Stay Alive

by Simon Kernick

  ‘My sister!’ the girl screamed again, resisting Scope’s efforts, but her voice was drowned out by a succession of shotgun blasts. Scope remembered giving the girl a shove and her taking off into the gloom, holding onto the kitchen knife she’d killed the first dog with, and then he felt a sudden, very hard, impact in his side and his legs went from under him. ‘Run!’ he managed to yell, and then he hit the ground with a hard thud that tore the wind right out of him.

  Everything was happening extremely fast for Keogh. First he heard the shot ring out from somewhere inside the woods – only twenty, thirty yards away. Even though he was half deafened from all the shooting he’d been doing, he knew straight away that the shot had come from a pistol, and one with a suppressor attached. He could no longer hear the barking of the dogs either.

  For a split second he wondered if the shooter was Mehdi. After all, guns with suppressors were unheard of in a remote place like this, but there was no way Mehdi could have found them back here. Not wanting to take any chances, Keogh crouched down at the edge of the tree line, motioning for Sayenko and MacLean to do the same, but Sayenko appeared to be looking at something further up the hill on the other side of the road.

  Keogh was just about to tell him to pay attention when Sayenko pointed towards whatever he was looking at. ‘There’s the young one!’ he shouted.

  Knowing the usefulness of having one of the fugitives as a hostage, particularly a kid, Keogh yelled to Sayenko to get hold of her alive, hoping like hell he had the energy to catch her.

  Almost immediately, a female voice called out in alarm from inside the trees. Keogh didn’t catch her exact words, but he distinctly heard the word ‘sister’. Holding his rifle in the crook of his arm, his finger still poised on the trigger, he switched on the Maglite torch and shone it into the undergrowth, trying to catch sight of whoever was in there.

  He caught movement twenty yards in, but then two shots rang out in rapid succession, passing between him and MacLean, who was crouched down with his shotgun next to the abandoned car, five yards away. As Keogh dodged behind a tree, swinging round the rifle as he hunted for a target, a third shot hissed through the trees, and the torch bucked in his hand as the light shattered, plunging the world back into a heavy, impenetrable gloom.

  That was when MacLean opened up with the shotgun, its retorts cracking across the night air. Dropping the torch, Keogh put the rifle to his shoulder and leaned out from behind the tree. He saw movement – shadowy figures partially screened by bushes, running further into the woodland – and opened fire until he’d run out of bullets.

  He thought he saw one of them fall and hoped it wasn’t the target, Amanda Rowan, because if she was dead, he was dead too. But there was little time to worry about that now.

  Motioning for MacLean to follow, Keogh started into the darkness.

  Casey sprinted for her life through the big dark wood because she knew the horrible bony man with the bald head like a skull, and the big gun, was after her.

  He’d seen her in the bushes beside the road, where Jess had told her to wait for them to pick her up. She’d seen the car crash, heard the shots, and didn’t even know whether or not Jess was still alive. She was thinking that she couldn’t lose her sister, not after everyone else. It was like God was trying to do everything he could to hurt her, even though she’d never done anything wrong before.

  Then the man had shouted something and started coming up the road after her, waving the gun, a horrible look on his face like one of the zombies in Jess’s Call of Duty 3 game she’d got last Christmas, and then just after that she was sure she heard Jess shout something, but she couldn’t be sure what, and then she was running, because she really didn’t know what else to do.

  And she was continuing to run, even though her shoes were hurting, and the brambles kept scratching her face, and she was more scared than she’d ever been in her life. This was worse than the worst nightmare. It was worse than being attacked by the faceless monster with the werewolf claws that she’d always been convinced lurked beneath her bed ready to tear her to pieces and eat her head the moment she shut her eyes and fell asleep. Because the people doing this were grown-ups. Grown-ups were meant to look after children. Her mum had always told her that you had to be careful of strangers. That strangers might want to hurt you. But Casey had never believed it. The grown-ups she knew, even Lily’s mum back home in London who didn’t say much and never looked very happy, were always really nice.

  But these men . . . These men wanted to kill her.

  She sneaked a look over her shoulder for a moment, but couldn’t see the bony man with the bald head. If she could keep going a bit longer, then she could hide somewhere and he wouldn’t be able to find her. She’d always been good at hiding, and now she could no longer hear the dogs, they wouldn’t be able to sniff her out and hurt her. But her legs were tired, and her tummy ached, and she didn’t know how much longer she could keep going. She needed Jess here to help her. Jess would know what to do.

  Casey turned back round so she could see where she was going and spotted the branch hanging out in front of her one second before she ran straight into it with an angry smack.

  She cried out – she couldn’t stop herself in time – and fell backwards onto the ground. Her whole face was agony, but her nose especially. It was like someone had smacked it with a hammer. She tried to sit back up, trying desperately not to cry, but her vision suddenly went all blurry and she had to swallow to stop herself being sick.

  That was when she heard it. The sound of heavy, rasping breathing.

  And it was getting closer.

  Thirty-three

  SCOPE WAS HURT but he could still move.

  He could hear the sound of movement in the foliage behind him as the men who’d opened fire approached and, on the other side of him, no more than ten yards away, he could see the silhouette of the girl he’d rescued from the dog, partly concealed by a tree. But she wasn’t running, even though she’d be coming into the sights of the gunmen any moment now. She was looking back towards the road. From what Scope could gather, she’d been split up from her little sister, and wasn’t going to leave without her which, though a pretty laudable thing, was also the equivalent of committing suicide.

  She was dead if she stayed where she was. And so, he knew, was he. His left side ached where he’d been hit but, when he ran his hand down there, there was no blood. Instead, he felt the satellite phone he’d taken from the dead gunman back at Jock’s place. It was still in his jacket pocket, but its casing was now badly cracked, where it had clearly taken the force of the shot and somehow deflected it. He took it out and, seeing that it was cleaved pretty much down the middle, left it on the ground.

  He didn’t dwell on his good fortune. There was no time. Lifting himself as silently as possible to his feet, and using a thick bramble bush as cover, he took off at a sprint further into the woods, conscious of the sound of the leaves crunching beneath his feet as he ran in a crouching zigzag to put off the shooters, motioning angrily for the girl to follow him.

  A shot rang out, then another. Then a third. All of them were close by but Scope was eating up the ground quickly, and out of the corner of his eye he could see the girl running alongside him, a few yards away, also trying to keep low as the shooting continued.

  But it was sounding further away now.

  ‘I can’t leave my sister!’ cried the girl as she ran, her face contorted with emotion.

  ‘Where was she?’ Scope called across without looking at her.

  ‘We left her when we tried to get to the car. We were going to pick her up.’ She began to slow her pace as she talked.

  ‘Keep running,’ snapped Scope. ‘They’re still only just behind us.’ The shooting had stopped now, but he knew their pursuers wouldn’t be giving up that easily.

  ‘I’m tired,’ complained the girl. ‘And we’re running away from where we left Casey. She’s my sister, and she’s only ten years old.’

 
Scope suddenly saw a picture of Mary Ann as a ten year old in his mind. He and Jennifer had had a photo of her at that age on the mantelpiece in the lounge in her school uniform, her long dark hair in matching pigtails, a big grin on her face. His daughter.

  His dead daughter.

  ‘I’ll find your sister,’ he said, without breaking pace. ‘But we need to put some space between you and them. Has she got a phone?’

  ‘No,’ said the girl breathlessly. ‘None of us have. We lost them in the river when the boats were overturned.’

  ‘What’s she look like?’

  ‘Blonde, pretty. No, she’s beautiful. She’s so damn beautiful.’ The girl looked as if she was going to break down.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Jess.’

  There was a narrow gap in the trees up ahead as they met a path and, as the two of them emerged onto it, they paused briefly. Scope turned to her, feeling in his pocket for his own mobile phone. He knew he needed to part with it because it implicated him in what had happened here, and therefore the killing of the gunman back at Jock’s place, but he had no choice if he was going to help these kids get out of here.

  He checked it, but there was no signal. ‘Okay, Jess, follow this path upwards until you get to the road,’ he whispered, handing her the phone. ‘Keep to the edge so you can get out of sight if you need to, and keep moving, whatever you do. As soon as you get a signal, dial 999. Understood? Now go. I’ll try and distract them.’

  They could both hear the sound of movement coming up from behind them. It would only be a matter of seconds until they were back in the sights of the gunmen. Jess nodded. ‘Find her,’ she said, then turned and started running up the gentle incline, until seconds later she rounded a corner and was swallowed up by the forest.

  The sound of pursuit was coming closer now. Scope could hear their footfalls in the trees, some distance apart as the men fanned out, and he moved across the path and into the thick wall of pine trees that bordered it on the far side, weaving between them until he found a spot from which he could no longer be seen. Grabbing a thick branch from the deep carpet of pine needles on the ground, he waited a few seconds until a big shadowy figure appeared on the other side of the path, stepping onto it carefully as he slowly looked round. Scope didn’t have a very good view of him, but he could see he was well over six foot tall, and was holding a shotgun.

  Scope dropped the branch onto the ground. Not too hard, because he didn’t want to make what he was planning too obvious, but not too softly either, because he wanted to be heard.

  And he was heard all right. The gunman immediately cocked his head, then motioned to someone else out of sight. He was already pointing the shotgun in the direction where the noise had come from when Scope took off, making as much noise as possible, running roughly parallel to the path in the opposite direction to the one the girl had taken. He heard shouting behind him and then a shot rang out, passing a good few yards behind him.

  Keeping low, he continued his sprint, knowing he could outrun them, but knowing too that it was unlikely Jess could. He had to buy her time. A second shot rang out. This time it ricocheted off a tree, only a couple of yards to his left. Stealing a rapid glance, he saw that he’d strayed too close to the path, and the gunman was running down it, not quite keeping pace but not needing to, suddenly only about fifteen yards away.

  Scope did a rapid turn further into the trees and sprinted for his life, half expecting to take a shot in the back at any time.

  But no shot came, and a minute later he was back deep within the forest. Slowing up, he risked a glance over his shoulder, saw no one there, and turned in the direction of the river. He’d done what he could, and risked his life, to buy time for a girl he’d never met to escape from pursuers who were after her for a reason he’d probably never know. Now he was going to double back and try to find her sister somewhere in one of the biggest, loneliest forests in the country.

  He no longer had any bullets in his gun. He had no means of communication. In reality, getting involved in all this was madness. Yet, Jesus, it felt good.

  And if he could find that little girl, it would make it all worth it.

  If he could find her . . .

  Thirty-four

  Last night

  MIKE BOLT SANK his first pint of the week before the barman had even come back with his change.

  It tasted that good.

  It was just after 6.30 on a chilly Friday evening, and Bolt was in the bar of his local pub, The Pheasant, just down the road from the loft apartment in Clerkenwell that had been his home for more than seven years now. The place was full, but mainly with the local after-work crowd, and Bolt only recognized a couple of faces. He tended to get in the pub a couple of times a week, and he knew a few of the locals well enough to chat to, but they were acquaintances, not friends. He didn’t really have friends as such, not even among those he’d worked with in the Force down the years. Everyone was an acquaintance. He liked to think that it suited him just fine like that, but deep down, he knew it didn’t. The fact was, he was afraid of getting too close to people – a reaction, he supposed, to what had happened to his wife, Mikaela.

  He thought of Mo Khan, who would be back home with his wife and kids, while he was sitting here alone downing pints of lager, waiting to spot someone he knew well enough to snatch a conversation with. Mo often told him that his own life wasn’t all fun and laughter. ‘Sometimes I’d give my right arm for a few minutes of peace and quiet’ was one of his typical refrains, delivered while rolling his eyes at how frenetic his existence was, but Bolt knew that Mo wouldn’t change a thing about his own life, and was only saying these things to make him feel better.

  ‘Needed that, eh?’ said the barman as he returned with the change. He was a young Polish guy called Marius with big tattooed arms, who Bolt occasionally saw doing weights in the gym. ‘Must have been a hard week.’ He looked at the yellowing bruise on Bolt’s left cheek where he’d been struck by Leonard Hope during his escape four days earlier, and which still hurt like hell even though nothing was broken.

  ‘Hard enough,’ answered Bolt, ordering a second pint. He didn’t think Marius knew that he was the SIO on the Disciple case, even though it was currently the most high-profile murder investigation in the country. He’d only worked behind the bar for about three months, and Bolt tried to keep his personal and professional life as separate as possible. Those people who knew him in here were aware that he was a senior cop, but they never questioned him about it, which suited him just fine.

  But Marius the barman was right. It had been a hard week. Leonard Hope’s name and photo had been all over the news, and yet four days on from the discovery of evidence at his home that inextricably linked him to the Disciple murders, he’d still not been arrested. Nor had there been even a single sighting. It was almost as if he’d never existed, a situation that was unheard of in these days of blanket media coverage and security cameras on every corner.

  The fact that they’d come so close to catching Hope didn’t help either. It made them look incompetent, and none more so than Bolt himself who, it was reported in the papers, had got to within a yard of Hope, only to lose him when the suspect had turned and knocked him out with a killer punch. The coverage was lurid, and though not entirely true, it had had the desired effect. It had made Bolt look stupid, and he’d wondered several times in the intervening days how long he was going to last as the head of the inquiry.

  The realization that he might be ousted from it frustrated him more than anything else about the whole case. It was unfinished business now. He had to be the one who brought down Hope, especially after what they’d found in his loft. A small tin box hidden under the floorboards had revealed a number of items of jewellery belonging to the female victims, some of it bloodstained. Alongside them in the box, in a clear plastic freezer bag and wrapped in clingfilm, had been the left-hand little fingers of the first three female victims. Even more gruesome had been the film footag
e found hidden away in a file on Hope’s PC. There were three separate films taken at each of the first three murder scenes. They were all very short and concentrated on the torture of the female victims by the man wielding the camera. Bolt had managed to sit through all the footage – seven, interminably long minutes in total – and the horror of it would stay with him for the rest of his days. He’d become used to the savagery of his fellow human beings, having been involved in far too many murder investigations over the years, but he’d never become immune to it, and he’d never come across anything like the extreme sadism that Leonard Hope exhibited. It was for this reason that Bolt wanted to stay involved in this case. He wanted to be the man who read that bastard his rights.

  But they had to find him first. And right now they didn’t have a single lead to go on.

  In the last few days, a conspiracy theory had emerged in the press that there were two killers in the Disciple murders: Leonard Hope, and a second man who’d helped him escape from the police. There was at least some evidence to back this up. According to Hope’s mobile phone records, the last call he’d received had been while he was driving home to where Bolt and Mo were waiting to arrest him. The call had come through at almost exactly the same time he’d started driving erratically in an effort to shake off the surveillance team following him, almost as if the caller had been warning him that he was being tailed by the police. Hope had then made a call to the same number five minutes later, lasting about thirty seconds, which was when Bolt had seen him on the phone while he was being chased. To add to the mystery, the number in question turned out to belong to an anonymous pay-as-you-go mobile that had only been switched on for the very first time four minutes before the call to Hope had been made, and had been switched off three minutes after the second conversation. It hadn’t been switched on since, and so far they’d drawn a complete blank in finding out who it was that Hope had been speaking to.