TIM J. LEBBON
The Hunt

Copyright

Published by Avon

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2015

Copyright © Tim Lebbon 2015

Cover Design © ClarkeVan Meurs 2015

Tim Lebbon asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008122904

Ebook Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 9780008122898

Version: 2015-09-09

Dedication

For Dan the Man

Epigraph

‘Come what may, bad fortune is to be conquered by endurance.’

Virgil

‘Run when you can, walk if you have to, crawl if you must; just never give up.’

Dean Karnazes

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One: tiger

Chapter Two: chosen

Chapter Three: fifty minutes

Chapter Four: just begun

Chapter Five: Chapter three

Chapter Six: please

Chapter Seven: the hills

Chapter Eight: holt

Chapter Nine: trail

Chapter Ten: vet

Chapter Eleven: ambush

Chapter Twelve: rage

Chapter Thirteen: scree

Chapter Fourteen: lemons

Chapter Fifteen: broken bones

Chapter Sixteen: plan

Chapter Seventeen: change

Chapter Eighteen: her world

Chapter Nineteen: nail

Chapter Twenty: swim

Chapter Twenty-One: no ties

Chapter Twenty-Two: clean

Chapter Twenty-Three: night vision

Chapter Twenty-Four: throats

Chapter Twenty-Five: fall

Chapter Twenty-Six: drowning puppies

Chapter Twenty-Seven: dawn

Chapter Twenty-Eight: rain

Chapter Twenty-Nine: trust

Chapter Thirty: big ears

Chapter Thirty-One: tracks

Chapter Thirty-Two: safety

Chapter Thirty-Three: coup de grâce

Chapter Thirty-Four: thirteen days

Chapter Thirty-Five: moving

Keep Reading…

The Hunt – Author Q&A

About the Author

About the Publisher

Chapter One
tiger

When he wanted to run faster, Chris Sheen imagined being chased by a tiger. Sleek, stealthy, powerful, it pounded silently along the trail behind him, tail swishing at the clasping brambles and eyes focused on his back. He didn’t risk a glance over his shoulder. There was no time for that. If he did his pace would slow, and maybe he’d trip over a tree root or a rock protruding from the uneven path. He’d go sprawling and the big cat would be upon him. All they’d find would be his GPS watch and perhaps one of his running shoes, bloodied and torn and still containing a foot.

He giggled. Sweat ran into his eyes and down his back. Mud was splattered up his legs from the newly ploughed field he’d run across a couple of miles back. Blood pulsed, his heart thudded fast and even, and he had never felt so good.

He loved running with the dawn. Out of the house while it was still dark, leaving Terri and the girls sleeping, he was through one small woodland and already running down towards the canal towpath by the time the sun set the hills alight. Sometimes he saw someone else on the canal, walking their dog or cycling to work, but more often than not he was on his own. This morning he’d seen a buzzard in a field, sitting on a recent kill and staring around as if daring anyone to try for it. Once on the towpath a heron had taken off close by, startling him with its sheer size. He heard a woodpecker at work somewhere, scared ducks into the water with their ducklings, and he’d caught a brief glimpse of a kingfisher’s neon beauty. This early morning world felt like his alone, and he revelled in it.

Now, close to the end of his run, the giggles came in again. It was a familiar feeling. The endorphins were flowing, his heart hammering, and it felt so bloody great to be alive that sometimes he whooped out loud, running through the woods towards home. He ran with assurance and style, flowing across the uneven ground and watching ahead for potential trip hazards. Spider web strands broke across his face, but he didn’t mind. Once, he’d arrived home to find Terri in the kitchen, sleep-ruffled and clasping a warm mug of tea, and when he’d hugged her – ignoring her protestations at his sweat-soaked clothing and cold hands – she’d screeched at the sight of a spider crawling in his hair.

He leaped a stream, slipped, found his footing and ran on. He knew this was a good run, he could feel it, but when he glanced at his watch he saw that he was well on course for a personal best. It was one of his regular routes – through a small woodland on the other side of the village, along a country lane, up a steep hill to a local folly, back down a rocky trail to the canal towpath, then under several bridges until he entered the larger woodland that led back home. Twelve miles, and his best time so far was one hour fifty minutes. Not bad for cross country, and pretty good for a middle-aged former fat bastard. But today he was set to smash that record by five minutes.

It was almost eight o’clock, and he’d still be home in time to make sandwiches for Gemma and Megs to take to school.

He emerged from the woods and headed across the large field behind the village hall. He waved at an old man walking his dog, vaulted the fence instead of passing through the kissing gate, and crossed the village hall car park.

Half a mile now, and he put on a burst of speed to finish at a sprint. It felt so bloody good. When he’d hit forty he’d been thirty pounds overweight and unfit, but then everything had changed. A comment one day from Terri – I love you cuddly – had started a snowball effect of worry about his weight, unhappiness at his appearance, and concern for his kids. He wanted to see them grow up. He wanted to take his grandkids for long walks. Four years later he was fitter than he’d ever been, leaner, stronger. He’d tucked his first two marathons under his belt, and the year before he’d completed his first Ironman, with plans for more. The Chris of four years ago wouldn’t recognise the Chris of today, and he couldn’t deny a little smugness at that thought.

‘Morning, Carol!’ he shouted across the road. Their friend was dragging rubbish bags up her driveway, still wearing her dressing gown.

‘Nutter!’ she called back, waving. She was wildly overweight and never walked anywhere, even drove to the village shop. Chris was fond of her, but knew who the real nutter was.

There was a strange car parked at the end of his street, a suited man in the driver’s seat talking into a Bluetooth headset. He caught Chris’s eye then looked away, still talking. Smooth-looking bastard. Salesman, maybe. Chris hoped the guy didn’t knock at his door, but the ‘No Cold Callers’ sign didn’t deter most. He was an architect, he worked from his home studio, and nothing annoyed him more than people disturbing him to try to sell him things on his doorstep.

Their house came into view. One more injection of power, swing those arms forward and back, watch the style, land on mid-foot and sweep forward, and … hit the watch.

Chris looked at his time and muttered a delighted ‘Yes!’ Terri wouldn’t really care that he’d beaten his best time by almost six minutes. He’d tell her anyway.

Their bedroom curtains were still drawn. That was weird, because Terri had to leave for work in less than half an hour. Maybe she’d missed the alarm, although the girls foraging downstairs for breakfast and arguing over what to watch on TV should have woken her.

Panting heavily, already feeling the burn settling into his muscles, he plucked the front door key from his pocket and slipped it into the lock. He needed a pint of water and a bowl of cereal and fruit. But for another few seconds he breathed in the peace and quiet, readying himself for the pre-school chaos inside.

As he pushed the door open he already knew that something was different. No, not different, he thought. Wrong. Something’s wrong.

‘Terri?’ he called, closing the door behind him. ‘Gemma? Megs?’ Nothing. No angry voices as his daughters bickered. No tired admonishments as Terri tried to get ready for work while the girls dressed for school. No sound of the shower running or perfumed scents on the air. The TV in the living room was muted, there was no music from upstairs, and the alarm on Terri’s phone beside the bed must have been turned off. One of the joys of going out early was that he didn’t have to wake up to One Direction singing one of their bland songs. Though Terri said she liked waking to blandness: it meant the day could only get better.

And there was something else. Something he couldn’t quite place, apart from the unnatural silence, the stillness.

‘Terri?’ Four steps and he could look into the living room. The TV was off. There was no breakfast stuff scattered around. Usually the girls left their bowls for someone else to clear up, and lately he and Terri had been leaving them until after school, making the girls clear away their mess from the morning. Sometimes, anyway. More often than not he’d pick them up during the day, on his way through from his studio to the kitchen to throw a salad together for lunch. After today’s run he’d probably treat himself to something more substantial, maybe some cheese on toast or a bacon bagel with …

One of Terri’s slippers was on the floor by the doorway into their large kitchen-diner. Just one of them, lying abandoned on its side. So she’d been downstairs, at least.

‘Hello?’ No answer. They were hiding from him, of course, waiting to pounce when he climbed the stairs. But that certainty couldn’t prevent the stab of fear that pierced his chest and ran cold down his spine as he started up. It’s not like Terri, he thought. Me, yeah, I’ll jump out of cupboards and lark around, scare the kids. But not her. ‘Okay, I’m sweating more than usual, and the first person I find gets a really big hug.’

No giggles. No sounds of girls struggling further beneath beds or into wardrobes. The boiler ticked as it heated water, and that was all. The only noise in this usually bustling family home.

Chris ran up the last few stairs and checked the girls’ bedrooms. They were empty, messy as usual, clothes strewn about. Gemma was almost fifteen now, and amongst the books and DVD cases were make-up packaging and teen magazines. Megs was nine. She had more stuffed toys than was probably necessary, and Chris waded into her room, shifting them aside with his muddy trainers. Terri’ll kill me for not taking them off, he thought, but right then he didn’t care. Something was wrong, and every time he breathed …

He could smell coffee. It had been rich on the air when he’d opened the front door, and it was only now that he acknowledged the scent. Terri hated coffee. And she’d never have made some ready for him because she knew he liked it hot, fresh, and brewed by his own hand.

He darted along the landing to their room. Empty, bedclothes dragged down onto the floor. Terri’s phone was on the carpet beside the bed. As if it had been knocked from the bedside table.

‘Terri!’ Chris shouted, shocked at the note of panic in his voice. For an endless moment he didn’t know which way to turn, what to do. Grab her phone and call the police? And tell them what? Go back downstairs, then, check out the kitchen-diner where they were probably hiding, or maybe just sitting down having a quiet breakfast. Maybe he’d been so pumped up when he’d come in that he hadn’t heard them answer, and now they’d be frowning at each other with jam on their lips, Terri rolling her eyes and the girls laughing as their dad staggered into the kitchen, a sweat-soaked wreck who’d almost run himself into the ground.

Yeah.

But when he glanced into the large family bathroom and saw the shower curtain on the floor, its plastic hooks strewn across the tiles along with scattered pot pourri, bath dry but for the splash of blood across one side and the smear across the wall beside the shower head, he knew that everything had changed.

His vision and senses became focused, sharpened by fear for his family and the surrealness of this moment. He saw things he might not have otherwise noticed. The bathroom window was closed, and Terri always opened it first thing in the morning. Megs’ sleep teddy – the one cuddly toy she couldn’t get into bed without – was propped behind the bathroom door on the laundry basket. The shower power supply was on but the curtain, splayed across the floor with one end up on the toilet seat, was dry.

Blood.

Gemma tried shaving her legs, cut herself. Terri panicked, took her to hospital. But that just didn’t add up. She’d have taken her phone, and he always took his mobile when he went for a run, always! He frantically dug it from his waist bag and checked, but there were no missed calls, no emails.

Breathing heavier now, he smelled coffee again.

He ran downstairs, trying to blink away the image of blood. Splashed on the bath. Smeared on the wall, as if someone had it on their hand, reaching for purchase as they fell from the bath (or were pulled, maybe they were pulled) and took the shower curtain with them.

He ran past the still-empty living room and barged the kitchen door aside. It struck the door stop and bounced back at him, and he shoved it open again, blocking it with his foot, not making any sense of what he saw, because what he’d expected to see was his family sitting at the small table eating breakfast, Gemma perhaps with a bandage on her hand and looking sorry for herself.

Coffee. Terri hated coffee.

There was a man leaning casually against a kitchen cupboard beside the back door. The door was ajar, a small fingerprint of blood on the UPVC jamb. The man was holding a mug, the one from a Yorkie Easter egg that Chris’s mum still insisted on buying him every Easter, much to his secret delight. The man watched Chris while taking another long sip of coffee. He raised his eyebrows in greeting.

‘Who are you?’ Chris asked.

The man lowered the mug and swallowed. ‘Good coffee. Ethiopian. You ever been there?’

‘No, I … who are you?’

The stranger put the mug on the worktop beside him and picked up a phone. He wore a nice polo shirt, chinos, well-polished boots. He reminded Chris of the guy he’d seen sitting in the car at the end of the street, and that connection suddenly seemed all too real.

‘Where are my family? What are you doing here?’ Chris’s attention kept flitting to the open back door, that dab of blood. He was filled with a sudden, utter dread. His legs felt weak. His bladder relaxed.

The man looked at his watch, glanced at the phone screen, and sighed. ‘Stay in the house. Don’t go out. Don’t call the police, or your wife and children will be executed. I’ll be in touch.’ Then he turned and opened the back door.

‘Wait!’ Chris said, darting across the kitchen for the man, reaching, fingertips brushing the fine cotton of his polo shirt before the intruder turned fluidly and stood, motionless. He stared at Chris, his eyes empty, face blank and terrifying.

‘I’ll be in touch,’ he said again. He exuded danger in waves. Chris took one step back, and the man left and closed the back door behind him.

Terrified, shaking, alone, Chris waited for whatever might come next.

Chapter Two
chosen

Rose screamed herself awake, sprang upright on the uncomfortable bed and pressed one hand against her chest, feeling her thundering heart and assuring herself that she was still alive. Sweat had dampened her vest and underclothes. She’d kicked the blanket off during the night. The musty confines of the caravan were sliced by sheets of dawn sunlight shining through broken blinds, and birds sang cheerfully outside, as if her husband and three children had never been tied up and slaughtered in some dark, dank basement.

The familiar flood of reality rushed in, and Rose groaned at the awfulness of it all. Sometimes in sleep there was escape, and occasionally in dreams she enjoyed some form of vicarious peace. But not this past night. The memory of what she had found was so vivid and fresh that it was like discovering the scene all over again. Four years had passed, but most nights she found her dead family afresh.

Already the nightmare was dissipating, leaving brash images scorched into her memory. Adam, his eyes as wide and empty as the vicious gash in his throat. And her three children – Molly, Isaac, Alex – lying dead where she had not been able to protect them, hold them, whisper motherly words into their ears. She always remembered that, however hard she tried to forget.

She used the cramped toilet and dressed quickly, pausing now and then to glance from the windows. New habits persisted. It was dangerous to ever believe herself safe.

Outside, all was peaceful. The field where her caravan was parked remained empty right now – the farmer said he would be introducing some sheep in the next few weeks – and the grass was long, shimmering slightly in the morning breeze, jewelled with dew. The windows gave her good views in each direction, and she’d be able to see anyone approaching. Down the sloping field was the farm, still and silent this early in the morning. East lay the orchard, fruit-heavy trees dipping low limbs across the landscape. And to the north, a family of foxes played close to the hedge bordering the field and a woodland beyond, young cubs leaping, rolling, snapping at each other like puppies. She was always pleased to see them. If someone was close by, the foxes wouldn’t be anywhere in sight.

Rose went through her morning exercise routine. One hundred press-ups, sit-ups and crunches, along with chin-ups, planks, and squats. Her body had grown lithe and lean. The exertion kick-fired her metabolism and got her blood pumping, and the distraction steered her away from her horrible dreams. For a time, at least.

After eating a breakfast of fruit and yoghurt she pulled the pistol from beneath the mattress and tucked it into her belt.

She brewed coffee and switched on her laptop. The caravan was small and basic but suited her needs perfectly. She’d bought a new fridge and decent bedding, but the van’s outside was as mouldy and worn-looking as when she’d first seen it. Five hundred pounds and it was hers. The farmer took a chunk of cash from her each week for ground rent and silence, and he was happy to ask no questions. That was fine. She never stayed in one place for more than a few weeks.

Drinking strong coffee, humming quietly, she started scanning her usual news sites. But the memory of her nightmare was strong. She closed her eyes and breathed in coffee fumes, because every time she thought of her family the grief was rich, deep, and sometimes crippling. She dreaded forgetting them, though sometimes remembering was almost too much.

But her dreams and memories fed her fury. She knew that her current existence was a form of self-imposed limbo, and everything she did now would lead to an eventual resolution. Perhaps then she could lay her nightmares to rest, and true grieving could begin.

There was no news that drew her attention today. The usual political infighting, celebrity inconseque‌ntialities, far-away conflicts. She looked for murders or unexplained deaths. She sought news on kidnappings and shootings, unidentified bodies found strangely mutilated in city or countryside. Anything that might lead to the Trail.

As usual, nothing.

But something felt different today. Her nightmare clung on, and even though she had found nothing obvious on the net, perhaps today was the day to check again.

Rose gulped down the rest of her coffee in one and then opened a new browsing window.

She didn’t like doing this too often. She accessed the net via a proxy server in London, had a rolling defence protocol that would lock her out at the first sign of being tracked, used no identifying markers or traceable elements, yet she knew that they had far more expertise at their disposal than her. Rose liked to amuse herself by thinking about some of the online contacts she’d made and how much stuff she had access to that would give the heads of the CIA and MI5 panic attacks. But accessing the Trail’s own network was like dipping her toe into a river of alligators. It was only so long before she was noticed and they came for her.

She would only allow that to happen on her own terms.

She slipped by several firewalls and surfed communications she could not yet decipher. It was pretty standard traffic that she’d seen before, so she withdrew and re-entered under another address, creating an avatar that would easily be mistaken as a particularly intrusive trollbot, if anyone noticed it at all. Most trollbots’ aims were to spread viruses or collect information. Hers was simply to observe. She’d given it a variety of source links which flickered and rolled every three seconds – a sex-drug site; a Nigerian billionaire with money to get out of the country; a guaranteed tip to increase cock size. She hoped that, draped in the paraphernalia of a million other trolls, hers was all but invisible.

While her laptop worked, she made more coffee. It was her one vice, and had been for three years.

For almost a year after escaping the Trail and finding Adam and her children murdered, she’d drowned herself deep in London’s underworld. Her first thought had been to go to the police, but even then the shadow of the Trail remained over her, and the promises of harm they had levelled against her extended family and friends had felt even more real. They had proven themselves sickeningly brutal.

Then came the revelation that she was wanted for her family’s slaying. In a way, that was the worst abuse of all – the way they had framed her, made a mockery of her love and grief. A madness had taken her. A blazing fury and a smothering grief. It was incomprehensible how quickly she had changed from a family woman with a good job and a nice house to … someone else. And so she had cut her hair, dyed what was left, and submerged herself in the chaos of the capital. It was ironic that she went to so much effort disguising herself when in truth she was already lost.

Those shadowy places were more about the people than the locations – lost, dispossessed, cast adrift by society, or fallen by the wayside of their own volition. No one had seemed interested in her, and she had taken notice of no one. Occasionally she worried about being recognised, though in truth grief had changed her more than a haircut and new clothes ever could. She was a hollow person, and her body projected that physically. Sunken cheeks, stick-like limbs, deep eyes like pools of dark ink.

London had been an ideal place to hide, and to drink. Every day, every night, alcohol absorbed and obsessed her, becoming her whole world. When the memories threatened to surface she drank some more to smother them, and if she ever approached sobriety, another bottle of cheap vodka swept her away again. Abandoned buildings and squats had provided places for her to sleep, and if in a drunken haze she lost her way, there were always the shadowy spaces beneath bridges or in rubbish-strewn alleyways. She was one woman in a city whose lifeblood was anonymity, and time and place lost all meaning. The moment of change when she’d found her family was a deep, wide chasm in her life. Sometimes she stood on the edge and tried to look back, but it was too far to see clearly. So she remained on the other side, wallowing in the guilt of survival and letting alcohol smother her across this new, barren land.

Seeing a member of the Trail had changed everything.

Rose had stumbled into the woman outside the Apollo Theatre one rainy, cold November evening. She’d been wandering through Soho searching for one of her familiar sleeping places, a deserted, boarded-up pub accessed through a broken back window. Many of the dispossessed knew that place. It stank of piss and booze, echoed with drug-fuelled mumblings and occasional cries of wretchedness, pleasure or pain. But that night Rose’s befuddled sense of direction had failed her, and she’d emerged into the bright lights and bustle of Shaftesbury Avenue.

The lights had been blinding. Disorientated, she’d turned to make her way back into the shadows. People had parted to let her by, protecting themselves with space and muttered words of distaste. All but this woman. Rose had walked right into her, and many times since she’d wondered whether it had been orchestrated. Had the woman recognised her in that instant and engineered their collision? Had she been looking for her?

The last time Rose had seen her, she’d been standing beside a Range Rover somewhere in London’s Docklands smiling broadly as a man told Rose to run.

As the heat of recognition grew quickly in Rose’s mind, she saw that it had already settled in the woman’s eyes. Grin, Rose thought, because that’s how she had thought of the woman since that first meeting, in nightmares and booze-fuelled fantasies of revenge. Grin, you’re Grin, and I’ll wipe that name from your face.

Grin was smartly dressed, short and thin, strong. Her auburn hair was cut in an attractive bob, her skin smooth and relatively unlined even though she was perhaps fifty years old. She looked nice, like anyone’s mother. But Rose knew her secret.

Grin had smiled and reached slowly, casually into her raincoat pocket.

Rose still had no idea how she had reacted so quickly. Her hand snapped out, fingers closing around the object in Grin’s hand, snatching, and then she ran. Losing herself in those rainswept streets had been easy, and the shouts and pursuit she’d expected never came.

The phone had worked for seven minutes before its connection was cancelled. In that time, she had hidden away and managed to scratch two numbers into her arm with a shard of broken glass.

Then she had ditched the phone in a trash-filled alley and fled. She’d somehow gathered herself, suffering a terrible couple of days of relative sobriety. She’d retrieved the necessary documentation and money she’d once hidden, at the time barely believing she would ever use it again. Italy was somewhere Adam had always wanted to visit with their kids, and it had seemed far enough away from London, remote enough, to lose herself once again.

That chance meeting in a city of millions had allowed the dormant seed of an idea to sprout. Revenge. And later, in the Italian heat, alcohol hiding her once more, she’d traced and retraced those healing scars on her forearm. Numbers that might lead to something else, like a code to discovery.

But even in Italy she had not been able to drag herself from the depths. She’d tried again and again, spending a day sobering up, but quickly following those brief moments of sick reality with long periods of even heavier drinking and deeper oblivion. She so wanted to find some way back. She dreamed of Grin’s face opening beneath her pounding fists, a heavy rock, a wielded knife. But even approaching reality allowed the true, awful memories to flood back in.

She had been unable to find the strength to handle that. Not until Holt.

The laptop chimed.

Rose poured a new mug of strong coffee and sat down at the small table. Lifting the mug to her lips, she paused and stared down at the screen.

One of the inboxes she monitored had received a new email. It was only the fifth time in three years that such a mail had been sent and received. It was still marked in bold. Unread.

‘They’ve chosen another one.’ She sat back for a moment, stunned, chilled even through the rush of warm coffee. She knew that if she opened this email and read it, and they discovered it had been seen and read, everything might fall apart. The Trail would abandon their systems and networks and build again from the ground up, and she would lose everything she’d been working on, and hoping for, since bringing herself back to the world.

But the content of this email was everything. She could open it, screen-grab it, and mark it as unread again in a matter of moments.

She did not hesitate for a second before risking it all.

Chapter Three
fifty minutes

Don’t call the police, or your wife and children will be executed.

Chris stood motionless for a while, leaning against the sink and staring across the kitchen at the pinboard beside the fridge. There were photos on there, tickets for a show they were going to see in a few weeks, a couple of forms to fill out for a trip Gemma was going on with Scouts. Some discount coupons for the local cinema. A few of Terri’s hair bobbles tied together.

Had the man really said that?

Chris closed his eyes and the world swam. He remembered the words coming from the man’s mouth – how they’d sounded, the shape of his lips, the dreadful meaning – yet he still doubted.

He took in a few deep breaths and smelled the coffee. His coffee, that the intruder had brewed.

He took the phone from his pocket and placed it on the worktop. As he stared at it, it rang.

Grabbing the phone, dropping it, watching it hit the floor and break, case going one way and phone the other, Chris let out a hopeless cry. He went to his knees and picked it up – still ringing, not broken – and stroked the screen to unlock.

That voice again, cool and calm and inviting no discussion. ‘Fifty minutes. Be ready.’ Chris stood again, holding the phone in both hands. Fifty minutes. Be ready. Fifty minutes until what?

The back door was closed now, but he could still see the bloody smear drying on the jamb.

Everything but his family suddenly felt so distant. His work, their friends, his hobbies, all so far away from what was happening here and now. This was so surreal that his mind had picked him up and shifted him back a pace, making acceptance of the unbelievable situation easier. He’d felt something like this before. When his father had died three years earlier, there had been none of the disbelief and hysteria he’d been prepared for all his life. A distance had fallen around him, allowing him to cope with the situation and only starting to lift as grief eroded it away. It was a defence mechanism of sorts – perhaps purely natural, or maybe engineered by modern society and family needs – and for a while he’d felt an incredible guilt. But then his mother had told him that everyone deals with bereavement and grief in a very different way, and unnecessary guilt had no place in his heart. He’d loved her more than ever for that. He still did.

He dreaded the idea of her having to grieve again.

Chris looked down at his phone. Don’t call the police or your wife and children will be executed. The words hung in the air around him as if taking on substance. Everywhere he looked he heard them. He stared at the screen display, thinking, trying to work through the situation. Clicking on the timer, he set it at forty-eight minutes and pressed start.

Several minutes had passed since the man left. Standing in the kitchen, uncertain, he edged towards the back door, lifting the wooden blind aside to look out into the back garden. Maybe he should follow. Or call the police. That was his natural instinct, anyone’s first instinct when something terrible like this happened. And how would they know? He should call them, tell them about the intruder and his missing family, and by the time they arrived …

He looked at the time on his phone. Forty-four minutes and counting.

Something moved in the garden. Chris squinted and looked again, scanning left to right across the well-maintained lawn, colourful borders, and the kids’ stuff scattered here and there. Megs loved to play in the inflatable pool when it was warm enough. She said she wanted to swim the Atlantic when she was older.

‘Shit,’ he whispered, starting to shake. Fear gripped him. Terror at what was happening to his family, and confusion about why.

Movement again, and this time he saw the cigarette smoke rising from beyond the garden’s rear hedge before it dispersed to the breeze. There was a narrow, private path behind there serving the several houses that shared this side of their street, and no reason at all for anyone to be standing there.

Placing his hand on the door handle he pushed it down, slowly, and opened the door.

A pale shape appeared behind the garden gate. Chris couldn’t see much from this far away, and the gaps between the gate’s slatted wood were only an inch across. But the smoking person was watching him.

He slammed the door again and retreated into the kitchen. ‘Fuck, fuck, this isn’t happening,’ he muttered, pacing back and forth. He was chilled from the sweaty running clothes he still wore. He should change, get warm, get ready for …

… for the countdown to zero? Was he really just going to wait here like the intruder had told him?

Bollocks to that.

He held the menu button on his phone and said, ‘Call Nick.’ The phone called his elder brother, ring tone buzzing again, again, until passing on to answer phone. Chris hung up, pressed again and said, ‘Call Angie.’ She had five kids, an irregular boyfriend, and debt up to her ears, but his youngest sister was always a rock amongst stormy seas. It rang three times before she answered.

‘Chris.’

‘Angie, it’s me, something’s happened, something awful, and I need you to—’

‘I can’t talk right now.’

‘What? Something’s happened to Terri and the kids and you have to do something for me, but quietly, carefully. I need you to call the police.’

Silence. He could hear Angie breathing.

‘Angie?’

‘I can’t talk right now.’ Her voice broke, just slightly. Then there was the sound of fumbling before the call was disconnected.

Chris stared at the phone again, trying to make sense of his sister’s words. Angie having a bad day? She had a lot of them, but she’d never been like that to him, ever. He’d pulled himself out of the kind of lives his siblings lived, made a career for himself, made money. But they were still all the same really. They still loved each other. ‘Angie,’ he said, and the image came to him of her sitting alone in her kitchen, staring at the phone and shaking, while a stranger stood beside her own back door.

Chris snorted, shook his head. Pressed the button again. ‘Call Jake.’ He’d know what to do. Chris’s best friend was a gruff bloke and could be a bit of a dick sometimes – his delightful ex-wife could attest to that – but he valued their friendship, and they were always there for each other. It was picked up after two rings.

‘Jake, thank God. You’ve got to help me, mate, I’m in some scary deep shit here.’

‘Get the fuck out of my life,’ Jake said, and then he hung up.

Chris blinked at his phone. He tried to retain Jake’s tone, the sound of his voice, but his words scorched away any ability to recall. Had he really just heard that from his best friend?

‘This is … ’ Chris started, and he laughed. Once, loud, an unbelieving outburst. But there was nothing at all to laugh at here. The bloody dab on the door was testament to that. ‘What do I do?’ Chris whispered. ‘Just what?’

Filling the kettle, turning it on, he was moving on auto-pilot as he tried to think things through. He glanced at his phone timer again. Less than thirty minutes to go.

He clicked on the Facebook app and entered his password. Account temporarily suspended.

‘What?’ he whispered. ‘You’re kidding.’

He exited Facebook and opened his email account. It usually went straight to his inbox, but instead it came up with his password entry. His heart fluttered. Didn’t matter, that happened sometimes, once every few weeks he had to enter it again. Security measures, he supposed.

But even as he tapped in his password he felt the weight of dread.

Password not recognised. Please enter again. Be aware that password is case sensitive.

He entered it again, carefully, but already knowing what would happen.

Forgotten password?

How the fuck? How could they have done this? Maybe it was him, typing with clumsy, scared fingers …

… But no. It wasn’t him at all.

The kettle boiled and Chris poured water into a mug with one hand. The other hovered over the phone, thumb stroking the ‘phone’ symbol, finger hovering over the 9.

It’s a joke. A prank. A scam, scumbags scaring me to try and get some cash out of me. Or a reality TV show. Or … Anything but what it seemed. It had to be. Because things like this didn’t happen in real life.

He tapped 9 … 9 …

The piercing electronic whistle was almost unbearable, screeching through the house from his phone, the small flatscreen TV on the kitchen worktop, and whining in from the living room where the big plasma TV had burst into life. Chris juggled the phone and almost dropped it, face screwed up against the sudden, unexpected sound. He pressed his right shoulder and left hand to his ears, still clasping the phone in his right hand and looking at the screen. Ready to hit the last 9 that would move events on apace and, perhaps, reveal more of what was really going on.

The keypad on his phone’s screen had been replaced by something else. Winded, stunned, he barely even noticed that the deafening sound had ceased.

He thought it was a photo, but then he saw Megs nuzzle her head against Terri’s leg, and Gemma stretched her tied legs and shuffled to change position.

‘Oh no … ’ he breathed. His throat was dry, voice hardly registering.

Terri was sitting on a bench in what looked to be the inside of a dirty van. The walls were rough and spotted with rust patches. A naked light flickered somewhere out of sight. His wife was tied to the bench with ropes around her legs and waist. She was blindfolded, and wearing loose jogging bottoms and a tee shirt. Megs was kneeling beside her, also blindfolded, sobbing softly. Gemma was tied up on the floor on Terri’s other side.

There was a dark stain across the right shoulder of Gemma’s school shirt. It seemed to match the patches on the walls, as if the truck also bled.

‘No,’ Chris said again, louder. ‘Terri. Terri! Girls?’ But they couldn’t hear.

The image changed quickly, turning as whoever held the camera or phone on the other end switched it around to face themselves. It was a woman. Fiftyish, attractive, but with cold eyes. She smiled broadly, but only with her mouth.

She held up a gun.

‘One 9 away from this,’ she said, waving it back and forth and pointing it out of sight at his blindfolded family. ‘Last chance. Next time we won’t warn you again.’

‘What do you want?’ Chris shouted. ‘Just tell me, I’ll do anything, let them go and—’

‘You’re probably ranting and raving a bit right now,’ the woman continued. She had a nice voice, calming, controlled. She could have been a school teacher. ‘I can’t hear you. But I know you can hear me. So calm down.’ She looked aside at her watch. ‘Twenty-three minutes. Be ready.’ She smiled again, then the picture flickered off. His phone went dead.

‘Ready for what?’ Chris shouted. He raised his hand to hurl the phone at the wall, but held back at the last instant. ‘For what?’ He looked around for cameras, microphones, evidence of things in his home being tampered with. His home. They’d come in here, invaded his space, taken away his family …

He couldn’t shake the image of his girls tied up like that. Megs crying and nestling against her mum. Gemma, bloodied, struggling and stretching, probably doing her best to release herself from her bindings. And Terri, sitting there looking far calmer than she must feel. At that moment he would have given absolutely anything to have them back safe and sound. His safety, his sanity, his life, without a moment’s hesitation he’d have handed them all over.

‘I don’t have much money,’ he said. ‘Twenty grand saved, a bit more, but I can’t just get it. It’ll take five working days. Is that what you want? It must be. Money.’ He frowned, thinking that through and really not understanding it at all. They lived in a nice house, but nothing special. Two cars, both over three years old. His architect’s firm was reasonably successful, but he was the sole employee, turnover around seventy grand each year. Nice, but nothing spectacular. Nothing that would attract the attention of the sort of people who could do this.

Take his family, threaten his siblings and friends. Carry guns. Use his own tech against him.

He put his phone screen-down on the kitchen worktop and paced the kitchen again. He was sweating again now, chilled from his long run. He’d always had something of a vivid imagination, and now and then he’d written ideas down with the intention of one day writing a book. Terri had been encouraging, but it had never gone much beyond a few pages of notes and several tentative first chapters. Once, out on a long run, he’d imagined the end of the world. Running the barely used public footpaths across the top of a local range of hills, he’d lost himself for a few miles daydreaming about what would happen if he got home from the run and everything had changed. His family, friends, neighbours, associates, all gone. Turn on the TV … white noise. Nothing on the radio. Leave home and everything is normal, return two hours later and find he’s the only man left alive.

Now, that had happened. His whole world had changed, and unless he did precisely as instructed, they would end it. He didn’t know what they wanted. But in less than twenty minutes he would find out.

Chris couldn’t keep still. He walked back and forth, looking down at his phone every few seconds and waiting for it to make a noise. If the Black Sabbath song ‘Paranoid’ rang out it would be Jake calling him back to offer help. A whistle would be an email. A double-ping would be a text, perhaps from one of his siblings if they had a chance to secretly get in touch, tell him they were with him, they were doing their best. He picked it up and turned it over, checking the screen anyway in case he hadn’t heard. But there were no messages, emails, or missed calls.

He didn’t want to call his elderly mother. Not after what Angie had said, and Jake. He didn’t want to know.

Landline, he thought. I could contact the police that way. But that would be stupid. Whatever their reasons for doing this, they’d planned it in detail. They’d have the landline covered. Bugged, perhaps, if what he saw in movies was true. It was far too risky.

He paused by the chopping board and leaned back against the kitchen units. Eighteen minutes.

He made himself a drink. Tea, lots of sugar. As a teenager he’d always laughed at his parents whenever their first reaction to a crisis was to make tea, but as he’d grown older he’d come to recognise its calming properties. It wasn’t anything chemical, he thought, nor was it the warmth. It was distraction. Waiting for the water to boil, stirring the tea bag, adding the milk, watching the tea darken, all these took time. But he couldn’t distract himself from this.

He glanced up and saw the knife block. Six knives, all of them sharp. Terri had spent over a hundred quid on them, and he’d expressed his doubt that they were worth the money. But they were good knives that had kept their keenness over time.

Without pausing to scare himself out of it, he grabbed a medium-sized knife and slipped it into the waist of his running trousers, dropping his sweaty shirt over the handle with one hand as he picked up his mug with the other.

He turned and breathed across the hot tea, steam filming his eyes and warming his skin. The knife was cold against his hip. And just what the fuck am I going to do with that? he thought, trying to imagine himself plunging it into someone’s stomach. He almost puked.

‘I’m ready,’ he said. ‘No need to hang about.’ The phone said fourteen minutes.

Slowly, he sipped at the hot tea and managed to convince himself that everything would be fine. If they’d planned to harm him or his family they’d have done so by now. They wanted something of him, though he couldn’t imagine what. He’d made no enemies in life that he could think of. He’d always been fair in business. He and Terri led a boringly normal life in many ways – loyal to each other, adoring of their children. He vented any need for excitement through his running, triathlons, mountain racing. There are worse mid-life crises, Terri said to him sometimes when he signed up for another extreme race.

Chris closed his eyes and breathed in the tea fumes, but found nothing approaching calmness. He felt like crying at the memory of seeing his family like that, taken somewhere unknown, bound and gagged. It had been a woman guarding them, but he couldn’t help imagining how vulnerable they were to the men involved in this, too. Terri in what she called her comfy clothing, unconsciously attractive. Gemma, awkward and pretty, just developing into womanhood. Little Megs.

He opened his eyes, furious, and swigged at his tea. On the fridge door facing him, held on by magnets, were several drawings by Megs, a few money-off coupons for their local supermarket, and a twenty-pound note. Gemma had been due to go to the cinema with her friends that evening.

He heard a knock from somewhere beyond the kitchen door.

Holding his breath, Chris put the mug down slowly, mouth slightly open, listening hard. The heating was off now, though the boiler was still warming the water. But he hadn’t recognised the sound.

It came once more, definitely an impact of some sort. His phone showed nothing so he turned it face-down again. Taking the knife from his belt and holding it down by his side, he walked through into the corridor beyond the kitchen door. Ahead of him the front door was still closed, and there was no sign of movement elsewhere.

Studio, he thought. To his right a shorter corridor led beneath the staircase to another door, beyond which their converted garage had become his business studio. It was a good size, with computer station, an old-fashioned drawing board, walls lined with pictures displaying his designs, and an informal area for clients with leather sofa and coffee machine. Nothing extravagant, but comfortable. And now there was someone there.

He thought about edging through the door, moving cautiously, carefully. But that’s what they expected of him.

And he was angry.

Gripping the knife hard by his side he surged forward, shoved the door open and stepped quickly into the studio.

Something tripped him, he fell, one hand out to break his fall, the other twisted painfully as the knife was stripped from his grasp. He struck the timber flooring and tried to roll. A weight bore down on him, trapping him on his side with one arm crushed beneath his body, the other pressed between him and the person attacking him.

Chris kicked and writhed. A hand clamped down hard across his mouth. Another held his own knife against his throat.

He strained his neck and looked up into the woman’s face. She looked hard, unflustered, and totally in control.

‘I’m here to help,’ she whispered. ‘If you want to live past the next twenty-four hours and see your family again, do everything I say.’ She sat up and slowly took her hand from his mouth.

‘Who … ?’ he asked.

‘I’m the one that got away. My name’s Rose.’

Chapter Four
just begun

She crept to the door into his studio and crouched beside it, peering out beneath the stairwell and into the hallway. Chris respected poise, economy of motion, litheness, but there was something else about the way this woman moved that disturbed him. Something inhuman. She moved like an animal, and like an animal she seemed ready to strike. She held the knife she’d taken from him as an extension of her arm, aimed forward, ready to slice and stab. Her movements were soundless, and he searched for her shadow. He was happy to find it.

‘What are you going to … ?’ he began, and she was back to him between blinks, hand pressed against his mouth once again, eyes wide, head shaking once. She didn’t need to speak. The threat was palpable, radiating from her in powerful waves, even though she made no hint that she wished to hurt him.

She went to the door again and crept out, until she could look both ways along the hallway – left to the kitchen, right towards the front door. Then she came back and crouched in the doorway. She wore black jeans, a casual jacket with bulging pockets, walking boots. Her dark hair was tied in a ponytail, businesslike, impossible to tell its length. She might have been attractive, once.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘I told you. Rose.’

‘But what … ?’

‘Shut up.’ She held up one hand, head cocked, not looking at him. ‘There’s no time now.’

Chris glanced at his phone. The timer said nine minutes.

‘Just listen,’ she said. ‘I’m here to help. I only found out they were going for you yesterday morning. But it was long enough to plan and prepare. They’ll be coming in to get you soon, and then we’ll be leaving. You understand?’

‘No,’ Chris said. ‘My wife. My girls.’

‘We’ll get to them.’ She tried to smile. It was a sickly expression.

‘Where are they?’ he asked.

‘Not sure.’ An economy of words, and they explained nothing.

‘Why are they doing this?’

‘You’re an easy target.’

He was shivering again. His clothing was soaked with sweat, his body now trying to cool down. ‘I need to go to the police.’

‘No!’ she said, looking back at him again. ‘You can’t even try to do that, or they’ll just kill your family and move on.’

‘You’re not one of them?’

She glared at him. ‘Are you stupid?’

‘No, not stupid. I’m normal. I’m just a normal person doing normal things, and now my family are—’

The front door opened. Chris heard the familiar sound of the handle depressing, the catch sliding, and then the sigh as the door’s draught-proofing seal broke. It was so recognisable that Chris muttered, ‘Terri?’ before the door slammed and heavy footsteps marched along the tiled hallway.

‘We’re early!’ a voice called. Chris recognised it as belonging to the man from earlier, the same man who’d threatened to have his wife and children executed if he called the police. ‘Sorry for the delay. Traffic’s terrible.’ The man chuckled to himself, completely confident and in command.

Chris frowned at Rose and raised his hands, but she turned her back on him and flowed forwards, through the studio door, beneath the staircase and towards the hallway. But if you go that way you’ll end up— Chris thought, and then every thought was sliced off by what happened next.

‘So, where are you hiding?’ the man asked.

Chris saw him appear past Rose, framed through the doorway beneath the staircase. Rose stood from her crouch. The man’s eyes went wide and he reacted immediately, left arm coming up in a defensive gesture while his right hand delved into his jacket. But he had been too confident of Chris’s confusion and fear, too sure of himself.

The sound the knife made when it stuck in his neck was horrible. He seemed to growl, and blood bubbled at his throat, splashing the air and pattering down on the hall tiles. He took his hand from within his jacket and Rose knocked something aside—

—a gun, has he really got a gun?—

—sending it clattering out of sight.

Rose grabbed the man’s polo shirt collar with her left hand and held him steady as she tugged with her right hand, once, twice, hefty jerks of her arm and shoulder pulling the knife out through his throat. His eyes remained wide, tongue squirming in his mouth as he started to slump.

Rose staggered backwards into Chris’s studio, dragging the dying man with her. His blood was flowing. Not just dripping, but gushing from the dreadful wound, splashing on the floor and sending Rose slipping, shoving the man aside as she fell onto her back. Even as she hit the floor she hardly made a noise, but was up again in a second, kneeling on the man’s back and grabbing him by the hair, pulling, his head moving back much too far as the wound gaped and he bled out.

Chris closed his eyes, but the sight could not be unseen.

‘Don’t faint,’ she said.

The man was still making wet, coughing noises, feet scraping slowly at the floor as he tried to propel himself out of his killer’s grasp.

Chris turned away and stared at his drawing desk. There were plans of a new house sitting there right now, his client’s list of suggested amendments pinned above it. The client was a sixty-year-old man, someone who’d seen the world and made good money, and who now was settling down for retirement with his gorgeous forty-something wife. A good man. Great stories. I wonder if he’s ever seen anything like this, Chris thought, and then he realised that Rose was hissing at him.

‘Now, for fuck’s sake! We don’t have long!’

‘What?’ He turned, propping himself on his desk so that he didn’t slump to the floor. There was so much blood. Could there really be so much inside a human body? He’d bought that rug with Terri on holiday in Egypt, and now it was ruined.

‘I said go through there.’ She nodded through the door at the hallway, where blood was spattered on the floor and sprayed in one artful arc across the apple-white wall. ‘Stand facing the front door. When they come in, just wait there and let them come to you.’

‘No,’ Chris said, shaking his head. ‘I can’t just stand there and let them attack me.’

‘They’re not going to attack you! They want to take you. Do as I say or I’m out of here now, and I’ll leave you with this.’ She stood and kicked the corpse’s head at her feet. It moved too loosely on the neck, and Chris had a crazy, shocking image of it rolling across the floor, grinning up at him as the mouth gasped for air.

‘Okay,’ he said. He didn’t know who she was, why she’d arrived, how she’d even got in without them seeing. But right then, he didn’t want her to go. Not because he thought she could protect him, but because she had answers. She knew what was going on. ‘But my family … ’ He nodded down at the body.

‘What’s started can’t be stopped,’ she said. She seemed excited, pumped, displaying emotion for the first time. ‘No going back now, Chris.’

‘You know my name.’

She rolled her eyes and shoved him towards the door into the hall. But not too hard. It would have been easy to slip on so much blood.

He could smell it as he walked, a rich, warm odour. His feet splashed in it. Pausing at the door, he thought about removing his running shoes to prevent walking blood through the house. But he giggled instead, an hysterical outburst that burned at his eyes and filled his throat. He reached for the door frame, and even before Rose whispered from behind him he was composing himself, taking deep breaths through his mouth.

‘Hurry!’ She was closer than he thought, following him silently. He could almost feel her breath on the back of his neck. She can help me, he thought, but at the same time he realised that helping was not part of her agenda. She was here for something else.

Chris stepped into the hallway and turned to look along at the front door, and there were already shadows moving beyond the frosted glass.

‘One step back,’ Rose said. ‘And don’t look at me. I’m not here. I’m a shadow. Got it?’

He nodded, mouth suddenly too dry to speak.

‘If you give me away, we’re both dead. And then your family—’

‘I get it!’ he said. From the corner of his eye he saw Rose relax beneath the staircase, almost melting into the shadows there. She was motionless and silent. She’s not there, he thought, taking in deep breaths once again. The dead guy’s not there. I’m here on my own, just waiting.

For what, he was about to find out.

The front door opened. A man entered, and Chris recognised him from the car he’d seen parked along the street. He was tall, heavily built, the sort of man Terri might call a ‘honey’ while smiling at Chris and squeezing his hand. His sweet wife, always reassuring him that he was the one and only. He carried an Adidas kit bag slung over one shoulder.

A woman crowded in behind him. Black, much shorter, thin, wearing heavy-framed glasses and a casual sports jacket that might have cost a week’s income from Chris’s company, she was laughing as if at a joke. They seemed so casual with what they were doing. So confident.

They both saw Chris standing there and barely paid him any attention. Honey shrugged the bag from his shoulder. Glasses shut the door behind her, still chuckling and shaking her head. The joke must have been really funny.

‘Where’s Ed?’ Honey asked. When he looked at Chris his smile remained, but his voice was ice-cold, his manner suddenly threatening. He could break Chris across one knee while still smoothing his hair with his other hand.

But Rose? Chris wasn’t sure about her.

‘Making coffee,’ Chris said, pleased at his answer. Honey nodded, and Glasses rolled her eyes. It seemed Chris wasn’t the only one with a caffeine habit.

Honey dropped the bag and kicked it along the hall. ‘Right, there’s stuff in there you need to … ’ His voice trailed off. He’d watched the bag sliding, looked beyond it, and seen the dark spatters of blood speckling the tiles by Chris’s feet.

The sudden silence was heavy and loaded, and behind him Glasses was already tugging something bulky from her jacket.

‘He says do you want sugar?’ Chris said, and Honey looked up at him, frowning.

‘Huh?’

Rose flowed from the shadows beneath the stairs, shouldering Chris against the wall and throwing the bloodied knife underarm. It struck Honey in the chest. He grunted, swiping at the knife with his right hand. The blade dropped and clattered to the floor, and a bloom of blood spread across his shirt.

‘You,’ Honey said. Behind him, Glasses raised the object she’d pulled from her jacket.

Rose shot her once in the face. The glass behind her shattered and she fell against the door, her spectacles sliding down her nose and resting on the ruin of her right cheek.

The gunshot was incredibly loud and made the second shot sound much more muffled. Honey staggered back a step, stood on Glasses’ hand where she was sprawled against the closed door, and then moved forward in a sudden lurch. There was a hole in his chest, another spot of blood rapidly growing close to where the knife had wounded him.

‘You!’ He shouted this time, and Chris barely heard. His hearing had been blasted away by the gunshots, and now a heavy, high whine seemed to ricochet inside his head.

Rose crouched and fired again, raising the gun up at a forty-five-degree angle and then falling to one side as Honey slouched on top of her. His outstretched hand clawed down Chris’s chest where he was pressed to the wall.

Chris saw the exit wounds on the man’s back, ragged tears in his jacket. He was dead when he hit the floor.

Rose pulled her leg from beneath the body and stood, pointing the gun back and forth between Glasses and Honey.

Chris was slowly shaking his head. It felt heavy, and when Rose spoke to him it was like hearing a voice underwater. Daddy smells of poo, Megs had said to him last time they went swimming, both of them dropping beneath the surface at the deep end and seeing if they could understand each other.

‘ … out of here now!’ Rose said from a distance. She stood on the dead man like he wasn’t a human being at all – and shoved Chris back against the wall. ‘Really. Now! We have minutes, so we’ve got to go!’

‘You killed them,’ Chris said. His voice was incredibly loud inside his own head, as if he was the only real thing here. Perhaps that was it. Rose and the corpses were only nightmares.

She grabbed the Adidas bag at Chris’s feet and pushed it against his chest, then knelt and started going through the dead man’s pockets.

Chris watched. He couldn’t think of anything else to do. She was efficient and quick, and in moments she had a set of car keys and a phone in her left hand. In her right, she still carried her gun.

‘Will there be more of them?’ he asked, looking at the damaged, blood-spattered front door.

‘Plenty,’ she said. And then she grinned with delight. ‘I’ve only just begun.’

Chapter Five
three

I’ve only just begun. But in truth she had started all this years ago.

She’d spent a long time imagining what it would be like to exact some sort of revenge. At night, in between nightmares about her family’s final moments, and during the day when she strove to better prepare herself for what was to come, she would dream: pointing a gun and pulling the trigger; running them down with a car; tying them up and setting them on fire; slashing out with a knife. So many ways to kill those of the Trail who had killed everything about her, and sometimes she lost herself for hours picturing their deaths.

And they had recognised her. That had been a surprise, although she supposed that they were always looking for her.

But in truth it was nothing like she’d expected. She had felt not one sliver of regret when she killed, but neither had she felt a flush of satisfaction, nor the much sought-after contentment she had been expecting. Their blood still stained her hands and clothing, but it was as if she had watched someone else do the killing.

She put her hand to her mouth and tasted blood.

‘Are there more outside?’ That Chris Sheen wasn’t a gibbering wreck was something she could only be grateful for. But perhaps his reaction was a skewed echo of her own. She didn’t feel shocked or even pleased, maybe because her mind might be shielding her from events.

She wished it wouldn’t. Now that her revenge had begun, she wanted to experience every joyous moment.

‘Not here, not right now,’ she said. ‘Shut up and follow me.’

‘But my family will—’

‘Shut up!’ She pressed her finger against his lips. He flinched from the stickiness of their blood. ‘Follow … me.’

She looked at the phone she’d taken from the first dead man. The home screen was a picture of two little children, and she stared at their faces, frozen, swallowed away into memory. Her own children had been that young, and would never be older. He has a family. He has kids. How someone like him could have been anything like her, Rose could not conceive. She shook her head to dislodge the confusion. It was useless to her, and she was determined to keep her mind in the moment. She’d spent too long living in the past, and the future she so desired was here and now. This was everything she had been waiting for.

Chris touched her shoulder. She blinked rapidly for a second or two, then nodded at him.

‘Quick,’ she said. ‘And quiet.’ She headed back into the study and crossed to the French doors. She’d come in that way, and it would be quieter to leave that way, too. She picked up the loaded backpack she’d left just inside the door, slung it over her shoulder, then rested her hand on the door handle.

Neighbours would have likely heard the gunshots, but most of them would have no idea what they were. A car backfiring, someone hammering, a TV turned up too loud; for people living in Cardiff, and especially in nice neighbourhoods like this, the first thought at such a sound would never be, Gun! That would change when the bodies were found.

But as she slipped from the doors and looked across the front garden, Rose realised that things might not be so simple. When she’d shot the woman, the glass in the front door had shattered. And now across the street there were several people gathered around a car, examining a hole in one of its side windows.

They’d still not immediately think of guns and bullets. Their minds wouldn’t work that way. But it meant that she and Chris didn’t have long.

He followed behind her, close and quiet. That was good. She needed him more than he needed her, but she’d never tell him that.

As they approached the open gates at the end of the short driveway, she pressed the button on the key fob. A little way along the street, a white BMW’s lights flashed twice.

A couple of the people examining the damaged car looked up. One of them smiled and raised his hand to Chris, then his expression fell a little when he saw Rose.

‘Morning!’ Rose said. ‘Lovely morning.’

‘Yes, lovely,’ the man said uncertainly.

‘Don’t look at him or say a word,’ she whispered. She led Chris along the pavement to the BMW, climbed into the driver’s seat, dropped the backpack in the passenger footwell, and watched him get in beside her. He still had the kit bag clasped to his chest. Taking the gun from her pocket, she placed it between her legs on the seat. Then she checked the phone again.

‘They’ve seen my front door,’ Chris said.

‘Doesn’t matter.’ She scrolled through the contacts list. There were only half a dozen names registered. She smiled when she saw the photos beside two names. And then she saw other faces, knew them, hated them all over again. ‘Here they are,’ she said.

‘Who?’

‘The Trail.’

‘What’s that?’

She glanced across at Chris, sitting confused and scared and still shocked numb beside her. He didn’t need to know, not yet. Not until they got away from here and were closing on their destination.

Her destination. Because from this moment forward, she was taking charge.

She started the car and pulled away, making a three-point turn so that they didn’t have to pass Chris’s neighbours. Heading off along his street, she saw parents starting to leave home with kids. The school run. She missed that. She missed everything. For a moment her mind drifted again, flitting back to memories she could do nothing to temper and which seemed to become richer over time. Sometimes they were more real than her reality.

Your memories will be your downfall, Holt had said to her in Italy. You let the past distract you so much that it blurs your present. But memories were all she had left, and she never tried too hard to lose them.

‘How many people have you killed?’ Chris asked.

‘Three.’ Their dying expressions already felt familiar.

The phone in the door pocket beside her trilled. She didn’t answer. As soon as it rang off she knew that the alarm would be raised. They’re starting to panic, she thought. I can feel that. I can sense it. And she could. She knew the Trail so well – had lived and breathed them for the past three years – that their thoughts were hers, their emotions and actions so tied into her existence that she might as well have been monitoring their individual heartbeats, their pulses.

They wouldn’t yet know she was here or who she was. But soon.

‘Where are we going? You need to let me out, now. Let me go.’ Chris’s voice shimmered with panic. ‘You leave, I won’t say anything. Got to get out!’ He tried the door handle, but she’d clicked on the central locking.

Rose checked ahead. They’d pulled onto a small commercial street with a few shops on both sides, and the road was wide, not too busy.

‘Stop the car!’ He grabbed for the steering wheel. Rose nodded across at Chris’s window, eyes going wide. When he looked, she launched a fast, accurate punch at his temple. His head jerked sideways and struck the window, and he emitted a long, low groan, slumping in his seat. His eyelids fluttered.

She’d learned the theory, but had never done that before.

Rose checked the mirrors and looked ahead. No one had seen. And if someone did notice him now, he was sleeping on his way to work, that was all.

She could imagine the heat of the Trail’s networks buzzing with consternation. The phone rang again.

This time she answered.

Chapter Six
please

Gemma had no idea why they hadn’t blindfolded her as well. Maybe they needed a witness to what was happening, needed one of them to see just how serious this woman was. Or perhaps they just assumed she’d be no trouble.

Right then, they were correct. She was so scared, she seriously doubted she could even stand.

‘Please,’ Megs said.

‘Will you shut her up?’ the woman muttered. She’d said the same thing a dozen times, tone of voice hardly changing, but Gemma felt the air charging. Danger hung heavy. Violence simmered.

‘Megs, you need to keep quiet,’ their mother said.

Gemma’s heart hammered, vision blurred. She had never been so terrified, and she wished she could hold her little sister and make her feel better. The comfort would go both ways. But Megs was tied in a kneeling position next to their mum’s right leg, and Gemma herself was also tied, next to her mother’s left leg and with thin, strong ropes holding her against the van’s wooden seat. Her mother was on the seat, the two of them on the floor, all so close but with little comfort to be had.

‘Please,’ Megs said. She must have said it a hundred times, so many that the word had lost meaning.

‘Come on, Megs,’ Gemma said again. ‘It’ll all be fine, it’s just a game or something, a reality TV show. We’ll be famous!’ It was difficult sounding so positive and in control when she was so scared, but Gemma had always been protective of her little sister.

The windows in the van’s rear doors were covered with plywood boards, and a small, naked bulb provided the only light inside. It swung on a loose wire, light and shadows dancing around the vehicle’s interior. The space revealed was battered and well-used, the walls scabbed with rust, floor dirty, scratches and dents scarring the exposed metal bodywork.

‘If you just untie her, she’ll calm down a bit,’ Gemma said.

‘Really?’ the woman asked, raising an eyebrow. While they were being taken from the house, Gemma had heard her called Vey. The strange name only added to Gemma’s fear. Who called anyone Vey?

Were they going to be killed?

‘Where’s my dad?’ That he wasn’t here with them terrified Gemma. He’d always said that she had a vivid imagination, and she imagined him arriving home from his run and finding the house empty, meeting someone left behind to kill him. Her dad, in his sweaty, tight running kit that she often took the mickey out of, opening the door and being met with a fist or a gun.

The unreality of things hit her. That helped.

‘You just keep still and quiet. Be a good little girl.’

Gemma couldn’t remember the last time she’d been called a little girl. She was fifteen in six weeks, and already almost as tall as her mum. She hadn’t been a little girl for a while. Vey doesn’t know how to talk to kids so doesn’t have any, she thought, and she filed that in her memory bank. She called it ‘the box’, and imagined it as a concertina file like the one Mum and Dad used to store their household bills and other stuff. She closed her eyes briefly to open it and slip in this new piece of information. She didn’t bother with alphabetical order, just filed it in one of the cardboard folds.

The van bumped gently over a series of sleeping policemen. We’re still in the town, Gemma thought. She’d seen a film once where someone had been kidnapped, thrown into a car boot, and then tracked where they were being taken by listening to noises from outside, counting turns, making a mental map of the route they were taking. It was ridiculous, and she’d lost her way after the first couple of turns. But the box was still mostly empty. Every scrap of stuff she put in there might help her.

And concentrating on that might distract her from the terror that threatened to smother her.

She had just stepped into the shower when they came. A shout from downstairs, a scream from Megs, and then the door to the bathroom had swung open and the tall man entered. ‘Get dressed,’ he’d said, not even glancing her up and down.

Through her shock, Gemma had plucked a bowl of pot pourri from the small shelf beside the bath and flung it at the man. He’d caught it casually and thrown it back at her, dried flowers and bulbs showering the bathroom. The bowl had smashed on the tiled wall, and one heavy shard sliced across her shoulder. One foot had tangled in the curtain and she’d tripped from the shower, reaching out for balance but failing, tearing the curtain from its rings, falling to the floor with a heavy thud that vented the air from her lungs and winded her.

And something had happened. Her panic had dispersed, drawn back by the feel of warm blood cooling on her skin as her shoulder wound bled. There were smears across the shower tiles. Dad’ll see that, she’d thought, already starting to think ahead.

‘Please let us go,’ she said, knowing they would not.

‘Please,’ Megs said.

Vey pressed her lips tightly together and sighed. She still held the gun. She’d shown it to the phone earlier, the screen too far away to see clearly. Gemma thought Vey had been talking to her dad, although what she’d said was confusing. Something about one 9 away, and twenty-three minutes.

She flexed her right shoulder a few times. Her school shirt had stuck to the dried blood, and rolling her shoulder opened the wound again.

And then Gemma saw a long nail on the van’s bare metal floor. It had rolled into a joint between segments, and was now covered with a scattering of dirty sawdust.

She looked away quickly, down at her feet curled under her. Her legs were going numb. Looking anywhere but at the nail, she flexed her muscles, trying to keep numbness at bay. The time might soon come when she’d have to move quickly.

Chapter Seven
the hills

He dreamed of his family. Their voices accompanied him up and out of unconsciousness, and they were with him when he opened his eyes. His wife was beside him, Megs and Gemma were in the back seat, bickering softly over who was winning their game of Legs. They often played it when they were travelling, counting pub sign legs on their own sides of the car. The Duke of York had two legs, the White Horse four, and so on. Gemma made up pub names like ‘The World’s Longest Millipede’ and ‘The Herd of Spiders’, but she always let Megs win in the end. He tried to turn to speak to Terri but there was something wrong with his head, his neck. He opened his mouth to speak, but the pain was too much. It throbbed and pulsed within him like a living thing, too big for the inside of his head, rolling and turning and pushing with its many legs, its horse’s spider’s millipede’s legs.

Where are we? he wanted to ask. What’s happening? But as he closed his eyes again, wishing away the pain, he remembered.

He looked. Hedgerows flashed by. The woman, Rose, sat in the driver’s seat, glancing over at him. Her expression betrayed nothing.

‘Sleep,’ she said. ‘Rest. You’ll need it.’

Where … he tried to mouth, but even moving his jaw sent spasms of pain through his skull. He closed his eyes. The car’s motion was lulling, and the dreams welcomed him again.

It seemed like moments before he woke again, but it must have been longer.

‘Nearly there,’ a voice said. He thought it was Terri, but then Rose tapped his arm. She had blood under her fingernails. ‘Here. Take these, and drink this. Need to have your wits about you. They’re close, so we haven’t got long.’

The truth crashed in again with a flood of sensory memories – the splash of spilled blood, the warm tang of gun smoke, the fear on his family’s faces in the back of that van. A freezing terror so deep inside that he could never hope to reach it.

He tried opening his eyes again, squinting at the liquid fire pouring in and swamping his mind. Each jolt and bump of the car on poorly maintained roads was amplified a thousand-fold and punched through his head. But pain was nothing. A transitory thing, barely remembered and beyond description. Several years ago he’d been on several pain management workshops when a twisted back had put him out of action for weeks. There, past a sheen of new-agey trappings, he’d learned a powerful truth – that pain was all in the mind.

He opened his eyes and sat up fully, groaning out loud against the hammering inside his skull.

‘You hit me.’

‘Sorry.’ Rose, the murderer, was driving with the gun nestled between her legs. He took the water bottle she offered, and then the small foil pack of pills. They were strong painkillers. He popped three from the pack, held them on his tongue, and took a swig from the bottle. It tasted strange, vaguely bitter. An electrolyte drink. He used them when he went on very long runs, replacing electrolytes in his body to balance those lost through excessive sweating. This was an endurance athlete’s drink, not a murderer’s.

He squinted at the bottle. It was full.

‘How long … ?’

‘Couple of hours. You were in and out, so I gave you a mild sedative. Needed time to drive, didn’t want you distracting me, jumping from the car, something stupid like that.’

‘My family,’ Chris said. The memory of what he’d seen of them on the phone screen hurt more than any physical pain could, and there was no way of ignoring an agony like that. He didn’t want to ignore it.

‘The best way you can serve them is by doing what I tell you.’

‘You sound just like them.’

‘I’m nothing like them!’ She did not shout, but still her voice was loud.

‘Where are we?’

‘Almost there.’

‘Almost where? Why can’t you answer me straight?’

Rose sighed and stared ahead, concentrating on driving.

Feeling sick and light-headed, Chris looked around, waiting for her to speak, hoping she would. There was no way he could force her to say anything. He could only hope that her promise of keeping him alive, and everything else she was doing, would help and not hinder him and his family. She knew what was going on, and the only way she’d tell him was if she wanted to. And how will that benefit her? he wondered. Because it was painfully obvious that everything she was doing was for herself.

They were in the mountains. Chris knew these places. The vista was wild, windswept, undulating, with still lakes hidden in deep valleys and sheer mountains looming over them. Streams carved glimmering routes down mountainsides. Grasses, ferns, heathers, and scrubby trees painted the landscape green and purple, and here and there forested areas huddled across mountainous foothills. Snow speckled the higher peaks. Sheer rock faces hung grey and forbidding, and even though sunlight touched them, the mountains remained cool and aloof. It was a mythical land where the true wildness of nature existed close to the surface, unhindered by considerations of civilisation. Even the road they followed was barely allowed here, twisting and turning through the rough terrain. Drystone walling lined the road on both sides, and here and there were lay-bys for parking, and rough tracks leading up into the hills.

The land was huge, the sky even larger. Humans were small here, stripped to the bare essentials of existence, the trappings of their lives made inconsequential by the scope and scale of where they were. Nature was in command.

Chris loved landscapes like this. He lived for the few times each year when he could get away for a weekend, with or without his family, and run and hike through the mountains. He was not a believer in anything divine, but being somewhere like this invoked the closest he ever felt to a spiritual experience. Once, running across the foothills of Ben Nevis, he had realised that he was an animal, just like any other. It was a sobering, thrilling experience. He had always remembered that time, and dwelling on it made him calm, and sane, and able to face the trivialities of business and human existence with renewed strength.

He thought he recognised this place, and a glimpse of a bilingual road sign confirmed his suspicions. They were heading into the Welsh mountains.

But nothing about this was right.

‘I’m just an architect,’ he said. ‘I live a good life. Nice, comfortable, uninspiring. Boring, some of my friends tell me. But I like my work, love doing sports with my girls. My wife and I get on well, still, after a long time together. We’ve got our differences, but who hasn’t? We’re happy.’ He nodded, blinking away tears. ‘This isn’t my world. I know stuff like this happens, and it scares me because of my girls. It terrifies me that people like them … and you … exist. I see it on the news sometimes, you know, “Young girl kidnapped, raped and murdered”, and sometimes the terror just makes everything seem so hopeless.’

‘That’s because you can’t protect your family,’ Rose said softly.

‘Yes. Yes! Terri and I do everything we can for our kids, but you can’t allow for evil.’

‘I’m not evil,’ she said. ‘My family was very much like yours.’

‘Was?’ Chris could hear something in her voice that betrayed that, perhaps, he was getting to her. Maybe she was starting to feel something. Even when she was tugging her knife through the remains of that man’s throat – an image he would never, ever be able to shake, try though he might – her face had barely changed.

‘They’re dead,’ Rose said. ‘The Trail killed them all. My husband and three children.’

‘No,’ Chris breathed, thinking of his own family trussed and blindfolded. ‘It was a woman in the van with them. She might have children of her own, how could she—’

Rose laughed, bitter and harsh. ‘Oh, don’t for a second think of them as human.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They’re not people. Not normal. They’re monsters. Now shut up, we’re almost there, and I need to listen.’ She powered down both front windows in the car and tilted her head.

‘For what?’

‘Helicopter. I think we’ve got the lead on them, but we’ll have to stop soon.’

‘I have no idea what you’re doing,’ Chris said. He sounded pathetic, pleading, but Rose did not react. Whatever she said about them – the Trail, whoever they were – seemed to apply to her as well.

‘Rucksack in the back. Take what’s useful from the bag they gave you, too.’

‘What’s—’

‘Shut the fuck up!’ she snapped, glaring at him for a second then looking ahead again.

Chris reached into the back seat and snagged the rucksack resting there. It was a good one, a forty-litre day sack that he might well have chosen for himself. Several access zips, a waterproof cover in the base, small hip pockets on the waist strap. A whistle and compass built into the shoulder straps. Hydration bladder. It was heavy, and he grunted as he lifted it over into his lap.

For a moment he considered slamming the bag against Rose. He could knock her head against the doorpost, grab the wheel, steer them off the road and into a stone wall. While she struggled he could grab the gun from between her knees and press it into her stomach, and then everything would change. Then he would be in charge, and all the answers he sought would come tumbling from her mouth.

Except … he wasn’t sure they would. She would only tell him what she wanted him to know, gun or no gun. She was like no one he knew – one of them, those people he knew existed but whom he had always hoped he would never have to meet. Violent, brutal, a sharp edge in a life he’d strived to make so smooth. And he had never touched a gun in his life.

She glanced at him, as if reading his mind. Then she frowned and leaned to the side, concentrating on the road but listening for something else.

‘They’re close,’ she said. ‘We don’t have long. I’ll be leaving you soon.’

‘And going where?’

‘Check the bag.’

‘Do you know where my family is?’

Rose shook her head.

‘You do. You know.’

‘I don’t know! But as long as you’re going along with things, they’ll be safe. They’ll stay alive.’ Rose was looking up and around as she drove, trying to spot the helicopter only she could hear.

‘Yours didn’t.’

‘That’s because I didn’t play ball.’

‘So what do I have to do?’ Chris asked. He opened the rucksack and looked inside, knocked sideways for a moment by finding everything so familiar. New running trousers, base layers, weatherproof jacket, survival kit, energy gels, GPS watch, penknife, some energy bars, freeze-dried food packets. And a phone. ‘What the hell … ?’

‘There,’ Rose said. ‘We don’t have long.’ She changed down a gear and pressed on the gas, powering them up the steep, winding road that headed for a low ridge between two monolithic peaks. Chris leaned forward and looked up and ahead of them, and after a few moments he saw the shadow of a helicopter moving against the mountains across the valley. It looked so small against that vast landscape, but he could tell it was larger than a private chopper. Military, perhaps.

‘Rose, please. Please help me. Tell me what’s going on.’

‘You’re going to get out of the car and start running. I’m going to lead them off. That’ll give you a head start.’

‘But why?’

‘Because they’ll be hunting you.’

‘What?’

‘This is a hunt. You’re the prey.’

He shook his head, trying to make sense of anything she was saying. That distance he’d felt back at the house – drawing him back from events, allowing him to react without going mad – suddenly seemed shakier than ever, and fear flooded in once more. His head still throbbed. A cool, sharp pain pulsed across his temple where Rose had hit him, and just thinking of that assault made him feel sick. He’d never been attacked like that before. He felt sick.

‘The Trail provide people for rich clients to hunt.’

‘What, like chase down? Catch?’

‘Kill.’

Chris shook his head. He couldn’t take it in. Kill?

‘It’s a trophy hunt,’ Rose went on. ‘Like with lions and elephant in Africa, except this is with people. You’re the target. There’ll be some fat rich fucks in that helicopter who’ve paid millions each to hunt and kill you. The Trail set it up, provide everything they need – training, weapons, backup and support. They ensure there’re no repercussions. Except I’ve changed their plans a little. This one was supposed to take place in Cardiff Bay and the docklands. The Trail would have steered you here and there, made sure you did all the right things. It’s set up, completely, and when they felt the time was right and everything was safe, they’d have engineered the kill. Cleared up the mess, sent everyone home. Big money.’

‘Big money. Money? You’re doing this for … ?’

‘I’m doing this because I escaped my hunt, and because of that the Trail murdered my family. And now I’m going to kill them. All of them. See? Understand?’

‘I can’t escape,’ Chris said softly.

‘No. But you can run. They know that, which is why they chose you. But by bringing you up here, into the wild, I’ve done you a favour. You have an advantage over the rich fat fucks now, and whatever the Trail had set up in Cardiff is useless to them. It’ll all last much longer.’

‘But my wife. My girls.’

‘Are safe while you’re still on the run.’

Chris closed his eyes and tried to take it all in. It was impossible to digest, too huge to contemplate. Too unbelievable.

‘It’s a joke,’ he said. He even managed a small laugh. ‘A wind-up. Reality TV, or something. Derren Brown’s hypnotised me.’

Rose said nothing. He saw the dried blood on her hands, remembered what she had done. That had all been real. Nothing like that could be faked, not without movie trickery. He’d been there to smell the blood, hear it hitting the ground, see the ragged mess of the man’s throat, see the impact of bullets.

‘It’s real,’ he muttered. Rose glanced across at him, then pointed.

‘There,’ she said. ‘By that spur of rock on the ridge. That’s where you get out. Hide for a bit, get ready. You’ll know when to head off.’

‘How?’

‘When they get there.’ She slammed on the brakes, turned to him. He thought perhaps she’d hand him the gun, but she didn’t. Maybe that would make things too easy for him.

‘You don’t give a shit about me,’ Chris said, and a glimmer of something passed across Rose’s face, an expression he could not identify. Then she smiled, and for the first time it seemed almost genuine.

‘There’s a phone in the rucksack. It has my number, only mine. I’ll do my best to look after you. But I’m going to be busy, and you have to look after yourself, too.’

He could hear the helicopter now, rapidly coming closer. He stared at Rose. She wasn’t about to change her mind. Nothing was going to change, and Chris knew that he had to take action.

‘What happens to my family if they kill me?’

‘Usually they’re let go if the hunt’s successful.’

‘Usually? How many times—’

‘Out,’ Rose said. She touched the gun.

‘What, or you’ll shoot me?’ But he could see that she was getting edgy now, hand resting on the gear stick, foot caressing the gas pedal. Itching to go.

Chris opened the door and stood from the car, hanging on to the metal for a moment as dizziness threatened to drop him. He slung the rucksack over one shoulder, and Rose threw the Adidas bag out at his feet. He was hoping she’d say something else to reassure him, or to help. But even before he could close the door the car skidded away, raking his legs with shards of gravel as it tailspun back onto the road and up towards the ridge. He saw her silhouette lean over and slam his door shut.

Chris stood there swaying in the midday sun, cooled by the mountain breeze. He had never felt so far away, and so alone.

The helicopter appeared to the north, higher up against one of the mountains, describing a gentle descent towards the ridge where the road disappeared. He couldn’t see the BMW right then, but he knew that Rose was accelerating up towards that ridge, too. They might just reach it at the same time. He wondered what would happen then.

Hunt, he thought. That’s ridiculous. That’s crazy.

Then the helicopter changed course, its shadow flitting and leaping down the mountain’s craggy side like some wild animal.

Coming right for him.

Chapter Eight
holt

Of course, he only wanted to fuck her.

She couldn’t imagine why any man would show interest in her otherwise. She was a physical mess, an alcoholic, dirty, her hair now long again and knotted, clothes unkempt and worn through in several places. When she did look up from her feet it was to search for the next drink. She only saw as far as the morning after, and never took much notice of how hard that would be. She was a failure, a wreck, a hollow woman with a dead family and nothing left to live for. Existing was now simply a habit.

There was before, a beautiful utopia of love and friendship, joy and pleasure, and a contented pride in everything her children did, every single day. And then there was after, a smoke- and booze-filled miasma of crippling, unbelievable grief. In between was the unbridgeable gap of her pursuit and their murder.

How could anyone be attracted to what she had become?

But he sat next to her at the small corner table all the same. He didn’t speak for a long time, just continued to drink from a smoked glass. He topped up from a bottle in his bag, and she liked that. His expression when he tipped the bottle against his glass made her smile. Smiling was an unfamiliar expression, and it made her facial muscles ache.

The bar had seen better days, but worse days too. Apart from the regular clientele – her, a grizzly bear-sized African man with one arm, a couple of old women who looked like vultures and must have been sisters – it sometimes entertained more adventurous tourists on their way back from a trek in the Italian mountains, or perhaps some local workers looking to expand their horizons across the area. She’d seen several fights here, one randy couple having a drunken, clumsy screw out by the basic bathroom, and four alleged Mafia men playing cards. The barman made his own wine, and offered it for sale only to people he knew would appreciate it. Rose drank at least a bottle each night. She supposed the joint had its charm.

‘Drink?’ he asked.

‘Single malt.’

‘But of course.’ He sounded French. That surprised her, though she wasn’t sure why. Maybe because she’d expect a Frenchman to have more class. He called to the barman and ordered her drink, and the same for himself. When the two glasses arrived he tipped his into hers and slid the glass in front of her.

‘My name’s Holt,’ he said.

‘Jane Doe.’

‘I thought I recognised you.’

She drank her double in one, then dribbled half back into her glass, keen to give the appearance of making it last. Stupid, really. He’d been watching her drink for half an hour, and she’d managed three in that time. He topped up his own glass from his bottle once more, and she paid close attention for the first time. And frowned. The fluid didn’t have that vaguely oil-like consistency of a spirit, not even vodka, and it was completely clear.

‘You’re drinking water?’

‘Please don’t tell anyone,’ Holt said. ‘My reputation won’t survive. And Celso will eject me from his bar.’

She snorted laughter and took another drink. She couldn’t tell whether it was really single malt, but she didn’t give a fuck. It burned on the way down. That was all that mattered.

He might have been one of them. They’d found her at last and he’d come out here to deliver the killer blow. She’d been expecting it, and fear of the Trail had no bearing on why she continued to hide. It was life she was trying to elude, not them. And right then she didn’t care if he was Trail. The difference between death and this excuse of an existence was negligible.

‘You mutter when you’re drunk,’ he said.

‘I do not.’

‘You might think you don’t, but you do. You ramble. You’re just too drunk to even notice, or remember when you eventually surface.’

‘I never surface. There’s nothing to surface to. I just drink, sleep, wake, repeat.’

‘Well, if you want to do anything about what happened, that’s the first thing we have to change.’

He tipped his glass back and drained his water, and Rose stared at him open-mouthed.

‘How much do I say?’ she whispered.

‘You talk to your dead family,’ Holt said.

Rose dropped her glass and sobbed, so violently that Holt must have thought she was having a fit or a stroke. She pressed her hands to her face and squeezed, trying to hold in all the memories of her dear dead loved ones, afraid that they’d be gone forever if she let them go.

Holt’s arm rested hesitantly around her shoulders. There was no pressure there, nothing other than a desire to comfort. No one had shown her such kindness since …

Since she had run. Escaped. Since she’d fled normality, left the world, and let herself be consumed by the stark underside of life. There was no kindness this far down.

She rested her head against his shoulder and started to cry. That was when he told her the rest about what she mumbled in her drunken stupors – the sorrow, the guilt, the fury.

Lowering his voice he whispered close to her ear, ‘You tell Adam how much you want to kill them all.’

Rose’s crying paused, a dammed flow burning as it readied to burst through again.

‘I can help,’ Holt said. ‘I know all about killing.’

Chapter Nine
trail

He was still wearing his running kit from that morning. It had dried during his journey here in the car, and he could smell the odour of his early run. When he’d sweated that out, everything had still been normal.

For a moment he considered waiting where he was, rucksack and bag at his feet while he waved his arms over his head, motioning the helicopter to land on the widened area of road. He’d talk with them. Negotiate. Offer them money, or whatever else they wanted, so long as they released his wife and the girls. They must have made a mistake, anyway, and picked on the wrong family. He’d swear silence.

Then he remembered the woman’s cold, calm smile in the van as she’d waved a gun towards his blindfolded loved ones. And he knew that Rose had left him with very little choice.

Shrugging on the rucksack, slinging the holdall over one shoulder, he jogged across the lay-by and leaped the ditch beside the road. It only took a couple of seconds to see where he should be headed; an outcropping a few hundred feet up the hillside, a worn gully leading up to it, stream splashing down over rocks and past scrubby trees. Most of the way he’d be hidden from sight from the helicopter, so long as he stayed low. He’d worn his black running tights and a black technical tee shirt that morning, so it could have been worse. On a road run it would have been hi-viz gear all the way.

As he ran, that sense of unreality gave him pause several times, and he stopped and snorted disbelief. But he could hear the helicopter growing closer, rotor sounds whup-whupping across the valley and echoing from the mountains.

Don’t stop, he thought. Run fast, keep low. Not far, then I can see what’s going on. Hide, watch, figure out how fucking mad Rose is. Was she in with them in some weird way? An agent provocateur whose job it was to guide and steer him, as she’d said they would have done to him in the city?

But there were those people she’d killed. Though he had never witnessed a death in real life – the only body he’d ever seen was his father’s laid out in the hospital’s chapel of rest – he knew for sure that such brutality, such violence, could not have been faked. And in her eyes and voice afterwards, the truth of her revenge.

She was mad, but right then he’d be mad to ignore everything she had told him. He had to assume it was the truth until he could prove otherwise.

He slid down into the gully, one hand out to keep balance. The ground here was covered with short, stumpy grass, with frequent tufts of a hardy purple heather and a more ragged low-level shrub. There was sheep shit everywhere. Clumps of wool clung to plants, and down in the gully he found the scattered remains of a dead animal – a stripped spine, ribs, leg bones, and a sad skull with scraps of skin still attached.

The stream was barely a trickle. In the wetter months this would be a torrent, but now it was easy to climb its course, moving from rock to bank and back again. He kept his head down, using his hands as well as his feet when the incline grew steeper. He didn’t worry about his feet getting wet, but knew he might suffer later. Wet socks often resulted in blisters.

Glancing up frequently, Chris made sure he was heading towards the rocky outcropping he’d noticed. He’d become quite proficient at judging distances across landscapes such as this, and knew that features could often appear much closer than they really were. He’d scouted this one well. The helicopter was much louder now, approaching the wider area of road where Rose had dropped him off.

He only hoped it could not land anywhere else. He hoped that they wanted a hunt, and not just a quick kill, otherwise they could simply shoot at him from the air. He hoped he was faster than them, fitter, better prepared for confronting the changeable elements these mountains could throw at the unwary.

Chris was also painfully aware that he knew nothing. This was ridiculous, unbelievable, and everything here was new.

Breathing hard now, he moved slowly and methodically, resisting the temptation to leap and run up the gully formed by the stream. He’d soon wear himself out that way. Walking uphill, pushing down on his knees when not using his hands for support, would be as quick as trying to run. Gravity might only be a theory, but it was an insistent one.

The stream ran down directly through the rock feature he was aiming for, finding its way amongst the jumble of massive boulders that might have been there for ten million years. As he approached them he paused, pressed low to the ground and turned on his side so that he could look back down the way he’d come. The road already seemed a surprising distance below him, and the helicopter was just appearing from behind a fold in the land. It was close to the road, stirring up a storm of dust and dried plants as it dipped lower.

He’d never been interested in aircraft, not even as a kid. And with two little girls there wasn’t much call for toy soldiers and Airfix models. But he reckoned this was similar to the helicopters used to ferry workmen back and forth to oil rigs in the North Sea, a passenger craft with enough room for a dozen people, as well as equipment and luggage. Still dwarfed by the landscape, it took up most of the road as it touched down.

Chris scrambled the last twenty feet out of the gully and into the jumble of rocks, ensuring that he was properly out of sight. He was sweating already. Some of that was fear. He panted hard, catching his breath, and made sure he had a clear view between rocks down to the road.

The helicopter’s rotors kept spinning, though the motor’s tone lowered.

He tracked the route of the road as best he could up towards the ridge, and there at the top … was that a car? He wasn’t sure. It was too far to see, and from this angle the sun shone into his eyes. But he hoped that was Rose up there, paused to see what was happening.

She could have stayed with him. Rose and her gun, her knowledge of what was going on, everything she knew about these people and what they wanted … she could have stayed and helped him.

But she was using him, a lump of meat as meaningless to her as he was to these rich hunters she’d told him about. Her only aim was revenge against the people who’d murdered her family. To the hunters he was quarry, to her he was bait. It amounted to the same thing.

‘Fucking hell,’ he whispered, shaking, shivers passing down his back and tingling his balls. He still couldn’t quite believe it. People would pay to hunt people? Though he’d always regarded himself as a long-term optimist, he was also aware that in a society of millions there were bad eggs, twisted people with perverted desires. Whether sick or evil, or occupying the wide spectrum in between, these were realities that he did his best to ignore. They were the people he hoped never to meet, and who he was happy leaving alone in their own skewed realities. But he’d always known that such bad eggs sometimes crossed over into the gentle masses. It was one of his greatest fears.

Today he had met them, and his world had changed. Rose was one. A bad egg, whatever the cause of her badness.

And now, these others. The helicopter was filled with them. Rich people who might present a respectable facade for all but one day of the year, and today they wanted Chris Sheen dead by their hand.

He dropped the bag and rucksack from his shoulders and opened the rucksack, rooting around for the phone he’d seen before. His hand delved deep, moving other objects aside until he found the familiar shape of a smartphone.

He unlocked the screen. There was no service. ‘Shit. Shit!’ He stood, making sure he was still hidden by the rocks, holding the phone up towards the sky as if willing contact. He turned it this way and that, never taking his eyes from the top left corner. No service.

Later. He would call the police later.

Slipping the phone into the small, zipped back pocket of his running trousers, he crouched down again and opened the holdall. It contained a new pair of road-running shoes, useless to him up here. A woollen sweater that would hold water and become too heavy. A pack of sandwiches past their sell-by date and speckled with mould. There were spare socks and underwear which he slipped into the rucksack, but most of what the Trail had packed for him was useless. Of course. If what Rose had told him was true, they’d expected a chase through the city. Their aim would have been to make the hunt more exciting, not to give him anything useful.

He shoved the Adidas bag down between two rocks.

His shivering persisted. It was a warm September day, but in these mountains there was always a cool breeze drifting across the shadowed slopes. And after his sudden burst of activity, hunkering down motionless meant he was rapidly cooling. Got to keep moving, he thought. If I have to start again quickly, got to keep warm. So as he watched the helicopter he stretched his legs, massaged his muscles, kept the blood flowing.

The aircraft’s big side door opened and people started to climb out. From this distance it was difficult to make out much detail. But Chris could see that they wore camouflage clothing, carried rucksacks, and he was quite certain that the objects slung on their shoulders were guns of some sort, not walking sticks.

His blood ran cold, stomach tingled. Like real hunters, he thought.

Two people exited, three, and the fourth tripped and fell from the aircraft, sprawling in the dust. The others stood around and watched, not one of them going to help. The fallen figure stood and brushed themselves down. A fifth person jumped down from the helicopter, and the five stood around, seemingly aimless. At an unseen signal they hurried to the roadside, then slipped down into the ditch. There they waited. Someone shouted at them from the helicopter, gesticulating from the shadowy interior. Don’t want them to be seen dressed like that, with guns. Too close to the road. But Chris realised he hadn’t seen a single vehicle since Rose had left him standing there, and he wondered just where they were. He had been running in Snowdonia several times, but he couldn’t immediately recognise any of these peaks. He guessed they were more remote, in places where casual holidaymakers might not visit.

Three of the five seemed to be overweight. Either that, or their clothing was thick and bulky. He couldn’t tell for sure, but he thought they were all men. One had already stripped off his camouflage jacket and tied it around his waist. He seemed to be wearing a black bandana around his head. A real Rambo character. One of the fitter-looking ones was tall and blond, standing apart from the others and shielding his eyes to stare up at the mountains.

Chris wished he had binoculars. He delved into the rucksack again, realising he hadn’t checked every pocket. But though he felt around inside, he didn’t find any.

It was as if Rose had given him not quite enough to survive, and on purpose.

She wants me to lead them on, survive just long enough for her to do her thing. He wished he didn’t think that, but he could not deny the logic of the idea. She wanted to kill the people she called the Trail; those who organised the hunt, not the hunters themselves. And to do so the hunt had to continue, and she had to draw them in. If he escaped too quickly and his family were killed, her own venture might be over.

Until this happened to some other poor bastard.

But he had his own reason to lead on the hunt and not escape. She knew that, and if what she had told him about her own murdered family was true, she knew it better than him. If he escaped, his family would die.

‘I need to stay alive. But I can’t escape.’ It was impossible. He could see no good ending to this, and he felt like curling up and crying it all away. Man up, Terri would have said, laughing ironically because over the past few years, when his love of the outdoors had led to new, more extreme adventures, he’d become what she sometimes called ‘gnarly’. You’re just a bit dangerous, she’d sometimes say to him, and he could tell that she liked that.

‘Harden the fuck up,’ he said.

He looked down the hillside again, and three of the five hunters had vanished. In the few seconds that he’d spent looking through the rucksack and feeling sorry for himself, they must have spread out and started up the mountainside, secreting themselves behind scattered rocks and clumps of vegetation. He squinted and scanned close to the road, but he could only see two. Rambo was advancing slowly up the slope, making no effort to hide. Close behind him came another man, fat and already struggling.

The helicopter started powering up. Something glinted from its interior, the sun glaring from glass, and Chris realised that they were looking for him. They must have spotted him as they were descending, and now one of the bastards from the Trail was trying to give the hunters a head start. He crouched down further, realising that the sudden movement was the worst thing he could have done.

He didn’t hear the shouted instructions, because they were too far away. But looking between rocks, he could see the shape in the helicopter pointing directly up at his position.

As the aircraft doors closed and it lifted away in a violent storm of dust, something smacked from a rock thirty feet to his left. It took him a moment to realise it had been a bullet.

Shouldering the rucksack, Chris hunkered down and crawled back into the rocks, keeping low, climbing one boulder and dropping behind another. Down the slope the helicopter soon rose into view against the mountain opposite. It looked so small and harmless, but he dreaded it coming towards him. It could act as spotter, hovering above him wherever he went and however fast he ran, and it would draw the five hunters towards him like moths to flame.

Maybe he could run faster than them, move across the terrain quicker. But with the helicopter above there was no escape.

That’s exactly what they want, he thought. Yet again the hopelessness of the situation smashed in. Any chance he had of saving his family involved becoming a trophy kill for one of those people behind him.

He wondered what it would feel like to be shot. Would there be pain? Would he know he was going to die? He wasn’t sure which he’d prefer – an injury that killed him slowly, awareness leaking away as darkness came. Or a sudden head shot, bringing death before he knew it.

The sound of the helicopter changed. He paused, crawled across a low slab of rock and risked a look across the valley. The aircraft was rising, following the line of the road back up towards the ridge where it disappeared. And the car he thought he’d seen up there – the BMW Rose had taken from the Trail people she had killed in his house – was gone.

More gunshots rang out. They whip-cracked across the valley, and though he listened hard, he did not hear any bullet impacts. They were already shooting blind, flushed with the initial excitement of the hunt.

He clipped the rucksack tight. In the hip pockets he found a handful of energy gels, and he tore one open and gulped down the sweet contents, placing the empty wrapper back in the pocket. Then he took a moment to examine the steep mountainside above him. If he climbed he would be slow, and an easy target if any of them happened to be a good shot. But if he moved along the slope to the south, he could just make out a slope of jumbled rocks and boulders that led up to a shoulder of the mountain. That’s where he would aim for. There would be cover there, and once up on the ridge he’d be able to make a better judgement about where he was and where he should go.

Heart thumping, feeling strong and yet terrified, Chris started to run.

Chapter Ten
vet

‘I was a vet,’ she said. ‘We lived near Chelmsford, nice little village, friendly community. We had good friends. Adam was a landscape gardener. The kids loved the countryside. I treated animals, put them down, made them better. It didn’t feel like I was making a difference, not in the scheme of things. But for every sad owner’s face I saw, there were a dozen happy ones. Sometimes it’s the pets that make a person’s life worthwhile. A little old lady with a scratchy cat, a young boy with his dog. You can tell a lot about people by their pets.’ She turned to Holt where he sat by her window, ever-present bottle of water in his hand. ‘You ever had any pets?’

‘No. But I am a vet.’

Rose snorted, then sniffed back a shuddering sob. Jesus fucking Christ on a bike, how she’d kill for a drink.

She’d pleaded with him at first, told him how the way to come down was by reducing her intake day by day. But Holt had shaken his head. He wasn’t the sort of man you argued with, or who did things by half. She’d only known him for three days but she recognised that already. Short, slight, bespectacled, hair greying, dark skin weathered and leathery and so lined she couldn’t tell wrinkles from scars, he projected the look of a bookworm, not a mercenary. But he had such stories.

She’d only heard a few of them so far, but he held the weight of many more. A red history, heavy with death.

That was in the Comoros, on an island called Anjouan. A man called Badak had already killed three families. He shot the men and women to death, then raped the children and hacked them to pieces with a machete. His men feared him as a demon. I tracked them for three days, shot two of his men from a distance. The others fled. A day later I caught Badak in a snare, tied him to a tree, sliced him from throat to cock, and stuck a lizard inside him. I filmed the whole thing and let the people see.

The stories were like a dark star within him, the black hole of his endless, terrible experiences drawing her with a dreadful gravity. They promised experience. He promised help. At last, she perceived a route out of the spiral she had descended into.

She saw a way to hit back.

‘Why are you helping me?’ she asked.

‘Am I helping you?’

Rose nodded. She was sweating in the steamy hotel room, shaking with alcohol withdrawal. Every time she closed her eyes she saw her family as she had found them. With a drink inside her, at least they were sometimes still alive.

But yes, he was helping her. For the first time in almost a year the future, however bleak, seemed further away than the next drink. She had cast aside initial doubts and suspicions, trying not to worry about just how she had bumped into him, how someone like him happened to find her. She’d even asked him. His response had been that, sometimes, people like them washed up on the same shores.

So she had assigned their meeting to coincidence. And he had made such promises.

‘At first I thought you just wanted to fuck me,’ she said.

‘Is that what most men want of you?’

‘Hah!’ She shivered, drew a hand over the sweat beading her brow. ‘Only if they’re desperate. And I’ve never let them. Not once.’

Holt shrugged and stared from the window. Rose couldn’t even remember the name of the little town where they had met, but here in Sorrento it was scorchingly hot, the streets bedlam, and the smells of delicious cooking and rank sewage wafted through the curtains with each breath of sea air. Her mouth watered and her stomach rolled. Four miles east of them people lived in cheap, chaotic housing, while in the harbour’s à la carte restaurants holidaymakers spent a local’s daily earnings on a plate of imported meat. A site of such contradictions seemed a perfect place to hide.

‘It’s been a long time since I had a cause,’ he said, turning to face her. He was very still when he spoke, only his mouth and eyes moving. Every movement was spare and necessary. ‘Sometimes my causes were convenient because they paid well. That’s the definition of soldier of fortune, I suppose. On occasion, just now and then, I believed in something. But what you tell me happened to you … ’ He sighed. ‘It’s the children. Not you. Not your husband. Don’t care what one adult does to another, because it’s the adults who run the world. We can make our own choices, mostly. But when the children are hurt, that’s when I become sad. And angry.’

The children, she thought. Less clouded by alcohol than she had been for a long time, yet shaken by the burning need she still felt for blessed oblivion, her memories were becoming richer by the hour. Molly, stabbed behind the ear and left sitting up as if still waiting for her mummy. Isaac, lying in his own blood. Alex, one little hand still clasped in his father’s and his face a mask of dried blood. There were flies on them. They’d been there for so long by the time she found them that time had moved on, and nature had moved in.

‘You have children?’ she asked.

Holt stared from the window, silent. It was as if she’d never asked the question at all. Maybe he’d had children and they were gone, but she could not ask him that. She knew how that would burn.

‘I’m ready to learn from you,’ she said. ‘Everything you know. All of it. And I’ll pay you, somehow, one day.’

Holt turned to her again and his face creased into a smile. He had a beautiful smile. ‘I have almost three million dollars in a bank account in the Seychelles.’

She raised her eyebrows.

Holt shrugged gently. ‘What’s a man like me to do with beaches and blue seas?’

‘How long will it take?’ Rose asked.

‘What?’

‘To train me?’

He laughed as if the very idea was faintly ridiculous. Then he looked at her, really looked at her for the first time, and she had never been scrutinised like that before. It was so thorough that he must have seen into her, to those imprinted memories that she had never been able to escape. She was naked beneath his glare, stripped of clothing and skin, flesh and bones. He saw to the heart of her, and then he seemed to relax in his chair a little, drinking some more water as he looked from the open window once more. He stared out at the view across the city rooftops to the sea beyond. He seemed hesitant.

‘Holt,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said softly, as if answering a silent question of his own. Then he turned. ‘Yes. I’ll tell you some things that will help. A few tricks. How to fire a gun, how to fight, how to watch. Some knife work, some fist work. It helps that you’re already away from the world. And you have violence in you already, Rose. I see where it simmers. I’d say you’re halfway there.’

Chapter Eleven
ambush

As soon as they dropped off the hunters, Rose knew that the Trail would come for her.

She drove as hard as she could up the mountain road, and when the helicopter passed overhead and continued down the valley, she slammed on the brakes. Gun nursed in her lap, she used the remote wing mirror control to track the aircraft’s progress. It was not slowing or turning. Of course not, not yet. It had its cargo of rich arseholes to disgorge first.

Part of her wished that she’d stayed with that poor bastard Chris Sheen. She could have run with him into the hills, and by nightfall she could have killed at least half of the hunters, if not more. But mere blood was no revenge, even if it was the blood of those who’d murder someone for nothing more than the sick thrill. And it wasn’t the hunters she wanted, but those who’d sent them on their way.

The ones in the helicopter, for a start.

She hoped that Adam would be proud of the action she was taking. He’d understand, she was certain of that, because they’d once had the conversation that many couples have after a glass or two of wine, when life is good: If anyone hurt you or the kids, I’d happily kill them, he’d said. They’d laughed about it, imagining all manner of action-hero scenarios, and although she hadn’t verbalised it at the time, she’d always thought the same. So yes, she believed that Adam would approve.

Her children, though? Rose doubted they’d even recognise her any more. That made her so terribly sad. It felt like a betrayal, but as a mother she knew that sometimes a parent had to do what was right for their children, however cruel or harsh it might seem.

‘I’m still a mother,’ she whispered, and no voices rose in dissent. ‘That’s why I’m doing this. I’m looking after my children.’

She drove on, alert to movement or the flicker of reflected sunlight. It was possible that the Trail had placed other members to ambush her as she escaped the scene of the drop-off. With a sniper hidden on a hillside close to the road in both directions, whichever way she went she’d have to pass them. Even an average shooter would be able to put a bullet through her windscreen.

But she hoped they’d not had enough time to arrange anything. The whole hunt for Chris had been set to take place in the city south of here, so her enforced change of location, and her killing of three of their members, must have caused them a massive headache. Perhaps they’d take her sudden appearance as an unexpected bonus. But they’d be out of sorts, confused, and fucking angry. And that’s just how she wanted them, because the angry made mistakes.

She scanned the wild hillsides as she powered up the winding road towards where it passed over the ridge between two mountains. She’d already scouted out the place where she’d wait for them, on one of her several trips up here over the past few months. It had always been her own intended hunting ground for them when the time was right, and with good reason. She’d been here on holiday with Adam, before they were married, when their romance was a dangerous, passionate, exciting adventure, rather than the comfortable friendship it had become. When the kids had come along they’d allowed themselves to turn into parents rather than lovers, although the bond of love was still strong. But when they’d holidayed here together their love had been untamed, as tempestuous and unpredictable as the landscape and climate.

They’d hiked for six days, wild camping, bathing in streams, sleeping in a small tent and making love under the stars, buying food from farms and small village shops, and by day two they’d both known that they would be with each other for the rest of their lives.

Adam had been right, at least.

Keeping one eye on her mirrors, Rose drove the car up towards the ridge. She’d already noted the lack of other traffic. That could simply be down to the remoteness of this place, or it could be that the Trail had set up roadblocks. They’d not want anyone happening across their weekend warriors tumbling from the helicopter in combat gear and bearing rifles.

The dead man’s phone on the seat beside her started to ring. She ignored it. She’d considered ditching it, but there seemed little point. They’d be able to track it easily, but she had no intention of hiding from them. Not yet, at least. It rang off and went to voicemail. She’d speak to them on her own terms and no one else’s.

The road opened up on the left into a gravelled parking bay, and she slammed on the brakes and skidded the car around ninety degrees. From that angle she could look back down the valley, and the car’s nose was also pointing at the road, ready to go at a moment’s notice.

This is it, she thought. I’m in the thick of it now. She almost laughed, because already she was more visible than Holt had told her to ever be. The Trail knew who she was, where she was and what she was driving. Holt would have snorted in disgust.

But Rose wasn’t a mercenary. She wasn’t even a killer, not like him. Not cold-blooded, someone happy to end a life for a paycheque. Holt had always known that, really, but he’d chosen to ignore it. He had helped prepare her hands for blood. She knew that somewhere in there, unspoken and not acknowledged by either of them, he’d fallen a little bit in love with her.

This moment was when everything could go wrong. She was exposed and vulnerable here, and though the Trail didn’t exactly have the upper hand, the field was more level than she would have preferred.

She liked being hidden away below the radar, unknown, unseen, the shadow of a ghost.

But this part was always going to be this way.

She could see the helicopter further down the valley, sitting on a wide parking bay beside the road. Clouds of dust were whipped up by the rotors, swirling, dancing and spreading in complex and beautiful patterns. Through the dust she could just see the clumsy figures of the hunters, disembarked and already moving off onto the landscape. She glanced at the outcropping of rocks where Chris should have hidden. Beyond and above was wild country – his sort of territory, a place he was well used to. She only hoped he didn’t fuck up and get himself shot too soon.

A flash of memory jarred her. They came like this sometimes, especially if her mind was active, the thought of grief and revenge hot.

She was sitting on a rock on a mountainside, the view laid out before her beyond breathtaking. Adam was beside her. They’d been sharing a flagon of farmhouse cider that they’d bought from a local farmer – potent and cutting, quite vile, but it gave them a warm buzz that drew them even closer together. There were no roads, no houses, nothing manmade in sight. They were intruders here, and if Rose concentrated she could distance herself completely, be part of the landscape and understand just how wild this place really was.

She blinked and the memory faded, leaving behind the taste of foul cider on her tongue.

‘I hope you’re as good as I think,’ she muttered. If Chris got himself shot straight away, everything was fucked. And now she had revealed to the Trail that she was still alive.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.