Casey pulled a face. ‘Do I have to wear that?’

‘Unless you want to freeze to death, yes.’

Reluctantly, Casey started removing her clothes, and as Jess wrapped one of the towels round her, the door opened and Amanda walked in, wearing a concerned expression. ‘There’s no landline,’ she said simply.

‘No mobiles lying around?’ asked Jess, knowing there wouldn’t be.

Amanda shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

The implication was obvious. They might have found shelter but, in the end, they were still trapped out here in the woods.

Twenty-one

Today 18.25

KEOGH WAS AGITATED. He hadn’t heard from Mehdi for over an hour and hadn’t been able to raise him on the satellite phone. The Algerian was reliable, which meant that either he’d mislaid the phone or, more likely, something had happened to him. It was a problem. He needed Mehdi to guard the path along the river that led into the town of Tayleigh, in case Amanda Rowan had decided to risk trying to get there that way. Now they were just going to have to hope that she hadn’t, and had opted for the cross-country route that MacLean had predicted she would. Otherwise, the whole op was finished.

He was parked in a sheltered lay-by with a thick line of forest on one side and a long, rolling, gorse-covered hill on the other. Next to him, in the four-by-four’s passenger seat, sat Sayenko, the tall, cadaverous Ukrainian. Keogh hadn’t allowed him to smoke in the car, and had warned him against smoking outside and leaving cigarette butts with DNA on them where they could later be found in the police search of the area that would inevitably follow, but Sayenko had been insistent. He needed his cigarettes, and he made it clear that he was going to have them. So they’d come to a compromise. Sayenko would smoke outside and then dispose of his butts in the four-by-four. Now both it and he stank of stale smoke, making Keogh’s mood even darker than it had been already.

He disliked having men under his command who were prepared to defy him, but the problem was that Sayenko was a longstanding colleague of the boss’s, and the boss rated him highly, so he didn’t have a lot of choice. He looked a cold bastard too, thought Keogh, with his tight, heavily lined face set naturally in an undertaker’s frown, and narrow, flint-like eyes that poked out from the bony contours of his skin like malignant probes. Sayenko didn’t say much, which suited Keogh just fine. He wasn’t the kind of man who enjoyed small talk, nor was he interested in other people. Instead, he stared out of the window into the darkness. It was rugged, hard country out here, with far too many hiding places. But it also meant there were very few people around. In the ten minutes they’d been sitting here, not a single car had driven past, which meant they were unlikely to be disturbed in their work.

For a moment Keogh thought back to how he’d got himself in this position, leading a team of killers on a manhunt through the Scottish wilderness.

It had begun three months after he’d got out of prison for manslaughter. He’d still been on parole, living in a shitty little bedsit in an even shittier part of London, with no money, no prospects, and only a heart full of bitterness, when one day he got a knock on his front door. The visitor was an old detective colleague of his – a guy he hadn’t seen nor heard from in more than five years – called Jerry Johnson. The thing was, Keogh had never liked Johnson, who was a seedy bastard with a reputation for using prostitutes, and who was married to a stone-faced Thai bride who looked more like a man than he did. He didn’t think Johnson cared much for him either. He’d never been in contact in those months when Keogh had been awaiting trial, so it had been a real shock seeing him standing in the grimy hallway outside his door.

‘I’ve got a proposition for you,’ Johnson had said simply, not bothering with any niceties. ‘Something I think you’ll like.’

Keogh had been intrigued enough to invite him in, not knowing what to expect. Without bothering to sit down, Johnson had told him he was acting as a middleman for an unnamed individual who wanted to give Keogh a job.

Keogh had asked what the job entailed.

‘You’re going to be a fixer,’ Johnson explained. ‘A man who does what it takes to make the boss’s problems go away.’

‘And what does the boss do that he needs his problems fixing by an ex-con like me?’

‘He makes money,’ said Johnson. ‘Lots of it. Sometimes people try to get it off him. Other times they stand in the way of him making it and need to be moved out of the way.’

The inference was obvious. Johnson represented some kind of gangster, which surprised Keogh. He might have been sleazy, but Keogh had never taken him as corrupt. Johnson had told him that the pay would be good, the work ongoing, and that he had twenty-four hours to think about it.

‘I don’t need twenty-four hours,’ Keogh had replied. ‘I’ll tell you right now. I’m in.’

Johnson had given him one of his leering smiles. ‘I knew you would be,’ he said. And then he’d turned and left, and Keogh had never seen him again. The boss, it turned out, liked to keep the cops on his payroll away from the other workers.

The rest, though, was history. Keogh had come on board and had taken to his new role like a duck to water. Before today, he’d killed three times in cold blood on behalf of his boss, and had never felt an ounce of regret, although he was beginning to wonder if, by taking on this particular assignment, he’d bitten off more than he could chew.

He looked at his watch. Almost half past six. MacLean should be here with the dogs any time now; then they could begin the pursuit of Amanda Rowan. The important thing was to extract the target, get rid of any witnesses, and get out fast.

The passenger door opened and Sayenko started to get out.

‘Where are you going?’

The Ukrainian held up an unlit cigarette as he slipped off his seat, shutting the door behind him, and Keogh wondered if he was going to be fit enough to take part in the hunt, given that he was close to being a chain smoker.

At that moment, headlights appeared on the horizon, the first ones they’d seen since they’d parked up. Keogh looked for Sayenko but he’d slipped into the undergrowth, and all that was visible was the glowing ember of his cigarette. Keogh slid down in his seat, not wanting to be seen either. Thanks to the deaths so far, there was going to be a major police investigation into what had gone on here today. The four-by-four had false plates and would be at the bottom of a loch somewhere in twenty-four hours, but Keogh had a criminal record and, though his scars were faded, they still made him stand out.

As the headlights came closer, Keogh’s satellite phone rang.

‘It’s me,’ said MacLean as the Toyota Land Cruiser he was driving pulled up opposite the Land Rover.

Replacing the phone in his jacket, Keogh sat back up in the seat and got out of the car. He could see two big dogs moving about behind a mesh barrier in the back of the Land Cruiser. There was also someone else in the car, sitting behind MacLean. As Keogh approached the driver’s side door, he peered in and got a better look at the shadowy figure of the second occupant. He immediately turned away, suppressing the faintest hint of a shudder. People didn’t tend to scare Keogh. You could deal with most men one way or another, if you kept your wits about you, but occasionally you came across an individual with a darkness about them that was so potent and twisted that even the strongest men held them in some awe. The woman in the back of the Land Cruiser was MacLean’s mother and, though she was pushing seventy and looked just like any other old lady, Keogh had heard stories about her that made his skin crawl.