Dead if You Don’t

64

Sunday 13 August

08.00–09.00

Kipp Brown had no response, either. He sat at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, in a loose shirt, jeans and loafers, unshaven, cradling a mug of coffee and staring at the wall. Stacey was still in her dressing gown, her face pale, with no make-up.

‘You are not serious?’ Stacey said.

He shrugged, set down the mug and dug, gloomily and with no appetite, into a bowl of muesli, aware he needed to eat something to keep up his strength after a near-sleepless night.

‘Kipp, you are not, seriously, going to play hardball with whoever’s taken him, over our son’s life? Please don’t say you are going to do that — you’re not, are you?’ Her eyes were red from crying.

He stood up and put an arm tenderly round her. She didn’t shrug it off. ‘I’m not playing hardball, Stace, honestly. I will do anything I can to get Mungo back safely, but I just don’t have that kind of money — not at the moment — I don’t have it.’

‘What do you mean? It’s all gone on the gaming tables and horses?’

‘I’m just in a bad cash-flow situation — temporarily — negative equity.’

‘Negative equity — what’s that in plain English? What do you mean, negative equity?’

He took a deep breath. ‘I’m flat broke, Stace. Skint. I’ve barely enough money to cover next month’s mortgage on this house. And Mungo’s school fees. I haven’t got the sort of money they’re asking for.’

‘You are not serious?’

‘I wish to hell I wasn’t, but I am.’

‘But you’ve got millions in your discretionary client account, you always have, you told me you keep a percentage of all your clients’ portfolios liquid, waiting for investment opportunities.’

‘I can’t touch that money.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s not mine, it belongs to my clients.’

‘How much do you have there?’

‘Around fifteen million at the moment.’

‘Fifteen million?’

‘About that.’

‘Bloody hell! Kipp, two and a half million is peanuts, they wouldn’t notice it missing. You just tell them you invested it and the market moved the wrong way, or whatever bullshit speak you use.’

‘Sure, Stace. You’ll come and visit me in prison, will you?’

‘You know how to move money around, for God’s sake, you do it all the time for your clients!’

‘Yes, but I don’t steal it.’

‘It’s not stealing, it would just be borrowing, surely?’

‘Stace, I cannot take money from my client account. You want me to risk being banged away for a decade for embezzlement and my career over?’

‘So, you’d rather Mungo died?’

He stared at the wall again. At the antique Welsh dresser. At the framed picture of Mungo with his sister. Mungo was seven then, wearing a red school cap, a neat grey blazer and shorts, pulling an impish face at the camera.

Stacey said, tenderly, ‘Darling, do you remember soon after he was born? You came to the ward and held him in your arms, and looked down at him, and you said how much you loved him. That you would take a bullet for him?’

He nodded, bleakly.

‘But not any more? You wouldn’t take a bullet now? What’s changed?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You love him as much as you did that day?’

‘More.’

‘But not enough to take a bullet for him now?’

He stared down at his fingers. At his nails, which he normally kept immaculate, noticing several of them were bitten down to the quick. ‘Shit, Stace. Oh shit. Yes. Yes, of course I would.’

She kissed him. ‘I love you.’

It was the first time in a very long time he had heard those words.

‘I love you, too,’ he replied.

And meant it.