The Choice: An absolutely gripping crime thriller you won’t be able to put down Read online

  The Choice

  An absolutely gripping crime thriller you won’t be able to put down

  Jake Cross

  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

  A Letter from Jake

  Acknowledgements

  I just told a hundred-thousand-word story to people I don’t know, and there’s no more to say. This is for my mum, my dad, and my uncle Frank, who I didn’t say nearly enough to at the end.

  One

  Karl

  Nobody wants to run someone down in the road, but for a long time afterwards Karl Seabury wondered if things might have worked out better if his van had slammed the woman into bloody oblivion.

  He was piloting 3,500 lbs of Ford engineering along a road as wet as a solid river when something came at him. He didn’t even see a shape, let alone a woman, just a hint of colour that extracted itself from the black wall of trees on his right. Instinct pistoned his foot hard onto the brake. There was a screech of rubber that sent birds panicking from the treetops like gravity-defying leaves. His seatbelt cut hard across his chest as he was thrown forward. Before he had time to wonder what the hell had happened, it was all over. The van sat stalled and silent, headlights illuminating the curving road ahead and a woman in a sodden summer dress.

  He reached for the handle to open his door, missed it, cast his eyes away from the road to locate it, found it, started to open the door, ready to unload foul language, and let out a yelp as the door was wrenched from his grasp as if by a fierce gale.

  She was right there in the doorway, a face that had been gaunt and terrified in the headlights now gaunt and terrified in the van’s interior light.

  ‘What the Jesus are—’ Karl began, but froze when she grabbed his shirt in two tight fists.

  ‘You gotta help me!’ she moaned.

  Autopilot kicked in. On a bright summer’s day, he might have told her to calm down, might have stepped out of the van and led her to the side of the road to seek an explanation. But it was dark and eerie out there and that fired an alarm in his mind. He grabbed the woman under the arms, yanked her up and literally threw her across him into the passenger seat. Her head smacked the window but she didn’t seem to care, and neither did he. He just needed to get out of there. He twisted the ignition key and stamped and pulled at all the appropriate pedals and levers until the road started to vanish beneath the vehicle. By the time he hit second gear, the woman had already slipped out of the seat and crammed herself into the footwell. She clearly didn’t want to be seen in the van by whoever she was running from.

  And then it happened again.

  This time the shape was black, just like the night, and he didn’t see a thing until it stepped into the funnels of his headlights. He recognised a human form, but the mental alarm was in full flow and this time his foot stayed away from the brake. He did not want to stop out here again, ever.

  Instead, he tugged hard on the steering wheel, and the silhouette in his headlights vanished off to the side. It flashed by his door window then was gone. Only once he had passed did he realise it was a man in dark clothing and wearing a balaclava. A shiver ran down his spine at the image.

  He looked in the driver’s wing mirror at the shape in the road, saw twin dots of white high up in the blackness that must have been eyes, staring after him. Then the masked face turned to look the other way along the road, as if searching for something.

  Karl gripped the steering wheel hard and faced forward again. Nothing ahead but the road and the trees and the headlights. He glanced at the woman.

  ‘What the fuck’s going on?’

  ‘Is he gone?’ she croaked.

  The road grew bright ahead. Another vehicle. Karl hit his door lock, then cursed his paranoia – what did he expect, this new vehicle to screech to a halt and block his path? It would just be some car, just some guy heading some place. The headlights grew brighter, and then the car emerged from around the curve. The van’s interior was lit up like a surgery.

  In that moment he noted that her dress was patterned red and yellow, the material thin. She had manicured nails, smooth skin, and a bob haircut that was an ash blonde you couldn’t get from a chemist. An indoor look, or a summer-lunch-on-the-patio look. Certainly not a cold-March-walk-in-the-woods look.

  Then the car flashed by and all was dark again.

  ‘He bloody who? Was he chasing you?’ Karl realised his error even as he asked the question. Of course the guy was chasing her – he all in black, and her face coated in fear. ‘What did he want? You know him? Where did you come from? What are you doing out here?’ He took a breath, aware that his rapid speaking broadcast his own panicking heart. The man in black was gone, and the woman was safe, but not yet calm, and he felt some kind of male pride telling himself he needed to appear strong, as a knight in shining armour would. ‘You want to tell me what’s going on? The guy’s gone, so you can sit up.’

  She didn’t sit up. She lay her head on the seat as if it were a pillow and closed her eyes.

 
‘Do you live nearby? Did you get chased out of your house? You weren’t out geocaching dressed like that, that’s for sure.’

  No answer. He touched her shoulder, using a fist because that felt less intrusive. She jerked but her eyes stayed closed.

  ‘They came for us,’ she said, voice low, as if talking in her sleep.

  They? More than one? ‘What did they want?’

  ‘We have a house on land beyond the woods,’ she murmured, a delayed answer to his previous question. ‘We were going to have dinner. Our friends. I hope they’re okay.’

  ‘And what, these men came? And everyone ran away? Why are you on your own?’

  ‘They wanted to hurt us, I think. And rob us. My husband… he…’

  This was making his head spin.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ she blurted, eyes open, a new fear imprinted on her face as if she suspected the nightmare might yet have another chapter.

  ‘I’m sure all the others are okay,’ he told her. He tried to picture a party on a rain-drenched patio. Men in tuxedos and women in flowery dresses. Expensive wines and political chat. And masked men in black rushing at them out of the trees, making them scatter. Might there be other drivers out here with scared people in their passenger seats, listening to such a tale?

  ‘You’re not going to throw me out, are you?’ Her eyes were pleading.

  ‘I’m not taking you anywhere,’ he said. ‘I mean, I’ll take you to a police station. I’m not going to throw you out.’

  She didn’t speak again for a minute, and he was grateful for the silence. It gave him time to let this whole palaver sink in. He held his breath until he caught sight of the mist of orange lights oozing from around the next bend. A few seconds after streetlights appeared. Ahead were terraced houses in two neat lines. Karl felt himself relax. The proximity of the human world woke some confidence in the woman, too, because she struggled up out of the footwell and sat in the seat like someone… normal. She gazed out of the window as if enjoying the view, but then he realised his error: she was concentrating on the wing mirror. Checking behind them for pursuers.

  ‘Burglars don’t come chasing people who got away,’ he said, unable to think of anything else. ‘I’m sure they got spooked by everyone seeing them and just ran off.’

  She looked at him. Hard. As if he had said something naive. Or just plain wrong.

  ‘Maybe you shouldn’t have stopped for me. Now you’re caught up in this and in danger, and it’s my fault.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  She was examining a cut on her elbow, probably from crashing through trees to escape her pursuer.

  ‘Hey. What do you mean? Why would I be in danger?’

  ‘It’s probably fine,’ she said. But she didn’t sound sincere. In that moment, he wished he’d never slammed on the brakes.

  Two

  Brad

  Brad knew something was up the moment he spotted his partners.

  Set in a clearing dotted with tree stumps, the house was a stone barn conversion with an open-air porch containing all-weather sofas arranged around a large firepit. And there sat Mick, puffing away at a cigarette and seemingly oblivious to the light rain. Like a guy on holiday, no worries in the world. Dave paced nearby, agitated.

  He saw them clearly in the light from the flames despite their black clothing, but they did not see his approach until he was almost upon them. Like an apparition, he appeared from out of nowhere on the porch, right next to Dave who jerked with a grunt when Brad said: ‘Why are you two outside?’

  ‘Where the hell is she?’ Dave snapped. He was thirty-five, short and black and sinewy, like a track guy.

  Mick jumped to his feet. He was in his late forties, tall and white and heavily built, like a gym guy. He had an iron-grey buzzcut. ‘Where is she, Brad?’

  Brad ignored the question, his eyes on the kitchen door, fearful of what lay beyond. He didn’t like that his partners were both outside. And not wearing their balaclavas.

  Dave seemed to sense Brad’s concern and said: ‘It went bad. Ain’t a summer scene in there.’

  Brad started for the door. He got the handle in his fist and was about to twist it when Mick called out: ‘We can’t leave her body out in the trees, Brad. Come on, let’s go get her.’

  Brad hesitated but didn’t turn around.

  Mick said: ‘I mean, a body she is, right? Dead and no threat to us, for sure. Because you wouldn’t stroll back all casually like this if she had escaped.’

  ‘She escaped.’

  Dave started cursing.

  Mick’s voice was low and calm as he said: ‘Brad, how did she get past you and outside from all the way upstairs? A five-foot woman in high heels.’

  He ignored that question and explained that she’d hit the road and jumped into a passing vehicle. This news increased the tempo of Dave’s complaints. He’d expected rage from Mick, but there was none. The man simply shook his head like a parent disappointed in a child.

  Brad said: ‘She’s running for her life. Scared. That’s what you wanted. What’s the problem?’

  ‘Shut the screeching, Dave. Why don’t I show you the problem, Brad? Open the door.’

  * * *

  Brad entered the house, his worry rising. The kitchen hummed with modern technology but retained a graceful air with bespoke cabinets, a slate floor and exposed timbers. There was a wine rack. It had been attached to the wall beside a tall freezer, but was now broken on the floor, bottles scattered or shattered everywhere, and in among them was a man in a white suit, sitting against the wall. The red soaking his torso wasn’t a vintage Bordeaux.

  Grafton. Dead.

  Mick spoke from right behind him, like a devil on his shoulder. ‘I wish you could have seen his face. He knew the end was coming.’

  Brad could hear Dave further back, still moaning.

  ‘I’m thinking the plan to put him in a wheelchair looks like a no-go now, right?’ Brad asked, shocked. But was he really that surprised? He knew what Mick was capable of.

  ‘Well, I fucking apologise, Brad. I went a bit far.’

  Brad turned to him. ‘You didn’t go too far, Mick. You made the exact journey you planned. You were going to kill this guy all along.’

  ‘For what he did to me, you really think it was going to be just a scare? Really?’

  The silence of the house. Dave’s constant moaning. The fact Dave and Mick had been waiting outside, no balaclavas. Something was horribly wrong about that picture. Brad moved through the kitchen and stopped in a hallway with a vaulted ceiling and paintings lining both walls. It was there he learned exactly what was wrong.

  Another body. Another man. This guy wore jeans and a corduroy jacket. He was down on his face, and there was a chunk missing from where his shoulder and neck met, as if a giant bite had been taken out of him. The shotgun blast had taken him in the back. As he ran away.

  ‘He had the audacity to turn his back on me, this one,’ Mick said.

  Brad ignored him. The vast living room was next. Three-quarters of the floor was carpeted, the rest wood and set aside for an office. Here again was a vaulted ceiling in white and exposed timbers painted black. Colour had been added with yellow and green spotlights arranged artfully around all the walls. The lounge section of the room had a corner sofa and upon it, sitting back as if relaxing in front of the TV, was a woman in a dress. A spotlight above the sofa bathed her in green, making Brad think of some bizarre art exhibit. Her death had been cleaner because she had just a single bullet hole in her forehead. No blood, strangely. His head spun.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Mick, what the hell is this? We came here to put Grafton in a wheelchair, but he’s dead. That was overkill. But this. I don’t know what the hell to call this.’

  Dave followed them into the room looking like he’d just lost a winning lottery ticket. ‘This is a fucking escalation into a new universe, that’s what this is. What do we do? And the woman’s running around out there. So now we’re fucked.’

  �
�Not if we get her before she goes to the cops,’ Mick said.

  ‘She’s probably in a police station right now,’ Dave screamed.

  Mick grabbed Dave’s shoulders. He was a clear head taller than him. ‘Calm down. She won’t be running to the cops tonight. She’ll expect this to have been a robbery, or some guys wanting to give her sweet hubby a hiding. Like you said, he always told her: if any shit kicks off, crawl under a rock and wait it out. So, she’ll just hide away somewhere till morning, and then try to call him, or go to some place they pre-arranged. He’d fucking kill her if she brought the cops around. So she won’t be going to any fucking police station tonight. Hell, he’s Mr Invincible, remember. Maybe she thinks he killed us all. So, we have time to find her.’