The door opened again and the old lady looked out at them. She seemed more relaxed now, her face creasing into a kindly smile. ‘I’ve called the police, and they’re on their way from Tayleigh. They shouldn’t be too long.’

‘Thanks ever so much,’ said Amanda, flashing her a winning smile back.

‘Please, do you mind if we come in and use your toilet?’ asked Jess, desperate to get into the warmth of the house.

‘Well, you look like nice wee lassies, and since I know the police are coming . . .’ She removed the chains and opened the door to let them in.

As Jess stepped inside after Amanda, she caught the sound of the car again. It sounded closer.

‘I wouldn’t answer the door again unless you’re sure it’s the police,’ said Amanda as the old lady shut it behind them. ‘And if anyone else does turn up, we’d really appreciate it if you didn’t tell them we’re here.’

‘Don’t worry, lass. I can see you’re scared about something. You can explain it all to the constables when they arrive. In the meantime, you can sit in the kitchen out of sight if you want.’ She turned to Jess. ‘The bathroom’s at the end of the hall.’

Jess smiled and thanked her before hurrying down the hall, past a narrow staircase leading up to the next floor. As she passed the kitchen, a pleasant waft of freshly cooked food made her mouth water. For a second, she was reminded of home. Her mum had loved cooking. She’d make something different every night, and it was always tasty, and in all those years of growing up, Jess had never really appreciated it. Now that she lived with a foster family, who tended to exist on takeaways and ready meals, she realized how much she missed real home-cooked food.

And how much she missed her mum.

Forcing this new, unwelcome thought out of her mind, Jess found the bathroom, which was basically just a toilet and sink, and sat down and relaxed a little for the first time in hours. She could hear Amanda and the old lady talking as they went into the kitchen, and she wondered if they were going to get fed before the police turned up. She hoped so, and immediately felt guilty. Casey was out there somewhere, scared and alone, and here she was thinking about her stomach. She thought about the strange man who’d appeared out of nowhere and rescued her from the dog, risking his life in the process. He’d had a gun but he wasn’t a cop. He’d also told her he’d find Casey. She trusted him to do so, even though she knew nothing about him, and it made her wonder if she was just deluding herself.

‘You’ve done everything you can,’ Jess whispered to herself as she washed her hands in the cold water of the sink and went back into the hall, but she wasn’t sure she believed it.

She heard the old lady laughing from the kitchen, and there was something comforting and familiar about the sound that put a smile on her face, and gave her just that tiniest chink of hope that everything was going to be all right.

And then she saw it. A small dark patch on the carpet, just outside the cupboard under the staircase. For a second, Jess didn’t realize what it was, but as she took a closer look, her heart suddenly started beating faster and she had to stifle a gasp.

It was blood. Fresh blood.

Frowning, she looked up and down the hall. In the kitchen she could hear Amanda talking with the old lady, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying, although it all sounded perfectly normal. Jess took a deep breath. She really didn’t want to look inside the cupboard, terrified of what she might find, but she knew she had no choice. Something was bleeding in there.

Slowly, very slowly, she bent down and opened the door. It made a clicking sound and a light came on inside revealing a sight that made Jess groan aloud.

Two bodies – those of a man and a woman, both middle-aged – were hunched up and lying on top of each other in the narrow space. The man was on the bottom and his face was turned towards Jess, staring sightlessly at her like one of those paintings where the eyes follow you round. He had a large hole in one cheek that was leaking blood onto the floorboards. The woman had dyed blonde hair that was matted with blood and her face was buried in the man’s back.

Jess wanted to throw up. Even though she’d seen too many dead bodies today, this sight was the worst of the lot because it was so unexpected. Straight away, she knew that these two were the people who lived here, which meant this was a trap.

Closing the door as quietly as she could, she stood back and took a deep breath.

Then felt the cold metal of a gun being pushed against the back of her head as a voice hissed at her not to move an inch or she was dead.

Forty-eight

SCOPE HAD NO idea which way Jess – a girl who didn’t know the area – would head, but concluded that there was no way she’d stick to the road. It was too exposed. This meant, in all likelihood, she’d try and head up the hill away from the road and make her way down into the valley that he knew eventually wound its way into Tayleigh.

There’d been an old Ordnance Survey map at the house where he’d rescued Casey and he’d spent a couple of minutes perusing it before he’d left. There was a farm in the valley en route and, if she had any real sense of direction, she’d be heading towards it. Even if she didn’t, and went the other way, it was a good starting point for him to begin looking for her. His plan was to park at the farm, check that Jess hadn’t arrived there, then head back through the valley on foot, since there was no road he could use, and try to locate her that way. He’d found a torch in the house and he still had the gun and three rounds of ammunition, so he was as prepared as he was ever going to be.

A long rutted track, with cattle grids at various intervals, led down to the farm. The hills rose up on either side of him, stark and bleak, and it struck him that the gunmen might have had the same thought as him, and be using the farm as a starting point for cutting off Jess and Amanda’s escape if they chose to come this way.

He switched off the lights on the borrowed Defender and, when he was a hundred yards short of the farm, pulled up on the verge and cut the engine, concluding that it would be safer to continue his journey on foot.

Jess experienced a pure, unrelenting terror like she’d never felt before as she was manoeuvred down the hallway towards the living room, with the gun pressed hard against the back of her head. The gunman told her not to look round, and she didn’t, but then she saw Amanda being pushed out through the kitchen doorway just ahead of her by another gunman, who had an arm round her neck and a gun pushed into the small of her back. She immediately recognized him as the scar-faced man from the house where they’d originally taken shelter.

What really scared Jess was the fact that he hadn’t bothered to disguise himself, even though he had one of those faces that was utterly memorable, which meant that he didn’t care if she saw his face, because there was no way they were going to let her live.

Her legs felt weak and she thought that at any minute she might collapse. She kept telling herself to be strong but it wasn’t working. She was trapped, and at the mercy of men who thought nothing of killing innocent householders and stashing them in a cupboard like discarded rubbish. And soon she’d be joining them. At that moment, she wished desperately that she believed in God. But she didn’t, and never had. No God would let someone kill a mother in front of her young child, but that was what had happened to her, and it had been a hard lesson burned indelibly into her soul.

When they got to the living room, the gunman holding Jess threw her onto the sofa in the corner next to Amanda.

Jess was tempted to lie there with her face buried in the cushion and simply wait for someone to put a bullet in the back of her head, but she forced herself to turn round and sit up, clinging to a tiny hope that she could somehow talk her way out of this. The man who’d been holding her was tall and powerful-looking, with a pudgy baby face that looked out of place on such a big body, and small round eyes set too far apart. There’d be no mercy from this one, she knew that. Her own eyes drifted towards the gun in his hand, with the long silencer attached. It was such a small thing, really, and yet she’d seen all too vividly today the terrible damage it could wreak.