The Hunt (2 page)

Rose screamed herself awake, sprang upright on the uncomfortable bed and pressed one hand against her chest, feeling her thundering heart and assuring herself that she was still alive. Sweat had dampened her vest and underclothes. She’d kicked the blanket off during the night. The musty confines of the caravan were sliced by sheets of dawn sunlight shining through broken blinds, and birds sang cheerfully outside, as if her husband and three children had never been tied up and slaughtered in some dark, dank basement.

The familiar flood of reality rushed in, and Rose groaned at the awfulness of it all. Sometimes in sleep there was escape, and occasionally in dreams she enjoyed some form of vicarious peace. But not this past night. The memory of what she had found was so vivid and fresh that it was like discovering the scene all over again. Four years had passed, but most nights she found her dead family afresh.

Already the nightmare was dissipating, leaving brash images scorched into her memory. Adam, his eyes as wide and empty as the vicious gash in his throat. And her three children – Molly, Isaac, Alex – lying dead where she had not been able to protect them, hold them, whisper motherly words into their ears. She always remembered that, however hard she tried to forget.

She used the cramped toilet and dressed quickly, pausing now and then to glance from the windows. New habits persisted. It was dangerous to ever believe herself safe.

Outside, all was peaceful. The field where her caravan was parked remained empty right now – the farmer said he would be introducing some sheep in the next few weeks – and the grass was long, shimmering slightly in the morning breeze, jewelled with dew. The windows gave her good views in each direction, and she’d be able to see anyone approaching. Down the sloping field was the farm, still and silent this early in the morning. East lay the orchard, fruit-heavy trees dipping low limbs across the landscape. And to the north, a family of foxes played close to the hedge bordering the field and a woodland beyond, young cubs leaping, rolling, snapping at each other like puppies. She was always pleased to see them. If someone was close by, the foxes wouldn’t be anywhere in sight.

Rose went through her morning exercise routine. One hundred press-ups, sit-ups and crunches, along with chin-ups, planks, and squats. Her body had grown lithe and lean. The exertion kick-fired her metabolism and got her blood pumping, and the distraction steered her away from her horrible dreams. For a time, at least.

After eating a breakfast of fruit and yoghurt she pulled the pistol from beneath the mattress and tucked it into her belt.

She brewed coffee and switched on her laptop. The caravan was small and basic but suited her needs perfectly. She’d bought a new fridge and decent bedding, but the van’s outside was as mouldy and worn-looking as when she’d first seen it. Five hundred pounds and it was hers. The farmer took a chunk of cash from her each week for ground rent and silence, and he was happy to ask no questions. That was fine. She never stayed in one place for more than a few weeks.

Drinking strong coffee, humming quietly, she started scanning her usual news sites. But the memory of her nightmare was strong. She closed her eyes and breathed in coffee fumes, because every time she thought of her family the grief was rich, deep, and sometimes crippling. She dreaded forgetting them, though sometimes remembering was almost too much.

But her dreams and memories fed her fury. She knew that her current existence was a form of self-imposed limbo, and everything she did now would lead to an eventual resolution. Perhaps then she could lay her nightmares to rest, and true grieving could begin.

There was no news that drew her attention today. The usual political infighting, celebrity inconseque‌ntialities, far-away conflicts. She looked for murders or unexplained deaths. She sought news on kidnappings and shootings, unidentified bodies found strangely mutilated in city or countryside. Anything that might lead to the Trail.

As usual, nothing.

But something felt different today. Her nightmare clung on, and even though she had found nothing obvious on the net, perhaps today was the day to check again.

Rose gulped down the rest of her coffee in one and then opened a new browsing window.

She didn’t like doing this too often. She accessed the net via a proxy server in London, had a rolling defence protocol that would lock her out at the first sign of being tracked, used no identifying markers or traceable elements, yet she knew that they had far more expertise at their disposal than her. Rose liked to amuse herself by thinking about some of the online contacts she’d made and how much stuff she had access to that would give the heads of the CIA and MI5 panic attacks. But accessing the Trail’s own network was like dipping her toe into a river of alligators. It was only so long before she was noticed and they came for her.

She would only allow that to happen on her own terms.

She slipped by several firewalls and surfed communications she could not yet decipher. It was pretty standard traffic that she’d seen before, so she withdrew and re-entered under another address, creating an avatar that would easily be mistaken as a particularly intrusive trollbot, if anyone noticed it at all. Most trollbots’ aims were to spread viruses or collect information. Hers was simply to observe. She’d given it a variety of source links which flickered and rolled every three seconds – a sex-drug site; a Nigerian billionaire with money to get out of the country; a guaranteed tip to increase cock size. She hoped that, draped in the paraphernalia of a million other trolls, hers was all but invisible.

While her laptop worked, she made more coffee. It was her one vice, and had been for three years.

For almost a year after escaping the Trail and finding Adam and her children murdered, she’d drowned herself deep in London’s underworld. Her first thought had been to go to the police, but even then the shadow of the Trail remained over her, and the promises of harm they had levelled against her extended family and friends had felt even more real. They had proven themselves sickeningly brutal.

Then came the revelation that she was wanted for her family’s slaying. In a way, that was the worst abuse of all – the way they had framed her, made a mockery of her love and grief. A madness had taken her. A blazing fury and a smothering grief. It was incomprehensible how quickly she had changed from a family woman with a good job and a nice house to
…
someone else. And so she had cut her hair, dyed what was left, and submerged herself in the chaos of the capital. It was ironic that she went to so much effort disguising herself when in truth she was already lost.

Those shadowy places were more about the people than the locations – lost, dispossessed, cast adrift by society, or fallen by the wayside of their own volition. No one had seemed interested in her, and she had taken notice of no one. Occasionally she worried about being recognised, though in truth grief had changed her more than a haircut and new clothes ever could. She was a hollow person, and her body projected that physically. Sunken cheeks, stick-like limbs, deep eyes like pools of dark ink.

London had been an ideal place to hide, and to drink. Every day, every night, alcohol absorbed and obsessed her, becoming her whole world. When the memories threatened to surface she drank some more to smother them, and if she ever approached sobriety, another bottle of cheap vodka swept her away again. Abandoned buildings and squats had provided places for her to sleep, and if in a drunken haze she lost her way, there were always the shadowy spaces beneath bridges or in rubbish-strewn alleyways. She was one woman in a city whose lifeblood was anonymity, and time and place lost all meaning. The moment of change when she’d found her family was a deep, wide chasm in her life. Sometimes she stood on the edge and tried to look back, but it was too far to see clearly. So she remained on the other side, wallowing in the guilt of survival and letting alcohol smother her across this new, barren land.

Seeing a member of the Trail had changed everything.

Rose had stumbled into the woman outside the Apollo Theatre one rainy, cold November evening. She’d been wandering through Soho searching for one of her familiar sleeping places, a deserted, boarded-up pub accessed through a broken back window. Many of the dispossessed knew that place. It stank of piss and booze, echoed with drug-fuelled mumblings and occasional cries of wretchedness, pleasure or pain. But that night Rose’s befuddled sense of direction had failed her, and she’d emerged into the bright lights and bustle of Shaftesbury Avenue.

The lights had been blinding. Disorientated, she’d turned to make her way back into the shadows. People had parted to let her by, protecting themselves with space and muttered words of distaste. All but this woman. Rose had walked right into her, and many times since she’d wondered whether it had been orchestrated. Had the woman recognised her in that instant and engineered their collision? Had she been looking for her?

The last time Rose had seen her, she’d been standing beside a Range Rover somewhere in London’s Docklands smiling broadly as a man told Rose to run.

As the heat of recognition grew quickly in Rose’s mind, she saw that it had already settled in the woman’s eyes.
Grin
, Rose thought, because that’s how she had thought of the woman since that first meeting, in nightmares and booze-fuelled fantasies of revenge.
Grin, you’re Grin, and I’ll wipe that name from your face
.

Grin was smartly dressed, short and thin, strong. Her auburn hair was cut in an attractive bob, her skin smooth and relatively unlined even though she was perhaps fifty years old. She looked
nice
, like anyone’s mother. But Rose knew her secret.

Grin had smiled and reached slowly, casually into her raincoat pocket.

Rose still had no idea how she had reacted so quickly. Her hand snapped out, fingers closing around the object in Grin’s hand, snatching, and then she ran. Losing herself in those rainswept streets had been easy, and the shouts and pursuit she’d expected never came.

The phone had worked for seven minutes before its connection was cancelled. In that time, she had hidden away and managed to scratch two numbers into her arm with a shard of broken glass.

Then she had ditched the phone in a trash-filled alley and fled. She’d somehow gathered herself, suffering a terrible couple of days of relative sobriety. She’d retrieved the necessary documentation and money she’d once hidden, at the time barely believing she would ever use it again. Italy was somewhere Adam had always wanted to visit with their kids, and it had seemed far enough away from London, remote enough, to lose herself once again.

That chance meeting in a city of millions had allowed the dormant seed of an idea to sprout. Revenge. And later, in the Italian heat, alcohol hiding her once more, she’d traced and retraced those healing scars on her forearm. Numbers that might lead to something else, like a code to discovery.

But even in Italy she had not been able to drag herself from the depths. She’d tried again and again, spending a day sobering up, but quickly following those brief moments of sick reality with long periods of even heavier drinking and deeper oblivion. She so wanted to find some way back. She dreamed of Grin’s face opening beneath her pounding fists, a heavy rock, a wielded knife. But even approaching reality allowed the true, awful memories to flood back in.

She had been unable to find the strength to handle that. Not until Holt.

The laptop chimed.

Rose poured a new mug of strong coffee and sat down at the small table. Lifting the mug to her lips, she paused and stared down at the screen.

One of the inboxes she monitored had received a new email. It was only the fifth time in three years that such a mail had been sent and received. It was still marked in bold. Unread.

‘They’ve chosen another one.’ She sat back for a moment, stunned, chilled even through the rush of warm coffee. She knew that if she opened this email and read it, and they discovered it had been seen and read, everything might fall apart. The Trail would abandon their systems and networks and build again from the ground up, and she would lose everything she’d been working on, and hoping for, since bringing herself back to the world.

But the content of this email
was
everything. She could open it, screen-grab it, and mark it as unread again in a matter of moments.

She did not hesitate for a second before risking it all.

Don’t call the police, or your wife and children will be executed.

Chris stood motionless for a while, leaning against the sink and staring across the kitchen at the pinboard beside the fridge. There were photos on there, tickets for a show they were going to see in a few weeks, a couple of forms to fill out for a trip Gemma was going on with Scouts. Some discount coupons for the local cinema. A few of Terri’s hair bobbles tied together.

Had the man really said that?

Chris closed his eyes and the world swam. He remembered the words coming from the man’s mouth – how they’d sounded, the shape of his lips, the dreadful meaning – yet he still doubted.

He took in a few deep breaths and smelled the coffee.
His
coffee, that the intruder had brewed.

He took the phone from his pocket and placed it on the worktop. As he stared at it, it rang.

Grabbing the phone, dropping it, watching it hit the floor and break, case going one way and phone the other, Chris let out a hopeless cry. He went to his knees and picked it up – still ringing, not broken – and stroked the screen to unlock.

That voice again, cool and calm and inviting no discussion. ‘Fifty minutes. Be ready.’ Chris stood again, holding the phone in both hands.
Fifty minutes. Be ready
. Fifty minutes until what?

The back door was closed now, but he could still see the bloody smear drying on the jamb.

Everything but his family suddenly felt so distant. His work, their friends, his hobbies, all so far away from what was happening here and now. This was so surreal that his mind had picked him up and shifted him back a pace, making acceptance of the unbelievable situation easier. He’d felt something like this before. When his father had died three years earlier, there had been none of the disbelief and hysteria he’d been prepared for all his life. A distance had fallen around him, allowing him to cope with the situation and only starting to lift as grief eroded it away. It was a defence mechanism of sorts – perhaps purely natural, or maybe engineered by modern society and family needs – and for a while he’d felt an incredible guilt. But then his mother had told him that everyone deals with bereavement and grief in a very different way, and unnecessary guilt had no place in his heart. He’d loved her more than ever for that. He still did.

He dreaded the idea of her having to grieve again.

Chris looked down at his phone.
Don’t call the police or your wife and children will be executed
. The words hung in the air around him as if taking on substance. Everywhere he looked he heard them. He stared at the screen display, thinking, trying to work through the situation. Clicking on the timer, he set it at forty-eight minutes and pressed
start
.

Several minutes had passed since the man left. Standing in the kitchen, uncertain, he edged towards the back door, lifting the wooden blind aside to look out into the back garden. Maybe he should follow. Or call the police. That was his natural instinct,
anyone’s
first instinct when something terrible like this happened. And how would they know? He should call them, tell them about the intruder and his missing family, and by the time they arrived
…

He looked at the time on his phone. Forty-four minutes and counting.

Something moved in the garden. Chris squinted and looked again, scanning left to right across the well-maintained lawn, colourful borders, and the kids’ stuff scattered here and there. Megs loved to play in the inflatable pool when it was warm enough. She said she wanted to swim the Atlantic when she was older.

‘Shit,’ he whispered, starting to shake. Fear gripped him. Terror at what was happening to his family, and confusion about why.

Movement again, and this time he saw the cigarette smoke rising from beyond the garden’s rear hedge before it dispersed to the breeze. There was a narrow, private path behind there serving the several houses that shared this side of their street, and no reason at all for anyone to be standing there.

Placing his hand on the door handle he pushed it down, slowly, and opened the door.

A pale shape appeared behind the garden gate. Chris couldn’t see much from this far away, and the gaps between the gate’s slatted wood were only an inch across. But the smoking person was watching him.

He slammed the door again and retreated into the kitchen. ‘Fuck, fuck, this isn’t happening,’ he muttered, pacing back and forth. He was chilled from the sweaty running clothes he still wore. He should change, get warm, get ready for
…

…
for the countdown to zero? Was he really just going to wait here like the intruder had told him?

Bollocks to that.

He held the menu button on his phone and said, ‘Call Nick.’ The phone called his elder brother, ring tone buzzing again, again, until passing on to answer phone. Chris hung up, pressed again and said, ‘Call Angie.’ She had five kids, an irregular boyfriend, and debt up to her ears, but his youngest sister was always a rock amongst stormy seas. It rang three times before she answered.

‘Chris.’

‘Angie, it’s me, something’s happened, something awful, and I need you to—’

‘I can’t talk right now.’

‘What? Something’s happened to Terri and the kids and you have to do something for me, but quietly, carefully. I need you to call the police.’

Silence. He could hear Angie breathing.

‘Angie?’

‘I can’t talk right now.’ Her voice broke, just slightly. Then there was the sound of fumbling before the call was disconnected.

Chris stared at the phone again, trying to make sense of his sister’s words. Angie having a bad day? She had a lot of them, but she’d never been like that to him, ever. He’d pulled himself out of the kind of lives his siblings lived, made a career for himself, made money. But they were still all the same really. They still loved each other. ‘Angie,’ he said, and the image came to him of her sitting alone in her kitchen, staring at the phone and shaking, while a stranger stood beside her own back door.

Chris snorted, shook his head. Pressed the button again. ‘Call Jake.’ He’d know what to do. Chris’s best friend was a gruff bloke and could be a bit of a dick sometimes – his delightful ex-wife could attest to that – but he valued their friendship, and they were always there for each other. It was picked up after two rings.

‘Jake, thank God. You’ve got to help me, mate, I’m in some scary deep shit here.’

‘Get the fuck out of my life,’ Jake said, and then he hung up.

Chris blinked at his phone. He tried to retain Jake’s tone, the sound of his voice, but his words scorched away any ability to recall. Had he really just heard that from his best friend?

‘This is
…
’ Chris started, and he laughed. Once, loud, an unbelieving outburst. But there was nothing at all to laugh at here. The bloody dab on the door was testament to that. ‘What do I do?’ Chris whispered. ‘Just what?’

Filling the kettle, turning it on, he was moving on auto-pilot as he tried to think things through. He glanced at his phone timer again. Less than thirty minutes to go.

He clicked on the Facebook app and entered his password.
Account temporarily suspended
.

‘What?’ he whispered. ‘You’re kidding.’

He exited Facebook and opened his email account. It usually went straight to his inbox, but instead it came up with his password entry. His heart fluttered. Didn’t matter, that happened sometimes, once every few weeks he had to enter it again. Security measures, he supposed.

But even as he tapped in his password he felt the weight of dread.

Password not recognised. Please enter again. Be aware that password is case sensitive
.

He entered it again, carefully, but already knowing what would happen.

Forgotten password?

How the fuck? How could they have done this? Maybe it was him, typing with clumsy, scared fingers
…

…
But no. It wasn’t him at all.

The kettle boiled and Chris poured water into a mug with one hand. The other hovered over the phone, thumb stroking the ‘phone’ symbol, finger hovering over the 9.

It’s a joke. A prank. A scam, scumbags scaring me to try and get some cash out of me. Or a reality TV show. Or …
Anything but what it seemed. It had to be. Because things like this didn’t happen in real life.

He tapped 9
…
9
…

The piercing electronic whistle was almost unbearable, screeching through the house from his phone, the small flatscreen TV on the kitchen worktop, and whining in from the living room where the big plasma TV had burst into life. Chris juggled the phone and almost dropped it, face screwed up against the sudden, unexpected sound. He pressed his right shoulder and left hand to his ears, still clasping the phone in his right hand and looking at the screen. Ready to hit the last 9 that would move events on apace and, perhaps, reveal more of what was really going on.

The keypad on his phone’s screen had been replaced by something else. Winded, stunned, he barely even noticed that the deafening sound had ceased.

He thought it was a photo, but then he saw Megs nuzzle her head against Terri’s leg, and Gemma stretched her tied legs and shuffled to change position.

‘Oh no
…
’ he breathed. His throat was dry, voice hardly registering.

Terri was sitting on a bench in what looked to be the inside of a dirty van. The walls were rough and spotted with rust patches. A naked light flickered somewhere out of sight. His wife was tied to the bench with ropes around her legs and waist. She was blindfolded, and wearing loose jogging bottoms and a tee shirt. Megs was kneeling beside her, also blindfolded, sobbing softly. Gemma was tied up on the floor on Terri’s other side.

There was a dark stain across the right shoulder of Gemma’s school shirt. It seemed to match the patches on the walls, as if the truck also bled.

‘No,’ Chris said again, louder. ‘Terri. Terri! Girls?’ But they couldn’t hear.

The image changed quickly, turning as whoever held the camera or phone on the other end switched it around to face themselves. It was a woman. Fiftyish, attractive, but with cold eyes. She smiled broadly, but only with her mouth.

She held up a gun.

‘One 9 away from this,’ she said, waving it back and forth and pointing it out of sight at his blindfolded family. ‘Last chance. Next time we won’t warn you again.’

‘What do you want?’ Chris shouted. ‘Just tell me, I’ll do anything, let them go and—’

‘You’re probably ranting and raving a bit right now,’ the woman continued. She had a nice voice, calming, controlled. She could have been a school teacher. ‘I can’t hear you. But I know you can hear me. So calm down.’ She looked aside at her watch. ‘Twenty-three minutes. Be ready.’ She smiled again, then the picture flickered off. His phone went dead.

‘Ready for what?’ Chris shouted. He raised his hand to hurl the phone at the wall, but held back at the last instant. ‘For what?’ He looked around for cameras, microphones, evidence of things in his home being tampered with. His home. They’d come in here, invaded his space, taken away his family
…

He couldn’t shake the image of his girls tied up like that. Megs crying and nestling against her mum. Gemma, bloodied, struggling and stretching, probably doing her best to release herself from her bindings. And Terri, sitting there looking far calmer than she must feel. At that moment he would have given absolutely anything to have them back safe and sound. His safety, his sanity, his life, without a moment’s hesitation he’d have handed them all over.

‘I don’t have much money,’ he said. ‘Twenty grand saved, a bit more, but I can’t just get it. It’ll take five working days. Is that what you want? It must be. Money.’ He frowned, thinking that through and really not understanding it at all. They lived in a nice house, but nothing special. Two cars, both over three years old. His architect’s firm was reasonably successful, but he was the sole employee, turnover around seventy grand each year. Nice, but nothing spectacular. Nothing that would attract the attention of the sort of people who could do this.

Take his family, threaten his siblings and friends. Carry guns. Use his own tech against him.

He put his phone screen-down on the kitchen worktop and paced the kitchen again. He was sweating again now, chilled from his long run. He’d always had something of a vivid imagination, and now and then he’d written ideas down with the intention of one day writing a book. Terri had been encouraging, but it had never gone much beyond a few pages of notes and several tentative first chapters. Once, out on a long run, he’d imagined the end of the world. Running the barely used public footpaths across the top of a local range of hills, he’d lost himself for a few miles daydreaming about what would happen if he got home from the run and everything had changed. His family, friends, neighbours, associates, all gone. Turn on the TV
…
white noise. Nothing on the radio. Leave home and everything is normal, return two hours later and find he’s the only man left alive.

Now, that had happened. His whole world had changed, and unless he did precisely as instructed, they would end it. He didn’t know what they wanted. But in less than twenty minutes he would find out.

Chris couldn’t keep still. He walked back and forth, looking down at his phone every few seconds and waiting for it to make a noise. If the Black Sabbath song ‘Paranoid’
rang out it would be Jake calling him back to offer help. A whistle would be an email. A double-ping would be a text, perhaps from one of his siblings if they had a chance to secretly get in touch, tell him they were with him, they were doing their best. He picked it up and turned it over, checking the screen anyway in case he hadn’t heard. But there were no messages, emails, or missed calls.

He didn’t want to call his elderly mother. Not after what Angie had said, and Jake. He didn’t want to know.

Landline
, he thought.
I could contact the police that way
. But that would be stupid. Whatever their reasons for doing this, they’d planned it in detail. They’d have the landline covered. Bugged, perhaps, if what he saw in movies was true. It was far too risky.