Private London

Chapter 86

Hannah Shapiro was dressed now.

Tight jeans tucked into knee-length chocolate-brown boots, a sweater, her hair tied back, make-up on. The transformation was amazing.

She was rubbing her right wrist, still red from the rough abrasion of the rope she had been tied with. Attention to detail. You have to admire that.

‘We know it was a set-up, Hannah. Tell us now what we need to know and it’ll go easier for you.’

‘I’ve done nothing wrong. You’ve made a mistake, Mister Carter.’

Mister Carter. Just like the mechanical voice had called me on the telephone. It had been her all along, laughing at us. Laughing at me.

I remembered the younger Hannah once more, sitting next to me on the flight over, discussing F. Scott Fitzgerald and teasing me. I realised the past wasn’t just another country, as another novelist once said. You can travel to another country but the past is a whole different life.

‘Where have they taken your father, Hannah?’ I asked.

She shrugged.

I felt like taking two steps forward and backhanding her across the face. My god-daughter had been hospitalised because of her. She’d had us dancing around like puppets while she jerked the strings and it made me angrier than I had felt for a long, long time.

She must have seen something in my eyes because she stepped back a pace.

Her eyes flickered nervously. There was still something wrong with the picture. But I couldn’t work out what.

‘You can talk to us, Hannah…’ I said. Her eyes flicked to Del Rio who was leaning against the wall and saying nothing.

He’d told me earlier that it was my play. He’d follow my lead. I didn’t think we’d need the good cop, bad cop routine. We had her cold and she knew it. Just a matter of time.

‘Or we can take you down to Paddington Green and you can talk to the cops,’ I continued.

‘He deserved it!’ she spat out finally.

‘Why?’

‘Why?’ Hannah shouted back at me, incredulous. ‘Why do you think, you dumb prick!’

Her West Coast accent had come back strongly now. ‘He refused to pay the ransom and my mother died. She died, Mister Carter! But not before I was made to watch her being raped. And then they shot her.’

She broke down in tears and I regretted the urge to slap her. I felt more like putting my arms around her. She was right in some ways. Maybe Harlan Shapiro did deserve a bit of payback. But not this.

‘My god-daughter nearly died,’ I said instead.

‘She wasn’t meant to get hurt. She wasn’t even meant to be there.’

‘Who were the others, Hannah? We know about Laura, but who were the others who were there?’

She shook her head. ‘I’m not going to tell you. I don’t care what you do. He deserved this. So he’s had a fright? Look what I had to go through.’

‘If anything happens to him, Hannah, you will be in a whole world more trouble than you’re in already.’

‘Nothing is going to happen to him,’ she said. But her eyes were darting around again and she was rubbing her scraped arm, unaware that she was doing it.

Hannah didn’t believe herself, either.

And that worried the hell out of me.