The Hunt and the Kill

by Holly Watt

  ‘Who—’ Casey sat up.

  ‘I have something … ’ The words were silky smooth, oddly polite, ‘that I need you to do.’

  65

  Casey reached convulsively for her recorder. It wasn’t on the bedside table. It wasn’t on the desk. Where was it?

  ‘Why are you calling me?’ Her voice rose.

  ‘Listen to me, Casey.’

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  It was Hessa who had identified the house in Buckinghamshire on Airbnb.

  It’s perfect, she had messaged Casey.

  Casey had looked at the screenshot of the house as it flashed up on her phone. Four bedrooms, she read. Detached. Generous private garden. Stylish integrated appliances. Available by the week.

  Fine. Go for it.

  After publishing the first day of stories about Colette Warwick, Hessa had hopped on the train to Amersham. She walked down the leafy roads to the house and spent the night in executive luxury. The next morning, she got back on the train and carefully evaded any trackers as she stepped on to the Tube. Once she was sure no one was following her, she headed to the office for the second day of stories about the Health Secretary Scandal.

  After another long day in the office, she hopped back on the train to Amersham, neat amongst the commuters. Walking slowly, she made her way to the house, which looked as if it had just been plopped out of its mould into a row of identical homes.

  ‘You mean I’m a tethered goat?’ Hessa had laughed when Casey first laid out the plan. ‘Bait?’

  ‘Drummond told Bailey you were investigating Corax,’ said Casey. ‘And we know that Bailey moves fast and aggressively to shut down any whisper about Corax. Drummond has spelled out where you’ll be tonight, and on his past form, Bailey will strike fast.’

  ‘So they’ll track me to and from to the train station,’ Hessa mused. ‘And then … ’

  Limpets dangling, black, yellow and green.

  Torn away to die.

  ‘You’ll be quite safe.’ Miranda had been firm. ‘You’ll have a security team with you all the time. They’ll be with you all night, every night, while you’re staying there. They’ll be a few steps behind you on the way to the train station, with panic buttons and everything. You’ll be safe as houses.’

  ‘No problem.’ Hessa’s eyes sparkled.

  ‘If Bailey’s guys try anything at all, we’ll have about fourteen cameras on them at all times,’ said Miranda. ‘We’ll finally be able to prove it. Prove that he got your address from Drummond, and immediately sent round his thugs.’

  Casey had felt misgivings almost at once. Wished she could retract the words, such casual words, the words that spilled so easily. We could try this …

  ‘You don’t have to do it, Hessa,’ Casey said urgently. ‘I’ll think of something else. It’s too—’

  ‘Bleat,’ Hessa had giggled, pretending to nibble some grass. ‘Baaaa.’

  And now Casey clutched the phone to her ear in a seedy Harare guest house. ‘Who is this? What’s happening? What the hell do you want?’

  The voice was polite, emotionless.

  ‘There is a swimming pool outside your room. A telephone has been placed on the diving board.’ The words were deadpan. ‘Swim across the pool and wait for the phone to ring.’

  ‘What?’ Casey’s brain was moving slowly, an ant sprayed with poison. Was the recorder in her handbag? There it was. Her fingers wrestled with the small black device: nearly there. ‘You’re saying I have to swim across the pool?’ Almost.

  ‘Goodbye.’

  The phone went dead.

  Casey stared at the phone in bewilderment, her recorder dangling uselessly. She stood in the middle of the room, thoughts rattling. Then she scrambled to ring Miranda’s number.

  No answer.

  Hessa’s phone: no answer.

  Hands clumsy, she tried Miranda again. But the numbers rang out, the dial tone echoing round the streaky walls of the guest house.

  Casey walked slowly to the door. Stepped out on to the steel walkway and peered over the edge.

  There was the shabby swimming pool, grey scum floating in one corner. And there, on the diving board, was a small, incongruous object.

  As Casey looked down, the telephone’s screen lit up. Someone was calling.

  Casey sprinted down the staircase, her feet clattering on the steel treads. The phone was vibrating on the plastic diving board, pulsing closer to the edge.

  Swim across the pool.

  She didn’t hesitate. She jumped straight into the water. The pool was deeper than it looked, and she was out of her depth by the time she reached the diving board, awkward in her haste. Clinging to the edge of the swimming pool with one hand, she reached up to snatch the phone off the diving board.

  ‘Hello?’ Breathless.

  ‘Hello, Casey.’

  She knew the voice immediately. It was Bailey, clinically polite.

  ‘You?’ Casey shook her head, shoving wet hair out of her face, trying to avoid submerging the phone. ‘What the hell do you want, Bailey?’

  ‘I think you know, Casey.’

  Clutching the phone, Casey scrambled along the side of the pool, making for the steps.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t mess around, Casey. Don’t mess around, or people will die.’

  She reached the steps and leaped up, her only thought to reach her room, grab her recorder.

  ‘Why is that, Mr Bailey?’ Keep him talking. ‘What do you—’

  He interrupted her sharply. ‘Don’t move from the pool area, Casey. Stay exactly where you are.’

  Casey stopped short, sliding on the slimy tiles.

  That was the reason for the swim through the pool, she realised. So that he knew she had no recording devices with her. This was a conversation that didn’t exist. The leap into the ocean at Llandudno had had the same effect, wiping everything. And now Casey glanced around, wondering if there were spies in this grimy hotel, if there were men watching from the shadows.

  Yes. Someone had placed the phone carefully on the diving board.

  She sat down on the white plastic chair.

  ‘What do you want, Mr Bailey?’

  ‘I want the documents.’

  ‘What documents?’

  ‘The documents you stole from the laboratory.’

  The morning was cool. Casey had slept in just a T-shirt and shorts, and she was soaked through. She started to shiver.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘You’re wasting my time.’

  ‘What if I say no?’

  ‘Then people will die, Casey.’

  Casey jumped at a sound behind her. She leaped to her feet and spun around. A man was watching her impassively.

  ‘Who will die?’ She didn’t take her eyes off the man. ‘You’re bluffing.’

  ‘I never bluff, Casey.’

  ‘Who? Hessa?’ Casey’s mind was frantic. She thought of Hessa, sleeping peaceably in that Lego house with its generous garden, its stylish appliances, its off-street parking for two cars. Magnolia walls, and blood spattering. ‘No, please … ’

  ‘I think you can guess.’

  And she knew, like missing the top stair and falling, falling, fallen. ‘Not Miranda. No. You can’t … You mustn’t. I—’

  ‘I can. And so I suggest, Casey, that you do precisely what I ask.’

  66

  It was the chauffeur, she realised. The man waiting patiently by the side of the pool. He had driven the Overfinch out to Njana. She had seen only his shoulders, his hands, the back of his head. His profile, as he asked: Chocolate? Peanuts? But it was him, she was sure of it. Tall and powerful, with gym-built shoulders. He had large, capable hands and moved fast. And now he was moving closer, just a few feet from her table.

  Casey could hear Bailey’s voice on the line, but it was as if he was talking in the far distance. She couldn’t make out the shape of the words any more.

  ‘You can explain to y
our team, but no one else,’ Bailey was saying. ‘And that’s only because your team will wonder, and because they will have to know what to say. But you don’t tell the Post news editors. You don’t tell anyone else at all.’

  The words wavered again, like a radio losing its signal. She could hear disconnected syllables, but the sentences made no sense. Until one word jerked her back.

  Miranda.

  ‘You can’t … ’ she muttered.

  ‘I can. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ Casey said quietly, not quite sure what she was agreeing with. ‘Yes.’

  The line went dead.

  Casey stared down at the phone in her hand. It was one of the old Nokias, she saw dreamily. A long battery life, but basic. No capacity to record.

  She looked up. The man was waiting for her, eyebrows raised. He nodded towards the steel stairs.

  ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Quickly.’

  The man stood beside her as she deleted all the photographs and all her notes. Then he picked up her laptop and searched it fast, his fingers quick over the keypad. He knew what he was doing, this man. Knew how to check.

  His eyes narrowed as he found her emails to Miranda.

  ‘Delete them.’ There was a heavy Shona accent to his voice. ‘And the emails in her account.’

  ‘But I can’t. I can’t access her email.’

  His face twisted into a smile. ‘I think that you can.’

  ‘I can’t. Not from here.’

  The movement was so casual that her eyes couldn’t process it. But now he was holding a gun, the muzzle pointing inexorably at her forehead.

  ‘I don’t want to shoot you, but if you don’t get rid of those emails, you will die.’ His voice was quite calm, as if explaining to a child. ‘And your friend, she will die too.’

  It was the nonchalance that convinced her. His eyes were steady, dispassionate. She knew, with certainty, that he would kill her.

  ‘No. Please. I’ll try.’

  The shock made her ungainly, her fingers sliding incompetently over the laptop keys.

  ‘Hurry up.’ The gun nudged closer. ‘Do it now.’

  It took her four attempts to get into Miranda’s email account, cursing under her breath each time the computer froze, rejecting her guesses. But finally she was in, and the man looked over her shoulder as she searched and deleted, searched and deleted.

  Miranda hadn’t checked her emails for hours, Casey saw, with a shudder of despair. She hadn’t read the emails Casey had sent the night before. And she always checked her emails. Always.

  When Casey had finished, the man took her laptop and her phone, checking all the caches, all the possible hiding places. It took time, but he didn’t hurry. Casey stood beside him, her mind filled with Hessa and Miranda. Finally he stood, holstering the handgun, still entirely relaxed.

  ‘The papers?’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘The papers.’

  Unwillingly, she pulled them out of her bag. He read them briefly, counted the number of pages, then stepped out on to the steel walkway, pulling a lighter out of his pocket.

  It took only a few minutes. The papers flared bright in the early sunlight, and crisped to a fragile grey ash that he dusted away with his fingers. Casey sat on the bed and watched through the open door as the cinders blew away on the morning breeze.

  ‘Now,’ he said. ‘I will go.’

  ‘But I thought … ’

  ‘No.’

  He left then. As if a spell had broken, Casey scrambled to her laptop, flicking it on and checking everything again and again. But there was nothing to be done. It was gone, all of it: everything she had worked for. He had been thorough, wiping everything, overwriting all the data, deleting not just her emails but her accounts too. Her phone had been wiped. Her laptop was encrypted, of course. Backed up in the cloud. But its security depended on her. She had never imagined that she might be sent in, her own electronic Trojan horse. Washing away her own footsteps, destroying her own proof. She burned with fury.

  Toby might be able to get it back, she thought desperately. Maybe. The Post’s data whizz, with all his recovery software: he might be able to perform some sort of wizardry.

  But then she remembered Dash, after the Naji story. When the emails about the marathon runner were faked, and everything got a bit blurry.

  Dash wouldn’t rely on some document Toby managed to extract from somewhere deep in some Internet hole, not for this. He would need proof, proper proof to go up against the might of Adsero. He would need the physical documents she had hunted down, risking everything. And now they were gone.

  Casey slumped against her pillows, exhausted for a moment.

  Hurry.

  She sat up, ringing Miranda – the only number she knew by heart – again and again.

  Call Dash: no.

  And just as she was about to scream, pick up the little Nokia and hurl it at the wall with a crunch of cheap plastic, the screen of the phone lit up.

  ‘Hello?’ Miranda’s voice was faint. ‘Casey?’

  ‘Where are you?’ Casey almost screamed.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Miranda sounded hazy, confused. ‘I’m in my car. I don’t know … ’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Miranda?’

  ‘I must have gone to sleep.’ Miranda was louder now, more like herself. ‘I’m near that house in Buckinghamshire. How odd.’

  Miranda had gone to keep an eye on Hessa, Casey realised with a thud. Unable to trust anyone else to look after her team. And that meant …

  Casey found that her eyes were wet. ‘You didn’t,’ she said. ‘You didn’t go to sleep.’

  ‘Well,’ Miranda said slowly, ‘What the hell happened then?’

  ‘They must have used some sort of anaesthetic drug,’ said Casey. ‘Knocked you out as you sat in your car. Adsero would be able to get hold of those, easily.’

  ‘What happened? Tell me quickly, Casey.’

  And because it was Miranda, and because she always demanded precision and a clear, dispassionate accuracy, Casey managed to find the words.

  ‘They must have tracked you down,’ said Casey. ‘God knows how. Knocked you out. And then injected you … ’

  ‘Injected me with what?’ Casey could hear the fear electric in Miranda’s voice.

  ‘It’s one of the samples,’ she said. ‘Bailey said it was one of the samples they took from the hospital in Harare.’

  67

  Casey hadn’t been able to speak as Bailey set out his demands. There had been a loud buzzing noise in her eardrums, a sense of having too much blood in her veins.

  But she had understood enough.

  A sample from St Agnes. An injection. Corax is the only thing that will cure it. Listen very carefully, Casey, or she will die, do you understand?

  She had stared blindly at the cream walls of the guest room.

  ‘Where do I get it? Where do I get the dose of Corax?’

  ‘I’ve got it here.’

  ‘Where is here?’

  ‘Cape Town. You can have it in a few days.’

  ‘A few days?’

  The Adsero plane, she had seen on her laptop, was down in Cape Town now. Garrick must have told him, she thought.

  ‘You have to go to Cape Town,’ Miranda was speaking again.

  ‘Go to a hospital, Miranda. Now.’

  ‘Why?’ Miranda almost laughed. ‘We know that none of the standard antibiotics will even begin to touch the sides of this bug.’

  ‘Oh, Miranda.’

  ‘It will be fine, Casey,’ Miranda insisted. ‘I feel fine right now. Just hurry, Casey.’

  ‘I will,’ Casey promised. ‘I’ll fly straight down to Cape Town now and I’ll be back in the UK before you know it.’

  ‘I’ll tell Hessa what’s happened.’

  ‘But don’t tell Dash. Promise me? I can’t bear—’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do when I get—’ Her mind felt
tangled, twisted, the knots tightening with every attempt to unravel. ‘They’ve deleted everything. Everything. Even my contacts.’

  ‘I’ll tell Delphine to meet you in Cape Town,’ said Miranda. ‘I’ll send you her number. She’ll help. And I’ll send you as many contacts as I can, so you can reboot your phone.’

  ‘Can we tell her what’s happened? Bailey said only the investigations team could know.’

  ‘She is investigations.’ Miranda sounded firm, more like herself. ‘And you can’t do this by yourself.’

  ‘Miranda—’

  ‘I’ll drive back to my house,’ Miranda said. They all knew how to isolate, after corona. ‘I’ll wait for you there.’

  ‘It could be a lie, Miranda. He may not have given you anything.’

  ‘Yes. It could all be nonsense.’

  ‘I’ll be as quick as I can.’

  ‘Great.’ Somehow, Miranda managed to sound chirpy. ‘I can’t wait to see you.’

  Casey waited at the airport. It felt safer. Once she was through security, she collapsed in one of the hard plastic seats and sank her head in her hands.

  It was gone. Everything was gone.

  She felt empty, weightless. What was the point in any of it?

  After a few minutes, she forced herself to sit up, checking her emails out of habit. Miranda had managed to send her her contacts list again, so she reloaded her phone. She glanced at her text messages without reading them, except one. Call me. MD.

  Exhaling, she rang the number. ‘Maurice? It’s Casey.’

  ‘Good evening, Miss Benedict.’ His voice sounded light-hearted, cool, jarring with her surroundings. He must be in the Bahamas, thought Casey, a few time zones behind Zimbabwe.

  ‘What’s up?’ She had to delve for the words, stumbling awkwardly.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ His voice sharpened.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Fine.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I just thought you would be interested.’ He brightened again. ‘You remember that company that bought the rights to Corax?’

  Casey tried to think. ‘Slopeside Inc.? The BVI company?’

  ‘Exactly. Well, I’ve just come across them again.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘That oil deal I went in on with Garrick McElroy? In central Africa.’