Relentless (23 page)

sent it from an Internet cafe, which means it's going to be very
difficult to track down.'
'But you can tell when it was sent, can't you?'
'Yes, it's dated the eleventh of May. Ten days ago.'
Recent, then, and almost certainly connected to ParnhamJones's
death.
'I suppose this puts a different slant on things, doesn't it?'
said Turner rhetorically.
'It certainly does.'
'No idea what that bit about the dead girl and her father is all
about?'
'Not yet,' answered Bolt, lying for a second time. He asked
Turner to continue his search of the PC's hard drive to see if
there was anything on there that could be connected to the
ransom note, thanked him and hung up.
He looked down at his food with only vague interest. It
smelled good, but he was too busy thinking about this latest
information. He was convinced now that the Lord Chief Justice
had been murdered. He was also nearly certain that John
Gallan had been murdered by the same person or persons
several months earlier. The connections between the two were
too great for it to be otherwise. Gallan's murder had surely
been carried out to put an end to his investigation into the
allegations of paedophilia and murder that had been levelled
against Parnham-Jones, but this begged the question why
Parnham-Jones had also been murdered. It could have been
to silence him and therefore prevent his potentially explosive
secrets being made public. In which case the killer was likely to
be one of his fellow paedophiles, or possibly even someone
from within the establishment trying to snuff out a potential
government-toppling scandal.

But this theory begged another question. The person with the
most obvious motive for killing Parnham-Jones (i.e. to hush up
the scandal) would not have been blackmailing him. Quite the
reverse. He would have been going out of his way not to panic
him into foolish action.
So who the hell had sent the email?

34

It was just after 3 a.m. and the street was silent.
A black cat crept out of the bushes near Irene Tyler's front
door, took one disdainful look at the masked man in black
who'd loomed up in the darkness, and scuttled across his path
before disappearing. Lench couldn't remember whether such a
thing was a sign of good or bad luck, nor did he care. He wasn't
superstitious, and always marvelled at the rank naivety of those
who were. Individuals made their own destiny by their actions
alone. Luck was random. There was no afterlife, no spiritual
world. If there had been, Lench would have been haunted by the
ghosts of each and every one of the forty-three people he'd
murdered in his lifetime, and yet he slept soundly each night and
felt at home in the darkness.
He removed the skeleton keys from his pocket and started on
the five-bar lock on the front door. It took just under a minute
to undo. Then it was the turn of the Yale lock, which took a
matter of seconds. Slowly, he pushed the door open. It was on

a chain. He slid the bolt cutters from his pocket and cut it in the
middle. Irene Tyler was obviously more security-conscious than
most, but it made no difference. Any house could be broken into
if the intruder knew what he or she was doing, and Lench had
had plenty of lessons. He'd seen that the property had a burglar
alarm as he approached it, so now he pocketed the bolt cutters
and took out a laser pen. These days, a lot of homeowners
turned on their burglar alarms at night, activating the ground
floor sensors only, and given the fact that she'd double-locked
the door and put the chain across he had to assume that Irene
Tyler had probably done the same. Inching his way through the
door and into the hallway, Lench spotted the flashing motion
detector on the wall to his right. After a couple of seconds'
careful maneuvering, the laser pen's beam found the centre of
the detector's red light, effectively blinding it.
Shutting the front door with his foot, Lench kept the beam in
exactly the same position and moved sideways across the floor,
one easy step at a time, until he reached the bottom of the
staircase. He mounted the first three steps until the angle of the
laser became too narrow to keep still, but he knew that by this
time he was safe. He switched it off, replaced the pen in his
pocket and carried on climbing.
He found Irene Tyler's room on his first try. It was spacious
and warm, and he could see her in the eerie blue-white light of
the streetlamp outside. She was lying on her left side, tucked up
beneath the covers of her double bed, her long silver hair loose,
snoring lightly. He shut the door behind him and crept wraithlike
over to the bed, his heavy boots making barely a sound. He
could smell her vaguely perfumed scent. She was perhaps sixty
five, her skin lined and sagging a little at the jaw, but she was not
unpleasant to look at.

He leaned down until he was only inches from her face, so
close now that he could suck in her deep, slumbering breaths.
His eel-like tongue slipped out from his mouth, its tip creeping
along the line of her aquiline nose, almost, but not quite, touching
it. He so desperately wanted to lick her, to taste the warmth
of her skin, as he'd done sometimes with his female victims back
in the anarchy of Bosnia, an intimate gesture that he believed
drew him closer to them, and thereby increased his power when
he finally snuffed out their lives.
But he had to be careful tonight, knowing that he couldn't
afford to leave any trace of DNA. Instead, he pushed back
her silver hair and touched a gloved finger to her fleshy
earlobe. Irene flinched but didn't wake up, so he rammed
the finger into her ear and that did the trick. Her eyes shot
open and she tried to sit up but he shoved her back down
and put a hand over her mouth. With the other hand he produced
a long stiletto knife which he gently ran across her
throat.
'Is the burglar alarm on?' he hissed. 'Nod your head for yes,
shake it for no.'
She made some muffled noises and nodded her head.
'When I remove my hand, you're going to give me the code. If
you delay or give me the wrong one, I'm going to cut one of your
eyes out.'
He spoke calmly, almost with reassurance, in a slightly high
pitched Home Counties accent which utterly belied his huge,
looming bulk and somehow made the words he spoke even more
terrifying. The knife slid across the skin until the tip was pressed
against the loose fold of skin just beneath her right eye. There
was no doubt whatever that his threat was serious, and she
nodded again, this time to show she understood. Lench's hand

slipped away from her face, although the knife remained where
it was, causing her to squint.
'Five-two-eight-one.'
'Good.' He took the knife away. 'Turn over.'
'Take what you want, but please don't hurt the children.'
So they were here. That was useful. 'I'm not interested in
them,' he lied, keen to secure her co-operation. 'Now, do what I
say.'
She rolled over onto her front and he produced two pairs of
plastic restraints, one of which he used to bind her wrists, the
other her ankles. She didn't resist, but repeated that he could
take anything he wanted as long as he didn't hurt her grandchildren.
'Open your mouth wide,' he told her, and when she did
so he slipped in a golfball, which he secured in place with a piece
of masking tape.
When he was satisfied that she was helpless, he left the room
and went back down the stairs. He allowed the motion detector
to pick up his movement this time, and the alarm went off in
the house. He made his way over to the keypad and fed in the
numbers, automatically turning it off.
Now he was ready to move. Pulling a mobile from his pocket,
Lench made a quick call. 'Bring the van round the front in one
minute and keep the engine running,' he told the person at the
other end, before starting up the stairs again. The people he was
using tonight were reliable, and proven killers, but he also knew
they had grave doubts about involving children. Lench considered
this a weakness. In his world, there was no such thing as
a boundary that could not be crossed. It was one of the lessons
he'd learned during his four years in the killing fields of the
former Yugoslavia, fighting for whichever side paid him the most money. Everyone, young and old, was potential prey. All

just bags of blood. But not everyone understood that, and in
order to stave off any potential mutiny from his men he'd had to
double their money for the night's work.
The boy and girl were fast asleep in a bunk bed in the back
bedroom, which had been decorated with Disney characters on
the walls and was full of toys and fluffy animals. It was obvious,
even to someone like Lench, that Irene Tyler doted on them. He
crept through the gloom and lifted the boy from the top bunk.
He stirred but didn't wake, and Lench carried him silently
through the house. He could hear Irene Tyler writhing around
on her bed through the door, but knew she was in no position to
do anything.
As he approached the front door, he heard the Bedford
van pull up outside. He pushed open Irene Tyler's front door
with his foot and hurried down the path, the child asleep in his
arms. There were two men in the van, and the passenger got out and opened the double doors. He was no longer wearing a
balaclava but had a baseball cap pulled down low over his
forehead to avoid detection. In the back of the van were two
bare mattresses. Lench placed the boy on one, then headed back
inside, checking for lights in any of the neighbouring houses.
There were none.
The girl turned over and fidgeted in her sleep as Lench
approached the bottom bunk. It looked like she might wake up.
If he had to, he would tape her mouth shut and fit her with one
of the restraints, but he wanted to avoid this since it might create
a problem with his accomplices. But she remained asleep as he
lifted her up and took her down with him.
'I don't like this,' hissed the man in the baseball cap as
he closed the double doors of the van, the children safely inside.

'They'll be fine,' Lench told him, 'but don't fuck up. You've
got one hell of a lot to lose.' Lench had things on both men that
would put them in prison for life, and they knew it.
The man in the cap grunted something and climbed back
in the van. A second later it pulled away, accelerating slowly
down the street and out of sight. The houses were all still
dark. No twitching curtains could be seen. Lench slipped out of
the light of the streetlamp, then walked slowly back to the
house, experiencing a familiar frisson of excitement like soft,
cold fingers dancing upon his groin.
He didn't have to kill Irene Tyler. After all, she hadn't seen
his face and would be able to describe nothing about him with
the possible exception of his voice, which would be of no great
use. He could simply have left her there, trussed up like a pig,
unable to raise the alarm.
But that would have been a terrible waste. His opportunities
to indulge were so rare these days. And, as his commander had
told him years earlier in a burnt-out Muslim village in western
Bosnia while casually surveying a pile of corpses, the last stiffening
remains of a family of ten:
'The dead can't point the finger.'

35

I slept a grey, dreamless sleep. I vaguely remember half-waking
up at some point with a sore shoulder, but not really paying

much attention to it or my many troubles. I was too tired for
that, and I'd slipped under again within moments.
When I woke up properly, it was my face that was sore where
it had been cut with the filleting knife in the university library
the day before. The knife that held my wife's fingerprints. Kathy
was curled up in the passenger seat with her head propped
against the window. She'd taken most of the blanket - a habit of
hers throughout our years of marriage - and even looked quite
comfortable. I wondered whether or not it was the sleep of the
innocent.
I yawned, feeling cold and a little sick, and looked at my
watch. It was twenty to seven. Outside, it was light. I was thirsty,
and hungry too. I'd hardly eaten a thing since yesterday lunchtime,
a period which felt like a whole lifetime ago. Before I'd
gone to sleep the previous night, I'd taken off my shirt and jeans
and put them in the back of the Land Rover to dry out, but
when I put them back on now they were still wet and clammy.
I opened the door and stepped out onto the stone floor of
the barn, stretching my legs. Why didn't Kathy want to go to the
police? That thought worried me more than any other. Was
she really involved in Vanessa's murder? I couldn't see how she
could have been, but I still kept coming back to the big,
immovable question: what the hell were her prints doing on the
knife? It was a question the police would be asking and one she
didn't seem to want to answer. But we were both going to have
to face the music at some point, and it might as well be now. I
was going to turn myself in, even if Kathy was against the idea.
That way at least I could get some protection, both for myself
and the kids.
The kids. In all the drama of the previous day, they'd slipped
my mind. Now I realized I missed them. It was time to end all this.

The passenger door opened and Kathy stepped out of the
Land Rover, looking bleary-eyed. 'Morning,' she said, taking
slow, faltering steps in my direction.
'Hi.'
'Look--'
'We need to go to the police,' I said.
She seemed to think about this for a moment.
'I'm going to go, even if you're not.'
She nodded slowly. 'I'll come with you.'
Even after everything she'd been through, and a night of crap
sleep in a car, she still looked good, and I felt an aching for her
that made my throat go dry. I think if I'd been capable of it I
would have cried, but for some reason domestic woes have never
been able to bring tears to my eyes. I rarely cry, and when I do
it's usually about something I can do nothing about, like my
grandma's death fifteen years ago, or a bad result in a hugely
important football match, and it only happens when I've had too
much to drink, which I guess says something about me. As we
stood there facing each other, I wondered at which point in our
marriage it had all gone wrong. When she'd ceased to see me as
her lover. If I was honest, it was probably a long time before
she'd met Jack Calley.
'How are we going to get to the police station?' she asked.
'Have you still got the keys to your Hyundai?'
'They're in my coat. Are you saying we should sneak back to
the house and drive it away? The'police'll be there, won't they?
There were a lot of gunshots last night, not to mention the fire.'
'Well, if they are, that'll solve our problem, won't it?'
She nodded, but didn't look entirely convinced.
It took us fifteen minutes to retrace our steps back to what
was left of the cottage and when we saw it we were both