Part 35 (1/2)

'I'm fine, Frank, but thank you for asking. Where are you?'

'I'm at the airport, flying away and leaving everything behind.'

'I thought you'd left days ago,' Maggie said, a vague recollection of their conversation in a sandwich shop coming back to her.

'I did. I went to my conference, but now I'm going further afield and I won't be back.'

'Where are you going?' she asked. Not that it mattered much. Frank had been a friend, but she wasn't going to be staying in Manchester anyway.

'Oh, somewhere far away. My days of helping people discover who they really are have come to an end. You see, Maggie, I've lived vicariously through my clients for many years. First as a student counsellor, more recently as a psychologist. Controlling young minds was always something of a speciality of mine. But now it's time for me to leave my own mark.'

Maggie didn't speak. This didn't sound like Frank.

'I'm glad you came to Manchester, though, and that I had the chance to get to know you. I've wanted Michael back where he belonged for years and then the opportunity presented itself. Through you.'

Maggie was more confused than ever. What did he mean?

'Oh, Maggie. Maggie. You still haven't quite got there, have you? I have to say that Alf Horton becoming one of your clients was a complete bonus something even I couldn't have planned. He was one of my better experiments. When he first came to me for treatment he hated his mother, you know. She was a b.i.t.c.h she made his life h.e.l.l and I gave him the perfect outlet told him what he needed to do to hang onto his sanity and how to express his anger against his mother.'

Maggie was silent. This was Frank, but it wasn't.

'And Duncan,' he continued, 'although he will always be Michael to me, had developed nicely.'

The hairs on Maggie's arms were standing on end.

'You've done well. Better than I would have antic.i.p.ated. I had no idea what the endgame would be, but you surpa.s.sed my expectations. And now you're one of us, aren't you.'

'What do you mean?' she whispered, dreading his answer but knowing what it would be.

The almost jokey tone had left his voice. Now it had a hard edge.

'You're a killer, Maggie. You voluntarily took another life. In cold blood, unless I'm much mistaken. The question is, did you enjoy it? Have you developed a taste for it?'

He let the silence hang, and Maggie felt her body begin to shake, the tremors making it difficult to hold the phone to her ear.

'The choice is yours now, Maggie. Remember the words of the poem: ”I am the master of my fate.

I am the captain of my soul.”'

Without another word, he hung up.

Maggie stared sightlessly at the mirror on the wall facing her. She couldn't focus on her face, and wondered if she ever would again. Would she recognise the person looking back at her. She was a killer, and he knew.

Still shaking she pulled her laptop across from the far side of the kitchen table and typed Frank's final words into the search engine. A poem came up on the screen, and the first lines took her back to a day just over a week ago. It felt like years.

”Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole...”

She remembered Frank reciting those lines to her on the night it all began. Was he trying to tell her something even then?

She glanced at the name of the poet. William Ernest Henley.

William. But William was a common name. It didn't have to have anything to do with Duncan's online friend.

Then she saw the t.i.tle of the poem and she no longer had any doubt.

One word, a word that had haunted her for days, a word she had looked up to find its meaning: unconquered, invincible. A word that she knew represented the man who had manipulated them all, the puppeteer.

The poem was called Invictus.

About the Author.

Rachel Abbott was born and raised in Manchester. She trained as a systems a.n.a.lyst before launching her own interactive media company in the early 1980s. After selling her company in 2000, she moved to the Le Marche region of Italy.

When six-foot snowdrifts prevented her from leaving the house for a couple of weeks, she started writing and found she couldn't stop. Since then her debut thriller, Only the Innocent, has become an international bestseller, reaching the number one position in the Amazon charts both in the UK and US. This was followed by the number one bestselling novels The Back Road, Sleep Tight and Stranger Child.

In 2015 Amazon celebrated the first five years of the Kindle in the UK, and announced that Rachel was the number one bestselling independent author over the five-year period. She was also placed fourteenth in the chart of all authors. Stranger Child was the most borrowed novel for the Kindle in the first half of 2015.

Rachel Abbott now lives in Alderney and writes full-time.

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