The door opened, inch by interminable inch, and I held my breath as his shadow appeared in the doorway, illuminated by the torchlight.
A vision hit me then. A memory from that horrendous afternoon sixteen years before, when I’d lost David. Running through the cottage, a figure in black chasing me, just like I’d been chased tonight. Getting closer all the time. And the terror. God, the pure terror I’d felt then, and was feeling again.
The torch beam shone through into the bathroom, easily visible through the frosted Perspex of the screen, and I knew that he’d see me at any moment.
I wanted to believe his lies. I wanted to believe that he wouldn’t kill me. But something deep inside told me with total certainty that this was the man who’d murdered David and put me into a coma from which sometimes – just sometimes – I wished I’d never emerged.
He was standing just outside the bathroom door. I couldn’t hold my breath much longer. My grip on the piece of glass tightened, and with surprise I realised my hand was hurting. I looked down and saw blood pooling in the palm. I felt sick. Sick and exhausted and on the verge of a panic attack.
That was when he stepped inside. I could see his silhouette behind the torch beam. The knife in his hand. He turned the torch my way. I felt it illuminate me even though I was crouched down.
A drop of blood landed in the bath with a loud splat.
The beam lowered until it was shining right in my face.
‘There you are,’ he said gently, his knife glinting in the torchlight.
He took a step towards me and I tensed.
And then we both heard it. The sound of a car pulling up outside. He inclined his head a little.
Everything seemed to freeze in time. He didn’t move. Neither did I. And then I heard the door being kicked open with a loud bang downstairs.
The kidnapper cursed under his breath, turning his body towards the sound, and I knew this was my only chance.
With a loud, blood-curdling scream, I lurched upwards and threw all my weight into the shower screen, sending it flying out of the tub and into the kidnapper.
As he stepped back and batted it away, I dived at him, driving the glass into the first part of flesh I could find, skewering him in the upper arm of his knife hand, my momentum making me bounce off him and away, thank God, from his blade.
I landed hard on my side against the bathroom door, with the chain hanging loose beside me. I looked up to see him standing above me, but he was unsteady on his feet, the glass embedded almost to the hilt in his arm, the knife hanging loosely in his hand. He was clutching at the wound with his other hand, growling with pain.
The advantage was with me and I made full use of it, driving my stronger right foot into his knee and sending him staggering backwards. The next second I was on my feet, but I didn’t run. As he came forward again, swapping the knife into his other hand, I launched a kick that struck him straight between the legs.
This time he bent double and fell back onto the toilet seat, dropping the knife. I rushed forward and grabbed it but as I picked it up, he lunged at me, and that was when pure instinct kicked in. I drove the knife into his chest, pulling it out and stabbing him again and again, ignoring the strange gasping noise he made, and the slick, wet sound of the blade ripping through flesh, stopping only when he toppled sideways off the toilet seat and collapsed to the floor.
For a long second I simply stood there looking down at him, getting my breath back. I let the knife drop to the floor with a loud clatter, knowing that this man was no longer a threat to me. He was dead. I’d killed him. It was a strange feeling. A part of me felt disgusted, but there was also a grim satisfaction at what I’d done. A man had held me against my will and had planned to kill me, and yet somehow I’d vanquished him.
Finally I moved, picking up the torch and shining it down on his face. I needed to know who he was and who he worked for.
Reaching down, I pulled the balaclava from his head and flung it to one side, revealing the bruised, partly bloodied profile of a craggy-faced man with a strong jaw, and thinning grey-flecked hair in a widow’s peak. As I’d suspected, he was aged somewhere at the tail end of his fifties.
I experienced a hard mental jolt. Something about this man was definitely familiar. I’d seen him before. A long time ago. Another vision tore across my mind. Trying to get out of the upstairs cottage window on that sunny afternoon, desperate to escape, and then a struggle. The man chasing me, grabbing hold of my arm and yanking me round so that I was staring straight at him.
I closed my eyes, tried to picture him as he had been then, not sure how much was memory and how much the suggestive power of the mind. But as I opened my eyes again, I was sure that the man who’d come for us that day, who’d destroyed everything, was the same one I was looking at. And I felt a rage that had me shaking as I contemplated the terrible injustice of it all.
That was when I heard footsteps coming hard up the stairs. Was this the other kidnapper? I wasn’t sure that I had it in me to fight again, but then I heard a voice call out my name from somewhere down the corridor, and I almost wept with relief.
It was Matt.
58
Matt
I sprinted up the stairs. I could hear a commotion further up, banging and crashing, but no more screams. As I reached the second floor, it suddenly stopped. Dead.
So did I. The noise had been coming from the floor I was on, and the corridor running off to my right was the only one lit by dim overhead lights.
I listened but couldn’t hear anything. But that scream? I was sure it was Kate.
I made a decision. My grip tight on the baton, I called her name.
There was a long pause. If she was dead, I was just giving away my position. But if Kate was dead, then I no longer cared anyway.
But then I heard her call back from somewhere down the corridor, the fear still in her voice. ‘Matt? Is that you?’
Relief flooded through me and I ran towards her voice. ‘It’s me, honey. I’m coming for you. Are you okay?’
And then a door opened just in front of me and I automatically jumped back.
It was hard to believe that the wild-eyed woman covered in blood and with a chain round her ankle was Kate, and for a moment we both just stared at each other. Blood was spattered all over her, but the only place she looked like she’d been cut was her hand. More blood dripped from an unseen wound onto the carpet, but she didn’t seem to notice.
I dropped the baton and pulled her to me, holding her tightly, stroking her hair. ‘It’s all right. You’re safe now.’ I felt so blessed that I’d got her back, and my hand drifted down to her tummy, stroking it gently, hoping our child was safe.
She buried her head in my shoulder, taking a deep breath. ‘Oh God, I’m so glad you’re here. I thought he was going to kill me.’
‘Where is he now?’ I asked her.
‘In there.’ She motioned with her head towards the door from which she’d emerged. ‘The bathroom. We had a fight.’ She paused. ‘He’s dead.’
I was shocked but tried not to show it. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘Just my hand.’ She showed me her open palm. There was a deep gash that was still leaking blood.
I didn’t have anything to bandage it with, so I pulled off one of my socks and wrapped it round in a makeshift tourniquet.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered, smiling up at me, a look that always made me melt, even if it was diluted somewhat by all the blood on her face. ‘How did you find me?’
‘It’s a long story,’ I whispered, not wanting to talk about it yet, even though I would have to soon. ‘We need to get you out of here. You’re freezing.’
‘Can you do something for me first?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘What is it?’
‘The kidnapper. I need to know who he is. He’s probably got ID and a phone. It’ll be the key to the whole thing. Will you come with me to search him?’
‘Shouldn’t we leave it to the police?’ I sa
id, not liking the sound of that at all.
‘I know it sounds strange, but I need to know if my father or one of his family are behind this. There’s a lot I haven’t told you.’
‘I know,’ I said, nodding. ‘And I wish you had. I’ve had to find out a lot for myself today.’
‘I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you. But I need to know who this bastard was.’
I was desperate to get out of there, especially as I knew there was more than one person involved in this, but, like Kate, I also wanted to find out who had been tormenting me these past twenty-four hours. And I wanted to see if he was in possession of the flash drive I’d left at the bridge. ‘Okay. Let’s go,’ I said.
She went back inside the room and I followed, switching on the torch app on my phone even though there was a beam of light coming from somewhere inside.
‘He’s in there,’ said Kate, motioning towards the bathroom. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll wait here. Can you see if you can find the keys to this chain?’ She rattled her ankle.
To be honest, the last thing on earth I wanted to do was rifle through the pockets of a still-warm corpse for the second time that day, like some kind of latter-day grave robber, but I didn’t want to look cowardly in front of Kate either, so, taking a deep breath, I stepped inside.
He was in the bathroom just as she’d said, lying on his back, one arm half draped over the toilet seat, his head almost touching the back wall. I shone the light on him. He was a hard-looking middle-aged man, pale in death, with a cut on his forehead and bruising on his face. But even so, I recognised him as the man Laura had photographed earlier at the rendezvous, receiving the flash drive from Piers MacDonald. The same man who’d hired Geeta to set me up.
But why had this man wanted the master copy of the flash drive so badly? It still didn’t make sense.
I shone the torch round the room, seeing evidence of a violent struggle. The shower screen had been ripped from its hinges and now covered much of the floor. It was splattered with blood, as were the wall tiles and the floor where the body lay. A torch and balaclava lay close to the corpse.
I turned off the torch app on the phone, not wanting to look at him, then crouched down and felt first inside his jacket pockets, finding nothing, then in his jeans, pulling out a mobile phone, a set of keys, and a money clip containing some notes. But no identifying documents.
And no flash drive.
I searched the body again. I even resorted to switching the phone torch back on and checking round him, just in case I’d missed something. Only when I was certain that I hadn’t did I finally get back to my feet and leave the room, eager to escape the sickly smell of mildew and death.
Kate was standing where I’d left her. She looked calmer now, although she was shivering. I asked her if she was okay and she told me that she was. ‘Just hungry and thirsty and tired, that’s all. Did you find out who he was?’
I shook my head. ‘There’s no ID on him. Just some cash, keys and a phone.’ I handed her the keys, and she knelt down and tried each of them in the padlock holding the chain to her ankle until she found the right one. I thought again about the flash drive. ‘Has this man been here with you the whole time?’ I asked her.
She shook her head. ‘No. He went out about an hour ago and he only just came back.’
‘And you didn’t search the body?’
Again she shook her head. ‘I told you, no. This just happened. Why do you ask?’
‘I was made to deliver a flash drive to him in return for your life. But it’s not here.’
She looked at me. ‘Really? What was on it?’ It sounded like a genuine question, as though she had no idea of the contents.
I didn’t want to get into the details of what I’d discovered about her today. At least not until we were out of here. So I told her I didn’t know.
But the cloud of suspicion that had been lurking at the back of my mind was beginning to get stronger. Only one person in the world benefited from this flash drive being out of circulation, and that was Kate. But surely she wouldn’t have searched the kidnapper for it, because how would she even have known of its existence, let alone the fact that he’d be carrying it?
I was becoming paranoid and I needed to calm down. I’d got Kate back. That was the most important thing.
‘There’s at least one other person involved,’ she said, throwing off the chain. ‘Two people snatched me and I heard him on the phone to someone while he was here. Maybe he’d already given it to them.’ She didn’t seem worried about either the drive or its contents, which made me question why she’d paid a blackmailer for all her psychiatric notes.
‘Yeah, maybe that’s what happened,’ I said, although I wasn’t convinced. I pulled out the phone I’d taken from the kidnapper’s body and pressed the home button. The phone was an older Samsung and password-protected. ‘It’s locked, but I can see three missed calls here from the same number,’ I told her.
She asked to look, and I handed her the phone, wondering whether it was worth trying to break into it like Geeta had with MacDonald’s phone.
Kate was staring at the screen, an uncertain expression on her face.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
She took a deep breath. ‘The number showing up on here. I recognise it. It belongs to my father.’
59
Sir Hugh Roper
‘What a pleasant surprise,’ I said through the intercom on my study desk. ‘Twice in one day.’
Diana glared sourly up at the security camera above the front door. She was wrapped up in a different coat from the one she’d been wearing earlier, and it looked like her hair must have been glued in place because the wind was doing nothing to mess it up. ‘Let me in,’ she demanded.
‘I’m in the study,’ I said, knowing that whatever she wanted wasn’t going to be good, but at least her presence provided a distraction from my gloom. I pressed the buzzer, then settled back in my seat and waited.
Five seconds later, she stormed into the room, threw her handbag down on a chair and faced me with her back to the fire.
‘So,’ she snapped, ‘you went to see Tom, after all these years, and rather than seek a reconciliation with him in these your last weeks on earth, you effectively accused your own son of having something to do with that bitch’s disappearance.’ Her words had the hint of a slur in them, as if she’d fortified herself for this confrontation with a few stiff drinks, but she still stood ramrod straight, bristling with energy.
I looked at her and remembered the woman I’d fallen in love with; the intensity of our passion; the triumph of starting a young family together and giving them everything I’d never had. And I felt a terrible weariness as I finally realised the part I’d played in destroying it all.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, words that had so rarely come out of my mouth over the years. ‘To you and to him. I didn’t want it to come to this.’
She looked surprised, but of course she’d never heard me apologise for anything before, and her expression softened a little. ‘You need to apologise to Tom. Make amends with him.’
I took a sip of the whisky. ‘I will, if either you or he tells me where Kate is.’
‘We don’t know, Hugh. Can’t you get that into your thick head?’
We glared at each other and again I felt a huge weariness. What if Diana was telling the truth and it was nothing to do with them? But it had to be. There were no other suspects. It was time to take a different tack. ‘I think it’s too late for us to make amends, but I am prepared to leave him something in my will.’
‘How much is something?’ she asked, a glint of interest in her eyes.
‘I’m prepared to leave him ten per cent of everything,’ I said. Which was a lie. I wasn’t going to leave him a damn grain, but if Diana and Tom – both people who were very interested in money – were keeping Kate somewhere, this might make them think twice about having her killed.
‘Ten per cent?’ Her lip curled as she spoke.
&
nbsp; ‘It’s a lot of money, Diana. More than he deserves.’
Her expression hardened again. ‘What? And the bitch who killed our poor Alana does deserve it?’
‘How many times do I have to tell you, Alana’s death was an accident.’
‘No, Hugh. It wasn’t.’
There was a firmness to her tone I didn’t like. ‘How could you possibly know that?’
‘Alana wouldn’t have slipped and fallen. Even drunk. She never went close to the edge of that roof garden because she was scared of heights. But you wouldn’t know that, would you? Because you never spent any time with her.’
‘You never said that before.’
‘Of course I did. More than once. But you weren’t listening. You never did.’
‘Is that why you tried to have Kate killed?’
‘I told you. It wasn’t me who tried to have her killed.’
‘Well I know I didn’t do it.’
‘And I know I didn’t do it,’ she said.
We were at an impasse. I hadn’t been responsible for the attack on Kate and Griffiths, so it had to be Diana. And yet once again she was refusing to admit it, making me realise this whole conversation was pointless.
I sighed and finished the last of the Macallan, while she sat down heavily in the chair opposite me, suddenly looking tired.
We were silent for a few moments, neither of us sure what to say.
‘Do you mind if I have a drink?’ she asked.
‘Help yourself,’ I said, concluding that the drunker she got, the more likely her tongue was to loosen, and while she went to pour herself one, I put in yet another call to Burns. If he didn’t pick up, then this would be the last time I ever used his services, and I’d sue him for all the money I’d paid him for his fucking half-arsed consultancy.
Kill A Stranger: the twisting new thriller from the number one bestseller Page 24