Relentless: A Thriller - Softcover

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Simon Kernick is a Sunday Times #1 bestselling author and one of the UK’s foremost thriller writers. His twelve novels have been translated into more than twenty languages and have sold more than four million copies worldwide. He lives in London.

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Relentless

1

I only heard the phone because the back door was open. I was outside breaking up a fight between my two kids over which one of them should have the bubble-blowing machine, and it was threatening to turn ugly. To my dying day, I will always wonder what would have happened if the door had been shut, or the noise of the kids had been so loud that I hadn’t heard it.

It had just turned three o’clock on a cloudy Saturday afternoon in late May, and my whole world was about to collapse.

I ran back inside the house, into the living room, where the football was just kicking off on the TV, and picked up on about the fourth ring, wondering whether it was that perma-tanned bastard of a boss of mine, Wesley “Call me Wes” O’Shea, phoning to discuss a minor detail on a client proposal. He liked to do that on weekends, usually when there was a football match on. It gave him a perverse sense of power.

I looked at my watch. One minute past three.

“Hello?”

“Tom, it’s me, Jack.” The voice was breathless.

I was momentarily confused. “Jack who?”

“Jack . . . Jack Calley.”

This was a voice from the past. My best friend when we were at school. The best man at my wedding nine years earlier. But also someone I hadn’t spoken to in close to four years. There was something wrong, too. He sounded in pain, struggling to get the words out.

“Long time no speak, Jack. How are you?”

“You’ve got to help me.”

It sounded like he was running, or walking very quickly. There was background noise, but I couldn’t tell what it was. He was definitely outside.

“What do you mean?”

“Help me. You’ve got to . . .” He gasped suddenly. “Oh Jesus, no. They’re coming.”

“Who’s coming?”

“Oh Christ!”

He shouted these last words, and I had to hold the phone away from my ear momentarily. On the TV, the crowd roared as one of the players bore down on goal.

“Jack. What the hell’s happening? Where are you?”

He was panting rapidly now, his breaths coming in tortured, wailing gasps. I could hear the sound of him running.

“What’s going on? Tell me!”

Jack cried out in abject terror, and I thought I heard the sound of some sort of scuffle. “Please! No!” he yelled, his voice cracking. The scuffle continued for several seconds, and seemed to move away from the phone. Then he was speaking again, but no longer to me. To someone else. His voice was faint but I could make it out easily enough.

He said six words. Six simple words that made my heart lurch and my whole world totter.

They were the first two lines of my address.

Then Jack let out a short, desperate scream, and it sounded like he was being pulled away from the phone. There followed a succession of gasping coughs, and instinctively even I, who’d lived my life a long way from the indignities of death, could tell that my old friend was dying.

And then everything fell eerily silent.

The silence might have lasted ten seconds, but was probably nearer two, and as I stood frozen to the spot in my front room, mouth open, too shocked to know what to say or do, I heard the line suddenly go dead at the other end.

The first two lines of my address. The place where I lived an ordinary suburban life with my two kids and my wife of nine years. The place where I felt safe.

For a moment, just one moment, I thought it must have been some sort of practical joke, a cruel ruse to get a reaction. But the thing was, I hadn’t spoken to Jack Calley in four long years, and the last time had been a chance meeting in the street, a snatched five-minute conversation while the kids—much younger then, Max just a baby—shouted and fidgeted in their twin stroller. I hadn’t had a proper chat with him—you know, the kind friends have—in, what, five, six, maybe even seven years. We’d gone our separate ways a long time ago.

No, this was serious. You don’t put fear like that into your voice deliberately. It’s a natural thing, something that’s got to come from within. And this most definitely had. Jack had been terrified, and with good reason. If I wasn’t mistaken, and I would swear to God that I wasn’t, I’d just heard him breathe his dying breaths. And his last words were the first two lines of my address.

Who wanted to know where I lived? And why?

Let me tell you this: I am an ordinary man with an ordinary desk job in a big open-plan office, leading a team of four IT software salesmen. It’s not a huge amount of fun and, as I’ve already suggested, my boss, Wesley, is something of an arsehole, but it pays the bills and allows me to own a half-reasonable detached four-bed house in the suburbs, and at thirty-five I’ve never once been in trouble with the boys in blue. My wife and I have had our ups and downs, and the kids can act up now and again, but in general, we’re happy. Kathy works as a lecturer in environmental politics over at the university, a job she’s held for close to ten years. She’s well liked, good at what she does, and, although she probably wouldn’t like me saying so, very pretty. We’re the same age, we’ve been together eleven years, and we have no secrets. We’ve done nothing wrong; we pay our taxes and we keep out of trouble. In short, we’re just like everyone else.

Just like you.

So why did some stranger want to know our address? Some stranger who wanted it so badly he was prepared to kill for it?

Fear kicked in, that intense terror that starts somewhere in the groin and tears through you like an express train until it’s infected every part and is ready to develop into outright panic. The instinctive flight mechanism. The sick feeling you get when you’re walking empty streets alone at night and you hear footsteps coming from behind. Or when a man smashes a beer glass on the corner of a bar and demands to know what the fuck you think you’re looking at. Real fear. I had it then.

I replaced the phone in its cradle and stood where I was for a long moment, trying to think of a rational explanation for what I’d just heard. Nothing presented itself, and yet at the same time even the most paranoid explanation didn’t make sense either. If someone wanted to speak to me, then they presumably knew who I was. In which case they could easily have found out where I lived without asking a man who barely knew me anymore. They could have looked in the phone book for a start. But they hadn’t.

“Daddy, Max just hit me for no reason.” It was Chloe coming back into the house, grass stains on the knees of her jeans, her dark-blond hair a tousled mess. At five, she was a little more than a year older than her brother, Max, yet vastly more sensible. The problem was, he’d already overtaken her in bulk, and in the anarchic world of young kids bulk tends to win through in arguments. “Can you go and tell him off?” she added, looking put out, as innocent of danger as all children are.

Someone was coming here. Someone who’d just killed my oldest friend.

The last I remembered, Jack Calley had been living five or six miles away, just outside Ruislip, where London finally gives way to the Green Belt. If he’d called me from near his home then the person he’d...