Stay Alive

by Simon Kernick

  She hit the tarmac feet first and a stinging pain shot up her Achilles tendons as she rolled over and leapt to her feet, running again, making for the trees and freedom, tearing through the foliage. She felt a stinging pain in her right ankle but ignored it and kept running, running, running, making for the road, and anywhere where there might be people who could help her.

  The hole appeared without warning and, as her foot ploughed straight into it, she tripped and went sprawling, landing painfully on the hard ground.

  For a moment, she didn’t move, concentrating instead on quietening her breathing.

  And then she heard it. The sound of a twig breaking, followed by undergrowth being pushed aside.

  He was still following her.

  Using her hands, she pushed herself into the lee of a holly bush, trying to get as far under it as possible. Finally, she lay still and held her breath.

  Don’t move. Don’t speak. Don’t breathe. Don’t move.

  In those moments, she thought about her own vulnerability, and the fact that a person’s world could change in the blink of an eye, or the deep, painful slash of a knife. One minute, she was a married woman living an easy life in idyllic surroundings, with few if any worries; the next she’d discovered a murder in her own home, and suddenly she was alone in the woods while the man who’d committed it hunted her with a knife.

  She seemed to lie there for a long time. A minute? Two? Five? It was difficult to tell, and she didn’t dare look at her watch. But however long it was, she heard no further sound from her pursuer.

  It seemed that he might have given up and gone.

  And that was when she saw the glow of headlights coming from the road that ran through the woods, no more than fifty yards away. She had no idea who it could be. Very few cars used this route, especially at this time of night, because the road didn’t go anywhere, and there were only a handful of houses up here.

  But in the end, none of that mattered. What mattered was that it couldn’t be the man chasing her because the car was coming from the wrong direction, which meant the headlights represented safety.

  A twig cracked loudly a few feet away, and Amanda’s heart lurched. In the next instant, she was on her feet and sprinting through the woods, desperately trying to get to the car before it passed by. Screaming, too. Screaming at the top of her lungs, knowing that she must look a terrible sight to anyone driving through this lonely place at night, but no longer caring.

  Her lungs felt as if they were bursting as she tore out of the trees and onto the road barely ten yards in front of the car, with its blinding headlights.

  ‘Help me!’ she yelled, waving her arms, hardly hearing the screech of brakes as the driver tried to stop, realizing at the last second that he wasn’t going to be able to manage it in time.

  Amanda dived out of the way, crashing painfully into the tarmac, as the car passed by, inches away from her.

  And then finally, mercifully, everything went black.

  Two

  Today 11.00

  THE WOUND ON Amanda Rowan’s left forearm still throbbed. It was a good four inches long, running in a near dead straight line to just above the wrist and, even though the stitches had long since been removed, the cut was still deep and raw – a permanent reminder of the events of that bloody night. She examined it in the mirror as she did every morning and evening – a symbol of her vanity – but, once again, there was no discernible improvement.

  She turned away from the mirror and went over to the window, looking over the sprinkling of houses that made up the village she’d made her temporary home, hundreds of miles from the house she’d shared with her husband, which was now tainted beyond repair.

  The police had said that George and his lover – a woman fifteen years his junior – had been the victims of a serial killer known as The Disciple who’d been terrorizing the south of England for most of the previous year. Amanda had been the first person to have confronted him and lived, and as everyone, including friends, family and the police had been keen to tell her, she was extremely lucky to have escaped a killer who’d built a reputation for ruthless efficiency in his work.

  The twenty-four hours after the attack had been frenetic. First at the hospital, where they’d treated her, not only for shock and the stab wound on her forearm, but also the extensive bruising she’d received during her ordeal. After that it had been the exhaustive police interviews, when she’d had to go over and over what had happened, even though her first instinct was to bury it deep in the recesses of her brain. And then, finally, the inevitable media storm. Amanda’s case had an extremely compelling storyline. Not only was there the infidelity angle, the wronged wife returning home unexpectedly, but the fact that The Disciple had been so determined to kill Amanda that he’d chased her right through her neighbour’s house (thankfully, Mrs Naseby had been unhurt), forcing her to jump from a first-floor window, and that she’d only just missed being hit by a car during her escape, and still survived, was the stuff of media dreams. Everyone wanted to interview her. The Sun had even offered her a hundred grand for her exclusive story.

  But all Amanda wanted to do was get as far away as possible from what had happened. The police hadn’t been keen for her to go. Instead they’d offered her twenty-four-hour protection at a local safe house until they had The Disciple in custody, but Amanda was insistent. She was escaping the media – at least for the time being – and she didn’t want a police officer living with her either. She’d given the lead detective on the case – a big, good-looking DCS called Mike Bolt – her new address, and promised to keep it secret, even from her immediate family, until The Disciple was in custody. The consultant psychiatrist working with the police on the case had also suggested it might not be a bad idea for Amanda to get well away from the scene of her trauma, so Mike Bolt had reluctantly agreed (not that he had much choice), and had arranged for the local police to keep an eye on her. She also had a panic button, with a direct line to the nearest police station, installed at the property.

  ‘You don’t think The Disciple’s going to come after me, do you?’ Amanda had asked Bolt. ‘There’s no way I could ID him, so I can’t represent any sort of threat.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so,’ he’d told her, in a way that suggested it was possible he might, ‘but it’s always best to stay on the safe side.’

  And stay on the safe side she had. She’d picked a location deep in the Scottish Highlands, in a village miles away from the nearest town, paying three months’ rent upfront. Only one person outside the police knew she was here, an old friend she trusted with her life – someone she knew would never betray her, either deliberately or otherwise.

  She kept a low profile in the village, staying out of the pub and exchanging nothing more than brief formalities with her neighbours, none of whom recognized her, thanks to the fact they’d kept her picture out of the newspapers. Occasionally, one of the villagers would ask what a pretty young thing like her was doing living alone in the middle of nowhere, and Amanda would reply that she was writing a book, and wanted to be in a place that would give her the necessary inspiration. Further questions were fended off politely but firmly, and it hadn’t taken long for people to get the message.

  As it happened, Amanda had told them at least part of the truth. She was writing a book. Or planning one, anyway. It was something she’d wanted to do since childhood, but had never got round to doing, and she’d been working on the plan until late the previous evening, which was why she’d risen so late today.

  Amanda’s semi-detached stone cottage was the only house with two floors amongst the sprinkling of ugly, chalet-style, 1960s bungalows that made up the village of Sprey, and she loved to stand at her bedroom window looking out at the thick pine forest that started just beyond the tiny Presbyterian church. It was late October, and though winter was fast approaching, a watery sun was shining in a sky patchy with white clouds, and it looked as though it was going to be a nice afternoon. For Amanda, it was
a toss-up between actually starting the first draft of her novel – something she kept putting off – or going for a nice long walk in the hills and woodland round her temporary home, or down by the river that ran beneath the village.

  It wasn’t much of a decision really, and she was just about to go and make herself some brunch and a decent pot of coffee to give her sustenance for the walk ahead, when she saw something that made her stop.

  A car she didn’t recognize – a black four-wheel drive too clean to have been out here long – was slowly passing her front gate, and the driver was looking right up at her. It was hard to see what he looked like because of the distance between her house and the road, but she was certain he wasn’t one of the local cops, and she didn’t like the way he turned away from her just a second too quickly.

  As the car disappeared behind the hedge at the end of her front garden, a knot of tension formed in Amanda’s gut, and she realized she was grinding her teeth, a habit that she seemed to have picked up in the three weeks since George’s murder, and one she knew she had to stop as it was already beginning to drive her mad.

  Taking a deep breath, she turned away from the window, telling herself not to get so paranoid. There was no way that The Disciple could know where she was staying and, even if by some incredible accident of fate he did, there was no way he’d risk coming all the way up here to kill her. He was a hunted man. It was just a matter of time before he was caught.

  No, she told herself. She was safe. Nothing like that was ever going to happen to her again.

  Three

  RIGHT FROM CHILDHOOD, it had always been Frank Keogh’s ambition to be a police officer, and there was never any danger that he wouldn’t achieve it. He worked hard at school, did well at sport, and the stubborn, single-minded streak he possessed – the one that often drove his family and friends mad – meant that he got in at the first attempt, aged eighteen, coming second highest in his class at Hendon.

  Keogh didn’t just want to be any old cop. He wanted to be a detective, and bring the really serious criminals to justice. It was no surprise to anyone that he was in plainclothes by twenty-one, and a detective sergeant by twenty-five. The bosses up top liked him. He was tough, tenacious and patient, and they were already talking about him being DCI-level by the age of thirty.

  The problem for Keogh was the rulebook. He’d always had a strong sense of natural justice. He wanted to see the bad guys suffer and the good guys win, and it offended him that this often didn’t seem to happen. The good guys – the police – were stymied by an ever-increasing set of rules. The bad guys often escaped justice because their lawyers were good, and the law was on their side. This injustice drove him mad, as did the fact that, in the end, the criminals were so easy to catch. It wasn’t like in the books or the movies, as he’d imagined it to be when he’d joined up. These people were idiots. They left a trail of evidence in their wake, meaning that most of the detective work was building a case to go to court and then filling out a load of paperwork.

  Disillusioned, Keogh decided on a change in direction. He’d always had a thing about guns. There was something about their sheer power that fascinated him, and there’d been more than the occasional moment when he’d fantasized about putting one against the head of some cocky low-life thug and pulling the trigger. He never would have done, of course – he had far too much to lose for that – but he decided on the next best thing, by joining the Metropolitan Police’s elite CO19 firearms unit. He figured it would give him a new challenge, and a much-needed adrenalin rush now and again. His plan was always to go back into plainclothes eventually, work himself higher up the greasy pole, then retire and write a book about his experiences, which he was positive he could turn into a real success.

  It surprised no one, least of all Keogh himself, that he got into CO19 at the first attempt. He remembered thinking when he went out on that first patrol, a gun at his hip as he and his colleagues drove through the mean streets of Lewisham, that this was as good as life got. He was young; he was good-looking; he had a beautiful fiancée. The world was his to dominate.

  Except it wasn’t, because fate has a way of intervening when it’s least expected, and leaving the best-laid plans in ruins. And fate really had it in for Frank Keogh.

  It was three months into his time in CO19 when the Armed Response Vehicle he was travelling in received an urgent call from Dispatch about a group of youths from a well-known local street gang travelling in a stolen vehicle, one of whom was reported to have brandished a gun at passers-by. They got a dozen calls like this every day, and rarely did they come across anyone who was actually armed, but each call had to be taken on its own merits and, because they were very close by, they’d raced to where the vehicle had last been sighted, intercepting it at some traffic lights.

  All three of them had been out of the ARV in seconds, pistols drawn and shouting at the men inside the vehicle to put their hands above their heads. It looked as if the three of them were complying but, as Keogh approached the car from the side, the man in the back pulled something from his pocket. It was ten o’clock at night and dark, and Keogh had no idea what it was the man had in his hand, but Keogh remembered vividly him turning round rapidly in his seat and bringing up an object that looked a lot like a gun.

  Keogh had pulled the trigger then, shooting him twice through the window at a distance of no more than five feet. One of the bullets caught him in the neck, the other hit him in the eye as the pistol kicked, and it was this one that was fatal.

  It turned out that twenty-year-old Derrick ‘Slugs’ Foster had been holding a mobile phone when Keogh had shot him, and that none of the three men in the car was armed, not even with a knife. As far as Keogh was concerned, none of that mattered. He’d done his job, and he’d done it properly. The guy had pulled something that could have been a gun from his pocket and he’d looked as if he was going to fire it. In those situations, you have maybe a second and a half to make the choice of whether to fire or not. Make the wrong choice and you get shot, and Keogh was not the kind of guy who got shot because he was too scared to react.

  But the bosses – those men who’d been so supportive of him when he was on the way up – didn’t see it like that. Neither did the local community. The following night, the estate where the dead man had lived was the scene of the worst rioting that London had witnessed in years, and within days a ‘Justice for Derrick’ campaign had been set up by local community leaders, backed by several sympathetic human rights lawyers, calling for charges of murder to be laid against the man who’d pulled the trigger.

  Keogh was suspended from firearms duty, as was routine in such incidents. Then, as the furore mounted, and further street disturbances broke out in several other London boroughs, he was suspended from duty altogether. Then came the bombshell. The establishment had decided to bend to the power of the mob and the special interest groups. He was going to be charged with manslaughter. No one was above the law, said the well-groomed ex-public schoolboy from the CPS as he’d announced the charges at a news conference that was shown as the top story on every news channel.

  During the run-up to the trial, Keogh’s fiancée left him, citing the pressure of the situation. He’d really had a thing for Kirsty. She was the one. They were going to have a family and grow old together. Losing her had been like a massive and continuous kick in the balls. He couldn’t get it out of his head that she’d rejected him. But, even then, Keogh hadn’t lost his self-belief. He still had support from his colleagues past and present, and he was certain that no jury would convict a serving police officer with an unblemished record for shooting dead a low-life like Derrick Foster in a spur-of-the-moment, high-pressure incident.

  Unfortunately, he was wrong. Found guilty, he was sentenced to three years in prison. And it was hard time that he did, segregated from the main prison population for his own safety, and made to spend his days with rapists, paedophiles, and all the other assorted scum of the earth. The guards warned him to be carefu
l even there because members of Derrick Foster’s gang inside the prison had put a contract out on Keogh’s head, and within two weeks he’d been attacked by a fellow con wielding a sharpened piece of plastic. He’d been slashed twice in the face and neck, and though he’d managed to fend off his attacker until help arrived, the good looks he’d prided himself on were ruined forever by the scars left behind.

  They were the worst, darkest times of Keogh’s life. Brought as low as he’d ever been, he even contemplated suicide. But then, slowly but surely, that single-minded determination that had served him so well in the past came back into play. He forced himself to adapt to prison life and bide his time until release, and all the time his bitterness grew. He’d get his own back. On the bosses who’d hung him out to dry; on the public who’d done nothing to stop him being put behind bars. On every last one of them.

  He got out in two years, already forgotten by the rest of the world, but it had only been a matter of time before his bitterness found an outlet, and so began a journey that had got him here today, driving slowly past Amanda Rowan’s rented cottage in a four-by-four.

  She’d noticed him looking at her, he was pretty sure of that. He cursed, but kept driving. He was used to taking risks. It was all part of the job description, and at least now he knew she was where she was supposed to be. When he’d first arrived here in the darkness of the early hours, he’d considered breaking into the house, but she’d had at least half a dozen locks on the back door, and the brand-new PVC windows were locked and secure, with no sign of keys anywhere convenient. He’d also considered knocking on the door and showing his fake police ID, but had dismissed it as too risky. Amanda Rowan was no fool. There was no guarantee she’d let him in – the scars were always a problem like that – and, if she didn’t, then it would have blown everything.