Untouchable: A chillingly dark psychological thriller

by Sibel Hodge

  87 MPH.

  90 MPH.

  And then one word flashed up on the digital display in the centre of the dashboard:

  GOODBYE.

  The Jeep veered sharply left, off the road.

  It flew though the air. Weightless. Effortless. And it seemed as if the world slowed down and speeded up both at the same time.

  When people say their life flashes before their eyes when staring death in the face, they’re wrong. It wasn’t my life I was aware of. Only thoughts, firing madly with each synapsis of the cells in my body.

  Maybe some people would ask questions. Be suspicious. But they would probably be labelled conspiracy theorists or smeared or killed. My death would probably be announced to the world as an accident. Tired woman falls asleep at the wheel.

  If only they knew.

  Maybe I’d been naïve to believe the truth could ever come out. It was too much of a threat to too many people for too many reasons. And pretty soon I’d be yesterday’s news. I think I’d probably known even from the very beginning that I couldn’t win.

  There was always Mitchell, though. They didn’t know about him, I was sure. He’d expose them. He still had the evidence. He’d do what I couldn’t. He’d see it through to the end.

  Wouldn’t he?

  I said a silent goodbye to Ava. To Jackson and my parents.

  I hit the embankment, and the Jeep bounced.

  Once.

  Twice.

  The momentum smashed my head into the roof, against the window. The car flipped over. There was crunching and smashing and shattering and tearing and searing pain. Jerking and ripping and darkness and shadows. The world was up and down and everything in between as the Jeep rolled over and over.

  And the final thought. The one before the huge tree embedded itself into the bonnet was…

  At least I’ll see Jamie again now.

  PART 3

  SELLING THE LIE

  “My silence is not weakness but the beginning of my revenge.”

  ~ Author Unknown

  MITCHELL

  Chapter 49

  What if you ever found out who’d murdered Alex? What would you do then?

  Maya’s words echoed in my head constantly. Every second of every day.

  Over the years, I’d fantasised about dishing out the same treatment to them. What father wouldn’t? It had consumed me, like a writhing, hungry monster living inside my belly, its fangs and claws ripping me apart. And now the monster would be unleashed—a wild, angry beast. It was all about balance. Righting the wrong. Tipping the scales in favour of good, not evil. Creating order from chaos. Reinstating light from the deepest depths of depraved darkness.

  The bottom line was, child rapists and murderers didn’t deserve to live. We should bring back the death penalty.

  Which is exactly what I was about to do.

  I slid Alex’s photo out of my wallet. His innocent, trusting face smiled back at me. His bright eyes crinkling at the corners, so full of happiness and promise for the future. He should’ve grown up to be a complicated, moody teenager. A determined, principled young man. A well-balanced, fulfilled adult with everything to live for. He could’ve had his own kids by now.

  Alex. My greatest gift. The only thing I almost did right. And my biggest failure.

  I was supposed to protect him. Keep him safe. Watch over him.

  But I’d failed. Just as I’d failed so many helpless people. Hundreds of men, women, and children. Jamie and Maya, too. I couldn’t protect Alex, but I’d thought I could protect Maya. I couldn’t even do that right. There was so much blood on my hands.

  I was culpable in mass murder. Saturated with guilt. A fraud. A failure. A fake.

  Guilty as hell. And maybe that was where I was heading. Eventually. And maybe when I got there, I’d get rid of the ghost town in my heart and stop the shadows calling out to me from those desolate places.

  But first I had to get this done. First came atonement. Vengeance. Vendetta. Call it what you like. Only a thin, sometimes invisible strand separated it all.

  I rested my head in my hands and tried to breathe. I needed to stay focused. To plan. There were so many possibilities. It would take time to work them all out. To prepare. Make sure everything ran with precision. No slip-ups. No mistakes. Nothing to point back at me.

  But that was all I had left now, anyway. Time.

  I sat up. Slapped my cheeks. Shook myself like an animal shedding water from its fur.

  Focus.

  My gaze strayed to the newspaper article again…

  Woman Suspected of Trying to Take Her Own Life after Boyfriend Commits Suicide

  Emergency services were called to the North Orbital Road, St Albans, last night after what is being tragically described as a suspected suicide attempt.

  Maya Morgan, 37, was seen driving erratically by several eyewitnesses before appearing to drive her Jeep Cherokee purposely off the main road, down an embankment, and into a heavily tree-lined area. A female witness in a vehicle behind Ms Morgan stopped after the impact and dragged her unconscious body from the Jeep and alerted paramedics, fire brigade, and police. No other vehicles were involved.

  Ms Morgan’s sister, Ava Potter, said, ‘Maya was left devastated by the suicide of her boyfriend, Jamie, nine months earlier and was struggling to cope’. Mrs Potter described Ms Morgan as being depressed, preoccupied, and unwilling to seek help. Ms Morgan had been secretive and distant from her sister since her boyfriend’s death, and Mrs Potter believed that she had secretly been considering suicide for a long time. ‘The whole family is obviously devastated,’ Mrs Potter added. Ms Morgan suffered multiple broken bones, serious internal injuries, and is now in a coma. Doctors treating Ms Morgan have described her condition as critical.’

  Lee had told me it was possible to hack into her Jeep. They’d inserted code inside her electronic system and remotely controlled it. She hadn’t stood a chance.

  I’d called in some big favours and had a few good men I trusted watching Maya at all times. Lee had put a covert camera in her hospital room when it wasn’t possible to have a physical presence to protect her. It was a precaution, because I didn’t think they’d make another attempt on her life unless she woke up. For now, they’d leave her to suffer, trapped inside her own battered body. Alive and dead at the same time. They would’ve found out the doctors weren’t optimistic she’d ever come out of the coma. But I knew she was stronger than that. She was a fighter. She’d pull through. She had to. And by the time she did, the person who ordered the hit would be dead, and it would all be over.

  Apparently, it was good to talk to coma patients, and I spent as much time as I could with her, reading, talking, playing music. So far there had been no response. I’d introduced myself to Ava and her parents as an old friend of Jamie’s, and whenever they arrived to visit Maya, we made polite small talk and I left them to it. They were grateful I was there when they couldn’t be to try to stimulate Maya. One day, when this was all over, maybe Maya would tell her family who I really was.

  In between visiting Maya, I was perfecting the little details in my mind. The hunters would now be the hunted. Plan B had turned into Plan C.

  The evil bastards behind everything still didn’t know about me. They didn’t know I was coming. They thought they were safe now. Thought they’d silenced everyone who knew the truth.

  Suicide. Accident. Natural causes. There were so many ways to do it. And they weren’t the only ones who could sell a lie.

  When I found out who really took my son’s life, I was way past wanting justice and truth. Now it was a necessary ending. Now it was all about revenge. It was personal.

  Vigilante or protector? Who was to say?

  If justice wasn’t done by the legal system, then it was my responsibility to be judge and jury. I could save the world one person at a time.

  There was a time to follow rules and orders. A time to think outside of the box and start to question the bullshit. A time to wake up an
d take action.

  And then there was a time to kill.

  It was time to start a war of my own.

  Chapter 50

  Geoff Barker – Crossfield Head – DEAD

  Howard Sebastian – High Court Judge – DEAD

  Colin Reed – Chief Constable of Bedfordshire Police – DEAD

  Ted Byron – Children’s Home Inspector – DEAD

  Keith Scholes – Crossfield Deputy Head

  Eamonn Colby – Children’s Minister

  Douglas Talbot – Defence Secretary

  Felix Barron – Owner of Barron Private Banking Group, etc

  Hooded Man in dungeon at 10 Crompton Place?

  Four dead, five to go. Eeny meeny miny moe.

  I decided on Keith Scholes first for several reasons, but mostly because he was the weakest link, the easiest and lowliest target, and I wanted to start from the bottom up to take out as many as I could before their alarm bells started ringing.

  He’d retired to a small cottage on a quiet road that backed onto Epping Forest. Pretty handy, really. The nearest houses were half a mile away in a tiny village, and the occupants wouldn’t hear a thing.

  I established a small, one-man covert observation post to the rear of Scholes’s cottage. A thick bramble hedge ran along the fence at the bottom of his twenty-five-metre-long garden, which I had burrowed into via the rear of the hedge itself. Firstly, I made sure I had a good field of view towards the cottage. Once satisfied I had good eyes on, I set to work constructing the hide. Using secateurs to hollow out a small but manoeuvrable working space inside, I pushed out some chicken wire to hold the brambles and nettles in position, and then I covered the lot in a small individual camouflage net. Lastly, I laid out a green foam mat for insulation, and the OP was ready. In my daysack I had the various optics I needed for observation of the target—a good set of binoculars, a Tasco scope, mounted on a small tripod, a high quality set of AN/PSV-7 night-vision goggles, US-issued kit, which was another illegal souvenir from my operational days in the regiment, and a small Dictaphone, to note down timings and anything relating to his routine that was worth recording.

  For more routine tasks inside the OP, I carried in some cold scoff to eat and a flask of tea. For ablutions, I had an empty two-litre plastic bottle to piss in and some baby wipes, cling film, and plastic bags for anything else, because once inside the OP, I didn’t want to move unnecessarily. Keeping as still as possible and remaining quiet would reduce the likelihood of compromise, either from the target or by any passing ramblers. All would be carried out with me when I exited after each stint.

  I also had the business end of the equipment inventory, my Glock 19 pistol, safely tucked into a pancake holster on my waist, along with a double mag carrier holding two further sixteen-round mags, giving me forty-eight rounds in total. My expanding hasp baton was held in a small pouch on my belt. Inside my daysack, I had a large roll of black masking tape, a dozen heavy-duty plasticuffs, spare high-durability latex gloves, a Maglite torch with an IR filter, and some sedatives, just in case. To keep out the cold and the rain, I had a one-piece Gore-Tex camouflaged sniper suit with detachable hood. Encased in this, I was both protected from the elements and afforded a high degree of cover.

  At the rear of Scholes’s house was a small kitchen with an archway that led into a lounge at the front of the property, next to a downstairs toilet. Upstairs, a small bathroom, and next to that a spare bedroom at the front. The rear bedroom that overlooked the garden was used by Scholes. He had a single garage attached to the side of the house with an internal door that led into the kitchen.

  Over the next few weeks, I learned several things that allowed me to build up a tactical picture in my head, familiarising myself with his routine. Scholes woke up between seven and eight every morning. After a cup of tea, he left the house and walked to the small shop just past the nearest house. One newspaper later, he walked back and ate breakfast. Usually two slices of toast. Sometimes cereal. After that he left the house again in his classic old Ford Cortina that he kept parked in the garage when not in use. After observing which direction he always seemed to be heading in, I followed covertly in a beat-up old VW Golf I’d bought for five hundred pounds and would never register. A small price to pay. Scholes regularly drove to a park five miles away. A park that had a large pond in the middle of it, frequented by ducks.

  Scholes walked around the pond clockwise, carrying his bag of birdseed. He sat on the third bench he came to, opened his bag, and began to scatter his seed to the ducks. But Scholes wasn’t an avian fan. I could tell that by the way he flinched every time the ducks got too near his feet and the way his lip curled in disgust. No, Scholes wasn’t there for the birds. His gaze was firmly fixed on the children’s play area near the large gravel car park, directly in his sight line from the bench, watching with his tongue protruding from his moist lips like a reptile tasting the air, his eyes filled with glassy longing.

  But not for long, eh, Scholes? Not much longer.

  He usually spent about an hour in the park. Anymore time and it would’ve been hard to justify why an old man was sitting there with no bird food left, in the coldest November we’d had for twenty years, watching a kiddies’ play area.

  So back home it was for Scholes, where he spent the rest of the morning reading in a saggy brown armchair, stained with dark patches on each arm. Then a light lunch before turning on his laptop, probably intimately enjoying his private collection of child porn, which I’d discovered when I’d been inside the house when Scholes was out one day. It was all carefully hidden behind other images stored on his device.

  His medicine cabinet in the bathroom had a half-empty packet of Ambien, ten-milligram tablets prescribed to Scholes.

  Have trouble sleeping, do you? Is there any conscience inside you? Any remorse?

  It would happen at night-time, that was a given. When it got dark around four thirty, Scholes shut the curtains at the front of the property that faced the quiet country lane but not the rear ones. After all, who could possibly want to be looking into his house from the woods after dark?

  He pottered around in the kitchen every night about six, making dinner. Sometimes beans on toast. Sometimes a frozen microwave meal. After dinner he had a bath, before heading back downstairs to read again in his armchair, with a glass of whisky, which he refilled several times before retiring to bed, presumably with a sleeping tablet, too. I wondered if he had nightmares.

  I hoped so.

  I waited until Scholes went up for his nightly bath before making my move. Nothing like being nice and squeaky-clean before you kill yourself. It was a perfectly normal ritual, they’d say. He still had some dignity left and didn’t want to be found in a filthy state. Wanted to make it as pleasant as possible for whoever discovered him. Even though he was a lonely retiree, who appeared to have no friends—apart from the ones online, in secret chat rooms, who shared his evil predilections—he was still thinking of others until the end.

  Bless him.

  The man in the small shop and the nearest neighbour would say he was just a nice old man who kept to himself and couldn’t cope with it all anymore.

  I checked the plastic shoe covers on my steel toe–capped boots. Clenched and unclenched my latex-gloved hands. Adjusted the balaclava I wore a millimetre to the right.

  My Glock felt snug in my hand as I emerged from the cover of the woods. It was a new moon, and what little moonlight that should’ve been glowing was hidden by a thick band of cloud.

  Even the weather gods were on my side. The side of the righteous. It was a message, a sign. Of course it was.

  I climbed over the three-foot wooden post and rail fence just past the hedge and my OP, my eyes scanning the night, my ears alert to every sound.

  Nothing. Silence.

  The rear door that led into the kitchen was locked, but it was an old, single-glazed wooden door with an old, useless lock. It took about thirty seconds for me to get inside again. Upstairs, the radio wa
s tuned in to a play. I heard a slosh of water as Scholes settled into the bath, and I shut the door slowly behind me. There were no creaks, no squeaks of wood to give me away.

  As I said, a sign. Or maybe the fact that I’d been in the house yesterday to hide what I needed and had added a little lubrication to the hinges. Vaseline was a wonderful invention. I’d had plenty of time to familiarise myself with the layout of his house, scouting for any signs that might give me away before I was ready.

  I sat in Scholes’s armchair, the Glock like an old friend in my right hand resting on my knee. My left hand casually placed on my left thigh.

  And I waited.

  Chapter 51

  Scholes shuffled into the lounge, his head down, picking at a piece of fluff on his cardigan. The years hadn’t been kind to him. His once black hair was now grey and thinning. His face was saggy and criss-crossed with drinker’s veins.

  He was halfway into the room before he glanced up. Saw me. Froze.

  His eyes widened. His lips fell open.

  A gun had that effect on people.

  I pointed the Glock at his centre mass. I could’ve pointed it at his head. The idea of treating the sadistic Scholes to a third eye in the middle of his forehead was tempting. But this wasn’t a murder scene. This was a suicide. Of course, Scholes didn’t know that.

  Yet.

  ‘Wha-what…do you want?’ Scholes stammered. ‘I have a few pounds upstairs. About a hundred. J-just take it. I don’t have much else.’

  I smiled. ‘I have some questions for you.’ I trained my gun arm lower, lower. His balls were a perfect shot from here. ‘If you give me the right answers, I’ll let you live. If not…’ I paused and raised my eyebrows. ‘I’ll shoot you in the bollocks. It’ll be messy, of course. There’ll be a lot of blood. Not to mention the pain. Agony, in fact. You could bleed out, which would take a while. Or someone might find you before that, if you’re lucky. Or unlucky, depending on how you look at it. Then there’ll be a lot of reconstructive operations. Excruciating surgery to repair the damage.’ I nodded at his crotch. Smiled again. ‘Your choice, of course.’