Keogh was just about to tell him to pay attention when Sayenko pointed towards whatever he was looking at. ‘There’s the young one!’ he shouted.

Knowing the usefulness of having one of the fugitives as a hostage, particularly a kid, Keogh yelled to Sayenko to get hold of her alive, hoping like hell he had the energy to catch her.

Almost immediately, a female voice called out in alarm from inside the trees. Keogh didn’t catch her exact words, but he distinctly heard the word ‘sister’. Holding his rifle in the crook of his arm, his finger still poised on the trigger, he switched on the Maglite torch and shone it into the undergrowth, trying to catch sight of whoever was in there.

He caught movement twenty yards in, but then two shots rang out in rapid succession, passing between him and MacLean, who was crouched down with his shotgun next to the abandoned car, five yards away. As Keogh dodged behind a tree, swinging round the rifle as he hunted for a target, a third shot hissed through the trees, and the torch bucked in his hand as the light shattered, plunging the world back into a heavy, impenetrable gloom.

That was when MacLean opened up with the shotgun, its retorts cracking across the night air. Dropping the torch, Keogh put the rifle to his shoulder and leaned out from behind the tree. He saw movement – shadowy figures partially screened by bushes, running further into the woodland – and opened fire until he’d run out of bullets.

He thought he saw one of them fall and hoped it wasn’t the target, Amanda Rowan, because if she was dead, he was dead too. But there was little time to worry about that now.

Motioning for MacLean to follow, Keogh started into the darkness.

Casey sprinted for her life through the big dark wood because she knew the horrible bony man with the bald head like a skull, and the big gun, was after her.

He’d seen her in the bushes beside the road, where Jess had told her to wait for them to pick her up. She’d seen the car crash, heard the shots, and didn’t even know whether or not Jess was still alive. She was thinking that she couldn’t lose her sister, not after everyone else. It was like God was trying to do everything he could to hurt her, even though she’d never done anything wrong before.

Then the man had shouted something and started coming up the road after her, waving the gun, a horrible look on his face like one of the zombies in Jess’s Call of Duty 3 game she’d got last Christmas, and then just after that she was sure she heard Jess shout something, but she couldn’t be sure what, and then she was running, because she really didn’t know what else to do.

And she was continuing to run, even though her shoes were hurting, and the brambles kept scratching her face, and she was more scared than she’d ever been in her life. This was worse than the worst nightmare. It was worse than being attacked by the faceless monster with the werewolf claws that she’d always been convinced lurked beneath her bed ready to tear her to pieces and eat her head the moment she shut her eyes and fell asleep. Because the people doing this were grown-ups. Grown-ups were meant to look after children. Her mum had always told her that you had to be careful of strangers. That strangers might want to hurt you. But Casey had never believed it. The grown-ups she knew, even Lily’s mum back home in London who didn’t say much and never looked very happy, were always really nice.

But these men . . . These men wanted to kill her.

She sneaked a look over her shoulder for a moment, but couldn’t see the bony man with the bald head. If she could keep going a bit longer, then she could hide somewhere and he wouldn’t be able to find her. She’d always been good at hiding, and now she could no longer hear the dogs, they wouldn’t be able to sniff her out and hurt her. But her legs were tired, and her tummy ached, and she didn’t know how much longer she could keep going. She needed Jess here to help her. Jess would know what to do.

Casey turned back round so she could see where she was going and spotted the branch hanging out in front of her one second before she ran straight into it with an angry smack.

She cried out – she couldn’t stop herself in time – and fell backwards onto the ground. Her whole face was agony, but her nose especially. It was like someone had smacked it with a hammer. She tried to sit back up, trying desperately not to cry, but her vision suddenly went all blurry and she had to swallow to stop herself being sick.

That was when she heard it. The sound of heavy, rasping breathing.

And it was getting closer.

Thirty-three

SCOPE WAS HURT but he could still move.

He could hear the sound of movement in the foliage behind him as the men who’d opened fire approached and, on the other side of him, no more than ten yards away, he could see the silhouette of the girl he’d rescued from the dog, partly concealed by a tree. But she wasn’t running, even though she’d be coming into the sights of the gunmen any moment now. She was looking back towards the road. From what Scope could gather, she’d been split up from her little sister, and wasn’t going to leave without her which, though a pretty laudable thing, was also the equivalent of committing suicide.

She was dead if she stayed where she was. And so, he knew, was he. His left side ached where he’d been hit but, when he ran his hand down there, there was no blood. Instead, he felt the satellite phone he’d taken from the dead gunman back at Jock’s place. It was still in his jacket pocket, but its casing was now badly cracked, where it had clearly taken the force of the shot and somehow deflected it. He took it out and, seeing that it was cleaved pretty much down the middle, left it on the ground.

He didn’t dwell on his good fortune. There was no time. Lifting himself as silently as possible to his feet, and using a thick bramble bush as cover, he took off at a sprint further into the woods, conscious of the sound of the leaves crunching beneath his feet as he ran in a crouching zigzag to put off the shooters, motioning angrily for the girl to follow him.

A shot rang out, then another. Then a third. All of them were close by but Scope was eating up the ground quickly, and out of the corner of his eye he could see the girl running alongside him, a few yards away, also trying to keep low as the shooting continued.

But it was sounding further away now.

‘I can’t leave my sister!’ cried the girl as she ran, her face contorted with emotion.

‘Where was she?’ Scope called across without looking at her.

‘We left her when we tried to get to the car. We were going to pick her up.’ She began to slow her pace as she talked.

‘Keep running,’ snapped Scope. ‘They’re still only just behind us.’ The shooting had stopped now, but he knew their pursuers wouldn’t be giving up that easily.

‘I’m tired,’ complained the girl. ‘And we’re running away from where we left Casey. She’s my sister, and she’s only ten years old.’

Scope suddenly saw a picture of Mary Ann as a ten year old in his mind. He and Jennifer had had a photo of her at that age on the mantelpiece in the lounge in her school uniform, her long dark hair in matching pigtails, a big grin on her face. His daughter.

His dead daughter.

‘I’ll find your sister,’ he said, without breaking pace. ‘But we need to put some space between you and them. Has she got a phone?’

‘No,’ said the girl breathlessly. ‘None of us have. We lost them in the river when the boats were overturned.’

‘What’s she look like?’

‘Blonde, pretty. No, she’s beautiful. She’s so damn beautiful.’ The girl looked as if she was going to break down.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Jess.’

There was a narrow gap in the trees up ahead as they met a path and, as the two of them emerged onto it, they paused briefly. Scope turned to her, feeling in his pocket for his own mobile phone. He knew he needed to part with it because it implicated him in what had happened here, and therefore the killing of the gunman back at Jock’s place, but he had no choice if he was going to help these kids get out of here.