Private London

Chapter 93

Fifteen minutes later and we were back in front of Adrian Tuttle’s computer screen.

Adrian ran the kidnappers’ phone message to me through an audio sequencer and displayed a section in a waveform graphic.

Below the first graphic he ran a second piece of recorded audio and displayed it. This was the time Hannah had called me without benefit of voice distortion. The exact same phrase. Adrian aligned the two and they matched perfectly.

If I was enough of a contortionist I would have kicked myself. I had been puzzling over what had changed between Saturday night and Sunday morning and realised what it was. Harlan Shapiro was making the trip over. They hadn’t thought he would, given his past form. When he did, the goalposts were moved. The only person I had told that he was coming, outside of our own people, had been Professor Annabelle Weston.

I drummed my fingers on the table. Thinking. She had said she was going away on a conference. That was a lie. She was obviously moving Harlan Shapiro somewhere. And where was Laura Skelton?

I punched Del Rio’s number into the phone and told him to put Hannah on. Her voice was querulous, subdued.

‘I know what’s been happening, Hannah,’ I said. ‘And I know you had your reasons.’

‘You don’t know the half of it!’

‘I know I don’t. What happened to you was awful.’

‘Awful?’ She laughed, but it was a far from happy sound. ‘You really don’t know anything, do you?’

‘I know about you and Professor Weston, Hannah. I know she took advantage of you.’

She laughed again. It was a brittle sound.

‘She didn’t take advantage of me. I love her, Mister Carter.’

‘She was your tutor.’

‘She was my tutor and my counsellor and my lover and my friend! And I don’t expect you to ever understand.’

‘We need to know where she is. We need to get your father home safe.’

‘That’s exactly what we don’t need. That was what the million pounds was for. I was never going home.’

‘So what changed?’

Hannah hesitated. Not quite so strident now. ‘We figured it wasn’t enough. We figured five million was more like it.’

I doubted that she had done any of the figuring at all. She was just a pawn in somebody else’s game. I felt sympathy for her, for that much at least.

‘So where are they now, Hannah?’ I asked pointedly. ‘And why aren’t you with them?’

‘Plans change.’

I pictured her on the other end of the line, cradling the phone on her shoulder, rubbing her abraded wrist. Remembering how things had changed suddenly for her.

‘They hurt you, Hannah,’ I said softly. ‘They can’t be allowed to get away with that. They can’t be allowed to hurt your father.’

‘My father hurt me.’ The voice was almost a whisper. Under all the make-up and the clothes and the womanliness she presented to the world, she was still a small frightened girl at heart. A girl I had promised – and failed – to look after.

‘I know he did,’ I said. ‘And he’s sorry – he put his life on the line today for you. If he could go back to that other time he would do everything differently.’

‘I’m not talking about him not paying the ransom, Mister Carter. I’m not talking about him letting my mother be raped and butchered.’

Hannah’s voice had gone hard again and I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck.

‘He used to come to my room, Mister Carter,’ she said. ‘At night. We had to comfort each other, he said. There were just the two of us now… And he hurt me.’

I gripped the phone tight in my hand.

Seemed I had been wrong about pretty much everything.