When Evil Wins (22 page)

Could he have known that this was the way she would react? Should he have known? The questions tested him.

He thought that he could have probably foreseen this if he’d truly understood her mental state. But out of everything that had transpired over the past months, only one certainty could be drawn; his life lay in ruins just as much as Liz and Richard's did; all because of his previous life, the one before he’d bumped into Richard Jameson all that time ago.

The judge delivered his verdict after the jury had found Ms Malik guilty of all the crimes.

“Ms Malik,” the judge said, “please stand up.”

Lois Malik did not move.

“Ms Johns, you have not legally changed your name to Johns, so in law, you will be referred to as Ms Lois Malik. Do you understand?”

Lois Malik stood up, her face full of contempt.

“Ms Malik, you are not doing yourself any favours, and you have shown very little regard for the entire legal process. However, this will not stop me carrying on with my summation.

“You have been found guilty on all counts. Your heinous crimes have been laid out before this court for all to comprehend. Your actions were without a doubt premeditated. You stalked your ex-husband; you stalked your ex-husband's friends and colleagues determining who they were and where they went, with the sole goal to do harm.

“The CCTV footage the police have provided, show this.

“You stole copies of the keys to your husband's work place from his house for obviously malicious reasons.

“Why you took such actions you have kept to yourself, and I can't accept that the discontinuation of your maintenance was the only reason.

“It is perfectly clear to me that the acts described throughout this trial will leave no one in any doubt that through a perversion of jealousy you have undertaken the destruction of your former husband's life and consequently his employer's life as well.

“Never, in all my time, have I come across such a vindictive approach to the dissolution of a marriage by the sole person who instigated the dissolution in the first place. There is no motive that I can see. And the complete destruction of your ex-husband's new life, which you made your goal, was without warrant.

“Because there are no mitigating circumstances and because of the doctor’s report on your psychological state of mind, you will be committed to a secure mental hospital for the maximum term,” the judge finished his verdict.

***

Just as Lois Malik was being taken down to the cells below the court prior to her transportation to Broadmoor, she winked and smiled at her ex-husband.

Before Janus could make up his mind about what was going on, a short and balding man, in a black pin stripe suit, tapped him on the shoulder making him jump.

Janus turned to face the man and the man handed him a letter.

Janus looked at the letter, it was handwritten and on the front it stated, ’To my dear husband’.

Wondering what this could mean he passed his thumb along the letter’s glued flap, opened it and took out a single folded piece of paper. Before he read it he looked up, but there was no one around him, her barrister had disappeared, joining the rest of the crowd that were leaving the court room.

Janus unfurled the note and shivered as he read the three meagre sentences which were written there.

 
‘
I got your dad too. You shouldn’t have come to my chemist. I updated his prescription to warfarin
.’

Janus stared at the last word;
warfarin
.

Warfarin,
he thought.
The blood thinning drug, the anti-clotting agent!

Janus now knew that the last prescription he had ever been able to get for his father, for his recovery, was the one that had caused his dad’s internal injuries to un-knit and start haemorrhaging once again.

In reality he had been his father’s Grim Reaper; he had been the vehicle of his remaining parent’s demise.

And he had killed him outright, through his own actions
.