Hunted by Emlyn Rees Read Free Book Online Page B

right away Danny could see it was wrong.
    Two sets of prints – his and Lexie’s, occasionally interlocking, but mostly side by side – led away from the cabin door, showing the route he and his daughter had taken that morning as they’d set out to check the snares.
    But now Danny could see a third set of prints – bigger than his own – leading in towards the cabin from the woods to the right.
    He knew it for certain now. What his intuition had told him before. Whoever had walked this way, they’d scared those two crows into flight.

CHAPTER  NINE
11.23, GREEN PARK, LONDON W1
    The foyer of the Ritz Hotel on Piccadilly smelt of designer perfume and fresh flowers. Danny walked past the liveried doorman without breaking his stride. He’d called in here early the previous evening to scope the place out, so he already knew where to go.
    He walked straight past reception. None of the tourists or business people paid him any attention. This was something of an art with him, a point of pride. Whenever he was working, he liked to blend into the background, to become a distant figure in an Impressionist painting, just another blurred face in the crowd.
    He’d picked out the suit he was wearing at Heathrow yesterday. Didn’t even know its brand. It was grey, entirely unremarkable. A real IBM number. A garment he’d never have worn outside of work.
    He’d chosen the black-banded straw trilby he’d seen on display in the airport store window because he’d known its brim would partially obscure his face. His Aviator shades served the same purpose. Meaning that none of the CCTV cameras he’d passed on the way here would have got even a half-decent shot of him.
    If for whatever reason someone were to take a closer look at him now, they’d most likely mark him down as an accountant or a lawyer. But strictly middle management, nothing flash.
    He pushed through the swing door of the men’s wash room, slipping a standard size-four Phillips screwdriver from his suit jacket pocket as he did. When he reappeared less than two minutes later, it was without the small black Gor-Tex rucksack he’d walked in there with.
    Room 112 was on the third floor. Danny took the stairs instead of the elevator, making note of the fire exits and other doorways leading off each landing.
    ‘You still with me?’ he said out loud as he reached the deserted third-floor landing.
    ‘Every step.’
    The Kid’s voice had come through the Bluetooth audio bead Danny had slotted into his right ear. He was also wearing a transmitter sewn into his jacket lapel. He wanted this meeting recorded. The client’s voice. Everything they discussed. All the information he’d been denied prior to the meet, he wanted to own by the time they were done.
    ‘Happy eavesdropping,’ he said.
    He hooked out the ear bead and slipped it into his suit jacket pocket, knowing that as small as it was, anyone looking for it would soon be able to spot it. He checked his watch. Eleven twenty-nine. A minute early.
    He stayed where he was. Staring up through a high window that looked out on to the bluest of London skies, he felt a stab of homesickness for Saint Croix, where the few neighbours he occasionally socialized with all thought he was a yacht broker with business interests in Miami and Saint-Tropez.
    His mind wandered, remembering the warmth of the Caribbean sun on his skin and the crackle of twigs and dried leaves beneath his bare feet as he’d walked his four dogs two days before, down through the brushwood to the beach for their morning swim.
    He hoped Candy Day was coping OK without him. His sixty-seven -year-old housekeeper had been working for him for four years, ever since he’d first begun restoring the dilapidated overseer’s house on the old tobacco plantation out at Grassy Point. Even though Candy never complained, Danny worried that his dogs –two Rhodesian Ridgebacks and two Dobermanns – ran her ragged whenever he was away.
    He didn’t yet know how long