The Land Rover door slammed hard. The force with which Joshua had swung it shut saw to that. He reached out with a yellow cloth and rubbed the door panel where his ungloved fingers had touched it. Four days of driving the rented 4×4 before it had become a murder weapon made the exercise necessary.
Joshua’s fingertips stung with the pressure he applied. Hard enough that any prints left from closing the door were gone within five seconds. But he continued for another minute.
Satisfied, he stepped back, opened the rucksack he had taken from the passenger seat and placed the yellow cloth inside. It was not alone. Twenty-nine more filled the bag’s cavity. All thirty had been used to wipe clean every last inch of the rented vehicle that had crippled Daniel Lawrence’s car. The process had taken Joshua more than ninety minutes. Lucky for him he was in no rush.
The collision had all but destroyed the Porsche. The damage to the Land Rover had been superficial. Joshua had easily brought it to a controlled stop as he watched Daniel’s car flip into the roadside field. Turning off the headlights, he had waited for the Porsche to come to a rest before getting out.
The instructions had been simple: follow Daniel from Paddington Green police station and make sure that he never reached home. It went without saying that – whatever means he used to achieve his goal – it had to look like an accident. Daniel’s choice of car had made Joshua’s job easy. The Porsche had all of the advantages in a foot-to-the-floor race, but that was never going to be a factor. What mattered was its size and strength against the Land Rover. In that contest there was only one winner.
What followed was over in moments. On approaching the smouldering wreck he could see Daniel was still alive. Barely, but barely was enough. The wound to Daniel’s stomach would kill him; decades spent ending lives told Joshua that. But it would not kill him quickly, so Joshua had helped nature along. All it had taken was careful hand placement and an instant of sudden force to break Daniel’s neck. With his corpse pinned into the wreckage of his mangled car, no one would question what had caused the fatal injury.
For all of his compulsions, Joshua felt no need to admire his own work. That was something that afflicted deranged amateurs. Joshua was a professional and all too sane. He knew the feel and the look of a dead man; there was no need to check his victim’s pulse for reassurance. Instead he was back behind the wheel in seconds, and back on the road inside of half a minute. It had not been a moment too soon. In the rear-view mirror was the faint flicker of headlights; another car approaching. Without turning on the Land Rover’s own lights he had gunned the accelerator and felt the vehicle launch beneath him.
The lack of road lights on the country lane had made driving without headlights difficult but there was little choice: Joshua could not allow the car behind to notice him. Instead he put a clear half-mile between himself and the crash site before switching them on. He had not taken the time to inspect the front of the Land Rover but had expected some damage. The shape of both headlight beams indicated that it was not insignificant: the vehicle could not be driven much further without drawing attention.
Any rental in this price range came with an in-built satellite navigation system, which came in useful now. Just a few quick taps on the machine’s touchscreen accessed the ‘Points of Interest’ menu and the map to the nearest mainline railway hub. A box in the bottom-right corner of the screen stated that Egham station was a three-mile walk, back from where he had just travelled. Virginia Waters station was a mile further, but in the opposite direction. Joshua opted for the longer, safer journey.
It had taken just one minute more to find a narrow lane – little more than a pathway – that led away from the main road. He followed it for another mile, moving further and further to nowhere. His eyes kept returning to the electronic map as he drove. Memorising his bearings. He stopped only when the satnav could no longer register his location.
Once stationary, Joshua had climbed out of the car and looked around. There was nothing to see, just as he had hoped. Still, he had spent five more minutes looking for any sign that the lane had been used in the last few days. There was none. The likelihood that he would be interrupted was close to nil.
So the exercise had begun, with the removal of the satnav’s ‘brain’ from the centre console. With this gone – stored in Joshua’s rucksack – there would be no evidence of his recent search and no way to tell where the vehicle’s driver had headed. He had then set to work with the first of his thirty yellow cloths.
Within an hour and a half even the most skilled forensic examiner could not have connected Joshua to the Land Rover. Physically there would be no trace. Nor would there be a financial link. It had been rented by one of a hundred stolen identities. An identity he had not used before and would never use again. As always, Joshua was a ghost.