Loved by Mr. Night

Chapter 7

Aria had staked out the house deep in rural Ayrshire, a few times on the previous visits back home, so she knew that Mac Cameron’s movements were like clockwork. His routine never changed. Every afternoon he headed out of his driveway towards his local golf club. If it was raining, he and his friends did not play golf but had lunch in the clubhouse and spent most of the afternoons in the bar.

He would get into his car around seven and would be over the limit for driving, but would take it slowly along the four miles of the deserted farm road to his own house. He would drive his old Daimler straight into the old timber garage, come out, lock the double doors behind him and go through his front door.

Aria remembered her ex-boss slagging off to some old ex-pat cronies of his about how at one time, his friend and comrade, Mac, considering he used to be one of the most feared, sadistic bastards in Glasgow, now took pride in the simplest structures to his day.

He had quit the firm when the time was right for him and come over all respectable, Jackson had said, hobnobbing with the doctors and lawyers at the local golf club. He lived on in his own plush, white turreted house set so far back up a private drive that you would miss it if you did not know that it was there. Jackson had said that it was exactly how Mac had wanted it. He loved the seclusion and seldom had any visitors. But every Friday afternoon he would visit, he drove all the way down to Glasgow and went into one of the saunas where he would enjoy the service of one of the hookers for a couple of hours.

Aria had watched him do this the previous year when she had come down to visit Aubrey, she had driven down Elvanfoot and stalked his house. So tonight she knew exactly where she needed to lay low in the park to wait. She looked at her watch. It was nearly eight and she had been here, hiding in this spot not fifty yards away from the undergrowth by the fish pond at the bottom of his garden, for nearly an hour. She had no problem waiting.

She had been waiting for more than two decades for this moment. It did not take her much to summon the images that drove her on. It was never quite far away.

Aria had not seen Mac up close since that night in her home when he and Jackson had raped and beaten her mother until she was lying soaked in blood. Her skull crushed. She had witnessed it all from below her bed where Aubrey had told her to hide, she had lain there with her eyes wide in terror and too stunned to even move. Even when they had dragged Aubrey from her bed and slapped the screaming eleven year old all the way in the living room, Aria had lain there shivering her hand stuffed in her mouth to muffle her terrified whimpering.

She had been only twelve years old. She could hear the screams. Aubrey’s screams. And it brought her out from her hiding place to crawl along the floor to where she could peer through the keyhole. Mac was stripping Aubrey naked and bending her over. Jackson was laughing. They both had this wild crazy eyed look on their faces, they were all red and flushed, like they were drunk or they were really high on drugs. And they were shouting at her mother that she was a ‘f*****g grass’ and that was what they did to grasses.

Jackson had grabbed her mother’s hair and forced her to watch Mac. He was not spanking Aubrey. He was doing the thing that she had heard the older girls talk about in school…something about s*x. There was a piercing shill scream that had tore out from Aubrey’s throat. Like she had been scalded. Then nothing.

For a split second before she passed out Aubrey had looked at the keyhole where Aria was hiding and Aria had recognized the look as the pleading to save herself and keep quiet and stay where she was. She stayed with her back to the door, her heart pounding in her chest, choking with fear.

And then suddenly there was the smell of smoke.

She waited petrified, as it curled through the bottom of the door and up her legs until the room was filled with grey and black choking smoke. When she heard the front door slam, she flung open the bedroom door and immediately a huge belch of smoke and flames forced her back. She covered her eyes and nose and pushed her way through. At first she could see nobody. Then she saw the figure of Aubrey crawling towards her. Aria got on her knees and went closer to her.

Then through that fog of smoke she saw her mother’s leg and dragged herself to her. She had never seen a dead body, but she knew from the look in her mother’s face that, even with the blood and the battered flesh, that the eyes which were staring wildly were absolutely dead.

She wasn’t breathing and her mouth was open in a silent scream. Aria struggled to her feet, grabbed hold of Aubrey’s hands and had dragged her down towards the door and down the stone steps until they were out of the building. Seconds later all the others came rushing out of the tenetment and onto the street staring at the apartment building as the flames had leapt up to the night sky.

Aubrey had regained consciousness for a second and gripped Aria’s hand tight as she had knelt down beside her.

“Ari….Aria….don’t say a word. Don’t say a word what happened tonight….or they will come for us..”

Weeping and bewildered Aria had held her sister’s hands until the ambulance came and had taken them both away. And that was the last time that she had seen her for eighteen long years. Aria had passed out in the ambulance and when she woke up, Aubrey was gone and she was in some kind of children’s home or dormitory with other children in iron beds next to her. But no Aubrey.

In the nights that followed, for months she cried out Aubrey’s name, until the dormitory door flung open and slapped her bare legs until she stopped. And finally they told her that Aubrey was dead. That she had gone into some kind of shock, could not speak and then lapsed into a coma and died. Nothing else.

Tonight was about retribution. It was about justice. Jackson had his last week and this one was the time of Mac Cameron. Aria strained her ears and in the stillness she could hear the low hum of the engine that he was close by.

In a couple of minutes the car appeared over the brow of the hill, coming up the sweeping driveway. Aria crept from behind the building as soon as she saw him coming and she saw him drive straight through the open garage doors.

As soon as he was inside she moved like lightning and was inside the closed garage doors and quickly clicking the padlock shut.

Then she put the iron bars over the handles to make it doubly sure. From her rucksack she took the beer bottles which were filled with rags soaked in petrol. She lit them, then smashed the garage window with a heavy stone and dropped them inside, one after another on the garage floor. The floor which she had already sprinkled with petrol earlier.

She heard the whoosh of fire which she had heard in her nightmares almost for her whole life.

She knew that Mac would have smelled the petrol the moment he would have stepped out of his car and would have assumed that it was some kind of leak in the petrol tank. It would no have dawned on him that his number was up until it was too late.

That was the beauty of it.

She knew that it was risky, but she had to stay just a few more seconds longer if he tried to smash another window in desperation. He did, and she watched as he banged it with his fist, smoke swirling behind it in front of her.

But she was just able to see his face. And then, there was that split second where he looked straight at her, and somewhere in the depths of his evil twisted murdering mind perhaps he recalled that face from some distant place of his past. Some warped memory of his.

At least she hoped so. At first she could see the appeal in his eyes, he looked confused as if why was she not trying to help him, then suddenly his expression changed.

He must have seen Aria smile as she watched him choking, pleading. She shook her head, hoping that her face was the last thing that the bastard was going to see ever.

Then as the blaze ripped through the garage, Aria got in her car and pushed her foot to the floor knowing that any second now once the tank in the Daimler caught fire the entire place was going to blow up like the Fourth of July pop-ups. And the whole place was going to explode.

Bits of Mac Cameron would be strewn over all his neat fake red cobblestone yard.

As she drove over the brow of the hill just before she glimpsed the moment in her rear-view mirror and she savoured it, just as she had drove off after torching Jackson in his own villa.

The alarm bells would be truly and well ringing now. She needed to be ultra careful. She drove on to the M8 and headed for Glasgow, coming off at the exit for the West End, where unknown to Jackson or any other of the bastards that she had to deal with, the arseholes who thought that they ran the show, Aria had a neat little tidy flat where she could be completely anonymous.

Job done.

All now she needed to do was go back to the life that she had originally built for herself with her original name. But before that she needed to meet Adriel. They had unfinished business…