Behind Closed Doors (24 page)

As the barrier lifted, the guy behind the glass looked up and spotted me. I saluted and was returned a look of surprise. The guy hadn't expected to see me again. Knowing HP Logistics' shaky financial condition, he'd probably be scanning the job pages in a couple of weeks.

Maybe he could try for insurance assessor.

At three o'clock I was back in the office.

Shaughnessy was working on some stuff that had fallen behind. Lucy was out. I was at a loose end, lacking the file to close off the Rebecca Townsend job and not in the mood to go back to my company-exec telephone trawling.

I'd already called by at Gina Redding's and told her that her commission was closed. Explained that Eagle Eye hadn't been part of Rebecca's reappearance. Gina didn't care. What mattered was that the girl was okay and that Gina had done her duty. Without Eagle Eye she could have done nothing. The second thing she'd been pleased to hear was that Rebecca's abductors had been caught, though I don't know if “caught” quite covered Ray Child's predicament.

I'd angled my Herman Miller way back and was reclining in an indecisive daze behind my desk when Shaughnessy came through and flopped into a club chair.

‘Are you going to talk to them, Eddie?' he asked.

I nodded. ‘I want to close off the Tina Brown thing. I figure Larry will talk now.'

Shaughnessy looked sceptical. ‘The track record isn't good,' he said.

‘Slater already knows he's going to have to give everything to the police,' I said. ‘He's the closest link to Tina Brown. He can't keep the thing quiet any more.'

We heard steps on the stairs. The outer door opened and Lucy came trotting through.

‘Hey, you guys are heroes! You got the girl.'

‘We didn't get the girl, Luce,' I pointed out. ‘The Slaters paid the ransom and Rebecca was sent home. It was nothing to do with us.'

‘But you got the villains,' she said. ‘You've stopped this happening to anyone else.'

‘That's true,' I said. ‘It's not quite what Gina Redding was looking for, but she seemed happy.'

‘Happy enough to pay the bill?' Lucy's eye was on the bottom line.

‘She's happy enough,' I said.

‘Great. So we can pay the water people. Maybe even me.'

‘Sure,' I said. ‘We'll pay you everything, Luce, maybe a bonus.' I was throwing money around today.

Maybe my insurance company would even throw some money my way and I could get some new wheels, save the rental that was draining into ValuDrive's pockets for the privilege of driving their shit-heap.

The phone rang in the outer office and Lucy went to take it. She came back in a hurry.

‘It's Jean Slater,' she said.

Life never stops surprising you. Shaughnessy and I looked at each other.

I reset my Herman Miller and went out to take the call.

If I was expecting to hear grateful on the other end I was in for a surprise. I heard panic.

‘Mr Flynn?' Jean Slater's voice was urgent. ‘Something's happened. We need to see you.'

The Citroen stalled twice before I got to the street but I coaxed it back to life and progressed on three and a half cylinders towards Swiss Cottage. I tried to jump the crawling traffic on the main road but whenever I put my foot down I hit a flat spot. The Citroen bucked and lost power and the slow traffic overtook me with horns blasting. Twenty five minutes of white-knuckle cursing got me to Hampstead.

The house door opened before I was out of the car. Tears streaked Jean Slater's face as she urged me in to where Larry was sat in the lounge. I looked at him. Yesterday's assertiveness was absent. Now Jean was the one making the play. She didn't wait for me to ask.

‘Rebecca's gone,' she said.

She picked up a sheet of paper from the coffee table. It trembled in her hand as she handed it over. Larry stayed quiet on the sofa, his face a mixture of disapproval and confusion. Two sentences were scripted in red felt-tip across the paper:

‘We thought she was sleeping,' Jean said, ‘but when I went into her room I found the note.'

‘Have the police been to see you yet?' I asked.

She shook her head. ‘They told us they would be here this afternoon or early evening.'

‘Did they tell you what they wanted to talk about?'

Jean nodded wearily. She was still staring at the note in my hands. ‘They know about Rebecca's abduction. They've caught the people responsible.'

I nodded. ‘They've got the main guy. A man named McAllister.' I looked from the note to Larry Slater. The name still produced no reaction.

‘What you told me yesterday about Rebecca being ill...' I said. ‘We're not pretending anymore?' I was looking at Larry but Jean answered for him.

‘We're not pretending anything anymore,' she said.

‘What has Rebecca been doing since yesterday?'

‘Nothing. She just stayed in her room.'

‘Did she come out for meals?'

‘She's hardly eaten since we got her back,' Jean said. ‘She only came down for half an hour this morning because my sister called.'

Kathy Pope.

‘Does your sister know what's been going on?'

Jean shook her head. ‘She was here before we got the call from the police. We were still trying to keep it quiet. Kate noticed that Rebecca looked off-colour but we told her that she was recovering from flu.'

‘What else did Rebecca do today? Did she mention going out?'

‘No. She's just stayed in her room listening to her music. She wouldn't let me in to talk. She didn't eat lunch.'

‘How has she reacted to what's happened?'

Jean looked away. ‘I thought she was okay. She was emotional at first when they brought her back. She assumed we'd call the police right away. We had to explain how these people could still hurt us if we didn't stay quiet. Rebecca wanted us to tell the police anyway but Larry managed to dissuade her.'

‘Rebecca talked to Sadie yesterday,' I said. ‘Did she talk to anyone else?'

‘She may have done. She had her phone. Now it's switched off.'

‘Might she be with Sadie?'

‘No. I've already called her. Gina Redding too. She's not with them.'

‘When exactly did you last see her?'

Jean Slater tried to pull her thoughts together but her mind hit a dead end.

Larry Slater spoke for the first time, ‘Jean went up at twelve. Rebecca spoke to her but wouldn't come out of her room. Then my wife went up about an hour later to break the news that the police had contacted us. That's when she found the note.'

So the girl had been gone three hours.

‘Rebecca probably needs some time alone,' I said. ‘She may be on her way to Sadie's right now.'

‘The note doesn't sound like that,' Jean Slater said. ‘I'm frightened to death she might do something foolish. If she was going to see Sadie she would have called her!'

‘Has Rebecca ever tried to hurt herself?'

Jean shook her head. ‘She's not that kind of girl. She's highly strung but she's sensible.'

Maybe sensible wasn't enough this time. Even the strongest person would find something lacking when they got home from their nightmare to face the Slaters' wall of denials. Before the police contacted them the Slaters had been fixated on hiding the abduction. Maybe for Rebecca being in the house was worse than being alone. My guess was that she'd gone off to take a breather. Anywhere but this house. She probably just needed time to catch up. I didn't know the girl or how badly she was hurting so it was just guesswork. Mostly though, I didn't know why Jean Slater had called me. This was nothing to do with what went before. Eagle Eye weren't in the social services business, just like I'd told Sadie Bannister right at the start. But Jean was looking at me with a desperation in her face that was hard to disregard.

‘Is there any way you can find her?' she asked. ‘I want her home.'

Needles in haystacks – Eagle Eye's speciality. One girl. The whole of London. Barely a hunch.

I looked at the misery in Jean Slater's face.

‘I'll see what I can do,' I said.

The whole of London. One girl. The thing might daunt some. But sometimes you get lucky. My hunch panned out; I found Rebecca in twenty minutes.

I parked the Citroen in the Inner Circle of Regent's Park by the College and walked across the road. The café was just closing up but there were a few customers still inside. Rebecca had a table by the window under the trees. She was nursing a cappuccino that had gone cold a couple of hours ago. She looked up when I came across and her face pulled up a tired smile.

‘Mr Flynn,' she said. There was no surprise in her voice. As if she'd taken it for granted that someone would find her. More likely it was just indifference. I sat down.

‘How are you doing, Rebecca?'

She took her time, continued watching the world outside. She'd fixed herself up. Her hair had lost yesterday's dull stringiness. It was washed and flowing over her shoulders in a gleaming black river. Her face was what her mother's would have been two decades earlier, skin so clear it was almost translucent. But the unhappiness in her eyes was plain to see. What had happened in the last week had taken its toll.

The two of us watched the trees for a while.

There were a couple of grey squirrels darting around in the branches. I recalled a day trip from Yorkshire when I was a kid, feeding the same squirrels on an autumn afternoon in Hyde Park before heading back to King's Cross.

Different time, different world.

‘Did Sadie really go hiring a private eye?'

Now I was the one lost in thoughts. When I pulled my attention back Rebecca was watching me. The clouds had drawn back for a moment. This was the one thing she could hang on to. A world where you could depend on crazy friends.

I hid my grimace in a smile. ‘Your friend seemed to have picked up the idea that she could just walk into our office and have half a dozen heavies on your tail. Sadie's an interesting girl.'

The clouds stayed parted. ‘Yeah,' Rebecca conceded, ‘She's okay. Just a little nutty.'

Nutty! Finally I could give Lucy exact instructions. Keep the nuts out of my office.

‘She was going to pay us out of her ninety-day account,' I said. ‘I didn't ask how much she'd got in there.'

Rebecca's eyebrows arched as she dug for the information. ‘Probably a bit over three hundred?' she told me.

Three hundred! So Sadie would have shafted us after all!

‘Luckily,' I said, ‘your friend Gina had a little more capital. And she went along with Sadie's idea that someone should find out what you were up to.'

‘Yeah,' she said. ‘At least someone cared.'

‘Your family cared, Rebecca. I think they've been through hell.'

She said nothing.

‘Did those people hurt you?'

She shook her head. ‘They just chained me up. Left me to rot. One guy really scared me, though.'

Ray Child. Not someone you'd leave your kids with. My guess was that the only thing that had reined him in from harming his charges was that McAllister's scheme depended on the kids staying safe. It would be difficult to keep the families quiet if their children were brought home hurt or raped. The problem was that Rebecca hadn't known about the scheme. Having Ray Child as a jailer for ten days was not an experience any young girl would appreciate.

‘Did they feed you okay?'

Now it was Rebecca's turn to grimace. ‘Crap. Cold pizza. Sandwiches. Soft drinks. I got so I was nearly throwing up. They had soap and water but the water was cold. And I had to use one of those chamber pots. That was the worst thing. That and the way the guy kept looking at me. I wasn't sure if he was going to do more than just look.'

Ten days with some very unpleasant people. That's a hard thing to put behind you. But the hardest bit had probably been when Rebecca got home and was told to bottle it. That no one must know.

‘That must suck,' I said. ‘Your parents wanting to keep it a secret.'

Rebecca stayed quiet, staring at her coffee. Her voice was tiny when she spoke again.

‘That's all they're interested in. Pretending the whole thing didn't happen. Larry insists that the men will hurt us unless we keep quiet. So I'm supposed to lie to Sadie and Gina and everyone else.'

She looked at me. ‘I guess eventually they'll even convince themselves that it never happened. I told Larry no way I was keeping it quiet but my mother got in such a state I felt like I'd be hurting her if I let it out. That's what it comes down to, their own fears. Like they'd got a stolen car back. No scratches. No harm done. Don't call the insurance company. Keep the no-claims.'

The staff were cleaning up behind the bar. The last of the customers walked out. We were alone.

‘It's as if what happened didn't matter,' Rebecca explained. ‘When you came to the house yesterday we all just lied. Then the same thing when my aunt called this morning. She asked how I was and Larry started this whole thing about how I'd had the flu. We all had to pretend that nothing had happened. It's a little play we have to perform over and over. The story of how nothing happened to me.'

I saw a single tear expanding in the corner of her eye.

‘It's all over, Rebecca,' I told her. ‘That play won't be running. The secret is out.'

She looked at me.

‘The men who took you have been caught. They'd abducted another girl before you and they were planning more. But it's over. There's no longer a threat to your family. No need to keep the secret.'

She said nothing. Tried to take in what I was saying. Then her eyes went back to the world outside. The tear rolled down her cheek and fell.

‘Are they really caught?'

‘Really. The police have arrested the men involved.'

‘Was it you who caught them?'

‘We were involved. It's police business now. They'll be calling at your house later and they'll need to talk to you all. They aren't interested in any lies.'

‘But it was you who got them?'

We seemed to be stuck on this point.

‘You can thank Sadie,' I said. ‘She set us on the trail.'

The clouds drew back. The hint of a smile again, but there was still a shadow behind it.

‘Will we really be safe? Maybe they can get back at us some time.'

I shook my head. Reached across and took her hand. ‘Rebecca,' I said, ‘your family are of no interest to these people any more. They only needed to threaten you so that they were free to abduct other kids. That's all changed. The men won't be abducting anyone else.'

‘So they'll go to jail?'

I let go of her hand.

‘One of them will,' I said. ‘The big guy – the one who frightened you – had an accident last night. He didn't make it.'

She watched me.

‘It's over, Rebecca,' I repeated.

We waited for a while longer. The light was fading. The staff were moving in on us armed with mops.

‘How did you know I was here?' Rebecca asked.

I gave her my Sly Uncle. ‘I'm a detective. I analysed your note.'

Her mouth opened wide enough to drive a train through.

‘Bullshit!' she said.

These kids!

The woman wiping the table next to us gave us a look.

‘There was nothing in my note,' Rebecca hissed. ‘I was just angry. I wrote the first thing that came into my head and ran out of the back door. I didn't know where I was going myself.'

‘That's what the note told me,' I said. ‘That's how I knew where to come. You couldn't charge round to sob on Sadie's or Gina's shoulders because you thought the whole thing was still secret. Seeing them would have made things worse. You ran out with that secret bottled up inside you and nowhere to go.'

She was watching me like I was a mind-reader. One of the skills of the profession.