Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 128980 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 645(@200wpm)___ 516(@250wpm)___ 430(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 128980 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 645(@200wpm)___ 516(@250wpm)___ 430(@300wpm)
I’m not sure why I’ve chosen this way. Preservation of energy? I don’t know. All I have to cling to is hope. Hope that if I think about him hard enough, he’ll find me.
Chapter 33
JAKE
I’m a trained killer. It’s a skill that earned me a formidable reputation in the war against terror. People feared me. The unknown, unseen threat. I never broke a sweat. I never let anger possess me. For a long time I never let my personal struggles infiltrate my mission. I missed my wife. I missed watching her baby bump blossom and the first kick. I missed the scans, the parenting classes, and the birth of my child. I missed the first few months of my baby’s life. But none of those private battles affected my missions. My aim and balance were never compromised.
Until four years ago. Everything changed. My life turned upside down. My wife hadn’t missed me. She hadn’t mourned my absence. She’d found her comfort elsewhere. I had no purpose anymore.
Living wasn’t just having the ability to breathe, a heartbeat in your chest. It was having people to live for. I lost all sight of my other purpose in life—the one spiked by my parents’ deaths in the Lockerbie disaster. It didn’t seem to matter anymore. I was no longer able to think straight and act on sensibility.
I became careless. Reckless. I became a danger to myself, and worst of all, I was a danger to everyone around me. I couldn’t change anything, but after drowning in a sea of Jack, spending too many months lost in a haze of drunkenness and misery, balancing on the edge of the black pit to hell, I grabbed onto the only thing I could do to give myself some kind of self-purpose again. I couldn’t have my life back. But I could protect others.
All my subjects were a job. A duty. A way to maintain my selfish purpose. I needed to forget everything about my previous life. My subjects gave me focus.
Camille Logan spun that on its head. She gave me a reason to confront my demons. She made me feel and love again. I had everything arranged in my mind, all of the hard truths set to be faced head-on, cushioned by a hope I couldn’t let falter.
I handled it all wrong, and now I might have lost her forever.
Her face. The devastation when I looked up and found her in Abbie’s kitchen. And then the understanding that came after I’d poured my heart out on the street, rushing to explain, my hope rebuilding by the second.
Then she was taken.
My phone startles me, vibrating in my hand, and I rush to answer, praying for something. Anything. “Luce?”
“Where are you?”
“Outside Scott’s block of flats.” I look across the car park that’s littered with abandoned cars and piles of rubbish. Kids who should be in school are climbing in and out of the smashed windows of cars, some jumping from the roof of one abandoned vehicle to another. The grim high-rise apartment block has more windows boarded up than not, and grubby rags hanging at the smeared, filthy glass of the ones that are still intact. The monstrosity of a building stretches up into the sky, casting a shadow as dull as the brickwork across the landscape before it. It’s the pits.
“Anything?” Lucinda asks.
“Nothing. No sign of any white van and the apartment is empty.” I glance up to the apartment window that’s in plain view, shuddering when my mind’s eye reminds me of the squalor I found beyond the door after I kicked it down. And the stench. It’s still embedded in my nostrils.
“I might have something.”
I’m upright and quickly alert. “What?”
“Scott served his last sentence in Borstal. He was granted probation eight weeks ago and one of his parole conditions is to check in weekly with his parole officer in Shoreditch. Jake, today’s check-in day. If he’s following his parole conditions, he should be there now. I’m sending you the office address.”
I start the car and race out of the car park, leaving a cloud of dust and crowds of tatty kids cheering in my wake. “He’s doing well keeping himself out of trouble,” I growl, not bothering to stop at the junction, forcing a beat-up old Escort to swerve from my path. “I think someone’s hired Scott to take Camille. Keep an eye on Logan’s e-mails. I expect he’ll be hearing from whoever it is.” I throw my phone onto the seat next to me and drive like a demon to Shoreditch.
* * *
The high street is busy, hampering my speed as I scan every face I pass. I drive up and down every road around the vicinity of the parole office at least ten times, my pulse dulling with each precious minute that passes. No white van. She’ll be scared. It’ll be another week before Scott has to sign in with his parole officer. It could be another week of waiting for something that could lead me to her.