church. It meant manoeuvring the bike across a churchyard crowded with tombstones that seemed to jump out at him from the mist. Joe kept his attention fully fixed on the ground ahead. Within a couple of minutes, he came to the perimeter of the churchyard, where a metal gate, tied shut with a length of frayed rope, marked the edge of the field. Joe untied it, opened the gate and passed through. He left the rope untied: he might need to pass through this way again.
The ground was bumpy. Treacherous. It was beginning to freeze. Joe pushed the bike as hard as he dared, rebalancing himself every time it slipped. His visibility was no more than ten metres – the moon was little help. Beyond that, he was aware of bulky forms moving in the field. Cows, he presumed, or horses. The bike’s low rumble kept them away.
It felt like it took longer than it should to cross the field and reach the bridleway, half his mind on Conor, the other half on the terrain. In reality it was probably no more than the ten minutes he had estimated. There was a second gate on the opposite edge of the field. Joe passed through it and headed up an equally bumpy track at a steep, 25 per cent gradient. Two minutes later he had travelled what he knew from his study of the map to be about a third of a mile – 500 metres or so – and emerged from the mist as he reached the top of the hill.
He dismounted before he reached the brow itself, laying the bike on its side and crawling up to his vantage point. The ground was hard and cold. From this location, looking west towards the shore, Joe could see that the mist, although thick, was patchy and low-lying. It appeared to glow in the yellow light of the hazy full moon, almost like snow. He couldn’t make out where land met sea, but he could discern the lights of a ship out on the water. The rim of the hill on which he was standing ran north to south. He couldn’t see the road he and Eva had been following, but his mental snapshot told him that it forked after about 100 metres. The right fork headed to the top of the cliff, the left fork to a lone house.
And it was this that he could just about make out now.
The house lay, he estimated, about three klicks to the south-west, at approximately ten o’clock from his current position. He used the binoculars to focus in on the house. The magnification was high, the field of view narrow. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but tonight his hands were shaking. He had to concentrate hard on making them still before he could get a proper look.
There were no lights on – not, at least, on the northern or eastern sides of the house. But then he remembered that the video he had watched had been shot in a room overlooking the sea. If, as he suspected, it had been taken in this house, that meant it was on the far western side, out of view from this position. He could see the front entrance, and tried to see if there were any vehicles parked outside. But the night was too dark and the binos too weak to make out that kind of detail. After thirty seconds the mist rolled in and obscured the whole of the ground floor from his view, leaving just the steep roof peeping out from above the white blanket.
He cursed under his breath. He’d been hoping for some indication that Conor was definitely there. His boy’s face swam before his eyes, cut, bruised and terrified. With a pang, it hit him that his expression in the video was not so different from the one on his face when Joe stormed into his bedroom and tore his Xbox from the TV. He felt like throwing all this stealth out of the window and storming in a direct line down to the house to rip Conor from this bastard’s clutches as soon as humanly possible. But his military training told him that would be the worst thing to do. He needed to approach unseen.
And he couldn’t waste time. The mist would now be compromising the view of anyone watching from the house, so he took the opportunity to crest the hill and drop quickly to the west, keeping to the bridleway. Back on lower ground, the mist engulfed him again. He could see no landmarks, nothing with which to get his bearings. After ten minutes he estimated that he was directly north of the house, but his reckoning must have been off because two minutes later he had to brake as a sheer clifftop appeared with heart-stopping suddenness just five metres in front of him. He swung the bike round to the south and followed the bridleway along the clifftop, stopping after a couple of hundred metres to check the wind direction. It was onshore, blowing out to sea. He estimated that he could risk another 200 metres before ditching the bike and approaching on foot.
From there, it would be just half a klick cross-country to where Conor was surely being held.
He crawled along at less than 5 mph, to keep the noise of the bike’s engine as low as possible. He could hear the sea crashing to his right, and a lone gull called somewhere in the darkness overhead.
To the left of the bridleway there was half-a-metre-high bracken. Joe used it to hide the bike on its side. He ran east, away from the clifftop, along a mud path through the bracken and into an area of rough grassland. Fifty metres away, the house emerged from the mist.
No lights. Was his man sleeping? Joe doubted it.
His heart was thumping. He could hear his pulse as he advanced.
Halfway to the house there was a picket fence, but it was collapsing in places and Joe passed through a gap. He registered a tumbledown wooden shed five metres to his left, and a bleak concrete garage almost adjoining the right-hand wing of the house. Most of his attention, however, was on the two windows on the first floor. The curtains were open, but inside all was dark. Was Conor holed up in one of those rooms? Was that where his son was being held?
Joe removed the handgun from his shoulder bag. Then he approached the back door of the house, treading absolutely silently: toe first, then heel. He couldn’t afford to make a single sound. A single stumble or broken twig.
Even his breathing was, despite his exertion, noiseless.
A sudden, clattering noise in front of him. Movement.
He froze, three metres from the door, his weapon at the ready.
Then he exhaled slowly. It was a cat, bursting through a flap at the bottom of the door. Its eyes glinted in the darkness as it stared directly at him. As Joe took another step forward, the cat turned tail and headed back into the house.
Joe glanced up to the first-floor window. No light. No movement. Nothing.The paint on the back door was gleaming in the moonlight. He moved quietly to the door, then slowly reached out his free hand and grasped the handle. He twisted it gently so as not to let it squeak or scrape.
It opened. Did that mean someone was here? Probably.
Inside it was even darker than out. Having silently shut the door behind him, he waited a moment for his eyes to grow accustomed to the lack of moonlight. It took him twenty seconds to realize he was in a small utility room that led into a kitchen. There was a strange smell, and it wasn’t just the musty aroma of neglect. It was something else. A smell he recognized: sickeningly sweet. It grew stronger as he passed through the kitchen and along a narrow corridor that led to what was clearly the front hallway.
He had been expecting to see a body, so the sight of a crumpled human frame at the bottom of the steps was not a surprise. The cat was prowling around it. It miaowed, and that one sound seemed to echo around the house. Joe took a couple of steps closer. The strongest smell now was of shit: the corpse’s bowels had loosened after death.
Don’t let it be Conor, his mind was crying out.
He bent down in the darkness to examine the corpse’s face.
It was an old lady. Her eyes were wide open, her expression terrified. A sticky, mucus-like substance had oozed from her nose and ears. Joe estimated that she had been dead for less than a day. Maybe she had accidentally fallen down the stairs. Or maybe – he noted that the stairlift was halfway up the staircase – she hadn’t.
He stopped stock-still and listened. But there was nothing to listen to, other than silence.
Stepping over the body, he started to climb the stairs. His eyes were firmly fixed on the door at the top and to the left. It was slightly ajar.
The cat miaowed again. Joe froze. Had something disturbed it?
No sound.
He continued to climb.
At the top of the stairs he stopped. His finger was resting lightly on the trigger of his handgun. His breathing was shallow and silent. Slowly, he extended his right foot and gently kicked the door open.
By the misty moonlight shining through the windows, Joe immediately recognized the place. The video he had seen was burned on his memory. There, against the far wall, was the bed on which Conor had been sitting. On the wall behind it, a picture, its details obscured by the darkness, but Joe knew that if he looked more closely it
