The Final Minute Read Online Free PDF

and I stepped inside, wondering how I was going to do this. There was no point going in silently like some naughty schoolboy. I was a man after all, and I hadn’t actually done anything wrong. So I called out Jane’s name as I walked through the kitchen, trying to sound as jaunty as possible, as if me disappearing like this was the most natural thing in the world.
    I heard footsteps and a second later a woman I didn’t know appeared in the doorway. She looked like one of those lean, fit Californian women who populated the TV programmes I watched. She had an athletic figure, golden, sun-kissed skin, and naturally blonde hair tied back in a ponytail. It was no surprise that when she started speaking her accent was unmistakably American.
    ‘You must be Jane’s brother, Matt,’ she said with a big, confident smile as she came towards me and put out a hand. She must have seen the confusion on my face because she immediately added, ‘I’m Pen, an old friend of hers from college. She didn’t tell me her brother was so hot.’
    I must have been vain in my past life because that part got me straight away. I smiled back as we shook hands, thinking I liked this girl already.
    ‘We’re just in the lounge,’ she continued. ‘I’m sorry, I’m a bit of a prankster. I wanted to give you a shock. Jane says you deserve it, running away like that this afternoon. I think you scared her. Did she tell you I was coming tonight?’ Pen didn’t stop talking as she led me across the hallway to the lounge door, and I was thinking there was a real charisma about this girl and maybe, if she was single, it would be nice to get to know her.
    It only began to dawn on me that something wasn’t quite right when she opened the door and moved aside to let me go first, as if she owned the place.
    Which was when I saw Jane.
    At least I think it was Jane. It wasn’t that easy to tell. The woman I was looking at was sitting in a chair in the middle of the room facing the door. She’d been bound to the chair with black duct tape and her head was slumped forward. She was wearing a navy blue towelling robe that looked vaguely familiar and did a good job of camouflaging the worst of the blood: all but one of the fingers on her left hand were missing. A few feet away, lying on his side next to the TV in just a pair of nuthugging briefs, was Tom. There were two holes in his back, thick blood trailing from each one like tears, and more blood caking the hair on the back of his head.
    I took in all this in the space of a split second, and then I felt something hard and metallic being pushed into the base of my skull and the pretty American woman called Pen hissed, ‘Inside,’ giving me a hard shove.
    As I stumbled in, trying to make sense of what I was seeing, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and the next second I received a single hard blow to the side of my head, which sent me sprawling into a chaise longue. The initial pain immediately dissipated, replaced by a sense of shock as the adrenalin flooded my body. My vision blurred as I sat back up, then settled as I saw the man who’d hit me for the first time. He was huge. A man mountain dressed all in black, with big dark eyes that watched me coldly, like a lizard inspecting prey. I was nothing to him and he was letting me know it.
    In front of me, Pen picked up a crumpled apron from behind one of the chairs and put it on. It was white and liberally spattered with fresh blood. Then she pulled on gloves and screwed a silencer to the end of her pistol, before turning to the big man. ‘OK, let’s find out what he knows.’
    The big man reached down and yanked me to my feet, grabbing me in a headlock so I was facing his accomplice.
    I could just about see Jane’s corpse, and I felt an overwhelming sense of sadness. She’d seemed so alive such a short time ago, and now she was gone. The woman who’d looked after me these past two months. The closest person I had in the world.
    ‘You’re