The Hunt (11 page)

‘I never thought I could change so much,’ Rose said.

‘You were completely changed the moment it happened.’ Holt was driving them up into the forested mountains to the east of Sorrento. He drove a Range Rover this time, at least ten years old and with almost two hundred thousand miles on the clock. It smelled as if it had been used to transport animal dung for the last forty thousand of those miles, and the whole driver’s side of the interior was greyed with a fine layer of cigarette ash. Holt smoked foul-smelling tobacco, rollie hanging from one corner of his mouth as he drove. His fine, greying hair flickered in the warm breeze.

Rose thought about what he’d said for a while, leaning back in the seat with her arm resting on the opened windowsill. She looked out across the landscape and thought about never coming here with Adam. Italy had been on their list of things to do. They’d actually had a real list, scribbled in the back of the small notebook he’d often carried with him, and sometimes he would whip the book out and they’d add something more, another dream. Top of the list, the first thing written down, was ‘Have kids’, and after each birth he’d ceremoniously lined the sentence through. Some of the other entries had been ticked off. Many more remained unfulfilled. It was the first time she’d thought of that notebook since the murders. She hated the idea that it might now be in an evidence box somewhere, contents pored over by investigators searching for a marriage problem that had never existed.
How could she have done it?
she imagined people asking.
How could she kill her own children?

But beyond such thoughts lay madness, and she’d pulled herself too far through to submit to that now.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so. Not straight away. I lost myself pretty quickly, but I was just trying to hide from what had happened. Deep down I was still the old Rose, just hanging on. Avoiding looking back. I only really started to change when I came here.’

‘And met me?’ he asked. She already recognised that tone; he was being playful, though most people would have had trouble detecting any trace of humour.

‘Yeah,’ she said. But Rose knew she had to be careful, because of that way he sometimes looked at her. Though she was learning from him and able to bear looking into the future once more, she also had to remember that she hardly knew him at all. Perhaps he was contemplating all the lives he could have lived if things had been different. Maybe some of them were with her.

She’d only once asked him about his own family past, and the expression on his face as he’d turned away dissuaded her from ever asking again. She wasn’t sure whether it was grief or regret. Whichever, it had scarred him badly.

‘That’s me,’ he said. ‘The changing man.’

‘But for the best,’ she said. She’d been sober for almost a month, and though the hankering still sometimes bit in with glass-like teeth, she felt that she’d finally started to emerge from the other side. ‘You brought me through, and you’re helping me move on.’

‘By helping you sober up?’

‘Yeah. And teaching me to kill.’

Holt chuckled, a grating sound that was as close as he came to a laugh. It sounded like an old engine dying down. ‘Rose, I’ve told you before, I can’t teach anyone to kill. I can show you how to follow someone in a crowded street, how to pick a lock, how to avoid being seen, the ranges and capabilities of various weapons. I can tell you how to hold a gun and pull the trigger. But killing someone is something you have to teach yourself.’

‘That part will be easy,’ she said. ‘You’re showing me how to get there.’

Holt drove with one hand and rolled a fresh cigarette with the other. It looked casual, but as with everything she watched him do, Rose knew there was a measured assurance about his actions. His movements were spare but efficient. He turned from the winding mountain road and started down a lane leading into a heavily overgrown ravine. The track was barely visible and looked unused, with plants sprouting from cracked earth and several small rockslides that the Range Rover negotiated with care. The landscape had become more hostile and beautiful the further east they’d driven, and now they were surrounded by steep slopes and deep forests. True wilderness.

‘How many people have you killed?’ she asked. The question just fell out, hanging in the air between them. Ash drifted from his cigarette to swirl across the car.

‘Fifteen,’ he said without hesitation. ‘Close, so I could see them die. Most of them with a gun, three with a knife. One with a broken wine bottle. Others?’ He shrugged. ‘At a distance, remotely, with bombs and machine guns? Many more.’

Rose blinked a few times, trying to compute what he’d said. So many dead at his hand, and here she was willingly riding into the wild countryside with him. And still she struggled to understand the way he sometimes looked at her – not lustfully, but with an indecision that seemed so unlike him.

But she was not afraid. Because Holt had already changed her so much, and if something went wrong she knew she would do her best to fight back. He had made her life mean something once more, and the last thing she believed he wanted was to take it.

They drove on in silence for a while longer, then he parked in the shadow of a cliff and killed the engine. The sudden silence was calming, and Holt sighed and sat back in his seat, tipping his hat over his eyes.

‘And now?’

‘I’ve been driving for three hours, and I’m not as young as I used to be. Now, siesta.’

Leaving Holt fidgeting to get comfortable, Rose jumped from the Range Rover, leaving the door open and looking at their surroundings. The deep, narrow valley was a wild place with no signs of humanity. The trees grew thick down here, but higher up she could see sparser slopes, sun-baked and desolate. A scatter of lizards scampered away into cracks and dark places in the ravine wall, and nearby were signs of a dried-up stream. When the rains came this place would flood.

Rose sat in the shadows and waited, watching the Frenchman snooze in the vehicle.

Killing is something you have to teach yourself
, he’d said. Maybe that was true. But Holt would help her make the grade.

They spent three days parked and camped down in the ravine. He taught her the basics of how to follow someone across such a landscape, staying far enough back to remain hidden, but close enough to not lose your quarry. It was hot, hard, thirsty work, but he didn’t let up. He made Rose carry four litres of water with her when they left their camp in the morning, and she only had more water upon returning after sundown. Four litres felt heavy when they set out, but it was nowhere near enough.

Sometimes he stalked, sometimes he instructed her to stalk him. He talked about footprints and how to tell whether they were left accidentally or on purpose. He told her how to spot movement from a distance with the sun in your eyes. They triangulated sun flashes from uncovered equipment, and sounds from a radio he left tucked behind some rocks.

Once, when Rose had spent three hours tracking Holt towards a small clump of trees and bushes on a steep slope, he leaped from cover and fired his pistol at her. Dirt flicked up around her feet and scratched at her face and eyes, the blasts thumped at her ears, shock sent a cool flush through her that she thought might still her heart. Furious, she stood her ground as he advanced, ready to shout and rage at him. But when he was almost close enough to touch, he raised the gun again and fired it past her right ear.

Rose shouted and went down, hands pressed to the side of her head. On her knees, she looked around as sound slowly began to hiss back in from a hot distance. Holt’s mouth was moving but she heard only a distant mumble, like listening to him four rooms away through closed doors. A low whistling grew in her ears, and then a hum that would last for days.

‘Bastard!’ she said, and Holt raised an eyebrow.

‘We have to work on that,’ he said. ‘Get flustered in a gunfight and you’ll come second. Let’s eat.’

She was with Holt for seventy-three days. She’d lost track, but he had been keeping count. And he never once tried to touch her. She wasn’t sure what she would have done if he had. She was scared of him, she respected him, and however much she learnt and thought she had changed, he was someone from a very different world from hers. But she was not attracted to him, and she could not imagine ever being with another man now that Adam was gone.

It wasn’t the thought of betrayal that chilled, but simply that her life was on hold.

She felt that very keenly. While she was in Italy, learning things she had never imagined, everything else was frozen. Adam and her children were only just dead, no matter how much time had passed. The outside world moved on but nothing changed.

Slowly, the old Rose was eroded while the new Rose built herself up again with new talents, both deadly and subtle. But her deeper, inner self remained – a woman in love, a wife, and a mother in deep mourning. She would not lose her hold on that.

Ten weeks, he told her, was not a very long time. But he also added that with someone like him, it was worth a lifetime of study on her own. The internet might give her a thousand pieces of advice on breaking and entering a target’s property, but Holt was able to show her how it could be done silently, quickly, and with a gun still clasped in one hand. She could buy all manner of surveillance equipment online, but he demonstrated how to track a vehicle with a pair of runner’s GPS watches and a smartphone.

Close to the end of her time with him, the things he was showing her took a subtle change, the emphasis shifted. At the time it didn’t seem strange, but looking back on it she remembered a particular point when he seemed to make that decision. He left her one morning after showing her knife skills, and when he returned that afternoon he brought a pack containing forging paraphernalia. From then, they went from fighting and killing to more covert activities. He seemed to turn even more serious, if that was possible. He’d taught her to kill, now he was coaching her in how to stay alive. How to hide.

They talked a lot about staying below the radar, off the grid. It was easier than she had ever imagined. In her life before, she’d believed that everyone was a number, and to shed that number was almost an impossibility. But Holt told her that he’d existed for the past fifteen years without showing up on any databases, and with no trace of his identity stored or recorded anywhere.

‘What happened fifteen years ago?’ she asked, but Holt ignored the question.

Travelling with false documents, spotting and avoiding CCTV cameras, filtering money from existing bank accounts, making landline calls that did not leave a trace, dealing with mobile phones without leaving an electronic trail
…
Holt schooled her on all this and more.

Killing someone silently and instantly with an eating fork. High-speed driving techniques. How best to clean blood spots out of clothing, and how to dispose of soiled clothing if the bloodstains were too heavy.

Sometimes as the sun went down, they talked about music and movies.

When the final day came, she was not surprised. She knew from before breakfasting together that this was it. They drove out into the hills, and on the way Holt started summarising aspects of what he’d been telling her.

She listened for a while before saying, ‘I know you’re leaving.’

‘Something like this is never finished,’ he said. ‘You can always keep learning.
I’m
still learning. Sometimes, you just have to accept that you know enough.’

‘And I know enough?’

‘You’re an attentive pupil.’ He smiled across at her. Then the smile dropped and he returned his attention to the road ahead.

‘There’s still so much I don’t know,’ Rose said. She suddenly felt afraid, and alone, even though for now he was still with her. Maybe she’d secretly been hoping he always would be.

‘There’s a woman in Switzerland who will give you false documents, for a price. I’ll put you in touch with her. If she knows you come from me, the price should be fairer. And I know a guy in Germany, I’ll give you his address, he can help you with some computer stuff. A real whizz. He once emptied one of the CIA’s covert bank accounts and donated sixteen billion dollars to a donkey sanctuary in Spain.’

‘Lucky donkeys.’

‘Dirty money.’ He emitted that dry, clanking chuckle, then his face dropped a little. ‘I’ve done all I can for you, and more.’

‘Holt, thank you. I’ll see you—’

‘No, you won’t. Not after this. After this, I’ll be disappearing as well.’

‘Aren’t you already disappeared?’

‘Not enough.’ It was a strange comment, and he did not elaborate.

They reached a small lay-by and Holt pulled off, killing the engine and looking at the view. This landscape was wide, wild and harsh, peppered with white farm buildings and small villages.

‘Give me an hour,’ Holt said. ‘Then find me.’

They left the vehicle, he laced up his trainers, and Rose watched him jog away from the road and into the hills.

For the whole hour before she went after him, she wondered whether this was his way of saying goodbye.

Their final evening together was spent at a tourist restaurant in Sorrento.

Rose had found him after a couple of hours, and she realised that he hadn’t taken the day seriously. He’d done little to cover his tracks, and he had been sat waiting for her on a large boulder beside a fast-moving stream. On their way back to his vehicle they had been like friends taking a nice walk in the hills.

The restaurant was bustling with couples and families. They took a table near the back by the doors to the kitchen, and Holt sat facing the entrance.

‘Sparkling water or still?’ he asked.

‘You know how to show a woman a good time.’ Rose laughed, and he joined in. She didn’t think she’d ever heard his laughter so full and deep, as if he was forcing it to blank out a sadness.

It was a relaxed evening with flowing conversation, and as normal a time as she’d ever had with Holt. Knowing that their time together was almost at an end lifted the pressure of having to teach and learn. Now they were simply enjoying each other’s company.