Kill A Stranger: the twisting new thriller from the number one bestseller

by Kernick, Simon

  Bide your time, I repeated to myself as I was led slowly through the building, down a corridor, through a door and then up half a dozen steps onto what felt from the sound it was making beneath my feet like some sort of wooden stage.

  They brought me to a halt and turned me round so I was facing the other way. The man on the left moved away for a few seconds before returning and slipping something over my head.

  I was still telling myself to stay calm. That there would be a way out of this. Right until the moment the rope tightened around my throat.

  Which was when I realised it was a noose.

  3

  Matt

  The woman lying dead in the bed that I shared with my fiancée was young. Early thirties, with dark brown hair tied into a ponytail, and still wearing a pair of black-framed glasses. Her clothes were ordinary. A dark blue puffa jacket, jeans, black trainers. She was lying on her front with her head angled sideways and her arms down by her sides. It was clear that she’d been placed in that position and then covered with the sheets.

  It looked like her throat had been roughly cut. From the depth and width of the wound, it could only have been caused by a large knife. Semi-dried blood had leaked onto her collar and jacket, and a large pool had formed on the sheets round the upper half of her body. There were splatter marks all over the duvet cover and the headboard, as if she’d been standing facing the bed when the attack had happened.

  I couldn’t bear to look at her for more than a second at a time . . . yet my eyes were drawn to her like magnets. I was shocked; I was confused; but I also felt a guilty sense of relief that it wasn’t my fiancée lying there.

  But this left its own mystery. Where was Kate?

  I looked round the room. There was no sign of any kind of struggle. Everything was as it should have been. The book she’d been reading – a thriller with an attractive but hard-looking woman on the front cover – was open face-down on the bedside table, next to a half-drunk glass of water that would definitely have been upended in a fight.

  But I was certain she wouldn’t have gone out alone at this time of night either. We had two rental cars, and hers – a white Audi A3 – had been parked outside when I’d got home. Even so, I switched out the light and walked to the window, pulling back the curtain and looking out across the field that ran along the side of the house. There was no one there. The field was waterlogged from all the rain of the last few days, making it close to impassable. I opened the window and poked my head out so I could see into the back garden, just in case she’d decided – which would be completely out of character – to take a wander in the middle of the night. She hadn’t.

  I was pulling my head back in when I spotted something through the trees lining the end of the field. It was an unfamiliar parked car. I couldn’t see the make or the colour, but it was the first time I’d seen a car in that spot in the six days we’d been in this cottage.

  I closed the window and switched the light back on, deliberately turning away from the woman’s body. I didn’t want to look at her as I paced the room, trying to figure out what on earth was going on.

  Someone must have taken Kate. The same person who’d murdered the woman in our bed. That was the only logical explanation I could think of.

  But why? We were an ordinary couple. There was nothing that exciting about us. We ran a small boutique hotel together in an old plantation house up in the hills of western Sri Lanka, part owning it with a Sri Lankan businessman. We made enough money to live comfortably, but not a huge amount. We’d lived there together for just over a year and had been back in the UK for less than a week. During that time we’d had very little interaction with anyone, barring my trip to town that night, not even our neighbours in the village. We had no enemies that I was aware of. There was no reason for any of this.

  And yet clearly for someone there was.

  I forced myself to look down at the dead woman properly for the first time. I noticed that she had a phone clutched in her right hand. I didn’t want to touch it. I didn’t want to touch her either. The sight of her lying there – a corpse that only a few hours ago had been a living, breathing person with hopes and dreams and memories, and her whole life in front of her – made me feel nauseous. And yet I needed to know what was going on.

  The phone had to have been deliberately placed in her hand by someone. Which meant it would provide a clue.

  I reached down towards it, trying hard not to think about what I was doing.

  And then immediately jumped back as, without warning, it started ringing: the ringtone a loud, old-fashioned car horn sound that would have sounded faintly ludicrous if it wasn’t for the fact that the phone was vibrating in the woman’s soft dead hand.

  It rang once, twice. Three times. If I picked it up, I could find out who she was. But it also meant that I’d have to tell the person at the other end what had happened to her. It occurred to me that, with her body in our bed, I was a potential suspect in her murder.

  The phone kept ringing. Curiosity was killing me. Who was she? Why was she here?

  The ringing stopped as suddenly as it had begun. After a few seconds’ pause, I found some gloves in one of the drawers and put them on, then reached down and gently tugged the phone from her grip. It came free easily. Rigor mortis had yet to set in, which I guessed meant that she hadn’t been dead very long. But then I knew that from the way the blood hadn’t yet dried completely. For all I knew, it might only have been a matter of minutes.

  Which meant the killer could still be here.

  I listened but could hear nothing bar the wind. I told myself that if the killer was still here he’d have ambushed me when I’d come in – and he hadn’t.

  Even so, I looked behind me towards the door, just in case someone was lurking beyond it, before examining the phone.

  The missed call was from an unidentified number. The phone itself was a Huawei smartphone, and when I pressed the home button, it immediately opened to reveal a screen containing the usual apps: weather, photos. I checked the pictures. There were none. I went to the list of contacts. Again, nothing. Then I saw an unread text message. There was no number, just the name of the sender. Matt Walters.

  Me.

  I swallowed audibly and opened the message, reading it slowly, with a growing sense of dread.

  This phone is secure. Only I have the number. Use the Tor browser app already installed to go to the following site. 1298aband4141qq3.onion. You will get the answers you’re looking for there.

  I didn’t know much about the dark web, but what I did know was that it was where bad things happened. Throwing the covers back over the dead woman so I didn’t have to keep looking at her, I quickly located the browser on the phone – the need to know what was going on stronger than my fear of what I might see – and followed the instructions from the message.

  At first it simply showed a blank black screen. Then something appeared to start loading. A few seconds later, an image appeared that I knew immediately would stay with me for the rest of my life.

  Kate was standing on what appeared to be a stage. The room was illuminated by two bright lights in the background. She was dressed only in her pastel silk pyjamas and shaking visibly. I remember thinking how beautiful she’d looked when I’d left for London that afternoon – lean, more athletic than petite, with her soft feminine features, the sprinkle of freckles across her nose and cheeks, and her hair the colour of autumn leaves.

  Now she was blindfolded with a black scarf, which covered the space from her forehead to the bottom of her nose. Two loops of rope round her midriff pinned her arms to her sides. But it was the noose round her neck that grabbed my attention. It was made of thick hangman’s rope that was pulled tight as it disappeared towards an unseen ceiling, and as I looked down at Kate’s feet, clad in a pair of black socks, I saw that she was only just managing to keep them on the wooden floor.

  The message was clear. A couple more pulls on the other end of that rope and she’d be dead.r />
  It took me a couple of seconds to realise that this wasn’t an image but some kind of webcam footage. In the bottom left corner of the screen was a digital clock. It read 01.28 – which meant it was live.

  On the screen, as if sensing something, Kate inclined her head to her left. ‘Who’s there?’ she called out uncertainly, the fear in her voice obvious, even though the tinny webcam audio was distorting the sound.

  A few seconds later – while I was still processing the fact that my pregnant fiancée was in a strange room with a hangman’s noose round her neck – a figure moved into camera shot. I could tell straight away that it was a man. He was dressed in a long black coat that was far too big for him. The hood was pulled up over his head and he was wearing an old-fashioned gas mask that completely obscured his face. He stood next to Kate, facing the camera, and I could see that he was about three inches taller than her, making him five ten.

  The man waved a gloved hand at the camera, staring at me from behind the gas mask.

  Kate seemed to sense his presence and craned her neck in his direction. ‘Whoever you are, just talk to me,’ she said, clearly trying to keep her voice calm. ‘We can sort this out.’

  The figure’s only reaction was to stop waving at the camera. He didn’t turn her way.

  After a moment, he walked slowly towards the back of the stage, partially obscured from view by Kate’s body.

  ‘Please,’ she continued, as the figure crouched down out of shot. ‘I know you’re there. I’m pregnant. And I’m willing to let this—’

  She never finished the sentence.

  There was a sound like a pulley being turned, and suddenly her whole body was yanked upwards three inches, so that only her toes were touching the floor.

  She made a sound that was part gasp, part cry for help, and I could see that it was taking all her effort to retain her balance. If the man in black turned the pulley one more time, that would be it. She’d be throttled to death.

  ‘What the hell?’ I shouted at the screen. ‘Don’t do this, for Christ’s sake! Please, please!’

  But of course, neither of them could hear me. This wasn’t an interactive video.

  I watched as Kate balanced there, her face rigid with fear. Waiting.

  The seconds passed. Three. Five. Ten.

  Then I heard the pulley being turned again and I howled in frustration and horror, drowning out the noise on the film as I watched my pregnant fiancée die.

  Except she didn’t. Instead, her body relaxed as the rope lost a little of its tautness, and her feet were once again almost flat on the floor.

  The man in black came back into view and walked past Kate without looking at her before exiting to the right of the shot, the same way he’d come in.

  A few seconds passed, and then, without warning, the picture went black as if the power had been turned off.

  I tried to log back in, but nothing happened. The feed was lost. I waited a minute, counting the seconds, the tension rising in me in waves, then tried again. No luck.

  In a wave of directionless anger, I threw the phone at the floor. I couldn’t believe what I’d just seen. My fiancée – the first woman I think I’ve ever truly loved, pregnant with the first child for either of us – had been abducted by someone who meant her serious harm. But what did he want? And why the hell was he taunting me like this?

  On the floor, the phone began to ring again. I stared as the vibrations moved it in an aimless circle on the Persian rug, knowing this was no coincidence.

  I bent down and picked it up. Another unidentified number. ‘Hello,’ I said unnecessarily.

  ‘It’s time to talk.’ The voice was one of those robotic, disguised ones you hear in films.

  My mouth went dry. ‘What do you want?’ I managed to croak.

  ‘You saw the position your fiancée’s in,’ the caller continued. ‘We can kill her at any time. It’ll be an unpleasant way to die. Strangulation rather than a broken neck. Only two people in the world can save her. I’m one of them. And you, Matt, are the other. But for her to survive, you have to follow three rules.’ He paused, as if revelling in his power. ‘Rule One: do not tell anyone what’s happening. Police, friends, anyone. The moment you do, Kate dies. Rule Two: keep this phone with you at all times. Rule Three: follow your instructions to the letter. I’m not going to lie to you. It’s going to be hard. You’re going to need a strong stomach and an even stronger heart. But you have the best motivation. Succeed, and you and Kate will be reunited, with her unhurt. Fail, and you’ll never see her again.’

  ‘Please don’t do anything to hurt her,’ I said, conscious of the acquiescence in my voice, and knowing that my pleas would almost certainly fall on deaf ears. ‘She’s pregnant.’

  ‘All the more reason to succeed, then,’ said the voice with a casualness that both scared and angered me.

  I paused. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘First thing. That corpse in your bed. Get rid of it. Make it disappear.’

  ‘What do you mean? How? Where?’

  But I was already talking to a dead phone.

  4

  Matt

  Back in the day, I was an actor by profession. I did it for the best part of ten years, which sounds a lot more impressive than it actually was. For most of that period I was a waiter, a shop assistant, a minicab driver and, at one point, a not especially successful children’s entertainer. The acting roles were few and far between, and mostly bit parts, so there’s not much danger you’d ever have recognised me in the street.

  But there was one role that always stood out for me, and which I’d had high hopes for. The show was a drama on Sky called Night Beat that, though critically acclaimed, only lasted one six-part season. My role was DC ‘Jonno’ Johnson, one of the team of murder squad detectives operating out of a fictional London borough. To be honest, I was probably the least important member of the team, with a handful of lines in each episode, but I performed them well, and was optimistic that it might lead to something more substantial. I threw myself into the part too. I immersed myself in true-crime books and documentaries, and found a mentor in a decorated Scotland Yard detective who became an invaluable source of information. As a result, I gained a thorough understanding of how the police work in their investigations. And the single most important thing I learned is that it’s not like Sherlock Holmes. Or indeed like Night Beat. It’s slow, methodical and mundane, and most people are caught because they make mistakes, or because they had a prior relationship with the victim.

  I had no prior relationship with the dead woman in our bed. This, in theory, gave me some advantage, although how that advantage was going to help was unclear as I looked down on her unmoving form beneath the sheets, the phone still in my hand, my mind working in overdrive.

  I figured I had two choices. One: call the police immediately and let them use all their resources to find Kate before this man did what he was threatening to do and killed her. Or two: do what he’d ordered me to do and immediately become involved in a very serious crime. And of course still not have any guarantee that he would let Kate go unharmed.

  My first instinct was to call the police, because this was way too big for me to deal with alone. There was something reassuring about the idea of pouring my heart out to a tough, no-nonsense, problem-solving cop like DCI Luca Pacelli, the star of Night Beat, who’d be able to ride roughshod over the rules, using even the slimmest of leads to find where Kate was being held, and effect a rescue at the very last minute that would see her released unharmed (although only by the skin of her teeth) and leave her kidnapper dead, just as he deserved. The problem was, detectives like Pacelli don’t exist in real life. They have to follow the rules. The slimmest leads took time to turn into concrete evidence, and in real life the police were usually up against criminals who were, to put it bluntly, idiots.

  The man who’d abducted Kate was no idiot. Her kidnap had required significant planning. He’d not only got inside the house and taken he
r without a struggle – which wouldn’t have been easy; my fiancée’s no shrinking violet – but he’d also managed to kill someone else and dump her body in our bed. All without leaving a single thing out of place.

  It struck me then that there had to be two of them involved. What I’d just described wasn’t possible with only one person. This was even more unnerving, and it was made worse by the fact that they’d almost certainly been watching us. And if they could break in tonight without leaving a trace, then they’d almost certainly been in here before. Which meant they’d bugged the place. It made perfect sense. After all, the phone in the dead woman’s hand had begun ringing only a couple of minutes after I’d entered the room.

  I looked round wildly as if I was suddenly going to spot a hidden camera, then told myself to cool it. It didn’t matter whether there was one or not. I was clearly dealing with professionals who, for whatever reason, had planned their operation meticulously. I thought about contacting former DCI Geeta Anand, the woman who’d done so much to fill me in on the way the police operated for my Night Beat role. But she was a civilian now, having left the force more than five years back, and I knew what she’d say. Get the police involved. If I didn’t, there was no guarantee that she wouldn’t do it for me. I couldn’t risk that.

  So that was it. I made my choice. To do what the man on the phone had told me. I had to get rid of the body.

  A stupid move, you might think. Especially as that was unlikely to be the end of it. But I’d ask you to put yourself in my position for a moment. I’d just seen the woman I cared for more than anyone else in the world – the woman who was carrying my tiny two-month-old baby – standing precariously on tiptoes with a noose around her neck. At the mercy of some lunatic in a gas mask who’d killed once already and was threatening to do the same to her. I had to try to get her back, even if it meant carrying out a truly grim task.