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Chapter 26

Kate jogged across the road to the tennis club car park where Paul was standing beside the car, fiddling with his mobile phone. His face lit up with delight when he saw Kate, but when he saw her expression his smile vanished.

‘What is it?’

‘We’ve got to get out of here. Now.’

‘Why? What’s going on?’

Kate felt like the old woman who’d swallowed a fly . . . and a spider and the rest of the menagerie: panic wriggled inside her. Why did Paul insist on knowing what was going on before he would do as she asked? It was such a typical male trait. She just wanted them out of here, this second.

‘Get in the car and I’ll tell you later.’

Still, he hesitated.

‘Come on.’

‘All right. But I wish you’d tell me.’ He got into the driver’s seat and Kate jumped in beside him. She dropped the envelope Mrs Bainbridge had given her on the back seat.

‘It’s Mrs B,’ she said. ‘When you scared her earlier, she called someone, and they’re on their way now.’

His eyes widened. ‘What, the police?’

‘No – I wish it was. Listen, Mrs B was given a number to call if anyone ever turned up and started asking questions about Leonard. That’s what she did earlier, after you went into her garden.’

‘What? Who did she call?’

‘I don’t know exactly. But she almost shoved me out the door and told me I had to make myself scarce. She said I was in danger if I didn’t get away.’

Paul had inserted the key into the ignition, ready to start the engine, but now he removed his hand from it. ‘But these people might be able to give us the answers we’re looking for. We should stay and wait for them.’

He pushed open the door and got out.

‘No! Paul, don’t.’

She muttered a curse, then chased Paul as he marched across the main road towards Mrs Bainbridge’s house. She could see why he was reluctant to run away, but he hadn’t witnessed how palpable and contagious Mrs Bainbridge’s fear had been. There was so much Kate and Paul didn’t know, and whoever was on their way, they didn’t sound like people willing to sit down and provide them with answers over a nice cup of tea.

Paul had almost reached the house, Kate a few steps behind, when a black Audi pulled up. At the same time, Mrs Bainbridge came out of her front door and made ‘go away’ gestures to Paul, her face pale with fright.

The Audi stopped a few metres from Mrs Bainbridge’s house and a man got out.

Kate felt her knees buckle and she almost fell. He was older and was wearing sunglasses, and she hadn’t thought about him for sixteen years. She flashed on an image of him in the garden at the CRU, turning to watch her as she walked past.

Sampson. That was his name. Stephen had warned her to stay away from him, that there was something predatory about him. She didn’t need to be persuaded: he gave her the creeps. His chiselled good looks were cold and evil.

‘Kate,’ he said, unsmiling but intense. ‘Good to see you again.’

‘Sampson.’

Paul looked at both of them and took a step forward, saying, ‘Listen, Mr Sampson, or is that your first name? I wonder if . . .’

Sampson pulled out a gun and pointed it at Paul’s chest.

Paul immediately put his hands up at shoulder height, the blood draining from his face. Sampson took a step towards him, the gun held steady. Kate watched Sampson’s finger tense against the trigger. She shouted, ‘Paul!’ and then somebody screamed, and the bang was quieter than she’d always imagined a gunshot to be. She realised she had closed her eyes, and when she opened them she expected to see Paul’s body sprawled on the asphalt. But Paul was still standing. So was Sampson. The body on the ground was small, and old.

With surprising agility for an elderly woman, Jean Bainbridge had run in front of Paul, just as Sampson squeezed the trigger, blocking the bullet with her body. She had saved Paul’s life.

Kate felt a pain go through her like she’d been shot herself. At the same moment, Paul launched himself at Sampson.

Paul was lucky: Sampson was momentarily off balance. Paul struck him in the stomach and Sampson gasped, swinging up the gun to hit Paul around the head, but Paul lifted his arm and blocked the blow. The gun fell from Sampson’s grasp and Kate stepped forward and kicked it away. It span across the road and under a parked car.

Sampson moved towards the gun, and Paul shouted, ‘Run!’

They sprinted towards the tennis club, Paul ahead again, looking back over his shoulder to make sure Kate was with him, reaching back so she could grab his hand. He could see that Sampson was on his belly, trying to extract his gun from under the parked car. Paul yanked open the door of his own car – thank God they hadn’t locked it – and leaned over and shoved open the passenger door. A second later he started the car and they skidded out of the car park.

There was Sampson, on his feet now, gun in hand. Paul drove straight at him. Sampson fired but the bullet bounced off the bodywork, and then he had to jump backwards onto the pavement to stop Paul from knocking him over. Paul swerved around Mrs Bainbridge’s body and watched the mirror anxiously, as Sampson ran towards his Audi and climbed in, giving Paul and Kate just a few seconds’ lead before he managed to accelerate after them.

‘Fuck, he’s coming. Which way shall I go?’ There was no response. ‘Kate?’

She turned to him, her eyes wide with shock. ‘He killed Mrs Bainbridge.’

Paul reached and touched Kate’s arm. She was trembling. Or was that him? ‘Who the hell is this guy?’

‘He was at the CRU.’

Very quickly, they left the village behind, the streets of Penkridge giving way to countryside. They passed a nature reserve sign and Kate wondered frantically if they were doing the right thing, leaving the safety-in-numbers of civilisation behind. It was too late to turn back now though. Paul swung the car left. The road was clear ahead, but that would help Sampson catch them as much as it would help them get away. Sampson’s Audi was much faster than Paul’s seen-better-days Peugeot 205. They would need to outmanoeuvre him. But Paul, who didn’t know these roads, had no advantage. His hands, sweaty with stress, slipped on the wheel as he spun it and turned right onto another quiet country road, putting his foot down. Kate watched the speedometer rise until they were doing eighty.

The Audi was still close behind them.

‘Have you got your seatbelt on?’

‘Yes, of course. Paul, we have to . . .’

‘Hold on tight.’

Kate looked up and saw what Paul had spotted a moment before: an enormous, bright green four-wheel-drive tractor trundling around the bend ahead. Paul floored the accelerator, moved to the wrong side of the road – the right – and headed straight towards it. Kate gasped and closed her eyes.

It all happened in a couple of seconds. Paul drove straight at the tractor, waving his arms at the driver, motioning for him to change lanes. Behind him, Sampson was still on the left, a second behind them, obscured behind the tinted glass of his car windscreen.

Kate pushed herself back in her seat and whispered a rapid prayer.

The tractor driver pulled on the steering wheel of his huge, unwieldy vehicle, heaving it onto the left side of the road. Paul spun the wheel again, tyres squealing, swinging to the right and shooting past the tractor – which was now directly in Sampson’s path. As they cleared the tractor, they both heard another screech of brakes, the angry stabbing of a car horn.

‘We’re still alive,’ Kate said quietly.

Paul twisted his head and took a glance backwards. ‘No sign of him, not yet. But he won’t be held up for long.’ They drove around the next bend, moving steadily upwards until they came over the crest of a hill. Farmland stretched to either side of them, sheep grazing in silence behind low stone walls. Some poor creature lay in the road, its fur matted with blood: roadkill.

‘Do you have any idea where we are?’ Paul asked, as they continued at high speed along the empty road. ‘Apart from the middle of nowhere.’

Kate snapped out of her trance. ‘I think this is Cannock Chase.’

‘How far till the next town?’

‘I don’t know. I think if we keep heading north we’ll reach Stafford, I saw a signpost back there.’

She looked out the back window and saw the black Audi appear over the crest of a shallow hill and start closing on them.

‘He’s catching us. Paul, he’s catching . . .’

‘I know, I know. I’m going as fast as I can. The road atlas should be on the back seat. Can you try to find out how far it is till Stafford?’

Kate retrieved it and started flicking blindly through the pages trying to find the road they were on. She couldn’t even find the right page. Why the hell didn’t Paul have Sat Nav in this cruddy old banger?

Calm down, she told herself. She used a technique that she had learned when Jack was a baby, screaming in the night, when nothing would make him stop crying and she felt as if she would explode from the stress. She started to recite the periodic table under her breath: H – hydrogen; Li – lithium; Be – beryllium . . . She knew people would think this technique weird, but it worked for her – immediately, she felt soothed by the effort of concentrating, her brain working again in the way it should, and she was able to check the map at the front and quickly turn to the correct page in the atlas.

Kate found Penkridge, where they’d seen Mrs Bainbridge die, and traced their route with her finger.

‘I should have bought a decent car, one with GPS,’ Paul muttered. Kate bit her tongue to prevent herself from saying anything, then pointed at the wiggling line indicating the road they were travelling along. ‘We’re heading into the forest. I reckon Stafford is about fifteen minutes away.’

As she spoke, a wall of trees appeared ahead of them. Moments later they were speeding through the forest, pine and lark and birch trees lining the narrow road.

‘Oh shit,’ said Paul.

‘What?’

He nodded at the rear-view mirror. Sampson’s black Audi was behind them again, its reflection growing larger by the second.

‘If Stafford is still fifteen minutes away, we can’t outrun him. He’s much faster than us. Maybe we should stop, confront him?’

‘No. He’ll kill us.’

At that moment, just as Sampson was gaining on them, a stag appeared from between the trees and ran into the road. Paul swerved, Kate yelled out, and for a moment they left the smooth surface of the road, the car vibrating violently as Paul wrestled with the steering wheel. Somehow, they didn’t hit a tree and made it back onto the road, Paul panting with the effort of saving their lives.

Behind them, Sampson was less lucky: he too spun the wheel to avoid the stag, and found himself completely off the road, his car lurching to a halt an inch away from a pine tree. As the stag trotted away into the trees, oblivious to Sampson’s murderous glare, he reversed back onto the road, giving Kate and Paul more precious seconds with which to gain a lead over their pursuer.

Paul laughed wildly. ‘A tractor and a fucking stag. If I was religious I’d think someone was looking after us. What next?’

They headed deeper into the forest and Paul continued to drive as fast as he could on this bumpy road. The forest began to thin – and just as it did, the black Audi reappeared in the rear-view mirror.

Kate grabbed his arm. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘Hold tight again.’

As they emerged from the forest, Paul spotted a turning to the right, a crooked wooden signpost pointing towards what was probably a tiny hamlet with more deer than people, but they had no choice. They had to find help.

They swung into the lane and found themselves driving down a curving, narrow lane, overhung with trees. They crossed a bridge over a gurgling stream, the suspension shaking as they hit a bump in the road. Kate had had dreams like this – nightmares in which she was being chased, and her pursuer was close behind, gaining by the second, the panic growing ever more intense. In those dreams she was always saved when she woke up.

She fished her mobile phone out of her bag.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Calling 911 – I mean, 999.’

He reached out and snatched the phone from her.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I don’t want you to call the police.’

‘Why the hell not? We’re being chased by a guy who just murdered someone. If I call the police they might be able to get someone out here. Someone to stop Sampson.’

He took the next bend at high speed. They swayed in their seats. ‘No. I’m sorry – I’ll explain later.’

‘No.’ She tried to grab the phone and he snatched it away, throwing it out of the window.

She gawped at him. ‘What the hell did you do that for?’

‘I’ll tell you later.’

She shrank away from him. ‘Who are you?’

‘What? You know who I am.’

Kate pressed herself against the door. ‘I don’t understand why you just . . .’

Bang.

Kate jumped in her seat. ‘What was that? Did we hit something?’

‘Fuck’s sake. He’s shooting at us.’

Another bang.

‘And you wouldn’t let me call the police?’ Kate started to cry. ‘He’s going to kill us. Oh, Jack . . . I’ll never see Jack again.’

Paul grasped her hand. She tried to pull it away but he held firm, steering the car with one hand. ‘Kate, listen. You have to stay calm. I’m going to get us out of this. And then I’ll explain about the police. I promise. Just trust me. Okay?’

She blinked. ‘Okay.’

‘Good. Now, see that house in the distance? The big white one? That’s where we’re going.’

It looked like the kind of house the lord of the manor would live in. Huge, picturesque and surrounded by rolling fields. A hill rose up behind it, with a few other small stone buildings dotted around. The narrow lane they were driving down widened out as they reached the hamlet of Little Marrow, and another thin road led towards the large house. Paul turned into it and carried on at top speed. A pair of horses watched them over a fence. A second later, the Audi turned onto the road behind them. This was what it felt like to be hunted.

‘Keep your head down,’ Paul instructed.

They swerved left onto a road marked ‘Private – Keep Out’ and found themselves at the end of a long driveway, the start of which was marked by a gate that stood open. They drove up it, and the house loomed into view.

Gravel crunched beneath their tyres as they approached the house – more of a mansion – and saw a group of five men and a woman, all in their fifties and sixties, dressed in Barbour jackets and wellies.

All the men were carrying shotguns. It was a shooting party, heading into the countryside to shoot pheasants or rabbits. A couple of English pointers ran around their heels. All of them, people and dogs, stared at the Peugeot as it came to a halt, and Kate and Paul jumped out of the car.

The dogs came barrelling towards them. Kate held her breath, but the dogs just sniffed at her, then Paul. The woman in the Barbour squinted at them.

‘Can I help you?’ Her voice was so upper crust it was almost regal. Then, to the dogs: ‘Plum, Pudding, get back here.’

One of the shotgun-wielding men stepped forward. Kate had lived in America, supposedly a country populated by NRA-approved trigger-happy killers, if you believed the English media, and had never seen a gun, not once. Now, in England, she had seen enough in one day to last a lifetime.

‘What’s going on?’ the man asked in a voice that matched the woman’s.

Paul said, ‘I’m really sorry to intrude on you but we need your help. We’ve . . . run out of petrol.’

The man looked over Paul’s shoulder. ‘And what about him? Has he run out too?’

They looked back. Sampson’s black Audi waited menacingly at the end of the drive.