Stay Alive

by Simon Kernick

  But the hill was getting steeper and, after only a few minutes, she was panting heavily. Casey had stopped talking, and her head was resting against Jess’s shoulder. Jess wondered if she was asleep and hoped she was. She’d faced far more today than a girl her age should ever have to face. The problem was that she was going to wake up very soon because Jess couldn’t keep going like this for much longer.

  Up ahead, Amanda turned round and, seeing Jess struggling with Casey, she walked back to them. ‘I think the waterfall’s just up here,’ she whispered, seeing that Casey was asleep. ‘Look. Can you hear that stream there?’ She pointed into the thick wall of pine trees.

  Jess listened, and now she could definitely hear running water.

  ‘It’s not that far now,’ continued Amanda. ‘Why don’t you let me carry her for a bit? You look exhausted.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jess, reluctant to let Casey go. ‘I don’t know anything about you.’

  ‘I’m not a bad person, I promise.’

  ‘Then why are those men chasing you?’

  Amanda shook her head wearily. ‘I really don’t know.’

  ‘They must have a reason.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know what it is. I promise.’

  Jess wasn’t sure she liked Amanda, but the more she thought about it, the less she looked like a criminal on the run. She looked too well off, and her clothes were expensive. ‘Be careful with her,’ she said, a hardness in her tone. ‘She’s all I’ve got.’

  ‘Don’t worry, she’ll be okay. I’m not going anywhere without you.’ Amanda smiled a pretty smile that for some reason really annoyed Jess, but she handed Casey over, feeling a guilty sense of relief.

  Taking her gently, Amanda continued climbing the hill, her pace not slowing at all, and Jess had to walk fast just to keep up with her. Jess wondered if she was some kind of political refugee or whistle-blower who held some big secret that could bring down a whole government, and had to be stopped before she blurted it out. But whatever it was she’d done, she wasn’t talking. So, for the moment at least, Jess had no choice but to accept her story.

  The waterfall appeared out of the gloom. It was about the height of a big house, and pretty narrow, running down between two rocks before forming a round pool at the bottom that on a hot, sunny day would have been nice to swim in, but right now just made Jess feel cold. A set of steep wooden steps had been dug into the soil, each spaced several feet apart, and they led to the top. It was more of a climb than a walk, and Jess had to help Amanda with Casey as they made their way slowly upwards.

  ‘If I remember rightly, the path’s up here on the left somewhere,’ said Amanda, breathing more heavily now.

  Jess was panting too, although she was pleased that Casey still appeared to be asleep. Amanda started up the path with renewed purpose and Jess felt a real rush of excitement. If they got to this house, they could call the police and this whole thing would be over. She could take Casey back to London with her, and they could be together again properly. It was awful about Jean and Tim, but Casey would get over it, with her help. There’d be practical issues, of course. Jess had no money and was living with temporary foster parents until her eighteenth birthday, but they could sort something out. She knew they could.

  ‘Here it is,’ announced Amanda, stopping between two pine trees just up ahead.

  It didn’t look much like a path to Jess, and there were no lights in the distance that she could see, which tempered her excitement a little. ‘How far is it?’ she asked.

  ‘I can’t remember exactly, but not too far.’

  ‘Can you still manage Casey?’

  ‘For a bit longer, yes.’ She motioned for Jess to follow. ‘Come on.’

  They walked in silence until the path became more obvious. Finally, Amanda broke the silence. ‘I’m sorry about your parents,’ she said.

  ‘They’re not – they weren’t – my parents,’ said Jess quietly, not wanting Casey to hear this conversation. ‘It was our aunt and uncle. Our parents are both dead.’

  Amanda frowned. ‘I’m still sorry.’ She sighed. ‘I didn’t mean to get you involved.’

  ‘I know. It’s okay.’ And then, for some reason she couldn’t quite fathom, she added: ‘I’m adopted.’

  ‘I guessed that.’ She didn’t add anything but then she didn’t need to. Jess was mixed race, and quite clearly not Casey’s real sister.

  ‘My parents, the ones I called Mum and Dad, adopted me when I was seven.’

  ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘Dad had a heart attack two years ago. A massive one, while he was at work. Apparently, he died pretty much instantly. I don’t think Mum ever really got over it. They doted on each other, you know. It was almost sickly.’ Jess smiled at the memory of the two of them snuggling up together on the sofa, whispering and laughing in each other’s ears, then forced it aside, knowing there was no point languishing in a past that was never coming back. ‘Anyway, she got breast cancer last year. We thought she’d beaten it but it came back everywhere, and she died in June. That’s when Case came up here to live with Tim and Jean.’

  ‘You’ve had it tough,’ said Amanda, without sounding all syrupy sympathetic like a lot of people did.

  You don’t know the half of it, thought Jess. She’d had it tough right from the very beginning. And what she’d seen in those years before she’d been adopted still haunted her nightmares, even to this day. Life, in Jess’s experience, was hard. You either accepted that fact and lived with it, or you ended up wallowing in self-pity, and Jess had never been a one for that.

  The house loomed up out of nowhere behind a thick tangled hedge. It was modern-looking, with a long sloping roof like a Swiss chalet, and looked totally out of place in the middle of the woods. A gate led into a small front garden that needed work doing to it and, as Amanda stood aside holding Casey, Jess opened it and walked through. The house was in darkness. It looked empty and unloved, with grubby windows and paint peeling from the walls where the ivy was stretching up in tangled, invading fingers.

  ‘I didn’t think there was anyone here,’ said Amanda, coming in behind her. ‘But they might have a phone.’

  Casey stirred on Amanda’s shoulder and shook herself free of her grip. ‘Where are we?’ she asked, turning to Jess and rubbing her eyes.

  ‘We’ve found a house,’ said Jess, putting a protective arm round her shoulder. ‘We’re going to let ourselves in so we can get some dry clothes and food.’

  ‘But isn’t that like burgling?’

  Jess smiled. Casey had always had a real sense of right and wrong. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’ll be more like borrowing.’

  There were no keys in obvious places, but the windows were old and single-glazed, and they found one round the back that faced directly into the kitchen, and which looked easy to break. Cold, wet and thirsty, Jess didn’t hang around. She found a clay plant pot and, while Amanda stood back with Casey, she heaved it into the glass. It didn’t break the first time, or the second, but on the third attempt, she put everything into the swing, and a piece of glass the size of a football exploded, sending shards all over the kitchen worktop. Feeling a grim sense of satisfaction, Jess put her hand through the hole and turned the handle, opening the window. She leant in and used the still-intact plant pot to sweep the glass onto the floor, then climbed through the open window and helped Casey in.

  ‘Won’t the people whose house this is mind you’ve smashed their window?’ asked Casey.

  ‘Course they won’t. They’ll just be happy we’re safe.’ She took Casey’s hand. ‘Come on, let’s see if we can find you some warm clothes.’

  ‘I’ll have a look for a phone,’ said Amanda, climbing through the open window and shutting it behind her.

  But Jess didn’t see a phone as she moved through the empty house, finding a couple of towels in an airing cupboard in the hallway. There was a small single bedroom on the ground floor with long out-of-date Toy Story wallpaper covering the walls
and a wardrobe opposite the bed. The only thing hanging up inside was a navy blue dressing gown with a picture of Buzz Lightyear on the back, which looked as if it had been designed for a six year old. ‘Okay, Case, get those clothes off,’ said Jess, pulling it out.

  Casey pulled a face. ‘Do I have to wear that?’

  ‘Unless you want to freeze to death, yes.’

  Reluctantly, Casey started removing her clothes, and as Jess wrapped one of the towels round her, the door opened and Amanda walked in, wearing a concerned expression. ‘There’s no landline,’ she said simply.

  ‘No mobiles lying around?’ asked Jess, knowing there wouldn’t be.

  Amanda shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

  The implication was obvious. They might have found shelter but, in the end, they were still trapped out here in the woods.

  Twenty-one

  Today 18.25

  KEOGH WAS AGITATED. He hadn’t heard from Mehdi for over an hour and hadn’t been able to raise him on the satellite phone. The Algerian was reliable, which meant that either he’d mislaid the phone or, more likely, something had happened to him. It was a problem. He needed Mehdi to guard the path along the river that led into the town of Tayleigh, in case Amanda Rowan had decided to risk trying to get there that way. Now they were just going to have to hope that she hadn’t, and had opted for the cross-country route that MacLean had predicted she would. Otherwise, the whole op was finished.

  He was parked in a sheltered lay-by with a thick line of forest on one side and a long, rolling, gorse-covered hill on the other. Next to him, in the four-by-four’s passenger seat, sat Sayenko, the tall, cadaverous Ukrainian. Keogh hadn’t allowed him to smoke in the car, and had warned him against smoking outside and leaving cigarette butts with DNA on them where they could later be found in the police search of the area that would inevitably follow, but Sayenko had been insistent. He needed his cigarettes, and he made it clear that he was going to have them. So they’d come to a compromise. Sayenko would smoke outside and then dispose of his butts in the four-by-four. Now both it and he stank of stale smoke, making Keogh’s mood even darker than it had been already.

  He disliked having men under his command who were prepared to defy him, but the problem was that Sayenko was a longstanding colleague of the boss’s, and the boss rated him highly, so he didn’t have a lot of choice. He looked a cold bastard too, thought Keogh, with his tight, heavily lined face set naturally in an undertaker’s frown, and narrow, flint-like eyes that poked out from the bony contours of his skin like malignant probes. Sayenko didn’t say much, which suited Keogh just fine. He wasn’t the kind of man who enjoyed small talk, nor was he interested in other people. Instead, he stared out of the window into the darkness. It was rugged, hard country out here, with far too many hiding places. But it also meant there were very few people around. In the ten minutes they’d been sitting here, not a single car had driven past, which meant they were unlikely to be disturbed in their work.

  For a moment Keogh thought back to how he’d got himself in this position, leading a team of killers on a manhunt through the Scottish wilderness.

  It had begun three months after he’d got out of prison for manslaughter. He’d still been on parole, living in a shitty little bedsit in an even shittier part of London, with no money, no prospects, and only a heart full of bitterness, when one day he got a knock on his front door. The visitor was an old detective colleague of his – a guy he hadn’t seen nor heard from in more than five years – called Jerry Johnson. The thing was, Keogh had never liked Johnson, who was a seedy bastard with a reputation for using prostitutes, and who was married to a stone-faced Thai bride who looked more like a man than he did. He didn’t think Johnson cared much for him either. He’d never been in contact in those months when Keogh had been awaiting trial, so it had been a real shock seeing him standing in the grimy hallway outside his door.

  ‘I’ve got a proposition for you,’ Johnson had said simply, not bothering with any niceties. ‘Something I think you’ll like.’

  Keogh had been intrigued enough to invite him in, not knowing what to expect. Without bothering to sit down, Johnson had told him he was acting as a middleman for an unnamed individual who wanted to give Keogh a job.

  Keogh had asked what the job entailed.

  ‘You’re going to be a fixer,’ Johnson explained. ‘A man who does what it takes to make the boss’s problems go away.’

  ‘And what does the boss do that he needs his problems fixing by an ex-con like me?’

  ‘He makes money,’ said Johnson. ‘Lots of it. Sometimes people try to get it off him. Other times they stand in the way of him making it and need to be moved out of the way.’

  The inference was obvious. Johnson represented some kind of gangster, which surprised Keogh. He might have been sleazy, but Keogh had never taken him as corrupt. Johnson had told him that the pay would be good, the work ongoing, and that he had twenty-four hours to think about it.

  ‘I don’t need twenty-four hours,’ Keogh had replied. ‘I’ll tell you right now. I’m in.’

  Johnson had given him one of his leering smiles. ‘I knew you would be,’ he said. And then he’d turned and left, and Keogh had never seen him again. The boss, it turned out, liked to keep the cops on his payroll away from the other workers.

  The rest, though, was history. Keogh had come on board and had taken to his new role like a duck to water. Before today, he’d killed three times in cold blood on behalf of his boss, and had never felt an ounce of regret, although he was beginning to wonder if, by taking on this particular assignment, he’d bitten off more than he could chew.

  He looked at his watch. Almost half past six. MacLean should be here with the dogs any time now; then they could begin the pursuit of Amanda Rowan. The important thing was to extract the target, get rid of any witnesses, and get out fast.

  The passenger door opened and Sayenko started to get out.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  The Ukrainian held up an unlit cigarette as he slipped off his seat, shutting the door behind him, and Keogh wondered if he was going to be fit enough to take part in the hunt, given that he was close to being a chain smoker.

  At that moment, headlights appeared on the horizon, the first ones they’d seen since they’d parked up. Keogh looked for Sayenko but he’d slipped into the undergrowth, and all that was visible was the glowing ember of his cigarette. Keogh slid down in his seat, not wanting to be seen either. Thanks to the deaths so far, there was going to be a major police investigation into what had gone on here today. The four-by-four had false plates and would be at the bottom of a loch somewhere in twenty-four hours, but Keogh had a criminal record and, though his scars were faded, they still made him stand out.

  As the headlights came closer, Keogh’s satellite phone rang.

  ‘It’s me,’ said MacLean as the Toyota Land Cruiser he was driving pulled up opposite the Land Rover.

  Replacing the phone in his jacket, Keogh sat back up in the seat and got out of the car. He could see two big dogs moving about behind a mesh barrier in the back of the Land Cruiser. There was also someone else in the car, sitting behind MacLean. As Keogh approached the driver’s side door, he peered in and got a better look at the shadowy figure of the second occupant. He immediately turned away, suppressing the faintest hint of a shudder. People didn’t tend to scare Keogh. You could deal with most men one way or another, if you kept your wits about you, but occasionally you came across an individual with a darkness about them that was so potent and twisted that even the strongest men held them in some awe. The woman in the back of the Land Cruiser was MacLean’s mother and, though she was pushing seventy and looked just like any other old lady, Keogh had heard stories about her that made his skin crawl.

  ‘How’s the boss?’ he asked, as MacLean clambered out of the Toyota. MacLean had changed out of his police officer’s uniform now and, like Keogh and Sayenko, was dressed in dark clothing.

  ‘Not happy at all
,’ he answered, his hulking figure towering over Keogh. ‘He wants this thing sorted out quickly. And he definitely wants the girl alive.’

  ‘Why did you bring her?’ Keogh motioned ever so slightly towards the car, his voice trailing off.

  MacLean smiled, clearly pleased with the doubt in Keogh’s eyes. ‘In case everything else fails. Like I say, the boss wants this girl. And he wants her badly. Ma can watch the road while we go into the woods, and if they turn up here, she’ll be able to keep them occupied until we get back. People trust Ma. They think she’s harmless.’

  More fool them, thought Keogh as MacLean walked round to the Land Cruiser’s boot and released the dogs, putting them on tight leashes. They were young-looking Dobermans and looked as if they were raring to go.

  Keogh turned away and took the weapons from the back of the four-by-four.

  It was time to begin the hunt.

  Twenty-two

  Five days ago

  THEY GOT THEIR big break on The Disciple case purely by chance. In Mike Bolt’s experience, this was often the way it happened. Good old-fashioned detective work counted for a lot, as did the huge advances in technology that made committing a crime so much harder than it had been even a few years back. But sometimes it was just luck that made the difference.

  A month earlier, Bolt had set up a hotline for members of the public to call in with any information they had on the identity of The Disciple. Such was the high profile of the case, that the hotline had been taking an average of more than a hundred calls a day. Many of them had been from people giving the names of individuals they didn’t like, or were suspicious of in some way, and all these names had to be checked out, which took time and effort, and almost invariably turned into dead ends. Because of this, Bolt had made it clear that top priority was to be given to any name that appeared twice from separate sources, and this had finally happened a week earlier.