Page 69 of The Psychopath Next Door

Angela and Theo rushed over to him, throwing themselves down beside him. Dave was saying, ‘He’s okay, nothing broken, I told all of you to be careful and not to come running down the ramps.’

‘I . . . didn’t,’ Henry hissed.

‘Where does it hurt, darling?’ Angela asked, checking him over while Dave went on about how they’d all signed a legal disclaimer. ‘Oh, shut up, Dave,’ she said, just as Rose and Keira appeared fromaround the corner, both holding their guns down by their sides. Rose, I noticed, had two guns, presumably hers and Henry’s. Keira headed straight over to her dad and said something into his ear which made him frown.

I couldn’t take my eyes off Rose. She looked like she was fighting to suppress a smile, the muscles at the edges of her lips twitching. She set Henry’s gun on the floor but kept hold of her own.

‘He’s okay,’ Angela said, helping Henry into a sitting position. ‘He doesn’t appear to have broken anything.’

Theo crouched beside him. ‘Tell us what happened, son.’

Henry shook his head, but he looked at Rose, his lower lip quivering. ‘I fell down the ramp.’ His voice was very high. ‘It was my fault.’

Keira made a disgusted noise.

‘Did you see something different?’ Angela said to her. ‘Keira? What happened?’

Keira recounted what she’d seen. ‘Henry was up in the crow’s nest.’ That was a point on the higher platform, over in the corner. The Gallaghers had commandeered it and used it to snipe from when they were playing as a team. ‘Rose was up there too, talking to him. I didn’t see what happened next because I assumed they were forming an alliance, so I went and hid.’

‘Were you forming an alliance?’ I said to Rose.

She folded her arms. ‘I was telling him to surrender.’

‘And then what happened?’ Emma asked, going over so she was standing close to Rose, protecting her from the glares of Theo, Angela and Keira.

‘Tell them, Henry,’ said Rose.

I saw it then. He wasn’t merely afraid of her. He was terrified. He swallowed and stuttered as he tried to get the words out. ‘I ... I didn’t want to surrender, so I – so I jumped out of the crow’s nest and ran down the ramp, but I slipped and fell down.’

‘See?’ said Emma. ‘An accident.’ She turned to Dave. ‘I’m amazed you don’t have more of them in this place.’

‘I’ll have you know that we have been ranked the safest laser tag place in ...’

No one was listening to him. We were all watching Angela help her limping son out of the arena, Theo and Keira walking behind them. Outside, we went back to our cars in silence, except for Keira, who approached Dylan and whispered something to him which made him look at Rose as if she were a stranger.

I got behind the wheel as everyone else climbed in. I couldn’t get the image out of my head: the terror on Henry’s face. It conjured an echo from years ago. An incident at nursery and a streak in my daughter that I had thought was long gone.

Driving back from the laser tag, with my family sitting in silence in the car, I felt deeply unsettled.

I looked in the rear-view mirror at Rose on the back seat. At first glance, her face was blank, her expression neutral. But then I looked again. There was something else there, just beneath the surface. Something similar to what I’d seen after Albie had his accident. A glimmer of joy.

Of satisfaction at a job well done.

24

It was the day after her encounter with Tommy, and Fiona wondered what Rose was doing now. She could text her, of course, but she didn’t know if her parents monitored her phone, and she was unsure if Rose would know how important it was to be discreet in her replies. That was one of the things she needed to teach her: that in order to survive and keep their freedom, people like them needed to know how to hide, how to operate in darkness. It was something Maisie had taught Fiona shortly after she’d come to the UK.

The importance of hiding. And the importance of teaming up to help each other.

Fiona had only been twenty-three when she fled Australia, leaving behind the mess and chaos of her early adulthood, the years when she’d struggled to control her desires. She had only survived because she had stumbled into an underground scene where she’d found people who wanted to be hurt – people who threw themselves into victimhood, their lives even messier and less controlled than Fiona’s. Emotional masochists. Willing participants. The problem was, the initial thrill didn’t last. There was little satisfaction in hurting those who wanted to be hurt. Fiona had taken risks, been reckless. After a bad scene that led to a woman almost suffocating to death, she’d bought a one-way ticket to London.

She spent her first year in the city feeling even more lost than she had in Perth, and she almost went back several times. She had come to London dreaming of getting rich. Wasn’t this still the city where the pavements gleamed with gold? She got involved with a guy who worked in the City and was ten years older than her – a hedge fund manager called Gareth. He was loaded, generous, wild. They spent their weekends doing lines of cocaine and having the kind of sex that left them both covered with bruises and scratches, the expensive lingerie he’d bought her ripped and stained with blood; deep wounds in his flesh. During the week, when he was working, she would cruise lesbian bars, looking for soft, gentle women who would fall in love with her on Monday before she broke their hearts on Thursday.

A few months into their ‘relationship’, Gareth got coked up and bragged to her about how he was about to make millions. A ‘risk-free’ insider trading scheme that he and some of his posh friends had dreamed up. By this point, she was sick of him. She no longer enjoyed sleeping with him; was genuinely scared that one day he would really hurt her. Maybe even kill her. Or perhaps she would kill him. Mulling over the best way to dump him, she saw an opportunity.

Pretending all his talk about insider trading turned her on – in reality, she found it pitiful, pathetic – she asked him to explain it all to her again, and secretly videoed the whole thing. She also had access to his home computer – she’d watched him type in the password many times – and she found some messages between Gareth and his co-conspirators, which she took photos of.

The next day, hiding in a hotel room so he wouldn’t find her, she messaged him. If he didn’t pay up, she would send the video and other evidence to his bosses and the police.

---