Want You Dead

by Peter James

He shook her. ‘Red? Red, my love, my angel. Are you okay? Please wake up, please. Please wake up! Don’t do this to me. I have so much planned for us! Really I do. Don’t be a bitch and deprive me, please, don’t do that! I have so much pain lined up for you! You hear me, you bitch? YOU HEAR ME?’

  He kissed her on the cheek. Smelled her hair. It smelled the way it always had when they were lovers. A faint scent of coconut. Lemongrass. He nuzzled his face in it. ‘Wake up, my darling, my angel, please wake up. I love you so much. Wake up! I love you! Wake up!’

  She lay limp, her eyes closed.

  He held her wrist, trying to take her pulse. But his heartbeat had gone crazy. He heard the roaring of his own blood in his ears. Felt the pulse through his body. His pulse. ‘Red!’ he said, urgently. ‘Wake up, my darling. Wake up! We have so much to talk about. Wake up, it’s me, Bryce. I love you. I love you so much! Sooooo damned much! Wake up!’

  Was he imagining it or was her body turning cold?

  ‘Red! Please don’t die on me! Don’t die on me until I’m ready. Don’t cheat me, please!’

  He tore at the straps restraining her, undoing them one at a time. ‘Red, oh Red, my darling, my angel, my beautiful. Come back to me. Come back to Bryce. Come back to me.’

  When her arms and legs were free, he began chest compressions.

  Still nothing.

  He gently pulled the duct tape from her mouth with shaky hands. Pressed his lips to hers and began the compressions again.

  Then felt an agonizing pain as she bit right through his lower lip. And jammed her fingers in his eyes, so hard she was starting to gouge them out.

  He screamed, momentarily blinded, thrashing at her with his hands.

  She bit harder. He tasted blood. He could see nothing. He squirmed, wriggled, but her fingers, nails sharp, kept pushing into his sockets. She was wriggling beneath him. Suddenly, he could no longer feel her.

  Silence.

  His eyes were in agony.

  He raised his fingers and felt fluid. Lights flashed all around him. Green, yellow, blue, orange, bright red.

  ‘Nooooooooo!’ he screamed. ‘Nooooooo, you fucking bitch!’ He clamped his hand over his left eye, which was stinging as if it had been sprayed with acid. All he could see through it were streaks of colour. He swung himself around in the darkness. ‘COME BACK! COME HERE, RED!’

  His head struck something hard. The roof of the van, he realized. He stared with his good eye at the roof light, which burned as bright as a laser and shot shards of brilliant white in all directions. ‘RED!’ he screamed. ‘RED!’

  He grabbed his crossbow off the front seat. Beside it lay the night-sight. He lifted that to his right eye, his good eye. And saw her.

  Running away.

  She was running across the field.

  He snapped off the day-sight and slipped on the night-sight. Now he could see her clearly, against a green landscape. He took careful aim. She was already quite a distance away. A good eighty yards, he estimated.

  Eighty yards was the distance he had practised on for Rottingdean church.

  Slowly, much more calmly than he felt inside, he brought the cross hairs of the sight down to the middle of her back. Then he squeezed the trigger.

  99

  Monday, 4 November

  Roy Grace stared at his watch, and cursed the damned budget cuts. Sussex Police, in line with all the nation’s other forty-two forces, was required to reduce its annual expenditure by twenty per cent. A government edict. One of the savings had been to lose the county’s combined police and air ambulance helicopter, Hotel 900, located at Shoreham Airport, which had the capability to be anywhere in the city of Brighton and Hove in under three minutes. Now with the advent of the National Police Air Service, the helicopter allocated to them, NPAS 15, was shared with Surrey, Kent and Hampshire, and located at Redhill. It took a minimum of fifteen minutes for the helicopter to reach Brighton – providing it was even available. Fortunately tonight it was.

  He sat at his allocated workstation in MIR-1 rather than return to his office, watching the time with growing frustration. The helicopter was still ten minutes away. There was no certainty that Bryce Laurent was in one of those farm buildings south of the Dyke Golf Club, but it was all they had to go on at this moment and it seemed probable to him. If Laurent had abducted Red Westwood, he would have needed to take her somewhere remote and isolated. This place looked suitable, and Laurent would have known it.

  Grace was thinking fast. The first priority was to locate the two of them. But the even greater priority was to get Red away from Laurent, unharmed. That was going to be harder. Grace had spoken with Silver, who wanted the helicopter to overfly the farm buildings where he had a feeling Bryce Laurent had taken Red Westwood, using its thermal-imaging camera to establish whether there was anyone in the buildings. He had requested it fly at as high an altitude as possible to try to avoid alerting Bryce Laurent. He was awaiting a call back.

  Then he turned to the forensic behavioural analyst, Dr Julius Proudfoot, who was at this moment rummaging for something inside his tan man-bag. He retrieved a bottle of First Defence nose drops and pulled off the cap.

  ‘So if we are right in our assumption that Laurent has seized Red Westwood and is holding her captive, what in your view is his next step going to be, Julius?’ Grace asked him.

  Proudfoot shot two squirts of drops up each of his nostrils, sniffed, then replaced the bottle in his bag. ‘Sorry,’ he said in an unusually nasally voice. ‘Got a cold coming on.’

  Instinctively, Grace leaned back a little, getting as far from the man’s breath as he could.

  Proudfoot placed his elbows on his workstation, steepled his pudgy fingers and stared over the tops of them at an empty chair on the other side of the workstation for some moments. ‘What I don’t like, Roy, is what we learned last Friday about Laurent’s cash withdrawals from his bank. Cleaning out his account. People only use cash these days when they want to be untraceable. So the first question I would ask is what reason does Laurent have for wanting to be untraceable?’

  ‘He’s committed murder and a number of arson attacks against Red Westwood, and her family, and wants to go to ground to evade arrest?’

  ‘He’s a game player. The cartoon of the parents’ sailing boat? He’s aloof and arrogant. In his own mind he is far too clever to get arrested. I don’t think it’s his next step we should be focusing on, Roy, we need to try to establish his endgame. That will give us all his steps.’

  ‘So what do you think his endgame is?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Killing Red Westwood, after he’s enjoyed himself torturing her mentally or physically – and possibly both – then either killing himself or disappearing. However, the fact that he has emptied his bank account indicates he has plans beyond avenging Red – to leave the UK for somewhere further afield, either under one of his identities or by creating an entirely new one.’

  ‘Torturing her first, you say?’

  ‘Oh yes. He’s been systematically destroying her world – setting fire to everything dear to her. He hasn’t gone to all this trouble to capture her just to kill her right away. He’s going to have his sport with her. He’ll be driven by his ego, wanting her to grovel, to apologize, probably to beg him to start over with her again. He will want absolute power over her.’

  ‘She’s smart,’ Roy Grace said. ‘I’m sure she’ll play whatever game she needs to. Even to the point of pretending she’ll take him back, if needs be.’

  ‘The problem is, I don’t think he’s going to accept her offering to take him back. My guess is that he actually won’t want her back now. She and her parents have humiliated him. I’ve seen the texts that Red and he exchanged. She was pretty loved up with him, and then turned overnight.’

  ‘She turned for a good reason,’ Grace said. ‘She found out everything about his past was a lie and that he had a history of violence.’

  ‘Yes, but he doesn’t see it that way, you can be sure. He’s not capab
le of accepting he’s done anything wrong. In his mind, he’s the injured party, and now he has her in his power. I can’t predict the outcome, but it’s not going to be good. The only positive is that you have a little time. Certainly some hours, and possibly a few days. He’s not going to kill her quickly, that’s for sure. He’s going to want to have his day in the sun with her first.’

  Grace looked at his watch again. Red Westwood would have met Laurent at the house in Tongdean Avenue around midday. More than six hours ago. The buildings near the Dyke golf course would have been a ten-minute drive, if he went straight there. Or maybe, to be safe, he might have waited somewhere until after dark. In which case he’d have been there not that long ago. If Proudfoot was right – and what he said made sense – whatever might be happening to the woman, she was still alive now. With luck.

  ‘Julius, if Bryce Laurent is where we think, with Red Westwood, and we surround him, what’s he likely to do?’

  ‘He has to win, there’s no other possible option for him. He would kill Red and then himself, and see that as a grand act of defiance against you.’ He sneezed into his hand, then hastily dug a handkerchief out of his pocket. As he did so, he sneezed again.

  ‘Bless you,’ Grace said. Then his phone rang. It was the duty Ops-1 Controller, Andy Kille. The helicopter was two minutes away from the target position.

  100

  Monday, 4 November

  She was running blind through starless darkness, unable to see a thing in front of her other than the weak glow of the lights of the city several miles away. The ground felt soft and claggy, the mud sticking to the soles of her court shoes, making them heavier with each step and trying to suck them free of her feet. She heard a constant crunching that sounded like she was running through corn stubble. Then she stumbled and fell forward, and something sharp lanced her cheek painfully.

  How far was Bryce behind her?

  In panic, she frantically scrambled back onto her feet, and stumbled on. She was trying as best she could to head well away from the cart track, and towards the orange glow of the lights of Brighton and Hove. Have to keep away from the track and the road, she thought. Run across the fields. Keep going across the fields. Keep going. Going.

  Then she slammed into something sharp and unyielding, and cried out in shock, feeling painful pricks in her knee, leg, stomach and hands. A barbed-wire fence, she realized.

  Overhead, she suddenly heard the thwock, thwock, thwock of an approaching helicopter. She looked up for an instant, gulping down air, and saw navigation lights high above her moving quickly through the sky. She began to climb over the fence, feeling gingerly with her hands for the barbs. Her skirt snagged, and she jerked hard, hearing the fabric rip; then she felt a pain in her right leg as it caught on something sharp. She stretched her left leg down to the ground on the far side, and part of the fencing collapsed. She fell sideways, and as she did, she heard a sharp, hissing swoosh sound, felt a rush of air past her right ear, then heard a thud a short distance ahead, like a rock being thrown.

  Or a missile of some kind.

  A chill rippled through her as she remembered something about Bryce. One of his hobbies was crossbow shooting. He’d won prizes, he told her, and one of his many unfulfilled promises to her had been to give her a lesson.

  Was he shooting at her now?

  From somewhere, maybe a movie she had seen, she remembered that it was harder to hit a zigzagging target. That made sense. She began to run on, changing direction every few paces. A short way ahead she saw headlights, growing brighter. She heard the roar of a car, driving fast. The lights passed in front of her and then she saw the red glow of tail lights. The main road, she realized. She veered to the right, stumbling on so that she would be parallel to it, not reaching it. Bryce had brought her in a van, and that could not get across the fields and especially not through a barbed-wire fence. But he could chase her along the road.

  Shit, shit, shit. She stumbled on, the mud heavier, her pace slowing despite her efforts as her shoes became as heavy as lead.

  Then she heard the thwock, thwock, thwock of the helicopter returning, sounding louder, lower. An instant later she was illuminated, for a brief second, by a blinding pool of light. ‘Go away!’ she screamed, waving her arms, gesticulating angrily. ‘Go away, you idiots!’

  The light swept over her, then momentarily lit up the ground ahead of her. A field full of a short green crop – some kind of cattle field, she could see. Then the light swept around in a brilliant, dazzling arc and came back towards her, the thwock, thwock, thwock almost deafeningly loud, and suddenly she was lit up again, like a diva on a stage. ‘Get away, you fucking idiots!’ she screamed. Then her foot caught in something, a rabbit hole, twisting agonizingly, and she fell flat on her face again.

  As she scrambled to her feet, panting and crying in terror, there was another thud, right by her face. And now in the light she could see the feathered steel crossbow bolt sticking out of the earth. She turned and looked over her shoulder, and saw two distant bright white headlight beams. And what looked like the shadow of a figure standing between them, legs apart.

  She stood still for a moment, watching. Mercifully the helicopter moved away, leaving her back in darkness. She watched the beam of its searchlight moving across the field, illuminating briefly the fence she had clambered over. Then it was right over the white van, brilliantly illuminating it and the figure in front of it, holding something. Bryce, holding his crossbow.

  She buried her face against the mud, bracing herself, waiting. It was harder to hit a target lying flat. She’d heard that or read that somewhere. An instant later she heard another thud, over to her right. Oh Jesus.

  What the hell was the helicopter doing?

  Then she saw it was circling above the white van.

  She stumbled on, her chest hurting, a painful stitch in her side. One of her shoes came off, but she didn’t care, she broke into a sprint, stifling a scream of pain as her stockinged right foot struck something hard and sharp; she kept on going, then stopped dead again as she struck another fence.

  No, please no. Ignoring the barbs, she scrambled over it, ran on a few paces, then her legs banged agonizingly into something solid, metallic, and she fell forward, her arms plunging into icy, foul-smelling water, her chin striking metal. A cattle trough, she realized.

  She looked back over her shoulder and saw the helicopter still hovering in the same place, in front of farm buildings, above the white van. Suddenly, it made a sharp movement to the right, and banked steeply, its beam travelling up the buildings’ walls. Then it banked even more steeply, and despite the danger she was in, she watched, mesmerized for an instant, as it started to climb, then suddenly began to drop, almost on its side now.

  Plunging sideways.

  Not right, surely not right?

  No, please God, no, she pleaded, silently.

  It was dropping faster, plunging sideways towards the ground.

  She stared, as the gap between the helicopter and the ground reduced, as if she was watching something unravelling in a nightmare. Then, suddenly, she heard a deep, hollow, metallic bang. Seconds later, the entire helicopter erupted into a massive ball of flame.

  This could not be happening. It could not be. She was shaking. This could not be happening. Please, no. No. No.

  In the halo of the flames she could see dense black smoke billowing before being swallowed into the darkness of the night. She stood, rooted to the spot, in utter, numb horror, feeling as if her innards had been scooped out. No one ran from the wreckage. Christ.

  What the hell had happened?

  But she knew exactly what must have happened.

  Then she saw a powerful flashlight beam glinting towards her.

  Tears streaming down her face, she turned and ran painfully on, gulping down air, and after a few paces, she lost her left shoe, also. But she was beyond caring. All she could see was the image of the plunging helicopter. The fireball. Light rain was starting to fall,
cooling her face. She stumbled on, heard distant sirens, her feet cold, almost numb, squelching through the mud, every few paces she yelped in pain as one or the other struck something sharp and hard.

  Then in the distance, ahead to her left, she saw strobing blue lights. Getting closer. An entire convoy of them hurtling down the road which was a good half a mile away. A succession of police cars.

  She altered her course, for a wild, crazy instant thinking she might be able to get there before they passed and flag them down.

  Then the ground disappeared beneath her. With a yelp of fear she fell several feet, into a wet ditch, her face slamming into the bank. She closed her eyes for a moment, wondering how much more she could take. But she had to go on, she knew. She could not let that brute win. She felt a sudden rage at him. How dare he, the bastard? How dare he do all he had done? How dare he set fire to her parents’ house? Her car?

  And suddenly, she was not afraid any more, she was just angry. Driven by a fury. She would get this bastard, pay him back somehow. Oh yes. He would pay for this.

  The rain was hardening. She didn’t care. She was in the middle of nowhere, several miles from the city, but she didn’t care. She heard the sirens wail past, but she didn’t care.

  You bastard.

  She hauled herself up the far side of the ditch. If only she had her phone, she thought, she would get some small amount of light from that. But it was back in the van somewhere.

  At least the police were on their way. They would get him. And then?

  He’d spend a few years in prison, before being released. To do what? Come after her again? Or find someone else to abuse and terrorize?

  She ran on, the rain hardening with every step she took, heading towards the main road now. She would flag down a police car when she got there.

  Shit, fuck, shit!

  She had run into a gorse bush.

  Almost beyond feeling pain now, she backed away, then walked slowly forward. Only a short distance in front of her now she saw headlights moving from left to right.