Die Alone

felt like a long time, then looked round and listened.
The silence was all-consuming.
‘Follow me,’ she whispered, and they hurried over to the back gate. The gate itself was made of heavy oak and could only be opened from the inside by punching a four-digit code onto a keypad. The house and garden were near enough impregnable. The wall was twelve feet high and topped with a thick thatch of tangled ivy. Anyone climbing into the garden, even if they didn’t set off the alarm, would have made a lot of noise and been spotted by the officer on the ground, the man who was now dead.
So how did the killer get in?
Patrick punched in the code and flung open the gate, immediately taking up a firing stance in case there was anyone on the other side.
But there was no one. The narrow footpath that ran across the back of the property was empty. Rather than turn and head back to the main road, Patrick climbed over a stile opposite and ran through the empty paddock on the other side of the road towards a small stable building about thirty yards away. Manning ran after her, watching as she pulled out her phone and checked it, still holding her service pistol.
‘Have you got a signal?’ he asked, struggling to get alongside her.
She was punching something into the phone, ignoring him. It was clear she was sending a text.
‘Give me a moment,’ she hissed, shoving the phone back into her pocket.
By this time they’d passed through a gate into the deserted yard in front of the stable block.
‘What the fuck’s going on?’ Manning demanded, experiencing a growing sense of dread. ‘Tell me.’
And then, in the next second, he got his answer as a masked figure stepped out from behind the stable block, only a few yards in front of them, holding a pistol with a suppressor attached.
Manning stopped dead. Patrick still had her own gun in her hand and he expected her to fire.
But she didn’t. Instead, she stopped too, keeping her gun lowered.
Manning swallowed and his legs felt weak. He’d run straight into a trap. He turned to DC Patrick. ‘Why?’
But Liane Patrick was ignoring him. ‘Is my son safe?’ she asked the gunman. ‘I need proof. Right now.’
‘He’s unharmed,’ said the gunman. Except it wasn’t a man. It was a woman, and she had an accent. Was it South African? ‘He’s sleeping like a baby.’
‘Prove it. Now. Or I’ll kill you.’ Patrick raised the gun.
‘Here,’ the woman said, reaching into the pocket of her jeans and pulling out a phone. ‘Call him.’
She threw the phone to Patrick, who caught it one-handed. In that same moment, the masked woman shot her twice in the face, the bullets making a popping sound as they left the gun.
Both the phone and Patrick’s own gun clattered onto the cobblestones. She stumbled, made a noise like a sigh, and then fell to her knees.
The masked woman stepped forward and shot her a third time, then turned the gun on Manning. So, that was how they’d got to her, he thought. By using her son as collateral. It was typical of them. Find a weakness. Exploit it. Then clean up the mess.
And he was the final bit of that mess. Remove him from the equation and their problems went away.
He looked imploringly at the gunwoman. Her eyes were dark and hard behind the mask. ‘Please don’t do this,’ he said, knowing that his words wouldn’t change a thing, but knowing too that this was his last shot of the dice. He’d been on the wrong end of a gun twice in the last ten days. On the first occasion, they’d killed his wife. But he’d escaped. That wasn’t going to happen this time. His luck had run out. He knew it.
The sheer, wrenching terror he’d felt last time was gone. Now he was filled with a deep resignation and regret that his life had turned out this way. At least this time it would be quick. DC Patrick was already dead. Soon he would be too. And yet, in those last few seconds, time seemed to slow right down, stretching out interminably as the woman in the mask kept her gun trained on him.
Beside him, he could see DC Patrick’s blood pooling on the cobblestones, the sight making him want to retch. He took a deep breath, and in a final act of defiance said, ‘Tell Alastair Sheridan, I hope he rots—’
But he never finished the sentence as the woman in the mask pulled the trigger and ended another life.
As the first sirens started somewhere on the horizon, she turned and melted away into the darkness.

Part One
A Year Later


1
One of the saddest stories I ever heard took place on a sunny summer’s day in 1989. A thirteen-year-old girl called Dana Brennan had planned to bake cakes with her mother and younger sister, but they were short of ingredients. The family lived in a cottage in an especially pretty part of north Hampshire, less than a mile outside Frampton, one of those bucolic picture-postcard English villages with a church, a pub and, in those days, a shop. Traffic was quieter then, and when Dana offered to cycle to the shop to buy the ingredients, her mum had been happy to let her go.
Dana cycled away and never came back. Her bike was found abandoned next to some trees at the side of the road, with the shopping bag containing the cake-making ingredients lying a few feet away. A huge police search for her was launched that same evening. But the spot where her bike had been found was on a quiet back road and, aside from the shopkeeper who’d sold her the produce, no one else had seen her on her journey. It was as if she’d