The Missing Hours (35 page)

I look up at the park. I cannot see them. I cannot make them safe.

Is this how it will be? How it will all end, after so much?

Then I hear a door, look down the road to where my neighbour, an elderly woman with whom I have barely exchanged more than a dozen words, is coming out of her house. She pulls the door tight shut behind her and then, head down, begins to trudge towards us. Towards the park. Towards my girls. I see her gaze meander across the mountains and then fall, down to the playground, to where my children are. I see her face crease into a smile, a hand raise in a wave.

I close my eyes. I pray.

‘Let’s go.’

A placing of pieces

DC Leah Mackay: Saturday, 10.51 a.m.

SELENA IS STARING
at me, still unsure if she can trust me, whether the risk is too great. She glances at Beck and I sense Finn stiffen behind me, as I wonder if here is where it will all go so very wrong.

‘Ed,’ I say again. ‘He’s alive, isn’t he?’

Selena looks back at me. ‘Yes.’

The pieces slowly begin to slide into place, Selena shifting from a grieving widow to a desperate wife in the blink of an eye.

‘He’s …’ I glance about, at where we are, the loneliness, the isolation. ‘He’s being held?’ I hazard. ‘He’s a hostage?’

I no longer know where I am, what my focus is. A murder? A disappearance? A kidnapping? But I watch Selena, am prepared to go with it for a little while. The floor is cold through the knees of my trousers, a rising damp that creeps into my bones. The rain has settled into a steady thrumming, and the distant thought occurs to me that much more and we will be washed away.

I look to Finn, see him folding away his ASP, although his gaze never leaves Beck, his hulking frame stuffing the tiny cottage.

‘Can you tell me what happened?’ I ask.

Selena laughs, although it seems just as likely that it will become a sob. ‘I wish I could. I was a widow until five days ago. Then Dominic Newell called. And everything changed.’

‘Dominic …’ Finn is focused on Selena now, has stepped closer, his attention momentarily swayed from Beck.

‘He called me on Monday evening. He had found an e-mail. He pieced it together.’

6.02 p.m.

Dr Selena Cole: Monday, 6.02 p.m.

‘
THERE’S SOMETHING I
need to tell you …’

‘Okay.’

‘Ed … he’s alive.’

There are no words for a moment like this. Nothing that comes, freshly prepared, no obvious first response. Because my husband, my love, was dead. Had been dead for almost a year. I had lived almost 365 days without him. Or rather, I had not lived. I had existed. For 365 days.

What do you feel when someone tells you something like this?

What should you feel?

One imagines elation. Euphoria.

I felt anger.

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ My words scalded, me as much as him. But you cannot do that, hang the promise of life over a home in which there is death. It is too much, too excruciatingly painful to even entertain the possibility of hope.

‘I know this doesn’t make much sense.’ Dominic sounded afraid, like he had gone for a stroll on a wafer-thin ledge, was only now coming to appreciate the depth of the drop below. ‘Please, just let me explain. Seth … He didn’t mean it to be like this, I know he didn’t. But he’s weak. And with his family background, where he came from, the Cole Group, its reputation, his reputation, it means everything to him.’

‘Mr Newell,’ I said, straining to keep my voice even, ‘I’d appreciate it if you’d get to the point.’

He sighed heavily. A car horn beeped in the background. ‘I found an e-mail, on his computer.’

‘What were you doing on Seth’s computer?’ I am fighting now, struggling to hold on to the tail of a bucking horse.

‘We were … we are … Look, it doesn’t matter. Please, I just need you to listen to me. I found this e-mail. And then, I mean, I had to know, so I confronted him … we argued. It was … it was pretty bad. Ed … he’s being held. He’s been taken hostage.’

‘I …’ My brain froze in place. My husband, my dead husband, here in conversation, in the present tense. It made no sense to me, and yet the need I had for it to be true was breathtaking. I sank to the floor, sitting on the cold Victorian hallway tiles.

‘Look, I don’t know much else. All I know is that he’s being held, that Seth … his negotiations, they haven’t gone well. And the kidnappers, I don’t know how much time you have left.’

I gasped for air, trying to form words, or if not words then thoughts.

‘Look, there’s someone here. I have to go. You … you’ll take care of this, right? You’ll deal with it? Quickly?’

I heard him, but from far away, a ghost whispering in a crowded room. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ll take care of it.’

‘Okay. Okay, good. Look.’ He must have turned from the phone, his voice dropping, words I could not make out directed at someone that wasn’t me. ‘I have to go. But … good luck.’

I nodded, forgetting for a moment that he couldn’t see me. Then, ‘Dominic? Thank you.’

A click, and he was gone.

A primer in K&R

DS Finn Hale: Saturday, 10.55 a.m.

‘
DO YOU KNOW
who?’ asked Leah. ‘Who has your husband?’

I have my mouth open, an entirely different question ready and waiting. I close it again. I can wait a few more minutes.

‘It’s the group that orchestrated the hit in Brasilia.’ Selena still has her knees pulled up in front of her, her mouth buried in the denim of her jeans. Her voice is steady now, calmer. ‘Escorpion Rojo. Primarily they’re into drug development, but they run a healthy sideline in kidnap for ransom. There were a couple of incidents before Brazil. Attacks on police stations, that kind of thing, but nothing like what we saw in Brasilia. That was just completely out of left field. And now … now I think that was what it was about all along. After it happened, everyone said that it was a hit against the K and R industry, that they were trying to destroy us. But it was more than that. They were trying to show us that despite what we thought, they were still the ones running the show.’

Beck stands in the doorway, blocking out what little light there is, not to mention, I can’t help but notice, the exit. I scan him, looking for signs of weapons, and he catches my gaze, returns it in kind. Honestly. The guy doesn’t need weapons. He could kill me with his big toe.

He clears his throat, sounds like a landslide of rubble down a mountain. ‘Things had begun to shift in Latin America, Colombia especially. FARC’s position was changing, they were scaling back their kidnap operations. And people were getting wise. Pretty much all of the foreign companies setting up there had insurance, which meant they had access to people like us, and lots of the K and R companies were providing value-added stuff – situational awareness training, security audits. The operations throughout Colombia were getting smarter, safer. Over the last couple of years we saw a whole bunch of failed kidnap attempts, mainly due to what the K and R industry had put in place. And the drug groups, they were getting squeezed by Colombia’s new anti-narcotic strategies. They were hurting.’

‘We think Brasilia was an attempt to strike back, to hit us where we least expected to be hit,’ says Selena. ‘And I don’t think Ed is the only hostage. The woman, the one who collected me, who brought me here’ – she looks about the struggling cottage, her face a battle – ‘she talked about other deals they needed to be working on. I think there were others taken that day.’

‘Of the ones supposedly killed in the attack,’ offers Beck, ‘there were four whose remains were never found. We’re guessing they have them.’

I shift. My glance pulls back again and again to the doorway, the looming mass of Beck. ‘Why so long, though? Wouldn’t they want to get the money as soon as possible.’

‘You have to remember,’ says Beck, ‘it’s a business to them. Lengthy kidnappings aren’t uncommon, especially in Colombia. They weaken the hostage, the will of the family, their ability to deal with a lengthy negotiation.’

‘Doesn’t that only work if the family know the hostage is alive?’ asks Leah.

Beck turns, makes a noise deep in his throat. Adrenalin spurts through me, my hand drifting to my ASP.

‘What?’ says Leah.

‘Seth knew. He hid it. If Dominic hadn’t found out …’

I look to Leah. Dominic had found out, had uncovered something that Seth was working to keep secret. How angry must that have made Seth?

‘You have to understand,’ says Selena. ‘I was struggling to cope with getting out of bed, let alone doing anything else, so Seth stepped up, took over everything. When the e-mail came in, he was the first one to see it.’

‘Bastard isolated it,’ growled Beck. ‘Made sure that he was the only one who knew, that they only contacted him.’

Leah looks from Beck to Selena. ‘Was he trying to protect you?’

They exchange a look. Beck’s shoulders stiffen, anger radiating from him. ‘He was trying to protect himself. All he cares about is the company, his precious role in it. He wanted to make sure it remained nicely solvent.’

‘I went through all his e-mails,’ says Selena dully, ‘the night that Dominic called to warn me. They contacted Seth five months ago.’ Her voice breaks on this. ‘He ran it like a negotiation. Like any other negotiation. Right up until the end. He got the ransom down to a level where we could have paid it. Where the company could have paid it.’

‘Fifty thousand?’

Selena nods. ‘Fifty thousand. We could have covered that. Our insurance could have covered that.’

‘So why …’

‘He wanted to keep it a secret. He wanted to make sure that Ed being a kidnap victim didn’t compromise the reputation of the Cole Group, weaken our negotiating position in other cases, our ability to get new work. So he didn’t disclose it to the insurers. He carried on a protracted negotiation without informing them, which instantly invalidates our policy. Then, when he got it down to a level we as a company could have paid …’

‘He put himself above Ed’s survival. He was more worried that the company survived than that Ed did.’

Selena closes her eyes, covers her face with her hands. ‘We could have handled it. If he’d told me, we could have made it work. The company, we built it from nothing, we could have done it again. But to do this …’

‘Selena,’ says Leah, ‘the blood, on your sweater. That blood was your husband’s. His DNA, it’s on file.’

Selena looks up at her, and you can tell that she’s trying to piece things together. Then her expression clears. Piecing done. ‘It was the arrest. Must have been … what, ten years ago? He got picked up for affray, Seth drinking too much, shooting his mouth off. They dropped the charges after letting them spend a night in the cells. His DNA … I didn’t think.’

Leah studies her. ‘You saw him, didn’t you?’

The value of money

Dr Selena Cole: Tuesday, 5.25 p.m.

‘FIFTY THOUSAND?’ SHE
says it like she doesn’t quite believe it, looks at me like I am some kind of lunatic. Or a multimillionaire. She cannot be sure, so her disdain walks a fine line.

‘Yes,’ I say, quietly. ‘Fifty thousand. I’ll take ten today. I’m going to need to order the remaining balance to collect as soon as possible.’

There is a camera in my face and I glance up at it, and then away. I am a bank robber, stealing from myself.

‘This … Okay, sure.’ She is hovering, stands up, sits down, looks up at me, smiles. Multimillionaire, then. ‘It will just take a couple of minutes.’

I nod, no longer trust my voice.

I see his face. In this bank, amongst these people, the few stragglers left at the end of a long day, his face is all I see. My Ed.

I paid attention when the woman drove me. I didn’t bother asking her name, because what would be the point? I simply sat quietly in the passenger seat of the car, wondering distantly if I had handed myself over, walked quietly into my own kidnapping. Wouldn’t that be the ultimate irony?

I paid attention to the roads, trying to remember the maps I had seen, trying to imprint the turns, so that I could find my way back here. Or out of here. Whichever it would turn out to be.

As the trees whipped by, I sat, neither in one world nor another. I had abandoned my children, had left my babies to fend for themselves, whilst I ran off after the distant dream of finding their father alive. What kind of mother was I?

What kind of fool?

I looked at the woman, small, lithe, shaped muscles beneath her thin jacket, and knew that there would be no point in trying to run, that she had contained in her small frame far more power than I could muster. Could dimly make out the hard shape of my mobile phone pushing her pocket into a bulge. Let’s just turn this off, shall we? She’d taken it from my unresisting fingers. Don’t want any interruptions.

The neighbour would look after the girls. I clung to the thought as surely as if I had seen it happen. They would be safe. They would tell her to call Auntie Orla. They would be safe.

And I?

It had begun to rise in me, unchecked by the presence of my children. The grief that had been circling me since that Brazilian day. I stared out of the window at the climbing mountains and allowed myself to sink. I didn’t care. A terrible thing for a mother to admit, isn’t it? But I didn’t. I wanted to plunge down into the gloom, to give up.

We took a turn, down a narrow unmade path hanging precipitously from the mountainside.

It wasn’t possible that Ed could be alive. Too much had happened since, too much of life had passed.

And yet I, who knew better, had simply allowed myself to be taken.

I wouldn’t fight. I knew that. I was too damned tired to fight.

The girls would be safe. Orla loved them. She would care for them. And Seth … perhaps, with the girls to call her own, she would be able to cast him aside as she should have done so long ago.

The woman stopped the car before a tumbledown cottage, gestured for me to get out. I waited for a moment before obeying, my final act of rebellion.

The cottage was blackness, a cell in everything but name. The air was chilled, colder inside than out, and I dimly felt myself shiver, thinking that I should be noticing this more, that my own discomfort should register with me, at least a little.