In for the Kill (13 page)

With my heart hammering against my ribs fit to bust I used the pay phone in the marina café and called Spires. Some minutes later I had the information I needed. Gus was their senior partner, specialising in corporate finance. I rang off and headed for Petersfield.

‘

lex! What’s happened to you?’ Vanessa greeted me with a horror-stricken expression.

‘This?’ I fingered my bruised face. ‘An accident.’ She looked as though she didn’t believe me, but that was the least of my problems.

It was after school hours and yet the house was as quiet as the grave. I had wondered on my drive across country to Petersfield if I would see my sons but they couldn’t be here. I was disappointed. Then Vanessa tossed an anxious glance over her shoulder and I knew I was wrong.

My heart leapt into my throat. Before I realised it I had pushed past her and was tearing down the hall, all thoughts of Gus vanishing from my mind.

I drew up on the threshold of the kitchen. I thought I was going to pass out at the sight of them in school uniform sitting at the table, their heads bent over their homework. I was sure my heart had stopped beating. I stood perfectly still afraid that I might spoil the moment by bursting into tears, something I hadn’t done since I had fallen off the roof of Grandad’s folly and broken my arm. My crying in prison had been inside me, churning my gut until the pain had become almost unbearable, sucking the breath from my lungs.

Then they both looked up. My heart started beating again; it was as if someone had put one of those resuscitating machines on it and had kick-started it into life. I took a breath. I wanted to wrap my arms around them, to hold them tight and never let them go. I wanted to save them from bastards like Rowde. But I couldn’t even move. Vanessa stepped in front of me.

‘You can finish your homework upstairs.’

Her words brought me out of my emotional rigor. Gently I pushed her aside. ‘Hello.’ I sounded like someone with laryngitis. I tried to smile, maybe I did. I hoped I didn’t look like the ventriloquist’s dummy from
Dead of Night
.

David glanced at his mother. It angered me.

‘You don’t need permission to speak to your father,’ I said more harshly than I intended.

‘Are you my dad?’ Philip said, excitedly and slightly in awe.

How could he have forgotten me so quickly?

He had been almost eight when I had gone inside; I had been seven when my father had died of a heart attack. I hadn’t forgotten the gentle quiet man who had read to me and taught me how to sail, so why had Philip forgotten me?

Perhaps the hair had fooled him, or possibly my bruised face. Perhaps Vanessa and Gus had banished all photographs of me from the house.

I glared at her. She flinched and I wanted to crow because I had hurt her. Suddenly I felt extremely sad.

I smiled again, more naturally I hoped this time. ‘Yes. Don’t you remember me?’ I told myself a child’s memory was very short. And I had not allowed them to send me a card or letter whilst I had been in prison. Vanessa had persuaded me it was for the best, though I hadn’t need much persuasion.

‘Your hair’s white,’ David said.

‘Prison did that to me.’

Vanessa winced. The boys didn’t bat an eyelid.

I parked myself at the top of the table with David on my right and Philip on my left. It took all my powers of self-control not to scoop them up in my arms and hold them so tight that I might be in danger of suffocating them. My heart was breaking. I hoped they couldn’t see it.

‘What’s prison like?’ Philip wriggled, impatient to be let loose. He had always been the more active child. Many a time he and I had kicked a ball around the park, while David had preferred to have his nose buried in a book. I dug my nails into the palm of my hands underneath the table so hard that I wondered if I had drawn blood.

‘Philip, your father doesn’t want to talk about it. Now upstairs –’

‘It’s horrible and smelly and lonely.’

‘Did you meet loads of crooks?’

David scoffed. ‘Of course he did. Why else do you think they’re in prison.’

‘Dad’s not a crook.’ Philip declared hotly.

I felt the tears spring to my eyes. It took a supreme effort of will to hold them back. I gripped the top of the table as if it was going to collapse if I didn’t hold onto it, when in reality it was me that was in danger of collapsing.

‘You’re not a crook, are you, Dad?’

‘No, Philip, I’m not.’ I held the clear, innocent blue eyes that gazed at me.

David, now fourteen, looked as though he wasn’t sure whether or not to believe me, but I saw something in his serious brown eyes that wanted me to be telling the truth.

I addressed them both. ‘I was sent to prison for something I didn’t do and now I have to prove I’m innocent.’

‘Like in that film with Harrison Ford?’ David eyed me curiously.

I must have looked puzzled because he explained as if talking to a rather stupid child,

‘
The Fugitive
. He’s trying to find the one-armed man who killed his wife.’

‘Aren’t you a little young to have seen that?’

‘Nah, we’ve all seen it, except Philip; he’s still a baby.’

‘I’m not. I’m nearly as old as you.’

‘You’re two years younger,’ David said haughtily.

Oh my God, how I had missed this, the endless sparring between them, at one time friends, next fighting on the living room floor. Andover had deprived me of this. He would be punished. I was in for the kill now.

‘Philip, David, upstairs at once and take your homework. Your father and I need to talk.’

David rolled his eyes but scooped up his textbooks. I watched the boys slide off their chairs. At the door David hesitated.

‘You will find out who really did it, won’t you, Dad?’

‘I will.’

‘And you’ll come back and play with us like you used to?’

I nodded. I was beyond speech. He remembered.

‘That’s what I told them at school.’

‘David,’ I called him back, finding my voice.

‘What did you tell them?’

‘That you were going after the man who put that stuff on your computer.’

‘You think someone did.’

‘Of course. Anyone can hack into computers.

You can make them say what you want and people believe it because they think computers can’t lie. It’s easy.’

‘Room now,’ came Vanessa’s stern command.

David grinned. I smiled back and he ran off.

‘Alex –’

‘They’re great; they’re so grown up. They’re so…’ My voice faltered. I rose and turned away from her. I could hear them scuffling about upstairs, a toilet flushed and a door banged. When I had myself under control Vanessa had a whisky in front of me but I shook my head.

‘I’m driving. Coffee would be good though; help keep me awake.’

She turned away and flicked the switch on the kettle. I was glad that Gus hadn’t been here. It had given me the chance to be with my sons. I felt sick to the pit of my stomach at the thought of what Rowde threatened to do to them. If Gus had any part to play in framing me then I’d kill the bastard. But how could he have? And why?

It wasn’t possible and yet there was that pilot’s licence, the fact that he knew Couldner, and that he worked for Spires: Clive Westnam’s accountants. I told myself that knowing two out of the three victims wasn’t proof that Gus had any connection with Andover. And yet…

‘When will Gus be in?’ I asked, wondering if Vanessa would notice the hardness in my voice.

‘Monday evening, if all goes well with the deal.’

‘What?’ I shouted. I hadn’t expected this. It spoilt all my plans.

She gazed at me surprised. ‘He’s in Guernsey, on business.’

Guernsey! My heart sank. How long would it take me to get there, get some answers from Gus, and then fly back again? A day at least and I didn’t have a day to spare. I wouldn’t be able to get a flight until tomorrow, Friday,
if
I was lucky.

Maybe not until Saturday. There was one good thing though; at least I didn’t need a passport to get to Guernsey. It could have been worse; it could have been Hong Kong!

‘What kind of business?’ I forced myself to keep calm. If I couldn’t get to Gus until tomorrow, then I could at least get some answers to my questions from Vanessa now.

‘I don’t know. Something to do with one of his clients, I expect.’

‘Who is he seeing in Guernsey?’

‘Alex, what is this?’

‘Just humour me.’ I tried to keep a lid on my impatience.

‘Fosters, they’re private bankers based just outside St Peter Port. I think there’s a big deal going down with some property developers. I don’t understand it and I don’t ask.’

I could hear David and Philip talking and laughing, not a lot of homework was being done.

‘When did you meet Gus?’ I asked steadily.

A faint flush spread up her neck. The kettle boiled and flicked itself off. Vanessa made no attempt to make me a coffee. She sat down, looked at her hands and then up at me with a defiant gleam in her eyes. I could see that she had come to a decision. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to hear this, but I had asked for it.

Somehow I knew it was going to be painful.

‘We first met when I was a student at Manchester University. I was twenty. Gus was twenty eight.’

I kept my eyes on her and my expression blank, but my brain was whirring around like a demented dervish. She’d never said. She’d never spoken of Gus Newberry before. I didn’t even know he had existed until Miles had told me she had married him. When Vanessa had asked for a divorce she had said it was because she had wanted to make a new life for herself and the boys. Oh, she’d done that all right.

‘He was attending a conference in a nearby hotel. We met in a pub by the canal, not far from China Town and we hit it off immediately. I thought him very sophisticated. Even when he returned to London he used to call me. At weekends he’d come to Manchester, or I’d go up to London. After six months we got engaged.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ I felt betrayed.

‘It wasn’t important. Gus and I had finished long before I met you.’

‘How long?’ I asked curtly, wondering if I had been taken up on the rebound, a thought I didn’t much care for. No one likes to be thought of as second best.

‘Five years.’

‘Why did you break up?’

She ran a hand through her hair. ‘Alex, is this necessary?’ She must have seen from my expression that it was because she added, ‘You’ve grown hard.’ She rose and began to pace the floor.

‘Funny, you wouldn’t think prison would do that to a man, would you?’

‘There’s no need to be sarcastic. If you must know we broke up because he was very ambitious. He was offered a promotion, which meant working in the States. He wanted me to leave university and go with him. I said no. I wanted a career too. We kept in touch for quite a while then it fizzled out. I met you.’

‘So when did you see him again? I take it that it was whilst we were still married.’ I couldn’t keep the bitterness from my voice.

She met my gaze directly. There was no hint of regret or shame in her expression.

‘I met him by chance,’ she said. ‘We were on the Isle of Wight. I saw him at the airfield. He has a private pilot’s licence and flew into Bembridge one day when you’d taken the boys out sailing. I’d gone for a walk.’

I felt a tightening in my chest. It wasn’t only jealousy. Slowly the pieces were fitting together.

Could Gus
be
Andover?

‘When was this?’ I asked.

Her face flushed deeper red betraying what I’d already guessed: she’d had an affair with him whilst we’d still been married. It hurt. Even my marriage wasn’t what it had seemed.

‘Three years before your arrest. Alex, I’m sorry.

Nothing happened between us until… until…’

‘I was arrested.’

Jesus! Gus
was
Andover. Vanessa had just given me his motive. Incredible as it seemed he had stitched me up in order to steal my wife and children. Had Vanessa told him she couldn’t leave me? Perhaps Gus couldn’t take rejection.

A clever bastard like him could have worked out a way to ruin me and then provided the shoulder for Vanessa to cry on. He’d seen her through the tough times; even convincing her I was innocent.

Well, he should know.

I leapt up. I wanted to beat Gus Newberry until he begged for forgiveness for destroying me. She hurried after me to the door. At it I turned and said:

‘Did Gus know when I was being released?’

‘Yes. He took the call from Miles.’

‘Where was he the day I came out?’

‘At work. For goodness sake, Alex, what is all this?’

I was already at the car. ‘Take care, Vanessa, and please look after our sons. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

‘Where are you going?’

To Guernsey. Where else? I didn’t tell her that.

I found a travel agency in Petersfield and booked my flight for 10.55am the next morning, Friday, from Southampton to Guernsey.

It was just after seven when I disembarked at Fishbourne. Impatient though I was to get some answers from Gus there was nothing I could do except wait for tomorrow. Then another thought struck me: would Vanessa warn Gus? She didn’t know I was going to Guernsey but she might tell him that she had confessed to the affair.

Gus’s words came back to me,
‘You’re dealing
with a very clever man. I suspect he knows your
every move before you’ve even made it.’
I hoped he didn’t know this one. I wanted to surprise the bastard.

My head was pounding and my back was still aching from the beating Rowde’s henchman had given me. I was tired. I wanted to lay down and sleep for a year. A car tooted at me as I veered dangerously over the white line onto the other side of the road at the bend towards St Helen’s.

I jerked the steering wheel back and forced myself to concentrate. It wasn’t easy.

Surely if I told Gus about Rowde’s threat to my boys he’d hand over the money? He had to.

I couldn’t imagine him letting any harm come to David and Philip because if it did it would destroy his relationship with Vanessa. That cheered me. Gus hadn’t counted on Rowde. I might actually end up being grateful to Rowde, strange though it might seem.