Die Alone

by Simon Kernick

  Sheridan and George were old friends from school, although George probably didn’t see it that way any more. In fact, Sheridan was fairly certain the other man secretly hated him, but that didn’t matter. The most important thing was that when Sheridan whistled, George came running. As he’d done so this evening, bringing his singularly unattractive second wife and their rather wimpish ten-year-old son, the atrociously named Rafferty, for an early evening barbecue at the Sheridan family home deep in the Hampshire countryside where Sheridan had grown up, and where he had his constituency.

  ‘So where are we at on my leadership bid, George?’ demanded Sheridan as the two of them walked alone through the woodland at the end of the house’s immaculately tiered gardens.

  ‘We’ve definitely got the forty-eight MPs in place to trigger the election,’ said George, ‘and from the private polling I’ve done, you’ve got the support of at least a hundred MPs if you stand.’

  ‘That’s a long way short of a majority.’

  ‘It’s more than any other candidate. And there are going to be at least five standing. In a second ballot, I think the bulk of the parliamentary party would get behind you.’

  Sheridan looked down at George, enjoying the fact that he had six inches in height over the other man. ‘“Think” isn’t enough,’ he said. ‘I need more certainty.’

  ‘I can’t give you any more certainty than that, Alastair. You’re a fresh, exciting face in the party, a very popular candidate, and you’ve certainly got the charisma to appeal to a wide spectrum of voters, but there’s no denying you’re also controversial. There are rumours about your links to organized crime, and Cem Kalaman in particular. You know that.’

  ‘I have nothing to do with him,’ said Sheridan, irritated to have Kalaman’s name brought up. ‘We knew each other once. We did some business through the hedge fund, but that was a long time ago. And it was all above board. I haven’t seen him for several years.’

  ‘That’s good. Because I know of at least two ongoing investigations into his criminal enterprise, and there’s a very good chance he’ll be arrested and charged in the near future. If any links, however tenuous, between you and he are discovered, it’ll do immense damage to any leadership bid.’

  ‘But if I’m already Prime Minister, it’ll be hard to push me out. Therefore, now is going to be my best chance.’ Sheridan didn’t like the idea of running for leadership and being defeated, but he knew that, given his background, and the balancing act he’d performed for so long to keep his dark secrets out of the public domain, it was also too risky to wait to make his move. And, in truth, he’d never felt readier for the highest role in British politics. He had some excellent, if vague, policy ideas to free up the economy and drive it forward. He had the common touch. He could reach areas the other candidates couldn’t hope to reach. He was, in short, a winner.

  ‘We’ll make the move in September,’ said George, ‘when we’re back from the summer recess. We just need the PM to keep floundering over these next few weeks, a few more prison riots to add to the general impression of chaos and disorder, and then all the momentum will be with us. I think we can definitely do it, Alastair.’

  George looked up at him with a good attempt at enthusiasm on his chubby, middle-aged face, but Sheridan didn’t buy it. George wasn’t nearly enthusiastic enough – which, Sheridan had to admit, was unsurprising given that he more than virtually anyone knew the truth about the man he was helping to become Prime Minister. Sheridan was definitely going to have to bring him into line.

  ‘Are there are any criminal investigations aimed at me at the moment, George?’ he asked, revealing the real reason why he’d brought him here tonight.

  ‘I don’t believe so.’

  ‘I need a yes or no. You’re the Home Office minister for the police. You ought to know.’

  ‘I keep my ear to the ground, Alastair, and I do everything I can to make sure I’m made aware if there’s anything serious going on.’

  It was a typical mealy-mouthed politician’s response, evasive and unsatisfying. It was no wonder MPs were so despised. Sheridan stopped and put a firm hand on George’s shoulder, looking down at him like a headmaster addressing an errant pupil.

  ‘I need to know exactly who is after me, and how they’re doing it, George. I don’t trust my new colleagues in the government. And you’re my inside man, aren’t you, George? Because if I go down, old friend, you might find yourself answering some rather unpleasant questions yourself. I’ve still got the evidence of your little indiscretion, you know.’

  And there it was. Out there. Sheridan’s secret weapon.

  ‘I know,’ said George, wilting under his old friend’s gaze.

  ‘I don’t want any nasty surprises, and I’m sure you don’t either. You just need to do one thing for me, George. Get me into power. After that, I’ll do the rest.’ Sheridan patted him on the shoulder and grinned. ‘Come on, let’s head back to the ladies.’

  4

  My eyes opened and I sat up fast, expecting to find myself in some kind of restraints.

  Instead, I was in a comfortable double bed with what smelled like the first truly clean sheets I’d had in a year. And I was naked, my prison sweatshirt and tracksuit bottoms nowhere to be seen. I pulled down the covers and examined the wounds on my arm and belly. The dressings had been changed, and the area around the injuries cleaned up. They throbbed dully.

  I looked around. The room was small. The bed and an old-fashioned wardrobe at the end of it took up most of the space. There was also a bedside table with a lamp, along with a clean glass and a full jug of water. It was daylight, and sunshine was poking round the edges of the blackout blinds.

  Some time had clearly passed.

  I drank two glasses of water in quick succession before climbing out of the bed. My head ached angrily, and for a couple of seconds my vision blurred before clearing again. I opened the blinds and saw that I was on the first floor of a house that looked out onto a leylandii hedge that must have been a good twenty feet high, and was separated from the window by a short stretch of well-kept grass. I tried the window handles and wasn’t surprised to find them locked. Next, I tried the bedroom door. It too was locked, and there was a camera above it I hadn’t noticed before, pointing towards the bed.

  Where the hell was I?

  The bedroom had an en suite with a power shower. It was all very clean. I took a leak and examined myself in the mirror. I looked how I felt. Washed out and exhausted. The dressing that had been applied to my right cheek by the doctor back at the prison was no longer there. Instead, the wound now had two old-fashioned, but effective-looking, string stitches. It was the same, I discovered, on my belly and forearm wounds, which had six and ten new stitches respectively.

  This was strange. I’d assumed my kidnappers, or the people they were working for, would only keep me alive if they wanted to torture me, which meant they wouldn’t be bothering to stitch my wounds or let me sleep in a comfortable bed. I’d be in some kind of basement cell somewhere chained to the wall.

  So who had abducted me? And more importantly, why had they done so?

  I was intrigued, but whatever the answer it could wait until after I’d had a decent shower. Showering in prison is no fun. Firstly, you can’t do it alone. In our wing, more than a hundred prisoners shared the same small shower block, and there were only certain times of the day you could use it, so it was always busy. Second, you were rationed only three tiny sachets of shower gel a week, and it was expensive to buy more, so a lot of the time you were just rinsing yourself.

  But this place was different. Inside the shower unit was a full, unused bottle of some nice-looking stuff on a tray. Whoever had taken me had clearly prepared for my visit, and stitches or no stitches, I was going to take full advantage of their generosity.

  Ten minutes later, warm, refreshed and a lot less groggy, I emerged into the bedroom, towelling myself, just as a voice came over an unseen intercom:

  ‘There are
clothes in the wardrobe. Put them on.’

  The voice belonged to a well-educated woman, middle-aged, with a soft Scottish burr.

  Feeling suddenly self-conscious, I wrapped the towel round my waist and checked the wardrobe. There were a number of tops and jeans hanging up, and in the drawers were clean underwear and socks. There was even a pair of new trainers at the bottom. Everything fitted me too. My captor seemed to know a lot about me.

  I’d barely got the last of the clothes on when there was a knock on the door. I told whoever it was to come in, but it had already opened, and in walked a man of medium height and build, dressed in casual clothes, but wearing a similar balaclava to the gunmen the previous night. Unlike them, however, he was carrying a tray containing bacon, fried eggs and beans on toast, along with cutlery and a mini-cafetière of coffee. He also didn’t appear to be armed but, even though the door was open, I didn’t contemplate making a break for it. I was too interested in the food for that. I suddenly realized I was starving, having missed the previous night’s meal, and not eaten a thing since the crap we’d been fed at lunchtime the day before. Prison food, as you’d imagine, is uniformly awful. I’d had bacon only twice in the whole time I’d been inside. The meat had been a weird grey colour, and had tasted like rubber. This stuff looked like it had been carved off the pig that very morning.

  The guy put the tray down on the bed.

  ‘I’m assuming that means you don’t want to kill me,’ I said, unable to resist picking up a rasher with my fingers and shoving it straight in my mouth. Believe it or not, before I ended up in prison, I had good table manners.

  ‘Miss Lane will tell you everything,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in ten minutes to take you to her.’

  ‘Who’s Miss Lane?’

  ‘The woman you work for now.’

  Miss Lane was sitting at the end of the table in a dining room on the ground floor of what was a fairly spacious older house of character, the kind that costs a lot of money, when I walked in. She was dressed somewhat incongruously in a suit and not quite matching balaclava, and black leather gloves, and she had a cup of something on a saucer in front of her.

  ‘Miss Lane, I presume,’ I said as the guy who’d shown me in slipped back out, shutting the door behind him.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said in the same Scottish burr as the voice on the intercom, gesturing for me to take a seat.

  I sat down at the opposite end of the table and looked round the room. It was sparsely but expensively furnished, and the dining table was a beautiful mahogany. ‘Well, you’ve gone to considerable effort and risk to get me out of prison, Miss Lane, and it doesn’t look like you want to kill me, so what is it you do want?’

  ‘You know who Alastair Sheridan is, don’t you?’

  Alastair Sheridan was a murderer, and one I’d been hunting, and getting close to, when I was arrested. Now just turned fifty, he’d been killing young women for close to thirty years. But Sheridan was a clever man and he’d been so good at covering his tracks that he’d remained undetected. Few people in the world who weren’t involved in his crimes knew his secret. One of them had been a friend who’d worked as his lawyer, and also witnessed one of his killings, called Hugh Manning. I’d arranged for Manning to be handed over to the police after he’d gone on the run, and he’d subsequently been murdered along with four police officers at a supposedly secure location, before he could tell the world what he knew.

  ‘You know I know who he is,’ I said.

  ‘Alastair Sheridan is a threat to national security,’ said Lane.

  ‘I could have told you that. In fact, I tried very hard to tell plenty of people, but no one seemed to want to listen.’

  Lane shifted in her seat and sighed. ‘That’s because there’s no evidence linking him to any of the crimes he’s suspected of. And now, as you’re probably aware, he’s made a move into politics.’

  I’d read in the papers that Alastair Sheridan had been shoehorned into a safe government seat and was now an MP, and that the hedge fund he managed was doing incredibly well, which just shows you how much justice there is in the world. ‘I’m aware,’ I said.

  ‘Well, what you’re probably not aware of is how popular he is within his parliamentary party,’ continued Lane. ‘The government have lost control, the opposition are a complete mess, and Alastair Sheridan is looking increasingly like a potential leader, someone who can turn things around. The public know nothing of what he’s suspected of, neither do most MPs. He’s even being talked about as our next Prime Minister. We can’t let that happen.’

  ‘Who’s “we”?’

  ‘I work for the security services, Mr Mason. I’m not going to give you any more detail than that. Only a handful of people in the world even know I’m here talking to you, but they include individuals at the very top of government.’

  I’ve learned over the years that corruption and a complete disregard for the law go right to the very top in both business and government, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if senior politicians had sanctioned last night’s hijack.

  ‘Did you set up the prison riot? Because if so, it almost went very, very wrong. If it hadn’t been for some cheap netting, I’d be in the morgue now.’

  Lane shook her head. ‘Your enemies did that. Mr Sheridan, and of course his close friend Mr Kalaman, who I believe you’re also acquainted with.’

  Cem Kalaman. There are three things you need to know about him. One: he’s a violent underworld figure who runs a criminal empire worth at least a billion pounds. Two: nearly twenty years ago he murdered his own father so that he could take over the business. And three: he has been Alastair Sheridan’s partner in crime since the very beginning. Two very different men but the backbone, and last surviving members, of a cabal of killers who’d murdered possibly dozens of young women over three decades.

  ‘We were planning on getting you transferred and taking you then,’ continued Lane, ‘but things had to be brought forward very fast. We had intelligence that there was going to be an attempt on your life, but we didn’t know how or when. When we got word you’d been injured in the riot and were being transferred to the hospital, we moved fast.’

  I sat back in the chair and thought about this. It made some sense, but it also left a lot of unanswered questions, like how did they get there so fast? And of course, the most important question of all.

  ‘So what do you want me for now?’

  Lane sipped her drink before replacing the cup carefully on the saucer. ‘I think you already know,’ she said. ‘We want you to kill Alastair Sheridan.’

  She’d delivered the request so coldly that it made me snort in disbelief. ‘Don’t you think that’s a little extreme? You know, for a democracy where the law is supposedly sacrosanct? There must be an easier way. Why not try gathering evidence against him, like I was trying to do before I was arrested? He’s committed enough crimes.’

  ‘We’ve tried,’ said Lane. ‘But he’s got good security, he’s savvy, and he has friends in high places.’

  ‘Even though they know what he’s done?’

  ‘What it’s alleged he’s done. Remember, there’s no actual evidence. And he doesn’t look like a killer, does he? He looks and sounds like a charming, handsome and charismatic man. And looks count. Most people would never believe it. Unfortunately for Mr Sheridan, the people who count do. So they’ve decided on a course of action, and the reason we’ve chosen you to take him down rather than anyone else is—’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ I said. ‘I’m expendable.’

  ‘That’s not quite how I’d have put it. But yes, if you fail and you’re caught, it wouldn’t be that difficult to concoct a motive for you as a damaged man suffering from PTSD, with an irrational grudge against Alastair Sheridan. And if you succeed and you’re caught, everything about Sheridan will come out anyway. Either way, you’ll be on your own, and no one will believe you if you try to blame it on the security services.’

  ‘You’re
not exactly selling it to me.’

  Lane smiled behind the balaclava. ‘That’s the advantage for us. We don’t have to. You’re a man awaiting trial for double murder with a half-a-million-pound price tag on his head. You’re not exactly operating from a position of strength. And if you decide you don’t want to take the job, we’ll put a needle in your arm again, drop you off somewhere, and let the police take you back in, where you’re almost certain to be murdered on Alastair Sheridan and Cem Kalaman’s orders at some point in the next few months.’ She paused, leaning forward in her chair and resting her gloved hands on the table. ‘But if you succeed in killing Sheridan, you’ll receive a new passport, a new identity, a new face, and you can start a new life somewhere a long, long way from here.’

  ‘What about Cem Kalaman?’ I asked her.

  ‘He’s not in our remit,’ said Lane. ‘But without Sheridan’s help, he’ll fall soon enough. There are a number of investigations into his affairs at the moment.’

  I thought about what was being offered to me. Lane was right. I wasn’t negotiating from a position of strength. They held all the cards. But there was something else too. A little over a year ago I’d personally promised Steve and Karen Brennan, the parents of Sheridan and Kalaman’s first and youngest victim, thirteen-year-old Dana, that I wouldn’t rest until I’d brought her killers to justice, and the fact that I hadn’t done so had played on my mind throughout my time in prison. Now I was being offered the opportunity to make good on at least half that promise.

  ‘So, if Sheridan’s got such excellent security that you people can’t get to him, how the hell am I meant to?’ I said.

  Lane smiled again. ‘You’ll be pleased to know we’ve got a perfect way in.’

  5

  Tina Boyd’s life should have been easy. She’d enjoyed a safe, comfortable, middle-class upbringing in the Home Counties, with parents who were still together and who’d shown her and each other the kind of love and compassion that was in short supply in so many families. She’d had a great time at university, left with a pretty decent degree, and had spent an adventurous and hugely satisfying gap year travelling through Asia (still the best year of her life by far, although in truth, the competition had been limited). Happy days, and they could have continued that way: a decent job, maybe marriage, a comfortable if slightly boring life like her brother and his family.