Hunted

Caro Savage

Description

She can run, but she can’t hide...

Bailey Morgan is being HUNTED.

Someone is out to murder Detective Constable Bailey Morgan before she can testify in an upcoming trial.

Using her undercover skills, Bailey embarks on a dangerous mission to help the police catch this elusive killer before it’s too late.

But it won’t be easy for she’s up against a cunning and ruthless adversary who will stop at nothing to eliminate her.

A tense game of cat and mouse ensues, leading to a shocking revelation at the heart of which lies the key to Bailey’s survival.

Sujets

• Mashups
• Legal
• Psychological
• Women Sleuths
• Private Investigators
• Hard-Boiled
• Amateur Sleuth
• Traditional
• World Literature
• Political
• Thrillers
• Women
• Coming of Age
• Adventure (Guyana)
• Suspenso
• Gran Londres
• Inglaterra
• Psychological thriller
• Domestic
• General officer
• Woman
• Politics
• Psychology
• Greater London
• The Women
• City Life
• General
• Adventure
• Crime
• Legall de Kermeur
• Family Life
• England
• Suspense
• Thriller
• Grand Londres
• Fiction
• London

Informations

• Publié par: Boldwood Books
• Date de parution: 18 janvier 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781838895389
• Langue: English

Extrait

HUNTED


CARO SAVAGE
For Claire & Edward
CONTENTS




Chapter 1



Chapter 2



Chapter 3



Chapter 4



Chapter 5



Chapter 6



Chapter 7



Chapter 8



Chapter 9



Chapter 10



Chapter 11



Chapter 12



Chapter 13



Chapter 14



Chapter 15



Chapter 16



Chapter 17



Chapter 18



Chapter 19



Chapter 20



Chapter 21



Chapter 22



Chapter 23



Chapter 24



Chapter 25



Chapter 26



Chapter 27



Chapter 28



Chapter 29



Chapter 30



Chapter 31



Chapter 32



Chapter 33



Chapter 34



Chapter 35



Chapter 36



Chapter 37



Chapter 38



Chapter 39



Chapter 40



Chapter 41



Chapter 42



Chapter 43



Chapter 44



Chapter 45



Chapter 46



Chapter 47



Chapter 48



Chapter 49



Chapter 50




Acknowledgments



More from Caro Savage



About the Author



About Boldwood Books
1

Senior Crown Advocate Jeremy Westerby had already passed out once from the pain. Now as he came to for the second time, he realised that the agony he was currently experiencing surpassed anything he’d ever gone through before in his life.
Passing a kidney stone. Being stung by a poisonous jellyfish on holiday. Slipping a disc in his back. Those things, while extremely painful at the time, were nothing compared to this.
Having his genitals slowly crushed in a portable vice really did top them all. The pain was absolutely unbearable but he couldn’t scream out loud because there was a gag in his mouth.
The whole experience was amplified no end by the sickening fear that also consumed him. To know that someone was deliberately and maliciously subjecting him to this.
He looked up through blurred vision at the man standing over him. The man was tall and gaunt with dead black eyes and a small scar across his right eyebrow. Westerby had never seen him before in his life, but whoever the man was, it was obvious that he did this kind of thing for a professional living.
Westerby himself worked for the Crown Prosecution Service bringing offenders to justice on behalf of the state. He didn’t earn as much as other legal professionals, particularly those in the private sector, but he did it because of his principles. However, he now realised he was paying a high price for holding those moral values for it had become very clear by now that this incursion related to the work that he was doing.
He’d been alone in his house in Ealing, West London, his wife and two children having gone out to the theatre earlier that evening to watch a musical. Much as he’d have liked to accompany them, he’d declined to do so in order to stay in and focus on the casework he was doing for the trial of a major-league drug trafficker that was coming up in a few weeks’ time. And it was this very trial that the man was torturing him about.
One minute he’d been sitting in his study tapping away on his laptop immersed in the casework, then something had hit him over the back of the head and the next thing he knew, he’d woken up tied to his desk chair with his hands bound firmly behind his back, a gag in his mouth and a portable vice attached to his nether regions. It hadn’t taken him long to realise that the man had broken into his house somehow and in fact had probably been watching and waiting for an opportunity to catch him while he was home alone.
He kept being assailed by a sense of disbelief that this was really happening to him. Although he knew that he was prosecuting some very dangerous people, the idea that they’d go so far as to actually harm him had seemed like an abstract consideration. After all, he’d worked for the CPS for many years and nothing like this had ever happened to him before.
The man repeated the question he’d asked Westerby just before he’d passed out.
‘What’s her name?’ he hissed. ‘Tell me the name of the undercover cop who’s testifying in the trial. What’s her real name?’
Westerby knew that this information was highly confidential. Undercover police officers always testified anonymously in order to protect their security. He knew that the man only wanted this information so that he could harm the policewoman whose evidence was key to securing a conviction at the trial. If he told the man the woman’s name then he would be placing her in terrible danger. He would in effect be signing her death warrant.
The man pulled the gag from Westerby’s mouth to allow him to answer. Westerby sputtered and gasped, sucking in a huge mouthful of air, sweat running in streams down his face.
‘Pl… please…,’ he pleaded.
‘The name,’ repeated the man. ‘Tell me her name.’
‘I can’t. Please. I… I can’t…’
The man shook his head and tutted. He slipped the gag back on and leant down to tighten the vice even further, sending an almighty spike of agony through Westerby’s body. Westerby felt like he might be about to pass out again, but instead his pain and fear conspired to make him lose control of his bowels, his sphincter opening up to release a hot flatulent gush of foul-smelling effluent.
The man recoiled, his face wrinkling in disgust. He looked down at Westerby scornfully and shook his head in cold contempt. Westerby gritted his teeth and fixed the man with a shaky but defiant gaze.
The man picked up a framed picture of Westerby’s family that was sitting on his desk. Holding it in a leather-gloved hand, he examined it with his cruel eyes.
‘Nice family,’ he whispered nastily. ‘Maybe I’ll hang round here until they get back. Unless you tell me what I want to know.’
Westerby’s eyes widened. The thought of the man harming his wife and kids filled him with insurmountable horror. Better to just tell the man what he wanted to know. Better to cooperate with him. It was a terrible thing to have to do, but with the lives of his family at stake, he didn’t have much choice in the matter.
Knowing that he’d got Westerby by the balls, in a metaphorical as well as a literal sense, the man pulled off the gag to let him speak.
‘Her name is Bailey Morgan,’ whispered Westerby. ‘Detective Constable Bailey Morgan.’
The man smiled sadistically.
‘Detective Constable Bailey Morgan.’ He rolled the name off his tongue. ‘There. That wasn’t so hard.’ His face tautened to become hard like stone once again. ‘Where does she live?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Westerby.
The man shook his head as if that was the wrong answer. He raised his eyebrow at the picture of Westerby’s family.
‘Please believe me!’ said Westerby. ‘I don’t know where she lives!’
With a snort of contempt, the man straightened up to his full height. He seemed to sense that Westerby was telling the truth. Looking down at him with a cold sneer, he reached into the pocket of his black jacket and pulled out a long thin implement. Westerby recognised it as an ice pick. A heavy black dread descended upon him as he knew now with a fatalistic certainty that the man was going to kill him.
Grasping Westerby’s head with a leather-gloved hand, the man inserted the pointed tip of the ice pick into Westerby’s right ear. For a brief moment Westerby felt the cold invasive tip of the pick penetrating his ear canal. And then with a shove the man pushed it deep into his head, right into the middle of his brain.
The last coherent thought that Westerby had was that at least the pain would be over.
2

Detective Constable Bailey Morgan woke up suddenly on Wednesday morning. The hangover hit her a few moments later, swamping her with a tidal wave of nausea accompanied by a splitting headache. She groaned softly. How many vodka blackcurrants had she drunk the night before?
Memories of the previous evening started to filter through in bits and pieces. It had been the leaving do of a work colleague, Anthony. He was one of the IT guys, a civilian police worker who’d decided to leave the police to go and get a better-paid job doing the IT for a bank. Bailey’s friend Emma, a fellow detective, had invited her along, saying that Bailey didn’t get out enough. So she’d dutifully attended. They’d all started off in the pub, then gone to a bar, then there had been some dancing. And then…
She rolled over in the bed. It felt odd. Lumpy. Unfamiliar. This wasn’t her bed. She then realised that she was naked. She didn’t normally sleep naked.
Her eyes opened a crack. A horrible sinking feeling came over her. She reluctantly turned her head…
…to see that there was someone else lying beside her.
It was Anthony. He was asleep, snoring softly.
Bailey instantly felt overcome with excruciating shame that he’d seen her naked. Her body was disfigured with an extensive lattice of scars and small round burn marks which covered most of her upper torso, front and back, and she was deeply self-conscious about it. Normally the most that anyone saw was the thin white scar running down the left side of her face, and even so, she made a concerted effort to conceal that behind a lock of hair which she deliberately wore loose for that very purpose.
She’d acquired the scars in the course of an undercover operation several years earlier which had gone badly wrong. The trauma of that experience had consequently been the source of profound intimacy problems. For almost three years since then, her life had been devoid of sex, and she’d reached the point where she’d as good as resigned herself to never having those kinds of experiences again. Yet somehow she’d managed to get wasted, sidestep all of that emotional and psychological baggage and sleep with… the IT guy from work. He was someone she barely knew, someone she’d barely even spoken to until Emma had introduced them both properly the previous night.
She sat up, her head throbbing horribly. Anthony made a grunting noise and shifted in the bed. She froze. But he didn’t wake up. He was still out for th