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

by Kernick, Simon

  I could have lived with all this, but the problem was, being a handsome, rakish socialite, Tom’s many misdemeanours (a drink-driving conviction; a fight with a doorman at Chinawhite; a stand-up row in the street with an ex-model girlfriend in which he’d slapped her on camera) seemed to have a habit of ending up in the press, and that was just plain embarrassing, especially as I’d recently been given a knighthood.

  And finally there was Tom’s business venture, with a couple of shady characters for partners, building a luxury spa resort in Fuerteventura that predictably enough never actually got built and which left many small investors badly out of pocket. Tom broke the cardinal rule of business: if you’re going to fuck things up, always make sure someone else carries the can. Which he most assuredly didn’t do. He was lucky to avoid charges, and when I was asked in a Sunday Times interview a few weeks later what I thought about his antics, I’d been characteristically blunt. ‘I tried to bring my son up to appreciate the values of hard work and honesty. Unfortunately, he decided it was easier to ignore both of them.’

  I’d meant the words to be hard-hitting – and they had been. The night the article was published, Tom had phoned me in a tearful fury and unleashed a torrent of foul abuse, until I’d told him, without raising my voice, that he was disinherited, and hung up.

  That had been nine years ago now, and we’d only spoken twice since. Once when Tom had swallowed his pride long enough to come to my home cringingly asking for money, to which I’d given the weak fucker a simple two-word reply. The other time had been at the funeral of a long-standing Peregrine employee. Neither of us had expected the other to be there, but we couldn’t avoid each other, so I’d said: ‘Hello, Tom.’ He’d said hello back. And that had been that. We’d gone our separate ways.

  And now here I was.

  I hadn’t called ahead. It was possible he wasn’t even here, which meant that I would have had a wasted journey, but it felt good just to be out of the house. I’d spent too much time at home in the last couple of weeks, rattling around in my prison, as Diana had once described it, with more accuracy than I cared to admit. My house no longer felt like a home. In some ways it never had, even when Ellen had been there with Edward. It was as if I’d tried to create the illusion of family, fitting it to my own selfish ends, and had ultimately failed.

  I felt a painful twinge of regret that it had come to this. Visiting my firstborn child for the first time in years – no, actually it was the first time ever – to ask him if he’d had anything to do with the disappearance of a half-sister he’d never once been introduced to, because I’d never allowed it.

  I sighed and propped myself up against the outside wall with an unsteady arm, my finger, thin and bony like an old witch’s, wobbling above the buzzer.

  After a few moments, a voice came over the intercom. ‘Well, well, well, this is a surprise.’

  I looked up at the security camera. ‘Can I come in?’

  There was a pause. ‘It’s a little bit inconvenient.’

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘It’s important.’

  The lock on the tinted-glass door clicked and I stepped inside. Tom hadn’t bothered telling me which apartment he lived in. He assumed I knew. I did. We might not have spoken in nine years, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t kept tabs on him.

  A fast ride in a spotless elevator took me to the eighth and top floor of the building. Apartments in this block started at eight fifty for one bedroom. Tom’s was worth 1.3 million in the current market. Not that he owned it. His mother paid the five-grand-a-month rent, which must have been hurting her. Although neither of them was short of money, they weren’t rich, and they weren’t going to be getting any richer with my demise either, which at least provided me with a minor sense of satisfaction.

  So there was no financial gain to them in Kate’s disappearance or death.

  Tom had already opened his front door by the time I reached it. He was barefoot and dressed in a pair of jeans and an open-necked shirt, wearing the kind of smile that I immediately felt like wiping off. At forty-one, he was still strikingly handsome in a superficial way. Like a catalogue model. He was just the right height at six foot three, with broad shoulders, a full head of natural blond hair only just beginning to fleck with grey, and the air of a man who’d made it in life without too much of a struggle. Tom had always been a good salesman. He had bundles of charm, and he could have ended up highly successful on his own terms. Instead, his vanity, laziness and inability to plan had always sent him down the road to cheap con-artistry.

  We looked at each other for a moment, then he moved aside to let me in, ushering me towards the sofa in his huge open-plan living room with its views out over the city.

  I sat down on one end while he took a chair opposite. Before I could start speaking, I heard a noise behind me and saw a young man – also strikingly handsome – walk by in the direction of the front door. It looked like he’d only just got dressed. He nodded at me and smiled at Tom.

  Tom smiled back. ‘I’ll call you, Jav,’ he said. Then, when the young man was gone, he turned back to me, a smug look on his face, as if he hoped I’d disapprove of him sleeping with a man, even though I’d known for years he was bisexual.

  I didn’t rise to the bait. ‘It’s good to see you, Tom.’

  That caught him out. ‘Why are you here? Is it because you’re dying and you want to make peace after all this time?’ He didn’t look comfortable with the prospect.

  Neither was I.

  ‘I’d like to make peace with you, but that’s not why I came.’

  ‘Then why are you here?’

  Nothing in his demeanour suggested he knew the answer to that already.

  ‘I’ve never discussed your half-sister with you,’ I said.

  ‘You mean the little bitch who was the by-product of you and the cleaner? No, you haven’t. Believe it or not, I’ve never felt the need to discuss it. Not with you, anyway.’

  ‘Who have you discussed her with?’

  ‘With Mother, of course. We’d both like to know what happened between her and my sister – my real sister – on the night Alana died.’

  ‘Kate has always maintained that Alana slipped and fell after they’d both been taking drugs.’

  ‘Well, to paraphrase someone, she would say that, wouldn’t she?’

  ‘She had no motive for killing Alana. They were friends.’

  Tom sat forward in his chair, glaring at me. ‘Of course she had a motive. Jealousy. She was the one who grew up the daughter of a cleaner. I can’t believe a cynical old bastard like you would have fallen for her lies. Alana was your daughter, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘And I loved her!’ I shouted, the effort almost starting a coughing fit, which somehow I saw off. ‘I loved her,’ I repeated quietly.

  ‘You never showed it. With either of us. But according to Mother, you’ve made up with the little bastard girl and now she’s your favourite. I gather you even financed her hotel in Sri Lanka. And I suppose you’ll be leaving all your money to her as well, won’t you? How do you think that’s going to look if it turns out she did push Alana? You’ll be laughed at even beyond the grave.’

  I felt like telling him that once I was beyond the grave – all too soon now – I’d cease to care. But I ignored the jibe, focusing instead on the fact that Tom and Diana had been discussing Kate, and that they knew about the hotel in Sri Lanka, even though I’d made huge efforts to keep her presence there under wraps.

  ‘Did you know Kate was back in the UK?’

  Tom met my eye with confidence. ‘No. Why’s she back here?’

  ‘To see me. She arrived a few days ago. And now she’s disappeared. Off the face of the earth.’

  ‘I’m sure she’ll reappear. She’ll want to keep buttering you up, won’t she?’

  ‘I think she’s been kidnapped. She may even be dead. So far I haven’t involved the police. But I will if I must. So if you have anything to do with it, tell me now. If Kate is alive and you le
t her go, I’ll consider that to be the end of it.’

  Tom looked at me with disgust. ‘Are you serious? Of course I don’t have anything to do with it. I’m here, aren’t I? With company as well. And she’s definitely not here. Or would you like to search the place, just to check?’ He waved his arm in a gesture of invitation.

  I didn’t move. ‘You have unsavoury friends. People you could have used to do it for you.’

  ‘But why? You’ve disinherited me anyway. You made that perfectly clear many years ago. You want to leave all your money to her, be my guest. You can leave it to Battersea Dogs’ Home for all I care. I really don’t give a fuck.’

  ‘Someone’s taken her. And they’re not demanding a ransom. That tells me it’s something to do with Alana.’

  ‘How do you know she’s even been abducted? She might have just gone off somewhere.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘She’s been taken.’ I wasn’t prepared to give him any more details, in the hope that if he was involved, he might let something slip by mistake.

  Tom sighed theatrically and got to his feet. ‘Well, it’s nothing to do with me.’ He walked behind the long chrome kitchen counter and produced a beer from the fridge, without offering me anything. ‘Is she still with that man?’ he asked, cracking the lid on the bottle.

  ‘Which man?’

  ‘You know, the actor guy.’

  I tensed. ‘How do you know about him?’

  He took a gulp of the beer, an amused smile on his face. ‘Because I was the one who hired him.’

  37

  Sir Hugh Roper

  I hadn’t expected Tom’s confession, and yet it made perfect sense. I’d never trusted that actor’s motives, which at least showed that my instinct for identifying liars hadn’t entirely disappeared. Although it wasn’t good that Kate, my only surviving daughter, could fall for such an obvious deception.

  Tom looked triumphant, clearly enjoying his moment of power. He’d wounded me and he knew it. I was never the last person to know something. I felt manipulated, which was deeply unpleasant for a man who’d always considered himself a master manipulator.

  However, the important thing was to find out everything I could.

  ‘So what did your man discover then?’ I asked him, working hard not to display emotion.

  ‘He didn’t,’ said Tom, taking another slug of the beer. ‘Not a thing. Or nothing that he told me anyway. But that wasn’t why I hired him. I wanted your daughter to fall in love with him, and then, when I was certain she was completely infatuated, I’d pay to take him away again.’ His face hardened. ‘I wanted to hurt her.’

  ‘Why, for God’s sake? What did she ever do to you?’

  ‘You still don’t get it, do you? You’re so fucking blinkered. She killed my sister. She may not have pushed her, but she was there. She was part of it. She still has questions to answer. I told Walters to find out all he could about her past. I wanted her to share all her intimate secrets with him, so that he could report them back to me.’

  ‘And did it work? Has he done what he was meant to do?’

  ‘No. You’ll be pleased to know he’s been an utter failure. He was paid five thousand upfront and he sent me some photos of them together two months later, along with a report saying he was living at the hotel full-time. He was sent some more money, but I never heard from him again, even though I repeatedly tried to make contact.’

  ‘You went to a lot of trouble to hurt her and it failed. So that makes you a prime suspect as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘My plan may have failed, but it required someone else doing the hard work. I’m not into taking huge risks, like organising a kidnap or a murder. Especially when there’s no obvious financial gain.’

  I watched him carefully, trying to ascertain whether he was lying. But that’s the problem with con men: it’s very hard to tell. I didn’t like the way he still had that cocky air about him, as if he was the one pulling the strings, and I briefly considered bringing Thomson in to force some answers from him. But even after everything, I couldn’t stomach doing that to my own flesh and blood.

  ‘Was there anything else?’ he asked, still standing with his beer.

  Slowly I got to my feet, using the arm of the sofa for support. It seemed such a huge effort, and Tom – whom I’d held in my arms as a newborn baby – made no move to help me.

  We looked at each other, and in that moment I really did want to make peace.

  His expression softened and he nodded his head slowly, as if he understood what I was thinking. But then I saw it. The calculating glint in his eye. He couldn’t quite hide it and I knew that any rapprochement he made would simply be a lie. The bastard had no feelings, and never had had.

  ‘If Kate isn’t returned to me and I find out that you had anything to do with her disappearance, I’ll have you killed,’ I told him, turning and walking as steadily as I could to the door. I didn’t look back.

  ‘I fucking pity you,’ I heard him snarl.

  I pity me too, I thought, and walked out of there knowing that we’d never speak again.

  Once I was back out on the street, I put another call in to Thomson.

  ‘I’m on the M40, sir, heading into town,’ he told me. ‘The traffic’s clear and I’ve got an ETA of twenty-six minutes.’

  ‘Walters was paid to start a relationship with Kate,’ I said. ‘Find out from him what’s happened to her and I’ll double what I offered you this morning. I want answers and I want them now.’

  ‘You’ll have them,’ he said.

  38

  Matt

  ‘I’m not going to do anything that puts you at risk,’ I told Geeta as she sat on the floor trying to break into the iPhone 7 of the man I’d killed. According to her, there was a security flaw on that model that made it susceptible to hacking. Apparently the flaw utilised Siri, the World Clock in Settings, and the Apple Store, and for the last fifteen minutes she’d been using instructions from Google to break into it. She’d already failed twice, but unlike me, Geeta had always been persistent. It was another reason why she’d made such a good detective.

  ‘You’ve already put me at risk, Matt, just by coming here,’ she said, ‘but I’m a big girl and can make my own decisions. Now do me a favour and get me a coffee. You remember how I take it, I assume?’

  Despite everything, I managed a smile. It was comforting to be with her. She was a strong, reassuring presence. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I remember. Two scoops. Strong white. No sugar.’

  ‘Brew for four minutes.’

  ‘Of course.’ She was, I thought, remarkably calm, considering the story I’d just told her.

  Maybe even too calm.

  As if she already knew it.

  As I made the coffee, I told myself I was being paranoid. Why would Geeta be involved? And yet she was. She’d been hired by someone to set me up in a honey trap. Whichever way I looked at it, it was an act of betrayal. Could she have deceived me further? I didn’t buy it. Geeta wasn’t the sort to get involved in murder. And I couldn’t afford to be choosy about my friends.

  When I came back with the coffees, she was on her feet, looking at the iPhone.

  ‘Okay, we’re in,’ she said, handing it back to me. ‘It’s unlocked.’

  I thanked her and immediately went into Settings. I saw straight away that the phone belonged to a Piers James MacDonald. There was a picture of the man I’d killed next to the name, smiling at the camera. The sight of it made me feel sick. I rapidly scrolled down to the Display and Brightness panel, where I changed the Auto Lock function to Never so I could keep the phone open.

  I’d been working out what I needed to do if I managed to break into it. Piers MacDonald had clearly been very close to the woman I was looking for. After all, she’d been the one with the flash drive round her neck, so it stood to reason that they were in regular contact. A quick look in the phone records located seven calls to and from a contact called Laura over the past three days. I scrolled through the contacts unt
il I found her. There was a photo attached of the woman who’d confronted me this morning. Like Piers, she was smiling. She was also topless. Unfortunately, there was no address for her.

  Undeterred, and conscious of the way Geeta was watching me closely, I scanned the phone for the Life360 app, which I knew some people used to keep tabs on where their loved ones were. I didn’t know how possessive Piers was, but I hoped he’d be the type to have the app – and thankfully, he was. There were three contacts listed on it, including Laura, and I immediately zoomed in on the location of her phone. She was on a street in Wembley, barely a mile from Piers’s house.

  My heart sank. ‘Shit.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Geeta.

  ‘It looks like she’s in the police station.’

  She gave a hollow laugh. ‘Are you surprised? Her partner’s been stabbed to death. They’ll be questioning her. She’s probably given them a good description of you too. And they’ll be checking CCTV footage of the whole crime-scene area. It’s only a matter of time before they come for you, Matt. That’s why you need to hand yourself in.’

  I looked at my watch: 5.03 p.m. ‘In just under four hours, if I haven’t found the flash drive this woman was wearing round her neck, the mother of my unborn child dies. I’ve got to do whatever I can to get her back.’

  ‘But you can’t do anything if the woman’s in a police station. That’s why you’ve got to get help. The police can help you.’