Relentless: A Novel Read online

  The gun went off again, and this time I felt the rush of air as the bullet tore past my face, breaking the window behind me. The noise was deafening, the smell of cordite intense. My cheek stung where it had been burned by gunpowder residue. I was thrown off balance. This time Caplin punched me and the blow sent my head flying back into the broken passenger window. Instinctively I relaxed my grip on his gun arm and he jerked his hand away, freeing it.

  The driver in the car behind us, clearly a brave man, tooted his horn, leaning on it for a good five seconds. At the same time I blinked against the pain of the blow and saw that Caplin’s gun was now pointed at my midriff. Strangely, I didn’t feel any fear, just a sense of resigned weariness. I no longer had any energy left to fight. If it was time to die, then so be it.

  ‘You fucking idiot,’ he said contemptuously. ‘You never know when to stop, do you?’

  ‘Were you lying about Kathy?’ I asked. ‘Her affair?’

  The guy behind us, who was either very shortsighted or suicidal, blasted away on the horn again.

  Caplin looked at me as though I was mad to ask this question at such a fateful point in my life. ‘No,’ he answered. ‘I wasn’t.’ Then he did a strange thing. He apologized. ‘I never wanted to get your kids involved. You’ve got to know that. I don’t hurt kids.’

  I wasn’t sure what to say. Instead, I looked at the gun, which was still pointed at my midriff. In the end I settled for a heartfelt plea: ‘Don’t shoot me.’

  ‘I’m not going to,’ he said. Almost to himself, he added, ‘Christ, why the fuck did I offer you a lift?’

  Then, turning the gun round, he put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  54

  ‘So, where am I taking you to?’ he asked.

  I had to think about it for a moment. ‘Home,’ I said, but I wasn’t really sure that it was any more. I asked him if he knew how to get there.

  Bolt nodded, and opened the driver’s-side door. ‘I was there last night.’

  ‘Is the place OK? Someone, one of Lench’s people, broke in yesterday afternoon. I saw him inside.’

  ‘It’s secure,’ he answered, getting in. ‘They’ve had a police guard on it.’

  I got in the other side and he switched on the engine. The clock on the dashboard said 14.35. As I fastened my seatbelt, Bolt drove out of the car park and through Hambleden village. There were more people around than earlier – talking in small groups, some on doorsteps – and two uniformed police officers were speaking to someone outside the pub. There’d been a lot of drama here this morning. You don’t expect a gun battle in a picturesque village, but then things seemed to be changing a lot these days.

  I asked if he minded if I smoked. I’d been given a pack of Benson and Hedges earlier by a sympathetic detective when I’d been taken back to the station after the incident with Caplin, and I now found that I was desperate to have another. A bad sign.

  Bolt gave me a mildly disapproving sideways look, and sighed. ‘I guess after all you’ve been through it’d be a little bit cruel not to let you. Can you open the window, though?’

  I did as he asked and lit up, taking a long draw. It tasted good, but I noticed that my hands were still shaking a little. It had been a long twenty-four hours. They’d released Kathy on unconditional bail, and without charge, an hour earlier and she’d driven her car back to London to get the children, telling me that I could come back to the house later. She’d looked pale and drawn, the shock of the deaths of her mother and two lovers carved deep into her face, but remained remarkably lucid and calm. She hadn’t explained herself, just given me a small nod to acknowledge my hurt before turning away with her solicitor in tow.

  I’d had to stay behind to answer questions relating to the death of DCI Caplin, and had given a lengthy statement. There was a sense of shock among the officers questioning me that one of their own could have been involved in the bloody events that had started a day earlier. This shock had become pronounced when I’d suggested that I thought Caplin’s colleague, DC Ben Sullivan, might also be involved. It struck me in the midst of my confrontation with the DCI that Sullivan matched the height and build of the man who’d attacked me in the library, and who’d appeared at the holiday cottage the previous night with Lench, Mantani and Caplin. I didn’t know whether anyone had been sent to interview or arrest him, so I asked Bolt.

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ he told me. ‘I’ve been suspended.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ I said, and I genuinely was. I owed Bolt a huge favour, and in the end, suspended or not, he was the only man I actually trusted to drive me back to London on the second attempt. The Reading police hadn’t been too happy about this, but I’d insisted, and they’d given us both a lift back to his car in Hambleden.

  I took another draw on the cigarette. I felt like talking. ‘You know, I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do now that me and Kathy are in the situation we’re in.’

  ‘Do you think it’s redeemable?’ he asked. ‘You and her?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Not after all this. I don’t think I even know her any more.’ I sighed, trying to articulate my current emotions. ‘It’s a strange feeling, you know. Empty. Like my life – everything I knew, everything I loved, everything – it’s like it’s all just ended.’

  ‘It’s a shock, Tom. But you’ll get over it.’

  ‘Easy for you to say, Mr Bolt.’

  ‘You’re not my prisoner. You can call me Mike.’

  ‘Well, Mike, put bluntly, I’m fucked, and I don’t think anyone knows exactly how that feels. Even you.’

  Bolt didn’t say anything for a few moments as he pulled out onto the main road, heading north towards High Wycombe and the M40. The road was busier, filling up with Sunday drivers enjoying the greenery of this pleasant pocket of England now that the sun had managed to break through the worst of the clouds.

  When the detective next spoke, his words were thoughtful and tinged with a melancholy I wouldn’t have associated with a man like him. ‘The thing about life is that it can run in a smooth line for years on end, so smooth sometimes that you take the whole thing for granted. Tragedies happen in far-off places, involving people you don’t know. Then, bang, out of the blue you hit a bend in the road and suddenly your whole life’s been turned on its head. That’s what’s happened to you, and three years ago that’s exactly what happened to me. So, yeah, take my word for it, Tom. I know what you’re going through.’

  We slipped into an uneasy silence. Eventually, my interest pricked, I asked him what had happened to him.

  ‘My wife was killed in a car crash,’ he answered, without looking at me.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’

  ‘The reason I’m telling you this is that life does come back to you. It takes time, it’s a hard, lonely road, but eventually you learn to get back some normality.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.

  ‘So am I. I was driving.’

  I was shocked. ‘Jesus, that must have been hard.’

  ‘It was. Even now, three years on, I have no recollection of the crash itself, or what led up to it. We’d been for dinner at a friend’s place. I remember arriving there, and I remember the first half an hour or so of the evening, but then the whole thing’s a blank until I woke up in hospital twelve hours later. I had severe abdominal injuries and internal bleeding, but my wife was worse, a lot worse. Her parents agreed to turn off her life support system three days later. I was too ill to make the decision. I was too ill even to leave my bed and see her. We’d been married four years and she was two months pregnant.’

  ‘Christ, Mike, I don’t know what to say.’

  He sighed, and I saw his expression harden. ‘You’ve been through one hell of a lot in the past day. More than most people will ever go through in their lives. You’re lucky to be alive. So was I. When they pulled me from the wreckage of my car, it was touch and go. I didn’t think I was so lucky at the time, though. As soon as I heard what had h
appened to Mikaela, I wished I was dead. No question. The six weeks I spent in that hospital, lying there helpless while my injuries slowly healed, were the worst of my life. The next six months, sat at home on sick leave with all the reminders of our time together, weren’t much better either. But eventually I got back to work, I moved house . . . I moved on, I suppose. I still think about Mikaela every day. I still wonder what would have happened if we’d stayed in that night, how life would have turned out. Family, children, a house in the suburbs. But I try not to dwell on it. Life goes on. You’ve got no choice but to get on with it.’

  ‘Is that how you got those scars? In the car accident?’

  He nodded, touching a finger to the S-shaped pink slash that ran above his jawline. ‘A constant reminder,’ he said. ‘In case I ever get too complacent.’

  I took a last drag on my cigarette and chucked it out of the open window. ‘I think I’m going to change jobs,’ I announced. ‘I hate being a fucking software sales manager.’

  I thought of Wesley’s oily smile and horseshit motivational speeches, and remembered that today I’d shot a man, and that somehow this meant that Wesley could never intimidate me again. I imagined standing up during the next weekly sales meeting and, instead of going through a list of frankly imaginary current business prospects in the hope that they’d be enough to appease him, simply announcing that I had none whatsoever, and what’s more I was quite happy with this state of affairs, before sitting back down with a big grin on my face. I could imagine the look of shock on his face as he realized that his supreme authority as Vice-President Sales of Ezyrite Software Services was being challenged, and that when it came down to it he wasn’t as charismatic, popular and invincible as he’d always thought.

  ‘Do you enjoy being a copper?’ I asked Bolt.

  He appeared to think about this for a few moments. ‘I do when I get a result, because then you can see that you’re making some sort of difference. But I don’t like it when I can’t get a complete line on what’s going on. When there are loose ends that need tying up. Like this case. Why don’t you fill me in on what you know?’

  ‘But if you’re suspended, surely it won’t make any difference. I’ve already said everything I know in the interview.’

  ‘Humour me,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a forty-five-minute drive ahead of us.’

  I was reluctant to go through the story again. I didn’t much like being reminded of all the details. But Bolt struck me as the sort of man who didn’t very easily take no for an answer, and who would probably take my reluctance as a sign of guilt. So I went through everything in chronological order, with him regularly interrupting with perceptive questions.

  When I’d finished he asked me why I thought Jack Calley had called me even though we hadn’t spoken in four years, particularly as he was having an affair with my wife.

  ‘He said he wanted me to help him.’

  ‘What possible help could you provide? I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, but I don’t see how you, a man ten miles away from where he was being chased, could assist him in any way. If I was him, I would have dialled nine-nine-nine.’

  I shrugged. ‘So would I, but who knows what goes on in the mind of someone in that situation?’

  ‘Well, you must know,’ he said. ‘You’ve been in that position several times over the past twenty-four hours and you’ve told me that when you were being interrogated and threatened with torture, if you’d known what the hell your interrogators wanted you’d have told them everything straight away. But it sounds like Jack didn’t.’

  ‘He got freed by Kathy. Then he made a break for it.’

  ‘But he was tortured prior to that, and then, what did you say was the last thing you heard him say on the other end of the phone? Your address, wasn’t it? He gave them your address.’

  I nodded slowly. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Why? If what you say is true—’

  ‘It is true.’

  ‘If Calley had handed the key these men were looking for to your wife, why not just tell them that your wife was in the house with him? Why give them your address?’

  I’d been thinking about this for a while today. ‘My guess is he was trying to protect her. Throwing them off her scent by sending them to our house. Perhaps he thought that if he could let me know what was going on, that they were after Kathy, I could get her away from there.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he mused, although something in his tone suggested he wasn’t entirely convinced.

  I played Jack’s final phone call over in my mind, and wondered whether he’d been trying to warn me when he’d shouted out my address to his pursuers. To let me know they were coming so I could get out. The last act of a man who’d once been my best friend. I liked to think so, but, as with everything else, I couldn’t be sure.

  I decided it was time to ask Bolt a question since he clearly had doubts about the reasons behind the call. ‘You’re the detective,’ I said. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think,’ he answered, looking at me out of the corner of his eye, ‘that your wife’s hiding something.’

  I gave a humourless laugh. ‘I think she’s been hiding a lot of things.’

  55

  Bolt cooked himself pasta sauce that evening – a slow dish of tomatoes, Spanish ham from the local deli, fresh garlic and spring onions, chilli and parmesan. He served it on a bed of penne with a glass of dry Aussie Chardonnay on the side. He tried to forget that he’d killed a man that morning. It wasn’t easy, but at least the food tasted good and the wine went down well. He wondered what he was going to do now that he was suspended. He’d missed his Dorset fishing trip; a few days’ salmon fishing in the west of Ireland to make up for it sounded an attractive proposition. He knew he needed the break, and thanks to his single status and the ultra-cheap rent on his apartment he wasn’t short of cash. He would have to make himself available to the PCC, but that didn’t mean that he had to sit on his arse at home waiting for them to call. The speed they usually worked, it would probably be August by the time they turned up with their reams of questions and stern, officious stares. He might as well do something productive in the meantime.

  But, as he’d said to Tom Meron, he didn’t like loose ends, and elements of this case still bugged him. It also bugged him that he was no longer privy to the information being garnered by the various investigation teams. He was out in the cold. It made trying to find the solution to what had happened – what the safety deposit box actually contained, who the hell wanted its contents so badly, and why – near enough impossible.

  He finished the Chardonnay, and his thoughts turned to Mikaela. He was surprised he’d told Meron as much as he had. It wasn’t like him to talk about what had happened that night. He’d always preferred to take the exact opposite of the route the bereavement counsellors recommended, and brood alone. But he’d felt sorry for Meron, sitting in the passenger seat, his face hollow with the shock of the seismic changes in his life, and the loss that was a part of it. He hadn’t told him everything, though. There were secrets he kept that no-one would ever know. That he hadn’t wanted the child Mikaela was carrying, had still felt he wasn’t ready; how unsupportive he’d been as a husband in those final weeks, even though he’d agreed to go through with starting a family; how at the time he was in the habit of drinking at, or occasionally above, the drink-drive limit when he was out for the evening; and how he still wasn’t sure whether or not he’d had alcohol on that fateful night. How the couple whose house they’d been at – Mikaela’s friends Chris and Sharon – had avoided him ever since the accident, and how he was never sure whether or not they blamed him for what had happened. He never told anybody about these things, or about the occasional crippling attacks of guilt he experienced when he went over them in his mind. Nor would he ever do so.

  He felt an attack coming now, a leaden cloak of melancholy that left unchecked would drag him down into a slow depression. In an effort to stave it off, he walked over to the window and loo
ked down at the bright lights of the street below. It was quieter than usual, being a Sunday evening, but people still wandered up and down. A bus snaked past and stopped outside the Feathers, the pub he drank in sometimes. Two young couples disembarked, their laughter drifting up towards him, and walked to the Thai place, thirty yards further down the road. One of the girls leaned into her boyfriend and whispered something in his ear. They kissed, and Bolt looked away, feeling like an interloper.

  He refilled his glass and took a long sip, wondering whether it might be worth popping down to the Feathers for a couple of pints. He knew the landlord pretty well and he was usually good for a chat when the bar was quiet. He could do with the company and it would help to take his mind off things.

  His mobile rang. He went over to the table in the lounge area and picked it up.

  It was Mo. ‘Hello, boss, everything OK?’ His voice seemed flatter than usual, the tone cautious.

  ‘Mo, how’s it going?’

  ‘I’m OK. I’ve been busy. What about you? I heard about the shooting this morning.’

  ‘He had a gun,’ Bolt said, maybe a little too quickly. ‘I gave him a chance to surrender.’

  ‘DCS Evans says he’s hoping you’ll be back on duty soon.’

  ‘Him and me both. I’m not the kind of person who likes sitting around twiddling his thumbs. You made the call to the police then, about the kids?’

  ‘Just like you said.’

  Bolt knew his friend wanted to ask him how he’d come by the information he’d called in, so he told him. ‘The guy I shot told me where the kids were. I shot him once in the belly when he aimed his gun at me, and when he went down I asked him where they were being held. He told me, but then he went for the gun again. That’s when I shot him a second time.’