Pitch Black: A Romantic Thriller (Blackwood Security Book 1) (31 page)

Bradley’s voice played in my head. “Emmy, you’re ruining the line of your jacket. It’s by Ishmael, and it wasn’t designed to be used as luggage.”

Nick called me just before ten.

“Did you know Luke had a conversation with the kidnapper before you got there?”

“No, I didn’t. Luke wasn’t exactly coherent last night when I tried to speak to him. What did the bastard say?”

“Something about Luke ruining his life. I’ll send over the recording. You’ll want to hear it for yourself.”

He knew me too well. That would have been my next request. “Thanks, Nicky.”

Upstairs in my office, I retrieved my laptop from the drawer it had been languishing in for three months. Sloane had been busy—my inbox only contained eleven emails, all dated today.

Did Sloane know I was back yet? Things had happened so quickly last night, I wasn’t sure anyone had mentioned it. I sent her a quick email to let her know.

When I took a closer look at the screen, I spotted a new folder she’d set up titled “Important – For Emmy to read when she comes back.” That held ninety-seven messages. At least she hadn’t assumed I was dead like everyone else had. It looked as if I needed to do some bedtime reading.

I ignored the emails for the moment and put my headphones on. The file from Nick had arrived already. I listened to it twice all the way through, then paused it again at the end, replaying the kidnapper’s comments several times more.

The kidnapper’s actions bugged me. When I saw him standing over Luke, I could have sworn he was about to pull the trigger. He’d had his finger on it for sure. But Luke was unconscious by that point. What would the bastard have achieved by killing him? Any “professional” kidnapper, and by that I mean one after an easy payoff, would have been long gone. Committing murder would complicate affairs to no end.

My gut said the kidnapper had a personal vendetta against Luke, and that was borne out by Luke’s memories. The kidnapper wanted Luke’s life? What were the main things in it? His work, sister, money, and at one time, me. My chest seized when I thought of what we once had.

The kidnapper almost took three of those pillars, and Luke, out of the picture. I wished he’d tried for the fourth. I’d relish the day that bastard came for me.

We needed to comb through Luke’s life for anyone with a grudge. Nick’s idea of starting with employees was a good one. For the time I’d been with Luke, he’d done nothing but work and hang out with me. But did he have anything else lurking in his past?

I sat in on Nye’s team briefing and added my thoughts at the end.

“We need to look for someone with a personal grudge against Luke. Try work, ex-girlfriends, their boyfriends, domestic staff. Everyone.” Everyone but Henry. He’d panned out as a lead—on the night of the ransom drop, he’d passed out in The Coach and Horses after being slapped by the barmaid.

“Family?” asked Nye.

“There’s only his mother and Tia. His mother’s a bitch, but she’d be shooting herself in the foot if she killed the golden goose.”

The team drifted off to their stations, ready to start work.

“Nye, you look shit,” I told him. “Get some sleep.” He’d been in the office for almost twenty-four hours.

“Someone needs to supervise the team.”

“I’ll do it.”

“You?”

“I think I’m qualified.”

The rest of the guys looked as surprised as Nye when I settled into the top seat in the control room. It had been years since I’d spent a whole day in there. So why now? I told myself it was helping in the hunt for Tia, but the truth was, I didn’t want to face Luke.

Was I being a coward? Hell yeah. I’d rather face the business end of a machine gun than my inner self, any day.

The curious glances of my staff as I called my contacts in the city were easier to deal with than a single moment with Luke. I didn’t enjoy the scrutiny, but after a while I tuned out the discomfort. They’d get bored with me after a day or two.

As I worked, I felt like a robot. Don’t think, don’t feel, just do. I missed the simplicity of my life with Luke. Why hadn’t I told him the truth in the first place? What if he’d known my true identity all along? Maybe, just maybe, there was a chance he’d have liked Emmy as well as Ash. Instead, I’d fucked up my first serious relationship in years, probably since Nick, in fact, with no chance of salvaging it. I mean, who would choose to continue a relationship based almost entirely on lies?

All I could do now was concentrate my efforts on finding Tia, then getting her safely back.

I missed Tia too. She’d been the sunshine in my life lately, making me smile in the evenings while I waited for Luke to get home. Was she keeping herself together? Was the kidnapper mistreating her? The thought of her being held prisoner had me planning ways to make him pay. And believe me, when it came to making lives a misery, my résumé was second to none. That reminded me, I needed to fit in some target practice.

Mid morning, the team who had gone to check on the stolen number plates returned. The registered owner was one Gabir Hassani, an Iraqi refugee according to Mack.

“He wasn’t there. His sister said he went home to visit their parents,” the operative told me.

“In Iraq?”

“He left over a week ago.”

“Any chance she was lying?”

My guy shrugged. “If she was, she did a good job of it. She showed us a family photo. Gabir Hassani’s missing his left arm and leg.”

Fuck. It may have been dark, but there was no way the man I chased through the woods had two limbs missing.

That avenue was a bust.

I spent the afternoon calling up old acquaintances and even went out to visit a couple. Nobody had heard a whisper about a kidnapping.

All the other leads evaporated too. We were chasing shadows.

No hospital in the south of England had treated a stab wound to an upper arm last night. That was disappointing, but at the same time, I hoped the kidnapper was in a lot of pain.

The tyre prints belonged to a common set of Goodyears, the perfect size for a transit van. You could buy them from almost any tyre fitter, and it would be an impossible task trying to trace them all.

I’d sent a team up to Lower Foxford. Six people had canvassed the village, and while four people thought they might have seen transit vans in the vicinity, none could give a description of the driver. A further two operatives were in Luke’s house and reported all was quiet there. They’d opened the mail but only found a credit card bill and a circular from the local Porsche dealership inviting Luke to a canapé party.

“The credit card bill’s interesting, though,” my man told me.

“How so?”

“The man goes to a tanning salon every week…”

Yes, thanks, I had noticed.

“And he spent a fortune on that holiday to the Bahamas. Even rented a private plane for the transfers. Are you still going?”

Luke was planning to surprise me with a holiday? Just when I’d thought I couldn’t feel any shittier, I did.

“Is there anything relevant to the case?” I growled at the guy on the other end of the line.

“What? Oh, no. Nothing at all.”

I wanted to hit something. Which reminded me, I needed to speak to Jimmy. I took a deep breath and forced myself to act professionally. None of this was my team’s fault.

“Send the canvassers back, would you? Keep one person with you at Luke’s, just in case. Make yourselves at home, but do me a favour and don’t drink the expensive wine.”

Next up, I needed to call Mack. I’d been putting that off.

She answered the phone with a stiff, “What can I do?”

Not her usual, “Hey, honey,” or even a “How are ya?”

I returned the sentiment. I didn’t know how to handle these situations, okay? “Could you take a look through Luke’s bank accounts?”

“Yes. Anything else?”

“You know the drill. See what else you can get into. Home computers, work network, anything interesting on the web.”

“Sure.”

“Thanks.”

Click.

Talk about strained. Mack had shown no inclination at all to chat, and usually she was the happiest, friendliest person you could imagine. I had a lot of bridges to mend. With that in mind, I fired off an email to Bradley, telling him I was back. If he was the last to find out, he’d never forgive me, but if I phoned him that would be the entire day gone. 

I hoped my last phone call wouldn’t be as painful as the one to Mack. I’d lived with Jimmy and his wife, Jackie, for almost two years, until just before my sixteenth birthday. He was the closest thing I had to a father.

“Amanda, that you?” he asked.

Few people knew me as Amanda. My birth certificate agreed with them, but I hated the name. I hated it because my mother chose it. And by chose it, I mean she opened a book of baby names and got bored before she’d got to the end of the “A”s. But Jimmy had always called me Amanda, and so I let it be.

“Yeah, it’s me,” I answered quietly.

“Blimey, girl, you had us worried the way you dropped off the face of the earth.”

“I needed to be on my own for a while. I’m sorry.”

“I get you, sweet thing, but next time you gotta promise to call Jimmy, you got it?”

“Hoping there won’t be a next time, Jim.”

“You won’t be replacing that husband of yours in a hurry then.” Jimmy said it as a statement.

“Doubt I’ll ever replace him. He was one of a kind.”

“That he was, girl. That he was. Now you know I wasn’t keen on him at first, but he grew on me over the years. He did you proud.”

Not being keen on him was a bit of an understatement from Jimmy. When my husband announced he wanted me to move to the States with him, Jimmy threatened to squash him like a bug. They were about the same size. It would have been an interesting match.

“I know he did,” I sniffed.

“No tears, girl. Gotta keep your chin up. You in town at the moment?”

“Yeah, working.”

“Well, try and fit in a few minutes to come see the two of us, if you can.”

“I’ll try, Jimmy. I’ll visit as soon as I can. I promise.”

Something else for my to-do list. At least Jimmy didn’t sound as unhappy with me as everyone else. Meanwhile I had to sort out this mess with Tia, so she and Luke could get on with their lives while I got on with mine.

Whatever was left of it.

Chapter 31

I WENT TO the gym in the office basement for an hour and felt better afterwards for having worked out some of my frustrations on the punch bags. Fuck knows, I had enough of them. Both frustrations and punch bags. Afterwards, I took a shower to rid myself of the sheen of sweat that covered me then grabbed a sandwich from the staff canteen on my way back to the incident room.

Turkey salad on rye. Toby’s directives had obviously reached the office. I longed for a meatball marinara sub, but I didn’t have time to go out and buy one.

I found the team sitting around the conference room table. From their glum faces, I could tell that frustratingly little had happened.

“Can you give me an update?” I asked.

“We’ve been through the employee files, but there’s little in there in the way of disputes,” a woman told me.

She’d joined just before I left. What was her name? Helena? Melanie? Normally, I remembered names, but I couldn’t think straight.