I put the phone down, ran a hand through my hair, tried to think. ‘You know,’ I told her, ‘I just wish I had some idea what was going on here.’
Geeta took a sip of her coffee, looking at me calmly. ‘You were told to kill this man to get your fiancée back, right? So he must be connected to this somehow. You need to find out who he is. Or was.’
Now I had his name, and the help of Google, it didn’t take me long. ‘That’s him,’ I said, having used Geeta’s laptop to scroll through photos of various Piers MacDonalds in image search. You don’t forget the faces of men who’ve died in front of you. It was an upper-body shot, sideways on. He was wearing a suit and had his head bowed as if he was trying to avoid the attention of the photographer. I clicked on the link attached to the photo and was directed to a newspaper article from a November 2011 edition of the Bristol Evening Post. I quickly skimmed it.
Geeta looked at me. ‘Well?’
I frowned. ‘It seems Piers MacDonald was a psychiatrist from Bristol who was struck off eight years ago for making inappropriate advances to two female patients while threatening to blackmail them, and for being under the influence of alcohol and drugs during some of his sessions. He got a suspended prison sentence because he promised to do a drug rehabilitation course. And that seems to be all there is on him. I’ve never seen this man before today, and I have absolutely no idea what connection he could possibly have to Kate. As far as I know, she’s never even set foot in Bristol.’
‘But that’s your problem, Matt. You really don’t know anything about her, do you? You seemed very vague about her past when we were talking last night. Before today, you didn’t even know she had a hugely wealthy father. And frankly, there’s got to be a lot more to her than meets the eye, otherwise why would all this be happening?’
Which was the big question. I used my own phone to google the name ‘Sir Hugh Roper’ and was immediately presented with a slew of images of a man in his sixties with silver hair and a lean, hard but not unattractive face. There wasn’t an immediate likeness to Kate.
Roper had his own Wikipedia page and I raced through it quickly. ‘It says here that he’s the father of two children, a son and a daughter. But the daughter died in 2001, although it doesn’t give any further details.’ I shook my head in confusion. ‘This whole thing gets stranger and stranger.’
‘So we’re going to have to keep trawling the Internet, trying to connect the dots.’
I looked at my watch again: 5.12. Time was running out. I thought about the flash drive, wondering what significance it had, then checked Piers’s 360 app a second time. The flashing red dot on the screen signified that Laura’s phone was moving. And moving fast. It stopped at the end of the road and then turned right, speeding up.
‘There may be a quicker way,’ I said. ‘Our woman’s not in the police station any more. She’s in a car.’
39
Kate
When you’re incarcerated and unable to move, it gives you a lot of time to think.
My captor had been gone for a while. Forty minutes, an hour. Something like that. Although I couldn’t hear him, I was certain he was somewhere near, because I hadn’t heard his car driving away as I had before. I had no idea what he was doing, or why he’d left me in this room, attached to the lie detector with my hands and feet still bound.
I simply sat there staring into space from behind the blindfold, travelling back in time.
Alana’s death had been a huge blow. To witness her suicide and know I was the reason for her death was a hard cross to bear.
I was already on the phone calling for an ambulance when I rushed back inside the flat and woke David. But it was too late. Alana was pronounced dead at the scene. I remember her body being taken away under a blanket while the police questioned David and me – first at the flat, and then at the police station. I’ll be honest, I didn’t tell them the whole truth. I didn’t want them to know Alana’s true relationship to me, so I said we’d been drinking and taking drugs and that Alana had slipped and fallen while standing too close to the edge. They’d asked what kind of drugs and who’d supplied them. I didn’t want to get David in trouble but I was terrified about what might happen if someone in the Roper family worked out who I was, and I knew that that would be a lot more likely if I didn’t cooperate. So I told them the truth.
I was released without charge. David was less fortunate. He was charged with supplying class A drugs. Because Alana came from a wealthy family, there was a lot of publicity, and although the coroner concluded that her death was an accident, her parents demanded that justice be done for their daughter. The result was that the CPS threw the book at David and he was found guilty and sentenced to fourteen months in prison, a sentence that Alana’s mother described in the press as ‘a travesty’, although it seemed like a long time to me.
In the end, because of good behaviour, he was released after serving seven months, and that should have been the end of it.
But of course, it wasn’t. David had been a good friend of mine too, and I felt guilty about what had happened – particularly as none of it had really been his fault. Alana and I had willingly bought the drugs from him, as we’d done plenty of times before, and he’d had nothing to do with what happened on the roof. And yet he’d taken the rap for everything without complaint and, like the police and the coroner, he believed my story that Alana had simply slipped and fallen. I didn’t like having to lie, but I could hardly tell the truth.
The fact that Alana was my half-sister never came out. I remember being in the coroner’s court, giving evidence in front of my stony-faced father and his equally stony-faced ex-wife, and thinking how these people didn’t have a clue who I was. The man who’d fathered me nineteen years ago had never even bothered looking at a photo of me. I was nothing to him. In fact, I was worse than nothing. He hated me for leading his beloved Alana astray. I could see it in his eyes. And hers.
But if I’m honest, I was thankful they didn’t know who I was. After all that had happened, I just wanted to be left alone. My father had become as dead to me as I’d always been to him. And I was terrified about losing my monthly allowance, which I’d come to rely on far too much.
Anyway, the upshot of it all was that I moved away from Bristol to a cottage in rural Gloucestershire, not far from the prison where David was being held, and began visiting him regularly. I won’t bore you with the details, but to cut a long story short, I was there to collect him when he was released, and he came to stay at the cottage on an open-ended basis, because, as he told me, he had no desire to go home and face his family. In the end, we only had each other and I think that’s why we fell in love.
It was an idyllic time. The past was behind us and we’d both made the decision to move on. I started working as a teaching assistant at the local primary school, while David got a job as a gardener on the country estate to which our cottage was attached. We lived simply and kept ourselves to ourselves, although occasionally we’d go for a drink in the local pub and exchange pleasantries with whoever was in there. No one knew who we were. No one bothered us. Thanks to our jobs and my allowance, we had no money problems. One time we even took our car – an old Renault Clio – on a three-week road trip round the UK, and ended up swimming with dolphins in freezing crystal-clear seas off the coast of western Scotland. It was as if, for the first time in my life, the cards were truly falling in my favour.
And then it happened. Just like it always seems to do with me. About a year after David had got out of prison.
The incident.
I was suddenly brought back to the present by the sound of footsteps coming towards me down the corridor, moving purposefully, and I felt a tightness in my chest, wondering what my kidnapper planned to do next.
I soon found out.
‘We’re going to talk some more,’ he said, sitting opposite me and tapping away on the keyboard. There was a severity to his tone. A cold professionalism that unnerved me. I knew he’d been talking to wh
oever he worked for – presumably going through the details of the conversation we’d had earlier and the results from the lie detector. I knew I’d told the truth but that didn’t mean the lie detector wouldn’t get it wrong. If it had, it was possible that the man had been told to kill me.
And yet he wanted to talk.
‘What about?’ I asked.
‘David,’ he said. ‘I want to know what happened on the day he died. Tell me everything you remember, starting from the beginning.’
There was no way I wanted to talk about that day – it was too painful – but clearly not talking wasn’t an option. ‘It’s all very vague,’ I said. ‘I remember leaving home that morning, kissing him goodbye and telling him that I’d see him later.’ I’ll always remember that. Our last goodbye. ‘I think I recall working at the school that day . . . but that’s it. After that, nothing, until I woke up in a hospital bed three weeks later.’
‘Do you remember coming home that day?’
I didn’t pause. ‘No.’
‘The polygraph says you’re lying.’
I sat back in the chair, exasperated. ‘Then it’s wrong. I was in a coma, for Christ’s sake. That’s a matter of public record. Comas give you amnesia. I have amnesia. And why the hell are you so interested anyway? What does it have to do with anything?’
‘I don’t think you realise,’ he said, ‘how important your answers are, and how important it is that you tell the truth. Because any failure to be completely honest means you won’t leave here alive.’
His words were delivered carefully and with the utmost seriousness. And yet he wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already suspect. You don’t abduct someone − keeping them blindfolded and tied up in a dark, isolated building − unless you’re prepared to kill them.
And I’ll be honest. The fact is, I was holding back.
For a long time, it was true, I couldn’t remember. A head injury followed by a three-week coma does that. And I hadn’t wanted to think about it either, because in many ways it was the day that my life was irreversibly destroyed.
But slowly, ever so slowly, tiny snippets have come back to me over the years. Not much, and very vague. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure if it was anything more than a dream I’d had. But then, a couple of years ago, I’d forced myself to read an old newspaper article about what had happened to David and me. It said that the police theory was that I’d come home unexpectedly, having finished work early because I wasn’t feeling well, and had disturbed the killer as he murdered David in our bedroom. The killer had then chased me and, while fleeing, I’d either jumped, fallen or been pushed from the window in the first-floor spare bedroom (which I suppose was ironic given what had happened to Alana), striking my head on the patio below.
This version of events seemed to fit with my gradually returning memories, and that was what made me conclude that they were probably real. And it was why the lie detector was finding me out.
The kidnapper’s words broke the heavy silence. ‘You remember coming back home that day, don’t you? Tell the truth.’
I knew I wasn’t going to get away with another lie, but still I paused. I just didn’t want to go back there. For years I’d been able to suppress it, but somehow, like formless ghosts, the memories had slipped through the cracks of my consciousness.
‘Vaguely,’ I said at last. ‘I remember going upstairs and thinking how quiet everything was. I might have called David’s name but I can’t say for sure. Our bedroom door was shut, but I think I heard a noise, a kind of faint moan, and I knew . . . I knew it was David, and that he was in pain.’ I paused, swallowing. I could hear that moan now. It was the last sound I ever heard him make. The man who’d been the love of my life. ‘I went to open the door, and then all I remember is seeing him lying there on the floor, covered in blood . . . blood everywhere . . . and a figure standing over him with his back to me.’
I stopped, my mouth dry. Reliving the scene.
Or was I? I couldn’t be sure.
‘I think . . . I think I remember the figure turning round, and then I was running, running for my life, through the house, just trying to get out, like I was in some kind of nightmare. And then . . .’ I exhaled slowly. ‘That’s all I can remember.’
‘Why did you lie to me before?’ asked my captor.
‘Because,’ I said with a long sigh, ‘I wanted to forget it.’
‘Is that the only reason?’
‘Yes.’
‘The polygraph says you’re lying. There’s another reason why you lied, isn’t there? And tell me the truth this time. Because there’ll be consequences if you don’t.’
His voice was hard. I knew what he was getting at.
‘Is there another reason why you’re lying to me?’
‘Yes.’
‘What is it?’
‘I’ve always been afraid of remembering too much because they never caught the killer.’
There was silence. ‘Do you think I was David’s killer?’
This was the question I truly hadn’t wanted him to ask, because it had been in the back of my mind ever since I’d been brought here. I’d always believed that David’s death, and my attempted murder, had been organised by someone in the Roper family. Just as this kidnapping had been. Unfortunately, there was no way I could avoid answering the question now. ‘Possibly,’ I said.
‘Did you see the killer’s face?’
‘If I did, I have no recollection of it.’ Which was true. He’d been a blur.
‘And do you remember anything else about him or her?’
‘No,’ I said, with confidence.
I heard him get up from his seat and come over.
That really scared me. Because as he came in close, it occurred to me that he could be holding a knife and this could be it − the end of my life.
‘I can put your mind at rest,’ he said as he began removing the blood pressure sleeve from my arm. ‘I didn’t kill David. And before last night, I’d never set eyes on you.’
Which begged the obvious question − why was he so interested in my recollection of the murder?
‘We’re finished now,’ he said, cutting the zip ties round my wrist and telling me to put my hands behind my back.
Once again I kept my wrists as far apart as possible as he retied them.
‘Is that too tight?’ he asked, his voice gentler.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s fine. But why can’t you let me go now? I’ve answered all your questions, and if it’s money you’re after, I’ve got plenty. I can pay you.’
‘You just need to stay calm for a few hours longer, and then you’ll be able to go.’
But there was something in his voice that didn’t sound quite right. I don’t know whether it was a change in his demeanour, or purely my instinct, but either way I had this awful nagging feeling that he wasn’t planning on letting me leave here alive.
40
Matt
‘I can do this alone,’ I said to Geeta as she drove us through the largely deserted London streets. We were in her car, as my rental would definitely be on the police’s radar by now, and closing in on Laura’s phone. It had stopped five minutes ago at a residential street in Harrow, which I was hoping was her home address. ‘I don’t want to put you at any more risk.’
Geeta turned to me. ‘I’m involved now and I have been ever since I accepted that money to meet you. And I don’t like being manipulated, so I want to find out what’s going on too.’ She sighed. ‘And believe it or not − even after all our ups and downs − I still care about you. And I also know that deep down you’re a good man.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, touched.
‘Okay,’ she said as we approached a junction, ‘where do I go now?’
I told her to turn left. ‘We’re only a few minutes away.’
‘I don’t want you doing anything stupid, Matt,’ she said. ‘From now on, we do things my way, okay?’
‘Sounds like a plan to me,’ I said, happy to let so
meone with expertise take over. ‘Take the next right.’
Geeta made the turning onto a road of tall, narrow old town houses, lined on both sides by cars, and with a succession of speed bumps, forcing her to slow right down.
‘Her phone’s pinging from down here on the left,’ I said, examining the app.
‘I think I can see where,’ she said. ‘There’s a squad car double-parked just up ahead.’
I looked up and saw the squad car with its hazards on outside one of the town houses. The house had a For Sale and a To Let sign from two different companies out the front. That meant it was almost certainly divided into flats, which complicated matters.
Geeta drove past and I glanced across, careful to shield my face. The squad car was empty. She found a spot about thirty yards further up the road marked Residents Only and pulled in, turning off the engine.
‘What do we do now?’ I asked. For some reason, I hadn’t expected the police to be here, and yet it stood to reason that they’d be looking after a witness to what they believed was a murder. And that, of course, was my big problem. I might have managed to track this woman’s location, and the location of the flash drive, but I had no idea how to get it from her. I was simply winging it, allowing myself to get carried along on the wave of events, trying hard to keep focusing on finding Kate and not think too much about all the trouble I was getting both myself and Geeta into.
But Geeta seemed remarkably calm as she looked in the rear-view mirror. ‘We wait,’ she said. ‘If they were staying with her, they wouldn’t have their hazards on. I think they’ll go.’
‘Don’t you think they’ll leave someone behind?’
‘I doubt it. The police are stretched to the limit these days, and if they don’t think there’s a direct threat to her, she won’t be offered protection.’ She settled back in her seat and looked at me. ‘Do you know what’s bugging me about your story?’ she said. ‘If your fiancée’s kidnapper was so desperate for this flash drive in the first place, why not kill Piers MacDonald himself and take it? It’s a totally unnecessary risk to use someone like you, a man who’s never killed before.’
Kill A Stranger: the twisting new thriller from the number one bestseller Page 17