The Hunt (3 page)

He paused by the chopping board and leaned back against the kitchen units. Eighteen minutes.

He made himself a drink. Tea, lots of sugar. As a teenager he’d always laughed at his parents whenever their first reaction to a crisis was to make tea, but as he’d grown older he’d come to recognise its calming properties. It wasn’t anything chemical, he thought, nor was it the warmth. It was distraction. Waiting for the water to boil, stirring the tea bag, adding the milk, watching the tea darken, all these took time. But he couldn’t distract himself from this.

He glanced up and saw the knife block. Six knives, all of them sharp. Terri had spent over a hundred quid on them, and he’d expressed his doubt that they were worth the money. But they were good knives that had kept their keenness over time.

Without pausing to scare himself out of it, he grabbed a medium-sized knife and slipped it into the waist of his running trousers, dropping his sweaty shirt over the handle with one hand as he picked up his mug with the other.

He turned and breathed across the hot tea, steam filming his eyes and warming his skin. The knife was cold against his hip.
And just what the fuck am I going to do with that?
he thought, trying to imagine himself plunging it into someone’s stomach. He almost puked.

‘I’m ready,’ he said. ‘No need to hang about.’ The phone said fourteen minutes.

Slowly, he sipped at the hot tea and managed to convince himself that everything would be fine. If they’d planned to harm him or his family they’d have done so by now. They wanted something of him, though he couldn’t imagine what. He’d made no enemies in life that he could think of. He’d always been fair in business. He and Terri led a boringly normal life in many ways – loyal to each other, adoring of their children. He vented any need for excitement through his running, triathlons, mountain racing.
There are worse mid-life crises
, Terri said to him sometimes when he signed up for another extreme race.

Chris closed his eyes and breathed in the tea fumes, but found nothing approaching calmness. He felt like crying at the memory of seeing his family like that, taken somewhere unknown, bound and gagged. It had been a woman guarding them, but he couldn’t help imagining how vulnerable they were to the men involved in this, too. Terri in what she called her comfy clothing, unconsciously attractive. Gemma, awkward and pretty, just developing into womanhood. Little Megs.

He opened his eyes, furious, and swigged at his tea. On the fridge door facing him, held on by magnets, were several drawings by Megs, a few money-off coupons for their local supermarket, and a twenty-pound note. Gemma had been due to go to the cinema with her friends that evening.

He heard a knock from somewhere beyond the kitchen door.

Holding his breath, Chris put the mug down slowly, mouth slightly open, listening hard. The heating was off now, though the boiler was still warming the water. But he hadn’t recognised the sound.

It came once more, definitely an impact of some sort. His phone showed nothing so he turned it face-down again. Taking the knife from his belt and holding it down by his side, he walked through into the corridor beyond the kitchen door. Ahead of him the front door was still closed, and there was no sign of movement elsewhere.

Studio
, he thought. To his right a shorter corridor led beneath the staircase to another door, beyond which their converted garage had become his business studio. It was a good size, with computer station, an old-fashioned drawing board, walls lined with pictures displaying his designs, and an informal area for clients with leather sofa and coffee machine. Nothing extravagant, but comfortable. And now there was someone there.

He thought about edging through the door, moving cautiously, carefully. But that’s what they expected of him.

And he was angry.

Gripping the knife hard by his side he surged forward, shoved the door open and stepped quickly into the studio.

Something tripped him, he fell, one hand out to break his fall, the other twisted painfully as the knife was stripped from his grasp. He struck the timber flooring and tried to roll. A weight bore down on him, trapping him on his side with one arm crushed beneath his body, the other pressed between him and the person attacking him.

Chris kicked and writhed. A hand clamped down hard across his mouth. Another held his own knife against his throat.

He strained his neck and looked up into the woman’s face. She looked hard, unflustered, and totally in control.

‘I’m here to help,’ she whispered. ‘If you want to live past the next twenty-four hours and see your family again, do everything I say.’ She sat up and slowly took her hand from his mouth.

‘Who
…
?’ he asked.

‘I’m the one that got away. My name’s Rose.’

She crept to the door into his studio and crouched beside it, peering out beneath the stairwell and into the hallway. Chris respected poise, economy of motion, litheness, but there was something else about the way this woman moved that disturbed him. Something inhuman. She moved like an animal, and like an animal she seemed ready to strike. She held the knife she’d taken from him as an extension of her arm, aimed forward, ready to slice and stab. Her movements were soundless, and he searched for her shadow. He was happy to find it.

‘What are you going to
…
?’ he began, and she was back to him between blinks, hand pressed against his mouth once again, eyes wide, head shaking once. She didn’t need to speak. The threat was palpable, radiating from her in powerful waves, even though she made no hint that she wished to hurt him.

She went to the door again and crept out, until she could look both ways along the hallway – left to the kitchen, right towards the front door. Then she came back and crouched in the doorway. She wore black jeans, a casual jacket with bulging pockets, walking boots. Her dark hair was tied in a ponytail, businesslike, impossible to tell its length. She might have been attractive, once.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘I told you. Rose.’

‘But what
…
?’

‘Shut up.’ She held up one hand, head cocked, not looking at him. ‘There’s no time now.’

Chris glanced at his phone. The timer said nine minutes.

‘Just listen,’ she said. ‘I’m here to help. I only found out they were going for you yesterday morning. But it was long enough to plan and prepare. They’ll be coming in to get you soon, and then we’ll be leaving. You understand?’

‘No,’ Chris said. ‘My wife. My girls.’

‘We’ll get to them.’ She tried to smile. It was a sickly expression.

‘Where are they?’ he asked.

‘Not sure.’ An economy of words, and they explained nothing.

‘Why are they doing this?’

‘You’re an easy target.’

He was shivering again. His clothing was soaked with sweat, his body now trying to cool down. ‘I need to go to the police.’

‘No!’ she said, looking back at him again. ‘You can’t even
try
to do that, or they’ll just kill your family and move on.’

‘You’re not one of them?’

She glared at him. ‘Are you stupid?’

‘No, not stupid. I’m normal. I’m just a normal person doing normal things, and now my family are—’

The front door opened. Chris heard the familiar sound of the handle depressing, the catch sliding, and then the sigh as the door’s draught-proofing seal broke. It was so recognisable that Chris muttered, ‘Terri?’ before the door slammed and heavy footsteps marched along the tiled hallway.

‘We’re early!’ a voice called. Chris recognised it as belonging to the man from earlier, the same man who’d threatened to have his wife and children executed if he called the police. ‘Sorry for the delay. Traffic’s terrible.’ The man chuckled to himself, completely confident and in command.

Chris frowned at Rose and raised his hands, but she turned her back on him and flowed forwards, through the studio door, beneath the staircase and towards the hallway.
But if you go that way you’ll end up
— Chris thought, and then every thought was sliced off by what happened next.

‘So, where are you hiding?’ the man asked.

Chris saw him appear past Rose, framed through the doorway beneath the staircase. Rose stood from her crouch. The man’s eyes went wide and he reacted immediately, left arm coming up in a defensive gesture while his right hand delved into his jacket. But he had been too confident of Chris’s confusion and fear, too sure of himself.

The sound the knife made when it stuck in his neck was horrible. He seemed to growl, and blood bubbled at his throat, splashing the air and pattering down on the hall tiles. He took his hand from within his jacket and Rose knocked something aside—

—
a gun, has he really got a gun?
—

—sending it clattering out of sight.

Rose grabbed the man’s polo shirt collar with her left hand and held him steady as she tugged with her right hand, once, twice, hefty jerks of her arm and shoulder pulling the knife out through his throat. His eyes remained wide, tongue squirming in his mouth as he started to slump.

Rose staggered backwards into Chris’s studio, dragging the dying man with her. His blood was flowing. Not just dripping, but gushing from the dreadful wound, splashing on the floor and sending Rose slipping, shoving the man aside as she fell onto her back. Even as she hit the floor she hardly made a noise, but was up again in a second, kneeling on the man’s back and grabbing him by the hair, pulling, his head moving back much too far as the wound gaped and he bled out.

Chris closed his eyes, but the sight could not be unseen.

‘Don’t faint,’ she said.

The man was still making wet, coughing noises, feet scraping slowly at the floor as he tried to propel himself out of his killer’s grasp.

Chris turned away and stared at his drawing desk. There were plans of a new house sitting there right now, his client’s list of suggested amendments pinned above it. The client was a sixty-year-old man, someone who’d seen the world and made good money, and who now was settling down for retirement with his gorgeous forty-something wife. A good man. Great stories.
I wonder if he’s ever seen anything like this
, Chris thought, and then he realised that Rose was hissing at him.

‘
Now
, for fuck’s sake! We don’t have long!’

‘What?’ He turned, propping himself on his desk so that he didn’t slump to the floor. There was so much blood. Could there really be so much inside a human body? He’d bought that rug with Terri on holiday in Egypt, and now it was ruined.

‘I said go through there.’ She nodded through the door at the hallway, where blood was spattered on the floor and sprayed in one artful arc across the apple-white wall. ‘Stand facing the front door. When they come in, just wait there and let them come to you.’

‘No,’ Chris said, shaking his head. ‘I can’t just stand there and let them attack me.’

‘They’re not going to attack you! They want to take you. Do as I say or I’m out of here now, and I’ll leave you with this.’ She stood and kicked the corpse’s head at her feet. It moved too loosely on the neck, and Chris had a crazy, shocking image of it rolling across the floor, grinning up at him as the mouth gasped for air.

‘Okay,’ he said. He didn’t know who she was, why she’d arrived, how she’d even got in without them seeing. But right then, he didn’t want her to go. Not because he thought she could protect him, but because she had answers. She knew what was going on. ‘But my family
…
’ He nodded down at the body.

‘What’s started can’t be stopped,’ she said. She seemed excited, pumped, displaying emotion for the first time. ‘No going back now, Chris.’

‘You know my name.’

She rolled her eyes and shoved him towards the door into the hall. But not too hard. It would have been easy to slip on so much blood.

He could smell it as he walked, a rich, warm odour. His feet splashed in it. Pausing at the door, he thought about removing his running shoes to prevent walking blood through the house. But he giggled instead, an hysterical outburst that burned at his eyes and filled his throat. He reached for the door frame, and even before Rose whispered from behind him he was composing himself, taking deep breaths through his mouth.

‘Hurry!’ She was closer than he thought, following him silently. He could almost feel her breath on the back of his neck.
She can help me
, he thought, but at the same time he realised that helping was not part of her agenda. She was here for something else.

Chris stepped into the hallway and turned to look along at the front door, and there were already shadows moving beyond the frosted glass.

‘One step back,’ Rose said. ‘And don’t look at me. I’m not here. I’m a shadow. Got it?’

He nodded, mouth suddenly too dry to speak.

‘If you give me away, we’re both dead. And then your family—’

‘I get it!’ he said. From the corner of his eye he saw Rose relax beneath the staircase, almost melting into the shadows there. She was motionless and silent.
She’s not there
, he thought, taking in deep breaths once again.
The dead guy’s not there. I’m here on my own, just waiting
.

For what, he was about to find out.

The front door opened. A man entered, and Chris recognised him from the car he’d seen parked along the street. He was tall, heavily built, the sort of man Terri might call a ‘honey’ while smiling at Chris and squeezing his hand. His sweet wife, always reassuring him that he was the one and only. He carried an Adidas kit bag slung over one shoulder.

A woman crowded in behind him. Black, much shorter, thin, wearing heavy-framed glasses and a casual sports jacket that might have cost a week’s income from Chris’s company, she was laughing as if at a joke. They seemed so casual with what they were doing. So confident.

They both saw Chris standing there and barely paid him any attention. Honey shrugged the bag from his shoulder. Glasses shut the door behind her, still chuckling and shaking her head. The joke must have been really funny.

‘Where’s Ed?’ Honey asked. When he looked at Chris his smile remained, but his voice was ice-cold, his manner suddenly threatening. He could break Chris across one knee while still smoothing his hair with his other hand.

But Rose? Chris wasn’t sure about her.

‘Making coffee,’ Chris said, pleased at his answer. Honey nodded, and Glasses rolled her eyes. It seemed Chris wasn’t the only one with a caffeine habit.

Honey dropped the bag and kicked it along the hall. ‘Right, there’s stuff in there you need to
…
’ His voice trailed off. He’d watched the bag sliding, looked beyond it, and seen the dark spatters of blood speckling the tiles by Chris’s feet.

The sudden silence was heavy and loaded, and behind him Glasses was already tugging something bulky from her jacket.

‘He says do you want sugar?’ Chris said, and Honey looked up at him, frowning.

‘Huh?’

Rose flowed from the shadows beneath the stairs, shouldering Chris against the wall and throwing the bloodied knife underarm. It struck Honey in the chest. He grunted, swiping at the knife with his right hand. The blade dropped and clattered to the floor, and a bloom of blood spread across his shirt.

‘You,’ Honey said. Behind him, Glasses raised the object she’d pulled from her jacket.

Rose shot her once in the face. The glass behind her shattered and she fell against the door, her spectacles sliding down her nose and resting on the ruin of her right cheek.

The gunshot was incredibly loud and made the second shot sound much more muffled. Honey staggered back a step, stood on Glasses’ hand where she was sprawled against the closed door, and then moved forward in a sudden lurch. There was a hole in his chest, another spot of blood rapidly growing close to where the knife had wounded him.

‘You!’ He shouted this time, and Chris barely heard. His hearing had been blasted away by the gunshots, and now a heavy, high whine seemed to ricochet inside his head.

Rose crouched and fired again, raising the gun up at a forty-five-degree angle and then falling to one side as Honey slouched on top of her. His outstretched hand clawed down Chris’s chest where he was pressed to the wall.

Chris saw the exit wounds on the man’s back, ragged tears in his jacket. He was dead when he hit the floor.

Rose pulled her leg from beneath the body and stood, pointing the gun back and forth between Glasses and Honey.

Chris was slowly shaking his head. It felt heavy, and when Rose spoke to him it was like hearing a voice underwater.
Daddy smells of poo
, Megs had said to him last time they went swimming, both of them dropping beneath the surface at the deep end and seeing if they could understand each other.

‘
…
out of here now!’ Rose said from a distance. She stood on the dead man like he wasn’t a human being at all – and shoved Chris back against the wall. ‘Really. Now! We have minutes, so we’ve got to go!’

‘You killed them,’ Chris said. His voice was incredibly loud inside his own head, as if he was the only real thing here. Perhaps that was it. Rose and the corpses were only nightmares.

She grabbed the Adidas bag at Chris’s feet and pushed it against his chest, then knelt and started going through the dead man’s pockets.

Chris watched. He couldn’t think of anything else to do. She was efficient and quick, and in moments she had a set of car keys and a phone in her left hand. In her right, she still carried her gun.

‘Will there be more of them?’ he asked, looking at the damaged, blood-spattered front door.

‘Plenty,’ she said. And then she grinned with delight. ‘I’ve only just begun.’