Relentless: A Novel

by Simon Kernick

  Fifteen yards short of ours, the brake lights came on.

  Oh no, no. Please, no.

  ‘Daddy, why aren’t we moving?’

  ‘Come on, Daddy. Come on, Daddy.’

  The Land Cruiser turned into our cul-de-sac, then disappeared from view. I knew then as much as I knew anything that its occupants were coming for me.

  I pulled onto the main road and accelerated away, the voices of my two children and Jack Calley – desperate, dying Jack Calley – reverberating around my head like distant, blurred echoes.

  2

  ‘You know, I’d prefer it if you called in advance, Tom,’ admonished Irene Tyler, my formidable mother-in-law.

  It was 3.35 p.m. and I was seven miles away from home and the occupants of the black Land Cruiser, and hopefully safe. At least for now.

  ‘I’m sorry, Irene. Something’s come up. An emergency.’

  I led the kids into the hallway of her grand Victorian semi-detached home that sat on a quiet, tree-lined street of equally grand homes, all of which boasted intricately painted, Swiss-style façades. It was the house where Kathy had grown up, and the type of place to which she’d always aspired to return.

  ‘What kind of emergency?’ she demanded, raising a sceptical eyebrow.

  Irene Tyler was an unnerving woman. A former secondary school headmistress, she had a dominating presence that was assisted by her powerful build and broad shoulders. I always felt that she would have made an excellent prison warder, or a trainer of gladiators had she been around in Ancient Rome. She wasn’t unattractive to look at for a woman of seventy, but you get the picture. She wasn’t someone you’d last long against toe to toe.

  But the kids liked her, and they ran up and hugged her now, chuckling delightedly as they clutched her ample form while I tried to think of a suitable excuse for being there. As a salesman of some twelve years’ standing, I was quite a proficient bullshitter, but a combination of my mother-in-law’s brooding presence and the fear that was coursing through me in waves made thinking up a plausible story next to impossible.

  ‘It’s just something with work,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to go in. One of our major clients is playing up. You know how it goes.’

  Although, of course, she didn’t, being a retired civil servant. However, this wasn’t an entirely unusual scenario for me. In the past few months Wesley O’Shea had experienced several entirely imagined client emergencies which had resulted in him calling his team leaders into work on a Saturday to help ‘brainstorm’ the problem. I was sure he only did it to make himself feel important.

  Irene didn’t look convinced. But then she’d never really trusted me. Like a lot of people, she thought there was something a bit dodgy about anyone who sold things for a living. Plus, the concept of people outside the retail trade and the emergency services working on a Saturday didn’t sit too easily with her. This time, however, she let it go, and asked where her daughter was.

  ‘She’s at work as well,’ I explained, putting down the overnight bag next to the ornate grandfather clock that dominated the entrance to the Tyler household. ‘Down at the university. She’s researching for a paper she’s writing.’

  I had to phone Kathy. Make sure she didn’t go home. I couldn’t remember what time she said she’d be finished, but thought it probably wouldn’t be yet.

  ‘So, when are you going to pick the children up?’

  ‘Can we stay for tea, Grandma?’ asked Chloe, pulling at her grandmother’s dress.

  ‘Course you can, darling,’ she said, smiling at last as she stroked Chloe’s long hair.

  ‘I don’t know what time either of us is going to get back. I’ve packed some things for them.’

  ‘So, you want them to stay the night?’

  ‘Yes. Please. I’ll pick them up first thing tomorrow.’

  ‘Why are you going to work on a Saturday afternoon, Daddy?’ asked Max.

  ‘I think you ought to tell your boss that you have commitments outside work too,’ said Irene in a tone that brooked no dissent.

  ‘It’s a one-off,’ I answered quickly, experiencing a sudden, unstoppable urge to get away from this interrogation and find out what the hell was going on with my life. I made a play of looking at my watch. ‘Listen, Irene, I’ve really got to make a move.’ There’s a Land Cruiser with blacked-out windows at my house. It contains men who want something from me, something they’re prepared to kill for, even though I have no idea what it is. ‘I’ve got a long night ahead, and I don’t want to be late.’

  She nodded, the glint of suspicion flickering in her dark eyes, then leaned down so she was level with Chloe and Max. ‘So, what shall we do, children? Do you want to go down to the river and feed the ducks before tea?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ they both cried.

  I could feel sweat running down my brow and I knew that Irene would have spotted it and drawn her own conclusions as to why it was there. I kissed the kids goodbye but they were already thinking about going to the river to feed the ducks and their reciprocation was perfunctory. I nodded to Irene and thanked her, conscious that I was avoiding her eye. Then I was out of her front door and down the pathway to the car.

  I jumped inside, drove to the end of Irene’s road so that I was out of sight, and speed-dialled Kathy’s number. The phone rang five times before going to message. I wasn’t entirely surprised she wasn’t answering. If she was working in the library she’d have the phone off, and I knew she didn’t like to be disturbed unless it was urgent. I didn’t leave a message but instead tried her office extension. I listened as it rang and rang before finally the voicemail came on.

  For a few seconds I wasn’t sure what to do. Then I put the car into gear and drove back in the direction of my house. I was sure now I wasn’t being paranoid, but I still wanted to check which house the Land Cruiser was parked outside, and whether it was, as I expected, my own.

  As I drove, I thought of Jack Calley. We’d known each other since almost the very beginning. He’d moved into our road in the late seventies when we were both eight years old, and had made his presence felt immediately. He was big for his age with a thick, ridiculously long mop of naturally blond curly hair that made him look a bit like Robert Plant in his Led Zeppelin days. His dad had died a few months earlier and they were moving down from East Anglia so that his mum could be nearer her own parents. My mum and dad took an instant dislike to him – I think it was probably the hair. And because they didn’t want me spending time with him, I inevitably did.

  We hit it off immediately. For a kid who’d just lost his father, he was remarkably full of life, maybe because he felt he always had something to prove. Jack was an adventurer, the kind who always wants to climb the highest tree, to perform the greatest dare. He was the first boy in the school to ride his bike down Sketty’s Gorge, a near vertical slope in our local woods at the bottom of which was a thick wall of stinging nettles. I only tried it once and got stung to pieces, but it remained Jack’s party piece; he was always doing it. It demonstrated his devil-may-care attitude. It made him exciting company. And never once did he fall off.

  We spent our whole childhood as friends and, although we drifted apart when he went off to university to study law and I got my first full-time job as a photocopier salesman, we renewed the friendship in our twenties, which was a good time to be hanging round with a man like Jack. He’d turned into a tall, handsome guy with plenty of charm, and a fair bit of money too. He tended to draw women to him, and because we were out together so much in the bars and clubs of central London and the City, they got drawn in my direction too. Sometimes, occasionally, I felt I was getting his cast-offs, but, like most men, I never let my dignity get in the way of sex. In those days I was in awe of Jack Calley a little, and appreciated the fact that I was his friend.

  Marriage, specifically mine to Kathy, had been the catalyst for our friendship to become more distant. Gradually, we saw less and less of each other. Jack found himself in a relationship with a high-fly
ing female lawyer, and Kathy fell pregnant with Chloe. It was a time of upheaval, and our meetings were reduced to once or twice a year, until eventually they fizzled out altogether. I always felt that this was more Jack’s doing than mine. I’d left a couple of phone messages for him that hadn’t been returned, and emails I’d sent, although answered enthusiastically with talk of getting together some time soon, never seemed to come to anything. As far as I could recall, we hadn’t even sent each other Christmas cards for the last couple of years.

  Half a mile short of home, I decided to break the law by calling Kathy’s mobile while driving. Again, there was no answer, something that was now beginning to worry me. I wanted desperately to talk to someone about what was going on, and she was the one person I could rely on to come up with either a rational explanation or at least a viable plan as to what to do next. Because if someone was after me, they were still going to be after me tomorrow, and the next day. And the day after that. Which meant I had to find out what the hell it was they wanted.

  It was just short of five to four when I turned into the estate. Usually when I make this turning it fills me with a deep sense of satisfaction because it means I’m almost home, at the end of a hard working day. The pleasant, well-kept 1960s houses with their neatly trimmed front lawns always seem so welcoming, an oasis of quiet amid the noise and traffic of suburban London. Today, though, I felt nothing but deep trepidation over what I might find here.

  But when I drove past my cul-de-sac without slowing and glanced across at it, I saw that the Land Cruiser with the blacked-out windows was no longer there. I continued round the bend at the bottom of the hill and went another couple of hundred yards before turning round. As I came back the other way, I looked over again. The Land Cruiser was definitely nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they’d found out I wasn’t there and had simply left. The Henderson boys opposite, two raucous tykes of seven and nine, were out on their driveway washing their father’s car. Martin Henderson once told me that he got them to do it by making the whole thing a game. One cleaned one side, one cleaned the other; whoever did the best job won the game. The beauty of it was that there was no prize for winning, so Martin got a spotlessly clean car for free. The normality of the scene was painful.

  I slowed down and stopped a few yards past the cul-de-sac entrance, parallel to the wall that ran alongside my back garden. I got out of the car, leaving its engine running, and walked over to a spot where I could see through the ivy-covered trellising at the top of the wall. From this position I had a view across my back garden and into the dining room at the back of the house. The dining-room door was open, and I could see the hallway and the front door beyond it.

  I stared for about thirty seconds. There was no movement. My house looked empty. I thought about going back inside and trying to find Jack’s number, but there didn’t seem much point. I knew he wouldn’t be answering his phone.

  A man in a cap and glasses crossed the hallway, moving purposefully, and disappeared into my study. He was dressed in black, and I thought he was wearing gloves too. He was only in my field of vision for a couple of seconds. I could almost have imagined it, but I knew I hadn’t.

  There was a man in black in my house.

  I waited, watching. Nothing moved. In the background I could hear my car’s engine ticking over. I felt like some sort of peeping tom, even though I was looking into my own house. I also felt the first flash of anger. Some bastard had broken into my home and was strolling about as if he owned the place.

  As I silently cursed him he appeared again, stopping in the hallway. I pushed the ivy out of my field of vision but still couldn’t get a good look at him. He was medium height and medium build, and was holding some of my files that he must have pulled out of the filing cabinet. There was nothing exciting in there, just bills and old tax returns, stuff like that. What the hell was this guy looking for?

  As I watched, he opened up one of the files, leafed through the contents and, apparently satisfied that there was nothing in there of any use, casually dropped it to the floor, spilling papers across the carpet, before starting on another one.

  ‘You bastard,’ I hissed, then made a decision.

  Jumping back in the car, I dialled 141 on the mobile so my number couldn’t be traced, then 999. When the operator came on I told him I wanted the police, and was put through to the police control room.

  ‘I’d like to report a burglary in progress,’ I told the woman at the other end, giving her the address. ‘The suspect’s armed with a knife and I think he may have attacked the occupant.’ I was trying to sound as alarmed as possible, something that was no great feat in the circumstances. ‘A woman lives there alone with young kids. I think they might be in there with him.’

  She seemed suitably concerned, which was the idea. I wanted the police there in five minutes, not two hours after the guy had left, which would probably have been the case if I hadn’t been bullshitting. When the woman asked for my name, I told her to hurry as I’d just heard a scream. Then I hung up and put the car into gear.

  It was time to find Kathy.

  3

  It was usually a twenty-five-minute drive to the university campus where my wife delivered her lectures on environmental politics (a subject in which I have to admit I have no interest whatsoever), but today I managed it in twenty. Traffic was quieter on the roads than normal, and I was hurrying. Halfway through the journey, I tried Kathy’s mobile for a third time. Still no answer. The same with the office extension. She’d now been non-contactable for forty minutes. Not unusual, but worrying given everything else that was happening. This time I left messages on both phones, telling her to call me as soon as possible. I made no attempt to tone down the urgency in my voice. I wanted to make sure she didn’t go home. I didn’t like to think what might happen if she ran into our uninvited guest, but I had a strong feeling he wouldn’t be very welcoming.

  The university campus was a set of bland 1960s redbrick buildings with oversized black roofs that looked like they didn’t fit properly, and which were dotted to one side of a much larger building that stretched from one end of the site to the other. On the other side of this main building was a large car parking area which, because today was Saturday, was only about a quarter full. I parked as close to the main entrance as I could and hurried inside.

  There was one woman manning the main reception desk but she was busy dealing with an enquiry by two Chinese students, and she completely ignored me. A bored-looking security guard of pensionable age sat on a chair beside the desk on duty in the reception foyer, supposedly to vet people who came into the building – a post created after the rape of one of the female students several years earlier. His vetting skills must have been on the blink, though, because he barely gave me a second look as I turned right and made my way along the corridor, past the lecture halls on my left and a café and Internet area on my right. It was in this building that most of the university’s lectures and tutorials took place, but it was relatively quiet today, with only a few students dotted about.

  I looked out of place, being at least a dozen years older than everyone else, but no-one challenged me as I made my way in the direction of the library and the politics department. I was just another irrelevant old guy. And yet I could have been anyone. I could have been the rapist from a couple of years ago, but no-one seemed to care. There’s a degree of truth in the maxim that people only notice what they want to notice; a lot of the time they simply ignore what’s going on around them, so absorbed are they in their own lives. I was beginning to wonder if I’d been like that too recently, and had therefore missed something important. Something that could have told me what was going on.

  As I cleared the café and Internet area, the number of people dwindled, and when I turned left and mounted a staircase to the first floor I found that I was on my own, my steady footfalls echoing on the linoleum. The corridor was completely silent, and it struck me that it would have been easy for a rapist to strike in a place like t
his, somewhere that initially felt safe because it was often alive with people, but which could just as easily turn into a place of darkened hallways with lines of doors beyond which anyone could lurk.

  I felt nervous. Not for myself – no-one knew I was here – but for Kathy, having to come and work here alone. She’d told me they’d installed CCTV cameras throughout the building and that they were constantly monitored by a security company, so there was no need to worry. But I knew that not even cameras stop the more foolish criminals, or the ones who can’t control their urges. If this were the case, Britain, which has more CCTV cameras than any other country in the world, would be a relatively safe and peaceful society. And it isn’t.

  At the end of the corridor was a set of double glass doors which marked the entrance to the university’s Department of Political Studies. They were shut, and beyond them I could neither see nor hear any signs of activity. The silence here was complete.

  I stopped and looked at my watch. It was 4.25 p.m. Beyond the glass was another corridor that led down to an arch-shaped external window at the back of the building. There were four doors on the left side of the corridor, only one on the right. Kathy’s was the second on the left, and I noticed it was closed, as were all but one of the other doors.

  I pushed the double doors and they opened. As I stepped through, they closed behind me with a loud bang that cracked across the silence like a gunshot. I flinched, resisting the urge to shout hello, and went over and tried Kathy’s door.

  It was locked, which was strange. I knew I hadn’t made a mistake. Her name was engraved across it on an expensive-looking stainless-steel nameplate: dr katherine c. meron ph.d. The C stood for Cynthia, a name she hated. It made me wonder why she’d had it included. I tried the door again, just to make sure. It remained locked.