Текст книги "Stay Alive"

Автор книги: Simon Kernick

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

Thirty-eight

‘I CAN’T BELIEVE he killed my dogs,’ said MacLean, staring down at the two dead Dobermans at his feet, his pudgy face dark with rage. ‘I spent months training them. What a fucking waste.’

‘Who the hell was he, though?’ said Keogh, thinking that right now dead dogs were the least of his problems. ‘He just came out of nowhere.’

MacLean leaned down and inspected one of the dogs with a gloved hand. ‘He shot this one in the neck, and he had a silencer on his gun.’

‘He must have used Mehdi’s gun, which is why I can’t get hold of Mehdi. Do you think he’s police?’

‘No way. If the police were involved, there wouldn’t just be one man, and he’d have shouted a warning before pulling the trigger. There are all kinds of rules about that sort of thing. You of all people should know that.’

Keogh ignored the jibe. ‘Did you get a look at him?’

MacLean shook his head. ‘He was too far away, and he didn’t fire back when I was chasing him down the path.’

‘Maybe he’s trying to conserve his bullets.’

‘Or maybe he’s run out of them.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ said Keogh, looking about him. The forest was dark and silent, the only sound the wind rustling through the leaves.

‘We need to get hold of Sayenko,’ growled MacLean. ‘Why’d you send him after the wee bairn? It’s just wasting time, and I’m telling you we don’t have an awful lot of that left. With all the shooting, sooner or later someone’s going to dial 999, and then we’re going to be caught out here. And I’m not going to have that. Understand?’

‘All right, all right,’ said Keogh, trying to stay calm. ‘I thought Sayenko could grab the girl as a hostage, but I wasn’t banking on some unknown gunman shooting at us.’ For the first time he seriously considered abandoning the op, getting in his car, and driving as far away from here as possible. He had money stashed away. He could head to Europe or Asia and lie low for a while. But he dismissed the thought almost immediately. The boss would track him down and exact revenge. ‘We can still salvage this,’ he said. ‘We’ll get hold of Sayenko, then we’ll go after the other two. Where do you reckon they’re going to head for now?’

‘They’ll go the same route they were always going to go. Out of the woods up to the road, then I reckon they’ll cross country, go over the hills, and double back through the valley. I doubt if they’ll try going to Tayleigh by road but, if they do, we’ve got Ma watching the road now, so we’ll know about it.’

‘So we’re going to have to chase them across country? How exposed is it out there? Will we be able to locate them easily enough?’ Keogh didn’t like the hint of desperation he recognized in his own voice.

MacLean put down his shotgun and took the Ordnance Survey map out from inside his jacket. ‘Shine a light over here, can you?’

The light in Keogh’s torch had been shot out by the mystery gunman, but he still had a mini-Maglite attached to his key ring and he shone it onto the map.

‘See, this is the path they’ll take,’ said MacLean, running a gloved finger through an area of white on the map lined with elevation contours that looked uninhabited. ‘There’s a farm here, about a mile and a half from the road, which they’ll pass on that route, and if I were them, when I got there I’d stop and ask for help.’

‘How long will it take for them to get there from here?’

‘At least an hour, even if they’re going fast.’

Keogh smiled for the first time in a while. ‘That should give us plenty of time.’ He took out the satellite phone and dialled the number of the handset he’d given to Sayenko, wondering if he’d managed to get hold of the little girl.

If he had, then Keogh would have no choice but to tell him to kill her.

Thirty-nine

UNARMED AND ALONE, Scope moved as swiftly as he could through the trees. He didn’t know this area of the forest very well, but he’d been on a run nearby a couple of months earlier, and remembered the chalet-style holiday cottage, close to where he’d heard all the shooting a few minutes earlier, and rescued Jess from being attacked by the dog.

He doubled back on himself, approaching the cottage from the north in a wide circle designed to keep him well out of the sights of the gunmen, in case they were continuing to look for him. He passed east of the cottage, giving it a wide berth, before trying to pick up the trail of Jess’s sister, Casey. But the problem was, he wasn’t a tracker. He’d found Jess earlier because he’d followed an established path and the protracted gunfire had pinpointed her exact location. But there was no gunfire or established path here, and he didn’t dare call out to her. Casey didn’t know him and, after all that had happened to her today, there was no way she’d respond to his calls. Also, Jess had said that one of the gunmen had gone after her, and was probably still in the vicinity. It was also possible that the other two weren’t far away either and, now that he’d run out of bullets, Scope didn’t want to attract any undue attention.

He stopped for a moment to get his breath back. He must have run at least four miles since he’d left the river, on top of a fast ten-mile kayak, and a fight that had almost cost him his life, and he was exhausted. He also had to make a decision about which way to go. The track that led from the cottage up to the B-road that snaked its way into Tayleigh was about two hundred yards to his right, and from the distance he’d travelled up the hill from the cottage, he guessed he was roughly level with the spot where Jess had abandoned the car she’d been in. That meant he was probably also about level with the place where Casey had entered the forest on this side of the road. She’d have been running for her life and panicking, so would probably have tried to get as far into the woods as possible, which meant running in an easterly direction. That, then, was the direction in which he’d head.

As his breathing slowed, he turned and was just about to start running when he heard it.

The sound of a phone ringing.

Stopping dead, he looked in the direction it was coming from and saw and heard movement coming from deeper in the woods. A second later, a tall, shadowy figure came into view no more than thirty yards away, and Scope could just make out the figure of a child walking closely alongside him. The man was pointing a gun down towards her shoulder and, as the phone rang again, he fumbled for it in his pocket.

Casey shivered in fear. The gun was resting against her neck, and her back really hurt from where the horrible man had jumped on her. She wished she’d stayed where she’d been now, even if it had meant the man weeing on her, because now she’d been captured, and she didn’t know what was going to happen.

The horrible man’s phone was ringing and he fished it out of his jacket, grunting and cursing to himself in a foreign language she didn’t understand.

‘Yeah,’ he said in a growly voice.

Casey looked up at him. He wasn’t looking at her any more. He was busy listening to the voice on the other end of the phone, and his gun was no longer resting on her shoulder.

‘Sure, I’ve got her,’ he said. ‘What do you want done?’

She couldn’t quite hear what the man he was speaking to was saying, but she was sure she heard the word ‘kill’ and it sent a huge shiver up her spine. She knew then that if she stayed where she was, then she was going to die right here.

Without even thinking about it, Casey grabbed the end of the gun and pulled as hard as she could. The man was so busy talking he wasn’t paying attention, and to her amazement the gun came free from his hand.

He shouted out and went to grab it back, but she was too quick, throwing it away as far as she could before turning, ducking away from his clawing hands, and sprinting into the trees, all in the space of a couple of seconds.

Sayenko couldn’t believe the little brat had caught him out like that, or that he’d been so careless as to have let his finger drift away from the trigger. And Christ, she was fast, darting away from him into the trees.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ snapped Keogh, who’d heard his curses. ‘You’ve still got her, haven’t you?’

Sayenko ignored him as he ran over and grabbed the gun. Then, keeping the phone to his ear with his shoulder, he turned and took aim at the fleeing figure, using both hands to steady the gun. She was wearing a dark jacket and she’d already covered a decent amount of ground, but Sayenko was an excellent shot. Squinting a little, he looked down the barrel, moving it ever so slightly until the middle of her back was in his sights.

Then he fired a single shot, the suppressor masking most of the noise, and the brat fell.

‘Bang,’ he said down the phone, and turned away, fumbling in his pocket for another cigarette. ‘Now we’ve got one less witness to worry about.’

Scope saw it all happen from barely twenty yards away. The whole thing had taken a matter of seconds. As the tall, thin guy had been talking on the phone, he’d been creeping nearer, yard by yard, taking advantage of the fact that he was distracted. But then the girl had made a sudden break for it and the guy had shot her, just like that.

Scope had thought about charging the gunman when the guy had had his back to him, but he’d left it just a second too long. And now the little girl was dead and the gunman was saying down the phone that they – whoever they were – had one less witness to worry about. There was a triumphant tone in his voice that set Scope’s teeth on edge.

For a moment, he was too numb to move. It was hard to believe he’d just witnessed the murder of a child. The shock was physical in its intensity. It made his legs weak and his heart surge as his system filled with adrenalin. Then, as the gunman replaced the phone in his jacket and lit a cigarette, the anger came. It wasn’t the hot, passionate anger of someone who loses all sense of reason; it was far colder and harder than that. It was anger that cut through steel, anger that was utterly focused in its intensity. It was the anger of killers, and it was what Scope had felt when the twenty-year-old dealer who’d got his Mary Ann hooked on smack had been on his knees begging for his life. All humanity had left him then. He’d put five bullets in a guy barely out of his teens and, even as he’d left him lying there, bleeding out his last breaths, that cold anger had still pulsed through him.

Taking a deep breath, Scope began to creep closer to his quarry, conscious of the silence in the air.

The gunman took a deep drag on his cigarette and started walking in the direction of the track, the pistol dangling idly by his side.

Ten yards separated them, but for Scope it was at least five yards too far. The gunman was a good shot and cool under pressure. If he ran at him, he’d be cut down before he got there – there was no question of it. And if he moved any faster than he was going now he risked being heard, and already the gunman was increasing the distance between them.

Scope controlled the anger. He’d get this bastard, and he’d make him pay for killing that little girl if it was the last thing he ever did, but right now it was going to have to wait.

But then the gunman took another drag on the cigarette, and was suddenly hit by a coughing fit. He bent over double, trying to bring it under control and, as he did so, Scope took his chance and sprinted at his back, hoping he couldn’t be heard above the noise.

The gunman spat on the ground and, as he stood back up again, he must have heard Scope’s rapidly approaching footsteps, because he swung round fast, a surprised look on his face, and instinctively raised the gun.

Barely two yards away, Scope dived straight into him, knocking his gun to one side, and sending the two of them crashing to the ground. The gun went off with a loud pop and the gunman gasped as he landed on his back with Scope’s weight on top of him, and broke into a second coughing fit. Making full use of his advantage, Scope punched him twice in the face, grabbing his gun arm by the wrist at the same time and giving it a twist. The gun went off again as the gunman fought to hang onto it. Even in his current state, he was putting up surprisingly strong resistance, but then Scope sat up on top of him, and used his free hand to rain blows down on his face with every ounce of strength he could muster, driven on by the thought that the bastard had just murdered a child, and the adrenalin that seemed to course through every sinew and muscle of his body.

The gunman grunted as his nose broke and blood splattered his face, and his body seemed to go slack. His grip on the gun loosened and Scope paused just long enough to pluck it from his hand, then leapt to his feet, panting from the exertion of the violence. Below him the gunman rolled from side to side on the ground, seemingly dazed by Scope’s onslaught, his face already beginning to darken and swell.

Scope pointed the gun down at his chest. ‘Who are you?’ he hissed in the darkness. ‘And what do you want here? Tell me now or I’ll kill you.’

The gunman finished coughing, rolled to one side, and spat blood and phlegm into the dirt. ‘Fuck you,’ he grunted.

Scope stiffened, the cold anger he was feeling enveloping every other thought. ‘No,’ he said, pulling the trigger. ‘Fuck you.’ He shot him once in the belly, feeling too much pleasure at the spasm of pain that passed across the gunman’s features, then once in the chest, finally finishing him off with a third bullet just beneath his left eye.

Afterwards, he stood rigid for several seconds staring down at the man he’d just killed, waiting for the anger to subside. He knew he was going to have to check the little girl to see if she was still alive, even though he felt sure she wouldn’t be. There was no way she’d have got more than a few yards into the undergrowth, and the gunman had seemed confident that he’d finished her off with the shot, but he was going to have to look, however hard it might be.

A vision of that little boy back in Afghanistan staring up at him with the gaping hole in his throat tore across his mind, and he took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

Which was when he heard it. The faint crunch of leaves underfoot.

His eyes flew open and he saw two shadowy figures a few yards apart, approaching him quietly through the trees, some fifteen yards distant. There was no question they’d seen him. Not only that, it looked like they’d identified him as an enemy. They were both holding rifles and, even as he watched, the closest of the two put his rifle to his shoulder and took aim.

Scope leapt for cover as the first of the shots rang out, scrambling behind a tree. A chunk of bark flew off as a round struck the trunk, only a few inches from his outstretched leg, and he rolled over on the ground so he was temporarily out of sight and, knowing he only had a few seconds to put some distance between himself and the two gunmen, he leapt to his feet and took off into the foliage, keeping low.

No more shots rang out and, as he ran, keeping to a straight line and using the thick undergrowth as cover, knowing he was going fast enough to outrun them, a sudden thought struck him.

He’d just run past the exact spot where Casey must have been shot. He remembered it well enough, even though he hadn’t actually seen her fall.

But there was no body there now.

Forty

‘JESUS CHRIST, WHAT the hell’s going on?’ said MacLean, looking over towards Sayenko’s corpse from his position behind a beech tree about ten yards away.

Keogh was standing behind a second tree nearby. His ears buzzed from the gunshots and his shoulder ached from the recoil of the rifle as he looked beyond the corpse to where the man who’d just killed Sayenko had disappeared. He’d almost had the slippery sod as well. One more second and he’d have got him in his sights and blown a nice big hole in his heart, but then that big oaf MacLean had made a noise and that had been it. The target had bolted, moving far too fast and purposefully for an amateur.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, trying to keep his voice quiet, even though the buzzing in his ears made it hard to hear himself. ‘Maybe he’s something to do with Amanda Rowan. A bodyguard, someone like that.’

‘If he was her bodyguard, where was he when we tried to snatch her?’ grunted MacLean dismissively.

It was a good point, but Keogh was completely at a loss as to any other explanation. He wasn’t a cop: MacLean was right about that. So who the hell was he?

Keogh motioned to MacLean and together they slowly approached Sayenko’s corpse, crouching low in case the stranger was waiting to ambush them.

‘Cover me,’ whispered Keogh, slinging his rifle over his shoulder and quickly searching the corpse as MacLean stood above him, looking round carefully. There were bullet holes in Sayenko’s belly, heart and head, and it was obvious that they’d been delivered by someone who knew how to use a gun. Even at a range of just a few feet, if you’re not good with firearms, you won’t make as precise hits as Sayenko’s killer had.

Keogh took out Sayenko’s sat phone and a spare magazine he had for his pistol, then got slowly to his feet. For the first time on this op – in fact, for the first time in a long time – he felt truly nervous.

‘So, what are we going to do about this fellah?’ asked MacLean.

Keogh sighed as they stepped back into the cover of the trees. ‘I don’t see how he’s going to raise the alarm. Not after he’s just committed cold-blooded murder. Our best bet’s to keep to the original plan, pick up Amanda Rowan, give the bitch a well-deserved kicking, then get the hell out of here with her.’ He took one more look into the gloom, wondering if the stranger had rescued the little girl (and, in a small way, hoping he had), then turned away, knowing that they were fast running out of options.

Forty-one

Today 15.45

BOLT OPENED THE window of the hire car they’d picked up at Aberdeen Airport and breathed in the fresh clean air as he and Mo drove along the A95, a thick wall of pine forest on one side of them, and a long sweeping loch with bleak, tree-dotted mountains rising up into a pale blue sky on the other.

It was rugged, dramatic scenery, and a far cry from the city where Bolt spent so much of his time. This was only his second visit to Scotland – the first had been a two-week family holiday to the Western Isles when he was a boy, and it had rained pretty much the whole time – but, looking at it now in all its silent, natural beauty, with virtually no other traffic on the road, he promised himself he’d come back at some point and do some fishing – even if it was on his own, now that his old fishing buddy Sam Verran had got himself a girlfriend.

‘This is where all those hikers got killed last year, isn’t it?’ said Mo, doing a great job of breaking the mood.

Bolt remembered the case well enough. Two young couples had come up from London for a weekend of hiking, and had been reported missing a few days later. All four bodies had been found in the house they’d rented for the weekend. Three had suffered stab wounds while the fourth – a teacher called Ashleigh Murray – had been found hanging in the living room. The local CID had concluded that the deaths had been a case of murder suicide, with Ashleigh Murray as the perpetrator, but the case had been racked by controversy ever since, with Murray’s family pushing hard for a full review by a separate police force.

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘I always thought there was something weird about that case. A woman primary school teacher, well liked by her colleagues, and with no history of mental illness, who reportedly has a great relationship with her husband, goes mad with a knife and kills him and two other people, then kills herself. I don’t buy it. I never did.’

‘Me neither,’ said Mo. ‘You know why? They never explained the injuries to the lower leg of the female murder victim. Remember? She had deep cuts consistent with being caught in an illegal hunting trap, as well as the stab wounds, but there was no sign of a hunting trap anywhere round that house.’

‘You know a lot about the case.’

‘I just remember, it all seemed wrong. Do you know what else?’

‘Go on. Surprise me.’

‘The cottage where the bodies were found was less than two miles from Vladimir Hanzha’s country estate.’

Bolt was surprised at that. ‘Really?’

‘Really. Do you reckon that’s a coincidence?’

Bolt frowned. ‘God knows. The thing is, there are too many coincidences around this whole case.’

‘Exactly, but I’ve got a strong feeling that our Vlad’s not going to shed much light on things.’

‘I think you’re right, but at least we’ve got a good excuse for going to see him. Any grieving parent would want to know that their child’s killer’s been found, even if he is dead.’ So far, the Disciple inquiry team hadn’t announced the discovery of Leonard Hope’s body. They’d been told from above to keep it quiet for at least another twenty-four hours. Bolt wasn’t quite sure why, but he guessed the Brass were still trying to come up with a way to announce it that didn’t make the Met look like a bunch of incompetents for losing him in the first place. Either way, it had meant that the press conference that Bolt had chaired that morning had just turned into another bout of hostile questions about the hunt for Leonard Hope that he’d been unable to answer properly, but at least it meant he and Mo could get Vladimir Hanzha’s reaction to the news of the demise of the man who’d killed his daughter first-hand.

‘He doesn’t know we’re coming, does he?’ said Mo, as Bolt slowed the car to turn up the well-kept private road that led to the estate.

‘No, and if he’s not in, we’ll wait. We know he’s up here somewhere.’

As it happened their luck was in. When they arrived at the ornate wrought-iron gates and introduced themselves through the intercom, they had a wait of less than a minute before the gates opened automatically and they were allowed to drive inside. A plainclothes security guard who looked Russian checked their warrant cards, then directed them down the left-hand fork of the road that led them a further two hundred yards through carefully manicured gardens, before they came to an impressive-looking, three-storey Georgian country house, the size of a small hotel, with turrets at either end and an imposing clock tower in the middle.

‘How the other half lives, eh?’ said Mo as they parked the car at one end of the driveway next to a brand-new crimson Ferrari and got out.

‘And I bet you we pay more taxes than him,’ said Bolt, taking a moment to bask in the afternoon sunshine before walking over to a flight of steps wide enough to hold a wedding party that led up to the front door.

Before they got there, the door opened, and a big man in an open shirt and suit trousers appeared. He was in his mid– to late-fifties, with a thick head of curly grey hair and a slight forward stoop, without which he probably would have been about Bolt’s height at six foot four. He was beginning to run to fat, and his face was jowly and grizzled, but not without a degree of charm, and Bolt reckoned that a decade ago he probably would have been a pretty good-looking guy. Even if he hadn’t seen a photo of Vladimir Hanzha, he would have known straight away that this was him. He looked exactly as you’d expect a dodgy Russian oligarch to look, and Bolt was surprised that he’d chosen to greet them personally rather than send someone else. Men like him usually had a fairly sizeable entourage.

‘DCS Bolt,’ he said in a booming voice, coming down the steps. ‘I recognize you from the press conferences.’

They shook hands and Bolt wasn’t surprised that Hanzha tried to crush his in some kind of Vulcan death grip. ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Hanzha,’ he said simply, not reacting to the pain as the Russian released his hold. ‘This is my colleague, DS Mo Khan.’

Hanzha gave Mo a curt nod and made no attempt to shake his hand. ‘Come inside,’ he said, addressing Bolt. ‘You must have come a long way. Can I get you a drink of anything?’

They both declined and followed him through a grand, richly carpeted foyer with animal heads and expensive paintings of traditional country scenes mounted on the walls. Bolt noticed the head of a huge stag with antlers several feet long that looked newer than the others.

‘I shot that one,’ said Hanzha, his tone matter-of-fact, as if he did such things every day.

Bolt didn’t comment. He’d never considered hunting animals with a big gun particularly impressive, and was one of those people who thought they looked better alive in their natural environment than decapitated and stuffed in a rich man’s house.

Hanzha led them down an adjoining hallway, past an indoor swimming pool, separated by a floor-to-ceiling glass window, and into a spacious, traditionally furnished living room with views out towards the mountains in the distance. They sat in chairs next to an unmade fire, Bolt and Mo opposite Hanzha.

‘Let me start by expressing our condolences for the loss of your daughter, Mr Hanzha,’ said Bolt.

Hanzha sighed deeply and his expression tightened. ‘We didn’t get on well, me and Ivana. She was headstrong, like her mother. But I miss her.’ He nodded slowly, as if this was the first time he’d admitted this to himself. ‘I miss her.’ For a few seconds he didn’t speak, then he looked at them both in turn. ‘So what brings you all the way up here to see me?’ he asked.

‘We have some news regarding our prime suspect, Leonard Hope,’ Bolt told him.

Hanzha’s expression darkened. ‘Tell me,’ he said, leaning forward in his chair, suddenly very interested.

‘We found his body yesterday. It had been dumped in countryside west of London.’

‘It showed signs of extreme torture,’ put in Mo, watching Hanzha closely.

For the first time the Russian smiled, but there was no humour in it. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I hope the bastard died in plenty of pain.’

Bolt nodded. ‘Yes, he did.’

‘So the hunt for The Disciple is over. It cannot bring my daughter back. She is with God now. But at least some kind of real justice has been served. I was worried he would end up in one of your prisons, watching television in his cell, taking drugs, living out the rest of his life in comfort.’

‘I don’t think our prisons are that comfortable,’ said Mo.

Hanzha grunted dismissively. ‘They are a lot nicer than Russian ones. Russian prisons are real prisons. The prisoners actually suffer there.’

‘The point is, Mr Hanzha, there are still unanswered questions,’ said Bolt. ‘The foremost of which is: who killed him.’

‘You’re the detective, Mr Bolt. That’s for you to find out, isn’t it? I’m just a businessman.’

‘Someone helped Leonard Hope escape our surveillance team. We suspect whoever helped him then killed him.’

‘You have a Frank Keogh working for you,’ said Mo. ‘Can you tell us what he does?’

Hanzha turned in his seat and glared at Mo, a barely suppressed anger in the expression, almost as if Mo was the one responsible for the death of his daughter. ‘Why are you asking about people who may or may not work for me? What has this got to do with anything?’

‘It’s just a simple question, Mr Hanzha,’ said Bolt, knowing he had to be careful here.

‘Tell me why you ask.’

‘Because he has a conviction for manslaughter, has links to organized crime, and we believe he may have had something to do with Leonard Hope’s disappearance.’

‘And do you have any evidence to back up this claim?’ demanded Hanzha, sounding as if he genuinely didn’t believe a word of what Bolt was saying.

Bolt didn’t have a scrap of evidence, but he wasn’t going to admit to that. ‘We can’t discuss that. We just need to know whether or not he works for you.’

‘And I can’t discuss that. You want to continue this conversation, you talk to my lawyers. I thought you were coming here to keep me informed of progress on the case to find my daughter’s killer, not question me about affairs that have nothing to do with any of this.’

‘Mr Hanzha, we’re just trying to find out what happened to Leonard Hope,’ said Bolt, attempting to smooth things over.

‘Listen to me, both of you.’ He pointed a finger at them. ‘I have no idea who killed Leonard Hope, although I am glad he’s dead. He brutalized my daughter. Raped her, tortured her. Painted signs on the wall in her blood.’ He gesticulated angrily with his hands. ‘I hope he rots in Hell for all eternity.’

‘I have no doubt he will,’ said Bolt.

Hanzha got to his feet. For him, the interview was over.

Bolt and Mo followed suit. They both knew there was no way they were going to get anything else out of him now, but that didn’t matter. Bolt had already heard what he needed to.

‘I heard that there were two killers,’ said Hanzha, as he led them back through the house. ‘That’s what some of the newspapers have been saying. How do you know it wasn’t the other killer who got rid of Hope?’

‘The two-killer theory is a line of inquiry,’ Bolt told him. ‘But we’re not convinced of it yet. If there is a second killer, we’ll find him and bring him to justice.’

Hanzha let out a vaguely derisive grunt. ‘If there is a second killer, I am surprised that, between them, they didn’t manage to kill the woman who disturbed them murdering my daughter. What was her name again?’

‘Amanda Rowan. It seems she’s a very resilient woman.’

‘Very,’ said Hanzha, and there was something malicious and sceptical in the way he spoke the word. ‘Almost unbelievably so.’

Bolt frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

Hanzha shrugged. ‘I’m just very surprised she got away. That’s all.’

They were at the front door now. Hanzha opened it and stepped to one side.

‘Thank you for your time, Mr Hanzha. Once again, let me reiterate how sorry we are for your loss.’

‘You came a long way just to tell me that.’ Something in his expression seemed to dare Bolt and Mo to accuse him of wrongdoing.

But Bolt simply nodded and turned away.

Neither he nor Mo spoke on the way back to the car. It was only when Mo had started the engine that Bolt turned to him. ‘Did you notice what Hanzha said?’

Mo smiled. ‘Course I did. I’ve been a detective a long time, boss. His problem is that he’s too arrogant. “Painted signs on the wall in her blood.” That’s what he said, wasn’t it?’