My sense of direction had never been brilliant, but it seemed that a route directly away from the path and slightly to the left would be the quickest way back to my car, and safety.

I stood up and ran.

Pushing back the undergrowth, branches cracking as I ploughed through, head down, ignoring the scrapes from protruding branches, ducking and weaving between tree trunks, a thick carpet of leaves beneath my feet. Hearing my own breathing loud and laboured in my ears. Imagining Ben appearing in front of me. Or maybe I wouldn’t see him. Maybe I’d just hear the shot.

Where was he?

I kept on running, my legs getting heavier. Stumbled into a dip and almost fell, barking my knuckles on a tree stump as I struggled to stay upright.

Just get back to the car. Get the hell out of here and don’t make the same mistake again. Worry about the rest later.

I burst through the last line of bushes and out into the car park, breathing hard, streaked with rainwater and dirt, shoes caked in mud, tree-branch scratches on my hands and face. Clutching the blue sports bag in my hand.

But I was too late. Ben’s white Aston Martin was gone.

Chapter 29

29

There was no sign of Ben anywhere. The only people in the car park were a middle-aged man and a younger woman getting out of a nondescript saloon, him in a dark jacket and tie and her in a charcoal-grey trouser suit. I studied them as I got my breath back, hands slack by my sides, panting hard from my run through the trees. The woman was slim and attractive in an uncomplicated way, with dark brown hair tied back in a ponytail. The man was a good ten years older than her, maybe forty, with a day’s worth of stubble on his face and his tie at half mast even though it was not yet 9.30 a.m. He wore a hangdog, almost apologetic expression, like he’d seen a lot of life and didn’t care for most of it.

‘Joseph Lynch?’ he said, walking over to me.

‘Yes?’

‘My name’s Detective Chief Inspector Marcus Naylor, Metropolitan Police.’ He indicated the woman next to him. ‘This is Detective Sergeant Rachel Redford.’

We all shook hands and I gestured back towards the way I’d come.

‘You missed him. You literally just missed him.’

‘Who?’

‘Ben Delaney. He was here. Just left, must have been right before you arrived.’

Naylor looked at his watch.

‘Didn’t get the message from morning briefing until half eight, and we came straight here,’ he said in his flat south London accent. ‘Thought we might be early. You said ten o’clock?’

‘He was early. So was I.’

‘Ah. Shame.’

He seemed to notice the bedraggled state of my clothes for the first time.

‘Are you all right?’ he said.