At her side, Harris moved from foot to foot, a new, nervous energy rolling through him with no place to discharge itself. She felt the same way. Neither of them were strangers to the nastier parts of human nature. You couldn’t be an ordinary plod without running into that kind of thing sooner or later, but the callous brutality of the murder scene in the house had left both of them struggling to process it.

  The killings didn’t look like acts of madness or passion. They were brutal and efficient.

  ‘Head’s up, Gracey.’ Harris jutted his chin as a man in a heavy greatcoat and thunderous mood came marching up the gravel drive toward them.

  Detective Inspector Mohan Khan wasn’t a man whose company regular coppers like Grace and Harris ever wanted to find themselves in. A hard-eyed, unsmiling officer with a face like weathered teak, he was known to work as a hatchet man for the higher-ups, and his appearance at any crime scene usually meant that someone, somewhere, was in for a serious bollocking. The lower ranks had a nickname for him – they called him ‘The Wrath’, a play on words from the title of an old 1980s Star Trek movie. But no one laughed when they said it. If Khan had ever possessed a sense of humour, it had been surgically removed upon joining the police service.

  To Grace’s silent dismay, she watched Khan demand an answer from one of the SOCOs that sent him coming their way, homing in on the pair of constables like a heat-seeking missile.

  ‘You two.’ He aimed a thick finger at them. ‘First on site?’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ Harris answered. ‘We were following up on an RTC with a single fatality. This is the unfortunate gentlemen’s home, and, uh . . .’ He ran out of breath, stumbling over his next words.

  Grace took over, earning a grateful glance from her colleague. ‘Bodies of the wife and daughter in the kitchen, sir. Multiple stab wounds. Not a pretty sight.’

  ‘Husband did it?’ Khan glanced in the direction of the house. Grace wasn’t clear if he was genuinely asking them to venture an opinion, and they both elected to remain silent. ‘I have already spoken to Sergeant Peake,’ he said. ‘I’ve been briefed. The house: any sign of forced entry?’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Grace.

  ‘The garage door and the back door were both unsecured,’ added Harris.

  ‘Murder-suicide.’ Khan let the words drop where they fell, as if he was testing out the notion. ‘Husband killed them, he went for a drive, put his car into the back of a tractor,’ he said, parcelling out the events in swift order. ‘Or not.’ The senior officer turned his searchlight glare on Grace. ‘Sergeant Peake informed me that you found possible evidence of a passenger in the car. He gestured at the air. ‘Correct?’

  ‘I believe so, sir.’ Grace gave a nod. ‘Obviously, the forensics bods will know for certain—’

  ‘Obviously,’ Khan replied, cutting her off. ‘But that potentiality does shake up this bag of shit quite a bit, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Sir.’ She nodded again, and Harris mirrored her.

  ‘A lot of wealthy people around here.’ Khan held up a finger. ‘Town council members, a judge, so on and so on, all within earshot of this house. You can be sure concerned telephone calls will be flying about.’ He fixed them both with a steady gaze. ‘And here we are tonight, spread thin and dealing with it on the back foot.’

  ‘Don’t follow, boss,’ said Harris, his brow furrowing.

  ‘Accident on the motorway.’ The senior officer’s reply was clipped. ‘Tanker lorry. It has proven to be a far more thorny issue than first assumed. For now, this incident has much less manpower on it than we would like.’

  ‘We’ being the upper ranks, thought Grace. Why do I get the feeling this will be a long night?

  Khan folded his arms across his barrel chest and made the two of them walk him through everything that had happened, step-by-step from the moment they arrived at the car crash, to the radio call going out about the bloody scene in the kitchen.

  He listened intently, probing for more detail here and there, absorbing every word that came out of their mouths. Grace stuck to the plain facts of the matter, leafing back through the scribble in the pages of her notebook where she had jotted down everything that appeared relevant.

  When they were done, Khan gave a slow, approving nod. ‘Assuming your conclusion is viable,’ he said, ‘assuming Price was not alone in the car, we must entertain the possibility his family was also not alone in the house.’ He nodded toward the street. ‘A neighbour mentioned seeing another car in the drive tonight. If we have an unknown person connected to both incidents, identifying and locating them is the highest priority.’

  Once again, Grace didn’t know if he wanted her to agree or if he was thinking aloud, so she said nothing, waiting for whatever came next.

  ‘On the way here, I spoke to the senior CIU officer at site of the crash.’ Khan glanced back at the house. ‘The car’s satellite navigation system is intact. It appears Price followed a route that he drove on a regular basis. To Ridley Hill airport.’

  ‘He’s a pilot?’ Grace recalled seeing framed photos on the walls of the house, including one particular one of Price himself leaning against a single-engine light aircraft.

  Khan snapped his fingers. ‘You two are doing nothing more than being doorstops here. Get out to that airfield, canvas the site for anyone who knows Price. If he was on his way there, he probably had a reason.’

  Grace and Harris exchanged glances. There was a conversation they both wanted to have about how close they were to the end of their shift, but one look at the steely glare from the DI told them that there was overtime in their immediate future, whether they wanted it or not.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Grace and Harris answered in unison, accepting the order.

  With her colleague trailing behind her, Grace headed back to their patrol car.

  ELEVEN

  The co-pilot interpreted Kate’s sullen silence as rudeness on her part, and she was content to leave him with that. The last thing she wanted was to deal with Ray’s continual enquiries, not while her mind churned with fear and anxiety as she tried to make sense of her next move.

  The digital clock on the Hawker’s control panel continued its inexorable march toward the top of the hour, closing the gap on the thirty-minute deadline.

  A thousand bleak possibilities had gone through her thoughts – everything from the prospect that this whole thing had been falsified with deepfakes and simulated voices, to the horrible notion that Alex and George might already be lying dead, and that Kate Hood would be next.

  The consequences of the grim choice weighing her down were heavy like lead. Suppose she obeyed the faceless voice on the phone; suppose she gave him exactly what he wanted. What then? There was no guarantee that Alex and George would be safe and no way to know if the man holding them hostage would keep his word.

  And what would happen to her? The landing coordinates in the message were within the Hawker’s flight range, up along the Mediterranean coast of Algeria, probably the site of some dusty and disused airstrip co-opted for exactly this situation.

  What would happen when she touched down there, if the prisoner in the hood was turned over to his liberators? Did they want to save him or kill him?

  She glanced at Ray, thinking of him, of Breeze and Finn. And of herself.

  They won’t let us live, Kate told herself. They get what they want and we’re dead.

  Was that a trade she was willing to risk? Her life and that of three strangers to save the man she loved, and his son?

  Yes. She felt a little ashamed when her answer came quickly.

  Kate thought about coming clean to Breeze, wondering if the acerbic American would take her seriously. But if she did, what would that mean for Alex and George? The voice on the phone had warned her he’d know if she talked. It was possible they might have surveillance on board the Hawker. She glanced around the cockpit. There were hundreds of places someone could hide a listening device if they had a mind to.

  Or did they have another way to know? Her gaze settled on Ray for a moment. What if there was someone on board working with them?

  Kate sighed and straightened in her seat, struggling to find a way to get her hands around the problem. There were so many variables, so many different ways it could go horribly wrong, but right now she knew only one thing for certain – when the thirty-minute deadline expired, if she had not obeyed, the man on the phone would hurt Alex and George in order to punish her.

  I can’t allow that. Her jaw hardened. And as long as I’m still flying this plane, I still have some measure of control. She thought about Breeze’s prisoner. Whoever he is, they want him. I can stop them getting him, so that gives me something of value.

  But before she could consider what could be done with that leverage, the problem in front of her – or, more accurately, the problem sitting in the co-pilot’s seat – had to be dealt with.

  She checked the control screens. A few moments ago, the city of Lisbon had passed under the port wing, its faraway lights a smudge of glowing amber in the darkness, glimpsed through the clumps of dogged rain cloud that had followed them down the Algarve coastline. Next, they would pass around Cabo de São Vicente at the southernmost tip of Portugal, and then it would be a run across open water until they came in sight of land again, approaching the shores of Morocco.

  If she was to take the Hawker where the kidnapper wanted it to go, Kate would need to course-correct soon, shifting to a heading due east over the Strait of Gibraltar, across the Alboran Sea and into the Med. Of course, Ray and the others would not agree to that. The co-pilot had to be deleted from the equation.

  Kate had flown the Hawker 800 on a couple of occasions before tonight’s events, but that had been more than a year ago. Still, she remembered that this particular jet had a few mechanical quirks that Brian Teller had gamely suggested his pilots ‘work around’, rather than having to commit to a costly full tear-down and repair. Every individual aircraft had its idiosyncrasies and G-LTTP was no exception.

  Now she had to gamble on one of them to get her what she needed.

  When the moment was right, with Ray’s attention briefly elsewhere, Kate surreptitiously adjusted the settings on the Hawker’s portside engine. After a few seconds, the turbofan gave a warning grumble like a faraway thunderhead and a status light popped up on the dashboard.

  Ray’s head came around in a bird-like jerk as he saw the alert. ‘What’s that?’

  Kate faked a weary grimace. ‘This crap again. I’m sick of asking Teller to sort it out.’ She leaned forward, peering at the engine readouts. ‘It’s probably nothing, don’t worry about it.’

  ‘Doesn’t feel like nothing,’ snapped Ray, as a faint shudder made its way up the length of the fuselage. He reached out toward the panel that would correct the tiny mismatch that Kate had deliberately created, and in that moment she put pressure on the Hawker’s starboard rudder, deliberately making the shudder worsen. Ray’s hand dropped to the arm of his seat automatically to steady himself.

  ‘Yeah, maybe you’re right.’ Kate shot him a look and did everything she could to hide the lie she uttered next. She reached for her seat belt fastener. ‘Do me a favour? Take the aircraft. I’ll go back and make a visual inspection of the intake. There’s been an intermittent issue with a panel working loose in the past . . .’

  Ray’s eyes widened at the idea of a piece of the ducting coming off in mid-air, perhaps to get sucked into the turbine blades. The pilot didn’t need to say more. In the worst-case scenario, something like that could severely damage the engine and force the Hawker to make an unscheduled emergency landing – or worse.

  ‘No.’ Before she could unbelt, Ray had already released his safety restraint. ‘You have to stay up here. I’ll check it.’ But before he left his seat, he hesitated. ‘You said this is a reported problem with this aircraft? Well, that should have been brought to my attention before take-off!’

  Kate shrugged. ‘If you know Brian Teller, you know he likes to play his cards close to his chest. I’m sure he didn’t want to risk scrubbing the flight and losing whatever you people are paying him.’ When Ray didn’t respond, she pushed her point. ‘Look, if you’re that worried about it, I can contact air traffic control and tell them we need to divert to Faro. We can check it out on the ground.’

  ‘Absolutely not.’ Ray’s reply was firm. ‘Stay off the radio. I’ll have a look, make an evaluation. Any decision to change course will not be yours to make.’

  ‘Whatever you say,’ she allowed.

  Ray left his radio headset hanging over the back of the seat and worked his way through the cockpit vestibule and down the length of the passenger cabin. Kate watched him exchange a terse comment with Finn, then head for a window on the portside of the plane. Anyone looking through it would have a clear view of the number one engine’s intake maw, and any visible issues with it.

  But there was nothing wrong with the engine, and the whole story about the loose panel was a complete fabrication, something that sounded just problematic enough that it couldn’t be ignored.

  Activating the automatic pilot to maintain the Hawker’s straight and level flight, Kate took a deep breath and threw off her headset and safety restraints before vaulting out of her seat in a quick, agile motion.

  Finn was the only person looking in her direction. He saw the sudden, unexpected movement and his eyes widened in surprise, but she caught him off-guard and he didn’t move, not until well after she was already at the cockpit’s security door.

  Kate slammed her shoulder into the door across the vestibule and slid it shut, her hands falling to the case-hardened steel locking bolts, closing them tightly one after another. The bolts thudded home and she turned the latches that would double-secure them, completely isolating the flight deck from the rest of the aircraft.

  Her hands trembled as she backed away from the door, the rapid spike of adrenaline that had carried her through her actions fading as fast as it had arisen. Someone banged a fist on the other side of the door and Kate heard a muffled voice as Breeze called out her name.

  She stood looking at the door for what felt like a long time, the consequences of her illegal act pressing down on her. Then, with finality, Kate tore herself away and returned to her seat.

  Her hands shook as she brought up the flight computer, and she had to force herself to remain calm. She wasn’t a stranger to stress – she’d flown fighter planes in active war zones after all – but that was very different to what she was doing now. Kate set to work re-calculating the Hawker’s route and fuel figures, losing herself in the numbers, blotting out the noises from the door.

  When that was done, she switched off the autopilot and resumed control of the Hawker. With steady, gentle pressure, she tilted the wings to put the jet into a slow, steady bank, to aim it eastward.

  There would be no turning back now; the pilot had hijacked her own aircraft.

  One moment Ray was leaning on the curved wall of the Hawker’s cabin, his nose pressed up against the oval window, and the next there was noise and shouting, and the sudden sinking realisation that he had been played for a mug.

  There didn’t appear to be any obvious problem with the portside engine and no sign of any loose panels visible in the glow cast from the interior. There was only the crash of the security door shutting firmly, and the woman from the CIA swearing as she hauled herself up out of her seat.

  She spun to aim a finger in the asset’s face and the man recoiled from her angry expression before she’d even said a word. ‘You. Don’t move,’ snarled Breeze. Then she turned her glare on Ray. ‘And you, you goddamn moron, you left Hood in the cockpit on her own?’

  ‘I didn’t . . .’ I didn’t think, he was about to say, and he clamped down on the reply before he voiced it. The pilot’s blithe mention of a potentially lethal engine problem had briefly overridden Ray’s normal caution, and now they would pay for it. His cheeks turned hot with humiliation. Hood had known exactly what buttons to push to send him off the flight deck, exploiting the same instincts for safety that were hard-wired into every serving pilot.

  ‘Katherine Hood, can you hear me? You need to open this immediately, do you understand?’ At the other end of the passenger cabin, Finn worked the door’s handle, pushing at the panel to no avail. He raised his voice so the pilot would hear him, not that it seemed to matter. Silence returned from the other side of the door, and he gave an audible grunt. ‘She’s bolted herself in,’ he confirmed.

  ‘No shit, Sherlock.’ Breeze’s retort was acidic. Her gaze dropped to the asset, eyeing the man in the prison fatigues. ‘Mask this prick up. I don’t want him talking.’

  ‘No! No!’ Yusuf held up his hands, as much as he could from where they were secured to the wall, his face ashy with panic. ‘Please, oh please don’t put that on me again! I won’t speak, I promise. I beg you!’

  ‘He’s the least of our concerns,’ said Finn. He turned to Ray. ‘Let me guess. She sent you back here on a fool’s errand?’

  ‘Hood said there was an engine issue,’ he confirmed. ‘Except there isn’t.’

  ‘I refer you to my previous answer – no shit.’ The American moved to the security door and banged hard on it, calling out to the pilot. When there was no response, she turned to Finn and prodded the bearded man hard in the chest. ‘You. Fucking. Assured. Me. You said this woman wasn’t going to be a problem!’

  Ray watched a change drop over Finn’s face, a bland and neutral veneer that gave nothing away. ‘With all due respect, I’d like to remind you that your man Chester also gave her the green light.’

  ‘Someone is fucking with me,’ growled Breeze, shaking her head. ‘The first pilot vanishes, second one gets foisted on us with zero prep time . . .’ Exasperated, she pressed the heel of her hand into the bridge of her nose. ‘Damn it! This is deliberate! Should have scrubbed it and gone home . . .’