by Kate Johnson
Run Rabbit Run
Kate Johnson
Copyright © 2012 Kate Johnson
First published 2012 by Choc Lit Limited
Penrose House, Crawley Drive, Camberley, Surrey GU15 2AB, UK
www.choclitpublishing.com
The right of Kate Johnson to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the UK such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1P 9HE
A CIP catalogue record for this book is availablefrom the British Library
ISBN-978-1-906931-85-8
To everyone who’s emailed, Tweeted and Facebooked to ask what happened to Sophie next.
Contents
Title page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
About the Author
More Choc Lit
More from Choc Lit
Introducing Choc Lit
Prologue
Four in the morning and I was painting over the number plate of my boyfriend’s car with black nail varnish while I hid in a camera blindspot in a car park in Dover for the early crossing to Calais. A 3 turned to an 8, a P turned to an R. Job done, I sprayed the whole thing with hairspray to fool the cameras, and got back into the car to wait, hat pulled down low over my face.
In the ladies’ room on the ferry, I nabbed a shower cubicle and, wincing, cut off my long blonde ponytail. Masses of hair fell into the shower tray, clogging the drain. I poked it all down with my hands and rubbed some cheap brown dye into what was left hanging around my ears.
The result was not pretty.
The bar area of the ferry looked like a refugee camp, tired families and lone backpackers setting out their own little camps, marked with rucksacks and coats and unfeasibly large pushchairs. I glanced longingly at the bar, and had it not been for the long drive ahead of me I’d seriously have considered beer for breakfast.
Little cameras blinked everywhere. Trying not to be noticed, I found an ATM and withdrew everything in my bank account as Euros, then went out on deck, huddled into my coat, and mainlined black coffee.
An hour later I drove off the ferry and onto the wrong side of the road. French lorries beeping madly at me, I swung the Vectra back into the right-hand lane and followed signs towards Paris. I didn’t want to go to Paris, but it was a start.
Twelve hours after that, having stopped once for coffee and refuelling, eyes blurry with exhaustion, I saw a sign for a campsite in a small seaside town on the Riviera and pulled in. I drove up to one of the bright courier tents belonging to those big luxury camping companies and asked if they had any pitches available. They did. I paid in cash, registered with a fake name, and hauled the car around to a small plot with a big tent on it.
I had a pillow and sleeping bag, a handful of personal possessions, clothes and toiletries. The lot of it was dumped on the floor next to the camp bed, onto which I fell, exhausted and near tears.
You would not believe the trouble I’m in.
Chapter One
Phone calls in the night are rarely a good thing.
When Luke Sharpe’s phone rang in the invisible hours of the morning he knew it was one of two things. Either work, which meant some sort of crisis, or Sophie, which meant some sort of crisis.
He rolled over and glanced at the glowing screen. Work.
‘Sharpe,’ he yawned into the phone, feeling anything but.
‘What the hell is going on with your girlfriend?’ exploded a furious voice on the other end.
Luke blinked at the empty side of the bed. She hadn’t come over last night, and he’d fallen asleep waiting to hear from her.
He wasn’t concerned. Sophie was a walking magnet for trouble and she could generally take care of herself. ‘What’s she done now?’ he asked.
‘Shot an MI5 officer and disappeared, that’s what,’ said Sheila.
That got his attention. Sitting up in bed, Luke said, ‘She’s what?’
‘Shot Sir Theodore Chesshyre dead,’ said his boss. ‘Where is she?’
‘She–’ Luke blinked and tried to put this together. Sophie didn’t go around shooting people. Well, not often, anyway. And certainly not people she was trying to get a job from.
He pinched the bridge of his nose, but didn’t wake up. Not a dream, then. Excellent. ‘Why would she shoot Theodore Chesshyre?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine, Sharpe.’
‘She went to see him for a job interview.’
‘To which she apparently took her gun. And explain to me, Sharpe, why she still had the gun? I have it registered here as destroyed. Sunk in a Cornish harbour.’
Bugger. ‘Why would she take her gun to a job interview?’ he said vaguely. Truth was, Sophie owned two guns; the one Sheila was referring to and a little revolver Sophie had liberated from a dead enemy a few years ago. The thing hadn’t been registered to anyone, so she’d just kept it quiet as a back-up. If Sophie was going to shoot anyone on the QT, she’d have used that.
‘You tell me. While the gun is missing from the scene, ballistics have identified the bullet. It’s a nine millimeter Parabellum and matches perfectly to bullets previously fired from a SIG-Sauer P-239 registered to one Sophie Green. We keep records of that sort of thing,’ she added crisply, before he could say anything. ‘Unless someone created two SIG-Sauer P-239s with identical rifling on the barrel, I’d say the evidence is pretty incriminating. So, Sharpe, where is she?’
‘Not here,’ Luke said, because that was the only honest answer he could give his boss.
Although, given that he’d just noticed a scrabbling sound coming from the kitchen, he wasn’t entirely sure if that was true.
Quietly, he picked up his gun.
‘I didn’t ask if she was with you, I asked where she was.’
‘I honestly have no idea,’ Luke replied.
While his boss ranted on in his ear, he swung out of bed and padded into the living room, gun loose in his hand. Please God, don’t let her be stupid enough to hide under the coffee table.
The living room was dark, but it was also entirely empty of Sophie. After a year together, he was pretty attuned to her presence. Besides, Sophie was about as subtle as a house fire.
The phone on the kitchen counter wasn’t showing any new messages, but that wasn’t what caught his attention. What caught his attention was the cat travelling box on the floor beside it.
Unease churned in his gut. A small tabby paw shot out through the bars at the front of the box and a pitiful miaow escaped.
If she’d brought Tammy here it wasn’t going to be good news.
‘Look,’ he said into his phone, �
�this is the first I’ve heard of it. It’s three a.m. for God’s sake. Sophie’s not here, I wasn’t expecting to see her until tomorrow, I’m her boyfriend not her keeper, and I have as much idea about what’s going on as you do. Okay?’
There was a short silence. ‘If you’re keeping anything from me –’
‘I swear I’m not.’
Another silence. ‘Keep me informed,’ she said, and rang off.
Luke put his phone down, let Tammy out of her box and scooped her into his arms. Her tiny body vibrated with a huge purr as she snuggled against him.
‘You okay, Tam? Been here long?’
She wriggled again, so he put her down and went in search of cat food. Since Tammy was Sophie’s cat and lived with her, the best Luke had to offer was a tin of tuna.
This met with Tammy’s approval.
‘Pee on my floor and you’re going to your granny’s house,’ he warned her, then went to start up his computer. While he waited, he switched on the TV and keyed in BBC News 24. The newsreader was running some story about the American president and Luke waited for the story to change. Politics. Earthquake. Entertainment. Royal family. American president.
So the news wasn’t that big. Well, how could it be? 5 didn’t go around broadcasting their business, did they?
On the other hand, if they thought a national news campaign was the way to get information about Sophie, they’d blanket every network on TV.
It was a mistake. It had to be a mistake.
He checked online news agencies but turned up nothing. Ran a search on Sophie’s name in conjunction with Sir Theodore’s. Conspicuously nothing. Finally, he searched for Sophie alone, but apart from her Facebook account and a one-line profile from the bookshop where she worked, there was nothing.
He had a hack into police frequencies, but got nothing there, either.
MI5 clearly didn’t want to broadcast this, at least not just yet. Perhaps they didn’t consider Sophie to really be a suspect, or perhaps they assumed they could find her fast enough that a public appeal wasn’t necessary.
He scanned his email for any relevant messages. Nothing from Sophie – she wouldn’t be that stupid – and nothing from anyone she was likely to have confided in, either.
If this was all true, if she really was on the run, then Sophie would know MI5 would hit up her friends faster than she hit up a shoe sale.
Luke started making calls. Not to Sophie, because if she’d been daft enough to take her phone with her then the second it rang there’d be a trace on it. And if she hadn’t taken it with her, there would be no point calling.
He called Maria, who berated him for waking her in the middle of the night, but sharpened up when he told her why. She wasn’t with his department any more, but she was still Service and she was still Sophie’s friend. ‘I’ll see what I can find out,’ she promised, and ended the call.
Harvey answered, ‘Why are you calling me at three a.m.?’
‘Because you’re in America so it’s late evening, and because Sophie has gone off the deep end,’ Luke replied.
His American friend laughed. ‘Buddy, I hate to break it to you, but she did that years ago.’
Luke’s fist clenched. All right, so Harvey might be married to Sophie’s best friend, and he might have helped Sophie out of some dire situations, and he might be an official liaison from the CIA, but …
… but Harvey had kissed Sophie a couple of times, and in Luke’s mind there ought to be a law against anyone else kissing Sophie.
‘She’s in trouble,’ he said shortly. ‘Accused of murder. 5 are after her. It’s …’ he tried to think of the phrase Sophie used.
‘A whole mess of crap?’ Harvey guessed.
‘That’s the one. You heard anything?’
‘Not my playground, but I’ll see what I can find out.’ Harvey paused. ‘You okay?’
Luke snorted, and resorted to Sophie’s trick of Buffy references to lighten the mood. ‘Sophie’s in trouble. Must be Tuesday.’
‘It’s Friday for you, buddy.’
‘She can be in trouble on Fridays, too,’ Luke said, with feeling.
I slept right through until morning, woke up and staggered to the shower block to wash away the terror-sweat that had accumulated in my pores all day yesterday. Unfortunately, I also washed away some of the cheap dye. My wet hair looked dreadful: hacked and uneven, the colour of diarrhoea. I looked like I’d just fallen down a French toilet.
I sternly reminded myself that the goal of this exercise was not to look attractive. Rather it was the opposite. I wanted no one to notice me.
Dressing and popping in my coloured contact lenses, I made my way into town. There are people who wouldn’t consider coloured contact lenses to be the sort of emergency item one might pick up from one’s flat in a dash to pick up supplies when one is in terrible trouble. Those people wouldn’t include me.
In the bar next to the camp shop the TV was playing the news, in English. It was only a matter of time before the story broke.
I made one quick stop in town at the first phone shop I came to. Pay-as-you-go, no contract, the biggest hurdle being my inability to understand the French instructions. But I understood that it had GPS, which was pretty much all I needed right now.
Eventually I found what I needed: a slightly faded looking shop front with pictures of eighties’ hairstyles in the front. The peeling legend over the door simply read Sandrine Le Bon.
Deep breath, Sophie. You’ve done the hard part already.
Ever notice how it’s the bits after the hard part that make you want to cry?
I pushed open the door and half-a-dozen women looked me over. The radio was playing French pop. The air was thick with hairspray and perm solution. A woman with sky-high hair greeted me, ‘Bonjour, cherie.’
‘Parlez-vous Anglais?’ I asked, and she nodded.
‘’Ow can I ’elp you?’
I took off my baseball cap and Sandrine (for I assumed it was she) gasped. ‘Cherie!’
The other women, customers and staff, all turned to look at me and made Gallic noises of disgust.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I need something different. And can you dye it? I want dark hair.’
Sandrine did not like the idea of me with dark hair, and to be truthful neither did I, especially as I’d spent so much money on lightening it. Naturally, my hair is a sort of nondescript dark blonde but it’s sort of, shall we say, assisted by my local hairdresser every now and then.
But I was firm. It’s all right for Gwen Stefani to want a platinum-blonde life, but I didn’t need the attention. Sandrine dyed my hair dark brown and cut it into a Meg Ryan crop that looked okay when it had been blow-dried, but I knew would look a cow as soon as I walked out.
I paid her in cash and left, my once-long blonde hair short and brown, my blue eyes hidden behind brown contact lenses, my tall posture stooped. Just another tourist.
He called various colleagues, half of whom told him this was MI5’s problem, not 6’s, and half of whom seemed to have developed amnesia when it came to his girlfriend. Being that Sophie was 5′10″ in her bare feet, tended to wear ludicrously high heels and a lot of bright pink, wore a DD cup and had a mane of hair that would make a lion envious, coupled with her inability to keep her mouth shut for five consecutive minutes, he doubted anyone had really forgotten her.
He called the police, who stonewalled him. He called airline contacts to see if Sophie had been stupid enough to get herself on a passenger manifest. She hadn’t, but he hit gold with a cross-Channel ferry.
She’d gone to France in the very early hours of the morning. He didn’t bother asking why: it was the quickest and easiest way to leave the country without anyone asking questions, and from there she could drive anywhere. The description on the ferry booking matched his car but the registration number didn’t. He wondered how professionally she’d managed to alter it.
Luke glanced at the clock, and was surprised to see it was mid-morning. She could be any
where by now.
He was just about to log off the computer and attempt some sleep when something caught his eye. BUFFY NEWS: Joss Whedon to direct Stephanie Plum movie.
All right, so he’d hold his hand up to being a Buffy fan, but it was Sophie who was always going on about Stephanie Plum and – Sophie was always going on about Stephanie Plum and –
– Sophie was a Buffy fan and –
He opened the email as fast as he could and swore when his computer took its time.
‘Buffy creator Joss Whedon has signed up to direct every movie in the Stephanie Plum series. It’s a huge coup …’
The piece was nonsense, especially as Sophie had jabbered on excitedly about the movie already being made. Joss Whedon could barely buy a cup of coffee without Sophie hearing about it. She’d have told him if this was true.
Which meant …
He scanned the email for clues, and when he found one, he smiled.
‘If you do not wish to receive further emails, please call this number.’
A French mobile number. Halle-bleeding-lujah.
He memorised the number, deleted the email, and crossed to the front window. His car was indeed missing, but Sophie’s great lummox of a Defender was parked there instead.
‘Cheers, Soph,’ he muttered.
Across the road was a plain silver Ford. Inside it sat two people. Nothing about them spoke of anything unusual, which in itself was a great screaming clue that they were there to watch him.
He looked at the phone in his hand, then at the Ford. There was only one person left to call and he really, really didn’t want to call him.
Tammy wandered over and started twining around his ankles, purring hopefully.
‘I hate this guy,’ Luke told her. Tammy didn’t seem to care.
Wincing, he dialled.
‘You know where she is?’ Docherty asked without preamble.
‘No idea. You?’
‘Went to France. Haven’t tracked the car yet.’ Docherty paused. ‘You want company?’
Luke hesitated. His flat would be bugged the second he stepped outside, or possibly while he was sleeping. There was probably a tap on his phone line already, although he expected Docherty would have nullified it from his end. Nonetheless …
