Twenty-seven

THE THREE MEN made a menacing sight as they moved purposefully down the forest path in a tight line, the two Dobermans that MacLean had brought back with him straining at their leashes. Each of them was armed with a pistol with suppressor attached, while Keogh also carried the Remington .303 rifle he’d used to shoot at the canoeists earlier, and the big cop MacLean was armed with a five-shot automatic shotgun as well, capable of bringing down a horse.

By now, Keogh was even more worried. Not only had he still not heard any word from Mehdi, but they’d been walking for a good half-hour through the forest and there was still no sign of their quarry. MacLean was confident that they’d be coming up from the river on this path, since it was the only one that led directly out of the woods, and that they wouldn’t have made it this far by now, but Keogh wasn’t so sure. Amanda Rowan would be doing her utmost to hide, which meant keeping off obvious paths like this one, and in a forest this size, with all manner of animals living in it, the dogs were going to have a hard time picking up their scent.

The only bonus was that, from what Keogh had heard, MacLean had some experience of hunting people in this kind of terrain, and not in the course of his police work, either. As well as being a copper, MacLean looked after the boss’s country estate in the nearby Cairngorms, and some pretty unpleasant things happened up there. Rumour had it that the boss kept young women imprisoned in the cellars of his manor house, where they were sexually abused, sometimes for weeks on end, before being killed and buried in the grounds. The women were mainly foreign prostitutes working illegally in the country, so they wouldn’t be missed, and Keogh wasn’t sure if it was just the boss himself who abused the girls, or whether his contacts in the criminal and business worlds were also involved. What he did know, however, was that the previous year, one of the women had escaped and been found by a group of hikers up from London, and it had been up to MacLean and his brother to hunt the five of them down before they raised the alarm. They’d done it too, eliminating both the woman fugitive and all the hikers, with the help of their mother (she, apparently, had been the one who’d hanged the last hiker to be murdered, a female teacher from London, in an effort to make her death look like a suicide). Keogh was hoping that MacLean could manage the same thing again tonight, although he also hoped that Amanda had split from the kids. He didn’t want their deaths on what was left of his conscience.

He turned to MacLean. ‘How much further on do you think they’ll be? They’ve had two and a half hours to cover the ground.’

‘They’ll be cold and wet, and there’s a kid with them, so they’ll be slow,’ growled MacLean in his thick Highlands burr. ‘But, even so, we ought to run into them in the next fifteen minutes.’

‘If they came this way.’

MacLean glared at him, his strange, round baby face looking almost demonic in the watery light of the moon. ‘They’ll have come this way. If they’d gone along the river, they’d have been in Tayleigh by now, and I’d have heard about it.’ He patted the phone in his pocket. ‘Don’t worry. Even if they try to hide, the dogs will pick them up. They’re trained to go after people, not animals.’

Keogh looked down at the two wiry-looking Dobermans and was pleased they weren’t after him. ‘Why don’t we let them off the lead now? See what they pick up?’

‘Don’t worry. I trained these two myself. When they get a scent, we’ll know about it.’ Without breaking stride, MacLean examined the map by torchlight. ‘There should be a waterfall coming up soon, and a few hundred yards east from that, there’s a house.’

Keogh tensed. ‘A house? I thought you said this wood was deserted.’

‘It’s the only house in the forest, and you’d have to know how to find it.’

‘Well, if they get there and raise the alarm, we’re finished.’

‘We’d better make sure they don’t get there then,’ said MacLean, as the two dogs stopped and began growling. He turned to Keogh and grinned. ‘What did I tell you? They’ve got the scent.’

Twenty-eight

AMANDA KNEW SHE had two options. She could either follow the single-lane track that led up from the house to the Tayleigh Road, or continue along the footpath through the woods.

As she left the house, she chose the footpath because it offered more hiding places and was, in her opinion, a less likely route for her pursuers to take. Amanda was a fit woman and she moved easily through the forest at a run, breathing in the fresh, cold air. Progress was a lot faster without the two girls in tow. In reality she’d had little choice but to take them with her for the first part of the journey, but she was glad they were no longer with her now, knowing they’d be far safer staying in the house.

For her own part, Amanda was terrified. She couldn’t believe she’d been targeted by a highly organized gang who seemed determined to kill her. When she’d found out from DCS Mike Bolt that they’d identified a suspect in the Disciple case, and that he was on the run, she’d been nervous, but not unduly so. There was no reason why he would follow her up here, or even have a clue where she was living. That information, as far as she was aware, was only known to the investigating team, and to one trusted friend whom she’d known for close to twenty years, and who would never betray her. And yet these men had found her, and she could only assume that they were somehow connected to the Disciple case.

The problem was, she couldn’t understand why they wanted her. They obviously thought she knew something, but what? Amanda knew nothing about The Disciple that wasn’t already known to the police.

Unless . . .

It hit her for the first time. A possible motive for her abduction. Something that truly was worth killing for. Amanda felt a coldness enveloping her as the thought took hold, because she knew that if she was right, then this was the end. She was finished.

But how could they know? How could they possibly know?

Amanda stopped running, telling herself to calm down. There was no way anyone could know about that. She shut her eyes and took some deep breaths, absorbing the silence of the forest.

And that was when she heard it.

The sound of dogs barking. Big dogs. Hunting dogs, probably. Not the kind of dogs that people took for walks.

And the barking was getting closer.

Twenty-nine

JESS STOOD IN the darkness at the foot of the bed, staring down at her sister.

Casey was fast asleep, with her head to one side, the position she always slept in, her blonde hair cascading down over her shoulders. Her mouth was ever so slightly open, her breathing coming in soft gasps, and she looked so peaceful that Jess didn’t have the heart to wake her.

It seemed strange that, even though they weren’t related by blood, Jess loved her so completely. But she did. These days, Casey was the only family she had left. Jess rarely thought about her biological family. On those few occasions that she did, it made her guts wrench and filled her with a cold dread. There were memories there that were far best forgotten, whatever the counsellors she’d spent so much time seeing in those early years might have said. All her love had gone into her adoptive family. The people she considered her real parents. They’d been the ones who’d taken her in – a damaged, hard-faced young girl whose innocence had long since gone – and brought her up as one of their own, showing her a love that she’d never experienced before.