Relentless: A Novel

by Simon Kernick

  The girl turned over and fidgeted in her sleep as Lench approached the bottom bunk. It looked like she might wake up. If he had to, he would tape her mouth shut and fit her with one of the restraints, but he wanted to avoid this since it might create a problem with his accomplices. But she remained asleep as he lifted her up and took her down with him.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ hissed the man in the baseball cap as he closed the double doors of the van, the children safely inside.

  ‘They’ll be fine,’ Lench told him, ‘but don’t fuck up. You’ve got one hell of a lot to lose.’ Lench had things on both men that would put them in prison for life, and they knew it.

  The man in the cap grunted something and climbed back in the van. A second later it pulled away, accelerating slowly down the street and out of sight. The houses were all still dark. No twitching curtains could be seen. Lench slipped out of the light of the streetlamp, then walked slowly back to the house, experiencing a familiar frisson of excitement like soft, cold fingers dancing upon his groin.

  He didn’t have to kill Irene Tyler. After all, she hadn’t seen his face and would be able to describe nothing about him with the possible exception of his voice, which would be of no great use. He could simply have left her there, trussed up like a pig, unable to raise the alarm.

  But that would have been a terrible waste. His opportunities to indulge were so rare these days. And, as his commander had told him years earlier in a burned-out Muslim village in western Bosnia while casually surveying a pile of corpses, the last stiffening remains of a family of ten:

  ‘The dead can’t point the finger.’

  35

  I slept a grey, dreamless sleep. I vaguely remember half-waking up at some point with a sore shoulder, but not really paying much attention to it or my many troubles. I was too tired for that, and I’d slipped under again within moments.

  When I woke up properly, it was my face that was sore where it had been cut with the filleting knife in the university library the day before. The knife that held my wife’s fingerprints. Kathy was curled up in the passenger seat with her head propped against the window. She’d taken most of the blanket – a habit of hers throughout our years of marriage – and even looked quite comfortable. I wondered whether or not it was the sleep of the innocent.

  I yawned, feeling cold and a little sick, and looked at my watch. It was twenty to seven. Outside, it was light. I was thirsty, and hungry too. I’d hardly eaten a thing since yesterday lunchtime, a period which felt like a whole lifetime ago. Before I’d gone to sleep the previous night, I’d taken off my shirt and jeans and put them in the back of the Land Rover to dry out, but when I put them back on now they were still wet and clammy.

  I opened the door and stepped out onto the stone floor of the barn, stretching my legs. Why didn’t Kathy want to go to the police? That thought worried me more than any other. Was she really involved in Vanessa’s murder? I couldn’t see how she could have been, but I still kept coming back to the big, immovable question: what the hell were her prints doing on the knife? It was a question the police would be asking and one she didn’t seem to want to answer. But we were both going to have to face the music at some point, and it might as well be now. I was going to turn myself in, even if Kathy was against the idea. That way at least I could get some protection, both for myself and the kids.

  The kids. In all the drama of the previous day, they’d slipped my mind. Now I realized I missed them. It was time to end all this.

  The passenger door opened and Kathy stepped out of the Land Rover, looking bleary-eyed. ‘Morning,’ she said, taking slow, faltering steps in my direction.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Look—’

  ‘We need to go to the police,’ I said.

  She seemed to think about this for a moment.

  ‘I’m going to go, even if you’re not.’

  She nodded slowly. ‘I’ll come with you.’

  Even after everything she’d been through, and a night of crap sleep in a car, she still looked good, and I felt an aching for her that made my throat go dry. I think if I’d been capable of it I would have cried, but for some reason domestic woes have never been able to bring tears to my eyes. I rarely cry, and when I do it’s usually about something I can do nothing about, like my grandma’s death fifteen years ago, or a bad result in a hugely important football match, and it only happens when I’ve had too much to drink, which I guess says something about me. As we stood there facing each other, I wondered at which point in our marriage it had all gone wrong. When she’d ceased to see me as her lover. If I was honest, it was probably a long time before she’d met Jack Calley.

  ‘How are we going to get to the police station?’ she asked.

  ‘Have you still got the keys to your Hyundai?’

  ‘They’re in my coat. Are you saying we should sneak back to the house and drive it away? The police’ll be there, won’t they? There were a lot of gunshots last night, not to mention the fire.’

  ‘Well, if they are, that’ll solve our problem, won’t it?’

  She nodded, but didn’t look entirely convinced.

  It took us fifteen minutes to retrace our steps back to what was left of the cottage and when we saw it we were both shocked. The whole top floor was gone. All that remained were four exterior walls, now uneven and charcoal-stained, barely a few feet high in places. Smoke still rose in thin plumes from the gutted interior. Yellow police crime-scene tape surrounded the whole thing.

  We moved through the undergrowth until we were level with the front of the property. A police car was parked in the front drive, but it was unoccupied, and whoever had turned up in it was nowhere to be seen. Kathy’s Hyundai Coupé was also still there, the maroon paintwork grimy and dull from the smoke but otherwise looking largely undamaged.

  ‘Give me the keys,’ I said, putting out a hand.

  ‘No way,’ she snapped. ‘I’m driving. Come on, let’s go.’

  Before I could protest, she took off across the driveway, running in her typically gangly fashion, her heels crunching on the gravel. I had no choice but to run after her. When I caught up I was surprised to see that she had a grin on her face.

  There was a shout to our left and a uniformed copper appeared from round the side of what was left of the cottage, about ten yards away. He was about two stone overweight with a round, pink face and didn’t give you much faith in the future of crimefighting in the south of England. It looked like we’d just disturbed him taking a leak.

  Kathy had the keys in her hand, and she flicked off the central locking and ran round to the driver’s-side door.

  ‘Oy, stop right there!’ the copper called out as he lumbered towards us.

  I stopped, but Kathy didn’t. She jumped in the car and switched on the engine.

  ‘Kathy, for Christ’s sake, what are you doing? He’s the police.’

  ‘All right, sir, stay there,’ panted the copper as he ran up towards Kathy’s door.

  The Hyundai slammed into reverse and roared backwards up the driveway in a shower of loose chippings, the copper following in its wake.

  I made a snap decision. Whatever was happening, I still didn’t know the half of it, but I had a strong feeling Kathy did, and unless I went with her it was possible, even likely, that I wasn’t going to find out the truth. So I ran after the car.

  Spotting that I wasn’t hanging around either, the copper turned in my direction and spread out his arms like a basketball player defending the basket. He made, I have to say, a pretty ludicrous sight, and I had to resist the urge to laugh. Instead, I sidestepped him easily, and though he got a hand on my jacket I brushed it off and kept running, breaking into the kind of sprint that, with the exception of the previous night outside the police station, I hadn’t managed since my school days.

  Kathy kept reversing up the drive, at the same time motioning for me to keep coming, and after another ten yards she slowed down and flung open the passenger door. I could hear the coppe
r behind me but I knew I was outpacing him. The Hyundai slowed to walking pace and, as I grabbed the open door and scrambled inside, Kathy suddenly accelerated again, reversing out onto the road in a screech of tyres. The last I saw of the copper, he was standing uselessly in the middle of the drive, frantically talking into his radio. Then Kathy shoved the gearstick into first and with a maniacal laugh took off up the empty road.

  You know the feeling you get sometimes when you wake up in the darkness of an early morning, and in those first few moments you’re not quite sure if you’re still in a dream or not? I had that feeling now. My wife, thirty-five-year-old college lecturer and mother of two, was behaving like some sort of lunatic. I could offer no explanation, other than, like her, I had to be going mad.

  ‘What the hell is going on, Kathy? We’re meant to be handing ourselves in, not doing some sort of fucking Thelma and Louise.’

  She grinned at me. ‘Don’t you like taking a bit of a risk now and then, Tom? You don’t, do you? You were never much of a risk taker.’

  ‘I don’t go running away from the police, no. Not when we need to speak to them. You might have forgotten, but your work colleague and your lover are dead.’

  The smile left her face in an instant, but the expression it left behind was hard and determined, and totally unlike the Kathy I knew. Or didn’t, as the case might be. ‘When we give ourselves up to the police, I want to do it on my terms,’ she said. ‘I want to walk into a police station in front of plenty of witnesses so nothing can happen to me. I’m not just walking up to the first overweight plod I see. Do you understand?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I do.’

  Before either of us could say anything else, my phone rang. Ten seconds later, so did Kathy’s. We were obviously hitting a reception area. I pulled mine out, flicked it open, and saw that I had a message from my voicemail service, as well as a video message. The sender had withheld his number. A prompt on the screen asked me if I wanted to play it. I wondered if it was some sort of spam thing. There was only one way to find out.

  I pressed play.

  A second later my two young children appeared on the screen, their expressions confused and scared. Chloe looked like she’d been crying. They were in a room I didn’t recognize, sitting on a double bed. The wall behind it was painted orange, and there were no pictures or ornaments visible. The video concentrated on the children for about five seconds. During that time they remained still and said nothing. Then the camera moved left and a man dressed from head to foot in black, the now standard balaclava hiding his identity, stood against one of the other blank orange walls. It could have been one of the men from last night; it was difficult to tell. It didn’t matter either. The message was clear: my children were now in the hands of some very ruthless people.

  The video ended, and I felt my whole body sag. A black mix of gloom, helplessness and terror filled my insides, its weight crushing me from the inside out. Not my kids. Please, anything else, but not my kids. Not the most precious, innocent people in my life. For a parent there is no worse feeling than knowing your child is in grave danger and being unable to do anything about it. Your utter impotence tears you apart. All your resistance evaporates. You are a pliant, begging wreck, which I guess is exactly what they must have been banking on.

  Beside me, Kathy pulled up to the side of the road, and I heard her groan as she looked at the video on her own phone. I couldn’t even turn my head in her direction. All my energy seemed to have gone, and this time I really did weep. I prayed too. Prayed that they wouldn’t be hurt, offered a God in whom until this moment I hadn’t believed in for close to thirty years anything he wanted if he’d just let them go. I would go to church, give all my money to charity, work with the poor in Africa . . . anything. But don’t hurt them.

  ‘Oh God,’ I heard Kathy say. ‘Oh God. Not my babies.’

  I wiped my eyes and tried to calm myself down. So far, Max and Chloe were unharmed. We had to make sure the people holding them got what they wanted, and this time there could be no bullshit. I assumed they’d left some sort of message to go with the video, so I dialled 121, and sure enough a man’s voice I didn’t recognize came on the line. ‘You know what we have,’ he said in the tone of someone describing the stock in his shop. His voice was perfectly ordinary, if a little high-pitched. ‘Call this number now if you’re interested in having them back whole.’ He reeled out a mobile number, and hung up. As I hunted in the glove compartment for a pen and paper, the time of the message was given as 5.53 a.m. – a little over an hour ago. I found a pen but no paper, so when I listened to the message again I wrote down the number on the back of the Hyundai’s logbook.

  ‘They want us to phone them,’ I told Kathy, staring out of the windscreen into the empty tree-lined road ahead.

  ‘You do it,’ she said, weeping quietly.

  ‘Whatever they want. Whatever you know, give it to them. OK?’ I still didn’t look at her as I spoke.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Don’t sure me. Yes. I want you to say yes.’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. Just phone them . . . please.’

  I wanted to tell her that this was her fault, but I didn’t. I took a deep breath and dialled the number. It rang five times before it was picked up.

  ‘I’m glad you called,’ said the man on the other end, the same one who’d left the message on the voicemail. ‘We need to get this matter concluded as soon as possible.’

  ‘Are our kids OK?’

  ‘They’re fine.’ His voice sounded confident, but it was impossible to know whether to believe him or not. ‘Now, tell me. Where are you?’

  ‘About a mile from the cottage, the one near Bolderwood. In a car.’

  ‘Whose car?’

  ‘My wife’s. We went back there to get it.’

  ‘And you weren’t seen?’

  ‘I don’t think so, no.’

  ‘Good. I have a set of instructions for you. If you follow them to the letter, your children will be released safe and well. As soon as this phone call ends, you are to delete the video message that was sent to you and switch off your mobile phone immediately. Your wife is to do exactly the same with hers. Then you are to throw them away, somewhere where they’re not likely to be found. And don’t try any tricks, like keeping the phone with you and switched on. The same person who gave us the identity and address of your mother-in-law will be calling the numbers periodically over the next hour. He has access to technology that will tell him whether or not your phone is transmitting a signal. If he finds that you have disobeyed my instructions, one of your children will lose an ear. You’ll be able to choose which one.’

  ‘Don’t harm Max and Chloe, please,’ I said, using their names in a desperate effort to personalize them in their captor’s eyes, even though I was sure it would do no good. ‘No-one is going to mess you about this time, I promise. Whatever you want from us, you’ll have.’ Out of the corner of my eye I saw Kathy nodding in numb agreement, tears streaming down her face.

  ‘Nothing will happen to them if you do what I say. Have you got a pen and paper?’

  ‘Hold on.’ With my free hand I picked up the pen and the Hyundai logbook again. My hands were shaking but my voice remained artificially calm as I told him I was ready.

  ‘Listen carefully. Once you’ve got rid of the phones, you’re to drive up the M3 to Basingstoke, then take the A33 towards Reading. Go through Reading and take the road to Henley-on-Thames. At Henley take the road to Marlow. Three miles along that road there’s a left turning to a village called Hambleden. Have you got all that?’

  I was writing furiously. ‘Yes. Yes, I have.’

  ‘Park in the village square. There’s a phone box there. In just over an hour, at eight fifteen, it will ring. I’d advise you to hurry, because if it’s not picked up by you I will have to make sure that one of your children pays the price for your delay.’

  ‘We’ll be there, OK? Please, don’t do anything to them. We’ll be there.’<
br />
  ‘You’ll then receive further instructions,’ he continued, completely ignoring my pleas. ‘At this time on a Sunday morning you should have no trouble making it by eight fifteen, and if everything goes to plan you’ll be reunited with your children before midday. But remember this, and remember it well: deviate even slightly from what you’ve been told, get caught by the police before you arrive here, or try to enlist the help of anyone, and your children will die alone and screaming.’

  The words were like punches, each one sapping my strength and driving me further and further into a darkness from which I could see no escape. ‘I understand,’ I said, my words little more than a croak.

  ‘Is my mum all right?’ asked Kathy, her words seeming to come from some distance away. ‘Ask him if my mum’s all right.’

  ‘Don’t even bother asking that question,’ said the man on the end of the phone, who’d obviously heard her.

  I knew then that Irene was dead, but didn’t really take it in. There was too much else to think about at that moment.

  ‘Get rid of the phones and get to Hambleden now. I’m looking forward to seeing you again.’ With that, he rang off.

  Kathy grabbed me by the arm, bringing her face close to mine. I’d never seen such pain in her dark eyes, a pain I was sure was right there in mine too.

  ‘What did he say?’ she demanded.

  ‘The kids are fine. I don’t know about your mum.’

  ‘Oh God. They’ve killed her, haven’t they? Haven’t they?’

  ‘I don’t know. Now, give me your phone. He wants us to turn them off and throw them away so that the police can’t use them to follow us. Then we’ve got to drive up to a place called Hambleden, near Henley.’

  Kathy pulled the phone from her pocket and handed it over. ‘They’re going to kill us, you know. When we arrive. They’ll never let us go, not after this.’