Fifth Victim

I stared at her, frowning. ‘And how the hell does stinging your mother for a ransom help?’

‘Ah,’ Caroline Willner said, before Dina could answer – even if she’d a mind to. ‘I have an insurance policy against kidnap. It was taken out some years ago, but it’s still perfectly valid. I was visiting South America, and I was told it was prudent to take such precautions.’ Her gaze skimmed over her daughter, strangely dispassionate. ‘It covers immediate family members, so the money would not have come from me directly.’

Funny how no one minds swindling insurance companies, from an ageing camera ‘dropped’ on holiday, to an overinflated estimate for storm damage repairs. And we all end up paying for it in the end, via rocketing premiums which only perpetuate the cycle.

I didn’t ask if Dina knew about the insurance. It was common enough in her social circle, and one look at her guilty face was enough to prove her mother had scored a direct hit.

‘You think an insurance company would just pay up that kind of money without making strenuous efforts to recover it?’ I demanded, not hiding my own incredulity. ‘And if it was all for your mother’s benefit, how the hell were you planning on giving it to her – claim you found it stuffed down the back of a sofa?’

Dina’s skin pinked all the way up to her hairline, and she gripped her coffee mug like a lifeline. ‘I don’t know,’ she muttered. ‘I hadn’t thought that far ahead.’

‘Well, I cannot begin to tell you how extremely disappointed I am at this level of dishonesty,’ Caroline Willner said, nothing in her voice. ‘It will be a long time before I feel I can trust you again, Dina.’

‘I was trying to help!’

‘By stealing?’ Her mother’s response came back like a whip. ‘And let us not forget that a boy is dead because of you and your friends.’

‘That was an accident,’ Dina said, heard her own desperation and swallowed it down. ‘It must have been. They would never hurt anyone. Not like that …’

There was an edge of panic in her voice, her eyes, and I remembered Manda’s assertion that Dina suffered from claustrophobia. The prospect of being buried alive held particular terrors for her. Caroline Willner’s face showed no sympathy for her daughter’s fears.

‘And what about the Benelli boy?’ she asked. ‘Was he behind his own … mutilation?’ She took a sip of her tea. Dina simply stared.

‘Benedict was a classical guitarist,’ she said, almost a whisper. ‘I don’t know what happened. They wouldn’t tell me. Maybe that was another accident. Why would he agree to anything so horrible?’

‘As a way of avoiding his parents’ ambitions for him in that direction, which were always far more … aggressive than his own,’ Caroline Willner said coldly. ‘While also serving as a constant reminder of their own vacillation when it came to paying the ransom.’

‘I—’

‘Tell me,’ she continued, raising a pale unpencilled eyebrow, ‘what means of persuasion did you have in mind to convince me to pay promptly? Have them tell me you’d also been buried alive?’

Dina swayed in her seat, put a steadying hand on the table.

‘OK, that’s enough,’ I said quietly. ‘I think you’ve made your point, Mrs Willner.’

She glanced at me, mild surprise in her face. ‘But, you see, that’s just the problem, Ms Fox, I don’t believe I have.’ Her eyes shifted to Dina’s face, scanned over it briefly. ‘What kind of child have I raised, that she thinks it’s remotely acceptable to commit such crimes?’ Her voice was a murmur, as if speaking rhetorically.

Dina, who’d seemed on the verge of fainting when her mother mentioned premature burial, now just looked sick.

‘I think you underestimate the influence Dina’s friends exert,’ I said, feeling compelled to take the girl’s side even though I thoroughly agreed with her mother. ‘I used to work for Amanda Dempsey’s family. That girl could persuade any saint to turn sinner.’

Caroline Willner allowed a small smile to flutter her lips. ‘I was a child of the Sixties,’ she said. ‘I took part in the big anti-Vietnam protest marches in Washington in sixty-nine, much to my father’s disgust. Yet he very much admired my grandmother’s participation in the women’s suffrage movement, although that’s beside the point.’ Another flicker of a smile. ‘My friends at the time were talking about involving themselves with more violent forms of protest. Some of them were people I very much admired, but I did not agree with their philosophy, so I did not take part.’ She paused, the reminiscence fading. ‘You were brought up to know better.’

Dina hunched in frustration. ‘You were never there! I was raised by a succession of nannies. All I wanted was for you to notice me.’

Caroline Willner’s jaw tightened. ‘Well, you’ve certainly gotten my attention now, Dina,’ she said. ‘And I’m sure there will be plenty of notice taken if this comes to trial.’

‘You’d turn me in?’ Dina gasped, then shook her head. ‘No, you wouldn’t. But only because they’d drag your name through the mud alongside mine, Mother, and you couldn’t stand that, could you?’ She waited a beat, but there was no reply. I doubt she’d expected one. ‘Yes, I’ve been stupid, but what happened to Tor was nothing to do with me. And it was an accident!’

‘If you want us to believe that,’ I said, ‘you’re going to have to shop them.’ Because they’ll shop you in a heartbeat, if the tables are turned.

‘No.’ Dina shook her head again. ‘They’re my friends.’

‘Dina—’ Caroline Willner began heavily.

‘Friends who broke Raleigh’s arm just because he happened to get in the way,’ I cut in. ‘Friends who murdered Torquil Eisenberg, and had a pretty good go at killing me.’

She wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t answer. Guilt was a good sign, I told myself.

‘You are to sever all contact with these people,’ Caroline Willner commanded, as if that alone was going to be enough to end the matter.

‘I already told them I changed my mind,’ Dina said. ‘I told them tonight, even before we knew about Tor. There won’t be another attempt on me.’

Caroline Willner nodded and rose gracefully to her feet. ‘Well, that’s a start,’ she said. ‘First thing tomorrow you will call the police and arrange an appointment to see the officer in charge. You will cooperate fully with the authorities,’ she added in a voice that allowed for no arguments. ‘And then you will call your horse-riding instructor.’

‘Raleigh? Why?’ Dina asked, confused. ‘I already apologised to him. You can’t mean I should tell him about—?’

‘An apology is not enough, Dina,’ her mother cut in. ‘You will call him and arrange to have your horses delivered to him immediately. It seems a fitting manner of compensation for your crimes.’

‘What?’ Dina leapt to her feet, her chair screeching back on the polished tile. Interesting that the prospect of telling all to the authorities had not raised the same kind of reaction as the prospect of losing her precious horses.

‘Actions have consequences, my dear,’ Caroline Willner said, absolute finality in her tone. ‘It’s high time you realised that fact.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

I called Parker as soon as I got back to my room. It had been a hell of a long day for both of us, but he still answered his phone on the second ring. With Joe McGregor hovering over by the window, pretending not to listen in, I ran through the gist of Dina’s confession and Caroline Willner’s reaction to it.

McGregor had not been present in the kitchen, so it was news to him, although judging by the look on his face, it didn’t exactly come as a big surprise.

‘What happens now?’ he asked when I snapped the phone shut.

‘We both get some sleep before one of us speaks her mind to these bloody people and does something she might regret.’

He grinned at me. ‘Not you, Charlie. You might speak your mind, but you’d never regret it.’

‘At the moment, I could cheerfully strangle the lot of them,’ I muttered, shaking my head. ‘I should have known Manda Dempsey was trouble from the moment I laid eyes on her again.’

‘When they were all in the living room, before you’d gotten back, it didn’t seem like she was the one in charge,’ McGregor said slowly. ‘If anything, I woulda said the other girl, Orlando, was making all the noise, with that Brit boyfriend of hers backing her up.’

‘Hunt does seem the protective type,’ I agreed. I opened my mouth, about to ask him what else he’d noticed while I’d been otherwise engaged, but shook my head. ‘Look, I can’t think about this anymore tonight. Parker wants me to go into the office tomorrow. You OK to stay on out here?’

‘Sure. For how long, you reckon?’

I shrugged. ‘Until Mrs Willner stops writing the cheques, I expect. But I’ll be back by mid afternoon and you can fill me in then.’ I paused, diffident. ‘Actually, while I’m over there, I wouldn’t mind going to see Sean – if you can stand another few hours of Dina’s company?’

His face softened slightly. ‘No sweat, Charlie. Take as long as you need. I don’t have any plans.’

Five hours’ sleep was all I needed to feel reasonably human again. Plus a long hot shower and an equally long hot coffee – in that order.

As I left the house, I found Raleigh was already loading Dina’s horses into a trailer hitched to the back of the riding club pickup. His arm was in a scuffed cast, and he had brought along one of the ubiquitous girl grooms to help him with his cargo.

When he spotted me, he gave me a brief wave, but didn’t stop to chat. I guessed he was anxious to be out of there with his remarkable piece of good fortune, before anyone came to their senses about exactly what it was they were giving away. Geronimo might be getting on a bit, but he was a willing ride, and Cerdo had the potential to develop into a top-flight dressage horse. More than worth having an arm broken.

I didn’t see Dina before I left the house. She was, according to Silvana, locked in her bedroom, weeping. I wondered if Caroline Willner knew that her daughter would probably never forgive her for this. It was a sad reflection, I thought, that Dina was more upset by being forced to give away her horses than she had been about Torquil’s murder.

With the Buell consigned to the nearest breaker’s yard, I was in the agency Navigator. For once, I can’t say I was sorry to have more than three tons of steel around me as I went hand-to-hand with the morning traffic. Not to mention the visibility afforded by the vehicle’s extra height.

That, and the fact that the Navigator lived up to its name by having the latest satnav fitted – as did all Parker’s vehicles – the system linked to the traffic reports. It suddenly began warning of heavy congestion ahead on the 495, and advised me to get off the freeway, fast.

Without that, I might not have spotted the tail.

He wasn’t very good, which was the first reason I caught onto him. The second was because of a cluster of slow-moving trucks that meant I had to accelerate hard and then change lanes late to make my exit.

I heard a cacophony of horns blast behind me, and checked my mirrors just to make doubly sure I wasn’t the cause, even though I knew I’d left the other vehicles plenty of room and completed the manoeuvre smoothly. One advantage of this job was the opportunity to take plenty of offensive and defensive driving courses.

In my rear-view mirror, I saw an old tan-coloured Honda Accord pop out of the line of trucks onto the slip road behind me, like a cork squeezed from a bottle. I saw the front end of one of the Peterbilts dip as it braked hard enough to fishtail the trailer behind the massive chrome-laden cab.

I sucked in a breath, but the truck driver corrected the wriggle before it got anywhere near out of hand. His fist was still wedged on the horn as his rig disappeared from view, giving a nice working demonstration of the Doppler effect.

The lights at the top of the slip road were against me, which was maybe another reason I was feeling twitchier than normal. I wondered how long it would be before I’d be able to view a red light as anything other than the prelude to disaster.

With my foot on the brake, I watched the Accord roll up slowly behind me, just to get a look at the driver’s face. I suppose I was part suspicious, and part curious about a man who enjoyed the thrill of almost becoming the puréed filling in a truck sandwich on his morning commute. I half expected to catch him yacking on his cellphone, oblivious.

Instead, his reflected image showed someone who was intensely uncomfortable. It was a dull day, leaning towards overcast with a chance of rain, but he was wearing dark glasses and a baseball cap with the brim pulled well down. I could just make out the intertwined NY logo on the front. He was a young guy, from what I could see of the rest of his features, dark hair sticking out at the sides, pale skin, wearing a T-shirt. He rang no bells.

One hand gripped the top of the steering wheel so hard he was going to leave dents for each finger. He didn’t seem to know quite what to do with the other, and currently had his elbow resting on the door top, fingers rubbing at his temple in a self-conscious gesture that only drew attention to how hard he was trying to mask his face.

I’d already glanced down at the front of the Accord before it was hidden behind the Navigator’s tail, but there was no plate. Nothing overtly suspicious about that. Nineteen US states did not require a front licence plate, and neighbouring Pennsylvania was one of them, even if New York was not.

Still, it was … convenient, if nothing else.

I drove on, sticking to the speed limits, making no sudden moves and giving no indication that I’d spotted my tail, if that’s what he was. Coincidentally, he happened to be heading from Long Island towards Manhattan, but so were thousands of other people at that time of day.

My cellphone was slotted into the hands-free kit on the dash, and I had Parker’s number on speed dial. As usual, it hardly seemed to ring out before he answered.

‘Hi, boss,’ I said. ‘I think I may have a problem.’

‘Tell me.’

So I did, short and sweet, adding, ‘Could be nothing, but after yesterday I’m sure you’ll forgive me for being a little jumpy in traffic.’

‘You did right, Charlie. How d’you want to play this?’

‘I’m tempted to simply call the cops and get them to pick him up. After Torquil’s death, I would have said they’ll play ball with that.’

‘Yeah,’ Parker agreed, and I heard the marked reluctance in his voice. ‘But that may well cause big trouble for our client.’

‘Nothing she doesn’t deserve.’

I heard him sigh. ‘Yeah, well, not everybody gets what they deserve. While we’re still in Mrs Willner’s employ, we have to protect her interests as far as we can – and yours. Drive straight to the office. The parking garage has a security entry system. He can’t follow you there.’

‘So, we just let him get away?’

Another set of overhead lights loomed in front of me. I must have just hit the timing wrong, because all of them seemed to be turning against me. Maybe I’d offended the small god of traffic lights and he was showing his wrath in the only way he knew. I eased off the throttle. My tail was still following, again unhappy about being forced to close up.

‘We’re not law enforcement, Charlie,’ Parker said, a hint of pleading behind the firm words. ‘In theory it’s not our job to catch the bad guys.’

‘It’s our job to stop them.’ I glanced in the mirror again. ‘What’s the difference?’

‘Charlie, I—’

But suddenly I wasn’t listening to what Parker was saying, because in that moment’s slice of view, I realised the identity of the guy in the tan Accord, and now this wasn’t about theoretical boundaries anymore.

This had become very personal.

CHAPTER FORTY

‘He’s injured!’ I said, cutting across whatever Parker was saying. ‘He’s wearing a T-shirt and he’s just lifted his right arm, but stiff, awkward. I see a bandage.’

I remembered the close-up CCTV image of the guy in the passenger seat of the Dodge, throwing his arms up as the side glass rained around him. Maybe even throwing an arm into the path of my next round. The arm nearest the window. His right arm.

Parker went silent for a moment, all arguments about law enforcement intervention put on hold.

‘Can you engage with minimum risk?’ he asked then.

Risk. An all-purpose word with a raft of meanings. Risk of success. Risk of discovery. Risk of imprisonment. Risk of injury or death.

‘Yes.’

‘OK,’ he said, his voice shortened and tense. ‘If you can, lead him somewhere … quieter. What’s your current location?’

‘On Atlantic Avenue – don’t ask, it was the satnav’s choice. I was going to take the Williamsburg Bridge in but there must have been some sort of traffic snarl-up.’

‘Stay on Atlantic and head for Bushwick. Plenty of places there to have a nice long … discussion, without being disturbed.’

Places where the residents aren’t likely to call the cops, more like.

I said dryly, ‘The last time I went to Bushwick, I was arrested in a brothel.’

‘Yeah, try not to do that again, huh?’ He paused, as if hating to ask, but doing so anyway. ‘You need backup?’

‘No time. I’ll call you.’

‘You better, or I’ll be sending search parties.’ Another pause, and this time I heard the smile in his voice. ‘And when you talk to this guy, Charlie, be polite.’

No lasting damage.

‘I’ll do my best,’ I said, and hung up.

I got off Atlantic at the next lights, started threading deeper into run-down side streets lined with decrepit apartment buildings that looked barely able to support the weight of their own roof. The factories were huge old red-brick affairs, closed mostly to the point of dereliction. Someone had told me that Bushwick had the cheapest rents in the whole of New York City, but you got exactly what you paid for. I saw nothing to disprove it.

As I’d reminded Parker, the last time I’d been here – the last time I’d done more than drive through the place with the windows up and the door locks buttoned – it had ended badly. I’d been arrested in a police raid on a brothel, in the company of Sean, my father, and an underage hooker. Not one of our finer moments.

My tail, meanwhile, stuck within a couple of cars’ lengths all the way. He was too anxious about getting cut off at lights and losing me to ask himself where the hell I might be leading him. He might as well have had a flashing neon sign on the roof.

Eventually, after several abrupt turns, I found myself back in the same kind of area as that seedy brothel. The scenery was overwhelmed by gang-tag graffiti and litter. Not so much quiet as cowed, with no inquisitive faces likely to appear at windows. Hardly any windows, for a start, and most of those had part-rotted plywood instead of glass.

It was not a side of the city mentioned on the tourist tours, but perfect for what I had in mind.

I slowed, ducking in my seat and making a big show of looking at the buildings on either side of me, as if searching for an address. The guy in the Accord naturally hung back, so he was caught flat-footed when I hit the accelerator and the Navigator’s massive V8 attempted its best impression of a fighter jet leaving an aircraft-carrier catapult along the empty street.

The Accord driver floored the throttle in an attempt to close the gap. Immediately I was up to speed, I stamped on the brake pedal and stuck the gear lever into ‘Reverse’. The transmission thunked in protest, but Lincoln build ’em tough and I had actually managed to pick up some rearward velocity when I connected with the nose of the Accord.

The laws of physics took over at this point. The Navigator’s large ground clearance and twenty-plus inches of departure angle meant its fat rear tyres were already attacking the Accord’s front bumper before the overhanging body fouled on the low-slung bonnet.

The tyres gripped and lifted, carried up and on by buckets of torque and a driver who was not about to let her foot off just yet. The Navigator mounted the front end of the Accord and sat on it, crushing the engine bay. I can only imagine what it must have looked like from inside the car.

I rammed the gear lever back into ‘Drive’ and, with less difficulty than I’d imagined, bounced back down onto the road surface. I’d always been taught to ram a solid object with the back of a vehicle rather than the front, if that were possible. Fewer vital moving parts to damage, for a start. As it was, the Navigator still felt perfectly driveable. The airbags hadn’t even deployed. Glancing in the mirrors, I was pretty sure the Accord was a write-off.

Well, good!

By the time I was out from behind the Navigator’s wheel and level with the wreck, leading with my left shoulder, I had the SIG out in a double-handed grip and pointed firmly at the driver’s fear-frozen head. It took him about half a second to jerk both hands up in surrender, palms facing.

The speed with which he got his right hand in the air, in particular, gave me a moment’s horrible creeping doubt. Bullet wounds, in my experience, severely restricted all movement, regardless of the situation. In the back of my mind, I began to wonder if I might have to go for a variation on the ‘I’m just a girlie and my foot slipped off the brake’ excuse.

Ah, well, too late to worry about that now …

‘Out!’ I barked, firm but not shouting. The driver’s window was down, so I didn’t have to. ‘Keep your hands where I can see them. Put them out of the window, right now! Come on, both hands!’

I moved round towards the A pillar, staying forward of the door hinge and keeping my knees soft in case he tried anything.

He didn’t.

In fact, the Accord driver fumbled in his haste to comply, fingers scrabbling awkwardly for the exterior door handle. He climbed out, shaky, his bandaged right arm beginning to droop. As he shuffled forwards he was leaning to that side, as if to compensate or maybe hoping to disguise the injury.

I transferred the SIG to my right hand only and edged closer, flicking the sunglasses and baseball hat off with my left and chucking them back into his car. He flinched as I uncovered his face, almost cringing.

My pursuer was maybe in his early twenties, late teens at a push, neither fat nor thin, with dark blondish hair, casually cut so its natural curl was taking over. His T-shirt and jeans were tight enough that I could tell he wasn’t carrying without having to frisk him. I frisked him anyway, just to be sure.

In the back pocket of his jeans I discovered a battered canvas wallet. Inside, along with a credit card and loose change was a driver’s licence that could well have been genuine.

I checked the picture, compared it to the face in front of me. Ross Martino, with an address in Elizabeth, across in New Jersey, right under the final approach for Newark International. I memorised it, threw the wallet back to him. And then, more in fear of a random police patrol than anything else, I tucked the SIG back under my jacket.

Ross Martino relaxed visibly as the gun disappeared from view. Or maybe not relaxed, but certainly became so much less tense that the effect was the same. And as his fear released its grip on his senses, his peripheral vision opened up again. Maybe that was why he suddenly realised the state of the flattened Accord.

‘My car! Aw, man, you wrecked my car.’ His accent wandered under stress, I noted, veering from an artificial neutrality down towards more working-class origins.

‘You wrecked my bike,’ I fired back. ‘This just makes us even.’

‘I didn’t!’ He went almost squeaky with outrage. ‘Shit, man, are you crazy? Just look what you did …’

‘Crazy? No. Livid? Well, now you’re talking.’

‘Hey, I—’

I didn’t have time for this. So far, nothing had stirred in the buildings on either flank, but how long that state of affairs would continue was anyone’s guess. I lunged forwards and grabbed the biceps of his right arm, just about in the centre of the bandaged area, and dug in hard.

The effect was immediate and severe. His speech chopped off, eyes ballooning as the spike of pain locked him up solid. He staggered back against the door-frame, almost fell. I pushed up close.

‘Yeah, getting shot’s a bitch, isn’t it?’

‘Shot? What the shit are you talking about? I ain’t been shot!’

Under the pain I registered surprise – shock, even – but no desperate invention. No outright lies.

‘Prove it – whatever’s under there,’ I said, and when he wavered, I sighed and reached towards the SIG again. ‘Or I will give you something to compare it with. Lose the bandage.’

I didn’t even need to clear the holster. As soon as my hand flipped under my jacket, he was already tugging at the dressing, letting it unravel down his arm like a loosely dressed mummy, paddling it on its way.

Beneath the bandage was a simple rectangle of gauze and a mass of intertwining bruises with a definite shape at their epicentre. I gestured and, with obvious reluctance, he peeled back the gauze. Only then did I recognise the central pattern on his discoloured flesh.

It was a near-perfect partial imprint of a horse’s hind shoe.

Horses’ hind feet are a very different shape to the front, more oval, less rounded, so their hoofprints are distinctive. And I realised at the same time that I’d been coming at this from completely the wrong direction.

When Cerdo had let rip with both back legs at Dina’s would-be abductor, that day at the riding club, he’d landed a direct hit on the man’s upper arm. That much I knew.

The thin curve of metal with its central fullered groove – designed to give more grip in soft ground – had caused a small but nasty gash, even through the guy’s clothing. It should have been professionally stitched, but I could understand why he’d kept away from the hospitals.

The sheer horsepower behind the blow had also caused a welter of bruises. After several days, they were dispersing in multicoloured array in all directions along his arm. It looked like he’d probably torn up the muscles at the same time.

But no way was it a gunshot wound.

‘Don’t you think it’s ironic,’ I said after a moment’s inspection, ‘that you clobbered Dina’s riding instructor with that baseball bat, and it was her horse who laid into you?’

Ross scowled, carefully sticking the gauze back in place and gathering up the streamers of bandage. He didn’t want to even look at me.

I shrugged. ‘OK, you don’t want to talk here, that’s fine – talk to the police instead.’ I hooked my cellphone out of my pocket, started to dial. ‘But you were the one following me, don’t forget.’

He hadn’t forgotten, not for long. He barely let me key in the first digit.

‘OK, OK! Jesus, why d’you think I’ve been on the run, man? I daren’t go home, in case the cops are there already. We thought the big guy at the riding club was the bodyguard, all right?’ he admitted through his teeth. ‘All we knew was she had a bodyguard called Charlie, and it sounded like she called him that. How the hell were we supposed to know you’d be a chick, huh? I mean, c’mon – shit, I thought your name was Pam or something.’

It might almost have been funny, if it wasn’t so bloody tragic instead. ‘What were you going to do if you’d managed to grab her?’ I asked. ‘Bury her alive? Or beat her to death first, like Torquil?’

‘No! No way! Listen, that wasn’t anything to do with us. You gotta believe me.’ His tone had turned wheedling. I wondered if he knew it did nothing for his cause.

I squared up to him, glanced at the phone still in my hand, as if in warning. ‘Who’s “us”, exactly?’

The emotions that crossed his face might have been comical in other circumstances. On the one hand, he wanted desperately to confess to the crimes he saw as his own, but he must have known he was hopelessly compromised if he did.

‘I’m not the police,’ I added, hoping he wouldn’t pick up on the fact I hadn’t promised not to call them regardless.

‘Me and Lennon,’ he said at last, unwillingly convinced.

‘So, does that make you McCartney?’

The Beatles reference was lost on him. He gave me a puzzled frown.

I sighed. ‘OK, Ross, so you admit you and your pal were behind the attempt on Dina at the riding club—’

‘No!’ he said again. ‘We just carried it out, OK? But the brains behind the whole thing? No way.’

‘Now, why doesn’t that surprise me?’ I murmured. ‘Who was giving you your orders?’

He flushed at that, but gave me a shrug that seemed as frustrated as it was reflexive.

‘Lennon was the one who dealt with them, man. He just used to get text messages. Instructions, directions. That’s how we knew where to find Dina and that she had a bodyguard. Lennon showed me the texts, but I never knew who sent them. He just asked me to help him out, so I did, y’know? We’re buds.’

I remembered the old saying about a friend is someone who will help you move, but a real friend will help you move a body. Looked like Ross was a real friend …

‘Helping out your “bud” probably just earned you life with no possibility of parole,’ I said coldly, going for the phone again.

‘Wait!’ he cried, the desperation sending his voice climbing. ‘Look, I’ll tell you everything, but you’ve gotta help me. Lennon asked me to give him a hand to take the other three, sure, and we had a go for the kid you were with – at the riding stables. But it was all, like, play-acting, not for real! Jesus, what d’you take me for?’

‘From where I’m standing? A kidnapper and murderer.’

‘Murder?’ he demanded, almost a squawk. ‘Hey, I tell you, someone’s trying to frame us for killing the Eisenberg kid.’ He shook his head vigorously, shivered in the mild air. ‘That was nothing to do with me. I never signed on for that.’

‘So, where do I find your buddy Lennon?’ I asked, grim. ‘Sounds like he and I really need to talk.’

‘That’s just it, man, I don’t know,’ he muttered, sour and defiant in equal measure. ‘You not been listening? Why d’you think I’m here? He’s gone. All I know is he got a message a couple days ago. He went out, saying he’d be back real soon, and how they’d promised him something big, and I ain’t seen him since!’

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

‘Lennon got me into this whole thing,’ Ross said dully. ‘We were on the same basketball team in college.’

‘College kids?’ I murmured. It didn’t quite have the ring of the ghetto about it. ‘So, what went wrong?’

‘My dad lost his job, and his medical benefits, so when my mom got sick …’ He gave an expressive twitch of his shoulders. ‘I was bussing tables, parking cars, anything to earn a dime. Only trouble was, I had no time to study. I flunked out. This was like a gift, y’know? Man, I needed that money.’

‘Spare me,’ I said shortly. ‘Not everyone who’s having a hard time of it turns to kidnapping to make ends meet.’

His gaze flashed out, sharp and angry. ‘Yeah? Look around you!’

We were sitting in a grubby little bar about a mile away from the site of our collision. I’d called the breakdown recovery service Armstrong-Meyer used, given them directions, and told them to collect the wrecked Accord and wait for further instructions.

Ross left the keys tucked above the sun visor – not that they would do anyone much good. What was left of the car’s engine was proving quietly incontinent on the cracked asphalt, and both front wheels currently sat at odd angles where the whole of the suspension had collapsed.

Nevertheless, the Navigator had made light work of dragging the carcass to the side of the road. A sturdy tow rope was standard equipment for all Parker’s company vehicles.

I persuaded Ross into the passenger seat of the Navigator with the promise that, if we talked and I liked what he had to say, I’d lobby Parker – and through him, Brandon Eisenberg – for a good defence attorney and new set of wheels. Preferably something of considerably later vintage than his elderly Honda. Eisenberg would no doubt be willing to pay a substantial reward for information leading to an arrest, not to mention retrieval of the missing Rainbow.

Ross was desperate enough to grab the lifeline I offered him, so I didn’t have to resort to Plan B, which was to PlastiCuff him and throw him in the back of the SUV.

Now, we perched on a pair of cracked vinyl stools near the doorway in a small bar on one of the main drags. It had obviously been converted from some kind of store, with big front windows and a long darkening slot leading to the smokers’ haven outside at the back. The bar ran almost the full length of the room and was studded with similar stools. The varnish on the planked floor had been long since scuffed away by the stumble of many beer-clad feet.

I sat with my back to the wall, where I could watch the doorway and the street, with Ross hunched alongside me. I’d been able to park the Navigator right outside. From this angle, I could admire the damage to the rear bumper and contemplate Bill Rendelson’s ire when he had to submit the insurance claim forms.

Every cloud …

The barman had managed to deliver two beers and take the money I offered without uttering a single word. The beer was cold, at least, but it seemed that glasses were not an option. Neither was change. I thought briefly of asking for a receipt for my expenses, but he was already disappearing into a ramshackle storeroom at the back, leaving us with the place to ourselves.

‘It didn’t seem like breaking the law – not at first,’ Ross said now, his face intent. ‘It was never supposed to be anything really, y’know, criminal. Lennon said how he’d met these rich kids at a couple of parties. They wanted some kinda big thrill, and being held to ransom was it. Some kinda role-playing thing, I guess. Easy money, he said, for letting them act out their dumb fantasy.’

‘Just a game,’ I murmured, recalling Dina making much the same protest.

‘First couple of times – those two girls – it was.’ He took a rapid sip of his beer, pulling a face at the taste or the temperature, I wasn’t sure which. I tried mine and probably gave off much the same expression. It wasn’t the most sophisticated brew, but it was effective at stripping the fur off your tongue.

‘So,’ I said mildly, ‘what kind of role play was it when you cut off Benedict Benelli’s finger?’

Ross paled and put his beer down slowly, picking at the edge of the label.

‘He did it himself,’ he said at last, shocked and low. ‘You should have seen him – when Lennon told him his folks wouldn’t pay. That they’d laughed at the idea. He went ape-shit, man, screaming and swearing, saying how he was gonna make ’em real sorry for what they done.’ He swallowed. ‘Then he grabbed a knife and just … did it.’

‘Just like that?’ I sat for a moment, eyeing him. Was it as totally unbelievable as it seemed? I remembered Benedict’s permanent scowl, Caroline Willner’s statement that his classical music career was more his parents’ choice, and his defiance towards everything, from his friends to his life. It might have started out as a game, but he’d taken it onwards in a big way. ‘What kind of a knife?’

‘Kitchen. One of those big mothers with about a nine- or ten-inch blade.’

‘How the hell did he just so happen to stumble across a kitchen knife?’

Ross heard the acidic tilt to my voice. He checked out the dark gloss ceiling, the dirt under his fingernails, the ingredients’ list on the back of the beer bottle. Anywhere but my face.

‘We was in the kitchen,’ he mumbled. ‘We’d been keeping him tied up in the basement, like always. Keeping it real, y’know? Like they wanted.’ He blushed. ‘But after the Benellis said nothing doing, there didn’t seem much point in keeping him down there any longer, huh?’

‘What happened?’ I asked, still not entirely willing to take his story at face value.

‘I threw up,’ he admitted, looking thoroughly ashamed. Hardened criminal, he was not. ‘It wasn’t the blood. Man, it was the noise. Like cutting through chicken bones. Right across the knuckle.’ He gave a shudder and reached for his beer again. ‘Still makes me wanna puke, thinking about it.’

I had once witnessed someone lose both legs in a marine hydraulic door. Even now, the soggy dull crunch of splintering bone stayed with me, rising up at odd moments. Still, I’d seen worse.

I’d done worse, for that matter.

I took a pull of my beer and didn’t wince this time. Either it was mellowing, or I was getting used to it. ‘So, you sent the finger to Benedict’s parents.’

‘Lennon did.’ Ross nodded miserably. ‘I never thought anything like that would happen.’

I recalled a comment Manda Dempsey had made, the night of Torquil’s birthday party – his last birthday party – about her supposed ordeal. About how they’d beaten her and photographed the bruises. ‘Not averse to getting physical with your hostages, though, are you, Ross?’

‘Manda, you mean?’ he said bitterly, not needing to be prompted. He shifted uncomfortably on his bar stool. ‘That is one crazy bitch. Lennon said that was all part of it – the fantasy. Some chicks get off on that kinda thing, y’know? And she had a safe-word, for if’n we went too far, but she never used it. I swear!’

‘Did Torquil have a safe-word he never used as well? Is that what happened?’

‘Look, man, how many more times? I didn’t have nothing to do with the Eisenberg kid! I swear on my mom’s grave, OK?’

But I heard the doubt and the fear in his voice. He genuinely might not have been involved, I realised, but I was willing to bet that his old school pal was in it up to his ears, and Ross must have known that, too.

‘Dina told me she’d changed her mind,’ I said. ‘That true?’

He nodded. ‘We got that she’d called the whole thing off. I was kinda glad, to be honest.’ His shoulders slumped, and he asked in a small voice, ‘What … um, what happens now?’

I put my beer down again. It was a good question. By rights, I should have dialled the cops as soon as I recognised Ross for who he was, and let them handle the whole thing from there. But if Lennon had gone into hiding, hauling in his co-conspirator would do little to make him break cover. If anything, it would push him deeper underground.

Ross was denying that he and Lennon were involved with Torquil Eisenberg’s abduction, but it seemed too much of a coincidence that there should be two gangs of kidnappers preying on the same group of kids. Lennon had recruited Ross, but he’d discovered at the riding club that they’d taken on more than they could handle.

So, it was entirely possible that Lennon had gone out and recruited somebody else in Ross’s place. Somebody like the man who’d Taser’d Torquil on the beach, and beaten him into delivering his own ransom demand to camera.

Somebody like the driver of the Dodge, the one who’d coolly and calmly shot me in the chest as I lay helpless under his front wheels. A professional. That was who I wanted, so badly I could taste it.

‘What happens next depends entirely on you, Ross. It sounds to me like you’ve been somewhat dragged into this against your better judgement by your mate, Lennon.’ I kept my tone casual, conciliatory, but that still earned me a quick hard glare. He was bright enough to know where this was heading, and didn’t like it. But he didn’t stop me going any further even so.

‘Torquil Eisenberg was beaten to death,’ I said bluntly. We hadn’t had any official reports yet, but Ross didn’t know that. ‘Ever since the Lindbergh baby, kidnappers have been reviled in this country, you should know that. Like I said, somebody’s going down for this, and they’re going down for keeps.’ I paused. His face, in profile, chin sunken, was tormented. ‘With your boyish charms, you’re going to be popular as hell in prison.’ That jerked him out of his stupor a little. ‘You still got all your own teeth?’

‘What? Of course I have, man!’

I shook my head again. ‘Not for long, you won’t,’ I told him cheerfully. ‘First thing they do is break the new guy’s teeth so he can’t bite down on anything that’s put in his mouth—’

‘OK, OK! Jesus Christ, man. What do I have to do? Tell me!’

‘Give us Lennon,’ I said, and saw him waver. ‘You think – if the positions were reversed – he’d hesitate?’

He picked up his beer, but the bottle was empty. He cast a mournful glance towards the storeroom, but the shopkeeper did not appear, by magic or anything else.

‘No,’ Ross said at last, so low I almost missed it. ‘I guess not.’

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

‘If you really weren’t in on Torquil Eisenberg’s murder,’ I said, ‘the only way you’re going to prove it is to help lead us to the people who were.’

‘Jesus, man, I only followed you today because I wanted you to know I didn’t kill the Eisenberg kid, but what you’re asking …’

Ross sat for a long time with his head down, staring at a puddle of condensation that had formed around the edge of the bottle, drawing his finger through it so it spread and dried to his design.

Eventually, he turned and looked right at me, defeat in his eyes. ‘OK, yeah,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it.’ And shook his head afterwards like he couldn’t believe the scope of his own treachery.

I nodded carefully, not wanting to spook him into changing his mind. I closed my mind to the fact I was probably committing all kinds of offences to do with not handing him straight over to the Feds. He might have acted dumb, but he wasn’t stupid, and if he’d any sense he’d lawyer up so fast they’d get nothing useful out of him for weeks. By which time, who knew where Lennon and his new playmate might be?

‘Where’s the place you were using to hold the others?’ It seemed best to start with something easy.

‘Over in Elizabeth,’ he mumbled, and I realised he’d been foolish enough – or Lennon had been cunning enough – to use Ross’s own house for this. Maybe Lennon had him pegged as a scapegoat from the outset. Even so, Ross still clung to the thought of his mate’s comparative innocence. ‘Lennon can’t have had the Eisenberg kid, though, man. Not there, anyways, ’cause I hardly left the place myself the last few days, y’know?’

Damn! Still, worth a try …

‘When you last saw Lennon – just before he went out – who called him?’ I asked. ‘You ever see the guy?’

He shook his head. ‘No, man. I picked up the phone, that’s all. He asked for Lennon and I don’t ask no questions.’

‘What did he sound like?’

He shrugged. ‘Just … ordinary, y’know?’

This was heading nowhere. I tried a different tack. ‘And you haven’t heard from Lennon since?’ I asked, and saw the quick but honest denial in his face. ‘How does he normally get in touch?’

Ross shrugged. ‘He calls me, but he changes his cell, like, every week. The last number I have for him is dead. I have to wait for him to call me.’

I paused, considering. For what it was worth, I believed him, and I’d become pretty good at spotting when people’s body language was not aligned with what came out of their mouths. My instincts told me Ross was scared enough to grasp at the possible way out I was offering, but not so scared he’d promise anything, just to get rid of me.

That part, if necessary, would come later.

The hard part now was that, to make best use of him, I was going to have to turn him loose. That rankled. For all his apparent innocence when it came to Torquil’s death, he’d still attacked Dina at the riding club. He’d been the one who’d swung the bat that had broken Raleigh’s arm. And if it had connected with the man’s head, as had clearly been intended, it could easily have broken his skull.

My fingers itched to dial 911 and have done with it. I remembered the carcass of the Buell being dragged onto a breaker’s yard truck. I remembered opening the makeshift coffin and finding Torquil already dead inside.

‘Give me your cellphone.’

He frowned, as if I wasn’t intending to give it back. The phone he handed over was old and scratched to the point where it didn’t look worth stealing. All I did was punch in my own cell number and dial just long enough for the number to register on my device. An easier, and safer, way to make sure he could get in touch with me and – more importantly – I could get in touch with him.

‘OK,’ I said as I handed it back. ‘I think we can help you, if you help us. When Lennon next gets in touch, you need to stay calm, arrange a meet, and call me, yeah?’

I saw the compulsive swallow as he nodded. ‘OK, man,’ he said, almost eager. ‘I can do that.’

‘You better.’ I slid off my bar stool, leaving half my beer untouched on the sticky counter, and straightened my jacket over the SIG, making sure Ross knew the gesture for what it was. His eyes, a blue-grey with pale lashes, were wary, but I read no deceit in them. I leant in, saw his gaze flick to my mouth, as if I were about to kiss him.

‘I know who you are, and where you live, Ross,’ I promised in a husky murmur. ‘You try to screw me, and it won’t just be your car that gets crushed. I will find you, and I will hurt you in ways you cannot imagine. Just remember that I keep my promises, good and bad. Yeah?’

‘Yeah, sure,’ he gabbled. ‘I hear you, man.’

‘One last thing, Ross,’ I said. ‘Don’t call me “man”, OK?’

I walked out of the bar, across the dirty sidewalk, and popped the locks on the Navigator. Before I pulled out into traffic, I glanced back, expecting to see Ross still sitting on his stool. The window of the little bar was empty.

I checked the street, but it looked like Ross had taken the back way out. A bar like that, in an area like this, it must have been a pretty well-worn route. I was aware of another twinge of guilt that I’d let him go, and hoped to hell that his rapid disappearance now was not an indicator of things to come.

My cellphone started to buzz in my pocket. I fished it out, half expecting it might be Ross, but Parker’s number came up.

‘Hi, boss,’ I said. ‘That’s good timing. I’ve just had a long chat with one of the guys who tried for Dina, and I—’

‘Charlie.’ Parker’s voice cut raw through my explanation.

‘What?’ I demanded, drenched with a sudden cold fear. ‘What’s happened? Is it Sean?’

‘No,’ Parker said. I heard him take a breath. ‘It’s Dina. She’s been snatched.’

‘We got that she’d called the whole thing off …’

Lying bastard!

‘No … no,’ I muttered. ‘I left McGregor looking after her. He should … What the fuck happened?’

‘He did his best, Charlie. They shot him.’

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

When Parker walked into Caroline Willner’s private sitting room at 1900 hours that evening, Dina had been gone nine hours with no word from the kidnappers. I took one look at his face and feared the worst.

‘How’s Joe?’ I demanded, not waiting for the social niceties. There were too many echoes of Sean with this one, too many shards. Inside, I bled deep from every one of them.

‘Out of surgery,’ Parker said, passing me a tired smile. ‘If he’s lucky, he’ll make it.’ His eyes flicked to Caroline Willner’s white face, wary of saying anything that might touch a nerve. ‘They obviously learnt from the attack on you, Charlie,’ he added quietly. ‘They fired low enough to go under a vest, even if he’d been wearing one. Pelvis.’

Nothing else, short of a head shot, would put a man down faster. So many vital organs were cradled in the pelvis that a gunshot injury there was bound to do critical, immobilising damage. And, unlike the head, the pelvis was often the most static part of an otherwise fast-moving target. I couldn’t see McGregor, a veteran of the Iraqi conflict, making things easy for them.

But he was alive – for the moment. That was something at least.

I closed my eyes briefly, unwilling to show more relief than that. Parker nodded, understanding, and moved across to greet Caroline Willner. She had not reacted to his arrival, and remained sitting rigidly upright in her chair, eyes fixed on a point in the distance as if willing herself to hold together. Now, she seemed to notice him for the first time and allowed him limply to take her hand.

‘Mrs Willner, I’m very sorry,’ he said gravely. ‘We will get your daughter back for you.’

‘I believe you will try your hardest, Mr Armstrong,’ she said stiffly. It was not exactly a glowing declaration of confidence, and by the way Parker’s face turned instantly neutral, he recognised that fact.

‘Do we know how this happened?’

He glanced across, not so much at me, but at Erik Landers, hovering discreetly across the far side of the room. Landers lived in north Brooklyn and had been first on scene after Dina’s abduction. He’d stayed at Caroline Willner’s side ever since. When I arrived, shortly afterwards, I’d been the one who’d talked to the staff and watched the CCTV footage, and pieced together what had taken place.

I’d been through it over and over, looking for the exact point when the day turned from clear to dark. And each time, I fought a sick dread that sat high under my ribcage.

What struck me most was the same sense of ruthless purpose that had characterised the ambush on me. I’d watched Dina sneak out onto the driveway, looking behind her as she came, furtive, eager. I’d seen the van pull up with its licence plate just beyond the reach of the cameras. Dina’s stride had faltered as she’d neared it and realised the unexpected danger. She’d begun to retreat – faster when two masked figures leapt from the van and came for her. One grabbed her immediately. The other stayed back, more warily. From the way he carried himself, I would guess he had to be the guy from the passenger seat of the Dodge.

The one I’d winged. The one I now suspected might be Lennon.

There was no audio on the house CCTV, but even without it I heard Dina start to scream. McGregor appeared so quickly from the direction of the house that I believed he’d already noticed her attempt at stealthy departure. He’d barely entered the picture when the man holding Dina yanked out a silvered semi-automatic and fired, three shots, as fast as the action would cycle.

McGregor went down on the second. It hit low in his body and his instinct was to clamp both hands to the wound. He’d managed to draw his own weapon, but had no clear shot. It dropped unfired onto the gravel as he collapsed, writhing.

With every repeat viewing, I willed him to move just that little bit faster, or the bad guy a little bit slower. The outcome was always the same.

But it had been good to have a purpose, because it stopped me thinking too hard about the fact that while Ross might not have taken part in this, I’d still had one of Dina’s erstwhile kidnappers in my hands, and had let him go. Now, I prayed it would not turn out to be one of the worst mistakes I’d ever made.

‘How did they lure her out of the house?’ Parker asked.

‘She got a text, apparently from Orlando, saying she was at the riding club when Raleigh arrived back with the horses,’ I said. ‘According to the message, Cerdo slipped coming out of the trailer and was injured, and she should come at once,’ I said. Nothing would be more guaranteed to make Dina throw caution to the winds.

‘You’ve checked, of course.’ It was a comment rather than a question.

I nodded anyway. ‘Raleigh says he hasn’t seen Orlando since the last time I was there with Dina, and the horses are fine.’

‘So, either Orlando’s complicit,’ Parker murmured, ‘or this was definitely a pro job.’

‘We know that whoever this guy Lennon’s hooked up with, he’s an expert when it comes to hacking technology – Dina’s email, the traffic light system, and Gleason’s comms network. I shouldn’t imagine Orlando’s cellphone would cause him much trouble.’

Parker raised his eyebrow, just a fraction. I’d already briefed him fully over the phone on my conversation with Ross, and the agreement we’d reached. He agreed, even with the benefit of hindsight, that handing the college kid over to the authorities would probably have got us nowhere – certainly not as far as recovering Dina was concerned. For better or worse, we had to trust him to deliver his end of the deal and lead us to his former friend. It was a calculated risk. I just hoped my calculations weren’t way off.

‘What will happen now?’ It was Caroline Willner who spoke, her voice hoarse with strain.

Parker turned back to her. ‘We wait, ma’am,’ he said. ‘No doubt they will be in contact with their demands. Until then, we just have to wait.’

She cleared her throat. ‘I would very much like for you to negotiate for my daughter’s release,’ she said, eyes sliding away from his. ‘I regret that, if they ask for a substantial amount, I … may not have the money to pay.’

‘You mentioned yesterday that you had kidnap insurance,’ I said. ‘What about that?’

Her face had hardened into a brittle mask, refusing to allow her fear and pain to break surface. ‘If I make a claim, and then it comes out – as it is bound to – that my daughter and her … friends were in any way responsible for their own predicament, I would likely face prosecution for fraud,’ she said, selecting her words with care. ‘Besides, Brandon Eisenberg was prepared to pay in full for his son’s life, and much good it did him.’

I heard the bitter thread, felt compelled to point out gently, ‘I know Dina told them she had changed her mind. Whatever’s happened to her now, it’s not of her choosing.’

Caroline Willner nodded, very slightly, grateful. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘And I pray that we both get the chance to ask forgiveness.’

We waited for the ransom demand most of the night.

Parker had connected a recorder to the house phone. As soon as the line rang out, caller ID was displayed on the screen of his laptop, allowing Caroline Willner to take the call if she recognised the number, or let Parker handle it.

There were a lot of rubberneckers, of one form or another. People who thought they might have heard a rumour and wanted to check it out. Caroline Willner rebuffed them all equally, telling them Dina had caught a chill and was resting in her room. They obviously came from a stratum of society where such a minor ailment was a viable excuse for bed rest. Either way, it seemed to satisfy them. If I hadn’t been able to see the sorrow in her face as she spoke, I would have believed her, too.

And when Manda called, just before midnight, pushing to speak with Dina, Caroline Willner dismissed the girl’s apparent concerns and told her, in a slightly obstreperous tone, that Dina was simply not available to come to the phone.

The kidnappers finally called a little after 6.00 a.m., no doubt aware of our sleepless night. Dina was twenty hours gone. Even though it wore the same mechanical disguise, I knew the voice belonged to the same man I’d spoken to, yesterday morning at the Eisenberg’s house.

And I knew, without a single shred of physical evidence to back it up, that this was also the same man who’d shot me.

Parker saw the unrecognised number and took the call. Caroline Willner had gone to lie down and rest in her own room, so he put it on speaker. The kidnapper did not seem surprised to find him on the other end of the line.

‘You want Dina back alive,’ the voice said flatly, ‘this time it’s going to cost you ten million dollars.’

‘Ten million?’ Parker allowed his incredulity to come through. He would have shown surprise regardless of the amount asked for, as a stalling technique. But this time there was little acting required. He paused, then pointed out calmly, ‘That’s double what you asked for Torquil Eisenberg.’

‘Yeah, and if his old man hadn’t tried to screw us over, maybe we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now, but he did. Get over it.’

Parker’s eyes narrowed and his voice turned soft and deadly. ‘How, exactly, did Eisenberg screw you over?’

‘That worthless pile of coloured glass. How long did you think it would take us to spot you’d given us a replica of the Rainbow instead of the real thing?’

I sucked in a quiet breath, remembered Nicola Eisenberg’s certainty that her husband might not have her son’s best interests at heart. She had collapsed after the failed ransom drop, I recalled. Did she know what he’d tried to pull?

‘That’s a huge amount of money. The kind that can’t be raised overnight,’ Parker said. ‘Mrs Willner is not rich. She doesn’t have the same sway with banks—’

‘Not rich?’ the voice cut in, distortion or disgust making it screech. ‘She lives in that fucking great palace on the beach, with servants and horses and all the rest of that privileged shit, and you try to tell me she’s not rich?’

‘Having assets is not the same thing as having available cash,’ Parker said, and his tone stayed easy even as his eyes burnt cold. ‘Not the kind of available cash you’re talking about.’

‘Dina was going out with Eisenberg’s kid, so tap up his father. He’s rich enough and he owes us, big time. Either way, you got a day and a half to put it all together. We’ll call you 4.00 p.m. the day after tomorrow with when and where to make the drop. No bargaining. No second chances. After that, the old lady starts getting her daughter back a piece at a time, you hear me? Dina’s a good-looking girl. Would be a shame if anything happened to that pretty face, wouldn’t it?’

‘How do we know you’ll keep your word?’ This time.

‘You don’t.’ Another short, rough laugh. ‘Guess we’ll just have to trust to luck that nobody’s going to be stupid enough to try screwing anybody else this time.’

The connection severed and the line went dead. An electrified silence remained for several seconds afterwards. Parker reached out and killed the speaker slowly, as if his limbs suddenly weighed very heavy.

‘I don’t trust him as far as I could spit him, never mind throw him,’ I said bluntly. ‘Even if it’s true about the necklace being a fake, we know Torquil was dead long before they could have discovered that fact.’

‘We could play along and set a counter-ambush,’ Landers suggested. ‘Grab him before he gets to the ransom drop – like they pulled with Charlie last time.’

‘What then?’ Parker asked. ‘Subject him to extraordinary rendition until he talks? If he puts Dina in the ground someplace before he arranges to collect the ransom, he’ll know time will not be on our side. She could easily die before we get her location from him.’

‘And she’s claustrophobic,’ I said, suddenly recalling her admission. ‘She freaked out when she found out what had been done to Torquil.’

Parker paused, frowning. ‘Do the kidnappers know that?’

‘I don’t see why not – they seem to know everything else.’ I stood, suddenly restless. ‘Look, I can’t just sit here and wait for this guy to torment us. I’m going to go and pay a visit on the previous “victims” – see what I can shake loose.’

‘You rattle the wrong cages, and you may provoke the kidnappers into acting prematurely,’ Parker pointed out.

But I was already shrugging into my jacket. ‘Whereas they’ve behaved so impeccably up ’til now.’ I favoured him with a cynical smile. ‘If I can find out which of them hired Lennon, it may give us another line on finding her before he buries her.’

I snatched up the keys to the Navigator and headed for the hallway, only to find Parker on my heels. He touched my arm just before I reached the front door.

‘Charlie, wait. I’ll come with you.’ There was something close to anguish in his voice that was enough to stop me, turn me back towards him.

‘You’re needed here, Parker,’ I said, almost gently. ‘What if they call again?’

He sighed. ‘Take Landers then. Don’t go alone.’

‘No offence, but Erik looks too threatening. I’m trying to coax them into talking rather than scare them.’ Not true, but it sounded halfway convincing at least. ‘I really think I’ll get more out of them if I’m on my own.’ That much was true. ‘And you need him here to look after Mrs Willner.’

‘I know,’ he said, and I realised he was only too aware that it was Landers’ sense of fair play I was trying to avoid, for what I might need to do. ‘Sean once told me your courage was the thing that terrified him most – that you never flinch, never hesitate,’ he said then, with a smile as twisted as my own. ‘Now I think I see what he meant.’

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

‘I’m sorry, Miss … Fox, did you say your name was?’ Orlando’s father said with the offhand snub perfected by the ultra-rich towards people who are clearly not their social equal. ‘But as our housekeeper, Jasna, explained to you, I’m afraid our daughter is not here at present. And as for your … suggestion that you will go to the police, I’ve already spoken to their chief today – he’s a friend of the family – regarding the Eisenbergs’ tragic loss. So, you see, I really can’t help you.’

For ‘can’t’, I read ‘won’t’. In big letters.

Orlando’s family didn’t so much have a house as an estate. A sprawling place with manicured lawns and clumps of trees that were too artistically grouped to possibly be natural.

The house was weathered red-brick, with gothic pointed arches, turrets, and an intricate series of what looked like blocked-up windows decorating the front facade. I dredged my distant education and recalled it was called something like ‘blind arcading’. The whole place was traditional and imposing, and must have cost more in window cleaning and gardening bills than I earned in a year.

I got my first glimpse of all this from the wrought iron gateway at the end of a long drive when I arrived. I pressed the intercom and waited, staring up into the lens of the CCTV camera, which was supposed to be hidden in the beak of a stone griffin.

It was just after eight in the morning. Two hours since the kidnappers’ call. Twenty-two since Dina had been taken.

When the intercom buzzed, I explained I was a friend of Dina’s, here to see Orlando. There was a long pause, then a woman’s voice said, ‘She not here. She go away.’

‘In that case, I’d like to speak to her parents.’

‘They busy. You go now.’ The accent was eastern European of some description, although it was difficult to be more accurate through the distortion of the tinny speaker. I was suddenly reminded of the kidnapper’s mechanical voice.

‘No, I not go now,’ I said with pleasant precision. ‘Tell them Dina has been kidnapped, and I need to speak with them before I go to the police, OK? Police, cops, FBI – they’ll all be down here, asking questions. You understand me?’

There was a long pause. So long, in fact, that I feared the woman had simply gone away herself and left me to stew with my veiled threats. But a minute or so later the gates began to swing open and I nosed the Navigator through.

There was a motor court around the side of the house, where there was undoubtedly also a tradesman’s entrance. I parked at a jaunty angle on the stone setts outside the front door, just for badness.

Now, sitting in one of the coldly unwelcoming drawing rooms, I assumed I was supposed to be so overcome at the orchestrated grandeur on display I would Know My Place.

I offered Orlando’s father a lazy smile. ‘As I mentioned to Jasna when she let me in, I’m just trying to ensure Dina’s safe return – that’s my only concern. Anything else is a matter for the police. You said you’d already spoken to them, but I can assure you they’ll be back. And the FBI. Kidnapping is a federal crime, after all.’ I waited a beat for that to sink in, then said, ‘I need to know if anyone had access to Orlando’s cellphone yesterday.’

‘Of course not,’ he said, brusque.

I crossed my legs, draped an arm along the back of the brocade sofa they’d steered me towards. ‘You seem very certain, considering your daughter is apparently not staying here with you at the moment?’

He bridled at that, a tall tanned figure I recalled from the charity auction, who had allowed his hair to grey a little around the temples, but drew the line at actually looking his age. He was wearing an open-necked shirt with a pale-pink sweater draped around his shoulders, and loafers with no socks. His face showed distinct signs of regular Botox injections, which made his micro-expressions difficult to read. Nevertheless, gentle provocation always seems to get people to reveal themselves.

‘Look, Miss Fox, I fail to see what business this is of yours, but Orlando left here only yesterday morning for one of our other properties, and she accidentally left her cell behind. It’s on the desk in my study. What can that possibly—’

‘Orlando’s cell number was used to lure Dina away from her close-protection officer, and into a successful kidnap,’ I said, piling over his bluster, shutting him down completely. ‘Her bodyguard was shot trying to prevent her abduction. He’s still critical. You know what happened to Torquil Eisenberg, only a few days ago. If your daughter knows anything that might save Dina’s life, we need to know.’

‘Of course she doesn’t know anything!’ he snapped, and though his face betrayed nothing, his voice told another story. Stress, guilt, and just an underlying trace of anger. But not, interestingly enough, directed at me. Not all of it, anyway.

As if realising how much he’d inadvertently given away, he sighed, aimed for a more reasonable tone. ‘Look, Miss Fox, I can appreciate your concern, but Orlando’s cellphone hasn’t been outside this house, and my daughter is not available. She’s in shock about the death of the Eisenberg boy, of course she is. Orlando’s a sensitive girl. I will not have her disturbed.’

There was going to be no moving him. Even the prospect of FBI involvement had not shifted him. But he was rattled, and it showed.

My turn to sigh, but quietly, under my breath. Always best to leave of your own volition before you were thrown out. I got to my feet, dug in my jacket pocket for a business card.

‘If you won’t put me in touch with your daughter direct, then at least please tell her I’d like to talk to her – urgently,’ I said, handing him the card. He took it by the edges, as if it were dirty. ‘The office number is on there. It’s manned twenty-four hours a day.’

‘Of course,’ he said, his relief plain. He put the card down on the side table and rose to shake my hand, going for the elbow clasp with his left, to show what a sincere kind of guy he was. ‘I hope Dina is returned safely, I really do.’

He showed me out into the tiled hallway, where Jasna reappeared instantly to shepherd me to the door. I wondered how much stick she was going to take for letting me through it in the first place.

The business card I’d given him remained on the side table, and I would have taken bets that’s where it would stay until the cleaning staff swept it away.

I still wasn’t quite sure who’d come out of the encounter ahead as I reached the end of the long straight driveway, and the gates drew slowly open. It was only as I reached them and pulled through that I found another car waiting, pulled up on the other side of the road.

I stopped to catch the number on the front plate, and as I did so the driver climbed out and waved in greeting. I dropped the Navigator’s window and watched him stride across the road towards me.

‘Hey, Charlie,’ he called when he was halfway there. ‘You’re looking good.’

‘Hi, Hunt. If you’re here to see Orlando, you’re out of luck. According to her folks, she’s gone away.’

To my disappointment, Hunt did not fall into my cunning plan and reveal Orlando’s present whereabouts. Instead, he pulled a wry face.

‘I’ve been getting the runaround from her folks, too,’ he said. ‘I was hoping that by hanging around here I might spot her coming back.’ He looked a little shamefaced as he said it, like he was embarrassed to be caught mooning over a girl. ‘I don’t suppose they told you where she is?’

I shook my head.

Hunt was in jeans and a sports jacket, and looked a lot younger, dressed like that, than Orlando’s father had managed. ‘I’m worried about her,’ he admitted. ‘She took Tor’s death rather hard. I’m not surprised her parents are trying to protect her from the press and stuff like that.’

I looked at him, then said dryly. ‘Yeah, I suppose they might have a bit of a field day when they find out she fixed her own kidnapping.’

Hunt stared at me for a moment, then gave a crooked grin. ‘Ah, so you know about that, do you?’ he said. ‘I thought you’d figure it out eventually.’

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

‘I didn’t meet Orlando until after her kidnap,’ Hunt admitted. ‘I was at some party last autumn and she arrived. I found out later it was the first time she’d been out since it happened, and everyone was making a big fuss of her.’ He gave a small rueful smile. ‘I thought she’d been ill or something.’

We were sitting in a pair of matched leather armchairs in the bar of the tennis club, which happened to be a short hop down the road from Orlando’s home. Hunt was a regular, it seemed, and was greeted with deferential respect by the staff, which they temporarily extended to me.

Hunt had ordered a pot of Queen Anne blend tea rather than the usual coffee, explaining that they brought it in from Fortnum & Mason in London, and the kitchen here actually knew what to do with it once it arrived. The tea was presented on a silver tray, in translucent china and a strainer provided, just to show it was none of your bagged rubbish.

The atmosphere was calm and exclusive, and the only similarity with the grubby little bar in Bushwick, where I’d had my chat with Ross, was that – apart from the two of us – the place was deserted.

I kept my face and hands steady, even though I was only too aware that time was ticking on. It was now 9.40 a.m. and Dina had been missing for just shy of twenty-four hours.

‘How did you find out?’ I asked, as Hunt sat forwards in his chair and poured milk into the cups before giving the teapot a gentle swirl. ‘That it wasn’t a genuine kidnap, I mean.’

‘She told me – eventually,’ he said. ‘I was pretty dumbstruck, to be honest.’ His voice hushed, even though the staff were too far away to overhear. ‘I mean, who arranges to have themselves kidnapped, for God’s sake?’

‘Bored rich kids,’ I said, accepting the cup he offered. ‘How else can they get their kicks?’ I took a sip and discovered he was right about the tea-making abilities here, raised my cup to him in salute.

He nodded in a distracted way, still frowning. ‘She said she was going to confess everything to her parents. I’m afraid I tried to talk her out of it on the basis that what was done was done. No point in making trouble for yourself if you don’t have to, eh? But I’d guess she went ahead anyway, and that’s why they’ve whisked her away somewhere out of reach, until all this dies down.’

‘Torquil Eisenberg is dead,’ I said. ‘I don’t think it will simply die down. The Feds will catch up with her eventually.’

His handsome face stayed grave, hands fiddling with his teacup. Eventually, he looked up. ‘And now Dina’s been kidnapped … I mean, for real, do you think?’

‘They shot her bodyguard,’ I said. ‘I’d say that makes it pretty bloody real.’

‘I thought you were her bodyguard?’

My turn to drop my gaze. ‘Yeah, so did I.’

He was silent for a moment. ‘I suppose … Mrs Willner will have to pay them, won’t she? I mean, what choice does she have – after what happened to Tor?’

I took a breath, put down my cup and rubbed a tired hand across my eyes. ‘It may be a case of willing but not able,’ I said. ‘Her ex-husband’s been bleeding her dry over the past few years.’

‘So, what are you saying?’ He gave a half-hearted smile. ‘That she’s all fur coat and no knickers?’

‘There’s a phrase you don’t hear much on this side of the Atlantic. But yeah, that’s the gist of it.’

‘Dina must know what her mother’s situation is. What on earth made her want to get involved in … all this?’

‘Mrs Willner had kidnap insurance, but Dina’s activities make it void. She realises she can’t claim on it.’ I checked my watch, but only a few minutes seemed to have inched by. ‘Look, I’m sorry but I need to go—’

‘Of course,’ he said, signalling for the bill. One of the hovering staff hurried over to comply. When the waiter had gone, Hunt said, ‘Hell, Charlie, I’m sorry for the kid. But, if anyone can get her back, I’m sure you can.’

Grateful for his apparent confidence, I closed my mind to any other possibilities. ‘We’ll do our best.’

‘Yeah, you don’t give up easily, do you? Even after they wrecked your bike and shot you, you’re still determined.’

I stood. ‘Well, maybe I just hate to lose.’

We shook hands. He had a firm dry grip without the fake sincerity antics of Orlando’s father.

‘If you find Orlando, tell her I’m thinking of her,’ he said, giving me a lopsided smile. ‘Tell her I miss her like hell.’

After the reaction of Orlando’s father, I wasn’t expecting much in the way of cooperation from the other families, but Benedict Benelli’s parents had no such qualms about keeping me away from their son.

I gathered shortly after being shown into the art-cluttered living room of the family’s palatial home that the cops had already spent most of the morning interviewing Benedict, and if his parents didn’t know about the kidnapping scam beforehand, they certainly did now.

The two of them sat one on either side of their son on an oversize sofa, as though to prevent him making a break for it. If the sulkier-than-usual look on Benedict’s face was anything to go by, that was a distinct possibility.

He sprawled between them with his arms folded and his fists tightly clenched, staring resolutely at a huge art deco tome on the coffee table in front of him, as if he’d developed a sudden fascination in the work of Clarice Cliff.

Even without their surname, Mr and Mrs Benelli were clearly Italian, from their Mediterranean skin tone and stature, to their clothing style and temperament. Mrs Benelli, in particular, could have been listed as the simple dictionary definition of voluble.

‘Tell her!’ she snapped now, and when that didn’t produce instant results, she leant across and cuffed him across the back of the head with her open palm. Serious injury would have resulted if she’d used the back of her hand instead. She wore gold rings on every finger, like some kind of ornamental gemstone knuckledusters.

Benedict flinched away from the blow with more annoyance than pain. His mother was barely five feet tall, even in her stout heels, and probably almost the same in circumference.

‘Tell her that you cut off your own finger, that you disfigured yourself! And for what?’ She appealed to me, talking with her hands as much as her voice. ‘So he wouldn’t have to work hard, that’s what!’ She shook her head, dabbed at her eyes with a lace handkerchief. ‘Your father and I, we came here and we started from nothing. Nothing! We worked our hands to the bone, and for what? To give our family the chance of a better life. And this is how you repay us? You bring the police to our door!’

‘Mama, I never meant—’

That was as much of a protest as Benedict managed before his mother was off again, jewellery vibrating like a seismic recorder in an earthquake zone.

‘To what?’ she shrieked. ‘To cheat money out of us? Is that how we brought you up? To lie to your own flesh and blood? To steal from us? Already today we have lied to the police for you. We told them you had an accident with your hand, that it was nothing to do with these kidnappings.’ She slapped her hand down on the arm of the sofa, punctuating her words. ‘No. More. Lies! The girl is missing. She is in danger. You tell her what she wants to know, Benedetto.’

Mr Benelli, meanwhile, sat in glowering silence at the other end of the sofa. His dark eyes flicked occasionally to his son and reminded me of a Rottweiler – capable of intense emotion and also of showing no humanity at all.

I waited a beat to see if Benedict’s mother was going to launch another broadside, or his father was going to bite somebody, before I turned my gaze onto the boy himself.

‘Was it you who originally made contact with Lennon?’ I asked. I’d chosen the question carefully, intending to drip onto him how much I appeared to know, without giving away how little that really was. It didn’t quite get the reaction I’d been hoping for.

‘Who?’ Benedict demanded, with enough genuine confusion and anger to ring true.

‘Answer her!’ Mrs Benelli yelled, fetching him another stinging blow round the back of the head.

‘Mrs Benelli, please,’ I protested, torn between letting her beat some sense into him, and managing to get some sense out of him before brain damage set in.

‘I don’t know any names,’ Benedict muttered, trying to rub his sore scalp and make it look like he was smoothing his hair down instead. ‘Manda knows. She got me into this.’ As he spoke, he flicked his eyes towards his mother. Her lips thinned expressively at the name and she folded her hands under her ample bosom. I found myself mentally wanting to do the same thing.

Manda Dempsey. No surprises there. I might have known that new leaf was just a version of the old one.

‘How long have you known her?’

‘I guess she was around, but I never noticed her ’til after she was kidnapped. She was … different afterward.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know – kinda empowered. We got to be friends.’

Mrs Benelli restricted herself to a powerful harrumph.

‘So, she talked you into it.’ I tried that one on him to see how it fit. He grabbed the metaphorical lifebelt with both hands.

‘Yes! She kept on about how easy it was – to gain independence. Not to have to go crawling to anybody for money.’

‘Like normal people have to,’ I said dryly. ‘Who crawl to their bosses, or their customers, every working day of their lives.’

‘Benedict will be working from now on, and he will be working hard,’ his mother said fiercely. ‘He will start right at the bottom, like his father, in the factory. And he will work his way up. Any money he gets from now on, he will earn!’

I suppressed a sigh as Benedict’s face closed up again. Reminding him of what he’d lost – and what he had to lose – was not going to get him to talk more openly. The Benellis were, I reflected, as protective and obstructive in their own way as Orlando’s father had been.

‘So, did Manda also recruit Dina and Torquil, or was it your turn?’

Colour lit along his cheekbones. ‘I knew Dina wanted to get involved,’ he admitted. ‘That’s why we went to that stupid party – to meet with her and talk about it. And that was our big mistake.’

I wondered briefly how he managed to narrow down one error among so many others. ‘In what way?’

‘That’s where Tor found out what we’d been doing. How were we to know he had that goddamn stateroom wired?’

His mother made another protest, but a more automatic one this time, more at the language than the meaning.

I remembered Orlando’s flustered reaction, the day she and Manda had come to see Dina after Torquil had been snatched, when I’d told her he liked to record what went on aboard the family yacht. I’d thought that, like Nicola Eisenberg before her, Orlando might have been caught in some kind of compromising position of her own. But it was clear Torquil had captured more than just sexual indiscretions.

‘So he knew about the fake kidnaps and he tried to blackmail you, is that it?’

There was a flash in Benedict’s eyes. ‘He wanted in, but of course he wanted his to be bigger and better than all the others,’ he said, bitter. ‘But we knew we couldn’t trust him not to shoot his mouth off. Especially after the fiasco at the riding club. He was gonna blow the whole—’

He broke off suddenly, realising that what he’d been about to say sounded very much like motive for wanting Torquil out of the way. Permanently. Mr Benelli’s eyes flickered in his direction, and I swear I heard an almost subliminal growl start up somewhere deep in the man’s chest, although it might simply have been the air con cycling.

I asked quietly, ‘So, what did you decide to do about that? Kidnap him to keep him quiet, and then shut him up for good?’

‘No!’ The fear in Benedict’s face was stark and uncompromising, but I didn’t necessarily take it as a sign that he was innocent. ‘I had nothing to do with that.’ It seemed to be a company line.

‘So, who arranged the “fiasco” at the riding club? How did you get in touch with the guys who made the attempt?’

He shrugged. ‘I didn’t. Manda and Orlando handled it. They told the guys where and when, gave them the details. I didn’t know any of it.’

Didn’t want to know. Hmm, maybe Benedict wasn’t an entirely lost cause. His mother’s plan for hard labour might either break or make him.

‘And Torquil?’

‘I don’t know!’ His voice was almost a shout, eyes darting towards his mother as if expecting to dodge another blow. She kept her hands clasped in her lap with an obvious effort of will. ‘I swear! I. Don’t. Know.’

I stared at him for a long time, but his gaze remained defiant and unblinking. I wondered, if he’d been alone, how long it would have taken me to get any more out of him. Too bad I wouldn’t find that out.

‘OK, Benedict,’ I said wearily. ‘Just remember, though, that the cops will be back, and they really don’t like being lied to. Try it with the Feds and you’ll find yourself on the first plane to Cuba. And people like the Eisenbergs will not let things like this go unpunished.’ I rose, gave him a last hard stare. ‘There are worse places to spend the next twenty-five years than the factory floor.’

It was just before noon. Dina had been missing almost twenty-six hours. I was willing to bet that, wherever she was right now, it had to be worse than anywhere Benedict’s parents could devise.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

‘I wondered how long it would take you to get around to me,’ Manda Dempsey said when she opened the door to her penthouse apartment.

She’d had a little time to prepare for my arrival on her doorstep. The glossy Manhattan apartment building had uniformed security who took their role more seriously than simply being a human doorstop with gold braid. They’d valet-parked the Navigator and called up to see if Miss Dempsey ‘might be willing to receive me’, seeming almost disappointed when she said yes.

Now, Manda led the way into the split-level living area. The room occupied a corner of the building, and faced partly north up Fifth Avenue, and east to catch the light. It was dominated by glass, as with Caroline Willner’s house in Long Island, but here the view was of the Empire State and the Chrysler Building, their outlines hazy in the afternoon sun.

‘Quite a place you have here,’ I murmured.

She paused by a low sofa, following my gaze as if the view was something she looked at so rarely she’d forgotten it was there.

‘I like it,’ she said, and sat down. There was a bottle of wine open on the table by her elbow and she picked up her half-drunk glass, but didn’t offer one to me. ‘Any news of Dina?’

Only that she’s now been gone twenty-nine hours …

‘They’ve asked for ten million,’ I said, noting the way her eyebrows climbed a little as she drank. She held the gesture a fraction too long for it to be entirely genuine. ‘But you knew that, didn’t you, Amanda?’

‘No,’ she said evenly. ‘I was just thinking that they’re getting kinda ambitious. They only asked one million for me.’

‘Ah, well, now they have experience on their side,’ I said, sitting down without an invite, as it didn’t look like she was going to extend one.

I debated on telling her about the kidnappers’ claims over the authenticity of the Eisenberg Rainbow, decided against. Parker was still trying to verify that information, and Brandon Eisenberg was proving evasive to say the least. ‘Lennon and his pal got away clean with those jewels last time. Maybe it’s double or quits.’

‘Ah,’ she said, giving me a smile that made her cheeks dimple, ‘so you know his name. Very good.’ She paused. ‘Or were you hoping that alone might shock me into a full confession?’

‘Everyone should have a dream,’ I said dryly. ‘You don’t deny you know him, then?’

‘Not much point in that.’ She snorted into her wine, put the deep-bowled glass down on the side table. ‘You already know Lennon and Ross were doing the kidnappings for us – the fake kidnappings, that is.’ The smile grew broader. ‘And I was the one who gave them Dina’s schedule, told them when she’d be at the riding club. I even told them she had a bodyguard called Charlie who was a tough customer. I completely overlooked the fact they’d automatically assume you were a guy. I mean, what a laugh!’

‘Oh yeah, hilarious …’ I muttered, remembering again the crunch Raleigh’s arm gave out as his bones splintered. ‘So, you recruited Lennon at a party? How did that come up in conversation?’

She shook her head, wagged a finger. ‘Uh-uh, not guilty. Maybe I should warn you, Charlie, I’ve had some very dour detectives here all afternoon, and they didn’t succeed in beating a confession out of me, either. Can’t get what isn’t there, honey.’

‘You sound disappointed. But then, you paid to have Lennon and his mate rough you up, didn’t you, Amanda?’

She shrugged. ‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘It’s a free country, and I kinda like it.’ She leant forwards, checking my face for signs of shock, and reached for her glass again. ‘Maybe you should loosen up and give it a try. Pleasure and pain are very closely related, after all. All those endorphins rushing around your system! Until you’ve had the experience, how do you know you won’t like it?’

I fought to hold down a sudden memory that threatened to burst loose. A dark bitter night, four distinct male shapes, the rancid fear, and the huff of expelled breath from the effort they were putting into working me over. It was a long time ago but it might have been only last night for all its vivid flavour. ‘Been there, done that, thanks all the same,’ I said calmly. ‘Didn’t think much of it.’

Another sideways little smile. ‘Maybe they simply weren’t very good.’

‘Trust me, they were experts.’

Her smile faded to a frown, but she refused to give me the satisfaction of asking more. Which, in turn, saved me the trouble of telling her to mind her own bloody business. I reckoned that made us even.

‘Is that what happened to Torquil?’ I asked. ‘You were trying to broaden his horizons as far as the enjoyment of pain went, and it all got a bit out of hand?’

‘Nice try, Charlie, but for once you’re way off base. Torquil wasn’t in the game plan. Personally, I didn’t want anything to do with him. Can’t blame us if he looked elsewhere and wasn’t careful enough about who he talked to.’

‘So you’re saying he bypassed your exclusive little club and did a deal direct with Lennon, is that it?’

‘Lennon?’ Her eyes were positively sparking. ‘Lennon and his friend couldn’t plan their way out of a paper bag, honey. Why do you think we had to spoon-feed them every scrap of information?’

‘But since then Lennon’s found himself another partner, hasn’t he? And this guy is playing for real. You aren’t calling the shots anymore, Manda.’

‘Who says I ever was? I told you that you were off base, Charlie, but I wasn’t the first one kidnapped, now was I?’ She toed off her shoes and tucked her feet up on the sofa underneath her, for all the world relaxed. Only the tightness of her fingers around the stem of her wine glass gave her away. ‘If you want answers about Lennon and who he might have gone to, you’re going to have to speak to the person who knows him – the one who first recruited me, in fact.’

‘And that is?’

‘Oh come on – Orlando, of course.’ She smiled again. ‘But I reckon you’re gonna have your work cut out getting to her. Good luck with that.’

‘Yeah,’ I agreed, ‘she hasn’t even told Hunt where she is.’

‘Well, then.’ She raised her glass in mock salute. ‘From what I’ve seen of that pair, they’re besotted. If she hasn’t told him where to find her, you’ve no chance.’

I left soon after that. There wasn’t much more I was going to get out of Manda, and the urge to smack her around was beginning to get the better of me.

As I waited for the valet to retrieve the Navigator from wherever they’d stashed it nearby, my cellphone began to buzz in my pocket. When I pulled it out and saw Parker’s number on the display, my heart gave a sudden lurch in my chest.

‘Hi,’ I said sharply. ‘What’s happened?’

‘I think I should … tell you when I see you.’

Oh, shit! Please, not another body …?

I checked my watch for the hundredth time. It was after four in the afternoon. Dina had now been held over thirty hours. A lifetime, but surely too soon for Lennon and his new partner to have killed their hostage?

‘Is she—?’

‘No, we think she’s still alive.’ I heard the cautious note, and the strain, and could have screamed at his refusal to speak plainly over an open line.

‘You think? Parker! What the fuck does that mean?’

The valet pulled up smartly at the kerb and hopped down out of the Navigator’s driving seat, a cheery comment dying on his lips as he caught sight of my face. He stuffed the valet ticket into my numb fingers and scurried away without waiting for a tip.

‘Look, just … you better get back here, Charlie,’ he said, and I heard his shaky sigh. Whatever it is, it’s bad. ‘Fast as you can.’

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Trying to get from the middle of Manhattan out to Long Island, by four-wheel transport, towards the close of the afternoon, will not put you in the running for any official land-speed records. I did my best, but as I sat and cursed in traffic, I mourned the demise of the Buell all over again.

Meanwhile, the clock ticked round to 7 p.m.

Thirty-three hours.

Finally, I reached the Willners’ driveway. And as I braked hard and swung the Navigator through the entrance, I nearly sent the four security people stationed there into group cardiac arrest. As one, right hands dived inside jackets. I made sure I kept both mine well in view as I came to a more moderate halt on the gravel.

It was only then that I recognised a couple of the guys as Gleason’s men. Or rather – Eisenberg’s.

What the …?

I got out slowly, making no overtly threatening moves. They recognised me soon enough not to slot me, which would have put the capping piece on a thoroughly shitty day.

I nodded to them as they relaxed back into hyped alertness, and jogged up the steps, aware that things were probably not about to get any better.

Parker was waiting in the open-plan living area, with both Brandon and Nicola Eisenberg occupying one sofa, and Caroline Willner in her usual high-backed chair. Nicola Eisenberg’s own personal bodyguard was hovering discreetly nearby with Gleason. Landers was in the far corner, out of direct line of the windows, watching all the exits. Not that we were expecting a direct attack, but it was the kind of ingrained behaviour Parker paid him for.

Through the glass, clouds were gathering darkened over the ocean, and the sun had begun a spectacular dying fall in the western sky, leaving a trail of streaks and sorrow.

Nobody was watching the sunset.

Parker was standing alongside Caroline Willner’s chair, as if providing support on a proximity basis alone. His lean face was tired, but there was more to it than that, and with a jolt I recognised it as defeat. He had the look of a field commander fresh from a bloody skirmish, who had never expected to lose the troops under him.

‘What’s happened?’ I demanded.

Parker hesitated a moment and glanced at Caroline Willner. She caught the gesture.

‘Go on, Mr Armstrong.’ She gave a slightly mechanical nod. ‘Please, say what needs to be said.’ She was deathly pale, but holding.

Parker stepped over to a side table. On it was an untidy cardboard package, sliced open. He pulled a latex glove out of his pocket and used that, folded over, to hold the box out to me. I checked the set faces, staring with varying degrees of horror and sympathy. Then Nicola Eisenberg averted her head, trying to make it look as if she were merely leaning her chin on her fist, resting on the arm of the sofa, rather than covering her mouth. Gleason had me under observation on a near-molecular level.

I leant forwards, and looked in the box.

Nestling inside was not the finger I’d been half expecting. Instead, it was a small bluish-white rubbery triangle, two edges smoothly rounded, and the last ragged and stained with dark flecks. It would have been hard to identify as part of a human body, were it not for the piercing through the lobe of what had once clearly been the lower half of a left ear.

One of the pearl drop earrings that Dina had inherited from her grandmother was still studded through it.

I swallowed, forced myself to be objective, rational, and channelled all the revulsion into a bright flame of rage. When I looked up, my gaze was as cold and empty as I could contrive.

‘When did this arrive?’ I asked. ‘And who delivered it?’

‘It came not long before I called you,’ Parker said tightly. ‘We already checked. Local courier company, pickup from the lobby of an apparently random apartment block, delivery instructions left with the package, cash in an envelope.’

A dead end, in other words. Still, discovering that much in the time it had taken me to battle with traffic was fast work.

I looked at Parker and saw he was waiting for me to ask the next question – the obvious question – the way you wait for someone to flinch.

‘So, was it cut off when she was still alive?’ I lifted my chin. ‘Or after she was dead?’

Over to my left, I heard Nicola Eisenberg suck in a harsh breath. ‘My God,’ she murmured, ‘you’re one hard-faced bitch …’

Well, it takes one to know one.

I might have voiced that opinion out loud, but Parker silenced her with a single, lethal stare. ‘There’s a forensic pathologist on his way now,’ he said, checking his watch. ‘I called in a favour. He should be able to tell us how long it’s been … severed, and under what circumstances.’

He put it so much more diplomatically than I had, which is why he was the boss.

‘We need to know quickly – before we go any further negotiating their demands.’ My God, they’ve had her less than two days and already they’re hacking bits off.

I didn’t need to see the anguish in Parker’s eyes to know the same thought had passed through his mind.

Brandon Eisenberg cleared his throat. ‘I have suggested to Mrs Willner that I be permitted to make a substantial contribution to Dina’s ransom.’ His wife shot him a poisonous glare, gave his arm an unsubtle jab. ‘Pay it, is basically what I’m saying,’ he added flatly.

Well, that answered the question of whether Nicola Eisenberg knew about his attempt to cheat her son’s kidnappers with the Rainbow replica. I remembered again that she’d collapsed shortly after the ransom drop had gone so badly awry. Was that when she found out?

Caroline Willner, meanwhile, had come stiffly upright in her chair, no mean feat when she already looked racked tight enough to crack her bones. She made to speak, but Nicola Eisenberg flashed a palm in warning.

‘No. We will do this,’ she said ominously. ‘For Torquil, as much as for Dina.’

She looked about to expand on that theme, but Eisenberg diverted her. ‘We can argue about the details later,’ he said, brusque when Caroline Willner herself would have baulked further. ‘For now, let’s just concentrate on getting your daughter home safe and sound, hmm?’

He had the air of a man who was approached by people constantly for handouts and found all these polite ‘oh, no, I couldn’t possibly’ coy protestations rather irksome.

Caroline Willner must have sensed this. She paused a moment as if to collect herself, then said simply, ‘Thank you.’

He nodded a couple of times, not making eye contact, but his linked hands flexed briefly in his lap.

Nicola Eisenberg gave a grim and bitter little half smile. Regardless of the fact that Torquil had almost undoubtedly been dead before we could have reached him, ransom paid or not, I realised she now had a stick to beat her husband with to the end of his days. I wondered if she would ever feel it was worth the price.

For the moment, however, the new-found power had its compensations. She rose, graceful in victory. Eisenberg automatically followed suit, as if either staying or going held no great appeal.

‘What do the authorities say about all this?’ I asked, looking around at them. Suddenly, nobody wanted to meet my eyes. I jerked a hand towards the box with its grisly contents. ‘How have you managed to keep that away from them?’

‘We are not without considerable influence in government,’ Nicola Eisenberg said, as if that answered everything. ‘We’ll take our leave.’ She bent to exchange distant air kisses on both cheeks with her hostess. She shook hands with Parker, covering both his with her own. ‘Do let us know as soon as you need the money.’ Her eyes slid sideways in the direction of her husband, half a pace behind. ‘It will be available immediately.’

‘Thank you,’ Parker said neutrally, disengaging himself. ‘I’m sure we’ll speak soon.’

I didn’t merit a handshake, just a vague smile as the entourage headed for the door. Gleason gave me a cool nod in passing, though, which was the equivalent of a high five and a bear hug in this business.

When they’d gone, Caroline Willner got slowly to her feet, as if suddenly feeling her bones, and stood with one hand resting on the back of her chair.

‘I believe Mr Armstrong has something important to tell you, Charlie,’ she said gravely.

A muscle jumped in the side of Parker’s jaw. ‘It can wait.’

‘Really?’ she said, her voice cool. ‘Your decision, of course, but I couldn’t help overhearing the phone call you received, and it sounded rather urgent to me.’ She gave me a slight smile. ‘I shall be in my sitting room, if there’s any news of my daughter.’ And with that she turned on her immaculate heel and walked out of the room, tall and composed by what could only have been a major act of self-control. Landers caught Parker’s eye and followed her out. If I didn’t know him better, I might have suspected he was relieved by the excuse to leave.

There was a long uncomfortable silence after they’d gone. I stuffed my hands into my pockets and waited for Parker to speak. He did not appear to be in any hurry to do so.

‘Is it Sean?’ I asked then, keeping my voice level with the same kind of effort that Caroline Willner must have employed.

‘No,’ Parker said, suddenly realising what I must have thought. ‘Jesus, no. Don’t you think I would have told you something like that right off the bat?’

I closed my eyes for a moment, relief flooding in. I’d missed seeing him the last couple of days, my mind so filled with life and death of another kind. For once, his condition had failed to fill my every waking minute. So, now – alongside the relief – guilt came crashing in over the top like a freak wave.

Am I leaving him behind? Is it starting already?

Unbidden, unwelcome, I felt the burn of tears behind my eyelids and my ears were filled with a roaring so fierce I didn’t hear Parker cross the floor between us until he took hold of my arms.

‘I’m sorry, Charlie,’ he said softly. ‘I didn’t mean …’

‘It’s just, the last time we talked about … Sean, you said there were signs …’ I paused, swallowed all that betraying, useless emotion back down again. ‘That he wasn’t going to come back from this.’ I stopped, shrugged helplessly.

The action loosened Parker’s grip. He let his hands glide up and down my arms, soothing.

‘And you said you couldn’t deal, Charlie, and I totally get that. I won’t burden you with any decisions right now.’

‘Oh, great.’ I gave a shaky laugh that turned sharply downhill somewhere in my chest. ‘So, now I’m going to worry about you keeping bad news from me.’

His hands tightened again, and he ducked his head, forcing me to make eye contact. ‘I won’t lie to you, either,’ he said. ‘Nothing’s changed since we last spoke, OK?’

Parker’s concern and his integrity were two of the characteristics I valued most about him. But suddenly the image of dancing together at the charity auction seemed very fresh and clear in my mind. My heart rate accelerated, mouth drying. I looked into those cool grey eyes and saw I wasn’t the only one assailed by the memory.

‘He’s interested,’ Dina had said. ‘I can tell.’ At the time, I’d dismissed it as her attempt to get a rise out of me.

But if it wasn’t … what then?

‘I’m sorry,’ Parker said again.

And then he stepped in close, cupped my face between gentle hands, and kissed me.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

It was the tenderness that was almost my undoing. With Sean, the sexual fascination between us had always been so fierce, so intense, that at times it almost seemed like confrontation.

But Parker revealed himself completely in the brief longing of his touch. It lit along my nerves like ice and fire and drew responses I wasn’t prepared for, including the urge to meet him more than halfway.

This wasn’t just sex. This was love.

Confusion reigning, I broke the kiss, stepped back. But, glancing into his face I saw anguish in the realisation of what he might have given away of himself in that evanescent moment. Of what it might mean – for all of us. He took a breath.

And I realised with a flowering dismay that I could fall for him. If I let myself. They might share many traits, but he was not Sean. I would not open my eyes every morning and see an echo of what I had lost. This could be something else completely. If I let it.

I reached up, touched his cheek, murmured, ‘Don’t.’

He captured my hand with his own, held it while he turned his head and pressed his lips into my palm. ‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. ‘I never meant for—’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Neither did I.’

He gave a rueful smile that did nothing to quiet the chaos of his gaze, and let go of me. With distance, we could both regain some semblance of sanity.

In a voice that was still woefully inadequate, I said, ‘Wow, it must be bad news if you’re prepared to go to those kind of lengths to distract me.’

He knew what I was doing, of course he did, but he let it ride. Eventually, with great reluctance, he said, ‘I had a call from Epps.’

‘Conrad Epps?’ It was a stupid question, but the connotations knocked me sideways into stupidity. Conrad Epps held some high-grade position within the US security services. I could only guess at the scope of his power, but when my father had found himself in serious trouble over here the previous winter, only someone with Epps’s clout had been able to disentangle him.

The only trouble was, once you turned over the kind of rock men like Epps liked to lurk under, it could never quite be turned back again. He didn’t do favours for nothing – he kept score. And because of that, we were sucked into his private war with the Fourth Day cult in California, during which … Well, let’s just say that if Epps had left well alone, Sean would not be in his current condition.

I had very mixed feelings about Conrad Epps.

‘What does he want now?’ I demanded roughly. ‘And what’s it going to cost us this time?’

Parker raised an eyebrow. He was regaining his poise, but there was still a tension about him that I mistakenly put down to our encounter, rather than the news he had to impart.

‘He called with an apology – and a warning,’ he said. ‘Charlie … they lost him.’

‘Lost …?’ It took me a moment to put the correct meaning on that word. Lost as in misplaced, as in escaped. As in free and clear …

And this time, I didn’t need to ask who he was talking about.

I knew.

The man who had put Sean in his coma, who had lied and cheated, and murdered, for no more desperate reason than his own desire to possess something that didn’t belong to him. For greed. For power.

Shit!

‘I should have killed that fucker when I had the chance.’

‘Then we wouldn’t be here,’ Parker said quietly.

‘No,’ I agreed. I tried to raise a smile and only got halfway. ‘At best, I’d probably be on Death Row.’

Parker shook his head with a hint of sadness. ‘Epps wouldn’t have let you die, Charlie,’ he said. ‘How could he just let someone with your … talent go to waste? But he would have owned you to the grave.’

I didn’t respond to that. It’s always hard to counter an argument you recognise to be bloody impregnable.

‘How?’ I said then. ‘How did he get away, I mean?’ I couldn’t even bring myself to say the man’s name. It was easier to be coolly objective about the whole thing. To speak about him as an abstract concept, rather than an utterly worthless human being.

‘Epps was not forthcoming with details,’ Parker said dryly.

‘Yeah, no surprises there.’

He sighed. ‘Look, I know how you feel. Trust me. I was there. I saw what that bastard did – and not just to Sean.’

I swallowed down the sour taste in my mouth, recognised that Parker had been as hurt by what had happened almost as much as I had. We’d both lost Sean, however permanent or temporary that might turn out to be. Perhaps it was the solidarity of loss that had just brought us together – or so I tried to tell myself.

‘I thought Epps would have used him up and spat out the empty husk by now,’ I said instead. ‘It’s not like him to be merciful.’

Parker leant his shoulder against the glass wall, his face bathed in soft reflected light from the last of the evening sun. ‘Well, I guess the guy could be pretty persuasive, you have to give him that.’ And if he sounded regretful, it was perhaps because we’d both been taken in, at one time or another. ‘In this case, all I know is he persuaded Epps he could give him a lead into various militia groups Fourth Day had ties to. Offered to go undercover.’

I stared at him. ‘Jesus H Christ,’ I muttered. ‘Epps just bloody let him go and he did a runner.’

Another twisted smile. ‘That would be my guess.’

‘When?’

‘Six weeks ago.’

‘He’s been on the run for six weeks?’ I repeated. ‘And Epps is ringing you now?’

Parker’s eyes flicked to mine. ‘Apparently, he believed he might still be able to retrieve him without making the fact public,’ he said solemnly. ‘The guy’s dropped right off the grid.’

‘I’d lay odds I could find him.’

Another flicker. ‘Maybe that was another reason he didn’t tell us.’

‘Parker, I—’

He moved closer and all the spit dried on my tongue, but all he did was look down at me, eyes roving my face. I don’t know what he was searching for, or if he found it.

‘Revenge is a poor servant, but a worse master,’ he said. ‘Don’t let it rule you, Charlie.’

I won’t. Not yet.

‘In case it’s escaped you,’ I said, forcing a lightness I was a long way from feeling, ‘we’re up to our necks in a situation here. How can I think of going after anyone when we don’t know if Dina is alive or dead?’

If Parker saw through the blatant evasion in my words, he didn’t get a chance to call me on it. Footsteps in the hall had us both turning. Landers entered, gaze taking in our tension, if not – I hoped – the reasons behind it.

‘Pathologist’s here, boss,’ he said.

Parker nodded and turned away, pulling on a set of gloves to pick up the gruesome package. By the doorway he paused, glanced back.

‘And when we know – one way or the other,’ he said, ‘what then?’

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

The buzz of my cellphone brought me paddling resentfully out of sleep. By the time I was alert enough to react, the noise had stopped, as is always the way. I sat up, muttering under my breath, and reached for the phone anyway, recognising as I did so that it was a text message rather than a missed call.

I was still fully clothed and lying on top of the bedclothes after Parker more or less ordered me to get some rest. It was only when I’d got to my room and crawled onto the bed that the aching tiredness caught up with me. All in all, I hadn’t much sleep over the past few days.

I glanced blearily at my watch, realising I’d been out like the dead for over four hours.

It was close to midnight. Dina’s ordeal had so far lasted thirty-eight hours, and showed no signs of ending yet.

I didn’t recognise the number on the display but opened the message anyway.

‘MUST meet with you! Very urgent! I have vital info! Come alone! Tell no one! PLEASE!! Orlando.’

The similarities with the message sent to lure Torquil into ambush were stark enough to kick-start my brain.

I sat for a moment, furiously processing. Orlando had left her usual cellphone at her parents’ place. Or – more likely, I thought now – they’d made her leave it behind in the vain hope of breaking off her contact with her friends. But Orlando was clearly more resourceful than that.

Only thing was, how had she got hold of my number?

The Willners had it, of course. I’d made sure it was programmed into Dina’s phone, but that had been switched off since her abduction, the GPS tracker disabled. And if Dina had given the number to Orlando after she’d been taken, that meant Orlando was party to the other girl’s mutilation.

I could only hope not.

The only other person I’d given it to had been one of the original kidnappers, Ross, and I couldn’t see why he would have gone to Orlando with that information.

I staggered into the bathroom and splashed cold water onto my face. It was only partially successful in waking me up. I was still stiff from being knocked off the Buell and this brief period of inactivity seemed to highlight every bruise and bang.

I cleaned my teeth, changed my shirt for something slightly less crumpled, and headed back upstairs to the living area.

Parker was sitting drinking coffee alone in the quiet room. Outside the glass, rain was falling at a steady slant in the moonlight, one of those freak weather events. I could see it pounding patches of water flat like wind across a field of corn.

Parker rose when I came in, and the smile he gave me contained an inner brightness that both warmed and chilled me.

‘Hi,’ he said, his voice husky. ‘Feeling better?’

I said, awkward, ‘Too early to tell,’ which was the truth on many levels. ‘Any word on McGregor?’

‘Stable. No change. They’re hopeful, at least.’

‘Good.’ I held up my phone. ‘I’ve just received a text I think you ought to see.’

I helped myself to coffee from the insulated cafetière on the table while he thumbed through the brief message, frowning.

‘I don’t like it,’ he said bluntly. ‘It’s a trap and they don’t care if we know it.’ He looked up, his eyes narrowed. ‘You want to do it, huh?’

I nodded. ‘They’ve cut off half Dina’s ear, Parker. How can I not, if there’s a chance she’s still alive—?’

‘She is,’ he said. ‘Or, she was when the ear was severed, according to the pathologist. Something to do with the amount of blood in the tissue.’ He paused. ‘He reckons they probably used a pair of shears. Must have hurt like hell.’

I shut that one out. ‘I’m going to this meet.’

‘Charlie—’

‘I’ve already sent a reply asking when and where.’

His eyebrow went up. ‘Last time I checked, you still work for me,’ he said. ‘That makes me responsible for your safety.’

‘What safety? The bottom line in this job is to get ourselves killed before our client,’ I said, keeping my voice even. ‘Either this message really is from Orlando, in which case she might be able to give us something that gets us closer to Lennon or the guy he’s working with, or it’s a trap, as you say. In which case, I may have the opportunity to grab whoever’s sent to grab me. I have to go, Parker,’ I added, when he would have cut in again. ‘It’s as much part of the job as standing in front of them in a hostile crowd.’

‘Let me come with you—’

‘You can’t,’ I said gently. ‘What if they call again? We can’t take the risk.’

He was silent for a moment, then he nodded. ‘OK, but stay sharp. And keep me informed. Understood?’

‘Yes, boss,’ I murmured.

My phone buzzed again and I checked the incoming message. ‘Ten minutes,’ I said, reading it. ‘The parking area just off the beach, near where Torquil was taken.’

Parker’s face was grave. ‘Let’s just hope they’re not planning on a repeat performance.’

I reached the parking area Orlando had specified exactly seven minutes later and found it deserted. There was a single multidirectional lamppost in the centre, but only half the bulbs appeared to be working, casting lopsided shadows across the space. The rain was still gusting through the beams, clouds scudding past a high moon.

As I swung the Navigator round in a slow circle, the headlights played across wind-blown sandy asphalt and not a lot else.

I parked up in the centre, on the darker side of the lamppost, facing the entrance. There, it would be difficult for anyone to advance from the scrub without being seen. I cracked the window, and cut the engine and the lights.

The smells and sounds of the ocean drifted in through the slot above the glass. In the dark, the rush of breakers on the beach took on a monumental quality, even above the drum of rain on the SUV’s roof. I was suddenly very aware of my own insignificance in the great scheme of things.

I touched a finger to my lips, as if I could still feel the imprint of Parker’s mouth on mine. What had happened between us still felt a little unreal, so that I was almost afraid to mention it to him, just in case it really had all been a dream. But then I remembered his smile, when I’d walked back into the living area.

No, it hadn’t been a dream.

But what the hell did I – did we – do about it?

The attraction to Parker had taken me by surprise. He’d been brilliant since the shooting, compassionate, a real friend. But I’d never had eyes for anyone other than Sean and I felt loathsomely unfaithful, regardless of the circumstances leading up to that kiss.

I rubbed a hand across my eyes. Combat stress could heighten emotions of all kinds, and maybe that was part of the reason for my confusion – little more than a dramatic release of tension. I told myself there would be a time to sort out my feelings. But later – much later.

‘How long are you going to wait for Sean?’ whispered an insistent little demon on my shoulder. ‘And how long do you think Parker will wait for you?’

It was a relief to see a set of headlights turn off the main road at that moment. I squinted in the glare as the lights panned across the Navigator’s windscreen. They bounced a little as the vehicle behind them negotiated the rough shoulder leading to the car park.

It pulled alongside me, nose to tail, and I recognised the outline of a 7 series BMW. Probably the same one that had brought Orlando and Manda to visit Dina, the day after Torquil had been kidnapped.

A lot seemed to have happened since then.

The driver’s door opened and a man got out. A big guy, built like a rugby player. As he turned, I caught him in profile and saw the broken nose that triggered my memory. So, she’d brought the same personal bodyguard with her as well.

I opened the Navigator’s door and stepped down, keeping my arms relaxed. The rain instantly drenched my bare head and found its way straight down the back of my jacket collar, but the air was surprisingly warm.

The bodyguard muscled in and flicked his fingers towards my hands, indicating I should spread for a search. I stood my ground and stared right back.

‘Either she wants to talk to me or she doesn’t,’ I said tiredly. ‘But you lay a finger on me and I will rip off both your arms and beat you to death with the wet ends. Your choice.’

He hesitated, his expression mulish. I shrugged and reached for the Navigator’s door handle, like I really didn’t care. It was a calculated risk.

‘Wait!’

I stopped. The Bee-Em’s darkened rear glass had dropped a few inches and Orlando’s face appeared, paler than ever in the mix of sodium and moonlight, blinking as the rain splashed inside.

‘Charlie, please,’ she said, sounding genuinely distraught. ‘Vincent, it’s OK. Please, just let her get in the car.’

The bodyguard, Vincent, didn’t like it. I wouldn’t have done, in his place, but he opened the rear door and jerked his head to signify I should get in. I took my time about it, taking a perverse satisfaction from the fact he was getting just as wet as I was.

Eventually, I shrugged and climbed in. Orlando slid over to the far side of the rear bench seat to give me room, and the bodyguard slammed the door after me with a certain amount of venom. He got back into the front, twisting round in his seat so he could keep an eye on me.

I don’t know where Orlando had been hiding out, but she looked terrible, which for her probably meant she hadn’t been near a hairdresser or a nail salon for the best part of a week.

‘Is it true about Dina being taken?’ she demanded by way of greeting.

I raised a dripping eyebrow. ‘How do you know anything’s happened to Dina?’

As far as I was aware, it wasn’t public that she had been kidnapped. Certainly we’d done our best to keep the information away from the authorities, at Caroline Willner’s insistence. The only investigating they were doing related to Torquil Eisenberg’s death.

Orlando’s eyes slid towards Vincent and I nodded in understanding. The ex-military grapevine was better than any twenty-four-hour news channel. I glanced back at the girl on the back seat.

‘It’s true that your boys sliced off her ear, yes.’

Her hands flew to her face, fingers rigid. ‘Oh, God,’ she choked. ‘They’re not “my boys”. How can you say that? You think I’d do something like that to one of my friends?’

I sat back into the corner, making it harder for Vincent to watch me. ‘Why not?’ I said mildly. ‘Torquil was supposedly one of your friends, wasn’t he? And you had him beaten to death.’

‘No! That wasn’t … I didn’t—’

‘Didn’t what, Orlando?’ I let my voice harden. ‘Didn’t authorise that? So who did? The same person who told you to feed me that crap about Torquil stalking you before your kidnap?’

‘Nobody told me to do anything! Nobody “authorised” anything!’ She let her hands fall back into her lap, her head drop, looked about to weep. ‘They must have done it themselves.’

‘According to your friend, Manda, Lennon couldn’t plan his way out of a wet paper bag. So, who’s he working with?’

‘I don’t know,’ she muttered.

‘Well, think harder,’ I said. ‘You created this monster. You’re going to have to help me deal with it.’

Her head shot up again. ‘But … that will mean everyone will know … about us. What we did.’

‘Yes,’ I said, not in the mood to let her down gently. That the prospect of exposure and disgrace seemed to horrify her more than murder, did little to arouse my sympathy. ‘How did you approach Lennon – who is he?’

She shrugged. ‘Just some guy I knew from college,’ she said. ‘We did drama classes together. He wanted to be an actor. And then I saw him again, at some party last spring. We got chatting. I asked him how he was doing, and he said the only decent piece of work he’d gotten was playing one of the bad guys in some TV cop show pilot that never took off. And the idea just … came to me.’

‘To have yourself kidnapped.’ I tried to stay neutral, but it came out flat instead. I sighed. ‘Why, Orlando? What possessed you to get yourself into this mess in the first place?’

That brought a little fire into her eyes, a little colour into her cheeks. ‘You have absolutely no clue what it’s like,’ she said, voice low. ‘You think it’s so fine, having money, horses, cars, clothes, but it’s like being in gaol.’

‘I can think of a few prisoners who’d disagree with you.’

She made a gesture of impatience, as if she hadn’t expected someone like me to be able to comprehend something on the scale of her life. ‘You saw my father, right? My mother’s in Europe someplace, touring art galleries, or museums, or something like that. I don’t think he even knows which country she’s in. If they pay that much attention to each other, how much do you think they ever paid to me?’

CHAPTER FIFTY

‘All my life, someone else has decided things for me,’ Orlando said, in a voice bitter-edged with sullen. ‘My father wanted a boy – had this name all picked out. When I turned out to be a girl, they couldn’t be bothered to think of another.’ She paused, pleating the belt of her coat with nervous fingers. ‘I just wanted some control over my own destiny for a change.’

I stared at her. ‘And how exactly do you achieve that by putting yourself completely at the mercy of a stranger?’

‘You just don’t get it,’ she snapped. ‘I was in control, deep down. I knew I was safe. Even when I was locked up, tied up, I knew they wouldn’t do anything I didn’t want them to.’

‘You put a hell of a lot of trust in someone you knew slightly from college.’

Her turn to stare. ‘But I was paying him,’ she said blankly, like that was enough to ensure anyone’s loyalty.

‘How much?’

She shrugged, as if it were vulgar to discuss it. ‘Fifty grand,’ she said at last. She might as well have said fifty bucks, for all it meant to her. ‘I don’t know how much of that he gave to the other guy, Ross.’

I wondered if she had any concept of what that amount of money would mean to the average college kid, or what they’d be prepared to do in order to get it.

‘How did you get in touch with Lennon if he’s always changing his cellphone number?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, when he played a part, he really played it,’ she said frowning. ‘If the one I had for him was dead, I had to go sit in a coffee shop down near the boardwalk on Coney Island, around ten in the morning.’ She gave me the name of the place and I filed it away.

‘And … what? He met you there?’

‘No, but he must have been able to see me or something, because he’d take that as a signal to call my cell, and then I’d have his new number.’

Lennon must work or live nearby, or have a trusted contact at the coffee shop itself. It wasn’t much, but it was a lead.

‘You know I’m going to have to pass this on to the FBI, don’t you?’ I asked, and saw something like relief flicker through her face. ‘Was that why you called me, Orlando – to do your dirty work for you, so you can keep your distance?’

‘No!’ The denial came too quick, too easily. Her eyes filled, but I wasn’t completely convinced she couldn’t do that at will. She had, after all, taken acting classes with Lennon. ‘Everything’s gone so wrong! Supposing they come after me again – I mean, for real this time? I didn’t know what else to do.’

‘Well, going to the cops as soon as Torquil turned up dead would have been a bloody good start,’ I muttered, and watched her head hang.

‘It was supposed to be a game,’ she repeated stubbornly.

I sighed. How did you deal with someone who was so far removed from everyday real life, it was like they were from another planet? ‘So, did it live up to your expectations – being kidnapped?’

Another shrug. ‘I guess,’ she said, but I’d caught the quick smile, the satisfaction that came and went in her face, quickly masked. Maybe it had given her the control she craved. Or maybe it had simply got the attention of her parents – both of them – for the first time in her life. I wanted to shake her.

‘So then Manda wanted out from under the family thumb, too, and you offered to do another deal with Lennon?’

‘Yes,’ she admitted.

I glanced at the bodyguard, Vincent, sitting motionless in the front of the car. His slightly crooked face was professionally impassive, but there was something disdainful in his eyes.

‘You knew, didn’t you?’ I said to him. ‘How could you not?’

‘Of course,’ he said, almost a sneer. ‘You think a couple of punks like that could get away with snatching my principal from right under my nose otherwise? How incompetent d’you think we are?’

‘So, it stands to reason, in that case,’ I added with slow realisation, ‘that her parents knew, also?’

I heard a disbelieving gasp from Orlando, but kept my eyes on Vincent. His gaze flickered across to her, then back to meet mine. ‘Yeah, course I told ’em,’ he said. ‘Why d’you think no cops?’

‘But …?’ Orlando’s voice trailed off into misery. ‘They paid,’ she whispered. ‘Why did they pay the ransom, if they knew …?’

‘Maybe they were indulging your little fantasy,’ I suggested. After all, in a twisted way it was only like going to a dude ranch and pretending to be a cowboy for the weekend. And what’s half a million dollars if there’s plenty more where that came from? I waited for her to absorb that one, then turned back to Vincent. ‘What about the others? Did they know, too?’

‘Dempseys, yeah. We let their security know – professional courtesy, y’know? I think they were kinda relieved that kid was going after herself instead of her old man for a change. Benellis were told, and I think maybe they decided enough was enough and refused to go along with it. But after the kid lost a finger, well, I guess they convinced themselves it was for real after all.’

I remembered the screeching of Benedict’s mother, the quiet seething of his father, and realised there had been more to it than simple surprise. Neither of them liked being taken for fools, but they’d been prepared to ignore it, until that wasn’t possible any longer. So, part of their anger was directed at themselves.

I shook my head, looked at Orlando’s dejected figure slumped in the corner of the luxurious leather upholstery. Above us, the rain hammered on the roof and bounced up into an ankle-deep layer of mist across the ground outside.

I glanced at Vincent’s indifferent face. ‘You didn’t feel it was worth extending the same professional courtesy to me, then, when I started looking after Dina?’

The bodyguard shrugged. ‘It was on a need-to-know basis, and Mrs Willner isn’t in the same league as the others,’ he said, dismissive. ‘The threat wasn’t taken seriously.’

And neither were you. He didn’t need to say it, I saw it in his eyes, his face, and wondered if I was going to be butting my head against this same misogynist attitude for the rest of my career.

‘Yeah, and look how well that turned out,’ I said, turning back to Orlando without waiting for his response. ‘First thing tomorrow morning,’ I told her, ‘you’re going to go back to that bloody coffee shop, and you’re going to sit there until Lennon calls you.’

‘What if he doesn’t?’

‘He may not,’ I agreed. He may have been working for her at the beginning, but clearly he was taking his orders elsewhere now, and that was who I wanted. ‘Torquil’s dead because of things you set in motion, Orlando. Dina is missing, injured, and they’re asking ten million dollars for her release. Right now, I’d make you parade up and down Union Square naked if I thought it might help.’

A hopeful thought struck her. ‘But I don’t have my cell. He won’t be able to call me.’

‘So get it,’ I said bluntly. ‘I’m sure if you explain to your father what’s at stake, he’ll give it back, don’t you?’

She nodded, gave a pathetic smile. ‘I never should have told my parents. Hunt told me not to, but after Tor … I felt so guilty. If I’d known they already knew …’

Confessing all, I realised, had simply meant they couldn’t pretend ignorance any longer, nothing more. I ignored the plea for a sympathetic response, reached for the door handle. ‘You’ll call me if and when you hear from Lennon?’

It was Vincent who nodded. ‘It’s my cell,’ he said. ‘I’ll call, don’t sweat it.’

He was the one who had obtained my cellphone number, I realised. Being in the industry, it wouldn’t have been hard.

As I cracked the door and waited for a brief lull in the rain, I said over my shoulder to Orlando, ‘Hunt sends his love, by the way. Says he misses you.’

‘Huh,’ she scoffed. ‘Yeah, I bet.’

But there was more than just ordinary sulkiness in her voice. I pulled the door to and looked back at her. ‘What does that mean?’

She flushed. ‘We’ve been going out together for ages, and we’ve never … well, you know. Made love,’ she said, wriggling with embarrassment in her seat.

Vincent, I saw, had quickly reverted to his stone-faced demeanour in the face of these girlie confidences. One of those macho guys who would happily discuss any amount of blood, unless it was menstrual.

‘Perhaps he’s just straight-laced,’ I suggested. ‘Doesn’t believe in sex before marriage.’

Yeah, and perhaps I’m in the running for Homecoming Queen …

She hunched a mournful shoulder. ‘At first I thought maybe he was, y’know, gay, and in denial or something,’ she said, with the assurance of someone who’s been through therapy and picked up all the right words. ‘I thought he was maybe trying to hide it, but then when we were at the party on the yacht, Tor played me a tape – of Hunt and Manda, in the cabin together, and—’ She broke off, choked back a sob. ‘He was all over her.’

‘Ah, I’m sorry, Orlando,’ I said, and meant it. ‘Sometimes it happens, when a group of you spend time together—’

‘But it wasn’t like that,’ she burst out, face crumpling. ‘He and Manda knew each other long before. She was the one who introduced us. Manda’s my friend. So, why would they do that?’

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

As soon as I got back into the Navigator, I called Parker, watching Orlando’s chauffeured BMW roll out of the parking area and back onto the main road as I did so.

He listened to my explanation of Hunt’s prior relationship with Manda without interruption. On its own, it meant little, but Manda had deliberately misled me when I’d seen her at the apartment. Besotted was how she’d described Orlando and Hunt’s relationship. If she was supposed to be Orlando’s friend, then surely she would know all was not well in paradise. So why had she lied? I couldn’t ignore my gut instinct.

‘I’ll get straight onto Bill, get him to check this guy out more thoroughly,’ he said when I was done. No arguments, no doubts.

‘He’ll still be awake?’ I glanced at my watch. It was 1.15 a.m. Dina had entered her fortieth hour of captivity. Was she even still alive? I felt the tension in my shoulders, my hands, and tried to relax.

‘Until we get Dina back, everyone’s on call twenty-four/seven,’ Parker said grimly. ‘Get back here soon as you can, Charlie. And you were right to go – good work.’

The return journey took only a minute longer than the outward one. There was almost no traffic on the rain-lashed streets, but it was no night to be out. The water had started to pile up in the gutters, sweeping debris down the enormous storm drains that characterise the sides of American roads. They buried coffins deep enough over here not to rise in a flood, I remembered, and couldn’t suppress a shiver that had nothing to do with cold.

When I reached the house, I found Parker had roused both Landers and Caroline Willner. A sleepy-looking Silvana was handing round fresh hot drinks, and I accepted a steaming cup of coffee gratefully.

‘I don’t know anything about the young man,’ Caroline Willner was saying. ‘He’s been here a couple of times, with Orlando, and he’s always seemed polite, attentive. I got no – how would you say it? – bad vibes from him.’

‘Neither did I,’ I said. ‘He had an answer for everything. Although, when I mentioned that Trevanion was a Cornish name, he didn’t seem to know.’ Should I have known? I shook my head in disgust. ‘He took me in completely. He seemed so plausible, so bloody nice, compared to the rest of them. I—’

I broke off suddenly, drenched with cold. Hunt had been so approachable, so friendly, so without an axe to grind, that I’d chatted openly to him about the current situation.

Parker had moved to my side to ask quietly, ‘What is it?’

I jerked my head towards the hallway and when we were alone I told him, in detail, about my apparently chance meeting with Hunt outside Orlando’s family estate, and about our oh-so-civilised pot of Fortnum & Mason tea at the tennis club.

‘I told him Caroline Willner doesn’t have the money to pay,’ I finished in a horrified voice, eyes flying to Parker’s. ‘He could already have decided this is a dead end.’

In which case, he could have decided Dina is a dead end, too. And if she is, it’s my fault …

‘It’s not over yet, Charlie,’ Parker said, tense. ‘Bill’s looking into him right now. Someone using the name Hunter Trevanion is renting a house in Sag Harbor for the summer, but so far we can’t find a previous address for him. He doesn’t have a US driver’s licence, but if he’s a Brit, he might never have gotten around to it.’

‘He told me he’d been out here five years,’ I said, focusing inward to recall our earlier conversation at Torquil’s party. ‘Said he’d been at Oxford and implied the university, but for all I know he could have been living rough in doorways. Oh, he also said his family were in the music business, if that helps?’

‘I’ll let Bill know.’

I frowned. ‘Ross said Lennon’s mystery pal was American.’

‘He could have used a go-between,’ Parker said.

I moved over to a small sofa that lined one wall of the hallway. It was uncomfortable, intended more for decoration than for use, but I sank onto it anyway. I was desperately tired but too buzzed to sleep. ‘Still nothing from the kidnappers?’

Parker shook his head. ‘We’re taking no news as good news until we reach the deadline they set – we still have thirty hours,’ he said carefully. ‘Brandon Eisenberg called to say he’s making progress securing the ransom. And the hospital called to say McGregor’s conscious. His family flew in from Toronto this afternoon.’

‘Well, that’s good, anyway,’ I murmured. I leant my head back and let my eyes close briefly as I took a sip of coffee. One less thing to worry about.

‘How you feeling, Charlie?’ Parker asked. I opened my eyes again and realised he was watching me closely. I made an effort to sit up.

‘Fine,’ I lied. ‘Why?’

‘You up to a quick trip back to Manhattan? I think we need to have another talk to Amanda Dempsey, see what she knows.’

I put my half-drunk coffee down regretfully on the side table and pushed to my feet. ‘OK,’ I said, giving him a weary smile, ‘providing you don’t mind driving? I think I’m likely to fall asleep at the wheel.’

We didn’t talk much on the way over, mainly because I reclined my seat slightly, bunched up my jacket between the Navigator’s headrest and the side window, and catnapped for most of the way.

I jerked awake at the touch of a hand on my arm, reaching for it almost before I had a chance to counter the automatic reaction.

‘Easy, Charlie,’ Parker said. ‘We’re nearly there.’

‘What time is it?’

‘A quarter of four,’ Parker said briefly, without needing to check.

Dina had been held for nearly forty-two hours.

By the time he’d braked to a halt outside Manda’s apartment block, I was sitting up again and with it, if a little groggy. It was still raining, the streets of the city washed clean and glistening in the lights.

‘You OK?’ Parker asked again as we entered the lobby area.

‘You don’t need to keep asking,’ I told him gently. ‘If I’m not, I’ll let you know.’

It was a pleasure to watch my boss intimidate the night security guy into not calling up to warn Manda we were on our way. He did it with a soft lethality that reduced the man to fluster in less than a minute.

‘Bully,’ I murmured as we rode up to Manda’s floor.

Parker flashed me a quick smile in reply. ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet …’

It took a lot of loud banging on Manda’s front door, and leaning on the bell, before she answered, wearing a thin peach satin nightgown and matching wrap. As someone who slept in an old T-shirt – if I slept in anything at all – the cynical half of me wondered if the delay had been partly caused by her searching for something alluring to put on.

‘Charlie!’ she exclaimed, covering the frightened note in her voice with a gloss of annoyance. ‘Do you have any idea what time it is?’

‘Yes,’ I said pleasantly. ‘May we come in? Or do you want to wait for the FBI?’

She hesitated, by which time I had moved forwards, smiling, and before she knew it we were inside with the door closed behind us. Manda realised she wasn’t going to get rid of us easily and shrugged. She led us into the living area with its fabulous view of the skyline, which was lightening towards dawn but still dominated by the beautifully lit, iconic buildings.

Once there, she tugged the flimsy garment closer around her body and glared at us with a certain amount of scared truculence.

‘What do you want?’ Her eyes flicked to Parker as if she thought he might be easier to manipulate. He stared back, radiating menace because of the total lack of emotion he projected.

‘You know what this is all about, Manda,’ I said quietly, snapping her attention back to me. ‘Tell us about Hunt.’

‘Hunt?’ She made a show of surprise at the question, stalling furiously. ‘I hardly know—’

‘You want us to dig out the tape Torquil made of the pair of you screwing on the yacht?’ I demanded. ‘Orlando’s already admitted that you introduced them. So – who is he, where did he come from, and why have you lied about him?’

She gave a mirthless laugh. ‘I might have known that little bitch would try and stir things. Why on earth should you believe anything she has to say?’

I sighed, half turned away, and whipped back to punch her in the mouth.

I led from my shoulders rather than my hips, so it was little more than a tap, but Manda let out a shriek and fell backwards across one of the armchairs in a tangle of arms and legs. Parker shot me a disapproving glance. I shrugged and waited until Manda had gathered herself, dabbing at her split lip with experimental fingers.

‘You bitch,’ she muttered, in a dazed voice.

‘I’ve been called worse – by you, as I recall,’ I said blandly. ‘And I don’t have time to play nice, Manda. I tried that last time, and you sat there and smiled at me as you lied your arse off. Stop LYING to me!’ I let my voice snap into loudness, watched her jerk of automated response. ‘Dina’s got less than a day. They already sliced off her ear. These are the same people who beat Torquil to death. We believe Hunt’s involved. Where do we find him?’

‘How the hell would I know?’ she demanded, pushing back to her feet, defiant. ‘And even if I did, you think I’d tell you?’

Parker sighed. He reached into the pocket of his immaculate overcoat and brought out a folding lock knife, which he opened up carefully. As it reached full extension it made a sharp click that made Manda flinch. I think it was the contrast between his totally urbane appearance and the threat implicit in the blade. He glanced at me, nothing in his face.

‘Left ear, wasn’t it?’

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

Manda, I realised quickly, had no doubts that Parker might be bluffing.

The combination of that and the shock of a smack in the mouth brought the words tumbling out of her. I wasn’t especially proud of what we’d just done, but it was certainly effective in the time we had available.

She told us how she’d met Hunt the previous spring and been both frustrated and intrigued by the fact that he seemed so unimpressed by her wealth.

Listening to her, it was painfully obvious that Hunt had played her like a cheap violin. He was a charmer, as all good conmen are, and he’d used Manda to carefully insinuate himself into the social circle in which she moved.

The fact that he’d specifically asked her to introduce him to Orlando, rather than presenting himself as being involved with Manda, had been a masterly touch. It allowed him to influence the other girl, while Manda got her claws into Benedict. And the hands-off approach had kept Manda well and truly hooked in a way he couldn’t have done if they’d been having an open relationship.

‘After Benedict’s kidnapping didn’t go according to plan – when his parents nearly refused to pay – Hunt said it would be better if he was the one who made contact with Lennon and Ross,’ she explained, her voice a mumble, staring at her clenched hands. ‘He said it would keep us one step removed from any of it.’

‘But?’ I said, hearing the hesitation in her voice.

‘He wanted to take things a lot further. Actively look for other people – people with money – who wanted to be kidnapped for the thrill of it, too. Make a business out of it, almost.’

‘And you went along with that?’ Parker left me to ask the questions, while he hovered in the background, projecting just the right level of intimidation.

‘He made it sound like … fun,’ she admitted. ‘Like a game, where everybody wins and nobody gets hurt.’

‘And where did Torquil fit into that theory?’

She coloured at that. It was nice to see even someone as amoral as Manda was not immune to shame.

‘That was … different,’ she said, stumbling over the words. ‘Tor found out what we were doing and was threatening to expose us – all of us – unless we let him join in. But he wanted it all to be perfect, like a movie or something. He was so furious when the snatch on Dina went all wrong. He said it was pathetic, that he’d give us all away.’

I remembered Torquil’s expression as he’d watched the two men I now knew to be Lennon and Ross escaping from the botched attempt at the riding club. His anger and disappointment now seemed understandable. At the time I’d worried it was because he might be behind the kidnaps, not that he was waiting impatiently for his turn.

‘So he was killed to keep him quiet.’

‘Yes. No!’ Manda said, head hanging. ‘Look, they don’t tell me the details. As far as I know, all that was supposed to happen was Tor was to be kidnapped and held for a couple days for a decent ransom – he talked about making his parents pay with something that would hurt them. I guess now he was talking about the Eisenberg Rainbow.’

‘So, where is it?’

She looked disbelieving. ‘Why the hell would you want it? It’s a fake.’

‘Ah, so you haven’t quite severed all ties with the kidnappers, have you, Manda?’ I said. ‘How else could you know about that?’

She flushed. ‘Hunt told me,’ she said in a low voice. ‘He said that Lennon was furious, and who knew what he might do to get even.’

‘And you believed that?’ I demanded. ‘Did Hunt also tell you that Torquil was dead before I ever left the Eisenbergs’ place with the necklace? That they’d no intention of letting him go, regardless of whether the jewels were real or not?’

‘No,’ she murmured, shaking her head. ‘No, that can’t be right. Hunt said that if we went ahead and kidnapped Tor, like he wanted, he wouldn’t be able to do anything against us, because then he’d be a part of it. But I never thought for a second that they’d kill him. You have to believe me …’

‘Would you have done it?’ I asked twenty minutes later, as Parker pulled the Navigator out from the kerb. His eyes switched from the rear-view mirror across to mine, with a flicker that could have signified just about anything.

‘Would you?’ he countered dryly.

I smiled. ‘It might have been a difficult one to explain away in court as justifiable force.’

He nodded, as if that was his answer, also. ‘The trick is not what you’re prepared to do, Charlie. It’s what they believe you’re prepared to do.’

‘I know.’

But Sean would have done it, I realised, for real, without hesitation. Maybe that was the difference between them.

Stop making comparisons!

‘The important thing is, did you believe her?’ Parker asked now, as if reading my thoughts.

I twisted slightly in my seat, watching him drive through the lightening streets, heading east for the Queensboro Bridge.

There had always been an easy competence about Parker, but where previously he’d seemed relaxed and confident, now he showed an uncertainty around me that I didn’t like. That kiss had changed things, not necessarily for the better, but there was no calling it back, I realised. Sooner or later, we’d have to deal with it and move on.

‘Some of it,’ I replied. ‘I think the bit about her becoming a little obsessed with Hunt is true. It made her angry to be under his thrall like that. From what I know of Manda, she hates having to admit to any kind of weakness.’

‘Particularly to you,’ Parker judged. ‘You must have left quite a lasting impression on her.’

‘Well, I stopped her from killing her father,’ I said. ‘That would tend to stick in anyone’s mind.’ I shook my head sadly. ‘They should have got some serious help for her back then. Who knows how differently she might have turned out?’

‘Some people just don’t want to be helped.’

Parker’s cellphone buzzed and he slotted his Bluetooth headset in place before he took the call. I realised he’d been waiting for it, hence taking the bridge rather than the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, where the signal would have been non-existent.

‘Bill,’ he said shortly. ‘Go ahead.’

He seemed to spend the next few miles listening more than talking, his face growing darker all the while. When he finally ended the call, he took the headset off and chucked it onto the dash in frustration.

I raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m assuming that wasn’t good news.’

‘Bill can’t find anything on Trevanion,’ he said. ‘And I mean anything. Fake name, fake addresses, fake references. No record of him with Immigration. Zip. Looks like he’d created a legend for himself that would stand up to initial scrutiny, but as soon as we dug down a layer, it all collapsed.’

‘Shit.’

‘Yeah, that’s about the size of it,’ he agreed with a little sideways glance. ‘That’s not all. This guy’s good – good enough to hack into a secure comms network and traffic light control programs. Bill said by digging around he’s triggered some kind of alert in the system.’

‘Shit,’ I said again, with a touch more feeling this time. ‘So he knows we’re onto him.’

He might kill Dina and run, just to cut his losses …

‘There’s ten million at stake,’ Parker said tightly. ‘He won’t cut and run now. This is what he’s been working toward.’

I wished I shared his confidence.

We headed east out of the city, against the traffic and into a fresh sun rising weakly from the ocean as if waterlogged by last night’s storm.

Dina had now been kidnapped for forty-four hours.

The deadline was ten hours away.

I cursed again the chance meeting that had caused me to open up to Hunt. ‘But how did he know where to find me?’ I wondered aloud into the quiet interior of the vehicle, and caught the twitch of Parker’s head in my direction. ‘The more I think about it, the more I can’t believe it was coincidence, him just happening to turn up as I was leaving Orlando’s parents’.’

‘You think he might have slipped a tracker on you?’

‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ I said. ‘Mind you, he didn’t have to bother doing that with Torquil’s ransom, did he? Gleason had two trackers on me then – one on me and one on the money. If Hunt’s so clever he can interfere with traffic lights, I’m sure he could have hacked into the GPS system and followed me that way.’

Parker’s face was grave. ‘All the company vehicles have on-board trackers in case of theft,’ he said. ‘If he’s activated this one, he knows exactly where you’ve been over the past twenty-four hours, and who you’ve talked to.’

‘There’s one person I didn’t meet at a known location,’ I said. ‘One person Hunt couldn’t know for certain I’ve been in contact with.’ Parker merely raised an eyebrow in my direction. ‘Ross. At least, I bloody well hope he doesn’t know – for all our sakes.’

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

‘He’s not going to call, is he?’ Caroline Willner said quietly.

We were gathered tensely in the living area at the Willners’ house. Beyond the wall of glass was a dull grey sky, specked with seagulls squabbling over the heaped kelp and general detritus that marked the edges of the tideline.

It was ten minutes past four o’clock in the afternoon. Ten minutes past the deadline the kidnappers had set. Ten minutes past the time we should have received detailed instructions about the ransom drop.

‘With this much cash at stake? He’ll call,’ Brandon Eisenberg said, his voice more confident than his tightly clasped hands would suggest. His wife had stayed away this time, I noticed, although Gleason was in attendance, taking up her usual position just behind his chair.

I wondered if Eisenberg felt guilt or vindication that he’d tried to palm off a paste copy of the Rainbow onto his son’s kidnappers. In the end, it hadn’t made any difference to the outcome. The boy was still dead.

But if they’d got their prize, would they have taken Dina so soon afterwards, and asked so much by way of retribution?

Parker glanced at me and said nothing. He’d spent the day fending off the authorities. I didn’t ask how Eisenberg himself had got them off his back. Made a few calls, probably. A guy like that always had a little black book of the right phone numbers.

When we’d got back to the house earlier this morning, we’d driven the Navigator straight into the garage and checked out the underside. Sure enough, we’d found a small magnetic GPS tracking device attached to the chassis where it was well hidden from our daily inspections. Nevertheless, I’d be beating myself up about missing it for some time to come.

I was beating myself up about so much at the moment that it could take a number.

If she dies, it’s on your head, Fox …

Bill Rendelson was currently trying to backtrack the signal from the tracker, but it was configured to fire off high-speed bursts of information that were almost impossible to follow – unless you were set up for the task.

Hunt, it seemed, had been one step ahead of us all the way.

He’d now had Dina for fifty-four hours, and the clock was still ticking.

I closed my mind to the fact that by the time Torquil had been gone this long, we knew for certain he was already dead.

I admit I was so tense that I jumped when my cellphone rang. I rose with a murmured apology for the interruption, moved across to the window. I didn’t recognise the number on the display, so I answered with a cautious, ‘Yeah?’

‘Uh, hi there, ma’am,’ said a man’s voice, careful and polite, a lifelong Brooklyn accent. ‘I’m tryin’a reach Charlie Fox. He there?’

‘Sort of,’ I said. ‘I’m Fox. Who’s this?’

‘Ah … oh,’ the man’s voice said, and I had the impression of his heart suddenly landing in his boots as whatever news he had to impart took on an added element of difficulty. ‘Well, ma’am, my name’s Officer O’Leary, from the Sixtieth precinct. We just picked up a gunshot victim, a young kid, asking for you.’

I said sharply, ‘A girl?’ Aware that Parker’s head had snapped round.

‘Uh, no,’ O’Leary said, caution forming around his words like frost. ‘Guy by the name of … um …’ I heard rustling as he leafed through his notebook, ‘… Ross Martino. You know him?’

‘Yes,’ I said faintly. ‘I know him.’ I reached automatically for the Navigator’s keys, which were still in my jacket pocket. ‘Which hospital? I can be there in—’

O’Leary gave a heavy sigh. ‘There’s no need to rush, ma’am,’ he said, and I heard years of weary experience in his voice. ‘Look, I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, but … the kid didn’t make it. It was a real nasty one, and by the time the paramedics reached him …’ I heard the shrug as he broke off. Wasn’t the first time he’d had to make this kind of call and no doubt it wouldn’t be the last.

‘Oh,’ I said blankly, mind reeling. Shit. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t really know him all that well. Can I ask … why are you calling me?’

Without any background to our relationship, O’Leary seemed taken aback.

‘Well, he seemed to think it was real important we contacted you,’ he said, with a note of censure. ‘Look, by the time we got there, he wasn’t makin’ much sense, y’know?’ He paused, obviously reassured enough by my claims of distance from the victim to expand. ‘He’d taken one in the gut. It was kinda messy, if you know what I mean?’

‘Yeah, I know,’ I murmured, remembering the shot the masked kidnapper – Hunt? – had aimed squarely into my own body. McGregor, Parker had told us, had lost his spleen and a part of his intestine as a result of his injuries. And I remembered, too, in a stark flash, Hunt’s apparently casual greeting when he’d engineered that meeting outside Orlando’s place.

‘You’re looking good …’

Yeah, not bad for someone he’d shot in the chest only a few days before.

I realised O’Leary was waiting for me to ask the obvious question, and hoping to avoid having to volunteer the information if I didn’t. I wasn’t about to let him off lightly.

‘So, what did he say?’

‘Well, it was kinda garbled,’ he admitted. ‘Like I said, he wasn’t makin’ much sense by then, and the medics, they was pumping him full of morphine. Something about lending somebody a horse?’ The furrows in his brow were almost audible as he spoke. ‘Then he mentioned something about Florida, and a casket. Did somebody close to him die recently? Horseback riding accident, maybe?’

‘Can you remember exactly what he said?’ I asked urgently, ignoring his query. ‘The exact words?’

‘Um, I guess,’ he said, so slowly I wanted to reach down the phone line and throttle him. ‘He definitely said about lending the horse, that I do recall. Or it mighta been horses.’

I made frantic writing motions and Parker immediately dragged a notebook and pen from his inside jacket pocket. I smiled briefly in thanks and scribbled down ‘lending/ Lennon?’ and ‘horse/s?’ Parker read the words over my shoulder and frowned.

‘What else?’

‘Well, I have to say I’m kinda hazy on the rest of it.’

I reined in a scream. ‘But he said Florida, specifically?’

‘Yeah, Orlando – and next fall. Maybe he was planning on a vacation he never got to take, huh?’

I ground my teeth for a moment, wrote down ‘Orlando’ and ‘fall’ below the other two words on the pad.

‘And he mentioned a casket?’ I persisted. That one got everyone’s attention and didn’t need much explanation, although I’d hardly dignify the rough-hewn box Torquil had been buried in by using such a term.

‘Casket, coffin – something like that. Yeah, I think so,’ O’Leary said.

‘Which was it?’

‘Hell, lady, I—’ He bit off whatever he was going to say, sighed again. ‘What’s the difference?’

‘Casket is American, coffin is English,’ I pointed out. There might be a big difference.

‘Listen, what’s going on here, ma’am?’ His voice was terse now. ‘This sounds kinda like something we should be aware of right now.’

‘It’s a federal case,’ I said, aware of sounding pompous. I softened it down by adding, ‘But you may just have given us a big break.’

‘For real?’ he said, all suspicion gone in the face of pride. ‘You be sure to tell that to my captain, huh?’

‘I will,’ I promised. ‘Oh, where was Martino found?’

‘Under the boardwalk down on Coney Island,’ O’Leary said. ‘He’d been worked over some, too, finished with a slug in the gut. I’d guess a thirty-eight or a nine. Kid was a mess all round.’

Poor bastard. ‘Well, thank you for letting me know.’

‘I’d say “you’re welcome”, but I guess this is not the kinda news anyone wants to hear, huh?’

‘No,’ I agreed, ‘but thank you anyway.’

I thumbed the ‘End Call’ button and sat staring at the brief notes I’d made for a second, until Eisenberg cleared his throat impatiently.

‘What the hell was that all about?’

‘Ross, the kidnapper I made contact with – the one who promised to help us catch whoever murdered your son,’ I said bleakly. ‘He’s just been shot dead.’

So, you’ll never get your new set of wheels now, Ross. Sorry, kid …

‘Sounds like our boy is cleaning house,’ Parker said. ‘Tidying up the loose ends.’

‘But, if he was one of the kidnappers …?’ Caroline Willner trailed off, her throat moving convulsively as she fought to keep her voice calm. ‘What’s going to happen to Dina?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. I added ‘casket/coffin’ to the list and read the apparently disconnected words, backwards and forwards, trying to get the gist. ‘But I think Ross was trying to tell us.’

Why the hell couldn’t you have been more coherent? I cursed heartlessly, but I remembered all too clearly what it was like to be shot. To experience such intense pain that it totally consumes you, blanks out everything around you until there’s nothing in the world but you and the agony, and even the prospect of dying seems welcome, because then it will stop. I don’t recall I said much at the time that anyone could have understood clearly.

But still, whatever internal sense of cruelty I might possess was squashed by the image of what Dina might be going through, right now. I thought of her terror at confined spaces.

If he’s buried her …

‘Horses,’ Parker said, eyes on my face as if he knew exactly what I was thinking. ‘Dina’s horses?’

‘What about the riding club?’ Caroline Willner asked abruptly. ‘Clearly he knows that Raleigh now has Dina’s horses, or he would not have been able to lure her away with that message.’

‘Surely the place is too busy,’ Parker argued. ‘Horses have to be looked after full-time, don’t they? There would always be people around.’

‘But there’s acres of space out on the cross-country course,’ I realised. I grabbed my phone again, dialled the riding club office. After our visits there, it was already programmed in, as were numbers for everywhere Dina had visited on a regular basis. I fervently hoped I wouldn’t have cause to delete them all just yet.

The number rang out twice, then the answering machine picked up with Raleigh’s cheery greeting that everyone was busy having a great time away from the phone right now, and anyone enquiring about livery or lessons should leave their name and number after the beep.

I rang off without doing so. ‘Answer machine.’

‘It’s still worth checking out,’ Parker said.

He had that closed-down look, I noticed, as if all his muscles had bunched in on themselves. It was a look I’d seen in Sean many times, when we were about to go into action. An economy of movement, a sureness of purpose, focus. Intent.

‘I’m coming with you.’

I turned to find Caroline Willner had risen and was standing very still and straight by her chair.

‘Mrs Willner, that’s not—’ Parker began.

‘I know,’ she cut across him, imperious. ‘But nevertheless, I’m coming with you.’

‘You’ll slow us down,’ I said, making it cold because it was the only way to make it hit home.

She flinched a little at that, but drew herself up to her full height and stared back at me. ‘The life of my daughter may be at grave risk because the man holding her believes I cannot pay the ransom,’ she said, hitting back on the point of a nerve with matchless precision. ‘I think you can trust me not to get in your way, but I will see this through. Now, we’re wasting time.’

Eisenberg cast her an admiring glance. ‘I’m going, too,’ he said, thrusting his chin out. Gleason’s expression went from smug at our troublesome client, to consternation as the tables were turned on her.

‘Sir, I really don’t—’

‘Stow it,’ he told her. He retrieved a set of keys from his trouser pocket and jingled them with a grim smile. ‘Lucky I decided to give the new Aston a run-out today, huh?’ he said. He glanced at Gleason’s furious face, at Caroline Willner’s pale determination, and heaved a sigh.

‘OK,’ he said at last, lips twisting in a rueful grimace. ‘I guess I didn’t get where I am by sending the wrong guy out to do the job.’ He threw the keys across to Parker, who caught them one-handed, almost snatching them out of the air. ‘You driven paddle-shift before?’

‘Yes, I have,’ Parker said, and tossed the keys over to me instead. ‘But Charlie will be faster.’

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

If Brandon Eisenberg was a little twitchy at the thought of letting loose a six-litre V12, on damp roads, with a girl behind the wheel, he manfully constrained the bulk of his dismay. The car was a brand-spun four-door Aston Martin Rapide, with oodles of torque and a top speed in excess of 180 mph. About the same as an average sports bike, but at roughly twenty times the cost.

Nevertheless, when I slid into the cream leather bucket seat and fired up that rasping great engine, I could entirely understand the appeal. The interior still had that fresh-offthe-cow, new-car smell.

Parker had ordered Erik Landers to stay behind and man the phones, just in case the kidnappers did decide to call. But at this moment Landers was eyeing the gleaming dark-green Aston and not exactly looking overjoyed at the prospect of being left behind.

‘We’ll be right behind you,’ Eisenberg said, nodding to Caroline Willner. He leant into the open doorway and added more quietly, ‘Let’s go find this kid alive, huh?’

‘We don’t even know we’re on the right track,’ Parker warned from the passenger seat. ‘This could all be a wild goose chase.’ He had argued against taking civilians along, as much as Gleason, but to no avail. The rich were too used to getting their own way.

Eisenberg shrugged. ‘It’s better than waiting around here.’ He straightened, glanced across at his stony-faced bodyguard who was standing by the Navigator. ‘Quit whining and get your ass moving, Gleason.’

I shut the heavy door on her furious scowl and snicked the gears into first. The transmission dropped in, firm and precise, and then we were rolling.

I waited until we were out onto the road before I booted it, catching Parker in mid sentence. He went abruptly silent as the big car squatted down and wriggled its hips, wrestling to put all that grunt down through the fat rear tyres, while a giant hand punched us back in our seats.

‘I know I said you’d get us there fast, Charlie,’ Parker said when he could speak again, ‘but try to get us there alive, too.’

I took my eyes off the road just long enough to flash him a small hard smile. ‘Just wanted to show you that all those driving courses you sent me on haven’t gone to waste.’

‘OK! I’m convinced.’

It took a couple of miles of three-figure speed and slingshot overtaking manoeuvres before he began to relax, I noticed. Parker had not driven much in Europe, whereas I’d experienced the German autobahns at full throttle. And the Aston had the kind of road-holding and handling characteristics – not to mention the sheer power delivery – that made driving gods out of men.

‘Even if the riding club is the right place,’ he said then, ‘where do we start looking?’

‘We take a ride round the cross-country course and look for disturbed earth,’ I said.

If he’s buried her …

I clung to the thought that Dina was not yet dead, that we stood a chance of getting to her in time. But burying her alive, when she had a phobia of enclosed spaces, and was horrifyingly aware of what had happened to the last victim, might be enough to send her over the edge.

The guilt was a solid mass, pressing down on me, threatening to crush my chest until I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, for the weight of it on top of me.

I pressed my right foot down a little harder and was rewarded by another surge of speed. The chasing Navigator, with Gleason behind the wheel, was already nowhere to be seen. Parker had all the company vehicles chipped for additional power and torque, but against this kind of supercar engineering, she may as well have been pedalling it.

‘So, what’s with the mention of Orlando, and the fall?’ Parker asked, unconsciously bracing himself against the centre transmission tunnel.

The half of my brain that wasn’t occupied with controlling the Aston flipped back to the day of the abortive kidnap attempt on Dina at the riding club, when I’d used Cerdo to kick out at Ross. If I’d known then that the one with the PlastiCuffs – the one I’d put on the ground first – was Lennon, the ringleader, I would have made sure he stayed down. Permanently.

Hunt had been there, as had Orlando. She’d been out on the cross-country course with that fine-boned little Arab horse of hers. It didn’t look robust enough to survive a round with fixed timber fences and, indeed, the horse had come back with a swollen knee from clattering against something solid …

‘It could be that we’re looking at this wrong,’ I said quickly. ‘It may not be the fall, but just a fall. Orlando had a fall, the last time she did the course. I wonder where?’

‘You’re reaching, Charlie,’ Parker said, doubtful.

‘Ross gave us this practically with his last breath, and for all we know, finding it out was what got him killed,’ I said, blasting past a slow-moving RV and just managing to dart back into my lane through a disappearing gap between that and an oncoming Kenworth. ‘If you can suggest a better place to start looking, I’m all bloody ears.’

The Navigator stood no chance of catching up with us now. Well, good. It was one less thing to worry about – two less things, if I counted Eisenberg as well as Caroline Willner.

‘OK, OK,’ Parker said, and I realised he’d gone quiet again during the last manoeuvre. ‘But for the moment, please, just drive.’

I totally ignored the signs welcoming careful drivers on the driveway leading to the riding club, spraying the verges with gravel on every turn. It certainly didn’t make for a stealthy approach.

So much so, that when I pulled up close to the stable yard, the Aussie instructor, Raleigh, was waiting for us by the gate, arm in a black sling, looking highly pissed off.

‘Hey, Pom!’ he shouted as soon as we climbed out of the car. ‘What the bloody hell d’you think you’re doing, driving up here like that, mate? You trying to scare half the horses to death or what?’

‘Where’s Hunt?’ Parker demanded, and though he didn’t raise his voice, he didn’t need to. He had an innate air of natural command that had Raleigh’s attention instantly diverted.

‘W-what?’ He jerked the thumb of his unbroken arm over his shoulder. ‘He’s out on the cross-country course. Said as he knew the course was out of use for a few days while the new sod beds in, he’d come to fix up one of the fences that Orlando busted last time she went round. I told him he didn’t need to, but he’d brought his mate over with a ute and all the gear.’

I felt the jolt of it go through Parker. It must have done, because it hit me hard enough to make my nape prickle.

‘How long ago?’ My turn to fire off a question. I clearly didn’t have Parker’s touch, though, because Raleigh just gaped at me. I reached under my jacket and pulled out the SIG. That seemed to get his notice. I felt my voice rising. ‘How long ago did he go out on the course?’

‘I dunno. About an hour, maybe. I’ve been busy in the yard,’ he gabbled. ‘Now look here, Pom, what the bloody hell’s this all about?’

‘Where?’ I snapped instead. ‘Which fence?’

I saw his colour start to rise in temper, and was close to losing my own when Parker stepped between us.

‘Dina’s been kidnapped and we believe Hunt may have her,’ he said, the tone of his voice leaving no room for not taking this seriously. ‘We need to find him, and we need to find him now.’

Raleigh’s colour ebbed away. ‘Jeez, mate. I dunno. He said it was over on the far side somewhere. I wasn’t really taking note. Look, there’s a map in the tack room.’ He wheeled away. ‘Come have a look for yourself.’

We hurried after him and found that, in keeping with the riding club’s upscale facilities, the map was actually a large framed satellite image, with the track of the course plotted and the obstacles clearly identified at every point. I was impressed and dismayed in equal measure.

‘Wow, I didn’t realise it was this big.’

‘Yeah, I spent a couple of years in the UK, studying course design – Badminton, Burghley, Gatcombe,’ Raleigh said, justifiably proud. ‘If you take the difficult route, it’s well up to international standard.’

‘My God,’ Parker murmured. ‘Where do we start?’

But one fence caught my eye. Leapt out at me in stark clarity. I stabbed a finger on the course map.

‘That one!’

‘You’re reaching again, Charlie,’ Parker warned tightly.

‘No, I’m not,’ I said, already starting to move. ‘Look at the name of it.’

As soon as I’d seen it, Ross’s cryptic dying warning made perfect sense.

The fence was called The Coffin.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

The Aston Martin may have been an utterly brilliant car on the road, but it wouldn’t have gone more than a few metres off it. Last night’s rain had turned the ground slick. The grass was so soft in places that just to walk on it broke through to liquid mud underneath.

Raleigh insisted we take the club runabout – the GMC pickup he’d used as a tow vehicle to collect Dina’s horses. It was sitting on the yard with half a dozen fence posts and a bale of straw stacked in the back. We drove out of the yard making a beeline for the far side of the course, and The Coffin. If the size of some of the other fences we passed on the way were anything to go by, it was going to be just as scary as its name suggested.

Back when I’d had horses of my own as a teenager in Cheshire, I’d never ridden beyond inter-county level, with the fences smaller and less well nailed together than these. But even so, coffins had never been my favourite.

They were a three-part obstacle with a straightforward rail in that tricked you into approaching too boldly, but the landing surface dropped away unexpectedly. At the bottom of the slope was the lined ditch that gave the fence its name, then usually a single stride back uphill to another rail.

Get the first element wrong and there was very little chance of recovery. It was a test of rhythm and control on the part of the rider, and bravery and fitness on the part of the horse.

The Coffin on the riding club course was possibly at the furthest point away from the stable yard and any chance of disturbance or discovery. Without Ross’s garbled warning, we would never have had any reason to look for it.

The natural landscape had that slightly too-perfect look about it that made it certainly artificial. The whole place had been reshaped to provide changes in elevation, and planted with trees to make the approaches to obstacles sudden and surprising. When Raleigh had been let loose to design this course, it seemed they’d given him an open chequebook and he’d taken full advantage of the fact.

Now, we bumped over the rough ground, slithering despite the four-wheel drive, following a set of similar tracks to our own.

‘Should be just past that next bunch of trees up on the left,’ Parker said, tense, reading from the pocket version of the map, which Raleigh had given us. ‘Stop here, Charlie, and we’ll go in on foot. We don’t want to spook him.’

I pulled the pickup a little closer to the shelter of the trees and cut the engine. The sudden silence was broken as Parker pulled out the Glock he carried and racked a round into the chamber.

He glanced across, a question in his eyes, and I realised that this was the first time I’d been into a situation alone with him. On a rational level he completely understood that I was up to the job, but purely on an emotional level, that was another matter.

‘You don’t have to worry about me, Parker,’ I said tightly. ‘Just stay out of my line of fire.’

He nodded, a flicker of a smile lingering around his eyes, and we both climbed out, dropping down lightly onto the grass. Parker reverted to hand signals immediately, indicating we split up round the trees to approach from different angles, then loped away, moving with a stealth and speed that did not fit with his suited attire.

I skirted the copse as fast and quiet as I could, keeping my own SIG out and ready. I could smell fresh earth and wet leaves, hear birds squabbling in the branches overhead, the drip of residual water from the leaves. Apart from that, it was quiet as the grave.

So, into that peaceful background rustle, the crack of a single gunshot somewhere ahead of me was loud and shocking.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

I abandoned any attempts at stealth and ran. As I knew from experience, the noise of an unsuppressed gunshot would cause a temporary hearing shift in those at close proximity. It should be more than enough to mask the sound of our approach.

I hoped Parker was taking advantage of that fact, too. And I realised, much as he had reservations about me, I was just as unsure of him. I’d been in so many tight spots with Sean that it was as though we worked by some kind of psychic link, knowing instinctively what the other was thinking, how they would react, what they would or would not do.

Parker, by the very nature of his position, no longer spent much time in the field. Hell, he didn’t even carry his sidearm with a round ready in the chamber …

As I neared the far side of the trees, I slowed, moving at a sideways crouch and leading with the SIG, straining to hear above the pounding of my heart. I took a couple of deep breaths to steady my aim, and edged closer, forcing myself to trust that Parker was mirroring my advance.

And then, beyond the branches, I caught sight of colour and movement. A man, standing in the back of a pickup, shovelling earth through the open tailgate. He was working fast and furtive, head down with the effort of his labours, putting his back into it.

Hunt.

I stilled, eyes sliding around me. Raleigh had said he wasn’t alone, so where was Lennon? And what about the gunshot we’d heard? Had Hunt decided to give Dina the mercy of a quick and relatively painless death rather than the long slow agony of suffocation?

I clamped down hard on that thought. If she was dead, then I had failed utterly.

Soft-footed now, cautious, I moved forward, right arm straight and left locked in to support it, keeping the SIG canted up so the centre of Hunt’s body mass stayed firmly in my sights. He had stripped down to a plain white shirt and rolled back his sleeves. The shirt was glued to his back with sweat, and was thin enough that I could tell he wore no protective armour underneath it.

Mind you – this time, neither did I.

As I cleared cover, I saw that Hunt had backed the pickup down to one end of the ditch element of the obstacle, and was currently filling it in with frantic haste. He bent again, his back still towards me. I reached the first rail part of the fence. It came up to my waist, telegraph-pole thick and forbidding.

And as I looked over it, down the slope, I saw a piece of cloth sticking out of the new earth in the ditch. Not just cloth, but the leg of a pair of trousers. More than that, a half-bent knee. I froze.

Dina?

And as the thought formed, I dismissed it. The leg was the wrong size, the wrong shape. Male …

‘Hello, Charlie!’

Disappointingly, Hunt’s voice did not sound in the least surprised at my sudden appearance. What surprised me about him, however, was the fact that all trace of his British accent had disappeared.

He’d straightened while my attention had been momentarily distracted by the body, and instead of the long-handled shovel, he was now gripping a silvered semi-automatic, probably a Colt, with self-assurance and familiarity. I remembered the almost casual way he’d shot McGregor in the gut during Dina’s abduction. Another good reason to kill him.

‘So, absolutely nothing about you is for real, huh?’ I said. ‘Not even your voice.’

‘Fooled you, though, didn’t I, Charlie? You swallowed that bullshit tale about Oxford and fox-hunting without a flicker.’

I remembered my doubts about his accent, the first time we’d met. I’d put it down to elocution lessons, or snobbery. My mistake.

I focused on him, avoided looking round too obviously. Where the hell is Parker?

‘I don’t suppose you believe for a moment that I’ve come alone,’ I said cheerfully, not lowering my own weapon.

He laughed. ‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘You’re certainly arrogant enough.’

‘You’ve room to talk.’

‘Yes, I suppose I have. Is this the point where I’m supposed to ask how you found me?’

‘Ross,’ I said. ‘If you’re going to shoot someone, you really should learn how to make it count.’

He pulled a wry face and gestured towards the body half-covered in earth below him. ‘As you can see,’ he said, ‘I’ve been practising.’

‘Lennon, I assume. Not very loyal to your associates, are you …?’ I paused. ‘What do I call you, anyway? I assume the name Hunter Trevanion is as fake as everything else about you?’

‘It was OK for a while,’ he agreed. ‘I’ve already got something better lined up to step into. A whole new life. Not quite as comfortable as it should have been, but hey …’ he shrugged, ‘… you win some, you lose some.’

‘Why cut and run so early?’ I said. ‘What about the ten million you asked for Dina?’

‘The ten million you told me Caroline Willner hadn’t a hope in hell of raising, you mean?’ he queried, derisive. ‘The secret of gambling is knowing when to fold a losing hand, Charlie, and although I say so myself, I’m a very good gambler.’

‘In that case, you should have held your nerve a little longer before you chucked in your cards, Hunt,’ I said, adding a scornful edge. ‘Mrs Willner might not have the cash, but you told her to tap up Brandon Eisenberg and she did just that. There we were at four o’clock, with the money sitting waiting for you, and you never bothered to call.’

Emotions whipped across his handsome features, from disbelief through rage to a sudden twisted amusement. ‘No shit?’ he murmured. He eyed me cynically. ‘So, are you telling me you still want to make a deal?’

‘No,’ Parker’s voice said from the exit rail of the fence, popping up out of nowhere at the far reaches of Hunt’s peripheral vision. ‘I rather think the time for bargaining is over, don’t you?’

Hunt’s head snapped round, took in the shooter’s stance, the cool gaze, and knew Parker for the professional he was. Then he smiled again, almost to himself. ‘Oh, I don’t think that’s the case at all,’ he said lazily. ‘After all, I still have what you want, and I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that you don’t have much time.’

‘We’ve caught you standing over a half-filled grave, you little bastard,’ I said. ‘Do you honestly expect us to believe she isn’t in there?’

She’s alive. She has to be alive …

Hunt merely smiled at the betraying desperation in my voice. He was still pointing the Colt at me, but when he spoke, it was to Parker.

‘I think I’d put the gun down if I were you, old cock, because not only can you not take the risk that Dina might be buried somewhere else, but you know I’ll shoot the lady first.’

‘So?’ I challenged, trying to keep his attention on me, to give Parker his chance. What the hell are you waiting for, Parker? Can’t you tell all that shit about Dina is a bluff – where the hell else would she be?

Hunt laughed again, eyes still on me. ‘She doesn’t see it, does she?’ he asked. ‘It was pretty bloody obvious to everyone at the country club do who watched you two dance together that you’re desperate to get into her knickers, but she’s still pining for her vegetable lover and—’

The shot took Hunt in the side, just above his left hip, spun him round and knocked him back onto the pile of earth still in the back of the pickup. The gun went clattering from his fingers and clanged loudly against the metal side of the bed. A scatter of birds took to the air from the trees around us, shrieking their outrage.

We ran forwards. I ducked to retrieve the Colt while Parker kept his Glock firmly trained on Hunt. He had started to moan, hands clutching at the greasy wound.

‘You took your bloody time about that one,’ I said sharply, clicking the safety on the Colt and shoving it into my pocket. Boss or no boss, the adrenaline was surging. ‘Where else would Dina be, for fuck’s sake?’

Hunt, despite the pain, managed a gasping laugh. ‘What did I tell you? Still she doesn’t see it. Tell her, Parker. Tell her that’s not why you hesitated—’

‘Shut up,’ Parker said through his teeth, ‘or I’ll shoot you again.’

I could have told them both that I knew exactly why Parker had hesitated, but I wouldn’t give Hunt the satisfaction of being right. That Parker had been afraid of him getting off a shot at me if he did.

I put the SIG away, jumped up into the back of the pickup, and dragged Hunt closer to the edge of the tailgate. I half expected Parker to lift him down from there, but he just grabbed hold of the injured man’s ankle and yanked.

It was almost a metre to the ground, and Hunt landed with a solid, satisfying thump, but he refused to cry out.

Parker reached into his jacket and brought out a giant plastic tie-wrap. ‘They were in the truck we borrowed,’ he said when he saw my raised eyebrow. ‘I think they use them to hold the fences together. It should do the job.’

He looped the substitute PlastiCuffs round Hunt’s wrists and zipped them up tight, forcing his arms back behind him. The wound, I noticed, continued to bleed steadily, but I didn’t really care much about that. Parker flicked Hunt’s discarded jacket off the corner of the tailgate and packed that roughly under his belt to act as a dressing. An unnecessary kindness, in my view.

I picked up the discarded shovel and jumped down, reaching the half-filled ditch in a couple of strides. When I scraped the earth away from the body I’d seen, a young man was revealed, eyes still open and an expression of hurt surprise on his face. There was a small black hole just under his right eye, slightly deforming his features.

I didn’t recognise him, but I realised I’d never seen Lennon unmasked. When I checked his right arm, I found it had been bandaged, somewhat amateurishly, and had no doubt I’d find a gunshot injury lurking beneath.

When I reached down to drag him clear, he was still warm to the touch.

Parker jumped into the ditch alongside me and helped. With the body shifted, there was only a shallow covering of earth on top of another rough wooden box.

‘Dina!’ I yelled, but there was no reply. I shot Hunt a poisonous glare, but he had drooped over onto his side and his eyes were closed.

Between the two of us, Parker and I scraped the lid clear enough to get to the fastenings. I glanced at him, suddenly fearful, with a bleak rising memory of having been here before, standing over Torquil’s body that day on the beach.

‘Oh my God, have you found her? Is it Dina?’

We straightened sharply to see Caroline Willner approaching at a run across the sodden grass, Gleason and Brandon Eisenberg not far behind her. The noise of Parker’s gunshot, it seemed, had done a similar job of deadening our hearing.

Caroline Willner slithered to a stop at the top of the slope and gripped the rail as she stared down at us. There were splatters of mud on her skirt, and her shoes were ruined. Her face was death-mask white.

Eisenberg arrived, panting, while Gleason barely seemed out of breath. She took one look at the situation, and drew her own weapon to stand guard over Hunt. Maybe Parker would offer her a job, after all.

‘Are there any tools in the truck?’ I demanded. ‘We need a tyre iron or a crowbar – right now.’

It was Eisenberg who obeyed without questions, skirting carefully round Hunt’s body to open the cab door of the pickup. He pulled out a scuffed toolbox and yanked the handles apart. Inside, he quickly found a hammer, long flat-bladed screwdriver and a pry bar and jumped down into the trenches without a thought to his own thousand-dollar shoes.

The three of us attacked the lid of the coffin with a vengeance. It seemed to take for ever before the last of the screws tore loose, and we could finally rip the lid loose.

I took a deep shaky breath, and looked inside.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

Dina lay slightly on her side, her knees wedged hard against one side of the box, her back against the other. She was groggy, filthy, bleeding, in shock.

But alive.

Most definitely alive.

We lifted her out with great care. Her whole body was shaking and the tears streamed down her face, leaving tracks through the grime. There was a stained dressing covering the amputated part of her ear and, not to put too fine a point on it, she stank. Infection, I considered, was a very real possibility.

Caroline gathered her daughter in her arms and held on tight, rocking her like a child.