Hunted (18 page)

The sound of the door slamming. Then another creak. Something being dragged. Elation leapt inside Danny’s heart. The stranger hadn’t gone out.

He doesn’t know about Lexie. Or he’s given up on finding her in the storm.

Pain tore through Danny’s arms as the stranger hauled him up by the knot binding his wrists – as easily as if he were a child, as if he didn’t weigh a thing – and dragged him across the cabin.

He gripped Danny’s hair with one hand and hooked him under the elbow behind his back with the other. He jerked him up, nearly dislocating Danny’s shoulder as he did, then shoved him down on to a chair positioned opposite Sally and his boy.

Danny stared hard into his young son’s eyes. All the love he’d ever felt for anyone, he felt it for Jonathan now.

But then his heart sank. On the other side of Sally was another empty chair. For Lexie. The stranger had not forgotten her at all.

A creak of gloves. The stranger gripped Danny’s neck, and exerted a sudden violent downwards pressure. He wound duct tape round Danny’s torso, strapping him tight to the chair. Then taped his legs tight too.

When he’d finished, he gazed down at Danny and smiled. All teeth.

‘Your little girl … Alexandra …’

The way he said it – like he was trying out the word for flavour – made Danny want to tear out his tongue. The bruises on Sally’s face … He’d not just done it to find out if Danny had a phone … This man had beaten their daughter’s name from her too.

‘Did you hide her somewhere out there? Or did you tell her to run for help?’

The stranger wasn’t expecting an answer, of course. Not now he’d taped Danny’s mouth. He watched Danny’s eyes instead. He watched them like a fisherman watches the sea for signs, searching for cormorants diving for fish, so he’d know where to cast his net.

He watched Danny, and then he smiled.

‘Not help,’ he said. ‘Not in this storm. She’s hiding. Somewhere dry and out of the wind. Just like those rabbits you’ve been busy gutting and skinning out back.’

Danny knew then for certain: the stranger had either been watching them the last couple of days, or he’d scoped the place out some time after he’d arrived. Either way, he’d know already that they had no neighbours near.

Without warning, the man turned to face Sally. He ducked down low and kissed her duct-taped mouth. A rushing sound filled Danny’s ears. He threw himself bodily forward. Instinctively. Without thinking.

But neither he nor the chair moved. That was when he realized it. That hammering sound. The stranger had nail-gunned the chair to the floor. So that whatever came next, whatever he chose to do to Danny’s family, Danny would have no choice but to
watch
.

Danny fought the blind fury rising inside him. He forced himself to focus instead on what he now knew he must do. He thought of the two-inch blade. How much time did he have? He couldn’t be sure. This man’s previous victims had sometimes been killed quickly, sometimes over days.

Never give up. Never say that you can’t.

He would not surrender hope. He still had surprise on his side. The stranger no longer regarded him as a threat. That much was obvious from the way he now turned his back on Danny and put more logs on the smouldering fire, before continuing to tear up more newspaper and scrunch it into tiny balls.

Danny already knew what he was doing that for.

He felt for the two-inch blade with his fingertips then. He started to work it free.

Through a warren of one-way streets and back alleys, the taxi driver reached Whelan Street nine minutes later.

Danny paid him and hurried out. In case the driver was later questioned, he walked in the opposite direction to the one he wanted, before doubling back on himself once the taxi had vanished from sight.

St Peter’s Girls’ School occupied a large site near Brook Green. During the taxi ride there, Danny had seen no police, either in cars or on foot.

Because they’re all still looking for me somewhere else.

Nine minutes … meaning it was now fourteen minutes since he’d been officially identified on British TV. It was possible, then, that news had not yet reached the school. Or if it had, then it had not yet been acted upon.

Despite having always paid the fees, Danny had had little contact with the school since his daughter had become a pupil here five years ago, shortly after her eleventh birthday.

He walked quickly though the open gates and set off along the hundred-metre gravel drive.

The turreted façade of the main school building gave it the air of an English stately home. A fountain with three stone dolphins
frozen in the act of leaping drew Danny’s eyes towards the building’s entrance. Landscaped lawns and riotously coloured flower beds stretched away left and right.

London’s wealthiest clamoured over places for their kids here. Lexie had got in on an art scholarship. She’d been a day girl here for her first four years, but had started boarding after her grandmother, Jean, had got ill. The one school holiday there’d been since Jean had died – this Easter just past – she had elected to spend with a school friend here in England, instead of with Danny.

Two cars passed him as he marched on, each of them moving too slowly to trigger panic. As they reached the turning circle surrounding the fountain, they were directed by a grey-haired groundsman into an already brimming car park, where a bunch of civilians were milling around several rows of expensive vehicles, as if they were all out visiting some kind of exclusive rural car dealership.

Most of the men were dressed in linen suits and ribboned panamas, the women in fashionable floral summer dresses. Danny, in contrast, in his hoodie and jeans, looked more like someone they might assume was about to break into their cars.

Beyond the lawns to the left of the main school building, a wide area of flat land had been given over to grass tennis courts, hockey pitches and an asphalt athletics compound. A hundred or so schoolgirls in running whites were engaged in a variety of sports. Their shouts of encouragement and excitement drifted across to Danny on the breeze.

He picked up his pace. If the police got to Lexie first, then at least she’d be safe, he was thinking. She might get wheeled out on TV in an attempt to entice him in, but she’d not be physically harmed.

But if the Kid was right and British intelligence agents were now involved, and
they
reached Lexie first, then the rules would be different, and a whole lot worse. Danny was the enemy. A
mass-murdering
terrorist in their eyes.

They’d treat Lexie any way they needed in order to bring him in, or find out where he was.

Ignoring the grey-haired groundsman, who called something half-heartedly after him, Danny marched up the worn stone steps into the cool entrance hall of the main building.

A marble staircase spiralled up. Bright sunlight shone down through lead-latticed windows. A couple of schoolgirls ran chattering past. Polished trophy cabinets and school photographs studded the walls.

In the three months since Jean had died, Danny had found himself officially directly back in charge of his sixteen-year-old daughter’s life. But she’d wanted no more contact with him than before. Two lunches. That was all. Each of them awkward, passed in near silence. Just as bad as any of the others he’d irregularly been granted while Jean had still been alive.

Danny felt his parental failure bearing down on him like a rock. What did he really know about Lexie? Nothing. He felt sick with nerves over the thought of seeing her. He didn’t know how he could even begin to explain what was going on. He just prayed she’d not seen the news since his name had been revealed. He prayed she would hear it from him.

His new trainers squeaked on the ancient red-and-white chequered floor tiles, as he hurried over to the reception, a
panel-fronted
mahogany counter behind which an immaculately groomed women in her mid forties sat leafing through a neat stack of paperwork. There were no TVs in sight.

As Danny reached her, she looked up. She had sharp brown eyes and wore her jet-black hair scraped straight back from her brow. Her professional smile faltered only slightly as she took in his hooded top and jeans.

‘May I help you?’ she said.

‘My daughter.’ Danny’s accent shifted smoothly into Home Counties English. ‘She’s a student here.’

‘There’s a PTA picnic in the car park,’ she said, ‘followed by drinks in the pavilion at half past.’

Danny stared at her blankly.

‘The pavilion … between the athletics track and the swimming centre,’ she said. ‘You are here for sports day, I presume?’

‘Er, yeah.’ Danny remembered again the letter he’d received about Lexie running in the fifteen hundred metres this afternoon. He remembered too how he’d planned to come here today after his meeting at the Ritz to watch her unseen. He couldn’t believe how much had changed in just a few short hours.

He glanced over at the doorway and up the driveway. It was clear. Glancing back at the receptionist, he saw she was looking him over warily now. He smiled at her to keep her on his side.

‘I’ve had a hell of a day,’ he said, raising his shades an inch as he did, revealing his bruised face. ‘Had an accident playing polo. Fell off my damned horse.’

She winced sympathetically.

‘But I really do need to see my daughter now. Before the races begin.’

‘I see.’ The woman grimaced, glancing at her watch. ‘The trouble is that most of the girls will already be getting changed.’

Danny pictured the school driveway in his mind’s eye. He sensed trouble coming sooner rather than later. Those same cop pursuit cars that had nearly snagged him by Hyde Park, he envisaged them screeching up beside the dolphin fountain now.

He gazed into the receptionist’s eyes and told himself to stay polite.

‘Anything you can do to help, I’d be most grateful.’ Another smile. ‘And by the way, I’ve got to tell you, that shirt really suits the colour of your eyes.’

The receptionist’s cheeks reddened. But the corners of her mouth were already pinching up into a smile by the time she reached for the intercom.

‘Right,’ she said, ‘well let’s see if we can track her down. Could you tell me what your name – what
her
name is?’ she corrected herself.

‘Alexandra. Alexandra Shanklin.’

‘Lexie?’ a female voice interrupted from behind, leaving the receptionist’s hand hovering over the intercom system before she’d actually switched it on.

Danny turned to see a tall blonde teenage girl, skinny as a stork, with an iPad hooked nonchalantly under one arm.

‘That’s right,’ Danny said.

The girl smiled at him brightly. ‘I just saw her. In the quad. If you hurry, she’ll probably still be there.’

‘Er, thanks.’ Danny turned back to face the receptionist, smiling abashedly this time. ‘The quad,’ he said. ‘Would you mind telling me exactly where – and what – that is?’

The school’s quadrangle was less than a two-minute walk through the oak-panelled corridors of the main school building.

Danny was taken there by the girl with the laptop, whose name was Sarah and who told him before she said goodbye that Lexie was one of her closest friends. As she pointed him out into the quad, she wished him the best of luck. From the look that accompanied these words, Danny guessed he was going to need it too.

Fifty metres long and open to the burning blue sky, the pillored, alcoved quad was boxed in on either side by tall Gothic buildings. Two decorative stone arches, both wide enough to drive a car through, stood at either end. Visible through them were the athletics track to the north and the dolphin statue to the south.

At first Danny didn’t recognize Lexie amongst the group of ten or more teenage girls, all dressed in athletics kit, huddled chatting and laughing beside a black-painted door.

Three guys were with them, all basking in the attention they were receiving in this otherwise female environment. All same age, sixteen or seventeen. Out of school uniform. In jeans, T-shirts and boots. Most likely boyfriends or relatives from another school, Danny supposed.

It was only once he’d got up close enough to the group for several of the girls to have fallen watchfully silent that he knew for certain that the laughing girl slouched up against the wall beside the door was his daughter.

She was slim like her mother had been. But in contrast to Sally’s elegance, Lexie was still bony-kneed, gangling, not yet fully grown. In profile, she was elfin-featured. So much like Sally, it wrenched his heart.

She’d still not seen him. She kicked off the dry, dusty wall, turning to face a dark-haired boy who’d just flipped a skateboard up vertically with a practised flick of his boot.

Seeing her at her full height, Danny reckoned she might even have grown an inch since he’d last seen her. It hit him that his little girl might one day be taller than him.

She’d dyed her hair and was wearing it tied up. Stripes of black ran like strips of liquorice through a tangle of strawberry blonde.

As the other girls – en masse a cloud of oversweet perfume – stepped back to let Danny through, Lexie finally noticed him too. He saw straight away that she’d got it all wrong. That she thought he’d just turned up here for sports day. Her estranged dad fumbling to make amends.

He could not have manufactured worse circumstances for a reconciliation if he’d tried.

He took off his shades and immediately regretted it. As she stared at the bruise Alan Offiniah had given him, her eyes grew harder still.

‘What do
you
want?’ she said.

A hiss of car tyres slewing through gravel.

Danny looked sharply across to the front of the school. What he’d dreaded was already happening. An unmarked black Mercedes – no, make that two – had just pulled up in a mistral of summer dust alongside the fountain.

Several men were already spilling out of the vehicles. Some of them in suits. A couple in jeans, T-shirts and shades. One sported a black leather jacket. Two of them ran for the school entrance. The others fanned out.

‘You’ve got to come with me now,’ Danny said.

‘You can’t just walk in here and tell me what to do—’

He grabbed her by the shoulder and jerked her aside so he could open the back door.

‘Get your fucking hands off me.’ She tried to break free.

He didn’t let go. He had to get her out of here. Now.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

Someone shoved Danny hard in the back. When he turned, he saw one of the teenage boys, the one who’d been holding the skateboard – thin, but athletic-looking, with dark curly hair – squaring up to him.

‘Don’t even think about it,’ Danny said.

The boy had his bony hands bunched up into fists.

Lexie stepped in between then.

‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘He’s my father.’

A cloud of confusion crossed the boy’s face, but he stayed right there by her side, his fists not relaxing one bit.

More vehicles slewed to a halt at the front of the school. No sirens. Not cops. Car doors opened and slammed. This time Lexie heard. She looked that way, then back at her father. Her eyes grew wide with alarm.

‘Dad, what is it? What’s going on?’

Dad
. She hadn’t called him that in years. Not since the two of them had moved to California after Sally and Jonathan had died. Not since he’d sat there with her and TV and not speaking, and her living on pizzas and Dr Pepper, and him on prescription pills, drinking himself slowly to death.

He stared into her eyes. His little girl. She’d stroked his hair as he’d lain there slumped in his bed. She’d cleared away the bottles and put them chinking out into the trash.

An order shouted. One of the suited men – bald, squat and powerful-looking – set off jogging purposefully towards the quad archway.

The other kids began dispersing, sensing now that something was wrong. Apart from the curly-haired boy who’d fronted up to Danny. He’d not taken his eyes off the older man. He hadn’t moved an inch.

‘Lex,’ he said. ‘What do you want me to do?’

Danny saw the way his daughter’s eyes softened when she looked into the boy’s. The two of them, Danny could see it, were clearly much more than just friends.

‘Wait here,’ she said.

Lexie pulled open the black door. Danny followed her inside.

‘I’m not going anywhere with you until you tell me why.’

Danny couldn’t see her face. She was marching ahead of him down a gloomy corridor. A sign reading ‘LIBRARY’ pointed to the left, but Lexie led Danny right, as somewhere nearby a machine burst humming into life.

‘Wait,’ Danny said.

The rising noise of the machine drowned out his words. Lexie stormed past an empty classroom. Lines of desks and tucked-in chairs. A whiteboard with a series of mathematical equations half rubbed out.

Two metres on and the noise became deafening, as they passed another doorway, through which Danny glimpsed a bent-backed janitor in a blue boiler suit, polishing a scuffed wooden floor.

The corridor branched left, but Lexie carried straight on. Into a music practice room, Danny saw, as he hurried in after her. A piano stood up against the wall to the right. Danny ran to the head-height windows and peered out into the quad.

Lexie’s friends had all vanished. Except for the boy, who, true to his word, had not taken his eyes off the door through which Lexie and Danny had gone.

The man in the suit who’d been jogging towards the quad hadn’t yet entered it. He was poised beneath the quad’s archway, a phone clamped to his ear, looking all around.

They’re configuring … laying down a net …

Lexie slammed the door shut, cutting off the sound of the machine. When Danny looked across at her, there was nothing but hatred and rage in her eyes.

‘Who do you think you are, coming here and—’

‘You’re in danger,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to trust me. We have to go.’

Just like that time in the woods, something in his eyes – a warning there – it stopped her dead in her tracks. Her own sharp eyes flicked towards the window.

‘Those people at the front of the school. They’re looking for you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘They think I did something bad.’

‘What?’

‘They think I shot some people. A whole lot of people. They think I shot them dead.’

‘My God …’

He watched her face crumple. Her defiance vanished. She looked like a kid, nothing more.

‘All those people on the news …’ she said. ‘The Running Man. You’re
him
? Oh Jesus. Oh God.’ She looked like she was about to throw up. ‘But everyone’s been talking about it.’ She shook her head, as if a part of her still refused to believe. ‘There’s meant to be … there’s meant to be nearly thirty people killed …’

Through the window, Danny watched the squat bald guy moving slowly into the quad. His right hand was inside his jacket, as if he was reaching for something. Danny already knew what.

‘Why can’t you just give yourself up?’ Lexie said. ‘Tell them it wasn’t you.’

A part of him burned for her then. She’d not asked if he was guilty. She’d not asked.

‘Those men out there … they’re not police,’ he said. ‘And even if they were, even if I did surrender to them – if they didn’t shoot me first – I might never get out again. I’ve got to somehow first prove it wasn’t me.’

Another man in a grey suit – blond, heavy, fast – now ran to join the squat guy. They entered the quad warily and marched to the kid by the door.

‘Please, Lexie,’ Danny said. ‘Or they’ll use you against me. They’ll hurt you to get what they want.’

This was his last opportunity, he knew. She realized it too. And something in her changed then. He’d never know why. Maybe because of the way his voice had just caught. Or perhaps because the same defeat he felt now ballooning inside him, she somehow saw in his eyes.

‘This way,’ she said.

She jerked the music room door open and hurried out into the noisy corridor.

Father and daughter, they started to run.