The Dead Line

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The Dead Line Page 30

by Holly Watt


  Through gulps, Emily read out the address.

  ‘Just outside Guildford,’ Casey visualised the map. ‘I won’t be long.’

  ‘I can’t wait to see her,’ whispered Emily. ‘Little Poppy Naomi Burton-Smith. Keep her safe, Casey. Promise me? Keep her safe.’

  ‘Emily . . .’

  ‘Casey.’ For a second, Emily sounded quite cold. ‘Please get her here as soon as you can.’

  Miranda drove, weaving impatiently through the London traffic. Casey sat in silence, staring into space.

  Portunus. Rhapso. Arachne. Aceso.

  ‘Have you ever thought about it?’ Miranda interrupted her thoughts.

  ‘Thought about what?’ Casey rubbed her eyes.

  ‘Kids. And all that.’

  ‘Not really. Not yet. Have you?’ A pause. ‘Has Tom?’

  ‘A bit. Yes.’ A long pause. ‘It all just seems so unfair, doesn’t it?’ Miranda gripped the steering wheel. ‘That these women will do anything – anything – to have children. And I’m ambivalent, at best.’

  ‘Everything’s unfair.’ Casey turned towards Miranda. ‘So Tom wants kids.’

  ‘Yes.’ Miranda let out a long breath. ‘And it’s going to be the thing that finishes us, after all that.’

  ‘I had wondered,’ said Casey carefully.

  ‘Becky, and all that.’ Miranda pulled a face. ‘Me. Doesn’t seem like a good basis for anything, does it?’

  ‘No.’ Casey softened it. ‘Sorry. But it might just be that she flirts with him, and all the things we . . .’

  The windscreen wipers swept back and forwards.

  Unless we’re working, Miranda didn’t say. ‘Don’t. Yes.’

  ‘Well, what do you want?’ asked Casey.

  ‘It’s all the bits of my life that I don’t enjoy . . .’ Miranda was almost speaking to herself. ‘The cooking, the cleaning, the knowing where I’ll be at three thirty exactly on Thursday afternoon – it’s all those things that would become my everything. They would submerge everything else. And all the things I love, those are the things that would disappear.’

  ‘But we’d make it work, you and I. No matter what.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Miranda’s eyes were on the darkness of the road. ‘But I wouldn’t be running to Heathrow for the next flight to Dhaka.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There’s something so primitive about the whole thing,’ Miranda said.

  ‘Has he offered to look after this theoretical child?’

  ‘Tom? No.’

  ‘Ask him? At least he would realise what he is asking you to give up.’

  ‘Maybe. How about you?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Casey waved. ‘I suppose if I want one at some point, I’ll have one. I’ve never understood men being smug about it all. That tick-tock crap. If I wanted a child – really wanted one, above all else – I’d probably be able to have one within a year. And where would they be?’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Although I suppose it’s that sort of confidence that leads all the way to Chittagong.’

  Miranda almost laughed, and Casey smiled across at her.

  Tilney Cottage was to the south of Guildford, just outside one of the pretty little villages that were slowly sprawling into each other along the main road.

  Casey stopped the car next to an empty cricket green, the jangle of an ice-cream van in the distance. Miranda looked across at her.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’

  ‘No,’ said Casey. ‘But it won’t take long to check, and there was something in Emily’s voice.’

  They stepped out of the car.

  Tilney Cottage sat at the end of a long, potholed drive, surrounded by fields, just out of sight of the road. Woods reached around the house, thick as a winter coat.

  ‘Why on earth do they call these houses cottages?’ Miranda had asked, as she stared at an old printout of the agent’s brochure. ‘It’s hardly a bloody cottage.’

  Casey flicked through the brochure. The kitchen was country-perfect: a navy blue Aga, a row of copper saucepans. ‘We’ll go across the fields,’ she said.

  They had dressed for it, in walking boots and coats, safe from the chill. A bridle path ran along the shelter of a hedgerow, taking them a few hundred yards from the cottage.

  Close up, Tilney Cottage was a big, tile-hung house, surrounded by yew hedges. It had the air of a house that had been rented out for too many years. Shabby, and not quite cared for, the swimming pool a leaf-filled hole.

  Casey had checked with the agent. A nice couple had hired it for a month, and then it would be available for rent again. ‘They’re charming, the current tenants,’ the girl had trilled. ‘I’m sure I could show you around, say, this Friday?’

  Clouds were gathering overhead now. In the gathering gloom, lights showed downstairs. ‘Let’s get a bit nearer,’ Casey murmured.

  They crept closer, to where the shape of the topiary was blurring slowly along the boundary of the garden.

  Casey dropped to the ground, edging through the hedge. Twigs tore at her hair. Now she was just a few yards from the back of the house, flat against the ground. She could see two figures at a big kitchen table. Then she froze at a sudden movement by the window: a man jerking the curtains closed. She caught the taut cheekbones, the sharp eyes.

  The man from the airport.

  The curtains snapped shut.

  Here.

  61

  Miranda and Casey sat in the car, staring across the rainswept fields.

  ‘He was going to kill us, wasn’t he?’ Casey spoke quietly. ‘If we had walked into that house with Poppy, he would have . . .’

  ‘And you didn’t see Dominic and Emily?’

  ‘No,’ said Casey. ‘But they could be upstairs somewhere if they’re in the house. It’s impossible to tell.’

  Cellars below the kitchen, she had read in the particulars. Attics.

  ‘Damn.’ Miranda thumped the steering wheel.

  ‘They must have worked it out when we checked out of the hotel in Chittagong,’ said Casey. ‘When the people they thought were Dominic and Emily disappeared at the same time as the raid on the ship . . . It must all have been too suspicious. We were so stupid.’ Casey slammed her fist into the dashboard. ‘Naive.’ Her worst criticism.

  ‘Why is he here?’ Miranda scrubbed her hand across her face. ‘What does he want?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘That man waiting at the airport, he could have been meaning to bring you back here too. We hadn’t published anything then. I suppose they might have thought they could stop it all. But now . . .’

  An elderly man squeezed past the car, tugging an old black cocker spaniel along in the pouring rain. He peered disapprovingly at the two women.

  ‘We need to move,’ said Casey.

  ‘But where?’ Miranda sounded almost despairing as she rattled the car keys. ‘We have to call the police now . . . This is a kidnap, Casey. It’s too serious for us. We need to get Dominic and Emily out of there right now.’

  ‘If we call the police, whoever is behind Greystone will get away with it,’ said Casey. ‘The police won’t know what to do with all this. Not in the timeframe. They’ll catch the man down in Tilney Cottage, probably. Possibly. But then what? They won’t have seen any of the evidence we saw in Bangladesh. They’ll never catch up.’

  ‘But we can’t leave Emily and Dominic just trapped in that house,’ said Miranda. ‘Not like that. Not with him.’

  There was a pause. ‘We have to,’ said Casey reluctantly. ‘Poppy Naomi, that’s what Emily said. She was trying to warn me that something had gone wrong. Naomi was the name of the surrogate who kept the Burton-Smith baby a few years ago. Emily would never have named this baby Naomi. She was warning me.’

  They sat there in silence for a minute, car headlights flashing past hypnotically. Then Casey sat forward.

  ‘Emily said, “Keep her safe.” That’s her priority. Not the police. Poppy is all that she wa
nts.’

  ‘It might be,’ said Miranda. ‘It’s what you want to believe, Casey.’

  ‘The police will cause chaos,’ said Casey. ‘The Burton-Smiths could lose Poppy for ever over this. You know that. They know that.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘No one outside that gang knows the Burton-Smiths are involved yet. If we keep their secrets, they could just quietly re-register Poppy over here, and get on with their lives. Heather worked out a way they might do it. Poppy Lancaster just disappears for ever.’

  ‘The police won’t like it,’ said Miranda. ‘They’ll want to know who the families are.’

  ‘We’d never tell them.’

  ‘That would be hard. They’d go for our computers, not that they’d find much.’

  ‘We have to work out who Zeus is,’ said Casey. ‘Finding him is the only way of getting Dominic and Emily out safely.’

  ‘How?’ Miranda raised her palms to the sky. ‘How are you going to find him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Casey. ‘But we need to get back to the office.’

  Shaking her head, Miranda put the car into gear.

  ‘Portunus,’ Casey was murmuring to herself as she dialled. ‘Arachne. Aceso.’ She swiped at her phone. ‘Toby? I need a hand with something.’

  Toby had worked with Casey and Miranda in the past. At the Post, he was a data journalist, in anarchic T-shirts and torn jeans. He was pale, his head almost shaved, and he rolled his eyes behind Ross’s back a lot. In the office, he was a brilliant coder, a magician delving into a dark parallel world of pythons and rubies and perls. The Post averted its thoughts from what he got up to outside the office. Casey, occasionally, sidled up to him.

  Now, she spoke fast. ‘Toby, can you get a list of every company set up around the world in the last – say – five years, and cross-reference them against the names of all the Greek gods and goddesses? And any other mythical names.’ She paused. ‘Yes, all of them. Thousands, yes. I know it’s a bit odd . . . But it might just throw something up . . . ASAP please. You’re a star.’

  Casey ended the call, and turned with a grin to Miranda. ‘It might work,’ she said again.

  As she spoke, Casey was scrolling through her phone. ‘Aristaeus,’ she murmured. ‘“Minor god of cheese-making, bee-keeping, and other rustic skills.” God, some of these are obscure. Asclepius . . . Atlas . . . Attis . . .’

  The car raced along, the rain spattering against the windscreen as the miles rolled past.

  Casey sat up sharply in her seat. ‘Tartarus,’ she read out. ‘Both a deity and place in the Underworld. They had that bull logo – that’s another Zeus symbol. Tartarus Energy, the company Bantham mentioned out in DC. They’re another one.’

  62

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Miranda said, as they pulled into the car park under the Post. ‘You need to sleep, Casey.’

  Casey stared at her in bewilderment. ‘We can’t sleep while Dominic and Emily are . . . And Poppy . . .’

  ‘Just for a few hours,’ said Miranda. ‘You have to.’

  ‘I’ve got a couple of calls to make.’ Casey was edging towards the escalator. ‘At the very least, I’ve got to give Emily a reason why we didn’t turn up at Tilney Cottage. You go home.’

  ‘Who are Tartarus Energy anyway?’ Miranda called after her.

  ‘Bantham mentioned them by mistake.’ Casey turned back briefly. ‘They own the rights to drill oil in a big chunk of central Africa. But there is a rival company that claims to hold the same rights as well, because they were awarded by an early government. A mess. The MPs were due to make quiet representations to their president on behalf of Tartarus.’

  ‘Typical.’

  ‘Go home, Miranda,’ said Casey. ‘I won’t be long.’

  As soon as she was at her desk, Casey pulled up the MPs’ register of interests. It was a huge list, regularly updated, of all the people or companies who had funded parliamentarians’ fact-finding trips or campaigns. It also showed some of the MPs’ own financial interests. In theory, an MP couldn’t own 20 per cent of a company and then stand up in the Commons to make long speeches about its brilliant products. In theory, an MP couldn’t be sent on a five-star junket to Antigua by a pharmaceutical company, and then vote for amendments that gave the company a huge tax break. In practice, loopholes had been found, time and time again.

  Now, Casey read through the register carefully. She searched for the six MPs she had seen in Washington DC, hunting for the name of the company that had funded the trip.

  ‘Chrysos Finance,’ Casey read to herself a few minutes later. ‘Someone’s got a sense of humour, at least.’

  She pulled up the threadbare information available for Chrysos Finance. Superficially, it was a small company offering wealth management for optimistic retirees. A basic website provided an address in the heart of the city, superimposed over glossy photographs of skyscrapers and smiling men grouped round a polished boardroom table. Just enough detail to avert the attention of a busy political correspondent. Deliberately mundane, thought Casey, and not even a phone number.

  The Chrysos logo was a golden raindrop.

  Zeus transformed into a shower of gold to seduce Danaë, Casey read in one of the books on Xavier’s desk.

  Googling, Casey found that forty-seven other companies operated from the same office at Chrysos. Casey looked up Chrysos’s accountants. The same as Tartarus Energy. She sighed to herself.

  Leaning back in her chair, she called Gabriel Bantham.

  Bantham sounded furtive as he answered the phone.

  ‘Have you heard anything more about Erica Whiddon?’ he asked, rushing on before Casey could get out a word. ‘I’ve decided to resign from the Foreign Office, I thought you should know. Time to do something else. I’ll find something. The FCO has been in touch about . . . Well. They’re not thrilled. But they didn’t threaten anything. And if I’m leaving anyway . . . I don’t know . . . I hope . . .’

  ‘I haven’t heard anything else about Erica.’ Casey tried to sound reassuring. ‘I will let you know as soon as I find out anything. But Gabriel, there’s something else . . . When those MPs came out to Washington, do you know who organised it all? I think the trip was funded by a company called Chrysos Finance. Can you remember if they were involved in the planning?’

  ‘Chrysos,’ Bantham said hesitatingly. ‘I don’t remember . . .’

  He paused, thinking. ‘There was a blonde woman who travelled out with the MPs. She seemed to be organising them. Knew about hotels, pick-ups, that sort of thing.’

  ‘What did she look like?’

  ‘Elegant,’ Bantham was definite. ‘Blonde hair, smart suits. Good legs,’ he excused the comment with a half-laugh. ‘Well, you did ask.’

  ‘None of them mentioned Chrysos at all?’ she said. ‘While they were out there?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Casey could imagine Bantham furrowing his brow as he spoke. ‘They were just enjoying the jaunt.’

  ‘Did they end up meeting the African president?’ asked Casey.

  ‘They did,’ Bantham said slowly. ‘At the Washington Ballet. There was a cocktail party. Several of the MPs went.’

  ‘Including Alicia Dalgleish?’

  ‘Yes,’ Bantham said confidently. ‘She definitely went along. She told me how much she enjoyed the ballet.’

  ‘And did the blonde woman go too?’

  ‘Yes,’ Bantham said. ‘She seemed to be good friends with Alicia. Chummy.’

  ‘Did you think’ – Casey made the question sound casual – ‘that the blonde woman might have had anything to do with Tartarus Energy?’

  ‘Tartarus . . .’ Bantham did the calculation fast. ‘Christ. No. I don’t think . . .’

  ‘Tartarus was never mentioned?’ asked Casey.

  ‘No,’ said Bantham. ‘I don’t . . .’

  ‘How did the MPs come to be going to the Washington Ballet? Who organised it?’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ Bantham said after a pause. ‘It was the
MPs themselves who had made those plans. It wasn’t the embassy who sorted that visit . . .’

  ‘Do you think that Alicia might have been involved in planning that meeting? Or this blonde woman?’

  ‘She could well have been,’ said Bantham. ‘You think that Chrysos is linked to Tartarus?’

  ‘It might be.’

  ‘What does it mean, anyway? Chrysos?’

  ‘Chrysos’ – Casey felt her mouth stretch into a wry smile – ‘is the spirit of gold.’

  ‘So that would mean,’ Bantham worked it out, ‘that Chrysos funded the MPs’ trip, so they could lobby for its sister company while they were in DC?’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Casey. ‘Something like that.’

  As she read Casey’s messages about Bantham, Miranda was perching on the uncomfortable sofa in the sitting room. She had lit the wood-burner earlier, but the fire had petered out.

  They never sat on the uncomfortable sofa, Tom and Miranda. Never just the two of them, companionable and cosy.

  Miranda stared around the room, and for a moment, it glimmered with another life, a different life. A pile of toys in the corner: plastic, those bright primary colours. A toddler, pulling himself up to lean on the coffee table, on little sturdy legs. Herself, cooking, unseen in the kitchen, with the occasional irritable shout. Noise, warmth, colour: a different world superimposed.

  She heard Tom’s footsteps hurry up the garden path, the crunch of the key in the lock.

  So familiar, unfamiliar.

  He saw her as he walked in, nodding, still polite. The pile of toys evaporated, the child faded away.

  ‘Tom . . .’

  He knew at once. She saw him try to keep his face steady, calm, but for once he couldn’t hide the flood of hurt. The vulnerability made her heart twist, and she wanted to reach out, hold him, undo it all.

  ‘You chose, then.’

  You have to choose.

  ‘I didn’t want to, Tom. It didn’t have to be a choice.’

  ‘It did, Miranda.’

  A pause, a nod. ‘I know.’

  For a moment, they reflected the same sadness: two mirrors, an infinity of sorrow.

  ‘They tell you that all women . . .’

 

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