ground floor windows. She put her ear to the glass and heard the sound of a TV.
Slowly, carefully, Tina made her way round the back of the cottage. A back door led into an unlit utility room with washing machine and sink, and beyond that Tina could see a narrow hallway with a staircase and the glow of lights at one end. Nothing moved inside, but there was definitely someone in there.
Putting on her gloves, Tina tried the back door and wasn’t surprised to find it locked. It didn’t matter. The lock looked as ancient as everything else about the cottage. She’d been trained in covert entry years before when she was in SOCA, and she’d brought a set of picks with her tonight.
Even so, she paused. The man who’d kidnapped Arley’s children was armed and extremely dangerous. He’d already killed her husband, and Tina knew he wouldn’t hesitate to do the same to her. Far better just to call the police, or better still Arley herself.
Except she hadn’t found the kids. Not yet.
Tina felt her whole body tense. She was going in. It was just the way she was. All her instincts told her to hold back, but in the end it made no difference. She wanted to find those kids and make them safe. If anything happened to them because she hadn’t done all she could … Well, she found it hard enough to live with herself anyway.
Reaching into her jacket pocket, she pulled out the picks and set to work, and in thirty seconds she had the door unlocked. It would have been twenty, but she was out of practice.
Slowly, she turned the handle and crept inside.
Seventy-four
LIAM ROY SHETLAND, CODENAMED Bull, had been buzzing all day. He’d finally killed a man. Put a gun against his head and pulled the trigger.
It was one of the most amazing things he’d ever experienced. Better even than sex, and similar too, in a weird way. There’d been this incredible rush as the bloke died – like having a really big orgasm. He’d been reliving every detail in his head ever since – the way the blood had splattered on the floor; the funny little grunt the bloke had made. Which was just as well really, because otherwise the day would have been shit boring, hanging round on his own in a house that reeked of mould, babysitting a couple of brats, and without even a Playstation or the net to keep him occupied. Just a tiny little telly with nothing but Freeview.
But the time was fast approaching when he would achieve the kind of notoriety he’d been dreaming of all his life, and he could feel the anticipation building. This was his chance to prove wrong all the bastards who’d ever doubted him. His mum. His teachers. The Paki at the Job Centre who always used to look down his nose at him. All of them.
The handler should be calling him any time now, telling him he could leave. There wasn’t a lot of time left if he was going to get to the rendezvous in time. His instructions were simple. He was to drive the van as close as he could to the Stanhope Hotel, and park it in as public a place as possible. There was a bomb in the back, set to go off at eleven p.m., and he needed to be well away from it when it blew. Fox had given him a rucksack containing a smaller bomb, and his job was to take this and continue towards the Stanhope on foot. When he got to the outer cordon where the crowds and TV cameras were gathered, he’d been told to get rid of the bag somewhere among them, without making it look too obvious, and then get the hell out, because the rucksack bomb was timed to go off at 11.15.
Liam was pleased he’d been given such responsibility by Fox, who was a bloke he seriously admired. Fox was the kind of soldier Liam wanted to be, and he was jealous of him in that hotel with the others, holding the whole world at bay. He’d been watching what was happening on the telly for most of the day, proud that he was a part of it all, although he still couldn’t quite understand why they had to work with Arabs and Muslims, the very people he most hated, even though Fox had explained it to him several times.
His mobile bleeped and he checked the screen. It was a text from the handler. All it said was WE’RE READY.
Liam smiled, leaning over and picking up the gun from the table next to him.
It was time to do the kids.
Seventy-five
TINA WAS HALFWAY up the staircase when she heard what she was sure was the bleep of a phone coming from beyond the half-open door that led into the living room – the only room downstairs she hadn’t yet checked for signs of the children. A couple of seconds later, it was followed by the sound of someone – a man, from the noise he was making – clearing his throat loudly and moving around.
It was too late to go back downstairs now. She was trapped in no-man’s land, and the weapons she was carrying – a piece of lead piping in one hand, a can of pepper spray in the other – were no use from a distance.
Making a snap decision, she continued up the last few stairs as quickly as she could, gritting her teeth when one of them creaked loudly, and darted behind the wall at the top just as the living room door opened with a loud squeak, and the man cleared his throat again.
There were three doors up here, two on her side of the landing, one on the other. Tiptoeing across the carpet, she opened the nearest one and stepped inside, and was immediately assailed by the smell of urine.
They were both on the floor in the middle of the empty room, lying on their fronts, trussed up from head to foot with duct tape like caterpillar larvae. As she gently closed the door behind her, they both started wriggling and making moaning noises beneath their gags.
‘It’s OK,’ Tina whispered, coming closer and feeling a huge sense of relief. ‘I’m here to help. Your mum sent me. You’ve just got to stay quiet for a second.’
They both fell silent and stopped moving. Tina crouched down beside the girl, whose name she’d forgotten, and, after putting down the weapons, removed the duct tape covering her mouth as gently as she could, before doing the same with the tape covering her eyes. This way the girl could see who she was dealing with. She blinked up at Tina with wide, frightened eyes, and Tina smiled back at her reassuringly, putting a finger to her lips.
‘Do you know how many men are holding you here?’ she whispered.
‘Two came to our house this morning,’ the girl whispered back. ‘They both had guns. I haven’t heard any talking down there, so I don’t know if they’re both still here, but one definitely is. He was up here a little while ago.’
‘OK. Now, I’m going to untie you both and then we’re going to go out of the window as quietly as possible. Understand?’
The girl nodded. She looked incredibly relieved that Tina was there. Next to her, the boy, who Tina remembered was called Oliver, rolled on to his side to face her and made a noise behind his gag.
She immediately leaned over and began to remove the tape round his eyes, at the same time pulling out her phone so she could text Arley the news.
And then she heard it. The stair that had creaked earlier when she’d been coming up had creaked again. Even louder this time. Another stair creaked, and she stopped.
The man was on his way up.
Seventy-six
22.05
ARLEY WATCHED AS Riz Mohammed picked up the phone and put it to his ear. A second later he was connected to Wolf’s phone in the satellite kitchen on the mezzanine floor, the sound of it ringing over the loudspeaker, filling the tense silence in the room.
