Say You're Sorry(133)
He looks at me sadly and kisses her forehead. “Then we’ll both watch her die.” He twirls her hair with his fingertips. “It’s such a pity. She’s been a dear, dear thing.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“You’re the psychologist, you tell me.”
Stepping closer, I crouch and take the pistol and ammunition clip.
“It slides in and clicks into place,” he says. “Now release the safety.”
I have never fired a gun. I hate them. I know some people who argue they’re just a tool, like a shifting spanner or a ballpoint hammer, but let’s be honest and accept that guns are designed to be lethal weapons. There are a lot of things I haven’t done. I haven’t had a body piercing or jumped out of a plane or tried to tip a cow. All of these things seem preferable at the moment to holding a pistol in both hands, trying not to shake.
“Careful, you might shoot someone,” he says, smiling.
“Let Piper go?”
“Shoot me and you can have her.”
I point the gun at his head.
“That’s the way.”
“I’m not going to shoot you. Nobody has to die.”
He smiles. He smells almost perfumed, as though he’s showered and shaved and doused himself in cologne.
“You weren’t in the service, were you?” he asks.
“Neither were you.”
“I got close.”
“That’s like saying you nearly had sex, Grievous. You either did or you didn’t—anything else is wanking.”
Anger lights up his eyes. I haven’t seen his temper before. He’s learned to hide it well.
“Should I call you Gerald or George?”
“Call me what you like.”
“Piper and Natasha called you George. It suits you.” I take a step closer. “I’m going to undo the handcuffs.”
He shows me the knife again. “I can flick my wrist and reach her heart before you take another step. How good a doctor are you? Can you patch a broken heart?”
I step back and find a straight-backed chair. I straddle it, resting my outstretched forearms on the top spar. I can hold the gun steadier now.
“This crime of mine,” says Grievous. “Kidnapping the girls, raping them—in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t mean very much. A thousand years from now nobody is going to care about the Bingham Girls or what I did to them. Not in a hundred years. Let’s face it, Professor, men have been penetrating women since our species began. It’s how we survive. So what if we don’t say please beforehand and thank you afterwards. It doesn’t alter the act. We penetrate. We procreate.”
“That’s an interesting philosophy, George. Your mother would be very proud.”
“Leave my mother out of it.”
“Is that who you’re trying to punish?”
“Oh, dear me, how disappointing,” he sighs. “Is that the best you can do—Freudian hostility, a mummy fixation? Please. I expected more.”
“You don’t have a fiancée, Grievous. She’s another fiction. That’s your problem, isn’t it? You can’t find anyone to love. It’s always been that way, ever since puberty when all those hormones were playing havoc with your thinking. You wanted a girlfriend, but you had a problem. You were deaf in one ear and couldn’t quite tune into what people were saying. Nobody knew about the brain tumor slowly growing, benign.
“You refused to wear a hearing aid or to sit up front in class. You didn’t want anyone to know, particularly the girls. You wanted to be one of the cool group sitting up the back, passing notes to each other.
“Do you know, Grievous, there is a correlation between deafness and paranoid thinking? If you can’t hear particularly well, it’s easy to think people might be talking about you, laughing and joking at your expense, putting you down. Isn’t that true?”
He doesn’t answer me, but seems to be pressing the knife tighter against Piper’s chest.
“Even the teachers thought you were slow and stupid, even your family. And every time someone laughed or behaved a little differently, you were sure they were making fun of you, whispering behind your back, sharing a private joke.
“You wanted a girlfriend, you were desperate for one, but girls rejected your pathetic attempts to woo them. I’m not criticizing you or being patronizing. It wasn’t your fault. You adored those girls. You would have treated them like goddesses. Showered them with love. Written them poetry. Sung them love songs. But they didn’t choose you, did they? They chose the arm-candy, the boys who made them look good and gave them status, the ones they swooned over.