Текст книги "Stay Alive"

Автор книги: Simon Kernick

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

Three

RIGHT FROM CHILDHOOD, it had always been Frank Keogh’s ambition to be a police officer, and there was never any danger that he wouldn’t achieve it. He worked hard at school, did well at sport, and the stubborn, single-minded streak he possessed – the one that often drove his family and friends mad – meant that he got in at the first attempt, aged eighteen, coming second highest in his class at Hendon.

Keogh didn’t just want to be any old cop. He wanted to be a detective, and bring the really serious criminals to justice. It was no surprise to anyone that he was in plainclothes by twenty-one, and a detective sergeant by twenty-five. The bosses up top liked him. He was tough, tenacious and patient, and they were already talking about him being DCI-level by the age of thirty.

The problem for Keogh was the rulebook. He’d always had a strong sense of natural justice. He wanted to see the bad guys suffer and the good guys win, and it offended him that this often didn’t seem to happen. The good guys – the police – were stymied by an ever-increasing set of rules. The bad guys often escaped justice because their lawyers were good, and the law was on their side. This injustice drove him mad, as did the fact that, in the end, the criminals were so easy to catch. It wasn’t like in the books or the movies, as he’d imagined it to be when he’d joined up. These people were idiots. They left a trail of evidence in their wake, meaning that most of the detective work was building a case to go to court and then filling out a load of paperwork.

Disillusioned, Keogh decided on a change in direction. He’d always had a thing about guns. There was something about their sheer power that fascinated him, and there’d been more than the occasional moment when he’d fantasized about putting one against the head of some cocky low-life thug and pulling the trigger. He never would have done, of course – he had far too much to lose for that – but he decided on the next best thing, by joining the Metropolitan Police’s elite CO19 firearms unit. He figured it would give him a new challenge, and a much-needed adrenalin rush now and again. His plan was always to go back into plainclothes eventually, work himself higher up the greasy pole, then retire and write a book about his experiences, which he was positive he could turn into a real success.

It surprised no one, least of all Keogh himself, that he got into CO19 at the first attempt. He remembered thinking when he went out on that first patrol, a gun at his hip as he and his colleagues drove through the mean streets of Lewisham, that this was as good as life got. He was young; he was good-looking; he had a beautiful fiancée. The world was his to dominate.

Except it wasn’t, because fate has a way of intervening when it’s least expected, and leaving the best-laid plans in ruins. And fate really had it in for Frank Keogh.

It was three months into his time in CO19 when the Armed Response Vehicle he was travelling in received an urgent call from Dispatch about a group of youths from a well-known local street gang travelling in a stolen vehicle, one of whom was reported to have brandished a gun at passers-by. They got a dozen calls like this every day, and rarely did they come across anyone who was actually armed, but each call had to be taken on its own merits and, because they were very close by, they’d raced to where the vehicle had last been sighted, intercepting it at some traffic lights.

All three of them had been out of the ARV in seconds, pistols drawn and shouting at the men inside the vehicle to put their hands above their heads. It looked as if the three of them were complying but, as Keogh approached the car from the side, the man in the back pulled something from his pocket. It was ten o’clock at night and dark, and Keogh had no idea what it was the man had in his hand, but Keogh remembered vividly him turning round rapidly in his seat and bringing up an object that looked a lot like a gun.

Keogh had pulled the trigger then, shooting him twice through the window at a distance of no more than five feet. One of the bullets caught him in the neck, the other hit him in the eye as the pistol kicked, and it was this one that was fatal.

It turned out that twenty-year-old Derrick ‘Slugs’ Foster had been holding a mobile phone when Keogh had shot him, and that none of the three men in the car was armed, not even with a knife. As far as Keogh was concerned, none of that mattered. He’d done his job, and he’d done it properly. The guy had pulled something that could have been a gun from his pocket and he’d looked as if he was going to fire it. In those situations, you have maybe a second and a half to make the choice of whether to fire or not. Make the wrong choice and you get shot, and Keogh was not the kind of guy who got shot because he was too scared to react.

But the bosses – those men who’d been so supportive of him when he was on the way up – didn’t see it like that. Neither did the local community. The following night, the estate where the dead man had lived was the scene of the worst rioting that London had witnessed in years, and within days a ‘Justice for Derrick’ campaign had been set up by local community leaders, backed by several sympathetic human rights lawyers, calling for charges of murder to be laid against the man who’d pulled the trigger.

Keogh was suspended from firearms duty, as was routine in such incidents. Then, as the furore mounted, and further street disturbances broke out in several other London boroughs, he was suspended from duty altogether. Then came the bombshell. The establishment had decided to bend to the power of the mob and the special interest groups. He was going to be charged with manslaughter. No one was above the law, said the well-groomed ex-public schoolboy from the CPS as he’d announced the charges at a news conference that was shown as the top story on every news channel.

During the run-up to the trial, Keogh’s fiancée left him, citing the pressure of the situation. He’d really had a thing for Kirsty. She was the one. They were going to have a family and grow old together. Losing her had been like a massive and continuous kick in the balls. He couldn’t get it out of his head that she’d rejected him. But, even then, Keogh hadn’t lost his self-belief. He still had support from his colleagues past and present, and he was certain that no jury would convict a serving police officer with an unblemished record for shooting dead a low-life like Derrick Foster in a spur-of-the-moment, high-pressure incident.

Unfortunately, he was wrong. Found guilty, he was sentenced to three years in prison. And it was hard time that he did, segregated from the main prison population for his own safety, and made to spend his days with rapists, paedophiles, and all the other assorted scum of the earth. The guards warned him to be careful even there because members of Derrick Foster’s gang inside the prison had put a contract out on Keogh’s head, and within two weeks he’d been attacked by a fellow con wielding a sharpened piece of plastic. He’d been slashed twice in the face and neck, and though he’d managed to fend off his attacker until help arrived, the good looks he’d prided himself on were ruined forever by the scars left behind.

They were the worst, darkest times of Keogh’s life. Brought as low as he’d ever been, he even contemplated suicide. But then, slowly but surely, that single-minded determination that had served him so well in the past came back into play. He forced himself to adapt to prison life and bide his time until release, and all the time his bitterness grew. He’d get his own back. On the bosses who’d hung him out to dry; on the public who’d done nothing to stop him being put behind bars. On every last one of them.

He got out in two years, already forgotten by the rest of the world, but it had only been a matter of time before his bitterness found an outlet, and so began a journey that had got him here today, driving slowly past Amanda Rowan’s rented cottage in a four-by-four.

She’d noticed him looking at her, he was pretty sure of that. He cursed, but kept driving. He was used to taking risks. It was all part of the job description, and at least now he knew she was where she was supposed to be. When he’d first arrived here in the darkness of the early hours, he’d considered breaking into the house, but she’d had at least half a dozen locks on the back door, and the brand-new PVC windows were locked and secure, with no sign of keys anywhere convenient. He’d also considered knocking on the door and showing his fake police ID, but had dismissed it as too risky. Amanda Rowan was no fool. There was no guarantee she’d let him in – the scars were always a problem like that – and, if she didn’t, then it would have blown everything.

Now that he knew she was at home, all he had to do was be patient. By coming to an isolated spot like this one, she’d made it far easier for him.

When he was about two hundred yards past her cottage, and the village had given way to fields with trees beyond, he made a right turn up a narrow lane. He followed the lane as it went straight for about fifty yards, passing a couple of barns, before swinging a sharp right back in the direction of the village. He stopped the Land Rover in a spot he’d recce’d earlier, and parked up on the verge amidst a copse of trees. From this position he could see the rear of Amanda’s cottage. Its rear garden backed directly onto a fallow field, and he could see a couple of kids playing on a trampoline in the garden next door.

If Amanda Rowan came out the back way, cutting across the field, he’d see her easily. If she went out the front, the tiny, sensor-operated camera that he’d planted in the undergrowth just inside her front gate would pick up the movement and start recording. Whatever happened, as soon as she left the house, he’d know about it.

And they’d finally be able to get to work.

Four

JESS GRAINGER HAD never been in a canoe before, mainly because it had never crossed her mind to get in one. She wasn’t a big fan of water, unless it was steaming hot and pouring out of a showerhead. She could swim okay, but only because they’d made her learn at school – and she still wasn’t that great at it – and right now the thought of falling into a cold, grey Scottish river (which she was sure she would do by the end of the day) filled her with a mixture of dread, and resentment that she’d agreed to come along on this trip in the first place.

Uncle Tim must have read her thoughts because he clapped her hard on the back, his hand lingering for just a second too long. ‘You’re going to love it, Jessie,’ he said, giving her a big toothy smile as he took a deep breath of the fresh country air. ‘Just look at it.’ He took his hand away – thank God – and swung it round expansively as he admired the view of the gently running river, with the forest stretching up the hills that rose gently on each side of it.

‘Some of the best countryside in the world up here,’ the old guy who ran the place they were hiring the canoes from announced as he pushed one of them into the water, turning it round so that it rested in the shallows parallel to the bank. ‘And I’ve been to a hell of a lot of places, I’m telling you.’

Jess was sure he had. Thin and wizened beneath his beanie cap, with a face full of cracks and lines, the old guy looked just like an Arctic explorer. But his words didn’t make her feel any more enthusiastic as she clambered unsteadily into the front of the canoe, almost toppling out of the other side in the process, and lowered herself onto the hard wooden seat.

The old guy handed her a wooden paddle while Aunt Jean got in the back with all the grace of a rhino, landing heavily in her own seat.

‘I’ll do the steering, Jessie,’ announced Aunt Jean. ‘You just paddle. One side then the other. You’ll get used to it soon enough. It’s easy.’ Her tone wasn’t unfriendly, but it wasn’t too cheery either, and Jess could tell she didn’t really want her there, but was trying to make an effort for Casey’s sake.

Casey was Jess’s little sister and she lived with Uncle Tim and Aunt Jean up here in the middle of the Scottish wilderness, having moved up a few months ago after Dad had died. They weren’t real sisters. Jess had been fostered, then adopted, aged seven, by the couple she came to know as Mum and Dad, when they didn’t think they could have children of their own. Then, less than a year later, Casey had turned up. By rights, Jess should have been jealous, but from the start she’d adored her little sister, and felt hugely protective of her, a feeling that had grown even stronger when first Mum, then Dad, had died.

The whole reason Jess had come up here from London was to see Casey and make sure she was settling in okay. And to be fair, it seemed she was. Unlike Jess herself, Casey was really excited about this canoeing trip, and she jumped into the front of the other canoe, taking her paddle excitedly from the old guy, while Uncle Tim got in the back.

The old guy grinned at Casey, his eyes twinkling. It was, Jess thought, the same old story. Everyone fell in love with Casey. She was just that kind of girl. She was blonde, bubbly, with a sweet cherubic face, a cute button nose, and a lively personality, but also enough smarts to know how to get round people, and make them do what she wanted without them realizing they were doing it. Although more than seven years separated them, Jess had always grown up in her shadow. Sometimes it surprised her that she wasn’t more envious of Casey, but only a few times had the fact that her sister got all the attention ever irritated her, and in truth, she loved her sister just as everyone else did. And now, with Dad gone, Casey was all she had left.

‘Okay, you’ve got my phone number,’ said the old guy, standing above them. ‘The mobile reception’s patchy along the river, but you’ll be able to get it in parts. The river’s running pretty slow at the moment, so you shouldn’t run into any problems but, if you do, just give us a call. Otherwise, we’ll meet you at the bridge near Tayleigh at five o’clock. That should give you plenty of time.’

Five o’clock? That was almost four hours away and Jess felt her heart sink. There were a hundred things she’d rather be doing than this. When she’d come up, she’d envisaged taking Casey shopping in Inverness, not hauling ass down some Godforsaken river in the back of beyond.

‘Have you got everything, Tim?’ yelled Aunt Jean from behind her, her voice loud in Jess’s ear.

Tim patted the rucksack beside him. ‘Food, drink, the lot,’ he replied, sounding as excited as Casey. ‘Are we all ready?’

‘I’m ready,’ shouted Casey, lifting the paddle above her head, two-handed, making the old guy laugh.

‘You’re going to have a great time, wee lassie,’ he told her, and gave their canoe a push so it drifted into the deeper water. ‘And you will too, lassie, if you let yourself,’ he said to Jess.

‘She’s from London,’ said Jean, as if this explained everything. ‘She’s not used to the great outdoors.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ said Jess wearily, forcing a smile as she sank her paddle in the water, while the old guy gave their canoe a push and they drifted slowly out onto the river.

And right into the beginning of a nightmare.

Five

20 days ago

MIKE BOLT WAS dreaming about his dead wife.

It was something he did more and more these days. The fact was he’d pretty much deified her. In death, she could do no wrong, which was why he’d never been able to hold down a serious relationship in the almost ten years since she’d passed away. He’d been engaged a couple of years back for a while to a CPS lawyer called Claire. He’d even moved her in to his place in Clerkenwell, and for a while he’d thought that she might finally be the one to get him over Mikaela. But in the end it hadn’t worked either. Claire did things that irritated him, things that Mikaela would never have done. She talked about her work all the time; she obsessed about her weight and kept going on strange, masochistic diets; and she didn’t like children. Bolt wasn’t a huge fan of kids either, but Mikaela had been, and she’d also been two months pregnant when she’d died. So, as far as Bolt was concerned, it reflected badly on Claire, and was yet another reason to end his relationship with her.

Since Claire had gone, Bolt had had a couple of other flings, including a recent one with a former colleague of his, Tina Boyd, which had been doomed from the start (Tina was far too much of a handful for him, and probably any man), but for the last few months he’d been resolutely single, giving him ample opportunity to fixate on Mikaela – something that he’d lost no time in doing.

In this particular dream Bolt was having, he and Mikaela were riding horses across a long lonely stretch of beach somewhere in France. Mikaela’s horse was galloping away into the distance, and looked to Bolt to be out of control, but Mikaela didn’t seem to care. The wind was blowing through her long blonde hair and he could hear her laughter fading away as she got further and further from his horse, which refused to go any faster than at a gentle trot even though he was yelling at it to get a move on. And then, as he watched, Mikaela disappeared from view altogether.

Which was the moment the windswept beach began to fade as an incessant ringing in his head drowned out everything else.

Bolt’s eyes snapped open and he sat up in the bed. His mobile was vibrating and bouncing round the bedside table. The clock said 05.46. As he reached over to pick up the phone, he paused to look at the photo of him and Mikaela that stood next to it. It was a shot from their holiday in Corfu two summers before she died, both of them tanned and grinning at the camera. Whenever he was in a relationship, Bolt would hide the photo away, sneaking only the occasional peek at it, but the moment he was single, it would be back on the bedside table so that he could wake up every morning to his memories. He knew it was bad for him to dwell as much as he did, but he seemed incapable of doing anything about it. Emotionally, he was trapped in a past that had ended almost a decade earlier, and the sad thing was, he probably always would be. Only one thing kept his mind off Mikaela, and that was work.

And it was work calling him now. Specifically, his long-time colleague, Mo Khan. And, even before he picked up the phone, Bolt knew what it was going to be about, because there’d only be one reason why Mo would be phoning at this time in the morning, although he hoped to God he was wrong.

Yawning, he pressed the Call Receive button. ‘You woke me from a beautiful dream.’

‘I’m truly sorry about that, boss, but right now that’s the least of our problems.’

Bolt felt his heart sink. ‘There’s been another one, hasn’t there?’

‘It looks that way. I’ve just had a call from a DCI Matt Black of Thames Valley CID. They’ve got a murder scene up in some woods between Reading and Basingstoke. A home invasion. Two dead, one injured. They think it might be the work of The Disciple.’

‘That’s three casualties. He usually only targets couples.’

‘It looks like he attacked the husband and his mistress, and the wife turned up and disturbed him. She made a dash for it, and although she got cut up a bit, and almost got hit by a car while she was running, she’s conscious.’

‘Is there anything specific that makes Thames Valley think it’s The Disciple?’

‘The MO’s definitely his, boss. No question about it.’

Bolt sighed and got out of bed, looking for some clean clothes. ‘Christ, this is all we need. The pressure’s going to be even more intense now. Who’s driving, me or you?’

‘I’m just about to get in my car now. I’ll be with you in twenty. You can sleep on the way down, have some more beautiful dreams.’

Bolt grunted. ‘Somehow I doubt it.’

Six

FOR THE LAST fifteen months, a brutal serial killer dubbed The Disciple had kept the south of England in the grip of fear, and the media in the grip of excitement. Before the previous night’s attack, he’d committed six murders in three previous incidents. His modus operandi was always the same. He picked isolated detached properties occupied by professional couples, all of which so far had been to the west of London. He would break in at night, disable the male partner with a non-fatal stab wound to the leg, before overpowering and binding the female partner. He’d then torture and sexually assault the woman, and on one occasion the man as well, before finally killing them both with a knife, using their blood to daub Satanic signs on the walls of the room in which he carried out the attacks. On each occasion the left-hand little finger of the female victim had been cut off, and was subsequently missing from the crime scene, suggesting The Disciple was taking them as trophies.

Bolt had been brought in to lead the inquiry four months earlier, after the previous senior investigating officer – a good solid cop called Mason, whom Bolt had met a couple of times before – had had a massive heart attack and dropped dead. That should have told Bolt everything he needed to know about this case. It was a nightmare for any SIO. Not only was the pressure for a result enormous, and seemingly continuously building, but leads on the ground were desperately scarce. The Disciple might have been a sick, deranged individual, but he was also clever enough not to leave any DNA behind at the scene of his crimes. So far, the only possible clue they had to his identity was a witness description of a man in dark clothing and a woollen cap seen by a male dog walker hanging round near the house of the final two victims the day before they were killed. The description of the man himself was fairly basic – tall, well-built, somewhere in his thirties – but the witness had noticed a dark green tattoo on his left forearm, where his sleeve had been rolled up. It wasn’t much to reassure an increasingly concerned public that they were making progress on the case, especially considering the number of detectives working on it, but Bolt had learned in more than twenty-five years as a police officer that sometimes you simply had to be patient and wait for the break, although in recent weeks he too had grown intensely frustrated with the lack of leads.

Now, though, it looked like they might have one, in the form of a survivor. Bolt wasn’t going to get his hopes up too much, but when he’d taken the case he’d always known that, as long as he kept killing, The Disciple was going to make a mistake eventually. Maybe, just maybe, this was it.

It was 7.10 a.m. and night had given way to an overcast morning when they arrived. The murder scene was a large detached house in the middle of a stretch of beech wood – the kind of place that estate agents would claim had character – surrounded by a high brick wall, which was possible but not easy to scale, set on a quiet, heavily wooded back road not far from the A33. The road in front of the house was lined on both sides with police vehicles, and a group of uniformed PCs were drinking coffee and eating sandwiches.

‘It’s a perfect location for The Disciple,’ said Mo, as they parked up behind a police van and got out of the car. ‘He could have watched the house to his heart’s content and no one would have spotted him.’

‘I don’t understand what makes people live out in places like this,’ said Bolt. ‘It’s so damn lonely. I need people around me. I need to hear, I don’t know . . . Noise.’

‘You’re a city boy. So am I. But I reckon my wife would love it out here.’ Mo stood staring at the house, leaning back so his belly stuck out. He’d always been a short, stout little guy, the very antithesis of Bolt, who was tall and broad-shouldered, but he’d put on a fair bit of weight of late, and with his thick head of almost-silver hair, he was now beginning to resemble a middle-aged Hobbit. ‘How much do you reckon this place costs?’ he asked vaguely.

‘God knows. A million. Two million. A lot more than you or I could ever afford.’ Bolt reckoned that Mikaela would have liked a place like this too. She’d always wanted to move out of the city and start a new life and family in the countryside. For a moment, he wondered how they would have coped: them living out here and him still a city cop, commuting into town. Pretty well, he imagined.

She’d liked fresh air. Bolt could take it or leave it.

They climbed under the police tape, showed their IDs to the group of cops eating their breakfast, then made their way over to the van containing the coveralls that they needed to put on before they could enter the crime scene. Bolt felt mildly nauseous at the prospect of going inside. He hated the sight of any dead body, and always had done, ever since he’d seen his first one back in the early days in the job. He’d seen plenty since and, every time, it reminded him far too much of his own mortality – the knowledge that one day he would end up a lifeless husk like all of them.

Death depressed Bolt. The needless, violent deaths of those whose time should have still been far away depressed him even more, and there were few killings more violent and needless than those committed by The Disciple. At the home of the last two victims, he’d been almost overcome with emotion as he’d walked through the house, seen the photos on the wall of the young couple – both barely thirty – and then gone into the bedroom and seen the terrible things that had been done to their naked bodies. Almost overcome, but not quite. Ultimately, he was still professional enough to hold himself together in front of his colleagues, but more and more these days he wondered if he was becoming too affected by his job; whether it was time to pull back from the tough, high-profile cases and finish the last four years of his thirty with a whimper rather than a bang.

‘DCS Bolt?’

Bolt turned to see a short, prematurely bald guy with a kindly, boyish face and chubby cheeks, dressed in coveralls. ‘Yes?’

‘I’m DCI Matt Black. Thames Valley CID. I’m in charge of securing the scene.’ He spoke matter-of-factly in a slight West Country burr that reminded Bolt of the guy who’d played Inspector Wexford in the old TV series. He also looked too young to be a DCI, but maybe that was just Bolt showing his age.

‘Pleased to meet you, Matt.’ He put out a hand and shook, before introducing Mo to him. ‘We’d appreciate it if you could show us around the scene.’

‘Of course. Come this way.’

They followed Black as he led them through the police vehicles and along a path lined with fluorescent markers towards the house. An imposing set of wooden security gates with a curving line of wrought-iron spikes along the top announced the entrance. The gates were open, revealing a gravel driveway and turning circle in front of the house, and a separate two-car garage to the left. A red Porsche Turbo – the kind beloved of middle-aged men wanting to impress the girls – was parked in front of it, and Bolt assumed that it belonged to the male victim. As they passed through the gates, he asked if they’d been open when the first officers had arrived at the scene.

Black shook his head. ‘No. They were closed and locked. We think the suspect came over the wall round the back, and picked the lock on the back door. It’s only got a single five-bar lock, along with two bolts that weren’t pulled across, so if someone knew what they were doing, it wouldn’t be that hard to get in.’

‘You’d think they’d have a state-of-the-art security system living round here,’ said Mo.

‘They do. And CCTV cameras covering the back and the front of the property. But the alarm wasn’t on, and it looks like the CCTV camera round the back was tampered with.’

‘How?’ asked Bolt.

‘The lens has been spray-painted black. The camera itself is about ten feet up an apple tree in the garden, facing the back door. My guess is the suspect shinned up the tree and did it.’

‘Can we take a look?’

Black nodded. ‘Sure. Follow me.’

As they walked down the driveway and round the side of the house, Bolt noticed a pool of vomit congealing on the front doorstep.

‘That came out of the first officer on the scene,’ Black told them matter-of-factly. ‘Apparently, the two upstairs were his first murder victims. And, as I’m sure you can imagine, it’s not very pretty up there.’

Bolt flashed back to the last Disciple murder scene. The blood and the horror. ‘Poor sod,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you ever get used to that kind of thing.’ But he noticed that Black didn’t seem unduly concerned by what he’d witnessed. Maybe some cops did get used to it after all, and he was the exception rather than the rule.

The rear garden was several hundred feet long and about half as wide, and was enclosed by the same high brick wall that lined the front of the property. Mature bushes and foliage ran along the borders, while beech trees from the encroaching woods loomed up beyond the wall. Apart from the occasional birdsong and the faint hum of rush-hour traffic from the nearby A33, the woods were silent.

‘The camera’s up on this tree here.’

Bolt followed the angle of Black’s finger to a point about halfway up an apple tree that stood a couple of yards beyond the patio at the back of the house. There was still plenty of foliage on it, and even a few mouldy-looking apples. ‘I can’t see a thing,’ he said.

Mo shook his head. ‘Neither can I.’

The two of them approached the tree, and only when he was at the bottom looking up could Bolt make out the black box partly concealed by a branch. It would have been easy enough for the suspect to have got up there and spray-painted it, but only if he knew where he was looking. He turned to Black. ‘How the hell did he know it was there?’

Black shrugged. ‘He’s your killer, DCS Bolt. Not ours. I thought he was meant to spend a lot of time casing the homes of his victims before he went in. If he knew what he was looking for, he would have found it eventually.’

It was a fair point, and once again it made Bolt realize how carefully their killer picked his targets and planned his attacks. ‘Can you take us through what happened here?’ he asked.