“Ha! And the vial?”
“Yes,” Colin said. “I told him I could hardly sleep, that I was at breaking point. He handed some Lorazepam to me from his own private store. Trusting fool.”
“Perhaps my old mentor had a heart, after all.”
Both men laughed.
“I don’t know what to do, now that she’s gone,” Colin found himself saying. “I’d grown so accustomed to her being there … and … and the flashbacks, they’re quite bad.” When he closed his eyes, he could see his mother’s final shocked expression as he had stabbed the needle into her neck. He remembered, too, the woozy feeling of release as he had watched her body convulse and then die. He had cried a little but the tears had been a mixture of regret and happiness.
At the end of the line, Edwards raised his eyes to the ceiling of his cell, fighting to remain composed in the face of such weakness. Why all the fuss about some old bitch who would probably have hung around for another thirty years, just to plague the man?
“The flashbacks will go,” he snapped at Colin. “Forget about your old life, forget about the old Colin. You are a new man.”
When Edwards ended the call, with Terry the prison guard loitering outside to make sure none of the other guards should overhear his conversation, he could hear the distant sound of an old A-Team episode playing on the communal TV screen down the hall. He emerged from his cell and nodded towards Terry, whose family would be enjoying an unexpected holiday on the Costa del Sol. Edwards considered it money well spent.
He headed in the direction of the TV and thought about how much he loved it when a plan came together, especially one that had been years in the making.