Free The Payback by Simon Kernick Page A

her laptop since she took it with her everywhere. But if they had access to her email addresses then she needed to move quickly before they had a chance to intercept the message from DS Weale.
    Signing into her personal hotmail account, she was pleased to see that his message was still there, along with a single Word document attached. She immediately downloaded the attachment and saved it to the USB stick she always kept with her, before deleting the message so there’d be no trace of it. After that, she allowed herself the luxury of a two-minute hot shower to banish the worst of the cold. Finally, she hurried through the house, putting some essentials – passport, change of clothes, wash bag, laptop, the torch/stun gun – into an overnight bag, knowing that she might be gone some time.
    She’d hoped what had happened wouldn’t put her off this place. It was a similar assault in her old apartment that had led to her move here. But when she’d opened the spare-room door and seen what they’d done with the rocking chair she’d bought from the antique shop in the main street a few weeks before – the one she liked to sit in at night sometimes, looking out across the village – she’d almost been sick. They’d placed it next to the bed, and there were ropes attached to the legs and arms, while on the floor beside it were two full, unopened bottles of cheap red wine and a plastic funnel.
    Bastards. Their plan had been to drug her, tie her to the chair, and force-feed her the alcohol through the funnel. By the time they finished she’d have been so drunk that she wouldn’t have been able to resist as they stripped her naked and drowned her in the bath. No one would have suspected anything either. Tina had a history of alcoholism, had been diagnosed with stress on more than one occasion, and was prone to erratic behaviour. It wasn’tsomething to be proud of, but that was the way it was. The conclusion her colleagues would clearly have come to was that she’d been sent over the edge by the suicide of the man she’d been having an affair with. No one would have checked for needle marks on her skin, and without any obvious injuries it would look like she’d simply chosen to go the same way. End of story.
    The ruthless clear thinking her adversaries were obviously capable of was terrifying, but then Paul Wise had the money to pay for the best. She’d been lucky tonight, just as she’d been lucky in the past, but as she stood staring at the rocking chair, knowing that she would never be able to sit in it again, she was struck by the unwelcome fact that some time soon her luck was going to run out.
    Either she got Paul Wise, or he was going to get her. It was that simple.
    After returning to her room to grab the bug finder from among the contents of the drawer that she’d chucked at her largest assailant, she pulled the overnight bag over her shoulder and left the house, looking both ways down the quiet street, in case her attackers were still around somewhere.
    But the street was empty. The lights from the local pub, the Carpenter’s Arms, shone brightly out of the darkness, the sign swinging in the cold February wind.
    Her car, a black Ford Focus, was parked in front of the house and she ran the bug finder over it, looking to pick up any tracking devices they’d placed on the bodywork. The bug finder wasn’t foolproof by any means, and wouldn’t have been able to pick up an advanced device, but she didn’t think they’d’ve had time to plant anything like that.
    When it didn’t buzz, Tina decided she was safe enough and got in the Focus. There were three roads leading out of the village, butonly one led directly to the M25, junction 22, and if the two men who’d attacked her had decided to hang around, they’d be waiting for her there. So she drove in the opposite direction, heading down silent, hedgerow-lined B-roads that seemed to belong to another, altogether more innocent world.
    And, as she lit a