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Once she was safely on the opposite side of the large desk, she turned to face him. As long as she kept the desk between them she knew she was safe. Unless he was going to clamber over the top of it, she could hold him off until either Ben returned, or she figured out what she was going to do. Hopefully, once he established that the flower wasn’t in the house, he would leave because there was no reason to be there. She could only hope that he didn’t intend to make her his next victim.
“Staying here is just going to put you behind bars,” Beatrice snapped. “They know all about you.”
“You know nothing,” Browning declared arrogantly. “You and your meddling boyfriend just don’t know when to keep your noses out of things. I know that the stupid fool Mottram brought you the damned flower. I just want what’s mine to be returned to me; the rightful owner.”
“You don’t own that plant, Browning, and you and I both know it. You have killed all of the men involved in growing it in the hopes that you could declare ownership without risk of being challenged by anyone. After all, if nobody is alive to tell the truth, there is nobody to stop you from claiming the plant as your own and selling it for a greedy profit. Everyone knows that you are in serious financial difficulty, and need funds to keep the roof on that miserable hole you call a house. Your spending and foreign travels might have brought rare finds and some riches, but they aren’t enough to cover your expenses. You are in debt, you are in trouble, and you desperately need that rare plant so that you can consider yourself better than all the rest. It doesn’t matter to you that you have had to kill for it. You are a murderer, nothing more.” Her voice dipped with cold fury. Her words were spat across the table in a voice that was raw with fear, desperation, and such deep anger, that she almost wished that he would lunge at her again so she
could start to throw things at him.
She eyed the contents of the table briefly and felt a little better at the sight of the floor to ceiling shelving behind her that was literally crammed full of heavy books of all shapes and sizes. Although they wouldn’t probably be enough to render him useless, they could give him a few nasty surprises. One thing was for certain, at the moment, they were at a stand-off. He wasn’t going to leave, and she wasn’t going to give in.
“You know nothing. Now, what did you do with that plant?”
Beatrice snorted. “I have told you.”
“My man has gone to your lover’s house, so don’t expect him to come and rescue you. By now, your lover boy will be unable to rescue himself, let alone anyone else.”
Beatrice’s heart lurched into her throat and she stared at him while her heart bled with grief as she considered the possibility that Ben might be the killer’s fourth victim. Just the mere thought of it almost brought her to her knees. She couldn’t even consider just how devastated she was going to be without him. It seemed so cruel, and all because of one person’s greed.
“You will have nothing, you know,” Beatrice declared firmly. “I have a very valuable document, signed by Jules Sanders, Brian Mottram and Bernard Murray that states quite categorically that you had nothing to do with the creation of the rare plant species. They purchased the parent plants off you, and declared the sums of money that were handed to you in payment. It has been witnessed by to separate people, and is a legally binding document. What Mottram and Sanders did with the parent plants they bought off you is purely their business, and certainly nothing that you should consider able to claim as your own work. No matter how much you try to bully Murray into helping you.”
Now that she was talking about it, she was able to plot things out a little more. It was a wild guess to insinuate that Murray was culpable in the murders too, but she knew she had hit the nail on the head when Browning’s lip suddenly curled at the mention of Murray’s name.
“You stupid woman, you know nothing at all. What do you know about the world? You live here in this God forsaken place, all by yourself. What have you seen of the world? What do you know about what it takes to get a plant like the ones I find?”
“I know that it costs a considerable amount of money to travel to somewhere like Brazil, or Mexico, and even more money to transport rare plants back into the country. Unfortunately for you, you cannot afford to go anymore. You don’t have the money. My guess is that once you found out that Jules Sanders and his friend had created this rare species, you saw it as your meal ticket to travel abroad and find yet more rare species to send home and sell for greedy profit. Not only would it get you out of the country so you couldn’t be arrested for the murders of innocent people, but you would solve a lot of your financial woes.”
“Shut up,” Browning suddenly yelled. The red veins in his eyes stood out and his mouth flapped open several times as he tried to speak past his rage, but couldn’t. The wild desperation she could see on his face unnerved her greatly and she struggled not to allow the panic to take hold.
“You have a hold over Murray over something and forced him to vouch for you, and help you lure people to their deaths. Unfortunately for him, I have no doubt that you have him lined up as your next victim.”
“Murray is stupid. He borrowed some money off me but couldn’t repay it. It was easy to get that fool to do as I wanted,” Browning boasted. “He thinks I will let him off the hook. Hah! He knows nothing.”
“I think that you are going to spend a very long time behind bars, Browning. Three murders mean three life sentences.”
“You can make that four murders,” Browning whispered, and started to sidle around the desk toward her.
Beatrice side-stepped so that the length of the desk remained between them. She simply refused to take her eyes off him. The next few minutes of her life would decide whether she was going to live or die. At some point throughout the last couple of minutes, some inner survival instinct kicked in and demanded that she simply not give in to this man.
When he stepped toward her, she lifted the heaviest book within reach and hurled it across the room. It didn’t move all that quickly though, and unfortunately Browning had no difficulty in side-stepping it. His smirk of pleasure made her shiver. When he eyed the length of the table in consideration, she knew what he was planning to do and glanced around for the next heaviest book she could find.
In that moment, a movement by the door drew both of their gazes. A sob escaped her as Ben lunged into the room and threw himself at Browning. Both men went down with a heavy thud, but Ben was too angry to care about a few bruises. The last few minutes had been the worst of his entire life, and he knew that the feelings that swept through him would remain with him for the rest of his life.
He had seen enough of Beatrice through the crack in the door to know that the bastard had tried to strangle her. The dark red marks across her throat and mouth, along with the almost hunted look in her eyes, infuriated him, and he took the opportunity to vent some of his rage on the man who tried desperately to fight back, but was no match for Ben’s fury.
Fist, after fist, after fist, rained down on the man before him. Beatrice stumbled and slid over the assorted papers and books on the floor and finally reached the doorway. Once she was free of the mess she raced into the sitting room and picked up the poker from the pot beside the fireplace.
Unfortunately, by the time she returned, the situation in the house had changed. A strange man now stood in the doorway. He was bleeding heavily from a gash to his forehead. His slightly dazed eyes were alight with anger, and he turned toward her with a feral snarl of rage. She knew instinctively that this was Bernard Murray, and didn’t think about what she was doing as she swung the heavy poker at his head with as much force as she could muster.
The resounding thudding noise it made as it came into contact with his skull was enough to make her wince, but lifted the poker again in preparation to take another swing anyway. Two or three strikes later, Murray surrendered to unconsciousness once more and collapsed without a murmur.
Before she even got to the hallway she could hear the grunts from the men within the study. She glanced back at Murray, and briefly wondered if she should restrain him in some way, but the need to help Ben was more important. Her grip on the poker was so tight that it started to make her knuckles ache, but the dull throbbing was firmly pushed to the back of her mind as she entered the study.
Ben had received a couple of blows to his face, the small cuts from which were oozing down his cheeks, but the man on the floor was considerably worse.
“Ben,” she snapped and hefted the poker.
It took a moment for Ben to come out of his daze but when she repeated his name, his head turned toward her. He spotted the poker she held and landed one particularly heavy thump on the man beneath him before he pushed to his feet. He took the poker off her and turned back to the man on the floor who had yet to move.
