by Zoe Sharp
‘Professional assessment – did it look real or fake to you?’
I considered for a moment, eyes focused back in memory, replaying the whole scene, from the moment the Jeep had leapt into view over the top of the dunes, to Torquil being unceremoniously tossed into the back of it.
‘I suppose I would have to say … real,’ I said slowly. ‘Nobody willingly agrees to have himself hit with a Taser – not when he could just have been threatened with it.’
‘He might not have been expecting them to go to quite that level of authenticity,’ Parker pointed out. ‘And if it’s the same people who took the others, they did chop off Benedict Benelli’s finger, don’t forget.’
‘Still, there was something about it … I don’t know.’ I frowned. ‘When the Jeep first appeared, he looked surprised but happy to see it – excited, even. And only when it came after him instead of Dina did he seem to panic, as if he’d been expecting to watch, not actively take part.’
‘Maybe he realised from what you said to him at the country club the other night that you were onto him, and he wanted to make it look good,’ Parker said. ‘Hence claiming he’d gotten an email from Dina asking for the meet.’
‘Ah, and there we might have a slight problem. He did get an email.’
Parker stilled at the implications. ‘So … Dina set this up?’
‘Not exactly, and that’s the problem,’ I said. ‘I found this on the beach.’
I handed Parker Torquil’s PDA. He’d seen the boy using it in the limo on the way to the charity auction, so he didn’t waste time asking whose it was. Instead, he scrolled through the menu and opened up the in-box, just as I had done as soon as I’d got back to the house.
And there was the message, clearly identifying Dina – or her email address – as the sender.
‘Meet me on the beach near the dunes in an HOUR. It’s VITAL we talk about what’s been going on before the truth comes out! Come ALONE and so will I. Tell NO ONE!!’
‘Looks kinda clear to me,’ Parker said. He glanced at me with a cool assessing gaze. ‘But you have doubts.’
‘I was with Dina all morning. She never had a chance to send an email, either from her laptop or her cellphone.’
‘You sure? It doesn’t take more than a half minute.’
I remembered again her shock when Torquil first appeared. If she’d been expecting him – expecting anyone – she was a far better actress than I’d given her credit for. Even if she’d been able to conceal her genuine reaction from me, Cerdo would have known.
‘I’m sure,’ I said. ‘But I can appreciate this raises questions. Like, if she didn’t send it, who did?’ I watched him hesitate. ‘My job is to protect her, Parker. Just how far am I supposed to go in order to do that?’
Parker was silent for a moment, eyes on the rolling breakers although I was pretty sure he didn’t see anything of the view outside the windows.
‘My laptop’s down in the Navigator,’ he said at last. He nodded to the PDA. ‘I can download the contents and we’ll see if we can trace exactly where that email came from.’ He checked his watch, added grimly, ‘And, with any luck, I’ll be able to do it before they get here.’
‘Who?’ I demanded. ‘I told you what they said about calling in the cops—’
‘No, Eisenberg’s people,’ he cut in, already heading for the door, where he paused just long enough to send me a wry smile. ‘You think they haven’t been tracking that thing since the moment the kid was taken?’
I didn’t move from the window while he was gone. Without knowing about the supposed email that had lured Torquil into the ambush, I hadn’t shown the fallen PDA to his bodyguards, hadn’t mentioned it in fact. Not that they’d stopped to ask a lot of unnecessary questions. Or one or two I would have said were pretty bloody vital.
Still, it should have occurred to me that the first thing they’d do was attempt to track him via the GPS chip. In fact, I was amazed they hadn’t bust the door down already.
Parker was back a minute or so later, without actually appearing to hurry. There was an economy of movement to him that inspired confidence. He was already opening up a case containing a slim laptop and setting it up on a side table that was probably not intended to hold more than an elaborate arrangement of flowers. He plugged in a USB lead, tapped a few keys, and coerced the PDA into opening up a dialogue with its temporary host. In moments, it was spilling its secrets.
In the midst of this operation, Caroline Willner came into the living area and sank into a chair. Her posture was still very upright, but she moved slowly, as though it physically hurt her to do so. For the first time, she looked like an old lady rather than a matriarch.
I would have asked her if she was OK, but something told me she would hate that weakness being so obvious, more than she hated the weakness itself. Instead, I rang for a pot of tea, and when one of the maids, Silvana, smilingly answered my summons, I politely asked if she could dig out something sweet to go with it, just as an excuse to bring some sugar into the equation.
When Silvana left, Caroline Willner flashed me a brief glance that told me she understood what I was doing, and was not ungrateful for it.
‘How’s Dina?’ I asked. Safer ground.
‘Still very shocked,’ Caroline Willner said. ‘They’ve given her a light sedative. She’ll sleep for a while.’
Parker met my eye briefly. ‘Probably for the best,’ he said much more soothingly than I would have managed. The PDA finished disgorging its content and he carefully unplugged it, coiling up the short lead and slipping it into his pocket, out of sight, before he began scanning through the captured files with the laptop’s screen canted away from us.
But I knew he’d found something by his sudden immobility, the hardening around his mouth. He glanced up, caught me watching him.
‘You better see this.’
I moved round to stand alongside him, leaning over the laptop so I could see the screen too. It was a video clip of an interior scene, a bedroom. There were three occupants, engaged in activity that was as athletic as it was inventive.
Two thirds of the trio were uniformly muscular young men, one blond, one dark, tanned and tattooed. The woman was older, paler, but she had the well-preserved look that comes with surgery and stringent maintenance. Her haircut – and what was left of her lingerie after the young studs had removed much of it with their teeth – was expensive in cut and colour.
I raised my eyebrows at Parker. ‘Torquil wouldn’t be the first immature male to download porn off the Internet.’
‘I don’t think this is a straightforward download,’ Parker murmured, calling up file names and root directories and a whole load of other stuff I had no clue about. ‘This was a direct feed from someplace.’
I looked again. The picture was surprisingly high quality, all things considered, but the camera position never altered, even when the players’ antics took them half out of the range of the lens. Never once did they seem aware of being filmed. There were no coy little smiles or knowing glances.
‘Hidden camera?’ I said.
Parker nodded. ‘That would be my guess.’
I blanked the cavorting on the bed and focused beyond them, out into the room itself. Where had I seen that decor, those furnishings, that giant plasma screen TV hanging dark on the far wall, the oval detail in the ceiling …?
‘Oh my God,’ I said faintly. ‘That’s Eisenberg’s yacht. One of the main staterooms.’
And not just any of the staterooms, but the same one where Dina had gone for her private chat with Orlando and Benedict on the night of Torquil’s party. I flicked my eyes to Parker’s. ‘Is there sound with this?’
By way of answer, he dragged the cursor across a small sound bar in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. The laptop’s small internal speakers struggled to accurately reproduce the grunts and groans and squeals of the audio track for a few moments, before he quickly lowered the volume again, looking ever so slightly embarrassed.
The maid, Silvana, returned with a teapot and cups and various highly calorific snacks on a large tray. She put the tray down on the low table in front of Caroline Willner, and obeyed her instruction that we would pour.
It was only when she’d left us again that Caroline Willner rose and said calmly to Parker, ‘I think you’d better let me see.’
It was the first time I think I’ve ever seen Parker look flustered. ‘Ma’am, it’s not the kinda thing you ought to—’
‘For pleasure, no,’ she agreed gravely. ‘But it’s entirely obvious what the boy was looking at, and I may be able to identify the, ah … participants, shall we say?’
‘Ah,’ Parker said, still with a touch of pink across his cheekbones. He turned the laptop towards her and tried to studiously ignore the way she peered closer at the screen, reaching for her reading glasses, which hung on an ornate chain around her neck.
‘My, my,’ she murmured after a few moments. ‘Well one has to admire their limber qualities, if nothing else …’
I grinned at her and she wrinkled her nose in brief response, before straightening.
‘Anyone you know?’ I asked.
‘The young men, I haven’t had the pleasure of making their acquaintance, and I’m quite sure I would remember. But the woman is undoubtedly Nicola Eisenberg – Torquil’s mother.’ She frowned thoughtfully. ‘I shall view her power yoga classes in a whole new light.’
Parker, old-fashioned in some ways more than others, looked in serious danger of spontaneously combusting with associated shame. He busied himself with the laptop again while Caroline Willner calmly went back to the table and, without a flicker, dealt with the tea.
‘It looks like this video stream came in a few days ago, right about the time we were headed to the charity auction,’ he said.
‘Torquil received a couple of incoming messages while we were in the limo,’ I recalled, ‘and he looked pretty smug about them at the time.’
‘Hardly surprising,’ Caroline Willner put in. ‘Brandon Eisenberg makes such an unseemly fuss about being faithful to his wife, when just about everyone knows he’s sleeping with that red-headed bodyguard of his.’
‘So, how big a scandal would it cause if it came out that Eisenberg’s wife was sleeping with half the crew on his yacht?’ I asked, and out of the corner of my eye saw Parker wince slightly.
‘Oh, I don’t suppose it would ever have come out,’ Caroline Willner said, sounding surprised that I didn’t know how this game was played. ‘I’m sure Brandon would have found a suitable financial incentive to prevent his son ever showing that video to anyone.’ She took a sip of her tea. ‘After all, he always has done in the past.’
Now when I glanced at Parker, his gaze had lost any trace of self-consciousness and turned calculating.
‘Maybe this time he got tired of paying,’ he said, reaching into his jacket for his cellphone. ‘How about I call him and find out?’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
‘Hey, um, Charlie? There’s folks here to see Miss Willner.’
Joe McGregor’s face appeared round the cracked edge of the bedroom door after a perfunctory knock, looking discomfited. I should have guessed why.
‘Who is it?’ I asked.
I was fully expecting a contingent from Eisenberg’s security personnel, come to interrogate the pair of us about what we’d witnessed on the beach the previous morning. Instead, it was Manda Dempsey who insinuated herself through the gap and hurried forwards into the room with a dramatic cry of, ‘Oh, honey, we heard the news! How are you taking it? Are you all right?’
Directly behind her was Orlando, and through the open doorway I caught a glimpse of a guy in a suit who’d taken up station on the other side of the corridor with his back to the wall. He had the build of a rugby player, complete with broken nose. I didn’t need to check the bulge under his arm to know he was security.
I glanced at Dina, sitting propped up against a heap of pillows, clutching the bedclothes tightly around her body as if suffering from a chill. She’d slept for most of the previous afternoon, after Parker’s departure, and all through the night. It was now the following morning, and she’d turned away three or four trays of elaborate delicacies before being coaxed into eating half a bowl of fresh fruit for breakfast.
She’d asked for me when she’d woken, and I’d been sitting with her for around half an hour when Manda and Orlando arrived. I’d managed, by approaching the subject as you would a potential suicide on a high ledge, to find out that she denied categorically sending an email to Torquil the morning before.
I’d also got the distinct impression she might just be working her way up to telling me something important – something that scared her – and hadn’t tried to hurry things. Now – with this interruption – I began to wish I’d pressed harder.
It was just after 10 a.m. Torquil Eisenberg had been missing a little over twenty-four hours with no ransom demand being made.
So far, we’d drawn one big blank when it came to answers. Parker had not managed to talk directly to Torquil’s father the previous day. A man like that is not freely available at the end of a phone to anyone but his closest friends.
Parker had argued and cajoled his way up the food chain as far as one of Eisenberg’s personal assistants before he met his match. By the sound of their one-sided conversation, she couldn’t have blocked him any more effectively if she’d been in goal at an ice hockey match.
Ever discreet, my boss would only say that we had picked up Torquil’s PDA, which he must have mislaid on the beach. I entirely understood Parker’s reasons for being so circumspect but, put like that, it hardly shrieked of urgency, and was dismissed accordingly.
Eventually, he ended the call and shrugged. ‘I’ve done what I can at this point,’ he said, and only because I knew him well did I see the frustrated weariness beneath his controlled tone. ‘My instinct is to call in the FBI, but I can’t do that without the family’s say-so. It could be putting the kid at serious risk.’
He left Joe McGregor on station as backup, which was no hardship. I’d worked with McGregor numerous times. A young black Canadian, his cheerful attitude belied solid combat experience and very good instincts.
Parker promised to keep us updated as soon as he had news, but we heard nothing for the rest of the afternoon and into the next day.
Now, the two girls came rushing in to offer Dina comfort, amid much fluttering and high voices. Orlando perched on the edge of Dina’s bed, taking the girl’s hands in hers and giving them a quick squeeze. I nodded to McGregor, who took one look at Dina’s face and realised there was likely to be an outpouring of excessive female emotion. He flashed me a look that said, ‘All yours!’ and went gratefully back to guard duty.
I stayed back and watched the three of the girls together for a moment, but it was difficult to read any new tension in Dina. She was already quivering like the wires of a suspension bridge in high wind. I wondered why. She hadn’t responded this badly when the attempt on her at the riding club had failed. Why the dramatic reaction now? Unless she had been a party to the deception that had lured Torquil to his fate?
Manda was fussing round Dina, straightening the covers, talking nineteen to the dozen without giving Dina much of a chance to say anything in return. Manda looked as well groomed as I’d come to expect, but there was something about the butter-soft suede jacket she slipped out of and held carelessly in my direction – like she’d chosen it in a bit more of a hurry than usual. But I suppose that, for them, ten in the morning counted as being up at the crack of dawn.
I took the jacket without comment and dumped it across the back of an armchair. If she was expecting valet service, she was out of luck.
‘I saw them coming and I … I thought they were coming for me,’ Dina said, her gaze unfocused, voice slightly reedy. ‘And I was frightened, after what happened to Raleigh, I—’
‘Hush now,’ Orlando said, soothing. ‘You’ve had a shock. Try not to think
about it. It’s all gonna be OK. Tor’s father and his people will do everything they can to get him back safe, you hear me?’
Dina moved her head in her direction, almost as though she was working on sound alone. ‘It could have been me,’ she whispered.
‘Not with Charlie here to look after you, honey,’ Manda said, giving me a meaningful look to back her up on this one.
‘I don’t want to be taken,’ Dina said.
‘You won’t be,’ I told her.
‘I—’
‘Hush now, honey,’ Manda said firmly, leaning forwards and making sure Dina established and sustained eye contact. ‘You’ll be quite safe. Nothing bad will happen to you, I promise.’
Dina hesitated, then nodded, a fractional movement of her head. Orlando leant forwards and gently tucked a stray strand of hair out of Dina’s eyes, smiling almost shyly.
Feeling like an intruder, I shifted my gaze to the window and the stunning view beyond it. The room was at the back of the house, overlooking the beach, but Dina rarely had the blinds pulled back to appreciate the view. I wondered if living with something beautiful all the time made you weary of it more quickly.
I’d been unable to offer this kind of sisterly comfort to Dina, and I doubted it was what she wanted of me. My instinct had been to tell her to pull herself together. She hadn’t been physically injured, wasn’t sick, so why hide herself away like an invalid?
But I hadn’t voiced such thoughts. I could still remember a time when all I’d wanted to do was burrow long and deep. And hope, when I finally surfaced, the world as I knew it had simply gone away. It hadn’t worked.
Behind me, Orlando was saying how they didn’t want to tire her, that they’d just stopped by to see how Dina was doing. She gave her hands another quick squeeze and stood up.
‘Get some rest, honey,’ Manda said, picking up her jacket. They kissed her cheek, headed for the door. I followed them out, collecting the silent bodyguard, and led the little party through the lower levels of the house. Manda and Orlando talked critically about how shaky Dina had looked, as if it never occurred to them that I might repeat their comments to her.