As sparse as the gathering was – of colleagues, as she had no family – it was still touching to see so much genuine emotion at her passing. He laughed. Was it fuck! Every tear, sigh and brave smile gladdened his heart more. The bitch was finally dead, and he was as free as a bird.
He felt a hand tap him on the shoulder, heard a voice in his ear.
‘You looking for me?’
He whipped around and felt his stomach drop to his knees.
Kim Stone was standing right in front of him.
Her face still bore the marks of his labours, and her smile wasn’t even close to reaching her eyes. There was a coldness, a detachment he’d never seen before.
‘You had your chance, Symes, and you blew it.’
She stepped closer, out of earshot of the police officers behind her.
‘Get out again and I’ll be waiting. Next time I’ll kill ya,’ she growled.
The last words went straight into his ear and the ruthlessness chilled him to the bone. They were not the words of a police officer. They were the words of someone with nothing left to lose.
He was still reeling from the shock when two officers appeared behind him. How the hell had this happened? He’d seen her take her last breath. Her death had been plastered all over the news for days.
She stepped back.
‘Take him,’ she said, folding her arms.
Symes considered trying to run but he knew he was surrounded.
He’d achieved nothing. It had all been for nothing.
The rage started to build in him, and the bitch recognised it immediately. Her eyes glinted dangerously, daring him to make some kind of move, anything to give her an excuse to hurt him. He could see the hunger for violence in her face.
He held up his hands, and four officers surrounded him.
They turned him around as her colleagues came walking down the hill. He took one last look at the woman he thought was dead.
It was over and he knew it.
EIGHTY-TWO
Kim waited until Symes was out of sight to lean back and use the wall of the crematorium to support her.
Woody had wanted her to take no part in his elaborate plan to flush Symes out, which he’d formed immediately. There had been a press conference to announce her death while her body lay in an induced coma for three days. No one had been allowed to visit her, and her whole team had been instructed to maintain the pretence. Woody had been sure Symes would resurface to make absolutely sure she was dead, and so the crematorium and cemetery had been staged accordingly, with a total of twenty-seven police officers in plain clothes keeping watch on every inch of the site. She had been waiting in the office for the right moment after insisting to Woody that she had to see it through.
Seeing his face again had brought it all back – the physical beating, the futility of her escape attempts, the vulnerability at not being able to defend herself, the pain and feeling of wanting to die when she’d been brought out of the coma.
The surgeons had said she was very lucky. She was full of pins and metal, and permanent damage had been done, but to them she was alive and somewhat mobile and a roaring success. The cocktail of drugs had helped with the agony while her body had started to heal, and she’d been told that it would be months until she was almost as good as new. Right now, the ‘almost’ was like a get-out clause, a loophole for the doctors because quite frankly they didn’t know.
Her team was growing closer, and she was running out of time. She had to find the strength within herself to reassure them she was fine.
It had been on her third day out of the coma that Woody informed her that her mother had passed away peacefully in her sleep. The only emotion Kim could muster was resentment.
After her chat with Leanne, she had resolved that she wasn’t going to visit her on her deathbed. There was no forgiveness in her heart, and her only course of action would have been to scream in her face and let all the hatred and rage out of her. Not a good move for a dying woman with a mental illness. So the hate would continue to live where it always had, deep down inside her.
As the team approached, she tried to fix a smile to her face.
There was an awkwardness once they were standing before her. Penn was checking her over physically, Stacey had tears in her eyes and looked like she wanted to hug her, and Bryant wasn’t removing his gaze from her face. Leanne looked around.
She had to try and pull this off.