'Okay, Mersiha, let's call it a day,' he said eventually. 'You go and wait in the car while I have a word with your mother.' He smiled without warmth. 'With Katherine,' he added.
Mersiha let herself out of the office and walked over to Katherine's car. It was a warm day and she didn't feel like sitting, so she paced up and down, replaying the session in her mind. She hated the way Dr Brown tried to second-guess her all the time. It was as if he were playing mind games with her.
She looked over at the window of Dr Brown's office, wondering what he was telling Katherine, what they were saying about her. She frowned as she noticed that the blinds were closed. She was sure they had been open before. She put her head on one side and stared at the blinds, a growing feeling of dread in her heart. She began walking towards the window as if her legs had a life of their own.
There was a narrow gap at the bottom of the blinds and she bent down and pressed her face to the window. Dr Brown's desk obscured most of the view but she could just make out two figures, standing in front of the bookcase. Dr Brown and Katherine, holding each other, kissing so hard it was as if they were trying to devour each other. Mersiha watched, horrified.
Mersiha lay on her back, staring at the ceiling and wishing that time would pass more quickly. She looked across at the Mickey Mouse alarm clock on her bedside table. Mickey's right arm had to move through another twenty minutes before she'd go downstairs. From the bed she could see the full moon glaring balefully down. She had no alternative, she knew that. She'd considered telling her father, but she had no wish to see him hurt.
Besides, what if he divorced Katherine, what then? More than half the kids in her class had divorced parents and they seemed to split into two camps: those who spent all their time shuttling between two homes and those who saw their fathers only every second Saturday. No. She couldn't face that. Whatever she did, her paramount concern was to keep her father happy.
One of Mersiha's first thoughts had been to confront Katherine, to tell her that she knew what she'd been up to and that she was to stop the affair immediately. But if she did that the relationship between them would sour for ever. And Mersiha was also scared that if she did try to put pressure on Katherine, she'd walk out. Mersiha knew that her adoptive parents had a rocky relationship. She'd heard them arguing late at night when they thought she was asleep, usually about money and occasionally about Luke. If Katherine knew that Mersiha had discovered the affair, it might be the last straw. Despite the arguments, she knew that her father loved Katherine, and it would break his heart if she left. That left only one course of action.
Mersiha looked across at the alarm clock. Fifteen more minutes. She wasn't worried about her parents hearing her moving about the house, but if they were awake they'd be sure to hear the car starting up. If there were any other way she'd have preferred not to have used the car, but Dr Brown lived more than twenty miles away in Parkton, to the north of Baltimore, and she could hardly call a taxi. She looked at the clock again. The minute-hand had barely moved. Mersiha decided not to wait any longer. It was agony lying and waiting. She had to do something or she'd go crazy.
She sat up and reached for the small flashlight she'd put in the top drawer of her bedside cabinet. She'd bought new batteries at a Rite-Aid store on the way to school the previous day. She switched the flashlight on and placed it on the bed so that it illuminated the closet. She took off her nightgown and slipped it under her pillow. The clothes she'd decided to wear – black Levi jeans and a black turtleneck pullover – were under her bed. She put them on, then slipped black boating shoes on to her feet. Her Baltimore Orioles baseball cap was on the chair by the window and she put it on, tucking her hair inside it. Her collection of stuffed animals sat together under the window. She put two of the biggest, a green hippo and a honey-coloured teddy bear, under the quilt and patted it down so that it gave the impressionthe stairs, holding her breath all the way.
The door to her father's study was open and she crept inside.
The cabinet where her father kept his guns was to the left of his desk, so she sat in his chair while she spun the combination lock.
She'd seen him open it on several occasions, though she doubted that he realised that she'd memorised the combination. Fifteen to the left, eight to the right, nineteen to the left. Click. She pulled the door open and knelt down by the side of the cabinet.
She sat back on her heels and looked at the wooden stocks and metal barrels as they gleamed in the moonlight. There were two pump-action shotguns which Tony and Katherine used when they went clay pigeon shooting at Loch Raven.
Alongside them were several hunting rifles which used to belong to Katherine's father. He had died the year before Mersiha had come to America. Tony Freeman never hunted, but Katherine had refused to get rid of the guns and Tony respected her wishes to the extent that once a month he took them out and thoroughly cleaned and oiled them. Mersiha had sat and watched as he worked on the weapons, but he'd never allowed her to help.
On racks at the top of the metal-lined cabinet was a collection of pistols, all of which had been owned by Katherine's father. Several were collector's items, almost antiques, and until Mersiha had arrived they'd been on display on the wall. There were several turn-of-the-century Colts, an 1891 pearl-handled single-shot Smith and Wesson, a British Webley-Mars which had been used in the First World War, and others that Mersiha wasn't able to identify. There were several modern handguns, too, because Katherine's father had been a devout believer in self-defence. Some of the handguns were extremely powerful – a.357 Magnum-calibre Colt Python and a.44 Ruger Super Blackhawk – but Mersiha knew exactly which gun she wanted.
It was in a case at the bottom of the cabinet, a Heckler amp; Koch HK-4. It was similar to a gun her brother had used in Bosnia.
What made it different from most other guns was that it came with four separate barrels, springs and magazines so that it could be assembled in four different configurations, allowing it to make use of different-calibre bullets:.22 LR,.25 ACP,.32 ACP, and .380 ACP. Mersiha's brother had always said that they never knew what ammunition they'd pick up, so the HK-4 gave him a flexibility that might one day save their lives. Mersiha smiled grimly. How wrong he'd been.
She took the case down and opened it. The gun lay in a thick piece of foam rubber, all its various extra components laid out in their own pre-cut slots. The gun was in its.380 ACP configuration which wasn't what Mersiha wanted, so she broke it down and reassembled it using the.22 LR components. At first she couldn't lift off the slide and barrel, then she remembered that she had to depress the latch in the trigger guard first. She felt as if her brother were chuckling over her shoulder as she moved the slide and barrel forward and then up.
When she was finished she put the case back on its shelf and closed the cabinet. From the bottom drawer of her father's desk she took a small steel key. The safe where her father kept the ammunition was set into the floor under a wooden panel behind the door. There was a box of.22 cartridges there and she took out half a dozen and one by one slotted them into the gun's magazine.
She closed her eyes and held the gun against her cheek, the metal cold to the touch. The memories flooded back. Her brother, shooting a Serb soldier in the back as he was running away, then laughing and shooting him again in the head as he lay on the floor. Her brother holding the gun to the groin of a Serb sniper, taunting him before blowing his manhood off. It seemed as if all her recollections of Stjepan involved the gun.
She opened her eyes and tried to imagine her brother without a gun in his hand. It was hard. She sifted through the mental images that were all that remained of him. There was always a gun or a rifle there somewhere. She tried going back, to the time before the Serbian invasion of her homeland, to the time when their mother had taught them English on the kitchen table after they'd cleared the supper plates away. She could hold that picture in her head, the way their mother had tutted whenever they made a mistake, the way she'd smiled when they'd done well, but her memory played tricks with her. Instead of a pencil in Stjepan's hand, there was a gun. The gun. The HK-4. They'd taken everything from her, the Serbs. They'd taken her parents.
Her brother. And her memories. She realised with a jolt that her finger was tensing on the trigger and that the safety wasn't on.
She looked at her wristwatch. It was time to go.
Buffy was asleep in her basket but her ears pricked up and her eyes opened as soon as Mersiha stepped into the kitchen.
'Shhhh!' Mersiha whispered. The keys to Katherine's car were hanging on a hook by the kitchen door. Buffy whined, asking to go out, but Mersiha glared at her and pointed to the dog's basket. 'Bed,' she hissed. Buffy did as she was told, her tail between her legs.
Mersiha slipped out of the kitchen and carefully closed the door behind her. It was a cool night and she breathed in the night air like a drowning man. Her heart was racing so fast that she thought it would explode. She put a hand to her chest and took deep breaths. It wasn't what she was about to do that made her so nervous, it was the fear of getting caught. Of what her father would say. Of the hurt she'd see in his eyes.
She switched the flashlight on and walked across the grass to the garage. Both cars were parked there. She pushed Katherine's car out on to the road before starting the engine. It had been a long time since she had been behind the wheel of a vehicle. Her new parents had steadfastly refused to allow her to drive their cars, insisting that she wait until her sixteenth birthday. She'd never told them she'd learnt to drive when she was twelve years old, that her brother had fixed wooden blocks to the pedals of an old Russian truck so that her feet could reach and so that she could change gear without the sound of crunching metal.
She used to drive while her brother and his friends rode in the back, guns at the ready, and compared with the war-torn roads of Bosnia, Route 83 North from Baltimore was a breeze. She kept the car at just under the speed limit all the way to Parkton.
She knew there would be few police around at that time of night, but there was no point in tempting fate. The further away from her house she drove, the calmer she felt. By the time she arrived in Parkton she was completely calm, totally focused on what lay ahead.
Art Brown always slept face down, had done ever since he'd been at college and a friend of his had died after an all-night drinking session, choked on his own vomit. After a few years it had become a habit, and now, a quarter of a century after the death of his friend, he couldn't sleep in any other position. The right side of his face was pressed into the pillow, his eye squashed shut, but he could open his left eye to see the blue luminous figures of his bedside clock. It was a quarter past two. Something had woken him from a deep sleep, a noise from somewhere downstairs.
Normally he never woke up in the middle of the night so he listened intently, trying to pin down whatever it was that had startled him awake. Maybe he'd left a door open, or it could have been a car backfiring. Parkton wasn't a hotbed of crime burglaries were relatively rare because most of the homeowners were armed or had big dogs, and the crime of choice among the well-heeled suburban residents tended to be tax evasion rather than breaking and entering. Somewhere off in the distance a dog barked. Maybe that was it, he thought. Maybe it had been the dog.
He closed his eyes and relaxed, trying to get back to sleep.
The warmth of the bed turned his mind to thoughts of Katherine Freeman. God, the woman was incredible; there wasn't anything she wouldn't do in bed. He sighed as he remembered the last time she'd come to his house. She'd walked straight by him as soon as he'd opened the door and headed up the stairs unbuttoning her dress and calling over her shoulder that she could only spare an hour. By the time he'd run up the stairs she was lying naked on the bed, a sly smile on her lips. She hadn't even given him time to take off his shoes, let alone his trousers. She'd motioned with her finger for him to lie on the bed, then she'd expertly unzipped his trousers and slipped him inside her, fastening her legs around his waist so that he couldn't have withdrawn even if he'd wanted to. He'd exploded inside her in a matter of seconds, but she'd carried on moving, pounding against him until he'd grown hard again. She knew just what to say and do to get a man aroused and to keep him that way until she'd been satisfied. And God, the woman took some satisfying.
Brown could feel himself growing hard. Even when she wasn't with him, she could turn him on. He knew it was unethical, sleeping with a patient's mother, but he'd known that the first day she'd stepped into his office. She was so obviously available, it had stood out a mile, and within a week of their meeting she'd been in his bed. He knew that he was taking advantage of the resentment she felt towards her husband following the death of their son, and he doubted that he was the only extramarital lover she had, but he couldn't stop himself. Their relationship was purely sexual. They had almost nothing in common except for bed and her daughter, and he knew there was no question of her ever leaving her husband to live with him, but for the moment that was enough for him. He sighed as he remembered how she'd taken him in her mouth, straddling his chest as she went down on him, brushing his thighs with her hair. Brown slid his hand down the bed, between his legs. If he couldn't have her there and then, at least he could have her in his mind. He gripped himself tightly, and pictured her soft, wet mouth.
'Dr Brown?' At first he thought he'd imagined the whisper, that he was hearing Katherine in his mind, but when the voice spoke again he realised that there was someone else in the room.
His eyes shot open and he whipped his head around, so fast that he heard his neck crack. He was still lying on his right arm, still holding himself, and he couldn't raise his chest off the bed.
'Who is it?' he mumbled, his throat so dry that the words sounded strangled. It was a girl's voice. What the hell was a girl doing in his bedroom? He felt something hard press against the back of his neck. Something hard and circular. His stomach churned as he realised what it was. The barrel of a gun.
'Don't move,' the girl said. It wasn't a ghetto voice, that much he was sure. There was none of the sing-song bravado that he heard in the voices of the inner-city kids whom he treated at his surgery whenever the city's welfare services came up with the money. The girl was young, the accent suburban, the voice vaguely familiar. The pressure of the gun increased as she leant across and switched on the brass lamp on his bedside cabinet.
He could see her out of the corner of his left eye, but not clearly enough to recognise her. He heard a clunking sound and then three musical tones. She'd picked up the phone and dialled a three-figure number. He realised with a feeling of dread that she'd called 911. Emergency services.
'Yes,' she said, quietly. 'Send an ambulance to 113 Lauriann Court, Parkton. Gunshot wound.' She replaced the receiver, then Brown felt the gun barrel pull away. 'Turn over,' she said.
Brown rolled on to his back. His right arm tingled as the blood began to flow again. 'Mersiha?' he said as he recognised his visitor. 'What's going on?'
Mersiha Freeman was standing at the left side of the bed, a gun in her right hand and two towels draped over her left arm.
Her black hair was hidden in a baseball cap and her face seemed unnaturally white in the light from the lamp. He tried to sit up, but Mersiha pointed the gun at his head. 'Stay where you are,' she said, her voice cold and flat.
'What are you doing?' he asked. His mind was racing. Mersiha had never shown any violent tendencies in all the time she'd been undergoing therapy, and she'd seemed perfectly rational during their last session. She was generally a bright, well-balanced girl, and while she had problems, they weren't the sort that would be expected to lead to her standing in her therapist's bedroom brandishing a pistol.
She threw a towel at him and it fell across his chest. He'd last seen it hanging on a rail by the shower in the guest bedroom. 'We can talk about this, Mersiha,' he said. It was important to get her talking, he knew. He was a trained psychiatrist, she was just a troubled teenager; once they began communicating he'd be able to calm her down. He'd dealt with manic depressive teens before.
They were relatively easy to defuse, once you got them talking. 'I want you to tell me what's upset you. We've always gotten along so well in the past. I'm not just your doctor, I'm your friend.'
Mersiha wrapped the other towel around her right hand, enveloping the gun so that all that could be seen was the last half-inch of the barrel. 'There isn't any problem that can't be solved by talking it through,' Brown said. He flashed his professional smile, but his legs were shaking under the quilt.
'Hold the towel,' she said, waving the gun at his chest. He gripped the towel with his right hand. She took hold of the quilt and pulled it off the bed. He was naked and he could feel his penis shrivel and his scrotum contract.
'Mersiha, come on, this is getting out of hand,' he said, unable to stop his voice from quivering.