Authors: Simon Kernick
Scope did a rapid turn further into the trees and sprinted for his life, half expecting to take a shot in the back at any time.
But no shot came, and a minute later he was back deep within the forest. Slowing up, he risked a glance over his shoulder, saw no one there, and turned in the direction of the river. He’d done what he could, and risked his life, to buy time for a girl he’d never met to escape from pursuers who were after her for a reason he’d probably never know. Now he was going to double back and try to find her sister somewhere in one of the biggest, loneliest forests in the country.
He no longer had any bullets in his gun. He had no means of communication. In reality, getting involved in all this was madness. Yet, Jesus, it felt good.
And if he could find that little girl, it would make it all worth it.
If he could find her . . .
MIKE BOLT SANK
his first pint of the week before the barman had even come back with his change.
It tasted that good.
It was just after 6.30 on a chilly Friday evening, and Bolt was in the bar of his local pub, The Pheasant, just down the road from the loft apartment in Clerkenwell that had been his home for more than seven years now. The place was full, but mainly with the local after-work crowd, and Bolt only recognized a couple of faces. He tended to get in the pub a couple of times a week, and he knew a few of the locals well enough to chat to, but they were acquaintances, not friends. He didn’t really have friends as such, not even among those he’d worked with in the Force down the years. Everyone was an acquaintance. He liked to think that it suited him just fine like that, but deep down, he knew it didn’t. The fact was, he was afraid of getting too close to people – a reaction, he supposed, to what had happened to his wife, Mikaela.
He thought of Mo Khan, who would be back home with his wife and kids, while he was sitting here alone downing pints of lager, waiting to spot someone he knew well enough to snatch a conversation with. Mo often told him that his own life wasn’t all fun and laughter. ‘Sometimes I’d give my right arm for a few minutes of peace and quiet’ was one of his typical refrains, delivered while rolling his eyes at how frenetic his existence was, but Bolt knew that Mo wouldn’t change a thing about his own life, and was only saying these things to make him feel better.
‘Needed that, eh?’ said the barman as he returned with the change. He was a young Polish guy called Marius with big tattooed arms, who Bolt occasionally saw doing weights in the gym. ‘Must have been a hard week.’ He looked at the yellowing bruise on Bolt’s left cheek where he’d been struck by Leonard Hope during his escape four days earlier, and which still hurt like hell even though nothing was broken.
‘Hard enough,’ answered Bolt, ordering a second pint. He didn’t think Marius knew that he was the SIO on the Disciple case, even though it was currently the most high-profile murder investigation in the country. He’d only worked behind the bar for about three months, and Bolt tried to keep his personal and professional life as separate as possible. Those people who knew him in here were aware that he was a senior cop, but they never questioned him about it, which suited him just fine.
But Marius the barman was right. It had been a hard week. Leonard Hope’s name and photo had been all over the news, and yet four days on from the discovery of evidence at his home that inextricably linked him to the Disciple murders, he’d still not been arrested. Nor had there been even a single sighting. It was almost as if he’d never existed, a situation that was unheard of in these days of blanket media coverage and security cameras on every corner.
The fact that they’d come so close to catching Hope didn’t help either. It made them look incompetent, and none more so than Bolt himself who, it was reported in the papers, had got to within a yard of Hope, only to lose him when the suspect had turned and knocked him out with a killer punch. The coverage was lurid, and though not entirely true, it had had the desired effect. It had made Bolt look stupid, and he’d wondered several times in the intervening days how long he was going to last as the head of the inquiry.
The realization that he might be ousted from it frustrated him more than anything else about the whole case. It was unfinished business now. He had to be the one who brought down Hope, especially after what they’d found in his loft. A small tin box hidden under the floorboards had revealed a number of items of jewellery belonging to the female victims, some of it bloodstained. Alongside them in the box, in a clear plastic freezer bag and wrapped in clingfilm, had been the left-hand little fingers of the first three female victims. Even more gruesome had been the film footage found hidden away in a file on Hope’s PC. There were three separate films taken at each of the first three murder scenes. They were all very short and concentrated on the torture of the female victims by the man wielding the camera. Bolt had managed to sit through all the footage – seven, interminably long minutes in total – and the horror of it would stay with him for the rest of his days. He’d become used to the savagery of his fellow human beings, having been involved in far too many murder investigations over the years, but he’d never become immune to it, and he’d never come across anything like the extreme sadism that Leonard Hope exhibited. It was for this reason that Bolt wanted to stay involved in this case. He wanted to be the man who read that bastard his rights.
But they had to find him first. And right now they didn’t have a single lead to go on.
In the last few days, a conspiracy theory had emerged in the press that there were two killers in the Disciple murders: Leonard Hope, and a second man who’d helped him escape from the police. There was at least some evidence to back this up. According to Hope’s mobile phone records, the last call he’d received had been while he was driving home to where Bolt and Mo were waiting to arrest him. The call had come through at almost exactly the same time he’d started driving erratically in an effort to shake off the surveillance team following him, almost as if the caller had been warning him that he was being tailed by the police. Hope had then made a call to the same number five minutes later, lasting about thirty seconds, which was when Bolt had seen him on the phone while he was being chased. To add to the mystery, the number in question turned out to belong to an anonymous pay-as-you-go mobile that had only been switched on for the very first time four minutes before the call to Hope had been made, and had been switched off three minutes after the second conversation. It hadn’t been switched on since, and so far they’d drawn a complete blank in finding out who it was that Hope had been speaking to.
Bolt was keeping an open mind on the two-killer theory. It certainly looked as though Hope had been warned that he was under surveillance, which would suggest a second conspirator and, more worryingly, someone connected to the police inquiry. It would also have made it far easier for The Disciple to target couples rather than individuals if there were two of them, rather than one. But Bolt was still far from convinced, and the reason was simple. In the last three days, the inquiry team had turned Hope’s life upside down, and in that time they’d been unable to find a single piece of evidence suggesting he was working with someone else. They’d checked all of Hope’s phone records going back more than three years and, with the exception of that last phone number, they’d traced every person he’d talked to who was still alive (there hadn’t actually been that many), and in the process eliminated all of them as potential suspects. There was nothing on his computer to suggest an online friendship with a kindred spirit (and the film footage didn’t show any accomplice), and none of his neighbours or work colleagues had ever reported seeing him with anyone they couldn’t readily identify.
Leonard Hope had, it seemed, been the classic loner.
Bolt took a big gulp from his second pint, tired of worrying about the case. Up until today, he’d put in fourteen-hour shifts since Hope’s escape and, realistically, there was little more he, or the inquiry team, could do, which was why he’d let most of them go at 5.30 and told them not to come back until Monday morning. There was still the matter of the unidentified DNA sample found at the Rowan/Hanzha murder scene – the one that matched the DNA found on Beatrice Magret’s body fifteen years earlier. The results for that were expected in the next twenty-four hours but, even if it was a match with Leonard Hope’s DNA, which Bolt assumed was likely, it wasn’t going to help them catch him.
The second pint was going down fast and pretty soon he was going to have to make a decision. Grab a takeaway from either the Thai place or one of the local Indians, and settle down at home in front of the TV with a bottle of decent red wine, or make a night of it here, get some food at the bar, and hope that somebody turned up interesting enough to chew the fat with for a couple of hours.
He was still mulling over the alternatives, and the second pint was sitting empty on the bar, when his mobile rang. It was DS Dan Grier, who was in charge of the skeleton crew manning the Disciple inquiry incident room overnight, and Bolt picked up straight away. He’d told Grier only to call him if he had something important, and Grier was the kind of guy who knew not to waste his boss’s time.
‘Sir, I think you need to get down here right away.’ Grier’s voice was grim.
Bolt slipped off his stool and moved away from the bar. ‘What is it?’
‘We’ve got reports of a body over near Maidenhead. They think it’s Leonard Hope.’
‘JESUS CHRIST,’ SAID
Bolt, as he and Mo Khan stared down at the ruined corpse of Leonard Hope. ‘I’m glad I hadn’t got round to eating dinner tonight.’ The two pints of lager he’d drunk in The Pheasant sat heavily in his stomach, making him feel nauseous.
‘I have to say, it’s not a pretty sight,’ said the DI from Thames Valley CID, a big round man called Joe Ruckley, who was standing to Bolt’s right, and whose face was far too cheery under the circumstances.
Leonard Hope lay on his back in a small culvert, partly concealed by brush, about five yards from a path that led down to a road around thirty yards away. The area was partially wooded and there were no buildings nearby. Hope himself was naked, except for a pair of grey boxer shorts. A ring of halogen lamps had been set up round his body to illuminate his many injuries, a significant number of which appeared to have been inflicted by deliberate torture. There were round burn marks the size of fifty-pence pieces all over his torso where a blowtorch, or something similar, had been applied to the skin. Both his nipples appeared to have been burnt off and, where his right eye should have been, there was little more than a charred lump of flesh. There was also a single stab wound to his neck that looked to have severed his carotid artery and was almost certainly the cause of death. It was difficult to tell how long he’d been dead for, or how long he’d lain here (although Bolt didn’t think it could have been that long, because there were no signs that any animals had been at him), but the body in front of them was definitely that of Leonard Hope.
‘There are also burn marks to the groin under the boxers,’ said Ruckley matter-of-factly. ‘Three of them. One to the end of his wanger that’s pretty much sealed the whole thing up down there, and one each to the bollocks. There’s not much left of either of them, and what there is just looks like a couple of half-melted Maltesers. Do you want to take a look?’
Bolt swallowed. ‘Thanks for the kind offer, Joe, but I think we’ll take your word for it. Unless you want to see, Mo.’
‘I think I can picture it well enough in my head,’ said Mo. ‘Far more than I want to.’
Bolt turned back to Ruckley. ‘So what have we got so far?’
‘The body was found by a dog walker at about two thirty this afternoon. The doctor took the body temperature at four p.m. He reckoned he’d been dead for between twenty-four and thirty-six hours at that point. As you can see, he was definitely killed elsewhere. Whoever did it put his pants back on him for some reason, then brought him here, but made no real attempt to hide the body. It’s possible they were disturbed, but probably more likely they just dumped it and left. Obviously, he was tortured for some time before he was killed. The doc reckoned some of those burns could have been done quite a few hours apart, so the killer went to town on him, then finished him off with a stab wound to the throat.’ Ruckley shrugged. ‘That’s pretty much it so far. We’re going to do a fingertip search of the area tomorrow, and SOCO have been over the scene taking samples, but we haven’t turned up anything useful yet.’
Bolt frowned. ‘And the doctor was sure it was twenty-four to thirty-six hours he’d been dead?’
Ruckley nodded. ‘Adamant.’
‘So that means the earliest he died was four a.m. yesterday morning, which is a full two and a half days after he went missing. We need to know what he was doing during that time, and who he was with.’
‘Do you go for that second killer theory they’re bandying around in the papers?’ Ruckley asked him.
Bolt took another look down at the body, no longer feeling any hatred for Leonard Hope. Now he just looked pathetic lying there, pale and mutilated; it was clear that, one way or another, he’d paid the price for the terrible things he’d done. ‘I don’t know what to think,’ he said, turning away. ‘Thanks for your help, Joe. It’s appreciated.’
‘Can we move the body now? The pathologist is waiting for it, and I want to get home for my supper. The wife’s cooking meatballs. I just hope to God she hasn’t burned them. I hate being reminded of work when I’m at home.’ He chuckled at his own joke.
Bolt didn’t join in the laughter. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘It’s all yours. Enjoy dinner.’
He motioned for Mo to follow him and they walked back in the direction of their parked car, and away from the bright glare of the halogen lamps. Mo looked tired and frustrated. The case, it seemed, was getting to him too, and he’d seemed uncharacteristically down when Bolt had phoned him at home – where he’d been watching a movie with his wife and youngest two kids – to tell him the news. Bolt had told him he didn’t need to come out to view the body, but he’d insisted, which was Mo all over. He had an almost annoying sense of duty.