Huntress Read online

  Having searched the hotel, the petrol station, and a couple of caravans, Claudia’s last chance was the canal. As she had rounded the corner from the services she had sighed. A row of narrowboats all along the canal path were moored up, at least eight of them. Knowing Amy’s talent for making friends, she surmised that the girl could be in any one of them.

  “No, not seen her. What’s she done?”

  Claudia watched as Margaret hurried from the narrowboat in front of them and rushed past, not wishing to make eye contact. Suddenly, the boat was being untied from its mooring ring by a woman who then pushed the boat out into the canal, leaping on board as it moved. The engine sprung to life.

  “Mr Perry, we need to follow that boat,” Claudia told him firmly.

  “Fred’s boat?” He looked at the boat with a confused look.

  “Yes, that boat,” Claudia told him. “Now.”

  “It will cost you.”

  Claudia glared at him. “Fine, fine, just do whatever you have to do to make this thing move and follow them.” She looked from George to the departing boat.

  “A hundred pounds.”

  Claudia looked at him and raised her eyebrow. “Mr Perry, if you don’t move this boat immediately, I’ll have you arrested,” Claudia threatened.

  He mumbled something as he stepped from the boat and untied the rope mooring it to the bank. He looked at her. “You might want to get on board then.”

  “Is this as fast as we can go?” Claudia asked in frustration.

  Initially, she had stood at the front of the boat, expecting that any moment they would speed up, and she would be able to jump to the other craft. It quickly became clear that they were travelling at exactly the same speed and wouldn’t be closing the gap any time soon. When a woman walking her dog on the canal path overtook them, she made her way to the back of the boat to speak to George.

  “The speed limit on canals is four miles an hour,” George said.

  Claudia stared at him, open-mouthed. “Four?”

  “Yup.”

  “This thing can only do four miles an hour?”

  “This thing? Thing? I’ll have you know that Ermintrude has a GreenLine 43 HP diesel engine.” George stood up from his stool on the tiny back deck. He pointed at the narrowboat in front of them. “They only have a Barrus 38.” He let out a derisive snort.

  “Ermintrude?”

  “The name of this boat, didn’t you see it when you got on board?” George sounded offended by Claudia’s disinterest.

  “Clearly not.” Claudia sighed. “If we have this super engine, why are they so far in front of us?”

  “Speed limits are speed limits.” George shrugged.

  Claudia let out a deep sigh and rested her head in her hand for a second. She looked up. “I get that we’re not going to do a James Bond and fly through the air in a stream of machine gun fire, but is there a possibility that we could go a tiny bit faster? So that I could maybe see the boat in front of us? Maybe push it to, say, four and a half miles an hour? Five would be nice.”

  George let out a sigh and shook his head. “Fine. But if we get fined, then you’re taking the blame.”

  “Trust me, I will take any and all blame. Just get us nearer to... whatever that boat is called.”

  She walked through the boat, back towards the bow. She looked at her phone and cursed the lack of signal. This was probably the one and only time she would consider ringing for backup, and she was on a narrowboat in the middle of the countryside with no signal.

  It was another fifteen minutes before they were any closer. Claudia stood at the bow, watching the waves between the two boats. She’d attempted to call out to the man on the back of the other boat, but he had ignored her as he held the tiller and softly steered his vessel. She looked at her phone for the twentieth time in the last couple of minutes. There was still no signal, no way for her to tell the ground team that they were now far away from the services and on their way to god knows where.

  She looked up from her phone and blinked in surprise. Amy stood on the small back deck. She had a cup of tea in her hands and looked directly at Claudia.

  “Hi,” Amy shouted.

  “This is ridiculous,” Claudia shouted back.

  Amy shrugged. “You’re just saying that because you’re losing. And your boat is named after the cow from a children’s TV show.”

  Claudia couldn’t help but smile. She turned back to look at George who, at the back of the boat, was too far away to hear. She turned back to Amy. “What’s yours called?”

  “The Kingfisher. Cool, huh?”

  “Very.”

  Amy spoke with the man steering the ship and then looked up at Claudia. “Fred says you’re speeding.”

  “I’m chasing a fugitive.”

  “Fred says you’re not supposed to make waves.” Amy pointed at the waves coming from the boat.

  “You can tell Fred that I wouldn’t be making any waves if he stopped and let me arrest you.”

  Amy sipped her tea.

  “This has to end eventually,” Claudia called out.

  “Is Kerry okay?”

  Claudia shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said honestly. She held up her phone. “No signal.”

  Amy’s brow knit in frustration. “I don’t suppose it will help to say it again, but, you know, I’m innocent.”

  “So everyone tells me. It’s not up to me to make a judgement on you, Amy. My job is to bring you in so you can be questioned.”

  “How did you get into this job?”

  The narrowboat surged a little, and Claudia put her hands onto the rail to keep herself from falling. She glared at George who shouted an apology. She looked back at Amy. “I don’t think that’s really appropriate.”

  “Sure it is, you’re chasing me. We’re going to be here a while, unless you want to try swimming. You might as well tell me what made you start chasing people. Not judging or anything, but it’s a bit of a weird job. It’s like competitive speed-stalking.”

  “I signed up after the London bombings on Seven Seven.” Claudia could tell by Amy’s expression that she’d given away more than she had been willing to. Somehow, Amy had seen right through her.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” Claudia tried to brush it off.

  “For whatever loss you suffered. You did, didn’t you?”

  “Not exactly,” Claudia confessed.

  “But you saw something.”

  Claudia opened her mouth. How did she explain? Did she even want to? The boat surged a little again, and she was reminded where she was. On a narrowboat, about to shout out her sob story to a woman she was hunting. She closed her mouth and swallowed hard.

  Amy offered a kind, understanding smile.

  Claudia took a couple of steps back and leant on the roof of the boat behind her. She needed to remind herself, this was just a waiting game. It wasn’t like Amy could go anywhere.

  32

  How Does She Do It?

  It had only been an hour, but Claudia was starting to think of herself as something of an expert on narrowboats. It seemed that it was normal practice to keep to the middle of the canal. Until another boat approached from the opposite direction, then Fred and George would steer to the right and allow the other boat to pass on the left side.

  Fred was obviously speeding, more so than George. But George was keeping up as best he could. The many turns in the canal were causing problems as both men had to slow down; the waves from the narrowboat in front were pushing Ermintrude back slightly. Claudia knew that they needed a long stretch of quiet canal so that George could really put his foot down, or whatever you did in a boat. Otherwise, a lock or a bridge would soon bring them both to a standstill anyway. It was just a matter of time.

  They were approaching a large, sweeping corner. Another narrowboat was approaching from the other direction as Fred steered into the bend. It wasn’t unusual, they’d performed this manoeuvre several times before. But something felt wrong.
Fred looked shifty.

  The Kingfisher was in the middle of passing the other narrowboat when suddenly Fred performed a hard turn, straight into the other boat. The front of the Kingfisher crashed into the back of the other boat. Fred shouted out an apology and held up his hands as if he didn’t know what to do. Claudia could tell it was all an act.

  The other boat was effectively pushed in between Ermintrude and the Kingfisher, wedged sideways between the two. Claudia spun around.

  “They are going to shore, get to the bank,” she shouted to George. George was way ahead of her, steering Ermintrude as best he could against the choppy waters and the narrowboat that was now drifting towards them.

  Claudia climbed onto the roof of the narrowboat to get a better view. She saw Amy make a leap for the canal path. A moment later, Fred threw her rucksack to her. She waved goodbye to them and ran into the woods that lay just beyond the canal path.

  “How does she do it?” Claudia murmured to herself.

  Claudia stood in the middle of a clearing in the forest and looked around. She held her breath and listened intently for any sounds other than the birdsong that surrounded her. Amy only had a five-minute head start at best. But it seemed like it was enough.

  As soon as she was free from the narrowboat, she ran into the forest, following the footprints Amy had left in the muddy floor for as long as she could. Soon it had become a game of guesswork, and now she was calmly trying to get a bearing on where Amy could have gone. She’d tracked suspects in wooded areas before, the smallest thing could send her in the correct direction. A smell, a sound, even a feeling.

  Her phone rang. She hadn’t even thought to check it once she’d entered the forest.

  She tapped her earpiece. “McAllister.”

  “I have the CCTV footage from the service station,” Mark told her. “You know, from when they first went on the run. It’s... surprising.”

  “Surprising?”

  “I’ve sent it to you, you should have it now.”

  “I’m kind of in the middle of something,” Claudia told him. She crouched down to examine a cluster of leaves.

  “You’re going to want to see this right now,” Mark told her.

  Mark was rarely wrong about these things. If he was encouraging her to drop what she was doing and view the footage, there was a reason for it. Not that it didn’t annoy her to be wasting the time she should be spending hunting for Amy. She got her phone out of her pocket and unlocked it. She quickly accessed the file and hit the correct button.

  “It’s downloading,” Claudia told him.

  “These girls are not professionals,” Mark explained.

  Claudia furrowed her brow. “Are you sure?”

  “When you see the footage you will see what I mean. If these girls are part of a terrorist cell, I’ll give up eating takeaway for a month, a year, even.”

  Claudia watched the loading circle with interest, willing it to speed up. “You sound pretty confident.” She started to walk in a direction out of the clearing. The kicked-up leaves looked as good an indication of Amy’s direction as any.

  “Claudia, these girls have been set up. I don’t know where MI5 have their information from, but it’s wrong. Anyone looking at this footage, without bias, will easily see that these two are just average civilians.”

  She looked at the screen to see that the footage was about halfway downloaded. “I’m in the middle of the woods, my connection is terrible,” she explained.

  “The woods?”

  “Long story. If you can get my location, I need you to ping it to MI5.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, I’ve nearly lost Amy a couple of times now. If she goes to ground, we’ll have no hints to work on. I need back up.”

  “I’m on it.”

  A piece of paper speared through a small branch caught her attention. She approached and cocked her head as she read the scribbled writing on it.

  Rabbit traps, be careful. A x

  She looked around the ground and saw a painful-looking metal trap which she hadn’t noticed before in her hurry. She looked back at the note and shook her head. Amy had stopped in her getaway to leave a note. A note warning Claudia of danger. This girl was unbelievable.

  Her phone beeped, indicating that the footage had downloaded. She held the screen up. “I’m playing it now,” Claudia said.

  The video started to play, and she watched with interest. Amy and Kerry were talking to someone off camera. They looked terrified, their line of vision moving quickly from one direction to another as they calculated their next move. Amy spoke again, and Claudia wished she knew what was being said. Suddenly the girls ran. The camera tracked them for a while before showing them vanishing into the ladies’ toilet.

  “Safe to assume it was a man they were talking to,” Claudia commented.

  “Yes, I’m looking for other angles to see if we can figure out who they were speaking with, but I’m coming up blank.”

  “What am I seeing now?” Claudia asked, the view having changed to an empty road.

  Mark laughed. “Just wait for it.”

  Claudia let out a sigh. She didn’t like waiting, and so far this entire case had been about waiting and near misses. And waiting at this particular moment was bordering on painful, knowing that she was so close to catching Amy and closing the case. She watched the empty road, her finger itching to slide along the trackpad and hurry time along a little. Just as she was about to do so, a car came into view. The shaky picture on an old CCTV camera made the scene all the more unbelievable. The car bounced heavily over speed bumps, the boot door open to the elements with two legs sticking out and flailing helplessly.

  “What the...”

  Mark laughed again. “Great, isn’t it?”

  Claudia scrolled the footage back so she could see it again. “Is that... Amy?”

  “Sticking out of the back of the car and being driven over speed bumps? Yep, that’s Amy. Why she’s laying in the back of the car like that, I have no idea. But it’s them. I have something else, too.”

  It sounded serious. “What have you found?” she asked.

  “I’ve found footage of Tom’s Café, going back months. The woman you asked me to look into, Cara, well, she comes in every morning without fail. She makes a drop, places something under one of the tables. Every evening a man comes in and picks it up.”

  Claudia raised her hand to her head, massaging at the stress that was forming. “Some kind of data drop,” she mused.

  “Exactly. Cara must obtain the information; she puts it on the USB and hides it in the services. In the evening, it’s picked up. Same thing, every weekday.”

  “What about Amy?” Claudia asked.

  “Oblivious,” Mark said. “She chats to Cara, but she is unaware of the data drop happening under her nose. Until Thursday. She vanishes for a while, and when she returns she checks the tables and finds the USB stick. A while later she presumably accesses it, and then all hell breaks loose.”

  “She was investigating Cara’s disappearance; she must have seen what you saw.”

  “It proves that these two aren’t evading us because they are master criminals. They are just stumbling along. Somehow keeping ahead of us by luck, and probably bad judgement.”

  “We’ve been profiling them all wrong,” Claudia whispered. She watched the footage again. Her mind swam at how someone could possibly get themselves into that predicament. “We’re calculating what their next step might be based upon information that they are part of an elite terrorist cell, but... they’re idiots.”

  “Exactly,” Mark concurred. “Everything that seemed random was probably just random.”

  “Which means someone has set them up,” Claudia said. “The information came from MI5; we have to assume that someone in-house is creating the lie. External information would have been counter-checked and discarded by now.”

  “Which means that someone inside MI5 planted false information about them,” Mark said.


  “And now, presumably, someone in-house is using MI5 analysts and software to find them so they can get there first. Probably to get the USB data they have, and kill them.”

  “That’s my guess, too,” Mark said.

  “Cancel what I said before, don’t tell MI5 where I am. Not until we know who we can trust.” Claudia leaned against a tree. A potential spy within the agency was serious business. As incompetent as she knew MI5 could be, this was unheard of. She needed to think quickly, work out what information she could trust. Who she could trust. And, most importantly, who was in danger.

  “I need you to come up here and get Kerry Wyatt,” Claudia said.

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “I’m sure you’ll figure out a way to fool the local police. You did used to work for MI5 after all. You know the drill,” Claudia said. “I don’t know who else to trust. We can’t let MI5 take her in.”

  Mark was silent for a moment. “Okay, okay, I can do that. I can forge something. We just need to get the real MI5 away from her.”

  “Tell MI5 we’re following a lead, send them somewhere away from here. We need to throw them off the scent so I can find Amy. I don’t know what these girls are mixed up in, but I’m not about to let them get killed simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Right, okay, lie to MI5... got it.” Mark sounded hesitant.

  “I believe we just call it an ‘alternative fact’ these days, don’t worry.”

  “Okay, I’ll get on it.”

  “Call me with an update,” she instructed and tapped her earpiece to disconnect the call.

  She snatched the note from the branch. Amy was as innocent as she seemed. All this time she had been telling the truth, she was innocent. Someone had set them up. It was a one in a million chance. Now she had to find Amy before anyone else did.