A minute later, he came to a halt in front of a large, imposing gate lit by twin lamps, one on each gatepost, and pressed the button to let down the driver’s side window.
I slid further down in the seat so I was almost lying down as a man approached and he and Marco had a quick conversation in Serbo-Croat. Then Marco brought the window up again and the gates opened.
We drove inside and I stayed down until, after about fifty yards, he brought the car to a halt. I sat up and saw that we’d parked in front of a large gothic-looking mansion with grey stone walls and swathes of ivy like jungle creepers running down them. There were lights on inside and the curtains were drawn.
‘What now?’ asked Marco.
‘Does he have a camera watching the front door?’
‘I’m not sure. I think so. Maybe.’
‘Well, you’d better be the one who knocks on it then.’
I followed him out of the car. The night was still and peaceful, the moon bathing the house’s neatly kept gardens in eerie light. No one appeared to be watching us from the gatehouse but, even so, I kept to the shadows and out of sight as Marco mounted the steps to the front door.
He knocked hard while I stayed round the corner, the gun already drawn, and then it was opened and I heard Alastair’s voice, deep and cheery. ‘Hello Marco, have you—’
He never finished the sentence. I was round the corner in an instant, and there he was. Alastair Sheridan. My nemesis. The man who’d murdered Dana Brennan and countless others. The man who’d destroyed my life.
His face didn’t just fall, it collapsed as he saw me. But I didn’t give him a chance to call out or shut the door. I gave Marco a hard shove and forced us both through the door and into a surprisingly narrow hallway.
‘Marco,’ I said as I shut the door behind me.
He turned round. Behind him, Sheridan was retreating with his hands raised.
‘This is for the girl,’ I said, and shot him right between the eyes.
Marco tottered, wearing an expression of surprise as a thin line of blood ran down the centre of his face and off the end of his nose. Then he collapsed straight to the floor.
The pistol was a .22 so the retort wasn’t loud enough to be heard in the gatehouse, and I knew there wouldn’t be a camera in here, not with the kind of thing Sheridan had been planning.
‘Oh God,’ said Sheridan, hands outstretched in supplication. ‘Please. I’ll give you money. Anything. Don’t hurt me.’ He continued his retreat into a large living room done out in dark woods and dominated by a huge, ornate stone fireplace until a large chaise longue blocked his passage. He stood against it, literally shaking with fear, tears running down his face.
I stopped ten feet from him. Raised the still-smoking pistol.
‘Please, Mr Mason. Ray. Don’t do this. I am rich. I can give you anything you want. I swear to God I will never hurt another soul. I will be a force for good. I’m sick. I need help.’
Fair play to him, he was trying every potential angle that might result in mercy. I let him continue, my face impassive, and I think he knew then that he had no chance. His knees began to shake uncontrollably and it looked like he might collapse.
‘Did you enjoy killing Dana Brennan?’ I asked him. ‘A thirteen-year-old girl who was going shopping for her mother. Did it make you feel good ending her life?’
‘It wasn’t … I didn’t … I didn’t know what I was doing.’ His face crumpled and he dissolved into loud sobs.
I thought of Dana. Of her parents. Hollowed-out versions of their former selves. A family utterly destroyed.
‘I’ve got no mercy for you,’ I told him, wanting to make him squirm in his last few seconds. It’s a terrible thing to say, but I was actually enjoying watching another human being suffer.
And it was for that reason that I didn’t hear the guards coming through the back of the house until it was almost too late.
I caught a brief glance of one of them through the open lounge doors as he crept through the dining room towards us. He was armed with a shotgun, and I could just make out a second figure behind him.
I swung round fast, firing immediately, but at least one of them fired too and I felt myself being blown backwards by an intense, unstoppable force. I went down hard, the gun flying away out of sight, and lay on the floor, my head down, suddenly finding it very hard to move.
I let out a low moan and rolled over. Both guards were lying injured on the floor, clearly out of action. But unfortunately so was I.
For a few moments I didn’t move, the shock of my injury knocking me temporarily off-kilter. Then I looked down and saw blood seeping through my shirt in a rough circle, a few inches below my heart. It hurt. It hurt bad. I felt round my back, looking for the exit hole, and found a big hunk of flesh missing. It was hard to know how seriously I’d been wounded. There was plenty of blood, but I was still conscious.
From my prone position, I saw a pair of patent leather loafers coming towards me and then I was grabbed by the hair and yanked round so that I was staring up at Alastair Sheridan’s face as he crouched down beside me, pushing the pistol into my face.
But this time his tears were gone and he was grinning intensely, his eyes alive with a dark, manic joy. ‘Now I’ve got you, you fuck. Just you and me. I’m going to let you bleed for a bit then, when you’re nice and weak, I’m going to cut you slowly into little pieces, and while I do it, I’m going to tell you all about how we killed your little friend Dana.’ His grin grew wider. ‘How we listened to her scream and scream until we’d snuffed out her worthless little life. Because that’s what her life was to us. Worthless. Like all the others.’ He pushed the gun into my face harder, barely able to suppress his intense excitement as he revelled in who he really was, free from the gaze of the outside world.
In this small space, deep in a forest, I too saw him as he truly was. A monster. And he saw me as just one more victim in a long, long line.
We stared at each other, my teeth clenched against the hot pain that was coursing through my body. I suddenly felt terribly tired.
‘You failed, Mason,’ he said, taking a deep breath, his smile calmer now. ‘After all this time, and at the last hurdle, you failed. How does that feel?’
‘It feels …’ I said slowly, my voice little more than a croak. ‘It feels …’
He leaned in closer, the smile widening. ‘It feels what, Mason?’
‘It feels … like success.’ And as I spoke the words, I brought up the switchblade, flicked it open, and shoved it straight up through his rib cage and into his heart.
The gun went off close to my ear but then dropped from Sheridan’s hand as he wavered in his crouch, an expression of utter shock on his face as if he couldn’t believe that I’d had the audacity to harm him. He fell back onto his behind, staring down at the switchblade, buried to the hilt inside him. His fingers fluttered close to the handle, touching it almost daintily, but then the hand dropped to his side, his mouth formed a small, perfectly round O, and he rolled over onto his side.
Slowly, carefully, I forced myself to my feet, taking hold of the pistol, preparing to finish him off.
But he was already gone. It was over. The Bone Field killers were all finally dead. I’d won and, amid the pain, I felt a small but palpable sense of satisfaction.
I fired a single round into his head, just to make sure, then threw away the gun, before staggering through to the kitchen where I used two handtowels tied together to form a tourniquet for my wound. I felt faint and sick, but still very much alive.
With a sigh, I made my way back down the hallway, stopping by Marco’s body to take the car keys out of his pocket, before opening the front door and walking unsteadily out into the silent, peaceful night, leaving my enemies dead behind me.
Epilogue
Eight months later
Tina Boyd lay back in the hammock and stared up at the perfect azure sky, thinking about all that had happened these past few months.
Alastai
r Sheridan’s death in an isolated mansion in Bosnia was initially treated as a national tragedy in the UK. Here was a charismatic family man and self-made entrepreneur who, for a short time, had been seen by many as the possible saviour of the dysfunctional British political system, and as a result the words of praise bestowed on him by the great and the good were effusive and plentiful.
But then, just as had happened with the fallen icon Jimmy Savile, the rumours started to surface. The house his body had been found in was owned by a company with potential links to organized crime, and the fact that there were three other bodies in the house, all those of men linked to a local criminal gang, raised more questions. As the rumours proliferated, a picture began to emerge of a man with a very dark side.
And then, when the remains of a Hungarian hiker, missing since the previous summer, were found buried in the grounds of the house, the truth finally came out: Alastair Sheridan, like Cem Kalaman, was one of the infamous Bone Field killers.
The news had a cataclysmic effect on the nation’s psyche, and trust in politicians, already at a low ebb, sank even further. Sheridan’s wife and child went into hiding. His hedge fund collapsed. Even those who’d been close to him, like his parliamentary colleague George Bannister, were forced to resign, so great was the taint of Sheridan.
And what of the man suspected of killing him? On the night Sheridan was believed to have died, Ray Mason was captured on CCTV receiving treatment for a gunshot injury at the Bosanes Hospital in Sarajevo. As was procedure with gunshot injuries, the police were informed, but by the time they arrived at the hospital, Mason was gone, and he hadn’t been seen since, despite a huge international manhunt.
And here was the thing. The Alastair Sheridan story had everything, and the public’s appetite for all the grisly details was insatiable, which was why the media were so keen to talk to Tina Boyd. Tina had been a part of the story and, although she never ended up facing any charges in relation to Ray Mason’s escape, the rumours that she’d played a role refused to die away, so the big-money offers for her story came flooding in.
Usually, Tina would have turned them down flat. She was a private person who gained no joy from having her name splashed all over the news. But this time she didn’t. With her business suffering, and because she had a hankering to do something different, she’d sold her story for £100,000, and given a series of interviews on the Bone Field case, and her part in it, as well as her life with the fugitive killer Ray Mason. The media were also especially interested in the part played by the assassin, The Wraith, who’d tortured Tina in a futile effort to find out her former lover’s whereabouts.
In the end, Tina had become something of a hero. Brave, loyal and resilient. But being a hero didn’t sit so easily with her either. She just wanted to be left alone, so, after a couple of operations on the damaged tendons in her left hand, she’d rented out her cottage and had gone travelling overseas.
She’d been gone two months now, crisscrossing first Europe, then Asia, and now the South Pacific where, for the past week, she’d been relaxing on a beach in the Cook Islands, thousands of miles from civilization. It was another gloriously sunny afternoon, with a gentle breeze coming in from a perfectly blue sea, as she got up from the hammock in front of her beach hut and strolled along the wet sand in the direction of the headland half a mile away.
In the distance, a tiny figure walked towards her, the only other person on the whole beach, and as he drew closer and lifted an arm in greeting, she smiled in recognition and waved back, thinking that however dark things became, it was still a beautiful world out there.
You just had to make the decision to leave the crap behind and go and find it.
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
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Copyright © Simon Kernick 2019
Cover image © Silas Manhood
Simon Kernick has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in Great Britain by Century in 2019
www.penguin.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781473535220
Die Alone Page 28