Authors: Simon Kernick
‘Omega to Bravo One, what’s going on?’
‘A car’s just pulled out in front of us . . . He’s blocking the road . . . We’re trying to pass.’ Bolt heard the sound of horns, and cursing. ‘Bravo One to all cars, we’ve lost the eyeball. We think he might have turned into Park Hill.’
‘All right, boss, we’re near,’ said Mo. ‘Make a left here.’
Bolt barely slowed up as he turned into yet another residential street, the tyres of the Audi A4 he was driving wailing angrily. It was almost dark now and he knew he was going to have to be careful not to get in an accident. A primary school loomed up on the left, then a church. He saw a mother walking hand in hand with two young children and, hearing his rapid approach, she turned and gave him an angry look, motioning for him to slow down, although he wondered if she’d be quite so annoyed if she knew the identity of the man he was after. On the radio, the different cars of the surveillance team were communicating in short, urgent bursts, but it was clear that none of them had Hope’s van in their sights.
‘Okay, boss, left again up here. I think we may be able to cut him off.’
Gritting his teeth, Bolt made the turn.
‘Park Hill’s just up here on the right. It’s about another fifty yards.’
But Mo had barely finished speaking when a white van came hurtling out of a side road, clipping a car parked on the other side, before righting itself and driving up the street away from them.
Bolt didn’t even bother to read the registration number. He knew it was Hope and he slammed his foot hard on the accelerator, giving chase.
Up ahead, a car was coming down on the other side of the road, but it was veering out towards the middle. Hope, who was rapidly picking up speed, swerved to avoid it, hit another parked car and lost control of the van completely, scraping another couple of cars before mounting the pavement and smacking into a wall.
‘Right we’ve got you now!’ yelled Bolt triumphantly. Only fifty metres separated him from Hope’s van and the speed he was going he’d cover the ground in a few seconds, and then finally they’d be able to take him down.
Up ahead, a figure jumped out of the van and sprinted away from it, while the car that had been coming the other way pulled up on some double yellow lines, its driver opening the door to get out.
Bolt sounded his horn to warn the driver to stay in the car, making no attempt to slow down.
‘Careful, boss,’ said Mo, gripping his seat, as Bolt raced towards the stricken van.
And then, as they drew level with the turning from which Hope’s van had emerged only a few seconds earlier, a sudden glare of headlights loomed up out of nowhere as a car came flying out far too fast, shunting the Audi in the side like a bumper car and sending it spinning round a hundred and eighty degrees in a sickening shriek of metal. Bolt didn’t have time to react before they hit a parked car sideways-on and came to a crunching halt.
For a second, neither he nor Mo moved. The other car was a few yards away, smoke rising from its ruined bonnet. Both occupants – a man and a woman – looked shocked but otherwise unhurt, and Bolt recognized them instantly as two of the surveillance team.
Then his instincts kicked in. Jumping out of the car, he shouted for Mo to follow him, and took off after Hope at a sprint. He could make out the faint wail of sirens coming from more than one direction, but they were still too far away to be of any help, and there was no immediate sign of the rest of the surveillance team. Grabbing his radio, he was about to shout his current location, but realized he didn’t know the street name, so pocketed it. Right now he was on his own. And, full to the brim with adrenalin and aggression, that suited him just fine.
He couldn’t see Hope any more, but there was no way he’d be hiding behind one of the cars. He’d be trying to put as much distance between himself and his pursuers as possible. There was a left turning up ahead and Bolt took it at a sprint. He didn’t have time to look for a road sign but just kept running. Unlike Mo, he not only liked to keep fit, but also to make his own collars. Too many times these days, the detectives left it to the TSG, the Territorial Support Group (the Met’s version of the Riot Police), to arrest the suspects, but for Bolt there was nothing better than taking down the person you’d been hunting. It was one of the great joys of the job and he felt a real exhilaration now as he ran alone down the cool, night street, ignoring the pain in his side from the impact of the crash.
Hope was in his sights now, thirty yards away and running, which was when Bolt noticed something strange. It looked as if he was on the phone. They’d always been convinced he was working alone, but it suddenly struck Bolt that maybe they were wrong. Maybe he had an accomplice. Serial killers had worked together before. It was rare but not unheard of, and, in this case, it made sense. It was no easy task to control and restrain a couple, but if there were two of you . . .
Bolt redoubled his pace, his footfalls heavy on the pavement. Hope was a big man and well built, but Bolt felt sure he could take him alone if he had to.
Hope must have heard his pursuit because he pocketed the phone and looked back over his shoulder, suddenly increasing his own pace, but he was nowhere near as fast as Bolt, and barely fifteen yards separated them now. Bolt felt his excitement growing. Hope was running like a desperate man, his gait ungainly, and there was no way he could keep it up for much longer.
When there were only ten yards between them, Hope turned into another side street, almost tripping over his feet in the process, and Bolt sensed victory. So much so that he didn’t even slow down as he followed his quarry round the corner, and was subsequently completely surprised to see Hope right in front of him, swinging an arm through the air.
Bolt just had time to see that he was holding something big and solid in his hand, and then he felt a sudden excruciating pain in his cheek as the blow struck him, the force of it sending him falling sideways into the road. He landed next to a parked car and rolled over, temporarily dazed, his vision blurring.
He thought he heard a car starting nearby, but couldn’t say for sure, because the next thing he knew, Mo Khan was kneeling next to him, asking if he was all right.
‘Get after him,’ he managed to say, although his voice sounded muffled, as if he’d just been anaesthetized.
Mo frowned, and then he said the words that Bolt had been dreading. ‘He’s gone, boss.’
And he had gone too. Within twenty minutes of Mo’s first call for backup, a blanket cordon had been placed round an area of more than a square mile, and a full-scale house-by-house search was in progress, involving more than four hundred officers. It was widely believed that there was no way Leonard Hope could have left the area on foot without being apprehended, and yet twenty-four hours later, when the search ended, there was still no sign of him. There were no witness sightings; there was no footage of him on any of the many CCTV cameras surrounding the area; and there were no reports of stolen vehicles.
It was as if he’d disappeared into thin air.
SCOPE KAYAKED FAST
through the darkness, making good progress. The distance from Jock’s place to Tayleigh along the river was just over 11 miles. It was a lot of ground to cover, but the wind had picked up from the east, and was helping to push him along as it whistled down the natural tunnel made by the river. Pine- and beech-covered hills rose up majestically on both sides of the water, and above him the first stars were beginning to appear, joining the thin slither of moon, and providing just enough light to see by, as Scope scanned both banks for any sign of the canoeists or the canoes.
He was no longer wondering why a local family of four had been targeted by professional thugs, including the scar-faced man he’d seen earlier. The simple fact was that they
had
been and, if it wasn’t too late, then it was his duty to help them. What was really preying on his mind, though, was the fact that once again his life had been disrupted by violence. Sometimes it felt as if death stalked him like a relentless hunter. He could escape for a while – weeks; months; years sometimes – but it always caught up in the end, even here in one of the quietest, wildest parts of the country.
Scope considered himself a quiet, reasonable man. He preferred to turn his back on trouble. He liked people. Sometimes he even dreamed of meeting someone special again, and starting another family. Living happily ever after, as they did at the end of the movies. But it never worked out like that. And, whichever way he chose to look at it, he was fully prepared to use violence to achieve his ends. He’d killed six men in cold blood to avenge the death of his daughter, even though none of them had been directly responsible for Mary Ann’s death. In the end, she’d voluntarily injected the heroin herself. Only one of the six he’d killed had even met her. And yet even when one of them – a young, mid-ranking dealer – had been on his knees begging and crying for mercy, Scope had put a bullet in his head, and only occasionally had he lost sleep over what he’d done. Other people would have gone to the police, let them deal with it, but Scope hadn’t. He’d taken the law into his own hands.
It was the same when his nephew had been kidnapped six months earlier by men trying to blackmail the boy’s father. He’d gone after the kidnappers himself and kept the police out of it. And now, here he was, paddling like a madman down a lonely river, far from the place he’d once called home, a gun in his waistband, his heart pumping, not just from the exertion of the last hour and a half, or from the intensity of killing a man, but from something else. The excitement of what he was doing. A part of Scope – a very primitive part – was actually enjoying this.
He was going to miss Jock. He was going to miss this place too. He stopped paddling for a moment, getting his breath back, and looked up at the vast night sky as it stretched over towards the west, where just the faintest hint of pink glowing light still lingered. Sometimes, at night, Scope would sit outside the tiny cottage he rented, and watch the stars that swarmed across the night sky, wondering if his wife and daughter were up there, watching him. The air up here was sharp and fresh and, as he sat in the kayak, he took a long deep breath, thinking that the scene in front of him – the tar-black river vaguely shimmering in the light of the moon, and the forest rising up on either side of it – was much the same as it would have been a thousand, even a million years ago. It made him feel insignificant, a tiny intruder in a tiny boat who would soon be gone, while this would remain here forever. Right now, knowing that he was about to risk his life to help people he’d never met, it was a comforting thought.
Somewhere amidst the greenery came the plaintive call of a heron, breaking the silence, and Scope began paddling again, keeping close to the bank as he rode a series of shallow rapids, enjoying the sensation of the kayak bouncing up and down in the water.
And then, as he rounded a bend in the river, he saw the two Canadian canoes sitting on a sand spit that jutted out from the left-hand bank thirty yards in front of him. He rode the kayak onto the spit and climbed out, looking around. The two canoes were about five yards apart, and straight away Scope noticed there was no sign of any paddles, which struck him as odd. There was something else too. A long dark stain running down the inside of one of them, next to the back seat. He’d picked up a mini-Maglite torch at Jock’s and he shone it at the stain, tensing as he realized it was blood. Then he saw the golf-ball-sized holes at various points in the canoe. He counted five of them on one side, and a corresponding number on the other. There was no doubt in Scope’s mind that they’d been caused by bullets, and from a high-calibre weapon as well. The entry holes appeared to be on the right side of the canoe, suggesting someone had been shooting at the canoeists from somewhere on the other side of the river. Looking in that direction, Scope saw a small gap in the trees at the top of the hill, and recognized the lookout point. So the shooter had been up there and, for whatever reason, he’d ambushed the canoeists as they’d paddled downriver.
He’d clearly hit at least one of them, and yet there was no sign of any bodies.
Turning away, Scope walked slowly into the trees that ran down to the bank, which was where he found the bodies of the man and the woman. Their names, Scope remembered Jock as saying, were Tim and Jean Robinson, a local couple from somewhere up between Tayleigh and Inverness. Tim Robinson was lying sprawled over the top of his wife and, as Scope shone the torch down, he could see that he’d been shot in the back, roughly between the shoulder blades, by someone who knew what they were doing when it came to high-velocity rifles. Jean Robinson was lying on her back beneath her husband, staring upwards. Her eyes were open and a thin trail of dried blood ran from one corner of her mouth.
Scope wasn’t sure how long they’d been dead, but it looked as though it had been a while. Although he was wearing gloves, he didn’t want to touch the bodies and contaminate the scene. He was in enough trouble as it was, and it would be far better if no one knew he’d ever been here. According to Jock, the Robinsons had been with their two nieces who were up from London. One was only a young girl, whom Jock had described as a real sweetheart, and Scope didn’t know how he’d handle finding her body, if it was round here. Ever since he’d become a father, aged only nineteen himself, he’d been hugely protective of young children. He hated the idea of them suffering violence. He’d done two tours in Iraq during his decade in the army, and during the second tour, an IED meant for the patrol he was a part of, had been detonated prematurely by the insurgents who’d been lying in wait for them, killing two boys riding past on a rusty old bicycle instead. The boys had only ridden past the patrol a few seconds earlier. They’d been smiling and laughing as they balanced precariously on the bike, and Scope remembered smiling back at them, thinking at the time that – wherever you went in the world – kids were always kids. They’d been no more than twelve, those boys, and the impact from the blast had flung their bodies more than fifty feet through the hot desert air. They’d landed in the dirt just in front of the lead soldier in the patrol, and Scope remembered vividly the scene of chaos as, deafened by the blast, they’d all dived for cover at the side of the road, several of the men letting off bursts of gunfire into the surrounding uninhabited scrubland in a vain attempt to flush out the insurgents.