by Carys Jones
‘Don’t turn this into something which is you against him,’ Amanda threatened. ‘I can’t go back and change things, Shane. Neither of us can. We can only move forwards. And unless we accept that we’ll just be stuck in the past forever.’ She climbed out of the car and slammed the door. Then she remembered herself.
Amanda fearfully bent her knees and crouched beside the car, searching the gentle stirring in the woods for something more sinister like a footstep. Or a gunshot. But all she heard was the soft melancholy chorus of distant birds and the rustle of wet leaves.
‘Okay, well, this is it,’ Shane climbed out of the car and joined her, keeping his voice low as he peered into the woodlands close by. ‘This is where I parked up and waited. Our rendezvous point. The house is a half-mile straight through there.’ He pointed at the tightly packed tree trunks. They gathered together like nature’s army, blocking the way up to McAllister’s fortress.
‘Okay then, let’s go.’ Amanda waited for her feet to obey her but they remained in the mud beside the car, sinking.
‘Is this safe?’ Shane placed a hand on her back and angled his body to shield her from the treeline. ‘What if we’ve just walked into some kind of trap?’
‘I’ve pulled myself out of a trap before.’ Amanda drew in a deep breath, tasting the damp earth, and straightened. Her heart started to keep a nervous beat. ‘We just need to keep quiet, that’s all.’ She pulled up the hood on her khaki coat, doing her best to blend into the foliage around her.
Both she and Shane wore green. Green coats, green combat trousers. Short of smearing mud across her cheeks Amanda hoped she’d done enough to be able to slip through the woods unseen. She reached the treeline and pressed on. The rain lingered in a heavy mist but Amanda was grateful for its presence. It meant that the ground was soft, that her steps fell on damp leaves and wet mud, muffling the sound.
The woods were beautiful, even in the strained light of a wet afternoon. Tall trees stretched up towards the grey sky, their twisted branches threading together like withered arms. Green leaves fluttered and fanned out overhead so that each tree wore a glorious mane. The leaves flooded the woodlands with colour, pushing back the bleakness of the slate sky.
Amanda crept forward, keeping her body low. Her pockets were stuffed full of the little digital cameras, each waiting to be hidden away within the woods. The silence was unnerving. The deeper Amanda ventured, the more it felt like she was entering a vacuum of sound. There was no distant hum of traffic, no rumble from a plane passing by overhead. She felt like she was standing in a different world, in her own personal piece of Middle Earth.
‘Hey.’ Even though Shane whispered, the sound startled Amanda like it were a yell. She bristled and searched the nearby trees for him. He was crouched beside a grand oak, gesturing at something in front of him. Amanda hurried over. ‘This looks like a track, doesn’t it?’
It certainly did. Amanda ran her eyes along the rugged mud track which swept through the trees in a perfect curve before turning and disappearing from view.
‘Yes, this must be it,’ she fumbled in her pocket for her first camera. She wedged it in the hollow of a nearby tree which overlooked the track. Its black eye blended seamlessly into the shadows within the darkened trunk. ‘I need to plant some more.’ She scurried along the track. Though she didn’t walk on it directly, she lingered at its edges. She knew better than to leave obvious footprints for McAllister to find – a little trail of breadcrumbs for him to follow.
‘What happens after?’ Shane was watching her balance a camera on a fallen tree and then cover it in a carpet of leaves.
‘After?’
‘After you’ve… you know… ended McAllister?’
‘We go home.’
‘I’m thinking closer to the event.’ He nudged the fallen tree with the tip of his boot. ‘What happens to the cameras? They’re covered in your fingerprints, linked to your computer. If you leave them here you might as well plant a sign saying, “It was me. I was here.”’
Amanda instantly ceased touching the camera, holding up her hands as if the object had just bitten her. ‘Crap.’
‘So what was your plan?’ Shane pressed.
‘Dammit.’ Amanda felt the weight of the other six cameras in her pocket. She’d only planted two so far.
‘Forgive me for thinking like a cop but we need to be pragmatic about this.’
‘Yes,’ Amanda was nodding, feeling numb. ‘Yes we do.’
Her hands had been all over the tree. All over the cameras. And her footprints, they traced an uneven route all the way back to Shane’s car.
‘Shit.’ Her knees dipped into the mud and she cradled her head with her hands. ‘I wasn’t thinking. I was just so focused on finding him and—’
‘Two cameras, that’s it?’ Shane began to rub his hand in circles across her back.
‘So far.’
‘Two. That will have to do.’
Yes, but—’
‘I can find two. When we come back, two is a reasonable number for me to retrieve. No more.’
‘But our fingerprints? And footprints?’ Amanda lowered her hands and looked at them as if she no longer recognised them as her own. As if they’d betrayed her.
‘The rain will take care of that,’ Shane tilted his chin towards the sky. The darkening clouds hinted that the mist would soon intensify. ‘This time we’ve been lucky.’ He helped Amanda onto her feet and dusted off her knees. ‘Next time we need to be smarter, more prepared. You need to wear gloves. Your hair has to be under a hat. Wear shoes several sizes larger than what you usually wear.’
‘Right,’ Amanda was nodding as she tried to create a mental checklist for herself.
‘I slipped up today.’ Shane hung his head as his cheeks reddened.
‘What, no, this was me.’ Amanda reached for him and traced his jawline with her fingertips. ‘I was too eager to trace the damn jogging route. I wasn’t thinking straight, I’m sleep-deprived and—’
‘You’re clouding my judgement.’ Shane gently lowered her hands away from his face. ‘This… this thing between us. Whatever it is, it’s messing with my head. I’m getting jealous and being impulsively reckless and if I keep this up I’m going to get us both killed.’
‘This thing between us,’ Amanda laced her hands around his waist, drawing him to her, ‘is what’s keeping me glued together. Without you I’d have fallen apart long ago.’
‘Amanda—’
‘Without you I’d just become a ghost. I’d allow myself to disappear. You give me something to fight for. A future to hope for.’
‘What about Ewan? Isn’t he future enough?’
‘You’re what makes the future bright.’ Amanda grazed the cold tip of her nose against Shane’s. His green eyes glistened as they held her in place. ‘I want Ewan to be safe. I want him to have a home, to be able to grow up into a man. ‘But you,’ Amanda leaned in close so that their hearts were beating just inches apart, ‘you’re the light outside on the porch that always leads me back home. I need you, Shane.
‘If he’d never left?’ Shane’s hands were on the small of her back, holding her against him. ‘If he’d always been the man he’d said he was?’
‘I refuse to live in the past.’ Amanda wished there was a map she could follow back to simpler times, back to when they had sand beneath their feet rather than mud. But she couldn’t go back. There was only the present and what lay beyond it. ‘I can give you my future, isn’t that enough?’
‘Yes,’ Shane kissed her, his hands feeling their way up her back and getting tangled up in her hair. ‘Yes,’ he declared breathlessly when they parted, ‘that’s enough.’
As they retraced their steps back to the car, Amanda wondered just how much of a future she had to offer Shane. Were there decades stretching out before them or mere days? Maybe even just a few hours? Everything would be decided the next time Amanda ventured back into the woods.
26
Amanda drummed her finger
tips against her temple. Her head was bowed as Shane frantically paced around the hotel room.
‘You just can’t do this,’ he lamented for the fourth time, throwing his hands up towards the ceiling.
During the drive back into the city he’d changed. There had been an hour of stony silence and when that broke Shane was no longer Amanda’s ally. She had no idea what sort of thoughts had hounded him as they drove away from the woods but he was suddenly resolute that they abandon their plans.
‘It’s too risky. Even… even if you pull it off. If you pull it off, Amanda. And it’s a big if. You’re going to get caught.’
‘I’m not.’ Amanda kept tapping her fingers, trying to drown out the worst of her own thoughts which echoed Shane’s feelings.
‘There will be something that will link you back to the murder. No crime is perfect. People always get caught.’
‘Not always.’
‘Amanda!’ His face twisted with frustration as he said her name. ‘I’m telling you that you can’t do this. I won’t let you. If you kill the bastard or not, you go into those woods and I’m losing you either way. He’ll kill you or you’ll get caught and locked up. I’m ending this madness. Now.’
‘How will I get caught?’ Amanda kept her voice level as she lowered her hands and raised her head.
‘What?’
‘Tell me, and be specific, how will I get caught?’
‘The gun,’ Shane gestured wildly at her, disgruntled.
Amanda pursed her lips, pretending to mull it over. ‘You mean the gun I bought in an untraceable transaction?’
‘Nothing is untraceable.’
‘This is. Trust me. You know your world and I know mine. The darknet is completely safe in these circumstances. There are entire police divisions who are tasked with trying to crack into it and expose its secrets and they are failing woefully. It’s a digital fortress. I bought the gun in an untraceable transaction with bitcoin that cannot be connected to me. I’ve always worn gloves when handling the gun. When I’m done with it I’ll throw it into the sea. If it should somehow surface on a coastline somewhere it will just be an unregistered gun, devoid of prints. A red herring not worth pursuing.’
‘Your DNA. In the woods.’
‘Circumstantial evidence at best.’ Amanda kept her voice firm, behaving like she was already on trial. ‘Like you say, the rain will have washed most of it away. What remained could be explained away – maybe we went hiking together. But no one is going to be looking for my DNA. I’m not stored on some criminal database somewhere.’
‘How do you know they won’t look for your DNA?’
‘Because we’re in Vegas, remember?’ Amanda smiled sweetly at him. She reached for her laptop and turned it towards him. ‘I’ve been Photoshopping a load of pictures of us at all the sites there just in case we need to rely on it as an alibi. And it’s a solid alibi, Shane. I hacked the airline, the hotel, booking us in, making us seem to physically exist over there.’
‘People have seen you. Here.’
‘No one can really trust their memory when it comes to getting a glimpse of a stranger. I’m just a tall blonde who was seen with McAllister. I could have been any number of girls.’
‘His men know who you are.’
‘And do you think that their records are so squeaky clean that they’ll go running to the police when they find their boss dead in the woods? Good men don’t end up working for a guy like McAllister.’
Something about her last statement caused Amanda’s confident mask to slip. She coughed against the grief which had suddenly been set free and was trying to claw its way up her throat.
Will had worked for McAllister. He’d been a good man who made bad choices. He let the world around him become an anchor which held him down.
‘I know you think you’ve got it all figured out.’ Shane dropped onto the bed beside her and pushed the laptop back towards the mound of pillows at the headboard. His voice was softer now, his cheeks paler than usual as the blood drained out of them. ‘But Amanda, there is going to be something you’ve missed. There always is in these sorts of cases. We need to stop this before it goes too far, before you do something you can’t come back from.’
‘Do you know how I feel when I think of McAllister?’
‘I know you’re hurt and—’
‘Fire.’ Amanda interrupted. ‘Everything turns to fire. All my insides liquefy with my fury and I’m just this bubbling mass of hellfire. Feeling that way – it’s corroding me slowly like I’m some wreck resting on the bottom of the ocean. I need to end McAllister. To save myself. To save all those other girls on his damned list. With the puppet master gone we can all be free.’
‘That freedom will have a price, Amanda.’ There were shadows in the depths of Shane’s green eyes which spoke of all the cases he’d worked, all the murders he’d helped solve.
‘It always does.’ Amanda drifted away from him to retrieve her laptop. ‘But it’s a price I’m willing to pay.’
*
It was four in the morning and outside it was just starting to get light. The black cloak of night was beginning to weaken to a threadbare grey. Amanda hadn’t slept. She’d tossed and turned beneath the covers, letting her mind race like a hamster on a wheel. When she was certain that Shane was lost to his dreams she got up and went to her laptop. She triple-checked all the Las Vegas information. It was there on the screen in black and white, a room booked in a luxurious hotel where she and Shane had stayed for two weeks. Tomorrow they would be checking out. And not just in Vegas.
The Glasgow hotel was booked under a false name. She’d tampered with the CCTV to remove any fleeting trace of her and Shane. Just like in Vegas the room was theirs for one more night. Then Amanda had to return home. Either in a body bag or on her own two feet, she’d be going back.
Amanda checked the details of her bogus flight home from Vegas. She set up the code which would tell the flight crew that she and Shane were checked in. She’d scramble all the seating records just as she had on the outbound flight to ensure that her absence went unnoticed. It was an airtight plan. One she’d learned from Turtle82.
She dragged her finger along the mouse pad and opened up her messages. There was no more word from Turtle. Did they still assume her dead and that was why they’d gone silent? Amanda frowned at the screen. There was a time when she loved the anonymity being online gave her. She could be anybody and nobody, a ghost drifting through the virtual world. But things were shifting in her life. She needed to be more present. More real.
Shane moaned in his sleep and rolled onto his side. For a half second, out of the corner of her eye, Amanda thought she saw a mass of dark hair flecked with silver resting on the pillow. She turned too sharply, caused her left shoulder to throb painfully. It was most definitely Shane bundled up beneath the sheet.
Amanda closed her eyes, allowing her mind to the place where it was so often forbidden to go. She thought of the wooded hillside on which Will had died. How he’d dropped to the ground, a toppled giant. She’d held him as the light left his eyes. Where was he now? McAllister had to have found him along with his dead men. Then what did he do with the body? There had been no reports of bodies washing up on a beach. Wherever McAllister had taken Will, Amanda knew that he wouldn’t be easily found.
‘Jeez, Amanda.’ Shane was sitting up, running his hands down his face. ‘You really need to get some sleep.’
‘I did sleep, a bit.’
The lie seemed to satisfy Shane as he leaned in towards her. ‘Good.’ He gently kissed her shoulder. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Waiting.’
‘Waiting for what?’
Amanda tapped a button on her laptop and dual images popped up side by side, filling the screen. It was so dark it was difficult to discern anything in them. But gradually details presented themselves, like the tall silhouette of a nearby tree.
‘You’re watching the camera feed?’
‘Uh-huh. They went off a few
times in the night with badgers and foxes, but I’ve logged in for a live feed since it’s nearly dawn.’
Just as it was beyond the hotel window, the sky in the camera feed began to lighten, slowly exposing the woodlands in various soft shades of grey.
‘If he doesn’t come?’
‘He’ll come.’ Amanda had to believe that at any second McAllister would come running past one of her cameras. She’d staked too much on this one plan for it to fail.
‘Just don’t pin all your hopes on it, okay?’
Too late.
‘Okay.’
*
Half four came and Shane went to shower. Amanda listened to the distant hiss of the hot water and kept watching her live camera feed, kept scrutinising all the shadows.
Five a.m. The sun was a burning orb on the horizon. The leaves had their colour returned to them as golden light poured through the trees. Amanda sat rigidly on the bed, feeling despair welling up within her with each passing minute.
Five fifteen.
Shane was out of the shower, towel drying his hair at the end of the bed and asking Amanda something, but she didn’t hear him. On the left of the screen there was movement. She held a breath, staring at her laptop as Gregg McAllister jogged into view. He wore dark grey joggers and a white T-shirt. His hair was slicked back and glistened like it was damp. He powered past the first camera, a quick blur of fabric and designer trainers. Then he was gone.
Amanda’s eyes were on stalks as she stared at the other half of her screen. A moment dragged out, unbearable in length. This camera offered a better vantage point, looking directly down the jogging trail from its perch in the hollowed-out tree.
He appeared at the end of the trail as silent as a ghoul and began pacing towards the camera, his arms powering back and forth at his sides. His Glasgow smile was embedded deep into his cheeks. Amanda shuddered when she looked at his face. She could still see the wicked glint in his eyes as he pushed her over the cliff to her doom. Her hands started to shake against the laptop. They clattered noisily against the keyboard.