Never Seen Again Read online

  For my wife, Catherine

  Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Six years ago

  I: The Worst Person on Earth

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  II: The Intruders

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  III: Shots in the Dark

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  IV: Different Ways to Die

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Epilogue

  Credits

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Six years ago

  Freddie didn’t know why Jodie and Rick were so glum. As they pulled away from the multiplex, his head was filled with the movie’s mind-blowing final images. Bond and his latest girl jumping hand-in-hand down the central section of an abandoned building. The chase along the Thames, Bond in a speedboat, Blofeld in a helicopter. At first, Freddie thought that Rick had quite liked it, his sister’s fiancé muttering as they’d left the cinema about it being ‘derivative of earlier 007s,’ whatever that meant, ‘but still a bit of fun.’

  Now though, the silence filling the car was heavy.

  ‘Everything OK, Jode?’ Freddie ventured.

  Jodie didn’t look around from the front passenger seat. ‘Everything’s fine. Don’t worry.’

  Freddie glanced from the Audi’s window. It was past ten on an October night, wind whipping the shrivelled leaves along the verges. If they were genuinely cross, it couldn’t have been about the movie, and at no point this evening had he noticed them having words about anything else. Which left one possibility.

  They were cross with him.

  And yet Jodie had just said that everything was fine. Which wouldn’t have been the case if Freddie had annoyed her. She was twenty-three and he was thirteen – she’d have told him off in no uncertain terms.

  ‘See you later,’ she’d told everyone earlier that evening, when Rick had arrived. ‘We’re off to see the new Bond.’

  Freddie had immediately protested, and the usual strained conversation had followed; their mother attempting to guilt-trip Jodie into taking him along, Jodie resisting more forcefully than usual. Freddie wondered about that. It wasn’t as if he was a difficult kid. And he got on with Rick. Well, the guy was a bit boring – he was training to be a lawyer, and how naff did that sound? – but they ribbed each other a lot, and they both supported Ipswich Town.

  But they’d been OK during the actual movie, eating popcorn and chatting …

  And then it struck him.

  Had Jodie and Rick been planning to do something else? Something they weren’t willing to mention? Freddie couldn’t believe it.

  Surely they hadn’t been intending to park up the way they’d used to when they were teenagers? He felt a pang of indignation. All this moodiness because he’d got in the way of that? Though it still didn’t make sense. Not when Rick had his own flat.

  They pulled up on a quiet lane, parking at the farthest end of it, a horseshoe of thick bushes, overhanging trees and mountains of dead leaves turning it into a cluttered, shadow-filled cul-de-sac. Rick switched the engine off.

  Jodie turned around. ‘Do you want to go for a little walk, Freddie?’

  ‘No. It’s wet.’

  ‘It’s not wet. It hasn’t rained since yesterday morning.’

  ‘It’s cold then.’

  Jodie looked to the front again. ‘Don’t you fancy some fish and chips?’

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I fancy some.’

  ‘Go and get some, then.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Freddie!’ Her tone was sharp, irritable, which surprised him. They used to play this game years ago, Freddie finding that his status as official gooseberry could be quite lucrative, though the negotiations had usually been good-natured.

  ‘I don’t see a chippie round here,’ Freddie said.

  Jodie readopted her patient tone. ‘If you walk back along the road, there’s a path through the woods on your left.’

  ‘Through the woods?’ Freddie was unhappy about that. He wasn’t a baby anymore, but the thought of cutting through a wood at night on his own …

  ‘It’s not real woods,’ she said. ‘Just a belt of trees. Then you’re on the Black Brook golf course.’

  ‘Golf course?’ Freddie was puzzled.

  ‘You don’t have to go all the way across it,’ Rick said. ‘If you cut left, you’ll see a sign saying public footpath. Follow that, and it’ll take you to the clubhouse. On the other side of that, you’ll see Wildeve Avenue. Turn right, walk for five minutes and there’re a couple of cottages, a newsagent and a chippie.’

  ‘I’ll have a saveloy and chips,’ Jodie said, handing him a twenty.

  ‘Cod and chips for me,’ Rick said. ‘Get yourself anything you want. Keep the change.’

  Thoughtfully, Freddie rolled the £20 note between his fingers.

  Jodie regarded him through the rear-view mirror. ‘OK … how much?’

  Freddie pursed his lips. ‘Thirty at least.’

  She swung around in her seat.

  ‘Thirty’s fine,’ Rick cut in, putting a hand on Jodie’s shoulder. ‘Thirty’s absolutely fine.’ He adjusted his glasses and reached under his leather jacket, filching out a wallet, opening it and extricating a twenty. He passed it back. ‘Because we’re springing this on you, let’s call it forty. In fact,’ he dug out an extra tenner, ‘let’s not be stingy. It’s no small thing we’re asking at this time of night, Fredster … so let’s call it fifty.’

  Freddie goggled as the additional note was placed in his open palm.

  He pulled on his anorak, zipped it, and stepped out into the dank wind. It was twenty yards to the nearest streetlight, its glow repeatedly obscured as semi-naked branches danced around it. Not far after that, he found the path on the left and cut down it, the flickery light fading behind him. He emerged at the foot of a short but steep embankment. At the top, Black Brook golf course unrolled before him. Overhead, the clouds were grey smudges scudding across the moon, but there was sufficient light for him to see the flat prairie of neatly mown grass. Veering left, he came to a cruciform signpost stencilled with the words PUBLIC FOOTPATH and an arrowhead. Beyond that, the ground tilted gently upward. At the top, it flattened off and there was another sign: BEWARE LOW-FLYING GOLF BALLS.

  Freddie pivoted around as i
f one such missile might be hurtling at him right now. His eyes were attuning, and here and there sat clutches of shrubbery. Ahead stood a third signpost. It directed him to the mouth of a narrow alley between two deep rows of thickets, into which the wind funnelled gusts of spinning leaves. Freddie ventured along this nervously, but after that it was open again and all downhill, and about a hundred yards to his left he saw a squat, single-storey building against a row of bright yellow streetlights. The clubhouse.

  No lights shone out as he circled around it, while all the windows were shielded by steel lattices. The car park lay empty and on the far side stood a pair of barred double-gates. They were padlocked closed, but there was a single gate alongside them, hanging open.

  Turning down Wildeve Avenue, the only sound was the wind. As promised, when Freddie rounded the first bend, he saw a row of buildings on the right. But something about them jumped out straight away.

  No lights. At least, not from either of the two shops.

  His dismay deepened as he approached. The newsagent and the fish-and-chip shop stood in total darkness. The notice hanging inside the chippie’s glass door read: CLOSED.

  He stamped back along Wildeve Avenue. At first he was fuming, but then he remembered the money in his pocket, and it dawned on him that he hadn’t been too badly done to. Basically, they’d wanted him to take a half-hour walk, and had paid him well for it.

  He re-crossed the clubhouse car park and re-entered the golf course. His eyes adjusted more quickly this time, and when he found the passage through the thickets, he entered boldly, determined to ignore any scary rustlings or creakings. However, when he was about ten yards in, there was a blood-curdling scream.

  He stopped in his tracks.

  It had been short but intense.

  An idea occurred to him that it might have been a vixen; he’d heard such sounds in the woods near his home. A vixen then … a harmless fox.

  Or maybe not.

  Freddie raced out of the thicket onto the open fairway, heading downhill. The signposts flickered by, the outer line of trees visible a couple of hundred yards ahead.

  There was another intense scream. This one broke off abruptly.

  Freddie jumped the small embankment and sped along the path to the road, but as the filtered glow from the streetlight grew brighter, he decelerated, mainly because he didn’t want to look a soppy kid in front of Rick. Even so, he didn’t slow to an actual walk until he was back on the pavement mopping sweat from his brow.

  But when he was still fifty yards from Rick’s Audi, he saw that another vehicle was parked alongside it, a van, with its rear double-doors hanging open. And that figures were in motion. Freddie squinted through the tumbling shadows. With thirty yards to go, he realised that a couple of the figures were wearing green boiler suits. He part-relaxed. Paramedics. The van was an ambulance.

  Only for new fear to strike him.

  Was someone hurt?

  He hurried forward, belatedly puzzled that the ambulance, which was clearly marked as such, was dark inside. Its back doors were open, but there was no warmly lit interior.

  Another scream ripped the darkness. The same as before: a wailing shriek from the bottom of someone’s soul. And that someone, he now knew without doubt, was not a vixen calling for a mate, but his sister, crying out in sheer terror.

  Freddie slid to a halt, watching from ten yards away as three figures in green manhandled someone to the rear of that so-called ambulance and threw them inside it.

  ‘Jodie!’ he croaked.

  Two of the figures glanced round.

  There was another scream as a second struggling shape was bundled into the back of the vehicle. This one had to be Rick because he was putting up more of a fight, and it was several seconds before one of the men in green was able to tear himself away and lurch towards Freddie, one hand upraised.

  ‘OK, son!’ he shouted in an accent Freddie couldn’t place. ‘There is accident.’

  Freddie didn’t know which he found the more chilling. That the guy approaching, who had lost one of his gloves in the struggle, was now showing a palm bearing the tattoo of what looked like a huge black spider. Or that his face was blacker still, blotted out by a ski-mask.

  Freddie bolted, but not along the lane. The nearest houses that way were miles off. Instead, he went left, crashing into the bushes, trying to dodge his way through. He’d covered twenty yards when he heard angry shouts, and an explosive CRACK.

  A slug zipped past him, ripping through the foliage.

  It goaded him to maniacal efforts, ignoring the branches that whipped and snagged him. As he reached the other side, he heard a heavy crashing of leafage as larger bodies entered the trees.

  ‘Mara!’ a gruff voice yelled. ‘This way!’

  This voice was different from the first. With another CRACK, a second shot was fired.

  It clipped Freddie’s left earlobe.

  Though it stung, he didn’t so much as yelp as he staggered up the short embankment. He knew that he’d need all the breath he could muster. But common sense was vital too. If he headed left towards the clubhouse and the road beyond, they’d see him, his dark shape a moving target on the moonlit grass. So, he went right, hugging the treeline as he sprinted.

  In no time he was two hundred yards away. He risked a backward glance.

  They were in close pursuit. One masked figure only fifty yards behind, another twenty yards further back than that. Freddie swerved left.

  A third shot sounded.

  A divot of grass was kicked up close by. But Freddie was already into the rough, the terrain dropping downhill towards an ornamental pond and then sweeping up to the first fairway. He sobbed for breath as he galloped around the edge of the water, risking yet another backward glance. The pursuers were still close. Even as he looked, light flickered, there was another CRACK, and a leaden wasp whipped past his head. Freddie stumbled on, cresting a low rise onto flatter ground. He dug for his phone, wondering if it would be possible to place a call at the same time as going pell-mell through this half-darkness. But his vision was too filmed with sweat, his fingers too slimy with blood from his ear.

  Metal clicked behind him. Directly behind him.

  Just as the landscape tilted downward.

  A vista Freddie hadn’t previously seen unfolded below him, at its heart the linear glow of a major road. He could even see the headlights moving back and forth. The slope steepened, making it easier; he found new strength.

  ‘Shit!’ someone shouted.

  Freddie glanced back. Their two black shapes were on the higher ground, framed against the night. They’d stopped chasing, though one was pointing down at him. Freddie thought to zigzag, but was travelling at such speed that he feared he’d trip.

  A CRACK split the night.

  The smashing blow of the bullet was the worst pain he’d ever known …

  I

  THE WORST PERSON

  ON EARTH

  1

  Today

  ‘Course, it’s not a problem these days,’ Connie said. ‘Being a shirt-lifter.’

  ‘We’re not exposing Sleaman because he’s a closet gay,’ David replied. ‘We’re exposing him because he’s been doing the dirty on his wife and kids.’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’ Connie’s raspy cackle sounded especially unpleasant through his in-car speakers. ‘Who’d have thought it? Barry Sleaman … How long’s this been going on?’

  ‘I doubt it’s just started,’ David replied. ‘But that doesn’t matter, does it? The fact remains I’ve caught him on film. And it’s clear as a bell. He has no deniability whatsoever.’

  ‘And let me get this straight … you staked out his house in Beaconsfield and followed him every evening he went out until you caught him?’

  ‘It was only five times.’

  ‘Even so, darling. Tailing someone from Beaconsfield to Soho. No one can say you don’t earn your money.’

  ‘You’re happy, then?’

  ‘How could I not
be? You’re getting the front cover and a centre-spread. Love your intro, by the way.’

  He’d known that she would. The road divided; he went left towards Tesco.

  ‘“TV tough guy busts a different kind of nut,”’ Connie read aloud. ‘“Brit-grit film and TV star, Barry Sleaman, famous for his roles as hardcase cops hunting lowlifes through the backstreets of Broken Britain, has this week revealed that he’s got more than a professional interest in those backstreets, not to mention those self-same lowlifes. The burly, bearded actor may be known worldwide as a fearless confronter of hardmen everywhere, but today Scandalous can exclusively report that confronting ‘hard men’ means much more to him than a mere profession. The Yorkshire-born Sleaman (48), who is married and has three children, has long been renowned for his portrayal of macho but tortured heroes, characters with shady pasts but a firm grasp on their personal principles. However, according to Scandalous reporter, David Kelman, it now seems that Sleaman doesn’t just have a shady past but a shady present too, though when it comes to personal principles, he is distinctly lacking. What he has a firm grasp on at present we can only surmise, but last Saturday night it was a young man called Sid, who cheerfully admitted to our intrepid news-hunter: ‘Getting some action from a good-looking celeb like Sleaman was fantastic. I know he’s on the scene a lot. He’d never admit that, but he is. But what a coup for someone like me. I only usually get the scrag-ends …’”’ Connie broke off reading. ‘This guy Sid proved talkative, didn’t he?’

  ‘Spoke to him in the bar after Sleaman had gone home,’ David said. ‘You’d be amazed how much lads like him’ll tell you once you’ve bunged them a few quid.’

  ‘Whatever, darling … This is very impressive work.’

  Again, he didn’t need her to tell him. The zip-filed photos and videos he’d sent with the story had only been compiled after a considerable expenditure of time; after waiting for hours, night after night, at different points along the suburban avenue where Sleaman’s family resided in their seven-bedroom villa, hoping against hope that each night would be the night. That said, when it finally was the night and the big guy came outside unusually late, it had been comparatively easy tailing his classic MG soft-top the forty miles to Stanmore, where the actor had left it at a row of clapped-out garages, and continued his journey to London in a rickety old Renault Clio.