Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Part One: Saturday
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Part Two: Sunday
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Epilogue: Three Weeks Later
Author’s Note
About the Author
An extract from The Witness
Also by Simon Kernick
Copyright
The Richard & Judy book that made Simon Kernick a star.
Saturday afternoon. You’re with the kids in the garden when the phone rings.
It’s your best friend from school. Someone you haven’t seen for a few years. It should be a friendly call, catching up on old times.
But it’s not.
This call is different. Your friend is panting with fear, his breaths coming in tortured, ragged gasps. Someone is inflicting terrible pain on him.
He cries out and then utters six words that will change your life forever . . . the first two lines of your address.
Simon Kernick is one of Britain’s most exciting thriller writers. He arrived on the scene with his highly acclaimed début novel, The Business of Dying, which introduced Dennis Milne, a corrupt cop moonlighting as a hitman. His big breakthrough came with his novel Relentless, which was selected by Richard and Judy for their Recommended Summer Reads promotion and rapidly went on to become the bestselling thriller of 2007.
Simon’s research is what makes his thrillers so authentic. He talks both on and off the record to members of the Met’s Special Branch and Anti-Terrorist Branch and the Serious Organised Crime Agency, so he gets to hear first-hand what actually happens in the dark and murky underbelly of UK crime.
To find out more about his thrillers, visit: www.simonkernick.com
www.facebook.com/SimonKernick
twitter.com/simonkernick
Some astute readers will notice that I’ve taken a few liberties with the village of Hambleden in order to further the plot. For instance, there’s no phone box in the village square anymore, and no such place as Rangers Hill. However, the pub’s real enough, and it serves good beer, too.
For my daughters, Amy and Rachel
I ONLY HEARD the phone because the back door was open. I was outside breaking up a fight between my two kids over which one of them should have the bubble-blowing machine, and it was threatening to turn ugly. To my dying day, I will always wonder what would have happened if the door had been shut, or the noise of the kids had been so loud that I hadn’t heard it.
It had just turned three o’clock on a cloudy Saturday afternoon in late May, and my whole world was about to collapse.
I ran back inside the house, into the living room, where the football was just kicking off on the TV, and picked up on about the fourth ring, wondering whether it was that perma-tanned bastard of a boss of mine, Wesley ‘Call me Wes’ O’Shea, phoning to discuss a minor detail on a client proposal. He liked to do that at weekends, usually when there was a football match on. It gave him a perverse sense of power.
I looked at my watch. One minute past three.
‘Hello?’
‘Tom, it’s me, Jack.’ The voice was breathless.
I was momentarily confused. ‘Jack who?’
‘Jack . . . Jack Calley.’
This was a voice from the past. My best friend when we were at school. The best man at my wedding nine years earlier. But also someone I hadn’t spoken to in close to four years. There was something wrong, too. He sounded in pain, struggling to get the words out.
‘Long time no speak, Jack. How are you?’
‘You’ve got to help me.’
It sounded like he was running, or walking very quickly. There was background noise, but I couldn’t tell what it was. He was definitely outside.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Help me. You’ve got to . . .’ He gasped suddenly. ‘Oh Jesus, no. They’re coming.’
‘Who’s coming?’
‘Oh Christ!’
He shouted these last words, and I had to hold the phone away from my ear momentarily. On the TV, the crowd roared as one of the players bore down on goal.
‘Jack. What the hell’s happening? Where are you?’
He was panting rapidly now, his breaths coming in tortured, wailing gasps. I could hear the sound of him running.
‘What’s going on? Tell me!’
Jack cried out in abject terror, and I thought I heard the sound of some sort of scuffle. ‘Please! No!’ he yelled, his voice cracking. The scuffle continued for several seconds, and seemed to move away from the phone. Then he was speaking again, but no longer to me. To someone else. His voice was faint but I could make it out easily enough.
He said six words. Six simple words that made my heart lurch and my whole world totter.
They were the first two lines of my address.
Then Jack let out a short, desperate scream, and it sounded like he was being pulled away from the phone. There followed a succession of gasping coughs, and instinctively even I, who’d lived my life a long way from the indignities of death, could tell that my old friend was dying.
And then everything fell eerily silent.
The silence might have lasted ten seconds, but was probably nearer two, and as I stood frozen to the spot in my front room, mouth open, too shocked to know what to say or do, I heard the line suddenly go dead at the other end.
The first two lines of my address. The place where I lived an ordinary suburban life with my two kids and my wife of nine years. The place where I felt safe.
For a moment, just one moment, I thought it must have been some sort of practical joke, a cruel ruse to get a reaction. But the thing was, I hadn’t spoken to Jack Calley in four long years, and the last time had been a chance meeting in the street, a snatched five-minute conversation while the kids – much younger then, Max just a baby – shouted and fidgeted in their twin pushchair. I hadn’t had a proper chat with him – you know, the kind friends have – in, what, five, six, maybe even seven years. We’d gone our separate ways a long time ago.
No, this was serious. You don’t put fear like that into your voice deliberately. It’s a natural thing, something that’s got to come from within. And this most definitely had. Jack had been terrified, and with good reason. If I wasn’t mistaken, and I would swear to God that I wasn’t, I’d just heard him breathe his dying breaths. And his last words were the first two lines of my address.
Who wanted to know where I lived? And why?
Let me tell you this: I am an ordinary man with an ordinary desk job in a big open-plan office, leading a team of four IT software salesmen. It’s not a huge amount of fun and, as I’ve already suggested, my boss, Wesley, is something of an arsehole, but it pays the bills and allows me to own a half-reasonable detached four-bed house in the suburbs, and at thirty-five I’ve never once been in trouble with the boys in blue. My wife and I have had our ups and downs, and the kids can play up now and again, but in general, we’re happy. Kathy works as a lecturer in environmental politics over at the university, a job she’s held for close to ten years. She’s well liked, good at what she does and, although she probably wouldn’t like me saying so, very pretty. We’re the same age, we’ve been together eleven years, and we have no secrets. We’ve done nothing wrong; we pay our taxes and we keep out of trouble. In short, we’re just like everyone else.
Just like you.
So why did some stranger want to know our address? Some stranger who wanted it so badly he was prepared to kill for it?
Fear kicked in, that intense terror that starts somewhere in the groin and tears through you like an express train until it’s infected every part and is ready to develop into outright panic. The instinctive flight mechanism. The sick feeling you get when you’re walking empty streets alone at night and you hear footsteps coming from behind. Or when a man smashes a beer glass on the corner of a bar and demands to know what the fuck you think you’re looking at. Real fear. I had it then.
I replaced the phone in its cradle and stood where I was for a long moment, trying to think of a rational explanation for what I’d just heard. Nothing presented itself, and yet at the same time even the most paranoid explanation didn’t make sense either. If someone wanted to speak to me, then they presumably knew who I was. In which case they could easily have found out where I lived without asking a man who barely knew me any more. They could have looked in the phonebook for a start. But they hadn’t.
‘Daddy, Max just hit me for no reason.’ It was Chloe coming back into the house, grass stains on the knees of her jeans, her dark-blonde hair a tousled mess. At five, she was little more than a year older than her brother Max, yet vastly more sensible. The problem was, he’d already overtaken her in bulk, and in the anarchic world of young kids bulk tends to win through in arguments. ‘Can you go and tell him off?’ she added, looking put out, as innocent of danger as all children are.
Someone was coming here. Someone who’d just killed my oldest friend.
The last I remembered, Jack Calley had been living five or six miles away, just outside Ruislip, where London finally gives way to the Green Belt. If he’d called me from near his home then the person he’d given my address to would be about a fifteen-minute drive away at this time of day. Maybe less if the traffic was quiet and they were in a hurry.
‘Daddy, what are you doing?’
‘Hold on a sec, darling,’ I said with a smile so false it would have embarrassed a politician. ‘I’m just thinking.’
It was two minutes since I’d put down the phone and I could hear my heart beating a rapid tattoo in my chest. Bang bang, bang bang, bang bang. If I stayed here, I was putting my family at risk. If I left, then how was I ever going to find out who was after me, and why?
‘Hey, sweetie,’ I said, keenly aware of the strain in my voice, ‘we’ve got to go out now, round to Grandma’s.’
‘Why?’
I squatted down and picked her up. ‘Because she wants to see you.’
‘Why?’
Sometimes it’s best not to get into a dialogue with a five-year-old. ‘Come on, darling, we’ve got to go,’ I said, and strode outside, carrying her in my arms.
I saw that Max had abandoned the bubble-making machine in the middle of the lawn and was now at the bottom of the garden, his head poking out of a makeshift, canvas-sided camp at the top of the climbing frame. I shouted at him to come out because we had to go. His head immediately retreated into the camp. Like a lot of four-year-old boys, he didn’t like to do what he was told. Usually this wasn’t much of a problem. I tended to ignore it and let him do his own thing. Today it was a disaster.
Jack’s words played over and over in my mind. ‘Oh Jesus, no. They’re coming.’ The urgency in them. The fear. They’re coming.
They’re coming here.
I looked at my watch. 3.05. Four minutes since I’d picked up the phone. Time seemed to be moving faster than it usually does.
‘Come on, Max, we’ve got to get moving. Now.’
I ran over to the climbing frame, still holding onto Chloe, ignoring her complaints. She tried to struggle out of my arms, but I didn’t let go.
‘But I’m playing,’ he called out from within the camp.
‘I don’t care. We’ve got to go now.’
I heard a car pulling into the road out front. This was unusual. The housing estate we live on leads nowhere and is simply a horseshoe-shaped road with culs-de-sac sprouting off it. Drive along it and eventually you end up right back close to where you started. Our house was on the corner of one of the culs-de-sac, and a car came down it once every twenty minutes at most.
The car slowed down. Stopped.
I heard a car door shut, further down in the cul-de-sac. I was being unduly paranoid. But my heart continued to thud.
‘Come on, Max. I’m serious.’
He giggled, blissfully unaware of my fear. ‘Come and get me.’
I put Chloe down and reached inside the camp. Max retreated as far as he could go, still giggling, but his expression changed when he saw the look on my face.
‘What is it, Dad? What’s wrong?’
‘It’s all right, nothing’s wrong, but we’ve got to go round to Grandma’s quickly.’
He nodded, looking worried, and scrambled out.
I took them both by the hand and, trying to stay as calm as possible, led them through the house and out to the car. They were both asking questions, but I wasn’t really listening. I was willing them to go faster. In the distance, I could hear the cars out on the main road. Above me came the steady roar of a passenger plane circling beyond the unbroken ceiling of white cloud. The neighbour’s new dog was barking and someone was mowing their lawn. The comforting sounds of normality, but today they weren’t comforting at all. It was as if I was in some sort of terrifying parallel universe where danger loomed on all sides, yet no-one else could see or understand it.
I strapped the kids into their car seats, then realized, as I was about to get into the driver’s seat, that I’d better take some overnight gear for them, just in case they were out of the house for any length of time. I tried to think what I was going to say when I turned up at my mother-in-law’s with them. The best man at my wedding just phoned me for the first time in years; then, as we were speaking, he got murdered, and now his killer’s after me. It sounded so outlandish that even I would have questioned my own sanity, if I hadn’t been so damn sure of its authenticity. And Irene had never liked me much either. Had always thought her daughter, with her strong academic background and her Cambridge degree, was too damn good for a glorified computer salesman.
3.08. Seven minutes since I’d picked up the phone.
I was going to have to tell Irene that something had come up at work. That maybe it was best if the kids spent the night with her. And then what? What happened tomorrow?
I told myself to stop trying to analyse everything and to just get moving.
‘Stay in the car, OK? I’m just going to get some overnight stuff.’
They both started to protest, but I shut the door and ran inside and up to each of their bedrooms, hastily chucking together pyjamas, toys, toothbrushes, everything else they were going to need, and shoving them in a holdall, knowing with every step that I was racing against time.
3.11. As I came running out of the house, I recalled the gurgling, coughing noise Jack had made as he was being attacked. The sound of death – it had to be. But who wanted to kill a middle-of-the-road solicitor like Jack Calley, a man who was doing well but hardly setting the world on fire? And, more importantly – far more importantly – who wanted to find out from him where I, lowly salesman Tom Meron, and my family lived?
As I reached the car, I cursed. Both kids had unclipped their seatbelts and were fooling around. Chloe had clambered through the gap in the front seats and was now playing with the steering wheel, while all I could see of Max were his legs sticking up in the air as he hunted for something in the back. They were both laughing, as if there was nothing whatsoever wrong with their world – which there wasn’t. It was just mine that was going mad.
I opened the door and flung the overnight bag past Chloe onto the passenger seat. ‘Come on, kids, we’ve got to go,’ I said, picking her up and pushing her back through the gap in the seats. ‘It’s very important.’
‘Ow! That hurt.’
‘Get back in your seat, Chloe. Now.’
I was sweating as I ran round to the back passenger door, pulled it open, yanked Max up and shoved him bodily into his seat. With shaking hands, I strapped him back in, then reached over and did the same to his sister.
‘What’s happening, Daddy?’ asked Chloe. She looked frightened, not used to seeing her father acting so strangely.
I’m not a panicker by nature. There’s not much in my life that would instigate panic, if I’m honest, which was why I was now finding it hard to stay calm. This all felt like a bad dream, something that should have been happening to someone else. An elaborate hoax that would end in laughter all round.
But it wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t.
I scrabbled around in my jeans pocket for the car keys, found them and started the ignition. The dashboard clock read 3.16, but I remembered that it was four minutes fast. Eleven minutes since the call. Christ, was it that long? I reversed the car out of the drive and drove up to the junction, indicating left in the direction of the main road. The relief I experienced as I pulled away and accelerated was tangible. I felt like I’d escaped from something terrible.
I was being stupid. There had to be some sort of rational explanation for what I’d just heard. There just had to be. ‘Calm down,’ I muttered to myself. ‘Calm down.’
I took a deep breath, feeling better already. I’d take the kids to Irene’s, drop them off, phone Kathy, then just drive back home. And there’d be no-one there. I’d look up Jack Calley’s number, call and see if everything was all right. From the safe cocoon of my moving car, I began to convince myself that Jack hadn’t actually been hurt. That the ghastly choking hadn’t been him dying a lonely death. That everything was fine.
A one-hundred-yard-long, relatively straight stretch of road led from the entrance of our culde-sac to the T-junction that met up with the main road into London. As we reached it, I slowed up and indicated right. A black Toyota Land Cruiser built like a tank was moving towards us down the main road at some speed. I could see two figures in caps and sunglasses in the front seats. When it was ten yards away, the driver slowed dramatically and swung the car into the estate, without indicating. I was about to curse him for his lack of courtesy, when I noticed that the side windows of the vehicle were tinted, and I felt a sense of dread. An unfamiliar car driving onto the estate only eleven minutes after Jack had called me. At a push, Jack lived eleven minutes away. The timing was too coincidental.
I watched its progress in the rearview mirror, a dry, sour taste in my mouth, fear causing my heart to rise in my chest. Our cul-de-sac was the third one down on the right, just before the road bent round sharply. The Land Cruiser passed the first cul-de-sac, then the second.
Fifteen yards short of ours, the brake lights came on.
Oh no, no. Please, no.
‘Daddy, why aren’t we moving?’
‘Come on, Daddy. Come on, Daddy.’
The Land Cruiser turned into our cul-de-sac, then disappeared from view. I knew then as much as I knew anything that its occupants were coming for me.
I pulled onto the main road and accelerated away, the voices of my two children and Jack Calley – desperate, dying Jack Calley – reverberating around my head like distant, blurred echoes.
‘YOU KNOW, I’D prefer it if you called in advance, Tom,’ admonished Irene Tyler, my formidable mother-in-law.
It was 3.35 p.m. and I was seven miles away from home and the occupants of the black Land Cruiser, and hopefully safe. At least for now.
‘I’m sorry, Irene. Something’s come up. An emergency.’
I led the kids into the hallway of her grand Victorian semi-detached home that sat on a quiet, tree-lined street of equally grand homes, all of which boasted intricately painted, Swiss-style façades. It was the house where Kathy had grown up, and the type of place to which she’d always aspired to return.
‘What kind of emergency?’ she demanded, raising a sceptical eyebrow.
Irene Tyler was an unnerving woman. A former secondary school headmistress, she had a dominating presence that was assisted by her powerful build and broad shoulders. I always felt that she would have made an excellent prison warder, or a trainer of gladiators had she been around in Ancient Rome. She wasn’t unattractive to look at for a woman of seventy, but you get the picture. She wasn’t someone you’d last long against toe to toe.
But the kids liked her, and they ran up and hugged her now, chuckling delightedly as they clutched her ample form while I tried to think of a suitable excuse for being there. As a salesman of some twelve years’ standing, I was quite a proficient bullshitter, but a combination of my mother-in-law’s brooding presence and the fear that was coursing through me in waves made thinking up a plausible story next to impossible.
‘It’s just something with work,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to go in. One of our major clients is playing up. You know how it goes.’
Although, of course, she didn’t, being a retired civil servant. However, this wasn’t an entirely unusual scenario for me. In the past few months Wesley O’Shea had experienced several entirely imagined client emergencies which had resulted in him calling his team leaders into work on a Saturday to help ‘brainstorm’ the problem. I was sure he only did it to make himself feel important.
Irene didn’t look convinced. But then she’d never really trusted me. Like a lot of people, she thought there was something a bit dodgy about anyone who sold things for a living. Plus, the concept of people outside the retail trade and the emergency services working on a Saturday didn’t sit too easily with her. This time, however, she let it go, and asked where her daughter was.
‘She’s at work as well,’ I explained, putting down the overnight bag next to the ornate grandfather clock that dominated the entrance to the Tyler household. ‘Down at the university. She’s researching for a paper she’s writing.’
I had to phone Kathy. Make sure she didn’t go home. I couldn’t remember what time she said she’d be finished, but thought it probably wouldn’t be yet.
‘So, when are you going to pick the children up?’
‘Can we stay for tea, Grandma?’ asked Chloe, pulling at her grandmother’s dress.
‘Course you can, darling,’ she said, smiling at last as she stroked Chloe’s long hair.
‘I don’t know what time either of us is going to get back. I’ve packed some things for them.’
‘So, you want them to stay the night?’
‘Yes. Please. I’ll pick them up first thing tomorrow.’
‘Why are you going to work on a Saturday afternoon, Daddy?’ asked Max.
‘I think you ought to tell your boss that you have commitments outside work too,’ said Irene in a tone that brooked no dissent.
‘It’s a one-off,’ I answered quickly, experiencing a sudden, unstoppable urge to get away from this interrogation and find out what the hell was going on with my life. I made a play of looking at my watch. ‘Listen, Irene, I’ve really got to make a move.’ There’s a Land Cruiser with blacked-out windows at my house. It contains men who want something from me, something they’re prepared to kill for, even though I have no idea what it is. ‘I’ve got a long night ahead, and I don’t want to be late.’
She nodded, the glint of suspicion flickering in her dark eyes, then leaned down so she was level with Chloe and Max. ‘So, what shall we do, children? Do you want to go down to the river and feed the ducks before tea?’
‘Yes, yes, yes!’ they both cried.
I could feel sweat running down my brow and I knew that Irene would have spotted it and drawn her own conclusions as to why it was there. I kissed the kids goodbye but they were already thinking about going to the river to feed the ducks and their reciprocation was perfunctory. I nodded to Irene and thanked her, conscious that I was avoiding her eye. Then I was out of her front door and down the pathway to the car.
I jumped inside, drove to the end of Irene’s road so that I was out of sight, and speed-dialled Kathy’s number. The phone rang five times before going to message. I wasn’t entirely surprised she wasn’t answering. If she was working in the library she’d have the phone off, and I knew she didn’t like to be disturbed unless it was urgent. I didn’t leave a message but instead tried her office extension. I listened as it rang and rang before finally the voicemail came on.
For a few seconds I wasn’t sure what to do. Then I put the car into gear and drove back in the direction of my house. I was sure now I wasn’t being paranoid, but I still wanted to check which house the Land Cruiser was parked outside, and whether it was, as I expected, my own.
As I drove, I thought of Jack Calley. We’d known each other since almost the very beginning. He’d moved into our road in the late seventies when we were both eight years old, and had made his presence felt immediately. He was big for his age with a thick, ridiculously long mop of naturally blond curly hair that made him look a bit like Robert Plant in his Led Zeppelin days. His dad had died a few months earlier and they were moving down from East Anglia so that his mum could be nearer her own parents. My mum and dad took an instant dislike to him – I think it was probably the hair. And because they didn’t want me spending time with him, I inevitably did.
We hit it off immediately. For a kid who’d just lost his father, he was remarkably full of life, maybe because he felt he always had something to prove. Jack was an adventurer, the kind who always wants to climb the highest tree, to perform the greatest dare. He was the first boy in the school to ride his bike down Sketty’s Gorge, a near vertical slope in our local woods at the bottom of which was a thick wall of stinging nettles. I only tried it once and got stung to pieces, but it remained Jack’s party piece; he was always doing it. It demonstrated his devil-may-care attitude. It made him exciting company. And never once did he fall off.
We spent our whole childhood as friends and, although we drifted apart when he went off to university to study law and I got my first full-time job as a photocopier salesman, we renewed the friendship in our twenties, which was a good time to be hanging round with a man like Jack. He’d turned into a tall, handsome guy with plenty of charm, and a fair bit of money too. He tended to draw women to him, and because we were out together so much in the bars and clubs of central London and the City, they got drawn in my direction too. Sometimes, occasionally, I felt I was getting his cast-offs, but, like most men, I never let my dignity get in the way of sex. In those days I was in awe of Jack Calley a little, and appreciated the fact that I was his friend.
Marriage, specifically mine to Kathy, had been the catalyst for our friendship to become more distant. Gradually, we saw less and less of each other. Jack found himself in a relationship with a high-flying female lawyer, and Kathy fell pregnant with Chloe. It was a time of upheaval, and our meetings were reduced to once or twice a year, until eventually they fizzled out altogether. I always felt that this was more Jack’s doing than mine. I’d left a couple of phone messages for him that hadn’t been returned, and emails I’d sent, although answered enthusiastically with talk of getting together some time soon, never seemed to come to anything. As far as I could recall, we hadn’t even sent each other Christmas cards for the last couple of years.
Half a mile short of home, I decided to break the law by calling Kathy’s mobile while driving. Again, there was no answer, something that was now beginning to worry me. I wanted desperately to talk to someone about what was going on, and she was the one person I could rely on to come up with either a rational explanation or at least a viable plan as to what to do next. Because if someone was after me, they were still going to be after me tomorrow, and the next day. And the day after that. Which meant I had to find out what the hell it was they wanted.
It was just short of five to four when I turned into the estate. Usually when I make this turning it fills me with a deep sense of satisfaction because it means I’m almost home, at the end of a hard working day. The pleasant, well-kept 1960s houses with their neatly trimmed front lawns always seem so welcoming, an oasis of quiet amid the noise and traffic of suburban London. Today, though, I felt nothing but deep trepidation over what I might find here.
But when I drove past my cul-de-sac without slowing and glanced across at it, I saw that the Land Cruiser with the blacked-out windows was no longer there. I continued round the bend at the bottom of the hill and went another couple of hundred yards before turning round. As I came back the other way, I looked over again. The Land Cruiser was definitely nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they’d found out I wasn’t there and had simply left. The Henderson boys opposite, two raucous tykes of seven and nine, were out on their driveway washing their father’s car. Martin Henderson once told me that he got them to do it by making the whole thing a game. One cleaned one side, one cleaned the other; whoever did the best job won the game. The beauty of it was that there was no prize for winning, so Martin got a spotlessly clean car for free. The normality of the scene was painful.
I slowed down and stopped a few yards past the cul-de-sac entrance, parallel to the wall that ran alongside my back garden. I got out of the car, leaving its engine running, and walked over to a spot where I could see through the ivy-covered trellising at the top of the wall. From this position I had a view across my back garden and into the dining room at the back of the house. The dining-room door was open, and I could see the hallway and the front door beyond it.
I stared for about thirty seconds. There was no movement. My house looked empty. I thought about going back inside and trying to find Jack’s number, but there didn’t seem much point. I knew he wouldn’t be answering his phone.
A man in a cap and glasses crossed the hallway, moving purposefully, and disappeared into my study. He was dressed in black, and I thought he was wearing gloves too. He was only in my field of vision for a couple of seconds. I could almost have imagined it, but I knew I hadn’t.
There was a man in black in my house.
I waited, watching. Nothing moved. In the background I could hear my car’s engine ticking over. I felt like some sort of peeping tom, even though I was looking into my own house. I also felt the first flash of anger. Some bastard had broken into my home and was strolling about as if he owned the place.
As I silently cursed him he appeared again, stopping in the hallway. I pushed the ivy out of my field of vision but still couldn’t get a good look at him. He was medium height and medium build, and was holding some of my files that he must have pulled out of the filing cabinet. There was nothing exciting in there, just bills and old tax returns, stuff like that. What the hell was this guy looking for?
As I watched, he opened up one of the files, leafed through the contents and, apparently satisfied that there was nothing in there of any use, casually dropped it to the floor, spilling papers across the carpet, before starting on another one.
‘You bastard,’ I hissed, then made a decision.
Jumping back in the car, I dialled 141 on the mobile so my number couldn’t be traced, then 999. When the operator came on I told him I wanted the police, and was put through to the police control room.
‘I’d like to report a burglary in progress,’ I told the woman at the other end, giving her the address. ‘The suspect’s armed with a knife and I think he may have attacked the occupant.’ I was trying to sound as alarmed as possible, something that was no great feat in the circumstances. ‘A woman lives there alone with young kids. I think they might be in there with him.’
She seemed suitably concerned, which was the idea. I wanted the police there in five minutes, not two hours after the guy had left, which would probably have been the case if I hadn’t been bullshitting. When the woman asked for my name, I told her to hurry as I’d just heard a scream. Then I hung up and put the car into gear.
It was time to find Kathy.
IT WAS USUALLY a twenty-five-minute drive to the university campus where my wife delivered her lectures on environmental politics (a subject in which I have to admit I have no interest whatsoever), but today I managed it in twenty. Traffic was quieter on the roads than normal, and I was hurrying. Halfway through the journey, I tried Kathy’s mobile for a third time. Still no answer. The same with the office extension. She’d now been non-contactable for forty minutes. Not unusual, but worrying given everything else that was happening. This time I left messages on both phones, telling her to call me as soon as possible. I made no attempt to tone down the urgency in my voice. I wanted to make sure she didn’t go home. I didn’t like to think what might happen if she ran into our uninvited guest, but I had a strong feeling he wouldn’t be very welcoming.
The university campus was a set of bland 1960s redbrick buildings with oversized black roofs that looked like they didn’t fit properly, and which were dotted to one side of a much larger building that stretched from one end of the site to the other. On the other side of this main building was a large car parking area which, because today was Saturday, was only about a quarter full. I parked as close to the main entrance as I could and hurried inside.
There was one woman manning the main reception desk but she was busy dealing with an enquiry by two Chinese students, and she completely ignored me. A bored-looking security guard of pensionable age sat on a chair beside the desk on duty in the reception foyer, supposedly to vet people who came into the building – a post created after the rape of one of the female students several years earlier. His vetting skills must have been on the blink, though, because he barely gave me a second look as I turned right and made my way along the corridor, past the lecture halls on my left and a café and Internet area on my right. It was in this building that most of the university’s lectures and tutorials took place, but it was relatively quiet today, with only a few students dotted about.
I looked out of place, being at least a dozen years older than everyone else, but no-one challenged me as I made my way in the direction of the library and the politics department. I was just another irrelevant old guy. And yet I could have been anyone. I could have been the rapist from a couple of years ago, but no-one seemed to care. There’s a degree of truth in the maxim that people only notice what they want to notice; a lot of the time they simply ignore what’s going on around them, so absorbed are they in their own lives. I was beginning to wonder if I’d been like that too recently, and had therefore missed something important. Something that could have told me what was going on.
As I cleared the café and Internet area, the number of people dwindled, and when I turned left and mounted a staircase to the first floor I found that I was on my own, my steady footfalls echoing on the linoleum. The corridor was completely silent, and it struck me that it would have been easy for a rapist to strike in a place like this, somewhere that initially felt safe because it was often alive with people, but which could just as easily turn into a place of darkened hallways with lines of doors beyond which anyone could lurk.
I felt nervous. Not for myself – no-one knew I was here – but for Kathy, having to come and work here alone. She’d told me they’d installed CCTV cameras throughout the building and that they were constantly monitored by a security company, so there was no need to worry. But I knew that not even cameras stop the more foolish criminals, or the ones who can’t control their urges. If this were the case, Britain, which has more CCTV cameras than any other country in the world, would be a relatively safe and peaceful society. And it isn’t.
At the end of the corridor was a set of double glass doors which marked the entrance to the university’s Department of Political Studies. They were shut, and beyond them I could neither see nor hear any signs of activity. The silence here was complete.
I stopped and looked at my watch. It was 4.25 p.m. Beyond the glass was another corridor that led down to an arch-shaped external window at the back of the building. There were four doors on the left side of the corridor, only one on the right. Kathy’s was the second on the left, and I noticed it was closed, as were all but one of the other doors.
I pushed the double doors and they opened. As I stepped through, they closed behind me with a loud bang that cracked across the silence like a gunshot. I flinched, resisting the urge to shout hello, and went over and tried Kathy’s door.
It was locked, which was strange. I knew I hadn’t made a mistake. Her name was engraved across it on an expensive-looking stainless-steel nameplate: DR KATHERINE C. MERON PH.D. The C stood for Cynthia, a name she hated. It made me wonder why she’d had it included. I tried the door again, just to make sure. It remained locked.
My mouth felt dry. Something wasn’t right. The silence felt heavy and unnatural. I couldn’t even hear the sound of traffic outside. Then I remembered. The walls here were very well insulated so that the academics could get on with their work in peace, unsullied by the constant racket of urban life the rest of us have to put up with.
Turning round, I went over to the door that led into the department’s library. The lights were off and it looked empty. I turned the handle and stepped inside, shutting the door quietly behind me.
It was a big room, probably fifty feet square, with a walkway running down the middle from the door to a bank of windows at the far end. About a third of the space was taken up by large rectangular worktables, some with PCs on them, all of them empty. There were no bags or coats to suggest that anyone was around, no books out and opened, and the screens on the computers were all blank. The tables gave way to lines of floor-to-ceiling shelves full of books that ran left to right and were bisected by the walkway, and which blocked out much of the natural light, giving the room that gloomy feel you often get in libraries. There was a line of further tables at the very end of the room by the windows. They too were empty.
This time I did call out. ‘Hello, is anyone here?’
No answer.
I pulled the phone from my pocket and speed-dialled Kathy’s mobile yet again. At the same time I walked over towards the lines of bookshelves filled with political tomes that took up much of the space ahead of me. I was unsurprised but increasingly unnerved when it went to message again. If she wasn’t here, where on earth was she?
I had to keep calm, I knew that. Maybe she’d left for the day and forgotten to switch the phone on. But of course that meant she might already have got home and run into whoever it was who was rifling through our belongings. Whichever way I viewed it, things were not looking good.
As I pocketed the mobile, something on the floor caught my eye. Just in front of one of the shelves. Difficult to see against the deep green of the carpet.
A stain, no more than a couple of inches across.
I swallowed hard, bent down, dipped a finger in it and flinched at its wetness. I inspected the upturned fingertip. There was no doubt about it. No doubt at all.
Blood.
And it was fresh.
Slowly my gaze moved along the carpet. There was a second stain, smaller than the first, then another. Thick droplets of blood. A trail.
My body stiffened. Please no. Please not Kathy. Not my wife, a woman who’s never hurt anyone. Anything but that. ‘Keep calm,’ I said, aloud this time. ‘Don’t panic.’
I looked up and saw a door facing me at the end of the bookshelf, fifteen feet away. It was about a foot or so ajar, and all I could see beyond it was darkness. I looked again at the carpet. The blood trail ran right along it towards the door. I stared at it, trying to detect movement.
My mobile started ringing. No, it wasn’t mine. It was someone else’s. A different ringtone. Mine was pretty normal; this was more jaunty. Annoyingly so. And it was coming from beyond the door.
Then it stopped.
The silence was so heavy that I could almost feel it weighing down on me. My instincts told me to run, to get the hell out of there. But what if it was Kathy who was bleeding in there? It wasn’t her mobile, I knew that. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t her behind the door.
I took a step forward. Halted. I was unarmed. What on earth was I going to do if I was confronted by someone? I needed to get help. Now.
The door flew open and a tall figure dressed in a sky-blue, paint-flecked boiler suit, black balaclava and gloves stood in front of me. He held a knife in front of him. It had a yellow handle and a long curved blade, similar to that of a filleting knife. The end of it was stained dark with blood.
For a split second neither of us moved, each studying the other. Only five yards apart. I didn’t have time for fear. Instead, I experienced a single, nightmarish jolt of shock that froze me to the spot. And then suddenly he exploded out of the door, coming at me with huge purposeful strides, the knife raised high in a killing arc.
Instinctively I grabbed a book from the nearest shelf and flung it at him, then turned and ran, but in my panic I went the wrong way and found myself facing the windows at the far end of the room rather than the door. There was no time to double back, he was right behind me, so I took off up the walkway in the direction of the windows, the sound of his breathing and the rhythmic patter of his boots clattering on the laminated plastic of the walkway spurring me on.
There was a wooden trolley full of books next to one of the shelves and I grabbed the end of it as I passed and yanked it out into the walkway behind me. I heard him clatter into it, and the sound of books falling to the floor, then him knocking it to one side, the delay to his progress giving me perhaps an extra second and a half. I didn’t dare look round; I was too busy concentrating on getting to the windows. I could see that they had handles and guessed – prayed – that they opened outwards. The library was high up, twenty feet above the ground at least, maybe more. It didn’t matter. I had to get out.
I ran between two round reading tables in front of the windows and pulled desperately at the first latch I came to. It didn’t move. The damn thing was locked. I could hear my pursuer’s footfalls gaining. I swung round and he was there, right in front of me, five feet away and still running, the bloodied knife thrusting forward at waist height. Ready to fillet me.
I heard myself cry out in fear, but at the same time I had enough instinct for survival to grab the nearest chair and charge into him, forcing its legs into his face and upper body as I tried to get him off balance. He stumbled backwards, lifting his arms defensively, and this gave me time to move into a more open space. Out of the corner of my eye I saw an open door marked TOILETS. A potential escape route, but there was no time to give it much thought as I pressed my advantage, advancing fast and thrusting the chair at him once again. But this time he was ready. He jumped nimbly to one side and grabbed one of the legs, twisting it away from me.
We wrestled with the chair for several more seconds, but I was now more exposed and he suddenly lashed out with the knife, just catching the exposed flesh of my arm below the elbow. I felt a sharp burning sensation but no pain. My adrenalin was pumping too hard for that. I gritted my teeth, saw the thin gash he’d made through the material of my shirt bubble up with blood, and then I was having to dodge him as the knife skimmed through the air again. It caught me in the middle of my cheek as I twisted my face away. Another burning sensation, and I could feel a drop of blood running down onto my neck.
The reality of what was happening now hit me. I was fighting for my life. This man was trying to kill me, and all the time the room was deathly silent.
He tried to get his leg round the back of mine so he could trip me up, then yanked at the chair again and drove the knife at my midriff. This time as I twisted away, banging hard against the nearest bookshelf, I let the chair go, giving it as much of a shove as I could manage under the circumstances. I don’t think he was expecting that because he stumbled backwards and almost lost his footing.
That was my chance. I turned and ran like I’ve never run before, aiming straight at the door marked toilets, knowing that if I fucked this up, I was dead. I have a morbid fear of being stabbed to death. Of being opened up by a hot blade and watching my blood and my life ebb away, unable to do anything about it. It’s been with me ever since a guy we went to school with was fatally knifed in a local nightclub a decade ago. Two thrusts, both straight to the heart. The doormen threw him out, not realizing what had happened, and he died on the pavement outside. This was the fate that awaited me. A lonely, terrifying, messy death.
As I moved through the open door, I slammed it shut behind me. My mind registered two more doors: one to the left, one opposite. I took the one opposite. The men’s. Behind me, the main door flew open again. He was still on my tail.
I charged into the men’s, saw a row of stalls directly in front of me, swung right, slipping on the tiled floor but somehow keeping my balance, and kept going round the corner where there were a number of individual urinals arranged against the wall in a rough semicircle. Directly above one was a narrow window, maybe eighteen inches high and three feet across. There was an ancient latch at the bottom of it, the paint almost entirely peeled off. I ran forward and jumped up onto the urinal, flicking the latch off its guard in one movement, and using both palms to knock open the window. Then I was scrambling through, head-first, my legs flailing. As my upper body lurched out into the open air, I could see a flat roof six or seven feet below me where the building had been given a single-storey extension. Safety. I was halfway out, arms outstretched, already prepared for impact, when I heard the scuff of his boots from inside and felt him grab my leg and pull up the material of my jeans in an effort to expose my calf. As the blade touched my flesh but before he could make an incision, I lashed out with the other leg and could tell by the impact that I’d caught him in the face. For the first time I heard him cry out, and I kicked again, like a donkey, then put the flats of both hands against the outside wall and launched myself forward into thin air, as if making a championship dive.
The roof shot up to meet me and I hit it in an unsteady handstand, pain shooting up my wrists. My legs hovered precariously in the air then made a rapid descent, and I ended up somersaulting over, the roof’s material digging into my scalp. It didn’t even strike me to look back, to check whether my assailant was coming or not. I half-crawled, half-ran, over to the edge of the building and, using my hands as a pivot, swung myself over and slid down the wall, jumping the last couple of feet to the ground.
I was in a small paved area enclosed by a brick wall some ten feet high. In front of the wall were two lines of car-sized green wheelie bins, the majority of them overflowing with rubbish. There was a strong smell of refuse. Beyond the wall, I could hear the sound of a car coming past. Freedom.
I stood where I was for several seconds, panting heavily, then heard movement on the roof above me. It was like being trapped in a nightmare. The bastard was still coming.
Summoning up my remaining strength, I ran between the lines of wheelie bins and tried to haul myself up on one that had been positioned adjacent to the wall. I failed with my first attempt. I’m no longer as fit as I used to be. My gym membership lapsed three years ago, and now the occasional game of tennis in the summer is my only real exercise. Bizarrely, as I went to try it a second time, I made a vow to renew the gym membership if ever my life returned to normal.
This time, with a grunt of exertion, I managed it, flopping onto the bin’s plastic top on my belly before struggling to my feet, pulling myself up the last couple of feet to the top of the wall and scrambling over, unable to see my pursuer in the half-second timeframe I had before the view behind me disappeared.
I hit the pavement feet-first and saw that I was in an unfamiliar residential street of terraced housing. A car came past but the driver didn’t seem to notice me. I’d lost my bearings, having never exited the university this way before. All I knew was that I was a long way from my car.