Relentless: A Novel

by Simon Kernick

  He’d known for months by then that she’d wanted kids. It had come up more and more in their conversations. Personally he’d been far less sure. He loved her, there was never any doubt about that, but children . . . They were a huge tie, and with the job he did, he just hadn’t been sure he, or they, were ready for it. ‘Let’s leave it a while. Give it a year or two. There’s no hurry,’ he’d said, delaying things, knowing all the time that one day he was going to have to choose between starting a family and losing her.

  He drove over the old stone bridge that led into the village square and almost immediately spotted the maroon Hyundai. He made a note of the plate. It was Kathy Meron’s car. He carried on driving, up past the family butcher’s and the pub on the right-hand side, to the point where the road began to climb as it left the village. He could see from the map on the car’s satellite navigation system that this was the beginning of Ranger’s Hill, but instead of driving up it, he turned right into the village car park, where a loose group of middle-aged ramblers in shorts and hiking boots stood next to their cars, chatting loudly among themselves. Bolt decided to make the rest of the journey on foot. His approach would be less conspicuous that way.

  He stepped out of the car, put his mobile on to vibrate, and started walking, wondering what it was he was going to find.

  43

  I could hear my heart beating loudly in my chest, a rapid rat-tat rat-tat that would have had any self-respecting doctor writing out a prescription for beta blockers. Each minute now was a lifetime. A lifetime filled with fear, confusion and betrayal. My children were in terrible danger. My wife had been living a lie that seemed to grow larger and blacker with each new layer of treachery I uncovered. How could I not have seen it? Kathy was – or rather, she had been – a good person. A loving mother, a friend to the people she met, someone everyone seemed to like. More than they ever did me. But underneath it all, something had been terribly wrong. She had been at the library yesterday, I was convinced of that now. Her prints were on the filleting knife, and it would explain the presence of my gloves. Once again, I looked over at her, but she didn’t seem to notice my gaze and continued to stare at her hands.

  I looked at my watch. 9.20. It would all be over very soon, one way or another. If they let my kids go, then that would be enough for me. I know it sounds a weird thing to say, but at that moment in time it would almost have been a relief to have the gun put against my head and the whole thing ended. Before I found out any more grim facts about the way my life had been knocked totally and utterly off course. As long as I knew that my kids were OK.

  The door opened and Lench came back into the room. It was difficult to read his expression behind the mask, but something told me he was not pleased about something. He stopped on the other side of the table and looked across at Kathy.

  ‘You told me you never knew what was inside the deposit box,’ he said darkly.

  ‘That’s because I don’t,’ she answered, looking up. Her tone was one of righteous indignation.

  It didn’t work. ‘Our man’s recovered the contents of the box,’ Lench said, making no effort to hide his irritation. ‘It’s what we were after, but we think there may be more. And we think you know where they might be.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I think you’re lying to me, Mrs Meron.’ There was something chilling in his voice. An undercurrent of excitement, as if he was pleased with her defiance because it gave him an excuse to hurt her. He moved slowly around the table in her direction.

  She seemed to sense this, and when she spoke again, her defiance was faltering. ‘I’m not lying, I promise you. I was just looking after the key for Jack Calley.’

  ‘Listen, Kathy, if you’re hiding anything, just tell him, please.’ I suddenly felt hugely protective towards her, though God knows why. Not after everything that had happened.

  Lench stopped several feet from her. ‘I want to know if there are any copies.’

  ‘Copies of what? I don’t know what you’re talking about, I promise.’

  ‘Tell him, for God’s sake. He’ll get it out of you one way or another.’ I put an arm on her shoulder, gripping her tightly. ‘Please.’

  Lench turned my way, then looked back over his shoulder at Homer Simpson. ‘Take him outside,’ he said, motioning dismissively towards me.

  Homer Simpson moved away from his position against the wall and walked over to me. I looked imploringly at Kathy, but once again she didn’t meet my gaze. Homer grabbed me roughly by the arm and pushed the silencer against my back, pulling me in the direction of the door.

  ‘Kathy, for Christ’s sake, he’s got our children! Just tell him what he wants he know. What the fuck is wrong with you?’

  Something was burning deep inside me. Rage. Rage aimed at Lench, Kathy, the man in the crappy Homer Simpson mask pushing me around. The whole fucking world. As Homer pulled me again, I shoved him away, ignoring the fact that he had a gun in my back.

  ‘Don’t try anything, Meron,’ snapped Lench. ‘Like you say, we’ve got your little brats, and we’ll cut them to pieces if we have to.’ Then to Homer: ‘Get him out of here. If he fucks you about, kill him. We don’t need him any more, so if he wants to commit suicide, that’s up to him.’

  The rage continued to simmer, and as Homer half-led, half-hauled me out of the room I aimed one more comment at Lench. ‘If anything happens to my kids, they’ll hunt you down to the ends of the earth. You know that, don’t you? They don’t like child killers in this country.’

  But Lench simply turned his back on me as if I no longer mattered and reached towards Kathy with an immense gloved hand. Her dark eyes flashed with fear.

  The kitchen door was opened and I was pushed out into the hallway. ‘You want to be associated with child killers, do you?’ I said over my shoulder at Homer as he manhandled me into a sitting room which, like the kitchen, had windows facing out over both sides of the property. Like the kitchen, too, it was immaculately neat and tidy, with expensive leather furniture and a plasma TV on the wall, but utterly devoid of character.

  ‘I couldn’t give a fuck,’ Homer answered casually, kicking the door shut behind him, and I could tell immediately that he genuinely didn’t. My kids were nothing to him. Nor was my pain, or Kathy’s.

  It was obvious I’d always viewed the world and its people in too much of an optimistic light. I had always believed that people were, by and large, good at heart. But it was becoming clearer to me by the second that there were evil bastards out there who were devoid of any positive attributes at all, who lived by no rules and cared nothing for their fellow human beings. And this ignorant piece of dirt was one of them.

  The rage exploded within me then and my actions became utterly instinctive, no longer the slaves to conscious thought and the attendant fear that always comes with thinking. As Homer pushed me towards a low-slung black leather sofa that would have probably cost me a month’s wages, I swung round without warning, knocked his gun to one side with a contemptuous slap and, before he had a chance to react, smashed my forehead into the bridge of his nose. There was a crack as it broke. It sounded like a gunshot when you were as close as I was to it, and blood squirted out of his nostrils. He stumbled backwards like a drunk, eyes wide and unfocused, and banged his head against the skirting. But he still had hold of the gun, so I grabbed his wrist and yanked it upwards so that the silencer faced the ceiling, then ripped the mask from his face and butted him again, three times in rapid succession, every blow landing in roughly the spot where I’d done the initial damage. His head was already back against the skirting so he was unable to move, and thus took the full force of my attack. At the same time I punched him in the gut, then the balls. He groaned and his wrist went limp, giving me the chance to yank the gun from his grip by the silencer. I pointed the gun back in his direction, viewing the unmasked features for the first time. His face was pallid and pock-marked, belonging to an unattractive and now only semi-conscious young ma
n in his early twenties. It was stained and splattered with blood, and I kicked it hard as his body slipped down the wall to the thickly carpeted floor, cracking another bone.

  The whole attack had been carried out in near silence, but I wondered whether I’d been quiet enough. We were only a matter of a few yards and a couple of walls from where Lench had my wife.

  I looked down at the gun in my hand. It shook just a little. I looked down at Homer Simpson. He was out for the count. I asked myself a simple question: what the hell do I do now?

  And then I heard a shot ring out, the sound of glass smashing, and suddenly the question was answered for me.

  44

  When Bolt reached the top of the hill at the point where it flattened out, he stopped and listened but could hear nothing other than the natural sounds of the woods: leaves rustling, the singing of birds, the odd squawk of a pheasant. He knew he was in the right place. This was the top of Ranger’s Hill and Kathy Meron’s phone would be round here somewhere. There was, however, no sign of Kathy herself. Through the treeline he could see the outline of buildings thirty yards or so away, and he made his way towards them, moving away from the road and quietly from tree to tree in his approach.

  When he reached the edge of the trees, he found himself faced with a freshly mowed back garden belonging to a Norwegian-style wooden lodge. There didn’t seem to be anyone about. Nor were there any other buildings visible. Bolt looked at his watch. 9.20. The phone was still emitting a signal from somewhere very close to here. It didn’t necessarily mean that Kathy was also here. The phone might have been abandoned, but even so, he felt it must have been abandoned for a reason. To leave some sort of clue. Which meant he needed to check the house out.

  Coming out of the trees and keeping low, he crept slowly towards the nearest window, using a pampas bush and then a loveseat as cover. He knew he was going to look like a right idiot if he was spotted by the owner sneaking through his back garden, but the worry lasted as long as it took to cover four of the five yards to the window. When there was only that one yard remaining, Bolt froze. He could see a man dressed in a black balaclava standing inside. The man had a gun in his hand and it was obvious he was talking to someone out of sight. The gun arm was straight, the barrel pointed at a slightly downwards angle, the man’s demeanour perfectly calm.

  Bolt felt a rush of elation. His hunch had been right. He was already crouching back down again and reaching into his pocket for his mobile to summon help, when in one of those perverse twists of fate the man for some reason looked his way. Their eyes met, and even from behind the double-glazed glass of the windowpane Bolt recognized instantly that they belonged to a killer. Knowing that he was hopelessly exposed, he dived to one side as a shot rang out and glass cracked. The bullet whistled past his head and disappeared off into the trees. Bolt’s flight mechanism kicked in and he rolled over in the grass, jumped to his feet and ran for the safety of the trees. A second shot rang out, and this time it passed so close to his shoulder that he felt its draught. He jumped to one side and smashed bodily into the loveseat, careering over the top of it and landing on his belly half a yard from where the treeline began.

  He waited an interminably long second for a third shot to ring out, but when it did it was muffled and seemed to be fired from inside the house. He scrabbled round onto his back, flicked open the mobile and dialled 999.

  45

  Occasionally in life you’re faced with choices you know you should never have to make, and this was one of them. If I charged into the kitchen, gun in hand, I risked dying. I also risked putting Kathy’s life in further danger. If I was successful and killed Lench, I risked sentencing my children to death. If I stayed where I was, I risked all three. It was, of course, no choice. All these thoughts shot across my mind and were computed in the space of a second, and, before they’d had too much of a chance to slow me down, I ran out of the lounge, across the hallway and straight through the kitchen door, not knowing what the hell it was I was going to see in there.

  I yelled out some incoherent battle cry as I charged inside, waving the gun wildly, just as a second shot rang out. I saw immediately that Lench had his back to me and was firing out of the window. Kathy, meanwhile, was still in her seat but leaning away from him, her face a frozen mask of fear and confusion. As she saw me with the gun in my hand, she screamed, ‘Don’t do it! We need him!’

  I hesitated, not knowing what to do, and as I stood there, Lench swung round with surprising speed, one hand lashing out like a tentacle to grab Kathy by the shoulder. He pulled her towards him in a grip that looked unbreakable, and arced the gun round in my direction.

  The world became slow motion for me as I watched the barrel line up against my chest. My whole body felt weak and exhausted, a stark and terrible contrast to Lench’s casual, cat-like grace. If I fired, my children might die; so might my wife. If I didn’t, I knew I certainly would. I don’t know if it was reflexive or not – I like to think that it was – but I pulled the trigger anyway. Three times, one after the other, aiming above Kathy at Lench’s head and shoulders, surprised at how mild the kick on the gun was. The bullets made an aggressive hiss, like air escaping from a balloon, as they flew out of the gun, while the whole room seemed to reverberate with Lench’s third shot.

  Somehow, incredibly, it had been me who’d fired first, and by some wondrous quirk of fate at least one of my rounds had found its target. Lench swivelled on his feet, his boots squeaking on the tiled floor, and seemed to lose his footing, while his own bullet went wide, shattering one of the plates on the wall. He let go of Kathy, who was still screaming, then she ducked as I fired a fourth shot, which struck the window and immediately made a spider’s-web crack. Lench slipped over and landed on his side, still pointing the gun in my direction, and I was forced to dive into the kitchen units as he fired again.

  We were operating on instinct now. I had no idea how many bullets were still in my gun but I knew that in an enclosed space like this I had to keep shooting. I didn’t think about the fact that I was killing a fellow human being. I’d gone way beyond that now, and anyway, I didn’t want to kill him. I just wanted to make him helpless so that he’d have no option but to tell me where my children were.

  From my position on the floor I could see him under the kitchen table rolling onto his back to face me, the gun flashing silver in his gloved hand. I didn’t have time to look for Kathy. I vaguely remember seeing something moving very slowly along the floor out of the corner of my eye, then I took as good an aim as I could and fired.

  I hit him in the sole of his boot, making a penny-shaped hole that immediately started smoking. He shrieked out in pain, and pulled the trigger himself. There was a deafening explosion just above my head and the sound of wood splintering. My ears were ringing and I scrunched myself into a ball, trying to make myself as small a target as possible, at the same time unloading two more shots. But he was already moving, rolling away once again, then jumping unsteadily to his feet and hobbling towards the door. I fired at his legs, my bullets striking kitchen cupboards, the washing-machine window, the fridge door. Everything but him. Then, as he came round the edge of the table, we were suddenly only six feet apart. He leaned round to fire, his gun hand still remarkably steady, the barrel pointing directly into my eye, and in that moment I knew I was finished. For the first time in the last few minutes, I felt abject fear.

  Kathy screamed, her sound not as high-pitched as the noise Lench had made when I’d put a hole in his shoe, and I swung my own weapon round, taking aim with a terrified desperation.

  ‘Armed police! Drop your weapons!’

  The shout came from somewhere outside the kitchen door, and Lench hesitated for a split second, his head inclining slightly in the direction of the shout. Because of this, his shot missed me, and he lost his balance, falling to one knee. I lost my nerve then, the realization that I, a lowly software salesman, was involved in a gunfight with a man far stronger and more ruthless than me suddenly proving to
o much. I scrambled under the table in Kathy’s direction, knocking the heavy wooden chairs out of the way, waiting for the inevitable agony when Lench’s next bullet caught me between the shoulderblades.

  ‘Come out with your hands up now! You are surrounded!’

  The bullet never came. I grabbed hold of Kathy and pulled her under me in a protective gesture, holding her in a desperate, exhausted embrace.

  And then the kitchen window exploded.

  46

  As soon as he heard the shout ‘Armed police!’, Lench experienced a flash of panic for the first time in years. Even the sudden burst of resistance from Tom Meron which had left him in the embarrassed position of being wounded for the first time in his life had only temporarily fazed him. The injuries – a flesh wound in his knife arm, and the bullet in the foot – could be treated and would heal. He’d always known that Meron, although a spirited fighter, was an amateur with a shot that was lucky rather than proficient, and so the final outcome of their shoot-out had never been in doubt. Lench would have finished him, then killed the wife. She’d already told him what he needed to know, so his use for both of them had run out. The wife had known that as soon as she gave out her final piece of information she’d be dead, which was why she’d held back. Lench admired her for that. She had guts. But it made no difference. The plan had been to kill them, then kill Grellier, the man in the Homer Simpson mask he’d brought with him today, hoping that he would then be saddled with the blame for the Merons’ deaths. Grellier was new to the organization, a petty criminal with no ambition but the right kind of evil streak, and was therefore considered totally expendable. Unfortunately, this morning he’d proved exactly why he was totally expendable, allowing himself to be over-powered and disarmed by a frightened office worker.

  But everything had still been under control until the moment Lench heard the shouts of the police. His one great fear, that of incarceration without limit, rose up and stared him right in the face. He’d planned for this day, knowing that it was inevitable, so he immediately reverted to the set of procedures he’d drilled into himself for just this kind of eventuality. First, he let the gun clatter to the floor. It was no use to him now. Then he unclipped the wristband to which the jet knife was attached and let this too fall to the floor. It was cleaned and sterilized regularly, the last time only hours ago, so would no longer contain traces of the blood or body matter of any of his victims, thus making it useless to the police. The gloves went next. They would carry traces of gunshot residue, but he would deny they were his. Now he no longer carried any incriminating evidence. It was his word against the Merons. They had nothing on him. And within hours, his employer’s team of lawyers would be arriving at the police station to demand to know on what charges he was being held, and to badger the arresting officers into releasing him.