“And what if I did?” he said.
“Did what?” she answered, feigning confusion.
“Make you an offer. Or express an interest in making one, let’s say. Would you tell me then?”
Don’t be daft, she told him. It’s a program - a piece of code. The sort of buyers I’m talking to are in tech, security, law enforcement. They’ll be selling it on to the police and the government. What could you possibly want with it?
I’ve got my reasons, he said. And you know who I am, so you know I can afford it. It’s not a wind-up; I’m not pulling your leg.
But why? she asked, nonplussed at the turn the conversation seemed to be taking.
He mulled the question over.
How about this? he said. You come and see me at the office before you fly back home and show me how it does what it does, or as much as you can show me without giving the game and all your IP away, and I’ll tell you why I might want it. Quid pro quo.
She stared at him, radiating puzzlement. But when he reached into his wallet for a business card and held it out to her across the table, she took it with no objection at all.
Three blocks from the cafe and heading west on foot towards Presidio Heights, she took a brand-new, American-issue mobile phone from her pocket and dialled one of only seven numbers saved in the phone’s address book.
“We’re on,” she said, before the woman on the other end could answer. “Tell Karen to get ready.”
Twenty feet behind her, innocuous in Bermuda shorts and a Giants cap and lost among a moving procession of tourists just arrived in the city from Milwaukee, a man she’d never seen before watched her go. When he judged she was distracted, preoccupied by her phone call, he pulled the camera dangling around his neck to his eye, pointed the lens at her face in profile and took his shot: once; twice; three times. Then replaced the lid, and walked on.
Chapter 13
Herne Bay, Kent
July 1997
Hunched over in his chair, his hands clawed and his cheeks sunken, Soames could have been a gargoyle - a chimeric grotesque, scaring away intruders from the shingles of his decaying country house.
“It was you who went after Michael and Sita, then?” El said, not doing him the courtesy of sitting.
“Indirectly, indirectly,” Soames replied. The admission seemed to leave him breathless, forcing him to take another pull on the oxygen mask.
“Who did you send?” demanded Rose, the new note of raw, cold anger in her voice reminding El of the woman she’d got to know in a townhouse in Notting Hill what felt like a decade ago now - the one who’d masterminded a hit on her own father as payback for the sins of his past. “I’d be interested to know what kind of person could be persuaded to ambush a senior citizen on her doorstep in the middle of the night. And how much they’d ask to be paid for the privilege.”
Soames rested his withered head against the back of his chair and closed his eyes. For a second, El wondered if he’d fallen asleep.
“I don’t have much air left in me, Lady Winchester,” he said after a moment, his eyes still shut. “And I don’t intend to use it to answer that question. So if I were you, I’d try another. You might ask me, for example, what I want with our Mrs Redfearn. Or with any of you.”
“You know it was Ruby who set you up,” El said flatly. “That she had you put away.”
There was no sense pretending he didn’t; she’d known that almost as soon as Jared had left the room, as soon as Soames had spoken.
“Not at first,” he said, sounding strained, the words like gravel in his throat. “But I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, Miss Gardener. A lot of time. And people talk. You might want to remind Mrs Redfearn of that, when you see her.”
And the first thing she’ll want to know, El thought, is who. Which people talked - which person.
Because you’re not going to tell us, are you? Not here, not now.
“What is it you want?” said Rose. “You’ve obviously expended some effort to bring us here. I assume it was for a purpose?”
Soames’ eyelids fluttered open.
“I have to admit,” he said quietly, “I had hopes it would be Mrs Redfearn I’d be speaking to today. That she and Mrs Acharya would have put on their wigs and greasepaint and driven out here themselves. What I have to say is really more for the sorcerer than the dancing broomsticks.”
He means Sita, El thought. Mrs Acharya is Sita. That must have been what she was calling herself, when he knew her.
“Well, we’re the ones you have,” said Rose, with some of the arrogance, the haughty aristocratic disdain that El remembered from their early meetings. “So whatever you have to say - say it.”
Soames smiled again - the grin of a vulture on a hilltop, surveying a carcass so large and so fresh it would eat for a week.
“As I said,” he replied, “I don’t have much air in me. So I’ll get straight to the point. I know about you - about all of you. Not the cons, before you ask - I’ve no interest in them, and I can’t imagine the police do either, or they’d have come for at least one of you before now.”
“What, then?” El said, sudden apprehension coiling in her stomach.
The smile widened.
“About your father, Lady Winchester,” he said. “Mr Marchant. The late Mr Marchant, I should say. I understand you did away with him last summer, you two and Mrs Acharya and Mrs Redfearn and some of your friends. Miss Baxter and that unfortunate girl with the head injury - Miss Morgan? And that those boys of Mrs Redfearn’s helped remove the body.”
El might have expected Rose to crumble, then. But she didn’t. If anything, the statement - the barely veiled threat of it - seemed to galvanise her, to stoke her anger.
Maybe she’s been expecting this, El thought. This, or something like it, since it happened. Ever since Ruby stuck that knife in Marchant’s neck and left him bleeding to death on her kitchen floor.
“I’m going to ask you again,” Rose said, levelly. “What is it that you want?”
Soames took another, lingering pull on his oxygen - this time, El surmised, for dramatic effect; to keep them hanging.
“I have a job for you,” he said when he’d finished. “For all of you - the whole gang. But want isn’t quite the right word. I wouldn’t want you to think that it’s a suggestion. The job I’m envisioning for you isn’t optional - it isn’t a question of agreement, of yes or no. You will do it for me. Because if you don’t, I’ll have no hesitation in sending every one of you to prison for the rest of your lives. And I can tell you from experience, you won’t enjoy it.”
It was power, it struck El afterwards. The pure, white-hot thrill of tugging people’s strings, and knowing they had no choice except to caper for you, for as long as you wanted them to - a malign inverse of her own modus operandi, of the cons she worked herself. The cons she used to work.
The string-tugging theory measured up with the little she knew of Soames already: the blackmail, the calculated fleecing of the lonely and bereaved, the girlfriend so young and so vulnerable that she’d never leave him, no matter what he did to her.
He probably did want the job done, and done the way he’d told them - he’d been planning it long enough that there couldn’t be much doubt of that. And there was even less doubt in her mind that he wanted Ruby to suffer, that he wanted to punish her for the nearly quarter century he’d spent inside. But there was more to it than just that, she was sure of it.
The pleasure for him, she suspected, came not just in making her pay, but in knowing that he could keep her paying, over and over, for as long as he wanted. And that her compliance could be guaranteed now, as he’d thought in the ‘70s that it could be, through explicit threats against the people she loved.
He’d been wrong then, of course; had misjudged her, and badly. Underestimated what she was capable of when she was backed into a corner. But as he said himself: he’d had a lot of years to reflect on his mistake. It wouldn’t be one he’d make again.
He’d have more on Ruby this time around. And not just on Ruby - on all of them, Dexter and Michael included. However he’d come by it - and El had her own ideas about that - he’d have evidence, solid and irrefutable; enough that, if push came to shove, he’d have something to offer the CPS beyond his own sworn testimony.
The kind of job it was would also delight him - she was sure of that, too. For women like them - women who believed, even if they were kidding themselves, that they had scruples, and that a job designed to capitalise on other people’s grief and pain wasn’t a job that ought to be done, by them or by anyone - it would seem obscene, unconscionable. Doing it at all would hurt them. And if they pulled it off, made it work, then the very success of it would torment them for a long time after. Which seemed to her exactly the outcome that he wanted.
“What’s the job?” she’d asked eventually, once it was clear that there wasn’t a choice, that he really did have them over a barrel, and that the best she could hope for was that Ruby or Sita or Karen would find a way to think them out of the hole they’d landed in, once she and Rose were back in London.
“I think you’ll like it,” he’d said, still wearing his carrion smile. “It’s one of the classics.”
“An old friend” - that was how Soames described the mark, though she understood later that former cellmate would have been the more accurate designation.
They’d met in Hendon, nineteen years into Soames’ sentence. Ted Wainwright was older, like him - Soames guessed it was one of the reasons they’d been thrown together - but his health was better, and Soames had found him a useful companion, one not averse to pushing him around the block in his wheelchair or hoisting him full-body out of his bunk when he woke up struggling for breath.
“He’d got eighteen months, I believe,” Soames told them. “Out in a year was the expectation. So quite different from an all-dayer like me, and terribly green. But we muddled along.”
Wainwright’s sentence, Soames had learned from the news, was for perjury. An occasional TV presenter and owner of a global chain of American-style jeans-and-t-shirt stores that were both too new and too casual for Soames to ever have cause to patronise before his wrongful conviction had claimed him, Wainwright was a semi-public figure on both sides of the Atlantic – well known enough for an unofficial biographer to have set about writing his life story, a big name publisher to have offered a significant advance for that story and a Sunday tabloid to have secured the pre-publication serialisation rights. Among the personal tragedies and professional triumphs the serialised book detailed was the revelation of Wainwright’s infidelity - of a year-long affair he’d ostensibly enjoyed with a former hairdresser who was, to the horror of tabloid and biographer alike, both the same age as Wainwright and markedly less well-maintained than his then-current wife.
Wainwright, not unexpectedly, had denied the accusation - and then, girded by his own hubris, had gone one step further, suing both newspaper and publisher for libel. He lost the case; was subsequently prosecuted in turn for the apparently false testimony he’d provided at the trial and before it and, thereafter - despite the best efforts of his legal team - convicted. Learning that he’d be spending the bulk of his sentence not in the open Category D prison he’d been expecting but in the altogether harsher environs of Her Majesty’s Prison Hendon had come as a particular shock.
He was a talker, Soames had discovered early on in their acquaintance; a talker and a pontificator, given to long midnight monologues about whatever was on his mind in the moment. It had irritated Soames at first, this incessant gabbling. Until, one night, something Wainwright said captured his interest.
“He was talking about his daughter,” Soames said. “His little Ingrid, as he called her. The name, or perhaps I should say the name in conjunction with his name… there was something familiar about it, though I couldn’t think what immediately.”
On and on Wainwright had droned about this Ingrid: what a beautiful baby she’d been, how funny and affectionate. There was a melancholic note to the rhapsodising, one that made Soames wonder if this child, this Ingrid, was estranged from Wainwright somehow, if a rift had opened between father and daughter since the halcyon days of her babyhood, however many years ago they might have been.
“You’ll see her when you get out,” Soames had said, as much to shut him up as to soothe him. “And you can always send her a V.O., if she can bear to come here for a visit.”
“She’s gone,” was all Wainwright had said in response.
“Gone?” Soames had asked - that same bell ringing again; another recollection stirring, unformed and nameless, in the dusty archives of his memory.
“Taken,” Wainwright had replied, the word catching in his throat.
And somewhere in the archives, a cabinet had sprung open.
Little Ingrid, he’d thought. The Yorkshire Lindbergh Baby.
The story came back to him then, almost wholesale - the same story Wainwright would eventually tell, in fractured and emotionally charged instalments, over the course of the weeks and months they bunked together.
In the spring of 1955, when Ted Wainwright was barely halfway into his twenties and still better known as the son of a decently successful textiles manufacturer than the international businessman and philanthropist he’d become, a group of masked men had forced their way into the home he shared with his wife (his first wife, Soames had mentally corrected himself) and their baby and, after tying the hands of both husband and wife to the bannisters with a length of cable and giving the husband a battering around the head, had grabbed the sleeping child from her bed and run off with her into the night, never to be seen again.
It was a kidnapping, the police had said at the time: a gang of chancers, albeit very well prepared chancers, looking to extort a pay-out from a local boy made good. But, though the Wainwrights waited, no demand for money was ever made, no ransom note delivered promising the safe return of Little Ingrid in exchange for a briefcase stuffed with £5 notes. And Ingrid herself remained missing.
Weeks came and went, then months, and eventually years. For the Wainwrights, suspended in time, the passage of these milestones meant nothing; Ingrid, they knew, was still alive, and would eventually return. Other possibilities were inconceivable; no God or just universe would allow them.
For the local police and the regional press, though - those few men and fewer women who kept half an eye on the now-cold case long after national interest had waned - the reality seemed clear: body or no body, Ingrid was dead. Murdered, quite possibly, on the very same night she was taken.
And when, two years on from the crime, Mrs Wainwright sank down into the River Ouse with a heavy stone in each of the pockets of her peacoat and the coroner, a good and trusted friend of Mr Wainwright’s late father Bill, had proven tender-hearted enough to rule her death an accident, it seemed to these onlookers like nothing so much as the coda to a tragedy - an ending, of sorts, albeit one that would bring Ted Wainwright no solace at all.
“They got it wrong, though, about Ingrid,” Wainwright told Soames from the upper bunk, through what could have been tears. “I can see how it must have looked to them, the detectives and that, but you’d feel it, wouldn’t you, if something like that’d happened to one of your own? You’d feel it. And I’m telling you now, same as I told them then: I never felt anything at all. So I know she’s alive, do you see? I know it.”
In the dark, Soames had nodded, and uttered suitably sympathetic sounds, while behind his rheumy eyes, the earliest beginnings of a plan began to coalesce.
“He’s spent a fortune trying to track her down,” Soames said. “Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. All for a child that anyone with any deductive reasoning at all could tell him is buried under six feet of earth on the top of a moor somewhere…”
He trailed off, his breath lost, and reached for his mask.
“That’s what you want us to do?” Rose asked, disgusted. “Trick a grieving old man into emptying his bank accoun
t by pretending to be… what? Private detectives who can help him find his missing child? It’s repugnant, absolutely repugnant.”
Not just detectives, El thought. Psychic detectives. It would have to be.
I’m not doing this, none of us are doing this - whatever bear-trap Soames has got us in, we’ll get out of it, we always do. But if we were doing it … a private detective con on its own wouldn’t cut it. This Wainwright - he’ll have seen enough investigators and missing person specialists and ex-Scotland Yard consultants to last a lifetime. We’d have to go bigger, better. More ethereal. And we’d need to give him a hell of a convincer.
She grimaced, appalled at herself for considering the possibility, even hypothetically.
Soames released the mask; pushed it, this time, up and onto his temples, where it sat, absurdly, like a pair of superannuated racing goggles.
“If that’s what you thought I intended you to take from the story,” he said, “then I have some good news for you, Lady Winchester. Because finding the child isn’t quite what I have in mind.”
Chapter 14
Presidio Heights, San Francisco
September 1997
At first, El had resisted the idea of the five of them renting a house together. It was too risky, she argued, for the whole team to be concentrated in one place; would be more sensible by far to book separate suites in separate hotels scattered across the city, in Chinatown and Hayes Valley, Pacific Heights and Russian Hill. But then Rose had been reluctant to leave Sophie behind at home, even in the care of her sister-in-law, and Sita had lodged her usual complaints against the impersonality and sterility of chain hotels, even those at the five star end, and a short term rental that was both big enough and luxurious enough to accommodate the needs of all concerned had seemed the obvious solution.
The Push (El Gardener Book 2) Page 12