was quieter than she’d always imagined a gunshot to be. She realised she had closed her eyes, and when she opened them she expected to see Paul’s body sprawled on the asphalt. But Paul was still standing. So was Sampson. The body on the ground was small, and old.
With surprising agility for an elderly woman, Jean Bainbridge had run in front of Paul, just as Sampson squeezed the trigger, blocking the bullet with her body. She had saved Paul’s life.
Kate felt a pain go through her like she’d been shot herself. At the same moment, Paul launched himself at Sampson.
Paul was lucky: Sampson was momentarily off balance. Paul struck him in the stomach and Sampson gasped, swinging up the gun to hit Paul around the head, but Paul lifted his arm and blocked the blow. The gun fell from Sampson’s grasp and Kate stepped forward and kicked it away. It span across the road and under a parked car.
Sampson moved towards the gun, and Paul shouted, ‘Run!’
They sprinted towards the tennis club, Paul ahead again, looking back over his shoulder to make sure Kate was with him, reaching back so she could grab his hand. He could see that Sampson was on his belly, trying to extract his gun from under the parked car. Paul yanked open the door of his own car – thank God they hadn’t locked it – and leaned over and shoved open the passenger door. A second later he started the car and they skidded out of the car park.
There was Sampson, on his feet now, gun in hand. Paul drove straight at him. Sampson fired but the bullet bounced off the bodywork, and then he had to jump backwards onto the pavement to stop Paul from knocking him over. Paul swerved around Mrs Bainbridge’s body and watched the mirror anxiously, as Sampson ran towards his Audi and climbed in, giving Paul and Kate just a few seconds’ lead before he managed to accelerate after them.
‘Fuck, he’s coming. Which way shall I go?’ There was no response. ‘Kate?’
She turned to him, her eyes wide with shock. ‘He killed Mrs Bainbridge.’
Paul reached and touched Kate’s arm. She was trembling. Or was that him? ‘Who the hell is this guy?’
‘He was at the CRU.’
Very quickly, they left the village behind, the streets of Penkridge giving way to countryside. They passed a nature reserve sign and Kate wondered frantically if they were doing the right thing, leaving the safety-in-numbers of civilisation behind. It was too late to turn back now though. Paul swung the car left. The road was clear ahead, but that would help Sampson catch them as much as it would help them get away. Sampson’s Audi was much faster than Paul’s seen-better-days Peugeot 205. They would need to outmanoeuvre him. But Paul, who didn’t know these roads, had no advantage. His hands, sweaty with stress, slipped on the wheel as he spun it and turned right onto another quiet country road, putting his foot down. Kate watched the speedometer rise until they were doing eighty.
The Audi was still close behind them.
‘Have you got your seatbelt on?’
‘Yes, of course. Paul, we have to . . .’
‘Hold on tight.’
Kate looked up and saw what Paul had spotted a moment before: an enormous, bright green four-wheel-drive tractor trundling around the bend ahead. Paul floored the accelerator, moved to the wrong side of the road – the right – and headed straight towards it. Kate gasped and closed her eyes.
It all happened in a couple of seconds. Paul drove straight at the tractor, waving his arms at the driver, motioning for him to change lanes. Behind him, Sampson was still on the left, a second behind them, obscured behind the tinted glass of his car windscreen.
Kate pushed herself back in her seat and whispered a rapid prayer.
The tractor driver pulled on the steering wheel of his huge, unwieldy vehicle, heaving it onto the left side of the road. Paul spun the wheel again, tyres squealing, swinging to the right and shooting past the tractor – which was now directly in Sampson’s path. As they cleared the tractor, they both heard another screech of brakes, the angry stabbing of a car horn.
‘We’re still alive,’ Kate said quietly.
Paul twisted his head and took a glance backwards. ‘No sign of him, not yet. But he won’t be held up for long.’ They drove around the next bend, moving steadily upwards until they came over the crest of a hill. Farmland stretched to either side of them, sheep grazing in silence behind low stone walls. Some poor creature lay in the road, its fur matted with blood: roadkill.
‘Do you have any idea where we are?’ Paul asked, as they continued at high speed along the empty road. ‘Apart from the middle of nowhere.’
Kate snapped out of her trance. ‘I think this is Cannock Chase.’
‘How far till the next town?’
‘I don’t know. I think if we keep heading north we’ll reach Stafford, I saw a signpost back there.’
She looked out the back window and saw the black Audi appear over the crest of a shallow hill and start closing on them.
‘He’s catching us. Paul, he’s catching . . .’
‘I know, I know. I’m going as fast as I can. The road atlas should be on the back seat. Can you try to find out how far it is till Stafford?’
Kate retrieved it and started flicking blindly through the pages trying to find the road they were on. She couldn’t even find the right page. Why the hell didn’t Paul have Sat Nav in this cruddy old banger?
Calm down, she told herself. She used a technique that she had learned when Jack was a baby, screaming in the night, when nothing would make him stop crying and she felt as if she would explode from the stress. She started to recite the periodic table under her breath: H – hydrogen; Li – lithium; Be – beryllium . . . She knew people would think this technique weird, but it worked for her – immediately, she felt soothed by the effort of concentrating, her brain working again in the way it should, and she was able to check the map at the front and quickly turn to the correct page in the atlas.
Kate found Penkridge, where they’d seen Mrs Bainbridge die, and traced their route with her finger.
‘I should have bought a decent car, one with GPS,’ Paul muttered. Kate bit her tongue to prevent herself from saying anything, then pointed at the wiggling line indicating the road they were travelling along. ‘We’re heading into the forest. I reckon Stafford is about fifteen minutes away.’
As she spoke, a wall of trees appeared ahead of them. Moments later they were speeding through the forest, pine and lark and birch trees lining the narrow road.
‘Oh shit,’ said Paul.
‘What?’
He nodded at the rear-view mirror. Sampson’s black Audi was behind them again, its reflection growing larger by the second.
‘If Stafford is still fifteen minutes away, we can’t outrun him. He’s much faster than us. Maybe we should stop, confront him?’
‘No. He’ll kill us.’
At that moment, just as Sampson was gaining on them, a stag appeared from between the trees and ran into the road. Paul swerved, Kate
