Matthew Barr was in the crosshairs.
Finally.
Finn Garrett watched him lock the battered old Focus and sling a backpack over one shoulder. There was a woman with him – young, and with her mousy hair tied back. Barr didn’t have a wife or a girlfriend at home, so he must have stopped somewhere on his way to pick her up.
Her and the boy.
He was about seven and with hair as ginger as a biscuit. The boy had his own backpack. Something colourful. Garrett couldn’t make it out from here.
‘Who’s the woman?’
His earpiece crackled. ‘Don’t know.’
Coughlan was in the trees to his left. They had been waiting here for hours. It had rained twice but they had not moved. Anticipation had warmed them. Not just now, but ever since they’d got word that Matthew Barr had left his home in Suffolk and was heading west. They hadn’t had to tail him; they knew where he was going. They’d got here first and waited.
Garrett adjusted his weight on his elbows and watched the three as they left the car and walked up the hill towards the copse. Barr was whip-thin. Even without optical sights, Garrett could see his camo jacket flapping around his narrow hips. He led the way, with the woman and the boy behind, walking together, in conversation.
Letting Barr take them wherever they were going to go.
‘Heading our way,’ Coughlan murmured.
Garrett said nothing. He practised keeping Barr in the crosshairs.
Barr’s head.
The headshot.
Barr would drop to the grass like a stone. The woman and the boy would be confused at first. What had happened? No sound of a shot. Just a man who had been walking, suddenly on the ground. They’d hurry over to see what was wrong – oblivious to personal danger – and find that the top of his head had been blown clean off, as if detonated from within.
Grey jelly with white-shard wafers and a dark blood sauce, while only birdsong broke the silence . . .
Garrett put down the scope.
Old habits die hard.
The little fake family were only a couple of hundred yards from the trees now. Garrett could make out the man’s pointed face. The woman’s ponytail. The boy’s mouth moving in time to the faint sound of childish chatter that preceded them up the hill.
It was turning into a nice day. In the sunshine, at least, although a brisk wind meant you had to keep walking. As good as it got for this time of year in the Brecon Beacons. But in the cover of the trees it was cold and dank, with the soft bed of pine needles barely soaking up the mud beneath.
Garrett slowly stretched out his ankles. Then his knees. If Barr ran, he didn’t want to make any mistakes. Didn’t want to stumble. Didn’t want to give him even a whisper of a chance of getting away. Not this time. Not after two years of watching and waiting and hope and near misses and screw-ups and failure. While all the time he continued to kill.
Again and again and again—
Garrett felt familiar anger warming his belly against the cold ground, and breathed slowly until it dissipated.
His life was all about patience.
A hundred yards away, Barr stopped and looked up at the trees. Garrett followed his gaze into the dark woods. He knew exactly where Coughlan was, and still couldn’t see him.
But Barr wasn’t looking for danger – he was checking his bearings, making sure he was in the right place. Garrett already knew that he was.
The woman and boy caught up with him.
‘How about here?’ said the woman.
‘I’m hungry, Mum,’ said the boy. ‘Can we eat?’
‘In a minute,’ Barr said. ‘Let’s go close to the trees to get out of this wind a bit. We can look for firewood then too. Get nice and warm, yeah?’
‘Yeah,’ said the boy enthusiastically. ‘Can I chop it with an axe?’
‘You can break it up,’ said his mother.
They resumed walking to the treeline. Thirty yards from Garrett – maybe fifty from Coughlan. And stopped.
‘This looks like a good spot.’ Barr shrugged his backpack off his shoulders. He took out a picnic blanket – waterproof on one side, tartan on the other – which he unfolded and shook out on to the ground. The woman had brought sandwiches and a flask, and a packet of supermarket cakes. Garrett didn’t need the binoculars now, but he put them to his eyes and refocused on Mr Kipling’s Fondant Fancies.
He was hungry, but it would wait.
Barr put his pack on again and – while the woman continued to lay out the meagre picnic – he led the boy into the trees.
It was shocking how quickly they disappeared.
But Garrett knew where they were going.
This was what the last two years had been about – knowing where Matthew Barr was going, and what he was going to do when he got there.
Garrett stood.
Slowly.
Silently.
Draped in a cloak of needles and strips of dark bark, he only had to stand still to become one with the forest – the reddish floor, the black trunks, the mossy stumps of trees long gone.
He followed the man and the boy like a wraith. Thought he caught a flicker of movement that might have been Coughlan, moving in the same direction, but didn’t look again to make sure. It didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that Barr didn’t see them. Didn’t spook. Didn’t stop what he was about to do.
The boy chirped – his sharp little voice blunted by the damp trees. A flash of colour from his backpack now and then. A Superman logo.
Not far now.
Garrett moved closer.
They were picking up sticks on the way. Making it look real.
Then Barr stopped and put down his sticks and turned to the boy.
‘Take off your backpack.’
Garrett sank gently on to his haunches, melting back into the shadows and the needles.
‘Why?’
‘I’ve got something to show you. Put it down here.’
The boy put the backpack down. He waited. Watching. Innocent of what was to come next, Garrett was sure.
From his own pack Barr drew a small folding shovel and began to dig.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Treasure.’
‘Gold?’
‘Better than gold.’
The boy’s mouth made an O of excitement and he jiggled with anticipation.
Barr was panting a little now. He was thin but he wasn’t fit. Too many hours spent in his attic, poring over his sins and the sins of the many who had gone before.
Garrett hoped Coughlan was recording this. That was the only part of this whole operation not in his direct control.
The shovel made the only sound.
Four inches. Six.
And then the plink of plastic.
Finn Garrett had shot men in the face, but his heart had never beaten harder than it did right now.
Matthew Barr dug more slowly, more carefully, clearing an area, unearthing . . . something. The boy knelt and peered into the ground.
‘What is it?’
But Barr didn’t speak. Instead he reached into the hole in the earth and withdrew a small plastic lunchbox. Then another. And another. And another. A fifth, a sixth, a seventh . . .
Twelve.
The boxes he had buried there nearly two years before. Garrett remembered it had been snowing in patches; he remembered Barr’s breath misting the air in visible puffs as he walked up the slope, into the trees and . . . disappeared.
The hissing panic of losing him; the agony of knowing what he was doing, but not exactly where. The low, angry redeployment, and then that idiot copper blundering right into Barr’s path, scaring him off. Garrett had watched him hurry out of the woods and known they would have to watch him from that day forward. Where he went and what he did and who he met and what they did too . . . until he came again to retrieve the boxes.
And that’s what they had done.
Two bloody years.
A lump in Garrett’s throat told him that this time it had worked. This time it was going to be OK.
‘What’s in them?’ said the boy, and Barr winked at him and beckoned him closer with a jerk of his chin, and curled back the lid of the box at his chest and said—
come and see
In a single smooth movement, Garrett rose and shrugged off his cape of needles and bark. Barr ran, but Garrett had shaken out his knees and his ankles and did not falter. Did not stumble. He was on him in yards, his heart pounding with joy that Barr had run, because it gave him the only opportunity he’d ever have to hurt him – which he did by dropping on to his kidney with the hardest of knees.
Behind them the boy was shrieking in fear, but Matthew Barr only groaned with his mouth full of needles.
Coughlan would read him his rights. That wasn’t Garrett’s job. All his job allowed him to do was to bend and hiss furiously against the fallen man’s ear:
‘I’ve got you now, you little shit . . .
‘And your fucking eggs.’
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