Death Comes First (30 page)

‘Yet you carried on working with him, and not once did you voice any doubts or fears, not a word of any of this to me,’ said Joyce. ‘To your poor bloody ignorant wife.’

She spoke quietly, thinking aloud.

‘I was sucked in.’ Charlie sounded desperate for her to accept his version of events. ‘Please, try to understand,’ he pleaded. ‘You’re his daughter. Once we had the house, and then the children came, what else could I do? Plus I knew everything. I knew it all by then. Henry wouldn’t have let me go, even if I’d tried
 . . .
’

‘What do you think he would have done, for God’s sake, taken out a contract on you? Had you shot?’

As she spoke, the grim reality of that day, the memory of the hospital visit she and her daughter had been about to make when they’d received Fred’s message, hit her. So much else had happened, she’d half forgotten. Crazy as it sounded, maybe there was some truth in what Charlie was saying.

‘As a matter of fact, I thought that was exactly what was going on,’ she heard Charlie say.

His voice was so strained. For a moment she wanted to reach out to him. Then she remembered what he had done.

She put her head in her hands. ‘Charlie, you don’t know, do you?’

‘Know what?’

‘Dad has been shot. He’s going to be all right. But he’s in hospital.’

‘Oh my God,’ said Charlie.

The remaining colour left his face. He didn’t ask any more questions. She had a nasty feeling he already had the answers.

‘Charlie, what changed for you?’ Joyce asked. ‘What made you decide you couldn’t take it any more? Tell me honestly, what made you stage your own death? What happened? What changed? And why that? Why do that?’

‘Well, I became more and more disillusioned, and more and more afraid for our children.’ Charlie gulped in a big breath of air, then continued: ‘I found out Henry was dealing in chemical weapons. Or at least, we were shipping out the chemicals used for making those weapons. To Iran, and worst of all to Syria. It’s more than likely our chemicals have been used in the barrel bombs Assad has been using. Chlorine to make chlorine gas. It’s reckoned twenty thousand Syrians may have died from attacks with chemical-laden barrel bombs since the conflict began there in 2011. That was too much for me to take in.

‘Chemical warfare is banned by international law, so I threatened to go to the authorities. But ultimately I let Henry talk me round. Like always. You see, Henry Tanner reckons he is above the law. And maybe he is.’

Joyce was horrified. ‘I don’t believe my father would do
that. I don’t believe he would be involved in something so terrible. In any case, why? How?’

‘I’ve told you why,’ snapped Charlie. ‘Money. And power. As for how, well, the Tanner-Max set-up is geared to transport illicit material around the world, and the pathways are smoothed by those in high places who pull Henry’s strings.’

‘Who are these people?’

Charlie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Only Henry had direct contact. Secret Services, the Foreign Office? Bit of both, probably.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Joyce. ‘I can’t believe it. It’s all too far-fetched.’

‘That’s as maybe,’ said Charlie. ‘Believe what you like. But that’s the business your father has been in for all of his working life, and me too. I couldn’t stand it any longer. And I couldn’t bear to watch Mark being sucked in. My life – and you might well be right, my entire bloody sanity – has been blighted by the sheer crazy awfulness of what our company, our own family company, does. What it is. I can’t believe I allowed myself to get involved in the first place. If it hadn’t been for how much I loved you, well
 . . .
’

‘Are you daring to blame me? It’s my fault, is it?’

‘I didn’t mean it like that. But I couldn’t watch history repeating itself with Mark, I couldn’t do it any longer. And as for Fred
 . . .
’

‘How much does Mark know?’

‘I’m not sure. Maybe not much. He is aware that the company is involved in some security activities overseas. Not the exact nature. Not yet. He only deals with paperwork, and everything is camouflaged. That’s the name of the game. What we are all such experts at. But I could see Mark’s future looming, his grandfather talking him into believing he
was doing something worthwhile. Working towards world peace, probably. The way he convinced me. Except now I knew what Mark’s life would be like: shrouded in mystery, fear of some kind or other always lurking. I should have done something to stop it, but now I’m afraid it’s already too late for Mark. He is so much in the clutches of his grandfather. I couldn’t watch any longer. I really couldn’t.

‘But I could still save Fred, provided I could get him away from your father. Away from all of it. That’s why I wrote you that letter. I waited and waited, but you made no move to get away. That’s when I decided I’d have to do something
 . . .
’

Joyce thought he sounded lame, pathetic. She also felt, deep inside, that he still wasn’t telling her the truth. Not the whole truth anyway. That there was something else. And how had he known that she’d made no move to get away? Had he been watching the house? After dark, perhaps. She said nothing. She didn’t want to do or say anything that might stop him talking.

‘So I thought, well, if I took Fred, I stood a chance of getting all my family together again,’ Charlie continued.

‘You thought that removing our son from his home in the middle of the night was a way of getting your family together?’ Joyce stared at him in disbelief.

‘Well, yes, you s-see—’

‘You really are mad,’ she said again.

Charlie shrugged. ‘I had to do something.’

‘Well, you’ve done something all right.’

Joyce was incandescent with rage. She was also frightened.

‘First you staged your own death, then you abducted your son, and now you seem to have abducted your wife and daughter.’

‘No, it’s not like that—’

‘Isn’t it? In that case I’m going to ask you again, am I free to go? Free to take our children away from their crazy, deluded father, to the place that used to be our home? Where I will tell the police about everything you have done. And about everything that you have told me today. They can look into your claims. They can sort it out. All I want is for my children to be safe at home again. I’m free to do that, to take my children home, am I, Charlie? You wouldn’t try to stop me.’

Charlie shrugged.

‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ said Joyce. ‘I’m going to get the kids. Then I’m leaving with them.’

She reached for the door handle, pulled it, pushed the door open, and began to climb out.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t let you.’ Charlie made a move to grab her arm.

‘Don’t you touch me,’ Joyce snapped, shrugging him off.

But Charlie was quicker than her. He jumped out of his side of the car and ran around it so that he was blocking Joyce’s way before she even had time to stand up straight.

‘I can’t let you go,’ Charlie repeated.

‘Can’t you?’ Joyce remarked levelly, slamming the car door shut behind her. ‘Then you have abducted us. You are keeping me and my children here against our will. You must be out of your mind, Charlie.’

‘Joyce, you simply don’t understand,’ said Charlie. ‘I have to do this. Like I had to leave.’

He ran the fingers of one hand through his cropped hair and stared at her, his unfamiliar eyes beseeching her.

‘Listen, Joyce, I never wanted to hurt you, honestly,’ he pleaded. ‘Just listen. When I decided to stage my own death,
I did it to protect you. There was no other way. You see, I found out something, something far worse and far more dangerous than anything I already knew about your father.’

He paused again. But he still did not attempt to move out of Joyce’s way.

‘Stop being so bloody melodramatic, Charlie, and get to the point.’

‘Your father has got greedy. Or should I say, even greedier. He’s been doing a bit of moonlighting, siphoning off some of the arms whenever we do an international deal. Only a few at a time. And then he’s been selling them to an organized crime syndicate here in the UK. That’s what he is, Joyce, not only an international supplier of ingredients for chemical warfare but an underworld arms dealer.’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Charlie!’ she said. ‘Dad would never get involved with criminals. Why on earth would he? He’s a wealthy man. And what other reason could there be, apart from money?’

‘Joyce, you don’t know your father. You really don’t. Trust me on that. There isn’t enough money in the world for Henry Tanner. Nor power. He lusts after power. I found out what he was doing by accident. I’d challenged him big time on the chemical warfare issue, and Henry doesn’t like being challenged. I was planning to go to the police without telling him. I think he would have known he couldn’t talk me out of it, not when he was involving the company and all of us in serious criminal activity. But he was a step ahead of me. As usual. I’d been cross-checking all the company records. I’d been using my laptop so my footprints wouldn’t show on the office system, because on that you can see straight away who has signed in and out and what they’ve been working on. But
I think Henry had someone hack into my laptop. He knew what I was planning, and he knew he had to stop me.

‘I discovered that he was trying to take out a contract on me, like you said. He wanted me killed, and he knew the people to do it—’

‘Charlie, if there is any truth in what you say, how come it’s my father who got shot?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Charlie. ‘He was playing with fire and I guess he got burned. He was dealing with dangerous people. Gangsters. People who kill for a daily rate, for God’s sake. Maybe he couldn’t give them what they wanted. Maybe they thought he’d reneged on a deal. I don’t know.’

‘I’m sorry, Charlie, I can’t believe—’

‘Joyce, sweetheart, I know this is hard for you, but I honestly believe that if he’d had the contacts he has now back when you and I first met, I wouldn’t have lived to cause Henry any bother. I’ve always known he didn’t like me, he never rated me, never wanted me in his business or in his life. He thought I was weak. And he was right. He never wanted me to be part of his family. It was all a pretence. He only took me on because he feared that otherwise he would lose you. He could see how close we were. And then, after William died, he needed someone, some puppet he could mould. My weakness became attractive to him then. He thought he could turn me into whatever he wished. And for years I let him.

‘You must have known that I was the last man on earth he would have wanted you to marry, me with my left-wing ideals. Mind you, nobody would have been right for you, Joycey, not in Henry’s eyes. But did you never wonder why he changed his mind about me? What led him not only to welcome me as his son-in-law, but to take me into his precious business?’

Joyce said nothing. Of course she had wondered that, many many times. Her head was buzzing.

‘Only I turned on him in the end, and then he decided it was time to be rid of me.’

‘What on earth are you saying? You’re not making any sense, Charlie.’

‘Aren’t I? Don’t you remember all those accidents I had last year? Like the brakes failing on the car, slates falling off a roof right by me, oil on the deck of the boat causing me to slip. Did you think it was all just bad luck?’

Joyce supposed she had, at the time. And carelessness.

‘Well, I’d come to think those incidents may not have been accidental. I reckoned I was living on borrowed time.’

‘So you staged your own death, gave me – and your children – months of grief and despair, and left us, if you are to be believed, which is highly fucking debatable, in the clutches of a man you say is so dangerous. Not only an arms dealer but a criminal. Is that what you are saying? You put your own safety ahead of that of your wife and children. And that is probably the least of your sins.’

Charlie shook his head.

‘No, you and the kids never were and never would be in any danger from Henry,’ he said. ‘You and Mark and Molly and Fred are his blood. That’s the most important thing in the world to Henry: family. His bloodline. More important to him than making money. That is how he justifies all that he does. He’s like a fucking Mafia godfather! I reckon that’s how the deluded old fool sees himself too.’

Charlie’s voice was harsh as he went on: ‘I am not Henry’s blood. He never gave a shit about me. I was always going to be dispensable in the end. When I was his pet poodle, as you put it so accurately, my darling, he put up with me. Once I
started to nip at his heels, he turned against me as I suppose I always knew he would. Which is why I had to act.’

‘Act?’ snapped Joyce. ‘Is that what you call leaving your wife and children in such a cowardly way?’

‘I left you the letter. I thought you’d understand. I thought you would act on it. At least take it seriously. That’s why I put in the letter about us wanting to find our Shangri-La, and how it was still possible.’

‘What?’

‘I was hoping you’d guess from that that I was still alive. I couldn’t be too explicit in case your father got his hands on the letter. Not that I didn’t trust Stephen, but I couldn’t take the chance, knowing how devious your father is. I had to phrase it in such a way only you would understand.’

‘Charlie, were you that caught up in your stupid spy-master world? Did you think I was some sort of code-breaker? How was I supposed—’

‘I was watching you. All of you. I wanted you to make a move. I was going to find you, once you’d got away, so that we could plan our next move.’

Charlie’s eyes were unnaturally bright. Everything about him, from what he was saying to the way he looked, was unnerving.

‘I didn’t get the letter until this week, Charlie. A clerical error, Stephen said.’

‘That explains a lot. No doubt your father was behind that too, for some twisted reason,’ Charlie continued. ‘Maybe you would have done something about it if you’d got the letter when you should have.’

‘I’m not sure that I would,’ said Joyce. ‘I don’t think I could ever have taken the kids, walked out on my life. Not without a much better reason than some cryptic letter. That
must have occurred to you, surely. So was this some mad contingency plan of yours, taking Fred?’