‘There’s nowhere to hide,’ said the mocking voice.
‘I told Julian that Abiola was becoming a problem.’
‘Tell it to the mirror,’ said the voice. ‘I want you to look at yourself telling it.’
She rolled over.
‘Julian told me he could solve the Abiola problem. All I had to do was lead him on, make him believe that I was interested in him.’
‘You probably didn’t have to work too hard, either,’ said the voice.
‘No, that’s true, he was primed,’ she said, and was immediately attacked by another stab of grief, which brought her knees up to her chest.
‘So he believed you?’
‘Of course he did.’
‘Just so that we know how far you went, he was going to introduce you to . . .’
‘His parents.’
‘And what were you going to tell them?’
‘That we were engaged.’
‘Serious stuff,’ said the voice. ‘And how did that go?’
‘It didn’t. We never met. They wanted to meet afterwards but I couldn’t. My father went to see them.’
‘Tell me how you worked it.’
‘Julian asked Abiola to come to his rooms in Christchurch for afternoon tea. Abiola liked that sort of English thing.’
‘And what did he find?’ said the voice. ‘Tiffin? Not exactly. Tell me what he found, Alyshia.’
‘He found me having sex with Julian.’
‘Whose idea was that?’
‘Julian’s.’
‘Yeees, it sounds like one of his,’ said the voice. ‘What were you thinking?’
‘I . . . I don’t know. I was just doing what I was told to do.’
‘Following orders, yes; they get that all the time at the International Criminal Court,’ said the voice. ‘Do you ever think about why you did such a thing, why you allowed yourself to be manipulated?’
No answer.
‘All right. We’ll come back to that,’ said the voice. ‘Just tell me how Abiola reacted to this sight of you fucking Julian?’
‘He ran.’
‘Where to?’
‘His flat.’
‘What did he do there?’
‘He hanged himself.’
Isabel Marks went to bed. Boxer had told her, as she’d extricated herself from his embrace, that she had to be rested, that the days ahead were going to be tough. Boxer stayed in the kitchen. He tried Amy again; still no answer. He sat there for an hour, sipping watery whisky and thinking: he had a reputation now. Why was he doing this? Killing kidnappers. Twelve years at GRM and not a thought of it. For no apparent reason, his father came to mind. The pain of that broken connection. But why so acute now? A few months shy of forty years old. He turned that over and over but, as always, couldn’t seem to make the logic work. Time to move on. At least he’d had the presence of mind to explain to D’Cruz that on the three other occasions he’d provided his special service, he’d always known who he was up against before he’d acted. A single man was no match for the mafia or a terrorist organisation, so he would only give his final agreement once it had been established who the perpetrators were.
Since that handshake in the Ritz, there’d been the shooting in Knightsbridge and the revelations from D’Cruz’s family history. He was relieved at his caution. D’Cruz was the sort of man who only cared about himself and his immediate family. Then there was ‘Jordan’, as he called himself. He was concerned by what Isabel had told him. This was not playing out in the usual way. There seemed to be intelligence at work here, both sorts, and not necessarily geared to achieving the greatest possible financial return. There was no solid evidence yet, but Frank D’Cruz’s personality and Jordan’s psychology gave him the disconcerting feeling that the motive for this kidnap might be punishment.
He went up to bed and listened in at Isabel’s room on the way. Silence. He hoped she’d be able to sleep through the night. He continued to the top of the house, showered and got into bed, as he’d always done since the age of ten, naked. He turned out the light, closed his eyes and was immediately aware of his insulation from the usual roar of the metropolis. There was no whooping of sirens from police and ambulances. The roar of city turbulence was still there but muffled by the quality of the build. Why was she living here? Why leave the real thing in Edwardes Square to come to live in this fakery, with no life and the sterility of investment about it? His mind was trembling in the confusion at the edge of sleep when the door to his room clicked and his eyes snapped open.
Isabel Marks entered, wearing a satin nighty, floor length. She came to the edge of the bed and stood over him. He wondered whether she was sleepwalking, with the stress ravaging her mind, but she looked directly into his eyes with an indecipherable expression. She said nothing, but flipped the thin straps of the nighty from her shoulders. The satin fell to the ground in a rush. Her firm, high breasts quivered as her arms dropped back by her sides. She slipped under the duvet next to him. Her hands were cool on his stomach, possibly with apprehension at what she was doing. Her breasts pressed into his rib cage, her pubis brushed against his thigh.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be on my own.’
This was the most unexpected complication of all. Boxer tried to think himself into the head of a different man; someone more professionally responsible, more emotionally prescient. It was a hopeless task; the physical reaction to her touch was instant, and a feeling of extraordinary tenderness towards her, too. Something he hadn’t experienced with any of his girlfriends of the last seventeen years.
He let his arm fall around her shoulders and with that confirmation, she ran her hands over his chest and stomach, the tops of his thighs, grasped his penis with a touch that sent something live through his veins. She kissed his chest as she moved her hand slowly and with a certainty of its effect. She looked into his face, concerned at his ecstatic torment, and he loved her in that moment, because he saw what was so special about her: her extraordinary capacity to care. It was both her greatest strength and her most awful vulnerability, and it gave him a powerful desire to protect.
It had been some months since Boxer had been to bed with a woman and it took self-control not to unleash that masculine urgency which a long sexual drought can precipitate. He was more gentle than he ever remembered being. He was like a man unburdened from disappointment and betrayal, as if all his wounds had not just healed but never been.
They didn’t stop there but came back to each other again like fascinated creatures. He looked up at her, amazed, as she arched backwards, driving herself down onto him, her whole torso trembling and, with a shout, collapsed forward onto his chest.
Afterwards, they lay staring at the ceiling.
‘Tell me how you met Mercy,’ she said. ‘You didn’t seem to want to tell me everything before.’
‘It’s a long story,’ he said, ‘and we need to sleep.’
‘Give me the short version.’
‘I met her in Ghana.’
‘What were you doing there?’
‘I was eighteen. I’d run away for the second time, looking for my father who’d disappeared when I was seven. He was wanted for questioning in connection with the murder of my mother’s business partner. He’d absconded. I thought he might have gone to West Africa, because I’d read that people liked to lose themselves in that part of the world. I didn’t find him, but I found Mercy instead. Her father was a senior policeman and a brutal disciplinarian. A friend in Accra had given me an introduction to him and he let me stay in his house while I searched for my father. He treated his five children like servants. They moved around the house silently, heads bowed, and wouldn’t dare look me in the eye in his presence. He beat them. It was a sad, dark, miserable family and I helped Mercy run away from it. She came back to England with me. I joined the army, in the ranks, and she went to college. The first Gulf War came along and we didn’t see much of each other for a couple years, but we stayed very close
and then she got pregnant. By the time she had Amy, it was over.’
Silence. She kissed his hand on her shoulder. They went to sleep.
At six o’clock they woke up.
‘The phone,’ said Isabel. ‘It’s the phone.’
And for a fraction of a second, it was just that. Two lovers who were going to ignore the intrusion. Then, in one movement, she came up off the bed and was out of the door and down the stairs, with Boxer on her heels.
‘It’s Alyshia’s phone,’ she said, standing naked in her bedroom, staring at the screen.
‘You have to take it,’ said Boxer. ‘You’ve just woken up. You’re still drugged from a sleeping pill. Give yourself some time to sharpen up.’
He left the room, came back with a pen, pad and the laptop, sat close to her on the bed so that he could hear the voice, nodded.
‘Hello?’ said Isabel, with a crack deep in her throat. ‘I’m . . . hello? Who is that?’
‘Isabel Marks?’
‘That’s me.’
‘This is Jordan. I’m sorry to call you so early but your daughter is not well.’
‘What? What did you say? Alyshia’s . . . what’s wrong?’
‘Yes, I thought that might wake you up. You’re that sort of woman, aren’t you, Mrs Marks?’
Boxer glanced at the laptop and saw that Alyshia’s mobile had been tracked by the Pavis online system. It was travelling down the M4 in the direction of Reading.
‘What’s the matter with Alyshia?’
‘You see, that’s what I mean. You’re different from Chico . . .’
‘Chico? How do you know I call him that?’
‘You’re different from Alyshia.’
‘What are you talking about? Just tell me what’s wrong with her.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with her,’ said the voice. ‘She’s bearing up under the strain.’
‘Let me talk to her.’
‘Still not possible, I’m afraid.’
Boxer held up a pre-prepared sign card with PROOF OF LIFE written on it.
‘Then you must give me some proof that she—’
‘You’re going to have to take my word for it, Mrs Marks.’
‘I don’t think that’s very fair,’ said Isabel, running on adrenaline. ‘How can we be expected to proceed in good faith if you’re not prepared to give us—’
‘Cut the shit, Mrs Marks. Life’s not fair.’
‘No, I won’t cut the shit. You’re holding my daughter. If you want this conversation to proceed, I want proof that she’s alive.’
‘Don’t antagonise me, Mrs Marks. You know what can happen.’
Silence from Isabel.
‘Yes, that’s right, I just take it out on Alyshia,’ said the voice. ‘Turn the heating off in her room. Cuff her to the bed for a day. Let her lie in her piss and faeces. Slap her around a bit. No lasting damage but very uncomfortable.’
Isabel glanced at what Boxer had written on the pad, said nothing.
‘How do you think I know that you call your ex-husband Chico?’ said Jordan. ‘Right. There’s your proof of life.’
‘It’s not . . .’ said Isabel, her legs shaking uncontrollably, ‘it’s not proof of life.’
‘It will have to do for now.’
Boxer shrugged, pointed to what he’d written before.
‘What do you want?’ said Isabel. ‘You said it wasn’t money, so what is it? If it’s something more complicated than money, we’re going to need time. Tell us what you want so that we can—’
‘What? Negotiate?’ said the voice. ‘Is that it? I bet Frank’s organised one of those for you: a ne-go-ti-at-or. There’s nothing he’d like better. He’s probably sitting next to you now, telling you what to say. But this isn’t going to work like that. I’m not going to demand anything material from you. I don’t need it. How do you think I know you left your house in Edwardes Square because of that tiresome neighbour of yours?’
Isabel didn’t know what to say, just shook her head, frowned.
Boxer scribbled more words. She looked at them without seeing.
‘And you’re right about Jason Bigley; I mean, not to take him on as a novelist. These screenwriters, you know, they’re great at structure but they can’t imagine the whole world. And Chico was right. Alyshia Bigley? I don’t think so. And she wouldn’t have looked at him anyway. You know why, Mrs Marks?’
Isabel fell silent.
‘Mrs Marks?’
‘I am not Mrs Marks,’ she said, and the chill in her voice froze Boxer’s hand.
‘Who are you?’
Boxer wrote: CAREFUL.
‘I was Mrs D’Cruz, but now I’m just Isabel Marks. No Mrs.’
‘I see. I’ll call you Isabel then.’
‘If you must.’
‘Do you know why she wouldn’t give Jason a second glance, Isabel?’
‘No.’
‘Because her interest lies elsewhere.’
‘And what do you mean by that?’
‘When I say she’s quite well, I should be a little more precise,’ said the voice. ‘She is physically well, but mentally a little distressed. She’s on a bit of a guilt trip; has been for a while. Since she left Mumbai, in fact.’
Isabel snatched at the bait.
‘What happened in Mumbai?’
‘I’m not surprised you were kept out of the loop on that one,’ said the voice. ‘But let’s take it step by step. First, the guilt trip. Your ne-go-ti-at-or will tell you where to find it. Ta-ta, as they say in India.’
Boxer looked at the computer screen. The phone signal was now stationary and transmitting from a point on the A404 between the M4 and M40 motorways, in the Maidenhead and Marlow area. He called the operations room in Pavis.
9
6.30 A.M., MONDAY 12TH MARCH 2012
Isabel Marks’ house, Aubrey Walk, London W8
As the phone went dead Isabel collapsed on the bed. Boxer called Pavis. He stood over her, still naked, feeling like a teenager caught in flagrante by a parent. Isabel, prostrate with guilt, pulled the duvet over her head.
Boxer left the room, went upstairs, showered. He was a changed man and it worried him, not least because Mercy was going to spot it with their first eye contact. He dressed. Isabel’s door was still shut as he went past her room. He transferred a recording of the call to his iPod and sent another to the ops room at Pavis. He went down to the kitchen, made coffee and toast and played the call back to himself, again and again. He phoned Fox at Pavis.
‘You heard that call yet?’
‘DCS Makepeace and I have been listening to it.’
‘Do you want to run it past a profiler?’
‘I’m doing that now,’ said Fox. ‘We haven’t had your situation report yet.’
‘I haven’t had time. I’m here on my own with Alyshia’s mother, Isabel. She’s turned down a Crisis Management Committee and she hasn’t got anybody close to support her, or rather she doesn’t want anybody around her, including D’Cruz.’
‘That’s a bit . . . intense.’
‘I’ll work on her and D’Cruz, see if I can bring them round,’ said Boxer. ‘I’ll get you your report as soon as I can.’
Isabel came in; he hung up. She was dressed and composed, had come through her shame and was out the other side of it. There was nothing to be said.
‘Pavis are getting a profiler to listen to the recording of that phone call.’
‘He frightens me, this . . . Jordan,’ she said. ‘He’s worked his way into my life . . . our lives.’
‘He seems to know you all,’ said Boxer. ‘Or at least knows someone who does.’
‘He’s like a poisoner,’ she said, ‘who wants nothing more than to be amongst the people whose food he’s laced.’
‘How big is your world?’
‘The wider circle is too big to know everyone in it.’
‘And he knows both ends: Mumbai and London.’
‘It also frightens me that he doesn’t seem to wa
nt anything from us.’
‘It’s early days yet. It could still be a ploy for wringing the maximum money,’ said Boxer. ‘He’s impressing upon you the power of his knowledge. He wants you to know that there’s nothing he hasn’t covered. It makes you feel vulnerable to have had your life penetrated to that extent.’
‘And I can tell you it’s working. That and the fact that he’s holding my life in his hands,’ said Isabel. ‘Alyshia is my life. If anything happened to her, it would kill me.’
‘It would kill anybody. Even if you were happy, fulfilled with a whole rich life of your own, it would still be unbearable,’ said Boxer. ‘That’s what kidnappers do. They drag you to that precipice and show you what’s over the edge. He’s shaping you into the person who will do anything he asks. The so-called successful kidnapping is less about holding the hostage and more about the manipulation of the family. He is sweating you so that when the time comes, you will exert the maximum influence on Frank.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ she said. ‘But something’s making me . . . I feel it in my gut: doom-laden.’
‘It would be unusual if you didn’t feel that way. It’s intended,’ said Boxer. ‘This is the rollercoaster. The mind game has started. My job is to make sure you win that game.’
She nodded, her jaw muscles twitched in her cheek as she pulled herself together. He poured her coffee, gave her toast. She waved it away. He insisted.
‘You can’t do this on an empty stomach.’
She ate with no appetite for it.
‘You handled that call very well.’
‘I didn’t think so. I hated him too much. I couldn’t stop myself.’
‘That’s why, normally, we’d create a barrier between you and the kidnapper, because the emotional involvement is very strong and it’s two-way: he’s breaking you down, manipulating you, and you’re hating him for it,’ said Boxer, easing off as he saw the resistance in her face. ‘He was throwing his weight around in that call. He hit you early, wrong-footed you. He was cavalier about the proof of life process, aggressive and threatening throughout, and showing off his knowledge – a classic undermining tactic. He wants you to feel unsafe, watched.’
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