The Family Man: An edge-of-your-seat read that you won’t be able to put down

‘Don’t you care?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘But you’ve been waiting for something like this for years. Don’t you want to …’ She trailed off. He always steered these conversations even if she started them.

‘Take revenge? And how did that work for you?’

A slew of images flashed across her mind. None of them were nice. Her hip ached where she’d been shot in Wales three years before, stalking and killing the people of the Trail, the shady organisation responsible for her family’s deaths. Her arm was stiff, muscles knotted and hard from another bullet impact. They’d shot her, but she had survived. Perhaps she’d even triumphed. But she didn’t feel like a winner.

‘It’s a lovely morning,’ she said.

‘Beautiful. Anything else?’

She’d tried to get close to Holt over the past couple of years. He’d pulled her out of her alcoholism following the murders of her family, then he’d trained her, preparing her for vengeance. Even so, she knew that he’d shown her only a small part of what he had learned and experienced over the years. His history was deep, and bathed in blood and grief.

And all the time, every moment they were together or apart, Holt seemed totally in charge.

She hung up without saying any more. It was her own attempt to take control of the conversation.

Jane Smith, real name Rose, glanced at her watch and decided it was time for another coffee.

Rose ran.

She had never been a runner. It still felt like a new thing for her. But since that time in the Welsh hills with Chris Sheen three years before, and the Trail, and the violence and pain that had resulted, it had become therapeutic. The Trail had selected Chris for a human trophy hunt, holding his family hostage to ensure he played ball. If he was caught and killed by the hunters, his family went free. If he escaped, they died.

It was the same terrible dilemma that Rose herself had once faced at their hand. She had escaped. Her family had not.

Chris had shown how running could keep you alive, and not just because you stayed ahead of those who meant you harm. It cleared the mind, flushed the veins, worked your systems. It was like a detox of the brain, gasping away accumulated ideas that were growing staid and stale. It drained thoughts that might do you harm. It was a form of freedom and serenity, when Rose rarely felt free, and to be serene was a state she had forgotten years before.

After leaving Wales, she had started with a few miles. She quickly became obsessed. When it was just her and her route, she might have been free. Now, she often ran eighty miles each week, but she never seemed to get anywhere she wanted to go.

Every step she took jolted up through her damaged hip.

Take revenge? And how did that work for you?

Holt knew how it had worked for her. Not at all. Killing the people who had murdered her family had done nothing to lessen the hollowness their loss had carved out inside her.

The grief was not tempered, the rage not calmed. It was something she’d had to do, and he had been partly responsible for her achieving and surviving the task. But so many deaths by her hand had done nothing to make the past more bearable, nor the future more certain.

She dreamed of them less now, at least. Her husband and three children, slaughtered in that basement by the Trail, gone forever without any of them having a chance to say goodbye. But maybe that lessening of dreams was more down to the passage of time than anything she had done.

Sometimes, she wondered whether her killing spree had achieved anything at all.

Rose pounded down the sloping woodland trails towards the lake. There were public footpaths through here, but they were rarely trodden, and she let herself run free. She wore shorts and a vest, knobbly trail shoes, and brambles and nettles scratched and stung her legs, tree branches lashed at her bare arms and shoulders. She welcomed the pain. She never actively hurt herself, but whenever pain came she relished it. It was one thing she’d never talked about to Holt. Partly because it frightened her, but she was also terrified that he would nod, understand, and tell her that she was now just like him.

She didn’t want to be like that. She didn’t want to descend so far, become so lost. They had worked together several times since the hunt in Wales. She took jobs for people who needed her help, innocents who were suffering or naive people pulled into difficult situations. She liked to think she still had morals, and that her sense of injustice drove her to do the things she did.

It was more complex than that, of course. Rose knew that well enough, but analysing too deeply scared her.

With Holt it was … fun. He didn’t need the money, and she could not even convince herself that he did those things to be closer to her, or to protect and help her.

She truly believed he enjoyed it.

By the time she reached the lake she was sweating heavily, panting, and her legs were burning. She turned left and followed the path along the shore, leaping a fallen tree, skirting around an area where the bank had collapsed into the water, arriving eventually at the small silt beach. The ground here was hard, the water having receded several feet due to the blazing hot summer they were still experiencing. Dropping onto the compacted sand, she kicked off her trainers and stared across the lake.

The other side was two hundred metres away, heavily wooded and rising beyond into a series of low hills. She’d circled the lake a dozen times before, a tough eight mile run that necessitated passing through several private properties. She was never seen or heard. Now, a group of kids larked on the shore and in the water directly across from her. Music was playing, a sibilant hiss, and they were jumping in from a tree that stretched out across the lake. Their laughter and delighted screams seemed to come from so far away.

Rose waded into the water, still in shorts and vest, and felt the slick bed closing around her feet. She jumped forward and went under, and after surfacing she turned on her back and floated. With her ears below the surface the world was silent, cool, consisting of nothing but a burning sky. She drifted there for a while. Hardly moved. Listened to her breathing, the gentle pop of water in her ears, her world for now so close around her that nothing else seemed to exist.

Molly, her sweet daughter, jumps into the pool, laughing as she surfaces, splashing Rose where she sits reading a book.

Rose rolled onto her front and started swimming. She breathed every three strokes, keeping her eyes closed underwater. Swimming was her least favourite exercise, partly because of the pain in her right arm, but mainly because she did not feel totally in control. She never went far. Fifteen minutes of hard swimming and she left the lake, enjoying the coolness across her skin as the sun dried the water. Even before she was fully dry she slipped her trainers on and started running again, heading along the shore towards the eastern tip of the lake, and the small footbridge that crossed the narrow river that fed it.

She’d already decided what she had to do. It was too easy for Holt to dismiss her on the phone, and it had been six weeks since they’d seen each other face to face.

It took another hour to complete her run and return.

She showered quickly, and as she was crossing the spare room where she kept her clothing and kit, she caught sight of herself in the wardrobe mirror. Even now she sometimes surprised herself. She paused and stared at the stranger staring back. Thinner than she’d ever been, leaner, stronger, she was also so far removed from the mother and wife who had let grief suck her into a well of alcoholic despair. Not a single drop of alcohol had passed her lips for over five years. Sometimes, the despair remained.

Even her dead husband, Adam, would have difficulty recognising her now. Her hair was shorter than it had ever been, spiked and dyed blonde. She wore green-tinted contact lenses. Her face was drawn, cheeks hollowed, and she’d lost every ounce of the fat that had given her what he’d called cherub cheeks. Laughter lines remained at the corners of her mouth and eyes, the scars of old smiles. Her left ear was pierced three times, and she wore a stud in her nose.

It was a diamond. She thought such luxury amusing.

She still carried the tattoo on her thigh. She’d had it because the woman who’d killed her family had it, visiting the same tattooist to glean what information she could. Laser treatment had never occurred to her. It was small, and would only be seen by those looking closely enough. Since her husband Adam, no one had.

She dressed in her cycling kit, locked up, and hit the road.

An hour later, approaching the small caravan that Holt had taken for himself, she was struck once again by how deserted it seemed. Holt fostered such an image, but she braked and paused by the small gate into the field, shielding her eyes and scanning the caravan and its surroundings. There were no signs of life.

She carried her bike across the ridged field. Its crop had already been harvested, leaving only sharp stubble.

‘It’s me!’ she called. It was unnecessary. He’d already know who was there.

The door was locked. She knocked, using their code. Two knocks, five, one. No answer.

‘John?’ He was John Williams. She was Jane Smith. In public, on the phone, anywhere.

Convinced that she was alone, she took out her bike’s toolkit and flicked open the small knife. It took fifty seconds to pick the caravan’s lock. She was out of practice. It was something she’d feared when they decided to settle for a few months, that they would become rusty, complacent, soft.

Door unlocked, she opened it a crack and peered through. The failsafe he used when he was inside was disconnected. Anyone breaking in when he was in residence would take a shotgun blast to the face.

Inside, she could already see that he’d left in a rush. Anger coursed through her. He wouldn’t have changed his mind so quickly, that was for sure, and even as she’d called him he must have been packing and preparing to leave.

‘Holt, you bloody prick!’ she muttered. Whenever she thought she was getting close to knowing him, she realised he was more of an enigma than ever.

She couldn’t help feeling hurt. He’d seen the reports and chosen to go on his own, not with her. They’d never really been a team, but she liked to think they had become friends, working together a few times since taking down the Trail’s UK cell. She trusted him as much as she would ever trust anyone again. She believed in him.

He’d lied to her, left without her, and that smarted.

A small note was propped on the table, beside an empty water bottle. Changed my mind, it said.

‘Yeah. Right. Bastard.’ She sighed and sat outside the caravan, looking across the fields at the farmstead in the distance, and the sweeping patterns the breeze made in dozens of acres of crops.

It took only a couple of minutes to convince herself that she had to follow.

Chapter Eight

Manson Eyes

For the final few normal hours of her life, Emma followed a familiar routine.

‘Hurry up, you’ll be late for school!’

‘Okay, Mum.’

She stood at the bottom of the stairs, listening to Daisy humming along to something on her iPod. Every school morning was the same, and every morning her daughter was out of the door with seconds to spare. It was only her second week back in school following the summer holidays, but it seemed that this final year in primary school would be the same.

‘Come on! I’ve got to get ready myself, yet.’

‘Chill pill, Mum.’ Daisy appeared at the top of the stairs. Short and slight like Emma, but also possessing her mother’s athletic build and love of sports, Dom always said that Daisy was going to be a heartbreaker.

‘What?’ Daisy asked as she hurried downstairs.

‘You’re gorgeous.’

‘Like a princess?’

‘Gorgeouser.’

‘That’s not a word.’

‘It is. I’m your mummy and I say so.’

‘Mu-um!’ Daisy rolled her eyes. She hardly ever called Emma “mummy” any more, another milestone that had drifted by without them really noticing.

‘Got your homework and stuff for your art project?’

‘Yep.’

‘And you’ll walk straight home from school.’

‘No, I’ll go to town and go to the pub then go to the nightclub.’

‘And where’s my invitation?’

Daisy rolled her big blue eyes again. ‘Mu-um!’

‘Love you.’ Emma kissed her, opened the door, and watched the most precious thing in her world leave. She often watched Daisy down the driveway and along the street, knew she was embarrassed by it, but guessed that deep inside she also quite liked it.

Even so young, Daisy was quickly becoming her own person. She was growing into someone who made her parents intensely proud, but that couldn’t camouflage the sense that she was already leaving them.

Sometimes when Emma watched Daisy walking away, her heart ached.

She closed the front door and sighed. The house was suddenly silent, with no blaring music, hassled husband or singing daughter to stir the air. Emma didn’t really like the house this quiet. It sang with the ghosts of children unknown.

She had always wanted more than one child. It had taken three years of trying before Daisy was conceived, after being told by doctors that she would probably never have babies. They’d tried for another without success, and now in their early forties she and Dom were still leaving things to chance. But she felt her clock rapidly ticking, and she was resigned to their daughter being an only child.

Secretly, she was sure that Dom blamed her, probably because in her darkest moments she blamed herself. She hadn’t even known Dom in those wild few years she’d spent with Genghis Cant and Max Mort. He had been the steady rock further downstream in her future.

At the age of eighteen she’d fallen so easily into that life, attracted by the glamour of a touring band, the charisma of its lead singer, the carefree atmosphere and sense of freedom that came from being in a different town every week and a different country every couple of months. They’d never been huge, but they’d built a large enough fan base to enable them to tour constantly, make reasonable money from their regular albums, and buy and maintain a small tour bus.

This had been in a time before music was so easy to download for free, and album sales had been much healthier. Genghis Cant had played regular festivals in Germany, Holland and Denmark, and their touring had taken them as far afield as Greece.

Their bus had been called Valhalla. It became the centre of her life. She’d shared one of its bunks with Max for two years which she could now barely remember, and he had been more than willing to share his drink and drugs.

She’d once asked her doctor whether such intense substance abuse could have damaged her chances of motherhood. The doctor had only stared at her. She’d wanted to strike him, curse at him, because she didn’t believe it was his place to judge, however silently. He couldn’t acknowledge the way she’d pulled herself back up and out of that life. As quickly as she’d fallen she had risen again, hauled back home by her parents and then saved by Dom.

Those years were a blur now, a poor copy of a movie of someone else’s life. She still caught occasional glimpses, and sometimes in dreams she was there again, although viewed from the perspective of comfortable middle-age those times were more nightmarish than daring and revelatory.

She was happy to leave them as little more than vague memories. While she acknowledged that she was a product of her experiences, there were plenty she preferred not to dwell upon.

One thing she hadn’t lost, however, was her taste for guitar music.

After Dom left for work around seven thirty and Daisy was out of the door by eight fifteen she always had half an hour to herself to get ready for work. Today she chose Pearl Jam, washing and dressing to the evocative strains of Eddie Vedder. It was at these times, when she was alone listening to music, that she came closest to missing those old wild times.

After she locked the back door and went out to her car, she saw a Jeep blocking the end of the driveway. It was several years old, a Cherokee, white and mud-spattered, tinted windows. She didn’t recognise it, and she stared for a while, passing her keys from hand to hand and wondering what to do.

She pressed the button that unlocked her car. She could get in and reverse down the driveway, hoping that the driver would see and move aside. Or perhaps she should walk to the Jeep and knock on the window.

The tinted glass made it difficult to tell whether there was even anyone inside. The vehicle hadn’t been there when Daisy had left for school, so it must have pulled up while she was showering and dressing.

I left the back door unlocked, she thought, mildly troubled.

As she started striding along the driveway, the Jeep pulled smoothly away. Emma frowned, shrugged, jumped in her car and reversed out onto the road.

She waved to a couple of people she knew in the village as she passed by, then hit the main road. The radio news came on, and she was shocked once more by the post office slayings headline. Police were appealing for witnesses. A silver BMW had been found several miles away, but they were still searching for a white van and a red Ford. Narrows it down to about a million vehicles, she thought.

By the time Emma reached the college ten minutes later she’d forgotten all about the Jeep.

Emma enjoyed her job. It wasn’t a traditional career choice, and when some people heard what she did they occasionally frowned, as if wondering why anyone would actually want to be a Student Welfare Officer. But she loved people. She interacted with dozens each day, and she was well liked by the college staff and pupil population alike.

She had her own office with a small desk, a laptop, and a comfortable and informal area for when students wanted a heart-to-heart. She spent most of her time whilst in the office seated here, whether with a student or on her own. She even got to choose the furniture herself.

Dom earned more then her. But he worked far longer hours, and some days it was just him and Davey. He was a nice enough kid, but hardly a conversationalist.

Sometimes that suited Dom, because he was at home with his own company, but to Emma that was the idea of a nightmare. She was a sociable creature. Added to that the pressure exerted on Dom from running his own business – the invoicing, estimating, and other admin tasks that went with it – and her job was a breeze.

Emma spent that morning speaking with a couple of students who’d fallen heavily for each other and had an accident. Got carried away, forgot a condom. The boy seemed more embarrassed than the girl, but Emma had shrugged and said, That can happen to anyone. She was good at putting students at ease, however difficult the situation they brought to her, and her conversational manner always put them on the same level.

They’d left in a better frame of mind, with instructions to go to the doctor’s for a morning after pill, and after promising to ensure they used protection in future.

After that, an older student came for a chat about workload, and Emma listened while he talked. There wasn’t much she could offer, but he smiled and said that she’d helped a lot. He had long dreadlocks and piercings, and reminded her of Dog Bolton, the guitarist from Genghis Cant.

She decided to drive out to a local garden centre for lunch. The Hanging Garden had a fantastic cafe attached, and their quiche was legendary. She had no afternoon appointments, so she took her laptop, intending to spend a couple of hours after lunch catching up on some work emails and form-filling. The sun was blazing, they had a garden with shaded tables and several water fountains, and she was prepared for a warm, relaxing afternoon’s work.

Stepping out of the main college building, the heat really hit her. It was a true Indian summer.

She paused outside the revolving doors and took in a few breaths. Sweat prickled beneath her summery dress and across her nose. She squinted into the light, waiting for her eyes to become accustomed. She loved this weather much more than Dom, but after spending several hours indoors it always came as a shock.

Heat haze shimmered across the expansive college car park, blurring some of the vehicles parked in the distance. It rose from metal chassis as if every car had only just parked. Her car was halfway across in one of the staff areas, and as she neared it she saw the Jeep.

It was parked on the access road, idling, exhaust fumes hanging low and dense in the heavy air. Its nose was pointed towards the exit, rear end facing her. Sun glinted from its raised windows. Whoever was inside was taking advantage of the air conditioning.

She shielded her eyes, tried to make a point of standing still and looking. Was it the same vehicle? It was white, and she thought it was a Cherokee, but the heat haze made the air between them fluid, confusing shape and distorting sharp edges. It must have been a hundred metres away.

Emma walked a couple of steps and the Jeep crept ahead, very slowly.

She stopped. It stopped.

Shock pulsed through her chest. What is this? More disturbed than she wanted to let on, she turned her back on the Jeep and jumped into her own car. Starting quickly, she reversed and aimed in the opposite direction before glancing in the mirror. It was still there, still idling. She dropped into gear and moved away, heading for a maintenance exit at the far corner of the car park. It was a rough lane and not really for casual use, but some of the staff used it at busier times.

‘Stupid,’ she muttered, opening every window in an attempt to swish away some of the baked air inside. By the time the air conditioning fired up she’d be at The Hanging Garden, so she resigned herself to getting sweat-sticky.

Once out on the road, she found herself glancing in the mirror more than usual. She considered just why someone might be following her. She came up with nothing.

Occasionally a student became fixated on a teacher or other staff member, and once or twice she’d been involved in one of these cases in her professional capacity. But no one had been coming to see her more than usual; she’d noticed no undue attention. She was pretty sure none of the students who drove to college used an expensive vehicle like that. It was a few years old, but probably still worth twenty grand

‘Fucking stupid,’ she said, and talking to herself was a sign that the Jeep had truly unsettled her.

She drove faster than usual back into Usk, then through the town and out along the river. The roads were lunchtime- busy, but there was no sign of the Jeep. She considered calling Dom, but they rarely chatted during the day. A few texts sometimes, but casual chat was kept to a minimum. They were both busy, and there were no regular break times to catch up. Besides, what would she say to him?

Half a mile from the garden centre there were traffic lights. An area of road had been coned off and excavated, curls of blue pipework piled on the verge. No workmen were present. She stopped at the red light as cars passed from the opposite direction.

A supermarket delivery van pulled up behind her. The driver was singing, bobbing his head and performing as if no one else could see him. In her side mirror she could see back along the road, and a couple of other cars slowed behind them. Then a flash of white and the Jeep was there.

‘Shit,’ she muttered. This was crazy. Dom preparing to show her a new car he’d bought as a treat? No, that was unlikely, and throwing a surprise like this wasn’t like him. Besides, he’d had to leave early to get the dinked Focus fixed.