Cold Revenge (Willis/Carter #6)(78)

‘Whatever! You really want to believe we were like some kind of perfect storm, then go ahead.’ Douglas looked at her for a few seconds, then laughed. ‘I love the idea of it, grabbing at everyone as I thunder through – a human tornado. But, Ebony, you make a fundamental mistake here; you underestimate those who stood waiting, arms outstretched, willing the tornado to hit, begging me to choose them. They were all ready to explode on their own, burst into fire, self-combust. Don’t credit me with so much power or hold over those innocent young lives; they had sought me out just as Nicola did, they had been looking for me and they just wanted a place to incubate, to flower, to blossom and that I gave them. I fed them and sheltered them and I worked to put food in their mouths but I didn’t breed them, create them or change them. They came to me, remember . . .’

‘Not always. They didn’t always come to you. Rachel McKinney didn’t come to you to blossom. Your sole aim was to destroy her.’

‘She tried to destroy me! Look where I landed up. The truth is that some people mean less in life than others. Some people are just vehicles for others. I was a vehicle for Rachel McKinney.’ He paused for a second, his expression blank, and then exploded in a squeal of laughter. ‘Talk to me about Micky.’

‘I never saw him again after they sent me back to live with my mother.’

‘What is your last memory of him?’

‘An outing to the beach, the hot sand, playing for hours, jumping the waves.’

‘What did it feel like?’

‘The best day of my life.’

‘Because it was, wasn’t it? It still is?’

‘Yes.’

‘The hot sand? Did you desire Micky?’

‘We were only young. I loved him like a brother.’

‘Except you had no idea what it was like to love someone like a brother because your mother was abusive to you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And she was the only family you knew?’

‘I lived with foster parents at one time and I was very happy there. They taught me the value of belonging to a family. My mother took me away from them, I was forced to go back to her.’

‘Bravo.’ He started slow-clapping.

‘I want to look at the others in the photo, tell me about them.’

‘Millie was a sweet little girl. She was lost. She loved cuddles and getting drunk.’

‘Nicola and Millie were very close, weren’t they?’

‘They were in the beginning. She put her faith in Nicola but Nicola grew bored of her. She was always trying to find favour with Nicola. There was some friction between them sometimes. Like mother and daughter.’

‘Why do you think someone would have targeted Millie for revenge?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘And what about Cathy Dwyer, what do you remember about her?’

‘I hardly remember her at all. Gavin and I were close then. What’s happened to him?’

‘He has a roofing company.’ Willis thought Douglas probably knew that and he was toying with her.

‘I remember the most important thing about Gavin was that he loved killing. The foot and mouth was like Gavin’s idea of heaven. It was lambing time and all night we had to stay and help the farmers. Lambing, sometimes thirty a day. It was unreal – birthing, pulling the baby lambs as they slid from their mother’s uterus, clearing their throats to hear their first bleat. We shot the mothers but the lambs were too small for that, the bullet would pass straight through, too risky, so we bashed their brains in or we stunned them and slit their throats or we did both. We killed hundreds of animals, a thousand, easily, probably more. Birthing one second, killing the next, again and again, all day long. We had to dig a hole with the tractor and bucket. The hole was forty feet long. Some of them were only dazed when they were thrown on the pile, covered in petrol, burned in the pit. Most of the animals were healthy but the farmers couldn’t move them, they couldn’t get food for them, they couldn’t be sold for meat. Over ten million animals were slaughtered in the UK, most of them healthy. There was no need, foot and mouth was around all my life in the country, no other place in the world slaughtered all these animals for nothing. We didn’t even eat them. It was the biggest barbecue I will ever see.’ He paused, looked up at Willis and for the first time she saw something like emotion in his eyes. Then it disappeared. ‘Have you ever made the most exquisite meal from the lowly offal?’ he asked. ‘You know: livers, hearts, brains, balls, that kind of thing?’

Willis stared straight ahead. ‘I can make them dance, sing like opera,’ continued Douglas, smiling. ‘I can create a masterpiece with a pair of kidneys, something out of this world, like you’ve never tasted.’ Willis watched Douglas perform. His eyes were sludge-green, so dark they were almost black, with a floating brightness like a mirror on them, as he seemed to be reliving a taste in his mouth that made his lips wet, made his jaw slide, made his Adam’s apple shift up and down his neck as he salivated. There was a pulse ticking in his bald head. ‘Crispy salty skin, with enough fat to make it spit, is my favourite. To think, when I first started with my love of the countryside I was a knackerman and at the end, I went back to it.’

‘Gavin Heathcote said you made a game of killing the animals, made a competition out of it?’