A potential murder suspect. That was how he saw me. I glanced in the rear-view mirror. He still had the kidnapper’s phone in his left hand as he gave our location to the person on the other end of the call. He was watching me carefully as he spoke, the expression in his eyes telling me not to try anything stupid. He was a big guy and his look told me in no uncertain terms that he’d come down on me hard if I did.
I indicated and slowed down. There was a car just ahead of me also making the turn, and I followed it onto the slip road.
I’m not the kind of man who makes snap decisions. I’ve always preferred to take my time. Look at the pros and cons. But sometimes life doesn’t work like that.
An idea hit me then, and before I’d worked out whether or not it was a good one, I acted, slamming my foot down hard on the accelerator. The car in front – a mud-caked Land Rover – was doing no more than twenty miles an hour as it decelerated onto the station forecourt, and I rammed into the back of it with a loud smash and enough force to send me lurching forward in my seat, but not enough – thank God – to set off the airbags.
The man in the back jolted forward too. He wasn’t wearing a seat belt so he almost went straight through the gap between the front seats, and it was only his bulk that stopped him. In one of those strokes of luck I’d been sorely missing so far, the kidnapper’s phone flew out of his hand, bounced off the dashboard and landed in the passenger-side footwell.
I was already reacting as the car stopped, simultaneously releasing my seat belt and pulling the keys from the ignition before scrabbling in the footwell for the phone.
As I came back up with it, a powerful hand reached through the seats and grabbed the collar of my jacket, dragging me backwards, while its owner yelled into his own phone, telling his colleagues to get here as fast as possible because I was trying to escape.
I’m not proud of what I did next. But desperate times call for desperate measures, so I yanked my head round and clamped my jaws down hard on his hand like a dog. He shrieked and briefly let go. That was enough. I was out of the door like a shot and bolting up the slip road away from the service station. The driver of the car in front, an angry-looking gamekeeper type in Barbour jacket, flat cap and hunting regalia, leapt out and demanded in a loud and thick West Country accent that I come back immediately.
Clearly there was no way I was going to comply. Unfortunately it was already dawning on me that I had another major problem on my hands as I ran back towards the dual carriageway: namely that I had no idea where I was going, and with just my feet for transport I wasn’t going to get very far before police reinforcements arrived.
I would have cursed my stupidity but there was no time for that because I could hear heavy footsteps coming up fast behind me, and as I glanced over my shoulder, I saw the undercover cop only feet away, his face a mask of anger.
I don’t know what made me do it – maybe something I’d once seen on TV, possibly even on an episode of Night Beat – but I immediately slowed, and as he grabbed me round the midriff in a high rugby tackle, I swung round and slammed my elbow into the side of his head.
He grunted and relaxed his grip, but momentum drove us forward and I hit the concrete hard with him on top of me. Over my shoulder, I could see the man in the Barbour jacket striding towards us with a confidence I wouldn’t have shown.
‘Help me!’ I yelled, still struggling violently. ‘I’m being kidnapped! Call the police!’
Barbour jacket man looked momentarily confused but he kept coming anyway. ‘All right, leave him be, come on now,’ he said, addressing my attacker in a voice that suggested he was used to giving orders. He then grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, pulling him away.
‘I’m a police officer, let go of me!’ yelled my attacker. ‘This man’s a murder suspect!’ Unfortunately for him, he didn’t look much like a police officer, with his aggressive demeanour and all-black gear. And with the terrified expression on my face, I wasn’t looking a lot like a murder suspect either. So Barbour man kept pulling, and luckily he was no small man either. At the same time, seeing an opportunity, I launched a sneaky punch into my attacker’s balls, and this time he let go of me completely.
I was back on my feet in an instant, thanking God that I’d managed to rear-end one of the few people around willing to intervene physically in a stranger’s dispute. As if to prove the point, a car coming onto the slip road veered round us, slowing down long enough for the woman in the passenger seat and a round-faced, sociopathic-looking kid in the back to have a good look at what was going on before immediately accelerating away again onto the forecourt.
As the undercover cop continued to shout at Barbour man, I made a dash back to the rental car, fishing out my keys and jumping inside. As I put the key into the ignition and shoved the car into reverse, I could see both men running back towards me with furious expressions on their faces.
But there was no way I was hanging round now. I reversed fast, straight at them, forcing them both to jump out of the way, then cranked the car into drive, mounted the low bank separating the slip road from the dual carriageway, and rejoined the traffic, accelerating away and watching the two of them become tiny dots before disappearing altogether.
I was still free. But for how long?
28
DCI Cameron Doyle
And that’s my problem with Matt Walters’ story. He’s got an excuse for everything. He claims he had no alternative but to do the things he did because he couldn’t trust the police to find his fiancée. But what on earth made him think he was capable of finding her? He’s a half-arsed actor who by his own admission has never been in a fight in his life. And yet he felt he could pit his wits against a hardened criminal?
Something’s not right and my gut tells me to treat his account with extreme caution. He’s not the good man he’s making himself out to be. He’s trying too hard. And he’s hiding something. Maybe more than one thing.
DS Tania Wild and I have already had a thorough debriefing with our undercover operative, DC John Obote, who I’ve had planted within Hugh Roper’s organisation for the past eight months (a highly expensive operation that sadly has yielded no evidence of Roper’s litany of wrongdoing beyond the usual hearsay). Obote told us that he believes Walters is telling the truth about the kidnap and the fatal stabbing of the man in London – given the fact that Clint Thomson, Roper’s chief bodyguard, was pointing a gun at him at the time. I can see Obote’s point, but it still seems a stretch that the stabbing was an accident.
But what is Walters’ motive for lying? Indeed, what would his motive be for killing this man if not to get his fiancée back? This is what I’ve got to find out. There’s a lot more to this than he’s admitting. I’m a little concerned that maybe Tania, and even Obote, is actually veering towards believing him.
No way. He’s a liar. All three of them are. And before tonight’s out, I mean to prove it.
29
Sir Hugh Roper
Hearing about my daughter’s disappearance had terrified me. And that, I can tell you, is not something I find easy to admit.
I’d spent the last five minutes coughing up blood into a handkerchief that was now almost drenched in it, and yet, somehow, that wasn’t my biggest problem.
As the coughing fit subsided, I threw the handkerchief into the bin, no longer bothering to conceal it from the staff, who all now knew that I was on my last legs, and resumed my incessant pacing of the study, ignoring the pain that seemed to come from every part of my body. The doctors had said that stress wasn’t good in my current state, and that it could make my symptoms worse, although how I was meant to remain calm and relaxed while dying painfully from cancer was anyone’s guess.
More importantly, how was I meant to react to my only living daughter going missing? I was angry with myself. I should have known that something like this might happen: the threat to Kate had always been there. But the truth was, I’d wanted her back here with me for these last few weeks of my life. And y
et even that hadn’t worked out as planned. We’d only seen each other once since she’d returned. I’d avoided a second meeting until I had proof that this new fiancé of hers was the gold-digging fraud I knew he was. I mean, let’s face it. A broke, not-very-successful former actor who’d been travelling alone somehow bumped into Kate at the boutique hotel she ran in the hills of Sri Lanka? There’s no way that wasn’t some sort of con. Now I had proof of it in the shape of the photos Burns had shown me this morning. The problem was, it was too fucking late.
My mobile rang. It was my chief bodyguard, Thomson.
I sat down heavily in my chair as the rain battered against the window. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked him. ‘Have you found Kate yet?’
‘We’ve got a problem,’ said Thomson, which was not what I wanted to hear.
‘I know,’ I told him. ‘My daughter’s missing and it’s a problem I’m paying you a very large amount of money to solve.’
‘We apprehended the fiancé, Matt Walters, back at the house. He had a bag of his bloodstained clothes with him.’
I felt like I’d been punched in the gut and had to grab the desk for support. ‘The bastard. I knew I couldn’t trust him. Did he . . . did he hurt her?’
‘We don’t know.’
‘Well find out, for Christ’s sake!’ I snapped. ‘Torture him if you have to, I don’t care.’ And I’ll be straight with you. I honestly didn’t. If he had killed Kate, I wanted his head on a platter.
‘That’s our problem,’ said Thomson. ‘I had him tied to a chair and was aiming a gun at his kneecap, getting answers out of him, when Obote tasered me.’
This was getting worse. ‘What the hell did he do that for?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Thomson helplessly. ‘But he took off with Walters in Walters’ car and now I can’t get hold of either of them.’
‘Hasn’t Walters’ car got a tracker on it?’
‘Not any more. They must have removed it.’
I had to force myself not to blow a gasket. The problem was, Thomson was a bodyguard, not a head of security like Nigel Burns had been. Good for muscle work but not much else. ‘You said you were getting answers out of him. What did he say?’
‘He claimed that Kate’s been kidnapped, and that he had nothing to do with it. That the kidnapper told him that if he wanted her back, he had to kill someone. That’s why he said his clothes were bloodied. It sounds like bullshit to me but he was sticking to his story even with a gun pointing at him. People don’t usually do that. They break.’
Walters’ story sounded like bullshit to me too. More worrying was why Obote had disappeared with him, but I didn’t think I’d get any useful insight into the reason for that from Thomson. ‘Keep looking for them,’ I told him. ‘And think about that quarter of a million I promised you for finding Kate alive.’
I ended the call, not confident I’d be paying him his bonus any time soon, and phoned Burns. He might be wanting to take a back seat on this, but I needed his help urgently.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t answering.
There was a time when he’d have taken a call from me even if he was humping the Duchess of Cambridge, but those days were long gone. He might still have been on my payroll, but with each passing day my power was waning. Soon I’d be gone. Which meant I was no longer a man to fear. It was an indignity I found harder to accept than the ravaging decay the cancer wrought on my body.
I left a message telling him to call me back urgently, then sat back with a sigh. For the first time in my adult life, I felt completely helpless. And full of regret for the way my life had gone. I wanted to cry. To break down and let the tears take hold. But something inside stopped me, as it had always done.
My phone rang again. It was Burns.
So there was still some vestige of my authority left.
‘I missed a call from you,’ he said. It sounded like he was outside somewhere.
I told him Thomson’s story. ‘You hired Obote, Nigel. Why would he take off with Walters like that?’
‘I didn’t hire him, Hugh,’ the bastard replied testily. ‘I recommended him to you because he came recommended to me as a good bodyguard. You hired him. But there’s a big difference between guarding you and threatening civilians with a gun, especially if he thought Thomson was going to shoot Walters. He probably bailed because he didn’t want to be involved in that kind of violence.’
‘I didn’t want someone soft,’ I growled.
‘Obote’s ex-military and police. He was thrown out of the Met for violently assaulting a suspect, so he’s not soft. But nor is he a lunatic. It was dangerous to send him and Thomson after Walters.’
‘My daughter’s missing, Nigel. What choice do you think I have? If Walters knows something, I have to find it out.’ I stifled a cough and stared up at the ceiling. ‘Do you think he killed her?’
Burns sighed. ‘The kidnap story sounds far-fetched, but there are two things that support it. One: Walters would be unlikely to lie when he’s about to be shot. Two: what’s his motive for killing her? Even if he doesn’t love her, as we both suspect, I still don’t see what use she is to him dead. In fact, he’s far more likely to want to keep her alive, especially if there’s a possibility she’ll inherit some wealth from you . . .’ he paused, ‘when the time comes.’
When the time comes. It was coming very soon. Too soon. I thought about this. ‘If she’s been kidnapped, then who’s holding her? It’s definitely not someone after a ransom, because I haven’t heard anything.’
‘She has enemies, Hugh. You know that. You might have to start looking closer to home.’
‘That’s what I’ve been thinking. I have an idea that you can help me with.’
‘I’ll do what I can, but I told you earlier, I’m not going to get involved in violence. I want to enjoy my retirement, not spend it in prison.’
‘This doesn’t involve violence.’ I briefly told him what I wanted him to do.
‘Okay. I’ll do what I can, and if I find anything out, I’ll let you know immediately, but I’ll be straight with you. My advice is to go to the police.’
I’d already thought about that more than once, but I was loath to involve them, knowing that it could well open a very large can of worms.
I ended the call and sat staring into space for a long time, trying to think who might wish Kate, or indeed myself, harm. And who had the necessary organisation and ruthlessness to abduct her from under the nose of the private detectives Burns had organised. I’ve made numerous enemies over the years and I have no doubt there were plenty of people out there raising a glass in celebration when they’d heard I had terminal cancer. But being pleased about someone’s misfortune and doing something radical to bring that misfortune about are two very different things, and there was no one I could think of who might be going after my daughter to target me. Very few people even knew of her existence or our relationship. And no one bar my lawyer of thirty years, Ivan Stransky (who would never breathe a word to anyone), knew that I intended to leave her the vast bulk of my fortune, including my thirty-five per cent stake in Peregrine Homes.
So there had to be another motive for going after her, and the problem was, I was fairly certain I knew what it was, even though I’d been trying hard not to think about it since hearing the news of her disappearance.
But now it was something I could no longer ignore. It was time to dredge up the past.
I reached for the phone and dialled one of the few numbers I’d always known off by heart.
‘You need to come over right away,’ I said the moment it was picked up.
30
Kate
I’d just sat back down again in my usual position leaning against the toilet when I heard him outside the door. He’d been hurrying through the building – and it was just one of them now, not two – as if he somehow knew that I’d been trying to escape. But as he was turning the lock, I heard the distinct buzz of his phone vibrating, and he moved away from the door, going bac
k through the building and out of earshot.
I stayed where I was, breathing slowly, trying hard to ignore the cold seeping into my bones. It struck me that there might be a hidden camera somewhere with night vision that had recorded me trying to get out of the restraints. If there was, then all that effort would have been in vain, and it would also mean that I was probably going to be trussed up even more to prevent any repeat of it.
That scared me. The longer I was here, the weaker I would become and the less likely it would be that this would end well for me. I told myself not to panic. There will be a way out of this. I just had to stay strong.
He was coming back again. I could hear him, his footfall moving steadily through the building, and then he was directly outside and I felt myself tensing. I knew that even if I broke the cable now – which I was pretty sure I could do – I was still essentially helpless with a chain round my ankle.
I noted once again that there were two locks on the door, suggesting they’d deliberately reinforced it before bringing me here.
He came inside and I turned my head towards the door. I felt vulnerable and played to it. I’m no psychologist, but I could tell the man holding me wasn’t a complete monster – which meant it was possible I could reason with him, even if he had seen me on camera trying to escape. ‘Hello?’ I said, my voice laced with fear and uncertainty. ‘Is that you? Would it be possible to have some more water?’
‘I’ll give you some water in a moment,’ he said. ‘Stay exactly where you are and don’t move.’
I complied as he crouched down and unlocked the padlock holding the chain to my ankle. I thought he was going to let me out of the chain completely and felt a twinge of hope. But then he unlooped it from whatever it had been attached to and wrapped the slack round my other ankle before relocking the padlock. I was now effectively in shackles and going nowhere. The only thing that made me feel slightly better was that if he was planning to kill me, he probably wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble.
Kill A Stranger: the twisting new thriller from the number one bestseller Page 12