T.J. Lebbon - The Hunt - ‘A great thriller...breathless all the way’ – LEE CHILD

The windows in the van’s rear doors were covered with plywood boards, and a small, naked bulb provided the only light inside. It swung on a loose wire, light and shadows dancing around the vehicle’s interior. The space revealed was battered and well-used, the walls scabbed with rust, floor dirty, scratches and dents scarring the exposed metal bodywork.

‘If you just untie her, she’ll calm down a bit,’ Gemma said.

‘Really?’ the woman asked, raising an eyebrow. While they were being taken from the house, Gemma had heard her called Vey. The strange name only added to Gemma’s fear. Who called anyone Vey?

Were they going to be killed?

‘Where’s my dad?’ That he wasn’t here with them terrified Gemma. He’d always said that she had a vivid imagination, and she imagined him arriving home from his run and finding the house empty, meeting someone left behind to kill him. Her dad, in his sweaty, tight running kit that she often took the mickey out of, opening the door and being met with a fist or a gun.

The unreality of things hit her. That helped.

‘You just keep still and quiet. Be a good little girl.’

Gemma couldn’t remember the last time she’d been called a little girl. She was fifteen in six weeks, and already almost as tall as her mum. She hadn’t been a little girl for a while. Vey doesn’t know how to talk to kids so doesn’t have any , she thought, and she filed that in her memory bank. She called it ‘the box’, and imagined it as a concertina file like the one Mum and Dad used to store their household bills and other stuff. She closed her eyes briefly to open it and slip in this new piece of information. She didn’t bother with alphabetical order, just filed it in one of the cardboard folds.

The van bumped gently over a series of sleeping policemen. We’re still in the town , Gemma thought. She’d seen a film once where someone had been kidnapped, thrown into a car boot, and then tracked where they were being taken by listening to noises from outside, counting turns, making a mental map of the route they were taking. It was ridiculous, and she’d lost her way after the first couple of turns. But the box was still mostly empty. Every scrap of stuff she put in there might help her.

And concentrating on that might distract her from the terror that threatened to smother her.

She had just stepped into the shower when they came. A shout from downstairs, a scream from Megs, and then the door to the bathroom had swung open and the tall man entered. ‘Get dressed,’ he’d said, not even glancing her up and down.

Through her shock, Gemma had plucked a bowl of pot pourri from the small shelf beside the bath and flung it at the man. He’d caught it casually and thrown it back at her, dried flowers and bulbs showering the bathroom. The bowl had smashed on the tiled wall, and one heavy shard sliced across her shoulder. One foot had tangled in the curtain and she’d tripped from the shower, reaching out for balance but failing, tearing the curtain from its rings, falling to the floor with a heavy thud that vented the air from her lungs and winded her.

And something had happened. Her panic had dispersed, drawn back by the feel of warm blood cooling on her skin as her shoulder wound bled. There were smears across the shower tiles. Dad’ll see that , she’d thought, already starting to think ahead.

‘Please let us go,’ she said, knowing they would not.

‘Please,’ Megs said.

Vey pressed her lips tightly together and sighed. She still held the gun. She’d shown it to the phone earlier, the screen too far away to see clearly. Gemma thought Vey had been talking to her dad, although what she’d said was confusing. Something about one 9 away, and twenty-three minutes.

She flexed her right shoulder a few times. Her school shirt had stuck to the dried blood, and rolling her shoulder opened the wound again.

And then Gemma saw a long nail on the van’s bare metal floor. It had rolled into a joint between segments, and was now covered with a scattering of dirty sawdust.

She looked away quickly, down at her feet curled under her. Her legs were going numb. Looking anywhere but at the nail, she flexed her muscles, trying to keep numbness at bay. The time might soon come when she’d have to move quickly.

He dreamed of his family. Their voices accompanied him up and out of unconsciousness, and they were with him when he opened his eyes. His wife was beside him, Megs and Gemma were in the back seat, bickering softly over who was winning their game of Legs. They often played it when they were travelling, counting pub sign legs on their own sides of the car. The Duke of York had two legs, the White Horse four, and so on. Gemma made up pub names like ‘The World’s Longest Millipede’ and ‘The Herd of Spiders’, but she always let Megs win in the end. He tried to turn to speak to Terri but there was something wrong with his head, his neck. He opened his mouth to speak, but the pain was too much. It throbbed and pulsed within him like a living thing, too big for the inside of his head, rolling and turning and pushing with its many legs, its horse’s spider’s millipede’s legs.

Where are we? he wanted to ask. What’s happening? But as he closed his eyes again, wishing away the pain, he remembered.

He looked. Hedgerows flashed by. The woman, Rose, sat in the driver’s seat, glancing over at him. Her expression betrayed nothing.

‘Sleep,’ she said. ‘Rest. You’ll need it.’

Where … he tried to mouth, but even moving his jaw sent spasms of pain through his skull. He closed his eyes. The car’s motion was lulling, and the dreams welcomed him again.

It seemed like moments before he woke again, but it must have been longer.

‘Nearly there,’ a voice said. He thought it was Terri, but then Rose tapped his arm. She had blood under her fingernails. ‘Here. Take these, and drink this. Need to have your wits about you. They’re close, so we haven’t got long.’

The truth crashed in again with a flood of sensory memories – the splash of spilled blood, the warm tang of gun smoke, the fear on his family’s faces in the back of that van. A freezing terror so deep inside that he could never hope to reach it.

He tried opening his eyes again, squinting at the liquid fire pouring in and swamping his mind. Each jolt and bump of the car on poorly maintained roads was amplified a thousand-fold and punched through his head. But pain was nothing. A transitory thing, barely remembered and beyond description. Several years ago he’d been on several pain management workshops when a twisted back had put him out of action for weeks. There, past a sheen of new-agey trappings, he’d learned a powerful truth – that pain was all in the mind.

He opened his eyes and sat up fully, groaning out loud against the hammering inside his skull.

‘You hit me.’

‘Sorry.’ Rose, the murderer, was driving with the gun nestled between her legs. He took the water bottle she offered, and then the small foil pack of pills. They were strong painkillers. He popped three from the pack, held them on his tongue, and took a swig from the bottle. It tasted strange, vaguely bitter. An electrolyte drink. He used them when he went on very long runs, replacing electrolytes in his body to balance those lost through excessive sweating. This was an endurance athlete’s drink, not a murderer’s.

He squinted at the bottle. It was full.

‘How long … ?’

‘Couple of hours. You were in and out, so I gave you a mild sedative. Needed time to drive, didn’t want you distracting me, jumping from the car, something stupid like that.’