‘How’s the boss?’ he asked, as MacLean clambered out of the Toyota. MacLean had changed out of his police officer’s uniform now and, like Keogh and Sayenko, was dressed in dark clothing.

‘Not happy at all,’ he answered, his hulking figure towering over Keogh. ‘He wants this thing sorted out quickly. And he definitely wants the girl alive.’

‘Why did you bring her?’ Keogh motioned ever so slightly towards the car, his voice trailing off.

MacLean smiled, clearly pleased with the doubt in Keogh’s eyes. ‘In case everything else fails. Like I say, the boss wants this girl. And he wants her badly. Ma can watch the road while we go into the woods, and if they turn up here, she’ll be able to keep them occupied until we get back. People trust Ma. They think she’s harmless.’

More fool them, thought Keogh as MacLean walked round to the Land Cruiser’s boot and released the dogs, putting them on tight leashes. They were young-looking Dobermans and looked as if they were raring to go.

Keogh turned away and took the weapons from the back of the four-by-four.

It was time to begin the hunt.

Twenty-two

Five days ago

THEY GOT THEIR big break on The Disciple case purely by chance. In Mike Bolt’s experience, this was often the way it happened. Good old-fashioned detective work counted for a lot, as did the huge advances in technology that made committing a crime so much harder than it had been even a few years back. But sometimes it was just luck that made the difference.

A month earlier, Bolt had set up a hotline for members of the public to call in with any information they had on the identity of The Disciple. Such was the high profile of the case, that the hotline had been taking an average of more than a hundred calls a day. Many of them had been from people giving the names of individuals they didn’t like, or were suspicious of in some way, and all these names had to be checked out, which took time and effort, and almost invariably turned into dead ends. Because of this, Bolt had made it clear that top priority was to be given to any name that appeared twice from separate sources, and this had finally happened a week earlier.

Leonard Philip Hope had been named first by a former girlfriend who’d had a short but violent relationship with him. She claimed he’d tied her up and beaten her on several occasions and, the last time he’d done it, he’d strangled her unconscious. He was also tattooed on his left forearm. On its own, this information wasn’t particularly useful. Sadly, there were many men who beat their girlfriends, just as there were plenty who were tattooed, but when Hope had been named by a clinical psychologist who’d treated him for post-traumatic stress disorder eight years earlier, and who described him as an incredibly damaged individual with a frightening obsession with the occult and sexual violence, Bolt had taken an immediate interest.

Hope was a forty-one-year-old former soldier who’d spent five years in the army before being dishonourably discharged for insubordination. He had no previous convictions, but had been given a police caution aged seventeen for indecent exposure after he’d flashed at a group of schoolgirls. He lived alone in the house he’d grown up in, in Ealing, which he’d shared with his widowed mother until her death, and for the last eighteen months he’d been working for a local courier firm as a driver, a job that took him across southeast England. In this respect, he perfectly fitted the psychological profile that Dr Thom Folkestone had suggested for the suspect. Hope had also filled up the company van he used for deliveries with petrol at a garage five miles from the scene of the first murders the day before they’d been carried out, putting him in the area at a crucial time.

But, of course, none of this made him guilty. Bolt remembered all too well the case of Colin Stagg, the man wrongly accused of the brutal murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common twenty years earlier, who’d been targeted because he seemed to fit the psychological profile, only for the murderer to turn out to be someone else entirely. Bolt wasn’t going to make that mistake. But the more his team looked into Leonard Hope’s background, the more they liked him as a suspect. His school reports suggested a quiet boy of higher-than-average intelligence, but one who was also disruptive. He’d been suspended from secondary school on two occasions – once for an assault on a younger pupil; the second time for a more serious assault on a female teacher that had involved him touching her inappropriately. He’d been fourteen at the time. How Hope had managed to stay on at the school while avoiding criminal charges was beyond Bolt, but somehow he had. More interestingly was an incident that had happened while Hope had been in the army, stationed in Cyprus, in 1999. A young Dutch couple, tourists on the island, had been walking back to their hotel from a nightclub in the early hours of the morning, past a quiet stretch of waste ground, when they’d been attacked from behind by a masked man. The attacker had struck the man on the back of the head with a blunt object, knocking him unconscious, before dragging the girl into some bushes and exposing her to a short but very violent sexual assault. He’d then beaten her unconscious with the same blunt object, and fled.

Both tourists recovered from their ordeal, and although neither had been able to give much of a description of their attacker, the young woman remembered him uttering the word ‘bitch’ during the assault, in what she described as a British accent. Soldiers at the base were questioned, including Hope, but because no DNA had been recovered from the scene of the crime, and no trace was ever found of the weapon used, no one was arrested. Hope had been off duty and off the base at the time, but he had an alibi. He was visiting a prostitute several miles away and she claimed he’d spent the night with her. Bolt could see why this had eliminated him at the time, but in hindsight, with everything else they’d found out about Hope, he now thought it was all far too convenient. It wouldn’t, Bolt suspected, have been that hard for a reasonably intelligent man to have bought an alibi from the prostitute; maybe he’d even sneaked out without her knowing to carry out the attack and then returned. Either way, Bolt now knew they had more than enough to justify a full-scale surveillance operation.

That surveillance had been going on for two days now. Like all twenty-four-hour surveillance ops, it was resource-heavy, using three separate teams of ten officers each. So far, Hope hadn’t done anything remotely suspicious, which was no great surprise. His habits were fairly mundane. He went to work, drove round most of the day delivering parcels, then returned alone to his flat at night. The problem was that there tended to be as long as six months between his killings, and since he’d only killed George Rowan and Ivana Hanzha two weeks previously, it was unlikely he’d be stalking new victims for some time to come yet. Their great hope lay in matching Leonard Hope’s DNA to the murder scene at the Rowans’ house, and the killing of the French student, Beatrice Magret, back in 1998. That way they’d have enough to arrest him and press charges. Unfortunately, because he had no actual convictions, Hope’s DNA wasn’t on the national DNA database, so one of the surveillance teams had had to take possession of a disposable coffee cup he’d dropped in a rubbish bin after one of his deliveries, so that SOCO could take a sample from it. But the results of any DNA test wouldn’t be known for at least five days, and meanwhile the pressure for a result remained absolutely intense.

Bolt tried not to let it get to him, but it wasn’t easy. Including Beatrice Magret, The Disciple had been linked to a total of nine murders, and Bolt was finding it incredibly frustrating having to fend off criticism about the investigation, while at the same time having to wait to find out whether or not Hope was their man.