Prey Read online

  Prey

  L.A. Larkin

  Copyright © 2020 L.A. Larkin

  The right of L.A. Larkin to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in

  accordance to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 2020 by Bloodhound Books

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be

  reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in

  writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the

  terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living

  or dead, is purely coincidental.

  www.bloodhoundbooks.com

  Print ISBN 978-1-913419-45-5

  To Lynne MacTavish. You are an inspiration.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  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

  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

  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

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Acknowledgements

  A note from the publisher

  Love crime, thriller and mystery books?

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  1

  Brighton, UK

  Parked outside a ground-floor Victorian terrace flat, he watches Sandra West through the bay window. It’s been raining on and off all morning and the car windscreen is a blur, but he sees enough to know that she and her fiancé, Charles Powell, are arguing. Powell’s are angry gestures: head jutted forward, staccato arm movements. She takes his hand. Powell yanks it away.

  Their observer isn’t interested in their argument. The less he knows the better.

  ‘Fuck off, Charlie boy, and let’s get on with it,’ he mutters, staring longingly at the heater, which is off, as is the engine. A stationary car pumping out exhaust attracts unwanted attention. ‘I hate this country.’

  It was a last-minute job, and if it had been for anyone else, he would have refused. A smile spreads across his unremarkable face, remembering the text message House clearance, followed by a name and address. He’d done a double take, mistaking Buckingham Place for Palace, until he saw the Brighton postcode. It came through as he was dragging the Russian woman into a cold storage unit on the outskirts of Moscow. Distracted for a moment, the bitch had bitten his wrist. He’d almost gouged her eye out to force her to let go.

  Peeling back a leather glove, he prods the swollen skin around the semi-circular teeth marks and inhales the pain, then exhales slowly as he folds the leather back into position. Eyes on his target again, Powell disappears from view, leaving the woman dabbing a tissue to her blotchy face. Maybe he’s finally leaving.

  No such luck. The pigeon-chested beanpole reappears, waving a phone in West’s face. She takes it, dials, speaks. The call is over quickly. Must have gone to voicemail. Neither of them has looked out into the street, so he’s pretty sure they haven’t reported a strange man watching them from a Ford Fiesta.

  Bored, he swipes his thumb across his phone’s screen and finds the photos of the Russian, Marta Ramazanova. He enlarges them to get a better look. Nice work. Artistic. Shame West’s death has to look like an accident. Takes all the fun out of it.

  He looks up. The front door opens, and Powell appears in a beige mac. It’s still pissing down, so he opens an umbrella and strides off towards the town centre.

  ‘About bloody time.’

  The assassin waits exactly five minutes to make sure Powell doesn’t change his mind.

  With the peak of his unbranded baseball cap pulled low over his face, he leaves the car in a standard black parka and strolls down a narrow path that leads to a back lane running the length of the terrace. He’s average height and works hard at being forgettable. His only identifying mark is on his neck, which is why he always wears shirts with collars.

  An elderly woman in a Barbour bucket hat and jacket passes him, clutching a stick in one hand and a lead attached to a shivering miniature poodle in the other.

  ‘Number twos, there’s a good boy, do number twos,’ says the woman to her dog, and neither pay the stranger the slightest attention.

  The ground-floor flat has exclusive access to a small rear garden. Running atop the fence is a lattice and through one of the little square holes he sees a waterlogged lawn and some wind-blown daffodils. The flats above are empty, their occupiers at work. The bedroom looks onto the garden and the ceiling light is switched on, which makes it easy for him to see she is packing a suitcase, moving back and forth in a dazed, mechanical way between a wardrobe and the case on the bed.

  The garden gate has an easily picked lock. He opens the gate slowly, wary of rusty hinges, and moves hastily to the back door, taking care to step on the square paving stones so he doesn’t leave footprints in the soggy lawn. The rear French door has an old-fashioned turn-key lock. He tests the handle and finds the door is unlocked. He sighs. She’s making it too easy. He covers each boot with pale blue, plastic booties and enters. He notices Powell’s forgotten Cabinet Office security pass
on the workbench by the kettle.

  Tempting. But he doesn’t take it.

  From the next room, he hears sniffing. Cranes his neck just enough to see West, her back to him, bent over her suitcase, reflected in the mirrored wardrobe. Out of sight, he pulls off his cap which he replaces with a ski mask. He readies the syringe of suxamethonium chloride and steps through the doorway.

  At that moment, West looks up. In the mirror she sees a man behind her in a ski mask. She freezes. They often do. He moves quickly. Grabbing her from behind, he plunges the needle into her neck. She struggles, thrashes, kicks him, tries to pull the syringe away. Their eyes meet in the mirror, hers wide with terror. She’s feeling it now, the gradual paralysis, her arms and legs turning to jelly. Too late, she tries to scream. Her tongue and jaw won’t co-operate. A gurgle, nothing more.

  He lays her on the bed next to the suitcase she will never use, then surveys the wardrobe. One side is filled with Powell’s stuff; on the other, hers. His client’s instructions were very clear. So instead of leaving his usual signature, he will have to be satisfied with a small theatrical touch: a suicide using the ties of the man who drove her to it. He picks out a navy-blue tie with diagonal stripes. Then a sky blue one with white spots, then red with navy spots, red and blue stripes, plain royal blue and, finally, a grey Prince of Wales check. He ties them together and creates a hangman’s noose which he pulls over West’s head and tightens around her neck. West watches, eyes watery, powerless, her muscles incapable of movement, her breathing so shallow she will be dead soon anyway.

  Now for the tricky bit. West probably only weighs fifty-five, fifty-six kilos, but she can’t support herself. He manages to get her on a chair, and, using one knee to keep her upright, he throws the other end of the makeshift rope through the ceiling light fitting, a wrought iron thing with candle-shaped lights. He pulls down hard. The light fitting holds. He keeps tugging at the rope until Sandra is dragged up to stand. She makes sucking noises. The next yank lifts her onto tiptoes. With the next, her feet are off the ground. Guttural choking, spittle dribbling. There’s an unexpected flutter of her eyelids. Her face swells, turns puce.

  When he has her raised a foot from the floor, he ties off the rope to the fitting, then pushes the chair away. It topples on its side, as if she has kicked it away. Stepping back, he admires his handiwork for a moment. He smooths down the duvet’s surface, checks he’s left nothing incriminating behind, and, having removed the ski mask and pulled on his cap, he leaves the way he came.

  Inside his rental car he uses a burner phone purchased at Heathrow Airport to dial Powell’s mobile.

  ‘Charles Powell?’ The assassin adopts a neutral British accent.

  ‘Yes, who is this?’

  ‘A word of warning. Tell anyone, particularly the police, what you think you know about the Chancellor, and you will be next.’

  ‘Next?’

  The killer cuts the connection. He drives away, dropping the phone into a public bin.

  2

  London, UK

  Investigative journalist Olivia Wolfe waits on a damp wooden bench in Kensington Gardens. Ahead is a winding path between cherry trees, their blooms battered by the heavy rain. In the distance, tourists in plastic ponchos mill around the ostentatious Albert Memorial, defying the weather. Pink cherry blossoms litter the glistening grass and float like confetti in a puddle at Wolfe’s feet, until a little girl in wellington boots runs through it, trampling the diaphanous petals.

  She’s five minutes early, her Harley-Davidson Sportster 883 parked down a side street off Kensington Road. On her way out, Wolfe got caught in a downpour so heavy it was like riding through a car wash. Her sodden leather jacket and jeans are cold and heavy against her skin. On her lap is her retro three-quarter black helmet with chin strap. On her back is a waterproof day-pack which goes with her everywhere. It contains everything she needs to travel at a moment’s notice, including her passport. But it’s more than that. Sewn into the back is an ESAPI bulletproof plate she managed to get her hands on in Afghanistan, which has saved her life more than once.

  Her line of work can be dangerous.

  She raises cold fingers to the scar above her right ear, less visible now the hair around it has started to grow back. She’ll never forget the rapid fut fut of a sniper rifle, then waking up in hospital to discover a bullet from an SR-25 had narrowly missed shattering her skull. At first, the headaches had been like a road crew at work inside her head day and night, but these days they’re little more than a dull ache.

  The fine hairs on the back of her neck prickle at the sight of Detective Superintendent Dan Casburn heading her way. Her spine straightens. For a blessed four months Wolfe hasn’t had any contact with him. Then out of the blue that morning he phones her, insisting they meet. She almost refused. Then he mentioned a name.

  Sandra West.

  As an investigative journalist renowned for exposing the criminal and the corrupt, Wolfe gets lots of tips. More often than not, they’re a waste of time. Some simply don’t interest her. Many are fabrications. Recently, she’s been getting a lot of prank calls because of her uncomfortably high profile – gained when a tabloid journalist splashed pictures of her and her Russian lover across a double-page spread of UK Today last year. But when she met Sandra West in a country pub nestled in the Downs behind Brighton, she knew immediately the woman was telling the truth, even though the topic, tax fraud by a member of parliament, was not normally Wolfe’s bag. Then West unwittingly revealed who the MP was. That’s when Wolfe started paying attention.

  ‘My fiancé was Assistant Private Secretary to, um, a cabinet minister. Well still is, I suppose,’ West had said, her eyes flitting nervously from the pub entrance to the bartender who was busy taking packets of crisps from a box. ‘He’s going to resign. Had enough, you see.’ She had paused. Chewed her lower lip. ‘He doesn’t know I’m talking to you.’

  ‘You are an anonymous source,’ Wolfe had confirmed. ‘But I need to know the name of the minister.’

  West replied, ‘For now, I want to keep it vague. At least until he’s resigned.’ As she took a sip of her coffee, her hand trembled. ‘This minister has a brother. They’re chalk and cheese. The brother is a loser. An alcoholic.’

  Wolfe immediately knew the MP in question. ‘You’re talking about the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Harold Sackville, and his brother, William?’

  West’s shoulders sagged. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘“Wild Will” is a bit of an open secret. He’s off limits except for the tabloid rags. The Chancellor tries to protect him.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’ said West. ‘I’m making a hash of this, aren’t I?’

  ‘I would have worked it out anyway. Please go on.’

  West had stared at Wolfe for a long while. ‘Of all the journalists I could have picked, I chose you because it’s said you’re trustworthy. I hope I haven’t made a mistake.’

  ‘Your fiancé’s name will stay out of anything I publish, unless he gives his consent for me to use it.’ Olivia waited.

  ‘Very well.’ West took a deep breath. ‘William phones the office. Won’t be fobbed off. Charlie puts the call through, but instead of cutting the connection, he listens in. I should make it clear that he’s never done anything like that before, but the brother’s desperation piqued his interest. Will was drunk. Slurring his words. Anyway, he pleads with Harold. Said he owed money. “How much this time?” asks Harold. “Twenty grand,” says Will, “and I promise this will be the last time.” “It never is the last time, and I’m not doing it. Not ever again.” Will then lays into him and threatens to tell the press about a tax-haven account.’

  ‘Were those Will’s exact words?’ Wolfe asked. ‘Tax-haven account?’

  West nodded.

  ‘Tell me about the account.’

  West then looked down. ‘I don’t know about that.’ Wolfe sensed she was lying. ‘What I do know is my Charlie came home that night devastated. Said that he couldn’
t believe someone he revered, entrusted with the financial stability of the country, was dodging tax.’

  Wolfe had closed her notepad. ‘I’d like to look into this, but you haven’t given me much to go on. I’m sorry.’ She had stood up to leave. West grabbed her wrist. Convinced her to stay. Told her what she knew about the offshore account.

  The park bench shakes, jolting Wolfe back to the present. Casburn sits next to her, hands in beige raincoat pockets, jaw in perpetual motion. Nicorette gum, she guesses. He’s never without it. Same flat-top haircut, shaved at the sides, as when she last saw him. He avoids eye contact. Just two people sharing a bench.