The Choice: An absolutely gripping crime thriller you won’t be able to put down

by Jake Cross

  Karl saw a red Varsity jacket with white arms smeared with blood. He put a hand on his chest, an attempt to shield the sound of his thudding heart which he was sure the guy would hear. Beside him, Liz wasn’t even looking, oblivious to the world and their final few seconds in it.

  He had a horrible thought: she was closest to the guy in the Varsity jacket. He would grab her first, because she was the target, and Karl could escape the other way. The idea made him feel like a weak little boy, and he hated himself for it.

  But the guy didn’t come any further. Didn’t slide five inches lower down the bank, or even lean forward, which was all he needed to do. Instead, he dragged himself to his feet, and turned. One step, then another. Until Karl couldn’t see him any more.

  Karl let out the breath he’d been holding, slowly, and took an even slower breath back in.

  Wood creaked inches above him. The guy was on the bridge. Karl looked up. The gaps between the deck boards were large, an inch or more, and he saw two black shapes above his head: the guy’s feet.

  Silence. No movement. Was he reconsidering coming down?

  ‘On top of a pile of gold, sure,’ the guy said a few seconds later. It took Karl a moment to realise that he was on the phone.

  Thirty-Six

  Brad

  Typical Mick, straight to the point. No hello, no Hi Brad, my old pal, just: This is where you tell me they’re tied up and waiting for me, right? So he got Brad’s sarcastic response. Then Mick said: ‘Pray tell me, how did you fuck this one up?’

  He had lied about how she’d escaped the first time because he hadn’t wanted to admit that someone half his size had fought him off. He lied again now for the same reason. ‘Because someone told me they were underground and sent me on a wild goose chase. They weren’t where you said, Mick. Fucking underground train station. I found the bar, but they weren’t there.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘The bar. The station. Where you sent me. Where else?’

  ‘They’ve gotta be there, Brad. I checked maps. That bar blocks the tunnel. It’s all collapsed beyond that station. There’s no way past.’

  ‘Well, they weren’t there. Maybe there’s a fork or something they took.’

  ‘There’s a fork, sure, but it’s a dead end. You took too long, Brad. They must have got out. But don’t go worrying your little head about it. I have a plan. I just killed Król.’

  That hit Brad like a smack around the head. ‘So Król was next. Who’s after him? Are you doing this alphabetically? Can’t wait until you reach S for Smithfield.’

  ‘Oh, now I get it. You think I’m on some killing rampage? He had surveillance tapes on us, Brad. All three of us. And he was going to spread them around. Well, that just wouldn’t do, would it? So, I just killed him in Seabury’s shop. But it’s part of a great plan. The cottage thing is in all the papers, Brad, and now that you’ve let her escape again, it’s only a matter of time before she knows her guy’s dead. Then she goes to the police, her and Seabury together. But first he makes a stop. If you can’t find them in the next hour or so, I get to them my way.’

  Brad didn’t mention the newspaper in the kitchen with its big, glossy picture of her dead husband on the cover. She must have seen it. He focused on something else Mick had said. ‘What stop?’

  ‘If I was Seabury, on the run, I’d want to talk to my wife. He probably left home this morning thinking he was going to have a normal day. Now look. So, he’ll need to see her again. That’s where he’ll go before he goes to a cop shop. Home. So, we get to Seabury by getting to his wife. Want to hear my great plan?’

  Now Mick was going to put other innocents in the blast zone? Brad knew he wasn’t going to like what Mick said next, and what he heard made him shake his head. ‘That’s nuts, Mick.’

  ‘Yeah? How? Point out a flaw, if you can.’

  ‘It won’t stack up to a police investigation, Mick, you know that.’

  ‘Doesn’t have to, Brad. Same as Ramirez. It doesn’t have to stop the traffic, just detour it. It just has to buy time. Enough time to get me close to Seabury and the bitch.’

  ‘How about the afterwards part, Mick? You can’t get away with it.’

  ‘Brad, my friend, you think I care about that? I’ll be in Germany. So, don’t you worry about me. You’ll have your name on a ladyboy bar for the world to trace, but not me. I’ll be a ghost. If you want to worry, do it about that fool Dave who thinks he can just live here as normal for the rest of his life. But if you think I need help get out there and find that pair. You’ve got an hour or so. Call me.’

  He hung up and stared into the trees. An hour? To search the woods? Futile, even if they hadn’t already got out the other side and found help. He wasn’t going to waste his time.

  He slotted the phone away and wiped blood off his face. It had sounded a lot like Mick was saying he didn’t care if he got out of this safely. As if getting to Grafton’s wife was all that mattered.

  It wasn’t all that mattered to Brad, though.

  Thirty-Seven

  Karl

  Karl heard Varsity’s footsteps leaving but didn’t dare move. He looked at Liz. She still had her head resting on her forearms, but she seemed more energised now, as if coming back to reality. Her upper body inflated and deflated with each massive breath she took.

  ‘He’s gone,’ he whispered. ‘But we should wait ten minutes, in case he’s still nearby.’

  She didn’t look up.

  ‘Then we’ll get to a phone. We need the police now.’ And Katie. Katie first, always. But he wasn’t about to say that.

  Thirty-Eight

  Katie

  Katie promised herself fifteen minutes, and didn’t want to panic, so fifteen it was. Exactly. As the second hand hit the ten, she hit redial. Fifteen minutes ago, no answer. Now, no answer again. Karl had been ten minutes away from the shop almost an hour and a half ago. She hung up and looked out of the window in case Karl was pulling up outside. But she wasn’t just looking for Karl out there.

  She didn’t want to admit it to herself, but it was true: Karl had her worried. He should have called by now, or been here, and he hadn’t and wasn’t. So, against better judgement and her normal optimism, she scanned the street for strange men.

  ‘Karl, you arsehole,’ she mumbled into the glass, and then turned away to grab the phone again. She took it upstairs, hardly able to believe what she was about to do. Go upstairs to pack a bag.

  In the bedroom, she dialled, one hand clutching the phone, and one hand hauling clothing out of the drawers. She still couldn’t believe she was doing this.

  ‘Police, please,’ she answered the operator. Suddenly she felt daft. Karl wasn’t a missing child, and he hadn’t been gone for days. She would tell them what he’d told her, but maybe all they would hear was a wife complaining that her husband had gone to work and she hadn’t heard from him for an hour. They might tell her to simply wait. They might tell her not to waste their time.

  But she wouldn’t get in trouble for a false alarm.

  So, when the operator passed her to an emergency control centre, she told her tale. And with that done, she relaxed somewhat. She stopped dragging clothing out of the drawers. She stopped pacing the room. The police were involved now, so everything would be okay. She would wait, and she would do it right here. She would not run from her own house.

  Thirty-Nine

  Karl

  For a long time they just sat there under the bridge. Waiting felt wrong because he was wracked with worry about Katie, about their little unborn. How was she reacting to the fact that he hadn’t called or returned home? What was she doing? Was she panicking? Were the bad men right now making their way to Karl’s house to get her? But the part of him that wanted to go running for her was beaten back by a practical voice: Varsity seemed to have gone, but he could still be out there, close, searching. He prayed that the world had stopped while they’d been stuck underground.

  His paranoia and urge to run ma
nifested itself in jittery movements, which, he realised, Liz had been aware of when she said: ‘Just wait a little longer.’ But she didn’t look up and her voice was dull. He wondered if she was picturing how things had gone down in the cottage after she’d run. All she had was a pair of words in a newspaper: THREE SLAUGHTERED.

  ‘We need to go. I need to find a phone as quick as possible.’

  ‘I hope she’s okay,’ Liz said, and then her head came up. Clear streaks through the dirt on her face showed she had been crying. But in those eyes now was a new firmness, as if the tears had sluiced away all sorrow. Maybe a new resolve was developing now that her husband, her protector, was gone.

  ‘She will—’ he started, and stopped when he heard a noise. A car engine.

  ‘Liz, wait,’ he said as she scrambled quickly out from under the bridge. Before he could grab her and pull her back, he heard a dog bark nearby.

  She climbed the bank and vanished. Karl followed, if only because he didn’t want to be stuck here if they had to run. Liz was running towards the fence. He noticed that another vehicle had pulled up behind the truck.

  He was too late to grab her, and she slipped through the gap, onto the street, and moved towards the new vehicle, a VW Caddy van with ‘Anderson Kitchens’ written on the side.

  There was a guy in paint-smeared utility trousers and a jumper at the open back door. At his feet was a dog that bolted towards Liz as she approached. Karl relaxed as he realised this guy wasn’t one of those hunting him, just a nobody bringing his dog to the scrubland for exercise.

  What happened next occurred with such speed that Karl found himself caught up in it before he could think. A third vehicle was coming down the road. Liz snatched a ball from the dog’s mouth and lobbed it. Hard, high. It sailed over the van and bounced in the middle of the road, and the dog went bounding after it. The driver of the van realised, screamed for the mutt to stop, and chased after it as it ran towards the oncoming third vehicle.

  ‘I can’t drive,’ Liz said as she snatched open the van’s passenger door.

  Karl realised her plan right then, because he heard the van’s engine still running.

  * * *

  Thirty seconds later, they were fleeing in a stolen vehicle. He tackled a number of corners, found the main road, and lost the Caddy in heavy traffic. Only then, as he finally took a breath, did he notice a mobile phone mount on the dashboard. With a mobile phone.

  He took deep breaths while the landline rang. He needed to adopt a calm tone when Katie answered so she wouldn’t worry. He needed to pretend that all was fine. He had left the shop with Liz, he would say – no mention of psychos chasing them along abandoned subterranean tunnels. He was waiting to call the police, he would say – no mention of hiding under a bridge while killers sniffed out their trail. But he had to insist that she got out of the house. He would get to a nearby supermarket, or somewhere else loaded with people, and arrange to meet her there, and then they’d head to her dad’s house in Harrow. There, among his potted plants and sagging bookcases, they would greet the police and end this infernal chapter of their lives.

  From an unknown number, but there was a degree of hope in the voice that answered:

  ‘Karl?’

  ‘It’s me, baby,’ he said, a lump in his throat.

  But not just hope, he realised. Distress, too.

  ‘Oh God, Karl, what’s going on? They’re here, they want you—’

  And then her voice went dead, and there was a sound like someone snatching the phone. The mobile made a protest-like series of beeps as his fist tightened around it. The next voice he heard was that of a croaky male, and it said: ‘Seabury, you’re a hard man to find…’

  Forty

  Cooper

  DC Cooper was knocking doors for information near Tile Kiln Lane when he got the call from Mac.

  ‘I just got word about an informant of mine,’ the DCI said. ‘He’s up to something. I’m going to go see him, but not alone. You okay there doing the door-to-door?’

  Of course not. He’d recently transferred from working robberies in West London under a supervisor who hated him, and this was his chance to impress the new guy holding his career in his hands. And he was trying to make up for his slip: brand new and none the wiser, he’d asked the DCI if he had a family. It had been a month since he’d broken that cardinal rule of the office, but he still gave him funny looks.

  So, he took the offer, noted the postcode, and got out of there, leaving an old lady to answer her door to no one.

  Forty-One

  Mick

  At exactly the same time that the old lady was cursing kids for knocking on her door, Mick was feeling as if his heart had stopped. He reached into his pocket for a mint, but the matchbox wasn’t there.

  He pulled the car to the side of the road, ignoring horns from other drivers, and ran his fingers around the footwell. Not there. He clenched his already-throbbing jaw.

  The shop. When he’d pulled out his gloves in order to erase the Król problem, he must have dropped the matchbox of mints. With his DNA all over it. Right there at the crime scene. The one he’d just sent a murder detective to.

  Traffic horns played another symphony as Mick slipped back into traffic. He opened the glovebox, just to check his gun was still there. Because he’d need that if the cops got to the scene before him.

  Forty-Two

  Cooper

  The postcode from Mac belonged to a shop in Old Ford on a dead-end commercial unit. An electronics/security outlet called Sunrise Electronics. Mac’s car wasn’t there yet. Cooper pulled in front of a plain white panel van and immediately noted Sunrise’s part-risen shutter.

  It set off an alarm bell but he knew better than to go in alone. Some of Mac’s informants were animals, and he didn’t want to get fucked up. But that open shutter was inviting…

  No. The brass were obsessive over red tape and those guys were scarier and more dangerous than any criminal out there. So, he was going to sit right here and wait for Mac.

  Forty-Three

  Mick

  Mick slowed down as he reached the commercial unit. The pain in his jaw seemed to vanish in a flash. He could be in and out, damning evidence back in his pocket, within half a minute. He shut the glove box – he wouldn’t need the gun.

  He opened the glove box a second later, though. As he turned into the commercial unit, he saw a car parked behind Seabury’s white van.

  ‘Fuck.’ The panic and the pain returned with dizzying speed. He was too late.

  Forty-Four

  Cooper

  Mac parked behind Cooper’s vehicle and got out.

  ‘How do you want to do this, Boss?’ Cooper asked as he shook McDevitt’s hand. He hoped he’d done the right thing by waiting for the DCI to turn up, but he couldn’t yet tell.

  ‘Just be careful around this guy,’ Mac said. ‘His nickname’s Król, so call him that. Keep your distance. Violent thug. Totally unpredictable.’

  They went in, the DCI first, and Król was in there waiting for them. And they kept their distance. But not because he was a violent thug. Because he was dead.

  ‘Know anyone who’d want to do this to him?’ Cooper asked.

  ‘Half of London.’

  The DCI was looking around the floor: Cooper understood: not seeking evidence, but to avoid looking at his slaughtered informant. Cops often felt at fault when people under their protection got hurt.

  ‘Maybe three-quarters,’ Mac continued. ‘Call the boys down here. The Yard doesn’t pay two mill a year to snitches just to let them get murdered.’

  ‘You want this one?’ Cooper said. ‘We’ve already got our hands full. We should pass it to—’

  He stopped when Mac gave him a stern look that made Cooper decide he’d second-guessed a superior for the very last time. Ever. He cursed himself for trying to challenge the DCI.

  ‘That’s my informant right there. That’s my reputation lying dead there if I don’t get the bastard responsible.’


  Cooper understood but had to bite his tongue. Literally. Operation Nook was only half a day old and looked like it was going to be long and drawn-out. Scope of motive was massive because there were three victims and because of who Grafton had been, and his hardened criminal enemies weren’t eager to talk to the police even to help eliminate themselves from the enquiry. Two large roundabouts close to Tile Kiln Lane, as well as a nearby restaurant with a two-for-one deal and a late-night amateur rugby match meant they’d barely scratched the surface when it came to tracing witnesses and vehicles in the vicinity of the crime scene. Grafton’s wife was still missing, possibly kidnapped. The post-mortems had been performed but hadn’t added much to the story told by the crime scene itself. The crime lab in Abingdon was only just beginning work on what it had been sent, and Grafton’s home was still being searched. And then there were two other ongoing murder cases that the team had to deal with. So, Cooper didn’t think they could spare the time on this one. Not for a low-life criminal who’d probably had it coming for years.

  But he wasn’t the boss. McDevitt was. Mac was the guy who could send him on a mundane task in 3 a.m. rain; so, Cooper hauled out his mobile and called the HAT phone.

  At the same time, Mac called his boss, Superintendent Archer, who ran the four Murder Investigation Teams covering South London. As he dialled, he walked past the body, careful to avoid the blood. He left an abrupt message: ‘Just called to a scene, found one of my informants dead, will keep you abreast.’