The Hunt (15 page)

As he topped the next rise, he paused to look back down at the lake. The hunters were scampering around it to his left, pale spots far away and below, and it was difficult to imagine that they meant him harm. He experienced a rush of wellbeing completely at odds with his situation – he could fly ahead of them forever, confident on his feet, fitter than he had ever been, and slowly they would tire and crumple and die into these hills. His tiredness was negated by adrenalin, any pain he felt was weakness leaving his body. He would triumph.

‘This can only end well,’ he said, as if to imbue the landscape with his positivity. The wide, darkening skies remained silent, and the mountains stared back in mute mockery.

Fuck them
, Chris thought, suddenly feeling very small. Running again, that brief moment of optimism faded with every footstep.

The mountain slope ahead gave way to a wall of almost sheer cliffs, craggy edifices that he would not dream of tackling. That left him with a choice – veer left and head down a series of slopes into the wide valley bottom; or turn right, negotiate a difficult scramble uphill, and enter the inhospitable mountaintop domain above the cliffs, where even now a heavy mist obscured his view.

Making things easy for him would do the same for the bastards chasing him.

He chose right.

An hour later he donned the yellow showerproof jacket from his rucksack, soaked though it still was. He waited until he was sure the hunters had seen him before entering the cool mists.

The more Rose had discovered about the Trail, the more she knew that she needed help.

She returned to Italy just once. She went looking for Holt, ready to present everything she’d learned to him. He was retired, she knew that. A rich man with nothing to spend his money on. A haunted soul. Someone with a red history that she had no doubt was much deeper, darker and more traumatic than the few hints he’d given her, and which he’d likely never reveal. But she thought he might help because of the children.

That’s why he’d taken time to instruct her, so he’d said. And with the Trail still active there would always be more children in danger.

Her second time entering Italy was as a different person. Not only had her name changed – she travelled under one of several
noms de plume
she had assumed for instances such as this, supplied to her by Holt’s contact in Switzerland – but she was also a colder, wiser woman, with a wider horizon and dark stains on her soul that she could never have imagined before. The first time she’d come to Italy she had been a grieving, confused drunk seeking oblivion. This time her quest was for the most violent revenge.

Holt was no longer in Sorrento. She visited many of the locations they had frequented the year before – restaurants and bars, parks and beaches, abandoned buildings, seafront walks, and places so far out in the wilds that they did not have a name. She spoke to barmen and hoteliers whom she’d believed had known him, but came up blank. Either they were very good actors or, more likely, he was even better at remaining unknown than she had suspected.

Her fifth day there she spent outside a busy harbour café, watching tourists living their safe, trouble-free lives, and blending into the background. She was becoming good at that. The café was one of the few places to which Holt had returned several times when the two of them were together, and though she’d never asked, she had come to believe that the small, innocuous place meant something special to him.

There was no sign of Holt. If he
was
in Sorrento, he had seen her and preferred not to make himself known. And that made her hope that he wasn’t there at all.

It had always been a long shot, because he’d passed that strange comment about not being quite lost enough. But at the back of her mind was the idea that he was always keeping an eye on her. Nothing had suggested this to her, other than her own troubled thoughts, yet she grasped on to the notion. She could not accept the concept that, to Holt, she had been just another lost cause.

That evening she returned to experience the café’s night-time atmosphere. She dressed in different clothing, wore her hair up instead of down, and sat at a table she’d never used before. On the waiter’s second visit to her table, she started asking him about Holt. She never mentioned him by name, instead painting the image of a mythical, shadowy figure, The Frenchman, a haunter of shadows. The man walked briskly away, and moments later someone else approached her. Uninvited, he sat in the table’s spare chair. He and the waiter must have been twins, and they both wore the same leathery mask of bad times.

‘You’re looking for The Frenchman?’ he asked in excellent English.

Rose nodded.

‘Why?’

‘I owe him money,’ she said.

‘Give it to me, I’ll pass it on to him.’ The man smiled, but it was ugly.

Rose stared him in the eye and finished her coffee.

The man’s smile dropped. He returned to the bar where his waiter brother was waiting. They whispered to each other, glancing over at her. The music and chatter in the café receded as she focused on them, her heartbeat increased, and the idea of soon seeing Holt again suddenly made her both nervous and excited. She was afraid of him, but he was the only friend she had in the world.

The waiter nodded, then scribbled something on his pad, tore off the sheet and left it on the bar. He caught her eye to make sure she’d seen, then picked up a tray and went to serve someone.

Rose stood and approached the bar. The other man stood to one side, pointedly ignoring her. When she was three feet away and could see that the paper was blank, she felt the waiter’s solid grip on her arm.

The two men dragged her out through the café’s back door.

‘No one asks about The Frenchman,’ the owner whispered, and then he turned away.

Maybe this is what I wanted
, Rose thought, letting them haul her through the kitchen and out past storage shelving heaped with packed food and bags of grains and spices.
Maybe danger is the only thing that will bring Holt
. She let herself be taken, feigning weakness, crying out when she thought they might expect it of her.

After the first slap fell across her cheek from one twin, and the first punch from the other rocked her jaw, she stood up straight, spat blood, and held up her hand.

The two men froze, wide-eyed and afraid. Rose was glad she couldn’t see what they saw.
It must be in my eyes
, she thought, remembering those times that Holt had looked at her in such a way. Still, she believed that he’d never given her the full weight of his dreadful history.

Rose was still gathering the mass of her own, and she relished her complete control of that moment.

She punched the waiter in the nose with the heel of her hand, swinging her shoulder and putting her whole weight behind it. Bone crumpled, and he slumped to the ground with barely a whimper.

His brother tried to run back into the café, but she tripped him and then kicked him between the legs, dropping her other knee hard onto the side of his face as he curled up in agony.

The coolness was there. Holt said he’d seen it in her, knew what it meant – that she was ready to be shown things and willing to change – but this was the first time Rose had really experienced it in herself. It was a calm distance that seemed to slow down time, an awareness that located her limbs, her body, her strengths. And it was a remoteness from everything that had once made her human. She still cared when bad things happened to good people, so much so that her empathy was sometimes stifling and smothering.

But she could have cheerfully slit those men’s throats.

Instead, she left along the dark alley, emerging into a bustling street rich with the scents of cooking food and the sea. The coolness remained, and in its embrace she saw how innocent everyone was. She alone walked with the knowledge of how cruel the world could be. It hung like a bubble of corruption about her.

She remained in Sorrento for two more days, and it was only when she grudgingly decided to end her search that Holt called.

She’d been moving hotels each night she was there. But when she’d given up any hope of finding Holt, and instead stayed merely to soak up more of the local atmosphere, she didn’t bother changing hotels. Two nights in one place would not matter. It was out of the way, a small private business run by an energetic family who did their best to make her feel at home. The sort of establishment used by experienced travellers, rather than the larger, more glossy hotels booked by package tour firms. It was nice. She might have come here with Adam, if they ever had a long weekend away without the kids.

The phone beside her bed rang on that final morning. Even as she answered, coughing away the familiar dregs of bad dreams, still breathing in their dark clouds, she knew who it would be.

‘Clumsy,’ Holt said.

‘What’s clumsy?’

‘Staying there for two nights. People will get used to seeing you. You’ll be remembered. Especially someone like you.’

‘Like me?’

‘Attractive white woman travelling on her own.’

‘Still such a smooth talker,’ she said, smiling, because he so was not.

Holt only sighed.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. There were a thousand questions –
Where are you? How did you know I was looking? How long have you been watching me?
– but none of them were worth asking. He’d tell her if he wanted to. ‘I know you didn’t want me to come back. But
…
’

‘I won’t help you,’ he said.

‘How do you know I haven’t already finished?’ she asked. ‘Come here flushed with victory ready to drag you off into the sunset?’

‘And live happily ever after?’

‘Maybe.’

He sighed again.
He knows everything
, she thought. She’d always believed that. What he didn’t know via whatever contacts or methods he had, he seemed able to pluck from her thoughts. He had wisdom. Maybe it came with years, but more likely it was a product of the life he had always led. He lived on a different plane to most people, his perception insulated against the interference of modern life.

She sat up and took a long swig of water from the bottle beside the bed. Outside, mopeds buzzed along the narrow street, and the city muttered and rumbled as it came to life. She kept the phone pressed to her ear, but Holt did not talk. He was waiting for her to say why she’d come, what she wanted of him, how desperate things might be. Waiting to say no again.

‘I have to tell you,’ she said. ‘But
…
not like this.’

‘We’ve already said our goodbyes,’ he said.

‘Can’t we meet?’

‘I’m not in Italy any more.’

That shocked her. It was foolish, but for some reason she’d believed that he was calling from somewhere close. Perhaps even the next room; she thought that would be his style. Her heart sank a little, realising she didn’t know him at all, and was not going to see him again.

‘But tell me anyway,’ he said.

So she did.

‘It didn’t take me long to gather together everything I knew about them. There wasn’t much
to
gather. Seventeen days working my way around the same place I’d seen Grin, and finally I saw her again. Clumsy of her, and I had to hold back from attacking her there and then. The impulse was there. And after everything you’d taught me
…
I could have murdered her in the street and walked away without anyone knowing.

‘But I followed her instead. She was fucking someone, that was the only reason she’d appeared there again. I was even kind enough to let her have her night there, then I went to the guy’s flat. He wasn’t one of them. If he was, he wouldn’t have talked so easily. He didn’t know her name, said they’d met on an internet chat room for people looking for casual sex. That was only the third time he’d seen her, and he said she hardly ever spoke, only told him what to do to her. He thought it was just her kink, and he got off on it. He was terrified of me. Maybe he thought that was
my
kink. I had no reason to hate him, but I did. He’d been
…
inside
her. Inside the woman who’d murdered my family, pleasuring her, making her feel good.’

‘Did you kill him?’ Holt asked. The question didn’t shock her as much as it should.

‘No. But I promised that if he spoke of me, I’d hunt down and kill his entire family.’

‘He knew you were serious.’ It was a statement, not a question. Holt knew he didn’t even have to ask.

Rose thought of the kiss of the blade, the parting of skin, and the man’s gurgled cry as he’d pressed the pouting wound on his thigh together.

‘He gave me enough to work on. The last part of Grin’s car number plate, a tattoo on her thigh, her accent. I did some work. It was a hire car rented through a third party, but the third party had a place in Camden, small empty office, stinking of rat piss. Just a registered address, but there was a cupboard filled with junked laptops. They didn’t know how to wipe their data histories very well. I got part of a credit card number from there, traced that to an address in Sheffield. Old couple. They talked soon enough, all it took was a threat. I have no idea if Grin was even a relative of theirs – daughter, niece, granddaughter – but pretty soon I had an address in Edinburgh.’

‘Sounds like a loose trail,’ Holt said. He’d schooled her on tracking people this way, and how some people not wishing to be found would often leave false clues and pointers to throw pursuers off their scent. He called them loose trails because they were baggy, too filled with clues, too obvious.

‘That’s what I thought, but it was all I had. So I went to Edinburgh anyway, expecting to find nothing.’

‘And?’

‘It was an empty house. I watched for a while, and there was a young kid paid to go in twice each day, turn lights on and off, clear mail from behind the front door. I got in on the third night and had a good sniff around. The mail was all junk stuff, nothing with a name. Everything was clean, dusted, pretty much pristine. But in one of the upstairs rooms there was a small case under the bed. It was filled with weapons and other stuff, survival equipment, false documents, few grand in cash. And a letter to Margaret Vey. On the surface it was a chatty one-pager about a holiday the writer had been on, but there was something strange about it. It was familiar, but impersonal. Like
…
an instruction manual. I didn’t take anything, and left the way I’d come in.

‘Margaret Vey. I had a name. But she didn’t exist. I used some of the contacts you gave me – Isaac, MonoMan, and the woman at GCHQ. While they were doing their work, I did everything I could. HMRC, National Health, insurance and investment filing systems, passport office, criminal databases. Nothing. She was nobody.’

‘False name?’

‘Of course. But people use false names to get things, and hers didn’t lead anywhere.’

‘So what then?’ Holt sounded interested. He wanted to know how Rose had found out what she had about the Trail, how she’d infiltrated so far. Enough to know when they had initiated another hunt. His interest was good, and she needed to nurture that. She didn’t believe for a minute that she knew him any better than he wanted her to, but the excitement he felt at things like this had always been obvious. He lived off the grid, and that quiet zone beneath the radar was his playground.

‘I remembered the tattoo the guy had described, and the accent. Went to Bolton, visited the studios there, showed them a sketch of the design I said I wanted – a snake coiled around a rat. No joy. But then I remembered the numbers I’d got from her phone the first time I’d seen her. Scratched into my arm. One of them was still visible, just, and it had a Bolton area code, so I tried it. And it was a tattoo artist who did home visits. I met him, talked about the design, and when I got the reaction I was looking for, I asked the guy about the woman while he was working on me.’