Die Alone

by Simon Kernick

  He reacted instantaneously, bringing his own gun round to fire, already having made the decision to pull the trigger.

  But he was too late. He felt her first bullet hit him with the force of a cricket bat, somewhere in his upper body, then the second straight afterwards, just as powerful.

  And then he was falling, the gun gone, the world seeming to melt and fade around him, no longer even conscious of the impact as he landed on the ground.

  49

  Even with the ringing in her ears, Tina clearly heard the two shots outside, and from where she was sitting she could just make out Mike falling to the ground beyond the now fully open roller doors.

  At that precise moment, Mo was removing her wrist straps with shaky hands. As soon as her hands were free, she pushed him aside, pulled off the remainder of the ties, and got to her feet, slipping her trainers back on.

  Tina didn’t hesitate. Ignoring the pain in her hand and Mo’s shouts to stay back as he followed her out, she ran over to the open roller door and out into the yard.

  Mike wasn’t moving and his eyes were closed. As she crouched down beside him, Tina could see the two entry wounds – one in his chest, one in his upper belly. There was no sign of The Wraith, but from the angle she’d fired from, and the fact that a high fence topped with barbed wire blocked off access to the railway track, there was only one way she could have gone.

  Anger and a desire for vengeance coursed through Tina, eclipsing every other feeling. Yelling at Mo to help Mike, she picked up his discarded pistol with her good hand and sprinted through the yard, making for the end of the main building where a narrow lane ran round the other side.

  As Tina rounded the corner, not even slowing down, she saw The Wraith twenty yards further on, making for the road, having discarded her mask. She gave chase, her footsteps crunching on the gravel, already lifting the pistol to fire, the bleeding hand down by her side. In the distance she could hear sirens drawing closer.

  Hearing her approach, The Wraith swung round, and Tina saw her for the first time, unmasked. In that single second it struck her that the woman who’d murdered her neighbour, possibly her former lover, boss and friend, and who’d almost murdered Tina herself too, was strikingly attractive – not at all the sort of person you’d expect to cause so much grief and pain.

  And then, still running, Tina pulled the trigger, three times in rapid succession. The recoil from the third shot made her stumble and fall to the ground, which may well have saved her life because The Wraith was already firing back into the space where Tina had been.

  But, as Tina rolled onto her side, bringing the gun back up, she saw that The Wraith had been hit somewhere near the top of her right leg and was clutching the wound with one hand while staggering around in a tight circle, still holding the gun, lifting it up to aim – not at Tina, but someone behind her.

  ‘Armed police!’ she heard Mo call out, his voice faltering just a little. ‘Drop your weapon!’

  The sirens were loud now, but reinforcements still weren’t quite here.

  The Wraith straightened, her finger tensing on the trigger.

  Tina squinted down the pistol’s sights, her hand shaking slightly, looking for a body shot.

  The Wraith didn’t move.

  A second passed.

  Then she dropped the gun and raised her free hand. ‘I surrender.’

  ‘Step away from the gun!’ shouted Mo.

  The Wraith took a tentative step backwards, still clutching her leg.

  Which was when Tina got back to her feet and strode towards her, still holding Mike’s pistol out in front of her.

  ‘Tina, get out of the way!’ shouted Mo, but still she kept walking until she stood directly in front of the woman who’d almost killed her twice. Now making her stare down the barrel of the gun.

  The Wraith stared back at her defiantly, although her face was contorted in pain. ‘Do as your friend says,’ she hissed through gritted teeth. ‘I’m unarmed and I’m surrendering.’

  ‘Move out of the way, Tina – now!’ Mo’s voice came from only feet behind her, angry and tense.

  Tina ignored him. Her finger tightened on the trigger. ‘This is for my neighbour, Mrs West,’ she said. ‘And for everyone else you’ve killed.’

  The Wraith suddenly looked utterly terrified, her poise completely gone in that one second, and she seemed to visibly shrink. ‘God please, no.’

  ‘Don’t do it, Tina!’ shouted Mo.

  Tina thought of Mrs West, of Mike, of the man she’d tortured to death on a live-stream feed to his wife … of every person this woman had destroyed in her foul career.

  She squeezed the trigger.

  And stopped. Just at the last second.

  ‘You can rot in prison, bitch,’ she said, and turned away.

  At that moment she heard movement behind her and Mo suddenly yelled a warning.

  The noise of bullets filled the air, and Tina fell forward.

  50

  ‘I cannot tell you how saddened I am to hear about the deaths of two brave police officers, cut down in the line of duty like this,’ said Alastair Sheridan solemnly as he conducted an interview with the BBC over his laptop via Skype.

  He was pleased that the BBC had approached him faster than anyone else, bar the Prime Minister, who’d still yet to make an official statement on the killings. It showed how important he was, how high up the pecking order.

  ‘People sometimes forget what an incredibly difficult job the police do, in often dangerous circumstances, as we’ve seen today, and with fewer and fewer resources. I’ve long said that the government needs to divert resources from other areas to give the police force the support it needs to maintain law and order. I also believe we are going to have to take a much tougher line on criminals in this country, because right now it really is beginning to look like they’re taking over our streets, and that is a frankly intolerable situation. We cannot let it happen. It would be an insult to the memory of these two brave officers.’

  Alastair knew you could never go far wrong on the law and order ticket. The voters never failed to lap it up. And at the moment it was an especially useful stick to beat the PM with.

  ‘Do we have any more details about what actually happened in this particular incident?’ he asked the interviewer, a boring middle-aged man who seemed to think that dyeing his hair the colour of turd would make him look younger. Four hours had passed since it had taken place but that was a lifetime these days.

  Unfortunately, the interviewer didn’t, or none that he could say on air anyway, and that was the problem with the BBC. It was always behind the curve.

  Alastair wound up the interview with some thoughts and prayers for the victims’ families then said a suitably sombre goodbye and got up to rejoin his family and the Buxton-Smythes on the veranda, where they’d been enjoying a Thai dinner personally prepared by one of Zagreb’s top chefs, who’d been flown in especially. Alastair was in a particularly jovial mood, and he was just checking his Twitter feed to see how many people had liked his earlier post condemning the police killings (27,618 in less than two hours) when he saw the name Tina Boyd trending.

  He clicked on one of the posts and saw that there was a rumour that the two police officers had been killed while rescuing Tina Boyd from a disused garage where she was being held against her will, and that Tina herself had been killed.

  Alastair grinned, and there was a real spring in his step as he went back out onto the veranda and sat down at the head of the table, picking up his glass and taking a big gulp of Cristal.

  ‘Now, where we?’

  51

  Tina wasn’t dead. She was in a hospital bed trying to come to terms with the events of the last few hours.

  One second she’d been about to kill the woman known as The Wraith, but then, as she’d lowered the gun and turned her back, everything had happened so suddenly that it had all been over in a flash. Using Tina as cover, The Wraith had gone for her gun, only for Mo Khan to open
fire on her as Tina dived to the ground.

  Tina wasn’t sure whether or not The Wraith was dead. The last she’d seen was Mo giving her first aid while she lay motionless on the gravel. But it didn’t look good for her. Still, as far as Tina was concerned, it was nothing less than she deserved.

  It was the shock of Mike’s death that had been like a hammer blow to her. Tina had seen violent death too many times before but even so, she’d only rarely lost people close to her, and none of them had she actually seen die. Mike had died right in front of her. Big, strong, dependable Mike – a good cop, and one who’d faced extreme danger before and come out the other side unscathed, who’d been only months from retirement; the man she’d never have expected to succumb to the job. And now he was gone. Worse still, he’d only been there because Tina had phoned him and he’d been trying to save her. It made her feel doubly responsible for his death.

  The police had already questioned her about what had happened, and she’d told them. The two detectives, both women, had been sympathetic rather than hostile, and had told her that the first officer she’d seen shot had also died of his wounds.

  The detectives had gone now, leaving two armed officers outside her door for, as they put it, her protection, but Tina was pretty certain they were also there to stop her from leaving.

  It was ten p.m. and she was lying in her hospital bed, staring up at the ceiling, knowing that she needed to borrow a phone to call her brother in Spain to let the family know what had happened before they heard about it on the news. They’d be horrified and would want to come home to see her. Her mum would insist on it. And Tina didn’t want that. She felt guilty enough as it was, without ruining their holiday too, and putting them in needless danger. All she wanted was to be left alone to grieve for Mike in peace.

  But it didn’t look like that was going to be an option because, barely ten minutes after the departure of the detectives, there was a knock on the door and someone she was very much not expecting stepped inside, carrying a large bunch of flowers, and shut the door behind him.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ asked George Bannister, the Home Office minister and, as anyone who watched the news would know, Alastair Sheridan’s permanent sidekick, his unofficial campaign manager for the job of Prime Minister.

  Tina stiffened at the sight of him, and sat up in bed. ‘Mr Bannister, isn’t it? What are you doing here?’

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ he said, leaning the flowers against the wall and approaching the bed. ‘Do you mind if I sit down?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ she said, watching him as he sat down warily on one of the plastic chairs. He was a small, fussy-looking man with thinning hair and tense body language. From what she knew, he was academically very bright and highly efficient in his governmental roles, but was missing any of the charisma that a leading politician needs, which made him the perfect foil for Sheridan.

  Bannister leaned forward in the seat. ‘I want to assure you that we’re not being recorded,’ he said, ‘which means I can speak frankly, and I want you to speak frankly too.’

  He paused there, and Tina felt the first flickering of contempt for him. His discomfort told her all she needed to know: he’d been sent here by Alastair Sheridan.

  ‘First of all, I want to say that I’m very sorry to hear about what happened to you today. I understand that you were a friend of one of the officers who was killed.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Bannister, but I’d prefer it if you ditched the niceties,’ she told him, ‘and got on with what you came here to say.’

  He nodded. ‘All right. Would you mind putting your hands where I can see them so that I know you’re not recording any of this?’

  Tina put her hands over the covers. ‘I haven’t got my phone right now, Mr Bannister. It was left in my car when I was abducted. I’m still waiting for the police to give it back to me. Perhaps you could help on that.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ He glanced back towards the door, then back at Tina, and specifically her hands, as if he still didn’t quite trust her. He looked very, very nervous. ‘I suspect’, he said at last, ‘that you know a lot about …’ He swallowed hard. ‘The real Alastair Sheridan.’

  ‘If you mean that he’s a serial killer, yes, I do.’

  ‘He’s an incredibly dangerous man,’ Bannister said quietly.

  ‘Then why are you helping him?’

  Bannister sighed. ‘He has something on me. Something that he’s been blackmailing me with for a long time.’

  Tina didn’t say anything.

  ‘He has to be stopped, Miss Boyd. But I can’t do that. Answer me a question. You have my word it goes no further than this room. Are you still in touch with Ray Mason?’

  Tina suspected Bannister’s word counted for next to nothing but he’d given her something so she decided to give him something in return. ‘I may be able to get hold of him if I have to,’ she answered carefully.

  ‘I know he’s not in the country,’ said Bannister. ‘And I also know that he was smuggled out, and by whom. A few hours ago, the French police raided a holiday home where it was believed Mason was hiding. He wasn’t there, but the police were of the opinion that he had been and that they’d only just missed him. Which they had.’

  Tina frowned, thinking that Bannister was worryingly well informed. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I phoned the house and warned him to get out.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Alastair is out of control, and has to be stopped. And I know Mason wants to kill him, just like he killed Cem Kalaman.’

  ‘It was Sheridan who set Ray up on the Kalaman hit,’ said Tina.

  ‘I thought as much,’ said Bannister. ‘I’d been warning him for a long time that his association with Kalaman would come to haunt him if he wasn’t careful. It looks like he took me at my word.’

  ‘He uses contract killers to clean up his mess. One of them murdered my neighbour. She was eighty-five. That same woman was the one who tried to kill me today, and who killed the two officers.’

  ‘I know,’ said Bannister, ‘and she’s now dead, so she can do you no further harm. It was the murder of your neighbour which finally prompted me to contact you. I can’t stand it any longer.’ He paused. ‘Alastair’s got to go.’

  ‘When you say “go” …’

  ‘I mean permanently.’ He looked at her. ‘He has to die, Miss Boyd.’

  Even after everything he’d said, Tina was still shocked to hear the words come out of his mouth. She’d seen this guy, a Home Office minister, so many times on TV, droning on about crime and asylum numbers, or standing next to Alastair Sheridan, his old school friend, the man he now wanted to have murdered.

  ‘And you want Ray to do it?’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Jesus, he must have something very, very big on you.’

  Bannister cleared his throat. ‘It’s enough. However, I want to make it clear that it has nothing to do with the crimes he and Kalaman and whoever else are responsible for. I’ve never killed, or indeed hurt, anyone.’

  ‘Maybe not, but like all politicians you like to get other people to do your dirty work.’

  He ignored the barb. ‘Alastair Sheridan is currently on holiday with his wife and family in Dubrovnik. They went there this morning. However, Alastair has a number of business interests in Bosnia-Herzegovina and he will be leaving his family and travelling by land to Sarajevo on Friday, where he’ll be addressing a civic event in the City Hall. There’ll be tight security there. Alastair’s popular in Bosnia and he’s being wooed by senior government figures who want him to invest some of his hedge fund money in their country. But while he’s there, he won’t be staying in Sarajevo. Two years ago, he and Kalaman used a shell company to buy an isolated property up in the mountains ten kilometres north of the city. I think they were planning to turn it into an eastern European version of the farm in Wales where they murdered the girls.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ Tina asked him.

  ‘I’m a Home Of
fice minister, and I’ve also been close to Alastair for a long time. The combination puts me in a good position to unearth this kind of information. I don’t know if they’ve already murdered any girls there, but a lone female hiker from Hungary went missing not far away last summer. The point is, Alastair can operate with a degree of impunity while he’s there. He can’t kill easily but he can certainly indulge in his sadistic tendencies far from anyone’s gaze. Bosnia’s a poor country and money has a very loud voice there.’ He paused. ‘Anyway, Alastair will be staying for several days at the house before returning to his family. I suspect in that time he’ll want to indulge a little. He also won’t have his British police escort with him. The house is protected only by private security.’

  Tina thought about what Bannister was saying. It made sense. Men like Alastair Sheridan – sadistic, violent killers – could never stop their activities. They might be able to control them temporarily but, in the end, the urge to kill or injure would always come to the fore. One way or another they would continue until they were either caught, or got too old, and Alastair appeared to be a long way from either.

  ‘How do I know this isn’t some sort of trap you’re setting up with Sheridan to catch or kill Ray?’

  ‘We both know what Alastair’s done, the depths to which he’s sunk,’ said Bannister, meeting her eye. ‘I’m a lot of things, some of them not that good, but I’m not a monster. I promise you this is no trap.’ He reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and took out a mobile phone. ‘The address and location of the house in Bosnia are stored in this phone. It’s unregistered. You have my word no one will try to trace it.’ He placed it on the bed next to her.

  Tina smiled coldly. ‘You’re a politician. Your word isn’t worth shit.’

  ‘But you’ve got things on me now. That should be enough.’