Stay Alive

by Simon Kernick

  It was a perfect shot.

  Fourteen

  THE SHOT CRACKED across the water, shattering the silence, and Tim fell to the ground like a stone, dropping Jean in the process. Casey cried out and Jess pulled her close, shielding her eyes.

  There was a long second of silence and then Tim cried out in pain, grabbing his leg. He was lying on his side facing Jean’s body, gritting his teeth. Only his head was inside the tree line, but he was trying to crawl further in.

  ‘Uncle Tim!’ cried Casey, struggling to get out of Jess’s grip.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ hissed the mystery woman, who was crouching down a few feet away. ‘They’ve wounded him deliberately. If we try to pull him in, they’ll shoot us too.’

  Jess turned to her. ‘But why? What do they want us for?’

  The woman put a finger to her lips, motioning towards Casey, who was still struggling in Jess’s grip. ‘It’s just too dangerous. Please. Trust me.’

  Tim inched forward on his belly, his progress painfully slow. ‘Ah Jesus,’ he hissed, through clenched teeth. ‘Girls, you’ve got to get out of here. Get to Tayleigh. Now . . .’

  ‘We’re not going to leave you, Uncle Tim!’ cried Casey, tears streaming down her face. ‘We’re not going to leave you!’

  His face contorted in pain. ‘You’ve got to.’

  But then suddenly Casey had broken free, and she was on her feet and running over to her uncle.

  ‘No!’ yelled the woman, jumping up from her crouch and sprinting forward in a single movement to cut her off, before Jess even had time to react.

  Casey was only a yard from Tim when the shot rang out.

  And then she was flying through the air as the mystery woman caught her in a sideways rugby tackle, and the two of them landed together in the dirt, rolling away as a third shot cracked through the air.

  Tim’s body kicked wildly as the bullet struck him somewhere in the back, and he lifted his head, his mouth open in an expression of surprise, before he slumped forward and lay still.

  But it wasn’t Tim Jess was interested in. It was Casey. Where was she? Had she been hurt?

  Another shot rang out, and another, and Jess had to lie flat on her front as the woman and Casey rolled along the ground towards her and out of the line of fire.

  Just as suddenly as it had begun, the shooting stopped, and Jess scrambled over to where the woman lay on top of her sister. Casey’s eyes were closed and Jess felt a terrible, gut-wrenching panic. ‘Casey, Casey, baby. Are you okay? Please tell me you’re okay.’

  For a second nothing happened, and a strangled sob rose up in Jess’s throat. She couldn’t lose her sister. Not Casey. Anyone but her. Anyone . . .

  And then her eyes opened and she was staring up at Jess. ‘I’m scared,’ Casey said simply.

  Jess sobbed with relief and pushed the woman aside as she took her sister in her arms, holding her close.

  For a few seconds, the girls clung to each other, both shivering from the shock and the cold. Then slowly Jess got to her feet and looked over to where the woman stood looking at them, an expression of regret in her eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry to have got you involved in this, I really am,’ she said.

  Keeping Casey’s face pressed into her shoulder, Jess looked across at the bodies of her adoptive aunt and uncle, as still as ghosts, then back at the woman. ‘Why the hell do these people want to kill you?’

  The woman sighed. ‘I have no idea. But I do know one thing. We can’t stay here. They’re going to be coming after us and we’re still a long way from help.’ She looked at Casey, and then at Jess, and Jess was once again struck by the way she held herself and the calm manner in which she took charge. ‘My name’s Amanda,’ the woman continued, ‘and I’m going to get you both to safety, get you some warm, dry clothes, and then everything’s going to be okay.’ Her voice was soothing in its tones, almost patronizing, and Jess could tell that she’d never had kids. She didn’t really know how to handle them.

  ‘It won’t be,’ said Casey, looking over towards the bodies of Tim and Jean. ‘My new mum and dad are dead.’

  ‘I know, and I’m sorry. But we’ve got to protect ourselves now. You both saw the faces of two of those men. That means you’re in danger too.’ She turned and looked up into the thick, dark forest. ‘Let’s go. We need to get to Tayleigh before dark.’ Without another word, she turned and headed into the trees.

  Casey looked up at Jess, her big blue eyes still wet with tears. ‘I don’t want to leave Uncle Tim and Auntie Jean,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t seem right.’

  But Jess knew it was a time for hard decisions. ‘Neither do I,’ she answered, stroking her sister’s wet hair. ‘But we’ve got no choice. You’ve got to be strong for me, okay?’

  Casey nodded, managing a weak smile. ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘I know you will.’ Jess helped her to her feet and together, hand in hand, they started after the woman who’d got them into this nightmare.

  Fifteen

  16.35

  KEOGH LOWERED THE rifle, wondering if he’d hit either Amanda or one of the kids with his last shots. He hoped he hadn’t killed a kid, but he knew he’d be able to handle it as long as he didn’t actually have to see his handiwork. He also knew he’d be in a lot of trouble if one of the shots had accidentally killed Amanda. He didn’t think it had, but you never knew, and he cursed himself for being so reckless.

  Turning away from the lookout point, he made the call he’d been dreading on the satellite phone he was carrying.

  His employer answered after three rings. ‘Is the situation resolved?’ he asked brusquely.

  ‘Not quite, sir,’ said Keogh, and briefly explained what had happened. As he spoke, he realized how bad it must be sounding.

  ‘I don’t pay you to fuck up,’ growled his employer, ‘but that’s exactly what you’ve done. If you want to live to see another job, you’d better deal with this and get hold of this woman.’

  Keogh was only too aware that such a threat from his employer wasn’t idle. He had the type of money, power and resources to kill almost anyone he wanted to. He had the ruthlessness too. ‘I will, sir,’ he answered, ‘but I can’t guarantee that we’ll take her alive. That’s what’s been the problem so far.’

  ‘I pay you very well to resolve problems like that. She has information I need very badly, you know that. You need to find her now, and if anyone else gets in the way, kill them too. Kill anyone you have to kill. It doesn’t matter, as long as you get her back to me tonight. Do you understand me? And I mean alive.’

  Keogh fought down his irritation at being talked to like a servant. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then do it. Otherwise I’ll have to find someone who can. Call me when you have news.’

  Keogh put the phone away, knowing now that his life depended on what happened in the next few hours. It was time to be ruthless. He’d already sent MacLean off to get the dogs, which would give them a much better chance of successfully hunting her down. In the meantime, they needed to make sure the canoe company didn’t raise the alarm. It was inconvenient that both the canoes were currently stuck on the sand spit over the other side of the river in full view, but now that the afternoon was moving inexorably towards dusk, Keogh considered it highly unlikely that any other boats would come down here.

  The Ukrainian, Sayenko, had arrived in his vehicle – an old Defender – and he and Mehdi were standing beside him awaiting instructions. Sayenko was a lean, wiry individual with tightly cropped grey hair and a dried-out, heavily lined face that looked in dire need of rehydrating. According to the boss, he had more than twenty years’ experience in the Russian military and had served in combat operations in Chechnya twice, and he wasn’t afraid of killing when it was necessary. He didn’t say a lot, but he spoke good enough English, and was capable of taking orders, although of the two men, Keogh considered Mehdi, who’d been living in the UK for more than a decade and a half, and whom Keogh knew far better, the more reliable. I
t was Mehdi he addressed now.

  ‘I need you to visit the canoe centre that rented out those canoes. The place is called Calvey Canoe Hire and, according to MacLean, it’s on the Inverness Road, about five miles northeast of here. There’s unlikely to be more than one person there, and it may be that he’s further downriver waiting to pick up the canoeists, but I want you to check it out.’

  Mehdi nodded casually, seemingly unworried by the assignment. ‘And if there is anyone there?’

  ‘Talk to them. Find out how many canoes they’ve got out, and whether there’s anyone else working there today. Then call me straight away.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘Kill whoever’s there and hide the bodies. We need to close down this thing as fast as possible. When you’ve done that, we’ll join up again and get hold of that woman. Any questions?’

  Mehdi shook his head, and Keogh fished a set of keys out of his pocket and threw them over. ‘Take the four-by-four. And move fast. We’re running low on time.’

  Mehdi didn’t need asking twice and, as Keogh watched him jog back up towards the four-by-four, he was pleased he had men with him who weren’t squeamish about killing in cold blood.

  Because, one way or another, there was going to be a lot of killing tonight.

  Sixteen

  Two weeks ago

  MIKE BOLT LEANED forward in his seat. ‘We brought you on board to get a handle on the man we’re hunting. You’re supposedly the best criminal behavioural psychologist in the business but, with all due respect, I’m struggling to find anything you’ve told us that isn’t blindingly obvious to everyone.’ He paused, hugely aware of the urgency of the situation. ‘I need something better. Something insightful.’

  ‘I’m not a miracle worker, DCS Bolt,’ answered Dr Thom Folkestone.

  ‘No,’ said Bolt. ‘I can see that.’

  Dr Folkestone looked mildly put out by Bolt’s comment, and even managed a small pout. He was a handsome, if very boyish-looking man of thirty-eight, with foppish blond hair and twinkling eyes, who looked far too young and carefree to be the eminent psychiatrist he was. But, as Bolt had pointed out, however ironically, he was supposed to be the best.

  As a general rule, Bolt avoided using behavioural psychologists. It wasn’t that they couldn’t provide useful information to aid an inquiry – sometimes (though not always) they did. But in his experience, some senior investigating officers became almost in thrall to the profiling techniques used by behavioural psychologists for narrowing down the list of suspects, thanks to the influence of TV and film. In the past, this had led to some notable injustices, and Bolt wasn’t keen to repeat the mistakes of past murder inquiries. But at the same time, with leads scarce and The Disciple’s body count steadily rising, the pressure for a result meant exploring every avenue possible; although, right at this moment, sitting in Dr Folkestone’s expansive central London office, Bolt was beginning to think they were wasting their time.

  ‘All I can do is give you an insight into The Disciple’s character,’ continued Folkestone, who was dressed in an expensive three-piece suit with the waistcoat done up – a look that, for some reason, annoyed Bolt. ‘We’re talking about a physically fit white male – I would say almost certainly between the ages of 35 and 45 – who’s of above-average intelligence. However, I don’t believe he’ll have a mentally demanding job. I don’t see him as a hard worker. He saves his planning for his crimes. I think his job involves driving long distances, which is why he’s able to spend time targeting his victims, and he lives alone somewhere in the west London area.’

  ‘Do you think he’s killed before this current spate of attacks?’ put in Mo.

  ‘It’s possible. Although, if he has, it would almost certainly not have been as well planned as the current killings.’

  ‘I’m glad you said that,’ said Bolt.

  Folkestone leaned back in his leather swivel chair and raised an eyebrow. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we know he has killed before. Fifteen years ago.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘We’ve only just found out ourselves. The forensic team discovered a trace amount of blood at the scene of the last Disciple killings that didn’t match that of either of the two victims: George Rowan and Ivana Hanzha, or that of Mr Rowan’s wife, Amanda. The DNA extracted from the blood matched that of the killer of a young Frenchwoman called Beatrice Magret, who was sexually assaulted and murdered in Hampshire in 1998.’

  Folkestone nodded slowly, as if deep in thought. ‘That’s interesting. Can you give me the details?’

  Mo Khan got out his notebook. ‘She was a twenty-one-year-old student studying at University College London, and she was on her way to the Isle of Wight Festival with two other students – one female, one male – when the car they were in broke down on the A31. There was some sort of argument and Ms Magret stormed off on her own. She was seen by a witness walking at the side of the road towards the village of Soldridge about twenty minutes later, but that was the last sighting of her alive. Her body was found two days later, ten miles away near Alton, partially concealed in woodland. She’d been beaten, tortured and sexually assaulted.’

  Mo paused. Although he was as professional as any copper Bolt had worked with, the fact remained he had three kids of his own, including a seventeen-year-old daughter, so it was difficult not to get affected by the senseless waste of Beatrice Magret’s murder. ‘According to the coroner, the assault was prolonged and brutal,’ he said slowly, ‘and then her skull was caved in with a blunt instrument. The scene-of-crime photos make pretty grisly viewing.’

  ‘But no knife?’ asked Folkestone, with a professional’s dispassionate tone.

  Mo shook his head. ‘No. No knife.’

  ‘And any Satanic symbols on the corpse?’

  Again, Mo shook his head.

  ‘Needless to say, the case was unsolved,’ said Bolt, ‘with very few leads generated, even though there was quite a lot of publicity at the time.’

  ‘Yes, I seem to remember something about it,’ said Folkestone, ‘but I’m surprised it’s the same person. Not so much because of the different modus operandi – it stands to reason that this would develop over time, and certainly it bears other hallmarks of The Disciple’s MO – but the timescale between that killing and the start of the current crop feels too long. Have you looked to see if there were any similar unsolved killings in between?’

  ‘I’ve got a dozen detectives scouring the PNC right now, but nothing’s standing out.’ When Bolt had first heard about this new murder earlier that morning, he’d thought it might represent a significant breakthrough, but already his enthusiasm was beginning to fade. If the murder of Beatrice Magret was The Disciple’s handiwork, and it clearly looked as if it was, then once again it seemed his luck had held. The case, though still technically open, had been wound down many years back.

  ‘What do you make of The Disciple’s attack on Amanda Rowan?’ he asked Folkestone. ‘When we last spoke before the Rowan/Hanzha murders, you said the man we’re looking for is highly organized, forensically aware, and extremely careful. And yet he takes a huge, and potentially fatal, risk to try to kill a woman who hasn’t seen his face, and after he’s already got his rocks off with her husband and his lover. What do you think makes him do something like that?’ A week on, this still bugged Bolt, although given the often and impulsive irrational behaviour of even the most successful criminals, it really shouldn’t have done.

  But Folkestone didn’t seem to find this puzzling at all, which shouldn’t have surprised Bolt either. Like most people who valued their own opinions, he had an answer to everything. ‘He’s all those things, DCS Bolt, and he’s also a perfectionist. But at the same time he’s also, in layman’s terms, a control freak. He controls his victims; he controls the scene of the crime by leaving behind virtually no evidence; he even thinks he controls the police inquiry by being the one who chooses when and where he strikes. That makes him much harder to ca
tch than what we’d call a normal killer. But it also makes him prone to mistakes. I don’t believe he was expecting Amanda Rowan to turn up and, when she did, he had to think fast. He decided to kill her, but when she proved a harder proposition than he was expecting, it seems he couldn’t handle the affront of her disturbing his crime. Rather than give up, as his perfectionist instincts would have told him to do, he became extremely reckless in his efforts to kill her. He still wanted to retain control, even though he no longer did. And this may well be how you catch him.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘He might be a perfectionist, but he’s clearly got a streak of recklessness. You need to take advantage of that. Push his buttons. Encourage him to make contact with you, and explain why he’s committing these crimes. He’s a narcissist and he clearly loves the notoriety. It’ll also make him think he’s in control once again.’

  It sounded like a daft idea to Bolt. Anyone as careful as The Disciple wasn’t going to respond to such an obvious ploy. Mo looked sceptical too.

  Folkestone gave an expansive shrug. ‘I can see you don’t agree, but I think it’s got to be worth a try. What have you got to lose?’

  Which Bolt had to admit was a fair point. ‘We’ll consider it, Doctor,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘Thanks, as always, for your time.’

  ‘How is Amanda Rowan, by the way?’ asked Folkestone as the three of them shook hands. ‘Has she recovered from her ordeal?’

  ‘She’s a very resilient lady,’ said Bolt, remembering that Folkestone had been the one who’d agreed to her decision to go to Scotland and rent a house. ‘She’s doing well.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. She’s a very lucky woman.’

  ‘Well, it depends on your version of luck, doesn’t it? She’s lost her husband, found out he’s having an affair, had her home turned into a charnel house, and been slashed with a knife by a man who came very close to killing her. That’s definitely the kind of luck I could do without.’