Simon arrived quickly in his police car with flashing lights and siren. In truth, he was already searching for Calli, having received a private phone call from his childminder’s house. Declan ran there with Calli’s discarded school bag, not trusting the police officer in the squad car who bullied and threatened him, obviously distracting him while the battered white car sped past. A latent evil oozed from the man, sickening the boy to his stomach and warning him not to confide his fears in the uniformed officer.
But Simon ignored his daughter’s hysterical plea not to put a call out across the system and so he was not alone on arrival. A veritable convoy of cop cars accompanied him, two of them bumping down the lane to the old house, set back from the road as it slowly dropped to pieces. The police stopped all traffic on the routes away from the house, effortlessly apprehending Nick and his handgun. The man had started out by looking for Calli and then decided to flee as he heard the sirens, abandoning his fat partner in crime gasping for breath on the dirty mustard-coloured carpet, his windpipe partially crushed. The tall stranger who screwed all their plans lay adding to the stains with a gunshot wound to the abdomen; an incredibly slow and painful way to die.
Calli’s behaviour as the police cars approached was peculiar. She emerged from her hawthorn hideout but refused to approach them. When Simon’s familiar body unwound itself from the driver’s seat of one of the second waves of cars to arrive, she felt her body relax, but not thoroughly.
“Come on, love. You’re safe now,” Pete said with a smile, emerging from the first of the traffic cars, the dark eyes Calli had seen so often observing her, deceptively gracious and sympathetic. She backed away from him, feeling the grass verge under her feet, accentuating the dampness of her shoes. She held her right hand outstretched in a universal ‘stop’ motion, urging him with her eyes to stay away.
“Come on Calli,” he flicked his long fingers towards her, beckoning the girl into a false safety. She could hear Simon’s heavy tread running towards her, the bottoms of his police-issue soles pounding the tarmac road. Pete’s face changed, morphing into a nasty snarl and he lurched for Calli’s arm. He was almost identical to his brother. The same dark eyes, olive skin and glossy good looks, but he had aged terribly, bowed down by the worry of being the one on the outside, carrying on the facade of normality and friendship. Why had nobody seen? Perhaps Marcia did and it drove her mad.
Pete’s fingers were sharp against Calli’s skinny wrist, her delicate bones easily grasped in his large hand. She dug her heels into the soft earth, pulling back into an ‘L’ shape, her shoulder almost dislocating with the effort of resisting his strength. He tried to go round the back of her instead, attempting to grip her torso and at the same time as Simon’s urgent order to, “Leave her alone,” came to them across the fresh breeze, Calli launched with her left hand, sinking the pin from the soldier brooch deep into the man’s chest. Leaning in close to his face as he reeled, she hissed, “Marcia says, ‘Hi!’”
Pete’s pupils shot wide in the strobing lights from the gathered police cars and he let go of Calli, staggering backwards and putting both hands up to the space just over his heart where the pin had snapped away from the brooch. He seemed to be having trouble inhaling.
The brooch was still firmly in Calli’s scratched and bleeding hand, the spiteful remainder of its jagged fixing digging into the flesh at the underside of her index finger. As Pete seemed to hang awkwardly in a limp and disbelieving stance, a body hit Calli at full stretch and she was knocked flat to the floor, her arm still reaching out with the little man in her hand. As her head hit the road and concussion absorbed what sense it had not stolen the first time, she heard Simon’s voice screaming out into the night, “No! God, Jim, no!”