Page 111 of The Psychopath Next Door

The blade sliced through Emma’s throat.

Emma’s hands went to the wound, her knees buckling at the same time, and she slid to the ground, her back against the wall. Blood spurted. So much blood. It sprayed Rose, spattered her face and hair and clothes as she stood there, crouched and panting in front of her fallen mother. Emma was on her rear with her legs straight out in front of her, still clutching her throat, blood seeping between her fingers, eyes wide and staring in disbelief.

Fiona couldn’t believe it either.

‘Rose. What did you do? We were meant to make it look like an accident! A fall down the lift shaft. Bricks falling on her head. How the hell are we going to explain this?’

Rose turned to her, the knife still clutched in her fist. The girl’s eyes were wide, almost bulging. She looked utterly insane. Almost inhuman.

‘Oh no.’ Fiona backed away.

In her life, she had rarely felt fear. Hatred, frustration, annoyance, the burning desire for revenge. All those, many times. But actual fear – that was an emotion that had hardly ever touched her. Why should it? She was an apex predator.

Rose was moving towards her – the knife, slick with Emma’s blood, held out before her. She was panting, like a dog that had crawled across the desert. A starving dog, confronted by meat.

‘Give it to me,’ Fiona commanded, trying to make herself sound authoritative. ‘Hand it over and I’ll think of a way for us to get out of this.’

At the same time she heard a man’s voice, coming from somewhere in the building. A man, calling.

‘Emma? Rose?’

It was Ethan.

Rose heard it too, her attention drawn to the door but snapping straight back to Fiona, who dropped her voice to a whisper.

‘Rose, put the knife down and I’ll fix this, and then we can go ahead with the plan. A new family: me and you and your dad and Dylan. We’ll be so powerful together. You and me. Think of all the things we can do.’

‘No.’

Fiona blinked. She could see Emma trying to speak, but nothing was coming out except for a trickle of blood running from the corner of her mouth.

‘Why would I want you as my mentor?’ Rose said in a voice that was so calm, so even, that it sent a chill through Fiona’s bones. ‘You’re terrible at this. You and Maisie allowed yourselves to get caught. Iris figured out who you were. Even that idiot across the road suspected you. You’re rubbish, Fiona. I don’t need you.’

‘Rose . . .’

‘I’m better off without you.’

Fiona took a last look at the approaching girl and made a decision.

She turned to run, to get out of there. She moved for the door.

Heard and felt the rush of movement behind her.

Then the pain.

The fall.

And the door, swinging open into the room, hitting her in the—

42

‘Emma! Rose!’

The place was a labyrinth. Dark, confusing, the rain and wind drowning everything out. Where had the scream come from? I ran through what had been the reception area, almost choking on the smell of bird shit, and into a corridor. There was a shower room and what looked like it had once been a gymnasium. A vast, empty space. I went back into the corridor and listened, my ears humming in the silence.

At the end of the corridor were stairs leading down to a basement and another staircase leading up. Which way would they have gone? I was drawn to the basement. It seemed the more likely place. Switching on the torch on my phone I ventured down the steps but found a locked door at the bottom. I rattled it and pressed my ear against it, hearing nothing. Surely Fiona wouldn’t have keys to lock this door behind her?

I went back up, continuing up the rickety stairs to the first floor and into another corridor which had rooms all along it on both sides. In the shaking, flattened, too-white light of my phone’s torch, it was a place ripped straight from a nightmare: the former asylum, obscene graffiti scrawled on the walls, the stench of decay. Echoes of cruelty and madness and despair, the energy of humansuffering imprinted in every brick and tile. I could hardly breathe as I ran down the corridor.

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