truth, why aye. That's what I soon realised, and the reason for that was simple: that Unity Gate had grown too big. When towns grow too big, they grow colder. Not like little towns that keep their warmth. Yah catch me on that?'

'Yes. In small towns people care, in big towns people don't. I gather that Granny Mansfield was soon forgotten, and then neglected out here.'

'Yah got that right. So no one knew what the feck her grand-daughter looked like, anyhow. I suppose, when the town had been small - nothing like the sprawling place it is now - there would have been those who knew Clare. But that would have been a long time ago, when Clare was little, whenever she came to visit for the weekend. Those people, though, they were no longer around when I broke out of Pengarrett. Dead, for sure. And by the time Granny Mansfield was croaking it on her death-bed, I had all the right paperwork in hand: the ID's, the National Insurance number, the passport, the bank account, the driving license. I even had a genuine copy of Clare's birth-certificate, so I did.' She flapped a hand at me. 'But ah, it's all easy enough to wangle, just as long as yah bide your time and go about it the right way. Even crooks can gain their paperwork in the legal way, if they've got a bit o' savvy.'

She glanced at the photo on the mantle then. 'So there yah have it. The woman who sold that car to that garage was Clare Mansfield. Not Anna Turpin. That would be the name you'd have seen on your documents there, girl, had yah cared to look: Clare Mansfield. She was the last registered owner before you went and handed over your hard-earned cash for that vehicle.'

Chapter 12: As The Flies Crow

My eyes grew wide. My mouth fell open. Just like that, Anna Turpin came over to me, taking me by surprise. _Stalked_ over to me, in truth, apparently forgetting now about treading lightly and keeping her voice low. Suddenly, it appeared that Anna Turpin knew that Helen Davenport was going to remain in a heavy, snoring slumber, no matter what pandemonium broke out, and now her constraint had been set free.

She bore down on me, her lips peeled back, her nose sliding up her face, becoming like a wedge driven between her eyes. Her eyes that spangled horridly in the waxing-waning firelight. Her hair boiled around her in a hypnotic red-orange fankle. The gun was now aimed directly at my forehead. In a voice that was uncompromisingly grim but still steady enough all the same, she said, 'I'm Clare Mansfield, that's who I am, yah fecker. You ain't taking that away from me, either; you ain't spoiling all the good I done here. Me life ain't turned out for the best, I know. But it's still a feckin damn sight better compared to a lifetime in Pengarrett. I ain't going back there, I can tell yah that much. I just ain't. And like I said, I never killed before, and not since.'

Her eyes flashed with a perverse kind of rationale that I saw coming before it took flight from her lips. 'And I wouldn't be killing yous two mad mammies, anyhow, would I? I mean, look at the mess o' the pair of yous! _You_ look like a corpse already, and she sounds like she's going to have a feckin heart attack the next time she takes a bite out o' the air. Lord knows how yous two made it all the way to that river, seeing as yah started off at the Gartley-White Mist road. Should have been dead way before that, the way I see it. And she'd have killed yah, anyway, had I not stepped in when I did. Probably would have put this cheap old shooter here to her own head, once she'd finished you off, the feckin crazy fat slob! That being the case, I can't see how I'd be doing much wrong. Just putting an end to what should have ended, anyhow.'

She leaned back a little. Her spine crackled. She tossed her hair from side to side so that it swung around one shoulder, then the other, until finally it flowed like lava down either side of her neck, before fanning out across her chest on which I could see two small nubs between the opening of her coat. She hooked the thumb of her gun-holding hand into a belt-loop on her jeans, and stuck out the swell of her crotch. Grabbed herself like Michael Jackson in "Bad". Gave me a theatrically lustful pout, and then said, 'Oh God, I have _so_ got the hots for you there, lass! You are totally fuckable, and no mistake, why aye man. But I don't have time for all that malarkey.'

I felt myself sway in front of her, loose-necked, my eyes heavy. My throat was bone-dry and felt as thin as a drinking-straw. My chest wheezed. I seemed to now be wearing a layer of cold, dead skin that only helped to further chill the last deposits of my warmth. There was no pain in my lower half anymore. My lower half had given up the ghost. Just a dead weight, it was, joined to my middle, which in turn, was a stem of brittle glass struggling to support an upper half that did nothing but flop all over the place. I wondered if any of this was real. I thought Anna Turpin might only be one of those visions I'd seen out there in the storm earlier.

However, she unhooked her thumb from her belt-loop, grasped my chin, but with at least some care for which I was grateful.

She was real, all right.

As real as the death that crooked a cold, uncaring finger at me.

As I gazed wearily and woozily up at her, she said, 'I know a place up in those woods where yous two won't be found until that snow out there melts. The forecast is for this storm to head out to sea in the next couple o' hours. When yous two poor wenches are finally discovered, me harse-tracks will be gone, and it'll just be you and her, lying dead together - she finally caught up with yah and nailed yah with this gun here. That's what the police'll think. And you were on the phone to yah mother, weren't yah, when the snoring beast on that couch there attacked yah? So it seems to me that if I took your phone out o' her pocket, I'd find missed calls from your mother on there. Missed calls full o' worry, no doubt, which is only right. What mother _wouldn't_ worry, knowing her daughter's trapped out in a fearsome blizzard the likes o' which won't be seen again for many years to come, I'm sure. Not in Hampshire, anyhow. Then there's the cars, yours and hers. It'll be clear to the police that once again Helen Davenport had latched onto some poor redhead, only this time she took it too far, and put a bullet in the poor woman. Feck, this'll be the easiest case the police will have had in years! _Decades_ , maybe!

'Not only that, but they'll finally be able to get that stupid bitch out of their hair, the pest that she is. The feckin Mental Health Services will think the same, too, given the amount of resources she must have chewed her way through since I escaped from Pengarrett. She ain't going to be missed by anyone, the big fat fecker. They'll all be glad to see the back of her, shut the file, and write "case closed" on the front.'

'What about my car?' I asked out of a mouth that felt like a hole lined with leather. 'Your old car? The police might look into that, don't you think?'

Anna Turpin shrugged. 'Yeah, they might. But then again, they probably won't. Feck, they'd be a weird bunch of detectives to take it that far and question me, wouldn't they? No _reason_ to question me. I'm just a local lass who sold a car to a local dealer. Good old Clare Mansfield who owns the farm up yonder. Good old Clare Mansfield who nursed her dying old granny. Good old Clare Mansfield who pays her bills on time, and hasn't even picked up so much as a speeding ticket. Nah, you're barking at the wrong bush there, it seems to me. I'm the cream that got the cat, make no mistake. And you're losing a fighting battle there, girl, so yah are.'

She was right, I was. There'd be no reason at all for the police to question Clare Mansfield. Only if they discovered, somehow, that Anna Turpin - the escaped murderer Anna Turpin - was hiding behind that name. I had no idea if HM Prison Services notified the police every time an inmate died, and if they did, it still wouldn't stop someone from impersonating that dead inmate, would it? Not that anyone would want to do that. You'd likely draw more attention to yourself, especially if you were an escaped convict like Anna Turpin. Christ, why not put a sign up outside this farmhouse here with ANNA TURPIN, THE MURDERER, LIVES HERE, NOT CLARE MANSFIELD! written on it.

No, Anna Turpin had this all buttoned up, and she knew it. Even if it _was_ standard procedure for the police to question previous owners of any vehicles involved in a murder enquiry, they'd have nothing on Anna Turpin / Clare Mansfield. What was more, Anna Turpin just had to be the biggest nincompoop in the world when it came to getting her phrasing all muddled up. Hilarious, in fact! But she'd be no nincompoop when it came to making sure that when she dumped me and Helen Davenport up in those woods, that not a single scrap of evidence would lead back to her. She liked her freedom, this woman. She would not relinquish the simple comforts of that freedom, either. Her life was hard, unmistakably hard. For her, though, there'd be no contest between a hard, free life and an easy but limited life.

'And just in case you're thinking that, if they did question me about the car, then they'd notice me hair - me bright-red hair - and maybe wonder about that? You know, how come _I_ hadn't been one of Helen Davenport's fixations in the past five years? Well, I've already got the answer to that. I work on a farm. Farming's a twenty-four-hour job, nigh on. And whenever I'm farming, me hair's either up in a scarf or under a hat. Yes, I did drive that Lancia around the area on the rare occasion, and with me hair down, too. Seems that Helen Davenport must have seen me on one of those rare occasions. But...she never caught up with me. She mistook you for me when she saw you in that car a couple months later. Bad luck, I'd say. For you, anyhow. Still, that's life, eh? That's you paddling up the river with no canoe.'

'Pretty much looks that way,' I said, sounding almost stoical. But that was just my tiredness. Inside, fear began to well up inside me...and then it gripped me, hard and naked and utterly terrifying. I think terror remains manageable all the time a way out can be seen...but I _couldn't_ see a way out. No way at all. I doubted death would be as painful for me as it would be for someone who hadn't slogged for miles in a snowstorm with a bullet-hole in their leg. Someone who wasn't already half-dead with the cold, as well. But it was still an experience I wanted to avoid, if I could help it.

However, that experience - the wellspring of it, at least - came around much too quick, along with my terror, which all of a sudden went from a low, tolerable hum to an electrified, shocking panic that filled up all of my brain like a breakout in hell.

My legs still crossed, I stared up at Anna Turpin, who, likewise, was staring down at me. To her I must have looked like a scared, cornered animal. A scared, cornered, _sick_ animal. To me, she looked every inch the woman who had mown down Helen Davenport's husband and son, and with nary a care in the world. From the beginning, back there at the river, I had seen no way into this woman, and no way out. She was emotionally blocked, both ways. The only way into her, it seemed to me, was by means of her sister. But even then her sister would come a poor second - if only on this occasion - to the more pressing problem of getting rid of me and old Happy Helen. Anna was an open wound for Mary. If Mary told Anna to jump, she jumped. Those were Anna Turpin's words, of course, not mine.

Nevertheless, I couldn't see how I could use Mary to get into Anna - to use her as a distraction - to buy some time in which to think. We were done here. The talking was over ( all the historical talking, that was ).

I could see it in the ruthless glimmer of Anna Turpin's eyes, and in the cold-steel hook of her mouth.

Our time was up.

Mine.

And old Happy Helen's.

*****

Anna Turpin pulled a mobile phone out of her jeans pocket.

Called a number.

No one answered.

'Feckin eejit shit for brains!' she said. She rolled her eyes and shook her head. She slipped the phone back in her pocket. After that, she looked around at old Happy Helen, established that she was still snoring her face off, that her mouth was still catching flies, and then looked down at me. She hooked a thumb at the front door.

'So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to take yah back outside, get yah up on me harse, and tie your hands to the saddle. Then I'm going to come back in here and put that fat pile o' shite over me shoulder again. Going to sling her over the back of me harse, just like before. That done, we're then going to go up in the woods with me leading the harse. If yah start screeching and kicking up a stink, then I'll use that headscarf of yours as a gag. Yah got that?'

I nodded. Then said, 'Please, I have a daughter - '

She slapped me around the mouth, and so hard, my bottom lip cut into my teeth. All of a sudden I could taste blood. My ears rang. My left cheek stung hotly.

'You were saying?'

Tears began to pour down my face. I shook my head slowly, which was my way of telling her I had nothing more to say. The front door once again rattled in the wind. The old silver-ghost made a long, mewling noise by the fire. Old Happy Helen went on sleeping like a hibernating bear. More snow was tossed against the window. The curtain in the kitchen blew out, hung there, billowing, and was then tugged back into the shadows.

'Good,' Anna Turpin said. 'That's how we like it, don't we? Nice and quiet. No feckin funny business. Now stand up.'

But...the only thing that stood up...was my hand.

My mittened hand.

It was suddenly there, hanging next to my face. Once again I heard Mrs Twee saying, _You just need to remember that there are two birds in the bush, and one bird in the hand! And I'm the bird in the hand. Tah-Dah!_

After that, my eyes rolled up inside my head, and I saw nothing but blackness. I felt my head sag to one side. My tongue, my blood-stained tongue, slid out the side of my mouth. My limbs began to contort. My left arm twisted around so that my elbow was jabbing under my ribs, and my hand - my hand that had been cut to ribbons by that stick of mine - was now an upwards facing claw. My legs uncrossed themselves...and then relaxed apart. My feet became arched, my toes pressing hard against the dusty, boarded floor.

I heard a voice suddenly say, 'My oh my, Anna, but you're losing your touch there, are yah not, Sis? The old Anna Turpin would have fecked this skinny whore-bag here before going about the rest of her business. What's up, yah lost the urge these days? Your old kebab dried up, has it?'

'Wah...wah... _what?'_ That was Anna Turpin, confused.

I couldn't see her. My eyes had flipped up, of course, and were now gazing at the inside of my skull, but all the same, I could sense her staring at my mittened hand. And the voice that came out of my hand did not sound like Mrs Twee's. This voice sounded like Anna Turpin's, but younger, and with a mischievous, jeering edge to it.

'Wah-wah? That's a noise yah can make with a guitar, ain't it? Feck me, yah eejit, it's me here, your wee sister, Mary! Yah gone and forgotten me already, have yah?'

'No...no, of course not!' Anna said, sounding embarrassed. _Squirming_ , in truth, was the impression I got. Frightened a little, too. I could hear her running her hands through her hair, and shuffling her feet about, uncomfortably. 'It's just that yah haven't come to me in a while, and...' She paused. When she spoke again, she sounded suspicious all of a sudden. Unconvinced. 'And yah haven't spoken a _word_ to me since last year sometime. Yah came to me in Pengarrett, and a lot, as I remember. But...'

'So yah got your doubts, have yah? Well, that's okay. I get where you're coming from. After all, this bitch here, this Sonia Rowntree bitch, she's no dumb-arse, that's for sure. She knows which way the feckin wind's blowing, all right. For all yah know, she could be behind all this puppet-shit here. She's got the talent, I know that much. But yah ain't got no worries there, Sis. It's me, for sure. After all, didn't we wank off that dozy fool Barry Callaghan down in the buttercup meadow that day? Yah recall _that_ , don't yah? Feck, his face was all red like a feckin beetroot, and he was breathing like an asthmatic, so he was!'

'Yes, I recall,' Anna said, but still doubtful.

'And what about the time we put dogs' shite in Shamus Connelly's boots, and the daft fecker even had the laces tied before he smelled the pong coming out of there!'

'Yes,' Anna said, laughing now, relaxing a little.

'Then there was the time we built a bonfire under old Granny McGinty's clothesline, did we not, and set all her feckin bloomers alight?'

'Why aye, bonnie lass, yes, I remember!'

'And you're still blaming yourself for what happened to me that day, I know yah are. But it wasn't your fault, it was mine. All mine. Screaming jack-rabbits, I was nothing but a pain to our mammy and pappy, was I not? Always up to no good somewhere along the way. That day, I said that if yah didn't take me on the back of old Clipper, I'd go and see those lads that weaved those hazel fences down in the woods. Said I'd take off all me glad-rags and let them feel me up, did I not?'

'Yah did.'

'So yah had no choice, did yah? Feck, but I had no morals, me. None at all. Nothing but a bad lass waiting for an accident to happen, was I not? If I hadn't broken me neck falling off old Clipper, I'd have gotten meself strangled by a mad-jealous lad, or gotten meself shot in a robbery. And I ain't no different, even now. I still got the devil in me...and the devil drives hard, so he does. Never lets up, the mad bastard. And this snowstorm's in for a while yet, Sis. Why not get munching on this bitch here before yah go back out there in the freezing cold? That ought to warm the cockles o' your heart, so it must.'

Right on cue, the temptation was cranked up a little more enticingly for Anna Turpin; I could feel inexplicable weight pulling on the backs of my legs, behind my knees.

Just like that, my bottom was sliding towards Anna Turpin, and as it did, so my legs opened wider. I could feel the cold draught from under the front door blowing around my thighs. Blowing into the wound there, too, but...there was no pain. Just an acutely pin-pointed sensation that was there like an irksome little rash.

I could also feel my coat bunching up underneath me, as it rode up my back. My headscarf became a thick ruff around my neck. My left hand suddenly made a grab for my crotch, randomly tearing away at the remains of my tights, and then my fingers - searching and scrabbling - found their way inside my knickers.

Finally, they jerked the gusset roughly aside.

Baring me entirely to Anna Turpin.

*****

'Get in there, Anna!' Mary Turpin cried. 'This dirty bitch is there for the taking! Feckin aching for it! Wetter than the sea in the pouring rain, so she is! Straight ahead, lass! As the flies crow!'

I heard Anna Turpin fall to her knees. Her breathing had picked up speed, and she was moaning, too, low down in her throat.

Old Happy Helen bugled another lengthy, melodic fart on the couch there.

The silver-ghost whined once more on the fireside rug.

Lazarus brayed yet again.

'In yah go, me girl! As the flies crow! As the feckin flies crow!'

She did go in; I felt Anna Turpin's hungry mouth close over me down there. Her tongue flicked out and began to probe me. They say you should try everything once, but about this, I was largely unmoved - one tongue is much like another when your eyes are closed. Fingers, too. In they went, two of them that spread me apart, and gently enough, thank goodness; the last thing I needed was a case of over-enthusiasm that would tip over into pain.

Into more pain!

I tried to open my eyes but couldn't. They were wilfully rolled up inside my head by whatever had a hold of me. Plainly had a hold of my body, too, which thrust itself towards Anna Turpin, not away from her.

I could feel her hands on my thighs, her thumbs caressing the flesh there, exposed through the holes-and-rips in my tights. Her gun was still in her right hand, resting on top of my leg. Even if I'd wanted to, I couldn't have made a grab for it - the same force that denied my eyes the ability to roll back down, denied me the freedom of movement to make a grab for that gun.

Anna Turpin moaned, delighted, and so did I. But the moan that came from me had not been caused by me. I suddenly had a thought: _I_ was the puppet here. I was in a role reversal that could have been instigated by Mrs Twee, but if it was, then Mrs Twee seemed to have handed her role to someone else. Mary Turpin, of course. But back in the woods, Mrs Twee had said, _We're about to head into the teeth of another storm, but it's a different kind of storm this time around...and one in which the advantage will swing your way, and out of Helen Davenport's. It's not without its risks, though._

Risks? I knew all about risks. But I had no idea whatsoever who exactly had control here. Was Mary Turpin _really_ Mary Turpin? Or was it Mrs Twee throwing the most miraculous impression of Mary Turpin? If it was, then Mrs Twee had somehow gotten hold of some convincing information about that bad-time girl. Convincing enough to fool Anna Turpin, for sure. And me as well!

Even though I was staring at the darkness inside my own head, I could still sense it getting darker in this farmhouse here. Afternoon was slipping further into evening, and the shadows would be growing longer. Anna Turpin - licking away at me down there like a dog with its tongue inside a marrow bone - had said the storm was due to end in the next two hours and move out to sea. That meant the body of the storm had probably passed over by now, and what we were getting was the wildly lashing tail of it, which, very often, was even worse. _Sounded_ worse, anyhow. The front door didn't rattle this time, it clattered, _bang, bang, bang!_ The hinges squealed. I heard the wind throwing what sounded like a lasso around the roof, that looping, scything _whoo...whoo...whoo!_ noise, and then it was like parts of the roof were being sucked away and dumped elsewhere. I heard what sounded like a window shake upstairs, or maybe a door. Something fell up there, too, and crashed to the floor: a vase, perhaps, or a jar.

The fireside ghost barked once, but lamely, like a protest with no conviction. Old Happy Helen sucked at her bloody, snotty gums, but that was all, and soon enough, she picked up the slow saw-cut rhythm of her snoring again.

Anna Turpin became even more enthusiastic. She began to rock slowly back and forth, her tongue slipping into me, then a couple of fingers followed that. She was moaning louder now: a quivering, breathless moan. I could feel her pawing at her own clothes, trying to ease off her coat, ease down her jeans, too, but doing it in awkward stages, not wanting to desert her pleasure for one moment, and also, not wanting to drop her guard too much.

'Straight in there, Anna, me darling!' Mary Turpin shouted...or maybe it was Mrs Twee doing a damn fine acting job. A _stupendous_ acting job, seeing as she was a diehard prude at heart. 'As the flies crow, baby! As the bastard flies crow!'

'Yes, yes!' Anna Turpin groaned, delirious, her mouth slurping.

'Give her one for me, yah dirty cow that yah are!'

'Yes, yes, oh _yes!'_

And then my eyes rolled down all of a sudden. At first bleary, but when my vision came back into focus, I saw that it was indeed darker in here, with thick, eerie shadows dancing on the walls that were cut in places by the orange-yellow of the fire.

My head, which was low down in the chair, my eyes peering over the arms, turned to the left, and I saw the curtain in the kitchen do its usual billow-out trick.

Only this time, it disclosed a figure: a girl with long red hair draped over most of her white, freckly face.

But I could see her grin, all right. Her grin in which there was no good, only bad. She looped her arms around, so that her elbows jutted. Her hands were clenched into fists, like she was gripping a horse's reins. She leaned forward. Began to pump her hips and bend her legs as if she were riding the last hectic furlong in the Epsom Derby. She pulled out an invisible whip and began to crack it behind her. She mouthed at me: _Giddy-up, giddy-up, giddy-up!_ _As the flies crow, Sonia, as the feckin flies crow!_

Then she burst into laughter, as silent as those words she had mouthed at me, her head thrown back cockily. After that, the backswing of the curtain covered her, then wrapped itself around her, and then, it bore her away.

She was gone

I looked to my right. Gripped in my mittened hand was the short, sharp stick I had picked up back at the rail-workers' hut.

I had forgotten about it.

I had not felt my hand go into my pocket to take it out of there.

My little finger became bent inside the mitten, as if the mitten was craftily winking at me. Then my hand flew up in the air. With wide, astounded eyes, I saw my hand's shadow printed there on the front door, stretched and dramatic, like a shadow in a film noir. Saw that shadow, too, as it began to arch fearsomely down towards Anna Turpin. Towards a point behind her head, between her shoulder-blades.

Mrs Twee's voice once again entered my head, reminding me of something she had said back at that hut. _But be prepared for anything, honey-bunch. At close-quarters, that stick might be the difference between life and death._

Chapter 13: Lifetime Debt

My body was thrown forwards. I grabbed a hunk of Anna Turpin's unjustly beautiful hair, and then, the short, sharp stick was driven hard between her shoulder-blades.

Out it came.

Back in it went.

Out it came.

Back in it went.

Blood squirted. She screamed. Of course she screamed.

Out the stick came.

Back in it went.

The film noir shadow thrashed back and forth on the frequently rattling front door. More blood squirted...and now the mitten was soaked. Warm blood ran down my wrist.

The gun slipped out of her hand and clattered to the floor. The silver-ghost, still there by the fire like its paws were screwed to the floor, gave out a bark that sounded like a grouchy, troubled question. _Yarp?_

Then Anna Turpin first arched her back, her hands fumbling up her spine, searching for the stick so she could pull it out of there. But no luck; the stick was poking out high up. She brought her hands around, and this time threw them over her shoulders, to try and reach it that way. Still no luck. She looked at me with perplexed fury. _Fury knows no woman like hell_ , I thought.

She tried to stand then, but her clothes were halfway off, her jeans unbelted, unzipped, and hanging around her thighs ( her panties were damp with excitement, I saw). One arm of her coat was pulled down to her elbow. Trying to undress while you've got your tongue up a woman must be a tricky procedure, I understood. The other obstacle stopping her from standing was my hand; it was still in her hair, and with a dogged strength I thought I'd be incapable of.

It was me who stood, not Anna Turpin. And I understood right then that her sister, Mary, was not her primary weakness, after all. _Yah see, I've got weaknesses, anyhow_ , Anna Turpin had said. _I'll have sex with anything that's got a pulse, I admit that_. Yes, it was sex that had tripped her up. Strangled by her own noose.

I stepped around her, and with a sharp tug of her hair, she toppled backwards, and down on the floor she went. She turned to the side, though, just in time to prevent contact with the floor that would, no doubt, have driven the stick even further into her back.

But now I scooped up the gun, after first shedding the blood-soppy mitten. It slipped off my hand and squelched to the floor. My experience of guns went no further than the knowledge that they were deadly. Oh, and I knew they had a safety catch to prevent them from being even more deadly. _Accidentally_ deadly.

I thumbed it into the deadly position.

Then I aimed the gun at Anna Turpin with a finger suspended over the trigger.

Her fingers spread, she held up a hand to me. Her mouth, her chin, even her nose, were all wet with what she had licked out of me. Her eyes had lost all of their delirious, sexual excitement. They were now loaded with lost, pathetic fright. 'Don't shoot, don't kill me!' she pleaded. 'You've got to understand that I had no choice!'

'I understand that you don't give a flying fuck about anyone but yourself,' I said, and patiently enough, even though my heart larruped along, and my legs were an untrustworthy prop to a body which felt entirely boneless. My eyes stung with extreme tiredness. My hands shook with the cold as much as they did with nerves. My own juices, mixed with Anna Turpin's saliva, ran stickily down the inside of my legs. The mud on my face had turned to dry, brown-green flakes that fluttered down to the floor. I could still taste blood on my tongue where Anna Turpin had slapped me around the mouth.

'And I'm not going to kill you, anyway,' I went on. 'Why would I kill you when you owe that woman over there a debt?' I glanced over at Helen Davenport, who, unbelievably, was still out like a light. 'A _lifetime_ debt, and one you're not going to wriggle out of by getting a bullet in the head. But - '

I paused. She looked up at me with a fake thankfulness that masked, or _tried_ to mask, what I saw beneath it: that her mind, her kinked and conniving mind, was already dreaming up ways in which she could gain back control, now that I'd told her I wouldn't kill her.

Still, I shot her, anyway.

Shot her in spite of my merciful announcement that I wouldn't.

But only in the leg. The outside of her right thigh, to be exact. The crack of the gun made my ears ring. Didn't even make Helen Davenport stir, though. I began to believe that she was, in actuality, dead. Just burning her way through the last, dwindling fumes that kept her chest rising and falling.

The bullet tore through Anna Turpin's thigh, and then socked into rug she was sitting on, splintering the floorboards beneath, no doubt. The gun was gripped in both my hands to steady the aim, but even then, once the bullet was released, the gun had a kick to it, it flew up in the air, and drove me back a step.

_'Oh, God, me feckin leg, me bastard feckin leg!_ ' Anna Turpin cried, now gripping her thigh, double-handed, and staring up at me with a mixture of surprise and fear. Surprise that I had gotten the better of her.

Fear that the next shot I fired would be fatal.

'Now you know how it feels,' I said, and again, my voice was totally steady. 'All you need is to spend most of the day out in that storm, and you'll get a pretty good idea of how I feel. But I think, even so, that I'm doing pretty well here, don't you? Staying rather calm even though this has not been one of my better days? A pretty fucked-up day, in all honesty.'

I reached around to the back of my neck. Pulled my scarf up over my head until it was hanging in my hand. I gently parted my legs and wiped myself down there with it. Then I went over to Anna Turpin, and suddenly, too. Her eyes widened as I approached. With the short, sharp stick poking out of her back, and now with a gun-wound to contend with, there was little fight in her. None, really.

'Have a taste of this,' I said mildly. 'It's got a little of what you like on it.'

I spun the scarf in my hands, until it was like a thick black rope that shone with a trail of my bodily fluids. That done, I crouched behind Anna Turpin and hooked the scarf into her mouth, her teeth becoming helplessly clamped over it. She muffled a protest. But I got a knot tied around the back of her head easily enough, even with the gun still in my hand. Just to do her a big favour, when really it would do her no favour at all - not in the short term, anyhow - I grabbed hold of the stick.

Pulled it out of her back.

The scream she gave vent to was muffled but pain-wracked. _Long_ and pain-wracked. I tossed the stick, all bloody, in the fire, and the silver-ghost tracked its flight with a foggy, indifferent gaze. The stick sizzled. A few sparks pinged out of there, glowing bright-orange in the shadow-strewn darkness, but they winked out soon enough. Didn't set the mangy, flea-riddled dog on fire...unfortunately.

It remained clamped to that rug like a furry barnacle.

I grabbed Anna Turpin - who was still squealing behind the gag - under the arms, and somehow, with a sterling effort, I got her into that dining-chair of hers. She'd managed to shrug her coat back up, which, on one side, had been hanging around her elbow, of course, but her jeans had slipped further down, and now they were rumpled around her ankles. Handy, that; they would act as shackles. Nonetheless, I went over to the kitchen door. Took down that hoop of rope, hanging on that hook there, among the hats-and-coats. The hoop of rope that Anna Turpin would have used to lash me to Lazarus's saddle, no doubt, had she been victorious, not I.

I pulled her arms back behind the chair, tied her wrists together, then wound the rope around her body, fixing it securely to one of the chair's legs, once all the rope had been used. That chair leg, I saw, was already slick with blood. The hole in Anna Turpin's thigh was gushing enough blood to leave a trail on the floor, as well as put a glossy, slippery layer between her and the chair's seat.

All of a sudden it was over. For the most part, anyhow. It seemed to me that I'd gone from victim to victor in pretty much the blink of an eye.

Oh, how the tables had turned!

I listened as the farmhouse took another huge buffeting by the wind, with everything that wasn't nailed down either slapping, creaking, banging, or crashing somewhere. Then the wind dropped for all of about ten seconds. It seemed that even the fire didn't crackle, or that the clock on Anna Turpin's cluttered dining-table didn't tick. The only sound, it appeared to me, was the sound of Anna Turpin producing her muffled whimpers. That, along with Helen Davenport's confounded snoring.

As for me, I was stood in front of Anna Turpin, still grasping Helen Davenport's gun. Her cheap old flyapart, as Anna Turpin had called it. Well, cheap old flyapart or not, I thought it wise to click the safety catch back in place.

Which I did.

It made a minute snick noise.

*****

And Helen Davenport rose from the dead.

Just like the resurrected Biblical figure after which that horse ( harse ) out there had been named.

I turned towards her. Her face looked like it had been hit by a bus. From the nose down, she was awash with blood and green snot. The combined goo was even smeared on the tips of her hair that stuck out of her hat, her hat which still looked gaily-patterned, even though the string ties were wringing with blood. The butt of Anna Turpin's shotgun looked branded there on old Happy Helen's forehead, as well as on the bridge of her smashed nose.

She sat there with her arms dangling between her legs, her shoulders slumped. Her big orange coat made her look like a pumpkin, but a pumpkin which had been kicked about like a football.

Her eyes, sunken and sporting puffy bruises, stared into the middle distance. She all of a sudden called out: 'Elliot, get a move on, or you'll be late for school! If you're looking for your backpack, I have it right here!'

She hugged the backpack as if it were there, right beside her, on the couch. It wasn't. She fumbled for it. Elicited a small groan of disappointment. Moved forward a little, believing, perhaps, that it was behind her somewhere. It wasn't yet again. She looked up at me then, her gaze pulling back, making me her focus of attention and nothing else. 'I know you,' she said, but vaguely. She clicked her fingers. 'You're...'

Her span of visual attention expanded beyond me then, so that it also captured Anna Turpin. The very damaged Anna Turpin who could match Helen Davenport in any horror show. Maybe even eclipse her.

Helen Davenport suddenly gasped, and placed her hands, flat, on her chest. Her eyes struggled to grow bigger with shock, given how bruised they were. So what they did was become sharper, more alert, with a horrified, if misplaced, realisation. 'Oh God, what have you done _now_ , you crazy, ginger bitch? Not enough that you killed my husband and son! Now you've fucked-up other people's lives, as well!'

I poked the gun at her, just in case she went for me. 'You've got it all wrong, Helen,' I said in a tone that I hoped would sound soothing, or at least confidently relaxed. 'This here, tied to this chair, is Anna Turpin. The _real_ Anna Turpin. Not any of the poor, mistaken-identities that you've been chasing around Hampshire for the past five years. Me included, of course. Me, Sonia Rowntree.'

'Oh, would you stop giving me all that bullsh - '

'Listen!' I snapped at her. 'I'm not here to mess around, Helen. You need to open your ears. You're done talking. You've done enough of that today, along with making my life hell. Christ, I've got a hole in my leg, and I'm about an inch away from passing out on the floor here. On the blood-soaked floor! So please, give me some breathing space, would you?'

She nodded, if reluctantly.

'All right, then.' I took a deep, shaky breath that made my ribs ache. 'You and me, we've been involved in one of the strangest, and yet, one of the luckiest, events ever. At least, in the end, I hope we'll both see it as lucky. If you run a finger - but please, do it gently, very gently - across your forehead, as well as across the top of your nose, you'll feel a wound there that was made by that woman here, tied to this chair. She hit you with the butt of her shotgun. Remember?'

Helen Davenport frowned, unsure. She raised a finger and, as I advised, she carefully trailed it over the wound up there, wincing a little as she did this.

'We were at the edge of a river,' I said. 'A horse suddenly appeared. You remember now?'

Still frowning. No, she seemed not to remember. I realised it was only the gun between us that was keeping this situation stable. If not for that, then she'd be on me by now. On me and trying to strangle or batter the life out of me.

Then I frowned, too. I thought, in order to make Helen Davenport stop looking at me like I was still telling her tall stories, I would have to do a recount that took us all the way back to where all this began, back to our cars which had been axle-deep in the snow on the Gartley-to-White Mist road. And which quite possibly were now roof-deep.

But then, thank God, she suddenly said, 'Hey...yeah, I remember now. Yeah, I do.' Unconvincing for the most part. Still hazy in her mind, obviously. But little by little we were getting there. She nodded. 'Yeah, the butt of her gun. And the horse...'

Just when I needed it, Lazarus let out a bray, loud enough so that Helen Davenport heard it, and she gazed around at the snow-spattered window.

'That's him,' I said, gentle and low. 'That's Lazarus outside, the horse you saw in the river?'

'Lazarus,' she said, like a wonder-struck child. 'Yeah, I remember him, all right. _Handsome_ Lazarus, wasn't he?'

'Still is.' I smiled stiffly but gratefully. 'Shame his master isn't quite so pleasant.'

Helen Davenport nodded. Delicately, she wiped the sleeve of her coat under her nose and across her mouth. Green snot and blood became streaked there. Then she looked neutrally at Anna Turpin. To begin with, anyhow. 'How did it come to this?'

I said, 'Her, tied to that chair with a bullet-hole in her leg, do you mean?'

'Yes.'

'It's a long story, and one you slept all the way through.' I pulled the front of my coat together, realising a lot more of me was on display than I wanted Helen Davenport to see. But I could tell she understood that part of that long story had involved an act that, thank God, she wasn't about to press me on.

She gave me a look then, that was a cross between admiration and sympathy. Comprehension began to break over her face: how much I must have given of myself to save both my life and hers. It seemed too much for her to bear, and she put a hand up to her forehead, but carefully, so as not to press too hard against the imprint of the shotgun butt. Then she let that hand fall gently down to the bridge of her nose. She daintily felt the damage there, and sighed.

Finally, and a little too dramatically poetic for me, she said, 'If death wasn't so close, even now, then I'd kiss you, Sonia Rowntree. I might even get down on my knees and put my bloody lips to your feet. For you are beyond the grace, and the valour, that my mind can fancy. Still, you are sick, and so am I. I am not yet blinded, though. We are dying, my brave thing, and our road has not yet come to an end.'

She paused. Stood up then, and looked disdainfully at Anna Turpin, who, in turn, looked up at Helen Davenport with wide, alarmed eyes. 'I am but calm in your countenance, Sonia,' Helen Davenport continued. 'But my hackles are still up, and my bile is still boiling in my throat. I have taken too much, and will never be able to repay your kindliness, no matter how hard, and for how long, I toil. So for now, with your blessing, we will lay our peaceful make-amends aside, and strike out, one last time, into the haze of madness.'

'Helen,' I said, bewildered. 'I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. You need to keep it simple with me. I'm not exactly a potential candidate for Mastermind, you know. Probably not even for Deal Or No Deal.'

Taller than me, by a good foot, her head swivelled around at me, and then tilted down. The blood-drenched string ties of her hat swung towards me. I limped tiredly back a step. She looked at the gun - at _her_ gun - in my hand, and I jabbed it at her, instinctively, as if we were still at loggerheads. Old habits die hard, of course. 'Sorry,' I said. 'You and me, all reasonable and that? It takes a bit of getting used to, I suppose.'

She nodded. 'You can keep the gun, anyhow. For comfort, yes? If it helps.' She raised her fists all at once, like a prize-fighter. 'These two beauties here are all I need.' Her eyes glinted at them as if they were diamonds she had found at the back of the darkest cave.

The mind-connection I made between Helen Davenport's fists and Anna Turpin's face became a brutal connection I could only wince at.

'She's already been stabbed and shot,' I said, doubtfully. 'You think it might be a little OTT to give her a good hiding, as well?'

Anna Turpin nodded enthusiastically in agreement.

'A little OTT, are you having a laugh?' Helen Davenport said. 'Nah, I don't think so. She killed, she _murdered_ , my husband and son. Just for fun, she printed the butt of her shotgun on my face, as well. The only thing that might be a little OTT is the possibility she might still be alive at the end of it all.'

'I guess so,' I said, though not without some hesitation. Or the onrush of morality, either, which now hung, suspended, in my brain like scales of justice I couldn't tip one way or another. But then: 'Whatever you do to that woman there, Helen, is fine by me. That is, to clarify, I understand, and completely, why you'd want to beat the shit out of her. However, I need you to keep one thing crystal-clear in your mind: that the only person in this room who should be going to Pengarrett is her, Anna Turpin. Not you...and certainly not I. Are we all square on that?'

'We are.'

'That means she should still be alive at the end of this beating. Are we square on that, too?'

'Absolutely.'

'Great!' I patted one of her not insubstantial arms, thinking that the power she could muster out of _both_ her arms, would not only dismantle Anna Turpin's features but almost certainly pummel them into a paste.

I felt like the governor of a torture house who only had to make sure procedure was adhered to, and then my job was done, time for a tea-break out the back. None of the messy, hands-on business for me. But of course many a procedure has a clock running on it. Therefore, I looked at a packet of cigarettes on Anna Turpin's chaotic dining-table. All of a sudden my love-affair with nicotine was back on again. Fuck my three-year marriage to fresh air and healthy living! I took one of those cigarettes, along with the lighter on top of the packet. I then looked at Helen Davenport's fists, still hanging there, menacingly, in front of her. Shadows wavered mystically on her bloody, smashed-up face. Her fists had now become the size of beach-balls on the wall behind her.

'You've got until I finish this,' I said, holding up the cigarette in front of her. 'Then we're done. After that, we dial nine-nine-nine and ask for the police as well as the medical services.' I pulled in a long, shuddery breath. 'Not that they're going to believe any of _this!_ Fuck, look at the mess the three of us are in! We look like extras in a zombie movie!'

No one laughed.

Not even me.

'You want your phone?' Helen Davenport asked.

'Yes.'

And then...

'No.'

'No?'

'I'll be compelled to call my mother,' I said. 'She'll want to know everything, the whole nine-yards, from front to back. It'll be spring and the daffodils will be out by the time she stops asking questions. No, you make the call to the emergency services.' I paused. Nodded at the gagged and entirely petrified Anna Turpin. 'Once you're done with her, of course.'

'Right-oh,' Helen Davenport said. She looked at the fire. 'What's that on the rug there?'

'A dead dog that is being kept animated purely by heat alone,' I said. 'A miracle of science, don't you think?'

I turned and limped into Anna Turpin's kitchen. As I did, I knew I'd forgotten something...something terribly important. Something of great influence and even greater repercussions. But I was sick, tired, and in terrible pain. Nothing but adrenalin and brainless determination was keeping me alive now. And even then something had to be turned off to keep me on my feet: my mind. My common-sense!

I switched on the kitchen light and hobbled in there. Closed the door behind me. I guess someone else - a writer more fastidious than I - would give you a detailed description of that kitchen. I could take a stab at it. But I won't. My lazy way out is to simply ask you to think about that room I'd just walked out of...and then apply it to Anna Turpin's kitchen. Whatever picture you get, you won't be far out, I'm sure. Just think shit-heap with a touch of pigsty thrown in, and you're pretty much there.

The curtain bloused out, as it surely would. I saw how rotten the window was behind it, and realised that even though that window was shut, the casement itself was so dilapidated, that the wind blew through it. Just holes everywhere in the paint-peeled frame.

I went over to the gas-cooker, which was tilted to one side, and shiny with grease. Slipped Helen Davenport's cheap old flyapart in my coat pocket. Lit one of the burners. Cupped my hands over the flame, but it burned them before it warmed them. That's how low my core temperature must have been. I lit my cigarette. Took a puff. Coughed my guts up. Took another puff. Coughed my guts up. By the third puff, I was able to draw in smoke, and keep it down. After that, the beating began in earnest. Even with the kitchen door closed, and Anna Turpin gagged with my makeshift headscarf, the noises she made were truly horrific. As were the swinging, thumping noises of Helen Davenport's fists, along with her grunts, and the profanity mixed in with it. I suddenly laughed. But quietly, of course. Christ, I'd been on my way to work this morning, that was all! How the hell had it ended up like this? As stories went, I thought if I lived to be a hundred, I would never be able to tell a story quite so riveting.

Quite so _peculiar!_

Would anyone?

I finished my cigarette. Stubbed it out in a filthy, blackened pie-dish behind which was a framed photo. Time for me to bring to an end the one-sided carnage out there. But...that photo. God, she loved her framed photos, did Anna Turpin. Oddly organised, I thought, in the light of what a filth-bag she was. Like hanging expensive paintings in a cowshed. The photo was of her smiling, while being hugged by a man. Being adoringly pecked on the cheek by him, too.

I gasped with a hand up to my throat.

Then I heard a loud, shattering boom that was followed by a hail of dust that sifted down from the ceiling, peppering my hair and shoulders.

All at once I remembered that something which had been terribly important. That something of great influence and even greater repercussions.

Oh...dear...God!

Epilogue # 1: Marsha Dunbar

Spring smelled fresh and sweetly-scented. Boaters Pond was a calm, smooth plate that gently rippled silver-green, beneath which was a rich, deep blackness. Birds swooped and whirled under a pale-blue sky that was laced, but not domineered, by thin, sketchy clouds. A warm wind blew softly through my hair, my hair which had been my friend and my enemy...and always it would be that way. Full stop. But if that remained my only lifelong burden, then at the end of my days, I'd consider myself fortunate. Remarkably fortunate.

I was sitting on one of the white, slatted benches on the ferry's top deck, my handbag on my lap; it was a rather lovely Floozie bag which Greg Halpern had bought me, along with a D&G watch whose face was surrounded by glittering Swarovski crystals. In the hospital that day, Greg had said that Daisy Hemmings was as shallow as a village pond. I wondered right then if he was simply drawn to women like that and didn't know it. Hello? If Greg Halpern wanted shallow, then he might want to include me in on that. I wouldn't even mind a little Papillon myself that I could dress up in pink, sparkly stuff!

I smiled.

Then that smile evolved into a loving, protective look.

Mitzi, my darling Mitzi, was standing just ten-feet away, behind the safety rails, looking across the water. She'd been withdrawn since my ordeal. Back in January that had been. It was now mid-March. My GP, a kind but strictly-forthright woman named Helga Midwinter, was now in charge of my aftercare, which had been clipped-back to the occasional gander at my bullet-wound, just to make sure the healing process was doing its bit. It was. No problems. Although at times my leg suffered numbness, and then other times it itched terribly. Daily applications of wound-care cream helped, though, along with gentle massages to keep the muscles supple. I was doing all right. I was grateful. A smiling-idiot grateful.

But Mitzi.

I told Helga Midwinter about Mitzi's problem. Or what I _saw_ as her problem, anyway. However, Helga was quick to pacify me. To shoot me down, actually. She said, 'The girl nearly lost her mother. What do you expect? Adults talk out their troubles, children can't. They don't know how to express these things. Just be kind to her. Be with her. Be her mother. That's all you need to do. She'll be fine.'

I nodded, and happily enough. Just that Helga Midwinter made me feel much like my mother could, like I was not the brightest star in the sky. And neither Helga Midwinter nor my mother knew about Mrs Twee.

That she was missing.

Mitzi either hadn't noticed or didn't care.

What I thought, given Mitzi's current mood, was that bedtime stories probably weren't all that important to her, anyhow. Not for the time being. However, as daft as it seems, I often pictured Mrs Twee, just twelve-inches high, walking off into that snowstorm, her head down against the bitter-cold, fading off into those woods. Mrs Twee who had reached the pinnacle of her abilities that day and no longer believed she could serve any useful purpose.

I raised my right hand as if Mrs Twee was snugged on it. I pushed her voice up from the back of my throat, her original soft twee voice...but no voice came. Nothing came. It seemed my talent for venting had gone missing along with Mrs Twee.

I let my hand fall back in my lap.

'Sonia? Sonia Rowntree?'

I looked up. The most beautiful woman in the world was all of a sudden looking down at me. I had to catch my breath when I realised who it was. Both my hands, clasped together, went up to my throat, as if in prayer. Head tilted, I cooed at her in glazed-eyed hero-worship. 'Marsha? Marsha Dunbar? OMG! Is that really you...or am I dreaming?'

'No, you're not dreaming,' Marsha said, smiling. Her smile was so gorgeous I wanted to kiss her. 'And I'm the one in awe, let me tell you. Sonia Rowntree! _The_ Sonia Rowntree! OMG straight back atcha! How's your leg?'

'Oh, the wound is healing nicely, but it's still a little unsightly. Put it this way, I've shelved my plans to become a glamour model for the time being. And your ankle?'

'Fine,' Marsha said. 'Although I withdrew my application to run in the London Marathon.'

We both smiled.

I stood, forgetting my handbag on my lap, and down it went on the varnished deck. About a dozen useless objects fell out of there, and were then scattered around our feet ( I'd simply transferred the clutter in my old bag into this one, without sorting the wheat from the chaff ).

Marsha laughed.

I thought I was falling in love.

She knelt down with me and helped me pick up those objects. We both swept our hair behind our ears. She picked up an old, crumpled birthday card from my best friend, Ellie Gladstone. Inside Ellie had scrawled, "Sonia, let's get down onya!"

I saw Marsha read it and grin broadly. Then she picked up a powder compact with a cracked mirror, a busted cigarette lighter, half a roll of spearmints ( which were now soft and crumbly ), a worn-smooth nail-board, an old gas bill, and a potato peeler. Marsha held the peeler out to me, so that it lay diagonally across her palm. 'You never know when you might need to peel someone to death,' she said. Silence at first. Then we both laughed, and rowdily, a right pair of hens clucking!

Up above, birds circled and squawked.

The ferry-boat went on chugging, creating a sloshing, foaming wake.

I plucked the peeler out of her hand and dropped it back into my bag. All the other stuff, too. Then we stood and hugged. After that, Marsha looked over at Mitzi, the lonesome Mitzi, whose hands were thrust deeply into her coat pockets. 'And I gather that's your daughter over there. Maisie, is it?'

'Mitzi,' I said. After putting my bag over my shoulder, I glanced over at her, and frowned. 'She's not been right since...you know...what happened. I worry about her.'

'I'm sure you do. But children are amazingly resilient. You know that, of course. No need for me to teach you how to suck eggs. Still, it's hard, I imagine, when the child is yours. People give advice a little too glibly sometimes, don't you think?'

'I do.'

'And I have a brother,' Marsha went on.

'I know you do!' I said. 'I read "Lucky Break". Maybe you could sign it for me one day.'

'Nothing would give me greater pleasure,' Marsha said, beaming, and her sincerity \- bright, painfully honest, abundant - almost broke my heart. This was a woman, I understood, who took nothing for granted. A woman whose depth was boundless, and whose dark secrets might tear someone else's soul apart. She gave life her all, I could tell, and yet, conversely, she kept much hidden. Presumptuous, I know, but I felt an attachment to her which I hoped she felt, as well.

For there was much hidden in me, too.

Too much.

'You were saying?'

'Hmmm?'

'Your brother?'

'Oh yes, my brother. Well, people give me advice about him. You know, that I should do this, or that, to make our relationship work? But again, most of that advice is given for the sake of it. People love to advise when it's you who has to do all the hauling. All the donkey-work, you know?'

I nodded. 'And it'll be me who'll have to do all the hauling with Mitzi. Not that I mind. She's my daughter, I love her. Like that song, "He Ain't My Brother And He's Heavy."

Marsha gave me a mystified look.

'Did I get that wrong?'

No answer. Marsha was already bent double, laughing so much, with one hand slung across her waist, while the other was held out to me, as if she were fending me off. Tears ran down her face, then dripped onto the deck, darkening the boards. I joined in, simply couldn't help myself. Then when Marsha said, 'Deary me, and I thought _I_ was the Dumb-bar!' Well, I almost went down on my knees. Would have, had I not gripped the back of the bench I'd been sitting on.

*****

I can honestly say I hadn't laughed like that since Ellie Gladstone had a fake tan that made her look like she'd been mud-wrestling. That had been the previous September, as I recall. So that made it six-months ago. But of course prior to that I'd been pushed up against a fridge and told I wasn't much of a fuck ( not a lot to laugh about there, all in all ). Now I was on my way to see the man who had put me through all that. We were talking again. That was good. And he was buying me things in the hope of wooing me back. That was good, also. Yep, it was all take, take, take - at the moment, anyhow - which I found more beneficial than all give, give, give. After all, that's how it had been between Greg Halpern and me before he'd gone off with Daisy Hemmings. Just give, give, give...and more give.

But I had hopes. Not high hopes. Those are for the rose-tinted glasses / dewy-eyed people of the world. My hopes were a little more realistic: that one day we would be a family again, and if it worked out, then Greg Halpern could put a ring on this lousy fuck here. A ring every bit as expensively swish as the one on Marsha Dunbar's finger.

When our laughter finally abated, our faces hot and flushed, we sat on the bench together. I said, 'I hear you're married now. How's that going? Or am I being a little too forward?'

'No, not at all,' Marsha said, graciously. 'We've only been married a couple of months. It's going well. His name's William. We honeymooned in Italy. Now I'm putting the final touches to a book named "Black Hearts And Red Mist". Not sure it'll have the same success as "Lucky Break", though. Still, better than sitting around and scratching my arse. Or my thrush. Which, touch wood' - she touched her own head rather than the bench - 'seems to have cleared up a treat.' She laughed, suddenly embarrassed. 'My, but we are getting along like twins, aren't we? You'll have to meet my best friend, Hayley Maitland. She'll love you like a hot dinner!'

'I'd like that,' I said. We exchanged phone-numbers. I sat there hugging my handbag, contentedly. Perhaps even a little smugly. Me all chummy with Marsha Dunbar? I felt like the luckiest girl in the whole, wide world! I looked down into Marsha's lap. No handbag. Just her hands knotted together, and a little nervously, I thought.

'You don't have a bag,' I said.

'No,' Marsha said. That was all she said on that subject. 'It's been over eighteen-months now. It'll be two years soon.'

I put a hand compassionately over hers. 'You beat him,' I said faintly. 'You beat a monster.'

She nodded, then looked over at Mitzi. In a low, respectful voice, she said, 'Nonetheless, I can't decide if I'm a heroine who deserves the plaudits, or a blundering fool who fucked with evil to catch evil and should be damned for that.'

'That's hard,' I said. 'You saved that girl's life. Cindy Loughridge's life?'

'She's known by another name these days. Out of respect, I'll keep that name to myself, if you don't mind. But yes, I saved her life. Still, nothing much matters given that we all die in the end.' She looked up then and smiled. It was a brave, gritty smile...and behind that smile, that beautiful smile, I saw a woman who still needed to get around a difficult bend in the road. Come the summer, I'd be visiting her in the Green Lodge, following a terrible mental breakdown. But right then I had fallen all the way in love.

And I knew we would be friends forever.

*****

'Anyway, you're the name on everyone's lips at the moment,' Marsha said. 'Let's not detract from that. I'm having lunch with Hayley. You want to come?'

I'd love to. I'm visiting Mitzi's father, though. He ran off with someone else, but they're no longer together. We're working on it. Can I call?'

'If you don't, then I will hunt you down.' She gave me a fake threatening look, which was all low eyebrows, narrow eyes, and a mildly wrinkled pout. 'And we have much to talk about. Too much. I need to know about your relationship. I need to know what happened that day, in the woods, and in that farmhouse, too. What _really_ happened? I'm a nosy bitch, you see.' She waggled her fingers at me, mystically. 'You will succumb. I have the power.'

'I believe you.' I smiled. It was filled with daffy adulation. 'It's been a joy to meet you.' I looked around at the unsociable Mitzi, who was still gazing out across Boaters Pond. In hushed tones, I added: 'We'll speak soon, yes?'

'Indeed.' Marsha looked at the passengers, only a few, who were now heading downstairs, ready to disembark. She took out her mobile. 'I need to call Hayley to let her know I'm just about to get off the ferry. God, she'll just about wet herself when she realises who I've just been talking to!'

I blushed. My skin tingled with goose-bumps.

'Call me, okay?' She stood. 'If you don't, I'll send the boys around.'

'Right you are.'

She kissed me, and my heart skipped a beat. Then she was gone down the stairs, the ferry making its way towards the timber jetty, the engines rumbling loudly, making the deck shudder. I stood and made my way over to the stairs, as well. Looked back at Mitzi. Called out: 'Come on, darling! Daddy's picking us up! Let's not keep him waiting!'

She wheeled around sharply.

Her face was sickly-pale. Her eyes were dark as coal. The wind blew her hair across the nasty little grin that was suddenly, creepily, bowed there. Then her eyes closed, fast as dropping sash-weights. All at once, she fell against the ferry's safety rail, her head slumped, her chin down on her chest, but she was still on her feet, thank God.

Her right hand flew out of her coat pocket, then.

Mrs Twee was perched there.

Her neat, sensible dress, and her white, lacy apron, were torn and hanging open at the front. Her legs were wide apart. Her gold-rimmed spectacles were missing. Her face was plastered in a harlot's gaudy make up. She opened her mouth, and screamed: _'As the flies crow, Sonia! As the feckin flies crow!'_

I dropped my handbag and dashed over there. Yanked the ghastly, obscene thing off of Mitzi's hand. It felt cold - cold as snow. But then tiny tendrils of black smoke began to curl up out of its eyes. I tossed it overboard, into the white, bubbly spume.

It was sucked under the ferry.

Hopefully to be shredded by the props.

I grabbed Mitzi. Hugged her close.

After a while, she became a little more solid, a little more animated. 'Mummy?'

'It's okay, darling, Mummy's here.' I ran my hands through her hair and over her face. Colour, healthy colour, began to flow back into her cheeks. She put her hands around my neck. She pushed her head into me. I kissed her. I kissed her like a thousand kisses would never be enough.

Earlier, I wrote that Helen Davenport and I had been heading straight into the mouth of a monster whose jaws would bite deep into the hearts of two women who would find that death can come in different ways, and from that death, strange, miraculous shoots can spring and flourish.

Death? Yes...it had been death, all right.

The death of our previous lives.

And the beginning of our new lives.

Mitzi pulled back from me. Her eyes were still faintly dazed, but they were bright, thank goodness, and lucidity was gradually flooding back into them. She was smiling, but there was a scrim of sadness there. She glanced at the safety rail, at the churning water down below. 'Mummy?'

'Hmmm?'

'Who'll read my bedtime stories from now on?'

I stood and looked over at the jetty to which the ferry had now, with a gentle bump, abutted. 'Me. I'll be reading the stories...'

Hand in hand, we walked over to the jetty side, Mitzi gaining the strength back in her legs now. Greg Halpern was standing there, grinning, looking a lot more handsome than I wanted him to...and the final part of my love, which I'd been holding back, now fell into place.

'...and your father,' I finished.

I blew him a kiss. _I love you_ , I mouthed

He looked startled. Awed, in fact.

He blew a kiss back. Many kisses back. Then he began to jump up and down, punching the air and cheering: _Yes, yes, yes!_ After that he put a clawed hand to his chest, like he was tearing out his own heart. Then he held it out to me.

Mine.

All mine.

Back in the hospital that day, after Greg Halpern had left - staggering, his hands up to his face - I'd dreamed of dead animals and of a man with blood pouring out of his eyeless sockets. In that dream, I heard myself say, _Oh God, where there is hatred, please, please, please, let me sow those kindly seeds of love._

And finally I had.

And finally...they were growing.

Epilogue # 2: Man In The Woods

I met with Helen Davenport a month later in the Green Lodge. Inevitable. We'd been corresponding. No red-tape in our way, either, not anymore; the decisions had been made and then acted upon. After several security checks - which included a thorough frisk, along with a search of my handbag - I was shown out by a doughy-faced, female nurse onto a plant-filled terrace that looked out over a garden of apple-blossom trees. It was now mid-spring, and blossom carpeted the grass.

Beautiful.

It was hot but thankfully the breeze took the sting out of it.

Had it been crowded out here, I would not have recognised her. As it was, she was sitting alone at a small, round table on which there were two cups, as well as a pot of tea. She smelled fresh as a daisy. Her skin glowed healthily. Her teeth gleamed. It was odd to see her without the shape of a shotgun-butt stamped into her forehead. Odd to see her without that gaily-patterned hat, as well, the string ties hanging either side of her face. Her nose had been fixed, and was no longer a bloody, flattened snout. I sat down. Took off my sunglasses. Thought better of it. Put them back on; the sun was sharp, piercing.

'You look beautiful,' Helen said, tears beginning to leak down her face. She blotted them with a large, white handkerchief. 'I'm sorry I called you such awful names that day.'

I held up my hand. 'You already apologised for that in your letters. And I said some awful things, too. _Terrible_ things.' I summoned my most disarming smile. 'Actually, I think _you're_ the one who's beautiful. You've lost weight, a lot of weight! And your hair has been restyled. Dark blonde suits you.'

'I was thinking red at one point.'

'No, wrong move. Red attracts unwanted attention.'

'Undoubtedly,' she said, gently dabbing the handkerchief under her eyes now. She smiled diffidently, then pushed a hand up through her hair, so that it slid through her fingers. 'I'm glad you like it.'

'I do. It makes you look a little like Renee Zellweger.'

'God, I'll take that! Let's call it a day already, can we?'

I laughed. We poured and then drank tea. I was wearing a staid, knee-length dress that made me feel completely un-sexy...although it almost certainly fit the situation; the last thing our meeting would be was sexy. After a while, I said, 'How's the treatment going?'

'Very well. The doctors think I'll be out of here by my seventieth birthday.'

I gave her a serious look.

'I'm pulling your leg, which is a lot better than _shooting_ your leg, don't you think?'

'Yes, of course!' I laughed...but, although she was steadily improving, her emotional thermometer still needed a fair bit of adjusting, I thought. Not the kind of joke I would have made. But the truth was she just wanted this to work, and people who tried to make things work, often worked too hard and made it fail. I wouldn't _let_ her fail. I'd already promised myself that.

'But it's still going to be a long, difficult road,' she went on. 'I think they want to make sure I serve an appropriate time.' She did the old bunny-ears thing with her fingers on the word "appropriate".

'I understand,' I said. But _I_ had no wish to travel on that long, difficult road. I counted myself not just lucky but heavenly-starred. We are all but one dark step away from mental illness - that's what I believe. Without warning it can strike, snatch us away, and turn our worlds upside-down.

I drank my tea.

Helen said, 'I like your bag. Your watch, too.'

'Thank you.' The bag was down by my feet. I ran a fingernail over it. Then I shook my wrist to make the little, round D&G decoration - which was attached to the watch via a short chain - jangle. 'Greg Halpern bought them for me. Mitzi's father?'

Helen nodded.

'We're back together. He bought me a new car, as well. He spoils me.'

'Quite right, too. And the car? The Lancia you drove that day? How weird that the previous owner was Anna Turpin! Sold by one redhead to another?'

'Weird, all right,' I agreed. 'Then again, the entire day was weird. _Horrible_ and weird.' I shuddered.

'And him?' Helen said. 'That was just...wow!'

'Oh...yes...him.' I shook my head, flushing a little. 'The police know it was either you, me, or Anna Turpin. Most likely me. But I can't remember. Not all of it, anyhow. Only some. And the police told me that Anna Turpin confessed to having an argument with him. It was about who would go out to check on their animals. Eventually he went, but she chased after him. That's when she came across you and me by the river.'

'You think she did it?'

'Honestly? No.' I reddened completely. It was getting hot out here. My life just recently seemed to centre around extremes...including the weather. Sweat ran down behind my sunglasses into my eyes. I blinked it away. 'But it helped - it was _convenient_ \- to pin it on an escaped convict who'd already murdered two innocent people, don't you think? Not that the police _did_ pin it on her. Still, I think they used it so that she'd go quietly back into Pengarrett. It would have shut her lawyer up as well.'

Helen said, 'So the bottom line is, he became a victim of circumstance. An innocent bystander.'

'Yes...I suppose so. I have no idea how the police work. However, they dealt \- or _seemed_ to deal - with this case with a lot of compassion. And they applied a great deal of common-sense, too. They knew I could have pressed a good few charges against you, including a compensation charge for my injuries. My distress, too. But I didn't _want_ to press charges. Your husband and son were murdered. How could I? Also, the police knew if you volunteered to be admitted into here' - I looked around the Green Lodge's terrace - 'there'd be no court-case, anyhow, even if I had pressed charges. And it was only right you should come here for long-term treatment. Sensible. Sympathetic. No one wanted you in jail. And the crowing glory for the police? That Anna Turpin had been arrested and would be going straight back into Pengarrett. That was the part the police wanted the public to see. That was the _story_ they wanted to turn the spotlight on. They succeeded, too.'

I paused, and then: 'Helen, did you ever tell the police I had a stick?'

'No. Why, does it matter?'

'It matters in that the police knew he'd...' I lowered my voice, unable to finish the sentence. 'But _I_ didn't tell the police I had a stick, either. Not even Anna Turpin knew that. After all, the stick went into the river after I hit you with it.'

'So it did.' Helen looked at her wrist ( at the place I'd struck it that day ), then gave me a stymied look. 'I don't understand. Are you saying that stick might be - '

'Yes,' I said, before she could finish. Her voice was low, but all the same, I didn't like the idea of someone hearing our conversation, be it by a deliberate eavesdropper, or by more innocent means; the story was still big news around these parts. 'I think that's why we had protection assigned to us at the beginning.'

She gave me a quizzical look.

'I think the police believed there'd be a backlash from the travelling community. That's what they were, he and Anna: travellers. Originally, anyway.'

'Gypsies?'

'No, not gypsies. That's pejorative.'

'What does that mean?'

'Derogatory...and not exactly politically correct. Anyhow, up until now there's _been_ no backlash. Probably won't be, either, thank God. I think the travelling community washed their hands of Anna Turpin a long time ago. A bad penny, you know? She killed her sister, albeit an accident. She killed your husband and son, too. And travellers have their morals - morals that in some cases can be a lot more exacting than ours. _Severe_ , even. And him? I did a bit of research. Back in the seventies, he broke into some old lady's house, robbed her, and then beat her black-and-blue. He spent five years in Pengarrett for that. He was no angel, that's for sure.'

Helen drank her tea. 'God, by doing a lot of bad that day, I also did some good. Maybe not for you, but...

'You're wrong,' I said. 'You did a lot of good for me. I never knew I was so plucky, for one. I have confidence now, as well. High self-esteem was never one of my strong points. On top of that, I'm back with Greg Halpern. That would never have happened otherwise. But I interrupted you. Sorry. Please go on.'

'I was going to say pretty much what you did. I had no confidence, either. Low self-esteem, likewise. But I'm _learning_ to like myself. Slowly. Might even learn to _love_ myself one day. And with Anna Turpin back in prison, I can finally move on. No more chasing redheads all over Hampshire.'

She gave me another quizzical look.

I asked her what was on her mind.

'Well, it's just that I'm confused.'

'About what?'

'Why did you shoot her exactly? You know, in the leg?'

'I simply gave her the bullet she should have gotten from you, but instead, you gave it to me. Just making things even, that's all.'

Helen Davenport nodded, then lowered her face with sad reflection.

I smiled sympathetically. 'It's okay, you know. We made it, we _survived_. We do that quite well, us women. We do it with _poise_ , actually. Not like men, who are good at many things, but when it comes to surviving, they are apt to get lost. Or even fail altogether.' My smile sagged a little. 'Can I ask _you_ something?'

'Yes...of course...anything.'

'How did you get hold of a gun?'

She looked up. 'The Internet. In the basket. Pay. Check-out.'

'Seriously, that easy?'

'No, not that easy. But almost.'

She did not explain further. I did not expect her to. My view of the world could be bitter enough at times, given that a gun could be bought with relative ease while little children went on starving. If I wanted my time with Helen Davenport to take a sharp downturn, then I was heading in the right direction. So I made my smile appear again like a trick. My good mood, too. 'I like you, Helen. I hope we'll be friends.'

She gave me a startled look. 'Friends? You're stuck with me for life!' She regarded my right hand, which was up by my face, adjusting the bows of my sunglasses for comfort. She must have pictured that hand once more sheathed in the mitten. 'But our friendship is almost entirely dependant on you teaching me how to throw my voice.'

'Oh, that's easy, I can do that,' I said. 'Although at the moment the talent seems to have deserted me. Gone into hiding, you know? A psychological thing, I think. However, to show you how simple it is, you can start venting right away. After all, just about everyone can say the five vowels - A, E, I, O, U - with their mouth closed. When you first start, you'll almost certainly have to stretch your mouth like you're grinning without showing your teeth. With practice, though, you can make it less noticeable.'

'A, E, I, O, U,' Helen suddenly said, her eyes overly wide, her mouth pulled tight.

I laughed, couldn't help myself. She looked like someone wearing an invisible gag.

'Okay,' I said. 'You might want to relax your jaw a little. It's all a bit stiff at the moment. Still, we can work on that. Once we have, you'll be able to try out the more difficult letters, which are B, F, M, P, Q, V, and W. However, there are ways of replacing those letters with certain sounds to make them more convincing. It gets a little more complicated after that, but for now, we won't go into that. You just need to know that when it comes to the more awkward words, or phrases, it's then that you can use the puppet as deflection. The puppet doesn't have to be impressive, either. Shari Lewis had a puppet named Lamb Chop, which was really not much more than a sock with long eyelashes.'

'Like your mitten,' Helen said.

'Yes, like that,' I said. I thought of the bloody mitten clutching that short, sharp stick. Thought of the way that stick had stabbed, stabbed, stabbed into Anna Turpin's back. Then I thought of Mrs Twee, moreover, how I had tossed her into Boaters Pond, her eyes discharging those curling puffs of black smoke.

Things come back. Dark things.

Things you can't push away, regardless.

'I shouldn't have brought that up,' Helen said. 'I apologise.'

'No need to. I guess we'll both have to live with things that will always sail back to us, in spite of how much wind we blow into them to keep them away.'

Nevertheless, after that, Helen Davenport and I spent a lovely, sun-drenched morning together, chatting about our pasts, as well as our plans for the future. I was hopeful that she would finally be able to move on, difficult as it would be, and sometimes it would be hellish, I was sure. Still, no pain, no gain, as they say. With my darling Mitzi by my side, along with a much more considerate Greg Halpern, my future felt equally hopeful, too.

But yes, things sail back to us, all right. After I said my goodbyes to Helen Davenport, I went outside, and despite how sunny it was, I saw a drift of apple-blossom up against a wall.

It made me think of snow...as it would.

All of a sudden, my mind took me back into that farmhouse's midden of a kitchen: how I'd I finished my cigarette, and then stubbed it out in that filthy, blackened pie-dish behind which had been a framed photo. How I'd thought it was time for me to bring to an end the one-sided carnage out there.

But...that photo.

God, how Anna Turpin had loved her framed photos. Oddly organised, I had thought, in the light of what a filth-bag she was. The photo, as you know, had been of her smiling, while being hugged by a man. Being adoringly pecked on the cheek by him, too.

And of course I had gasped with a hand up to my throat.

Then I heard that loud, shattering boom, followed by a hail of dust that sifted down from the ceiling, peppering my hair and shoulders.

All at once I remembered that something which had been terribly important. That something of great influence and even greater repercussions.

The shotgun.

Anna Turpin's double-barrelled shotgun on the chest of drawers out there.

*****

I floated back into that room as if surfing on a black, rolling wave of gloom - gloom along with a fair amount of guilt added in. I'd been much too decent to Helen Davenport, much too understanding. This, the woman who had shot me in the leg, and then chased me across half of Hampshire in a snowstorm. My leg would be fine, I was pretty much sure of that...but, I could not feel the same positivity for my saneness. God only knew what the long-term affects of a day like this would be!

Yet in spite of it all, I had agreed to Helen Davenport's bare-knuckle retribution. What kind of a woman was I, for goodness' sake? It had all seemed right and proper just a moment ago.

Now it seemed like utter madness!

What I'd find, of course, would be Anna Turpin, her face blown off, with Helen Davenport standing there, clutching the smoking shotgun. She'd give me a look that would say: _Sorry, I couldn't help it, I saw the gun there, and one thing led to another._

But...she wasn't there.

The front door was open, my eyes darting to it. The door flapped back and forth in the wind. Snow blew across the dusty floor.

I switched my gaze, my confused gaze, to Anna Turpin, who was still tied to her dining-chair, with a pool of blood around her feet, and with the gag still in her mouth. All of it the same - apart from the fact that her face seemed to have doubled in size due to the hideous, swollen bruising there. Her eyes were bulbous slits. Her knickers were wet with piss. Tears and blood poured down her face. Her hair was not a spellbinding flaming blaze anymore. It was red - blood red.

She was looking across at the fire, terror-struck.

Then I saw the recipient of that shotgun blast.

The old silver-ghost.

The blast had blown the poor, sick dog straight into the fire, and now it was a blazing, stinking bag of flames. Its head had been blasted clean off, and lolled, half in, half out, of the fire. Its jaw snapped slowly up and down, like a grotesque, clockwork toy, then finally stopped.

But perhaps I imagined that.

God, I hope so!

There was a small explosion after that, a fleshy, liquid _pop!_ The pink, hairy coconut-sized bag attached to its side began to ooze yellow, creamy pus that was streaked with blood. It plopped into the fire and sizzled there. Rank-smelling smoke filled the air. I thought of a joke then that was not a joke and had no witty punch-line. How do you move a dog away from the fire? Shoot the fucking thing!

It stopped me from puking, at least - the sight and the smell was revolting.

Still, the dreadful fun didn't end there.

The chest of drawers: the top drawer was open, I saw. This was where Anna Turpin kept her shotgun cartridges, quite clearly. An empty box as well as its lid, lay open there.

Another boom of the shotgun.

I ran outside.

I saw Helen Davenport wading through the snow, heading around the back of the farmhouse, loading the shotgun as she went. But further damage had already been done. Helen Davenport had called him Handsome Lazarus, which he was.

Or had been.

For now he lay in a heap of snow and gore.

The harse.

Dead.

As he'd toppled over, so his reins, tethered to the well, had pulled the winch down on top of him. Some of the well's surrounding brickwork, as well. I ran over to him, swinging my pendulum leg above the snow. I knelt beside him. 'Oh Lazarus!' I said, amidst the infernal, raging storm. 'I'm so, so sorry!'

But I saw no forgiveness, or hate for that matter, in his eyes. The shotgun blast to his heart had taken his life away in a painless flash.

I wept.

Behind the farmhouse I heard more animals being slaughtered. The sound was unbearable. But...there was something else that was also unbearable. I remembered Anna Turpin taking out her mobile phone, and not being able to connect to the person she'd been calling. _Feckin eejit shit for brains!_ she'd snapped.

I thought of the photo then, the one on the mantle: Anna Turpin wearing nothing but a man's shirt, smiling beside the Lancia Flavia back when it had been hers, not mine. Then I thought of the photo in the kitchen: Anna Turpin being kissed and hugged. _Lovingly_ kissed and hugged.

I'd seen images up in the woods, of course. Not ghosts. Just images produced by a delirious, failing mind. But then I thought of the man who'd stepped out from behind that tree, the man with long, silver-grey hair, and wearing a dark, snow-spotted coat. The man I'd whacked with my stick.

Jabbed him with it, too, several times.

In the eyes.

Hard.

Hard enough to kill him.

He was the man in that photo.

I cast my mind back to when I had been under that bridge, thinking, in my confusion, that Helen Davenport was right after all: that _I_ was the mad woman. I was Anna Turpin, and I deserved the fate that Helen Davenport had in store for me.

I recalled Helen Davenport saying: _So for now, with your blessing, we will lay our peaceful make-amends aside, and strike out, one last time, into the haze of madness._

What I thought right then was that all three of us were mad.

And...how easy it was to be a murderer.

Too easy.

The slaughter went on behind the farmhouse.

Finally...inevitably...I fainted.

The End ~ Back To Top
