Hostage to Fortune

by Carolyn McCrae

  “Or the police looking after their own?”

  “Either way he got the best care money could buy.”

  “Did all that care fail? We know he died in 1990. Was it the beating that killed him?”

  “No, not directly anyway. He left the hospital in February 1990 and stayed in Cornwall where he drowned.”

  “Why was he in Cornwall?”

  “That was where the private hospital he’d been recovering in was. Near Looe.”

  “How did he drown?”

  “He was surfing and somehow managed to get caught in a rip tide. It was a while before anyone realised he was missing. His body was never found. The papers were full of it, you know, poor little rich kid etcetera etcetera.”

  “End of story then.”

  Skye shook her head. “It was the end of Barford Eden’s story, certainly, but what if it wasn’t really the end? What if he didn’t die? His body was never found. What if it was simply a put-up job and he went into hiding and was given a new identity and became Brian Cliffe? Isn’t that possible?”

  “I see where you’re going with this. You’re suggesting that that would mean Guy would have a motive to kill Warwick. If he found out who his father really was, or might have been. It’s all still a bit tenuous.”

  Skye shook her head vigorously. “Not tenuous at all. Circumstantial perhaps, I’ll give you that, but if Guy could prove that the father he really doesn’t believe is Canadian Brian Cliffe was actually Barford Eden then the family would be really rich and he would be the heir to all that dosh.”

  “I can almost buy that, though he would have to have found out the long-buried secret of his father’s identity.”

  “Which he could easily have done, couldn’t he?” Skye argued. “If he knew where to look he could find out anything on the internet.”

  “But what about Ryan? Why would Guy want to frame him for Warwick’s murder then kill him?”

  “Maybe Ryan was just a random stool pigeon who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or…”

  “Or?”

  “Or maybe he discovered a link between his father and the O’Donnell family.”

  “Perhaps he found out that his father had framed Ryan’s father and… No. We have no proof of any of this. Everything is if and maybe.” Fergal remained unconvinced.

  “It does make sense though. What if Guy found out that it was John O’Donnell’s friends who beat up his dad? What if he knew Ryan was the son of the man whose friends beat up his dad causing him to give up on his family and all that wealth in the first place?”

  “That’s an awful lot of what-ifs.”

  “Maybe it’s just that Guy is a psychopath and likes killing people.”

  “Psychopath, sociopath or neither we’ll need a lot more than all this supposition to convince ourselves, let alone Gordon Hamilton, that Guy’s a killer.”

  “Let’s keep looking then. I just know Guy has to be behind all this. I just know it. Call it woman’s intuition.”

  “You and your bloody intuition. But this time I suspect you may well be right.”

  Chapter 17: Diane Plans

  Lying on the bed in the small cabin Diane felt the movement of the yacht. She hoped the journey would be a short one; the idea of heading back north through the Bay of Biscay did not appeal to her.

  “Where are we off to now?” she asked the Indian man with the Yorkshire accent when he brought her her lunch tray three hours later.

  “I’m not sure.” He was telling the truth. Guy had not told him. “Look, I know your name is Diane but why are you here? What have you done to Guy? Why does he keep you here?”

  “What have I done to Guy? I think perhaps you had better ask him that. And I think you should ask Guy what he’s done that he has had to run away from England like this.”

  Arjun hadn’t expected that response. “Running away? Guy?”

  “Hasn’t he told you what he’s up to?” Diane had decided that the principle of divide and rule would be her most useful weapon. She would find out what she could about her captors and then set about making them suspicious of each other. “Hasn’t he told you what I saw that made him want to keep me out of circulation for a bit?”

  “What did you see? Were you snooping around Beausale? In Dartmouth? What did you see? What do you know?”

  “Look, whatever your name is… You haven’t said in all the days you’ve been bringing me my food trays.”

  “You never asked.”

  “I suppose I didn’t. I’m asking now.”

  “I’m Arjun.”

  “Tell me, Arjun, what you know about this man who calls himself Guy Cliffe.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s not Guy Cliffe, is he?”

  “Of course he is.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  Arjun bridled at being questioned. He wanted to defend the man he loved, and who he still believed loved him, but this woman seemed to know something he didn’t, and he wanted to know what that might be.

  He took too long to find an answer so Diane continued. “I hope you’ve known him long enough to know he can’t be trusted.”

  Still Arjun did not know what to say, so he said nothing.

  “The boy you know as Guy Cliffe is a member of the Eden family. His father is Warwick Eden’s brother. Now why would he hide that from you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. His name is Guy Cliffe. He has the papers to prove it.”

  “Anyone can make papers up to prove anything these days,” Diane said dismissively.

  “Why would he take a false name and work on a yacht when, if what you say is true, he could afford to buy any yacht he wanted?”

  “Why indeed?”

  “His name is Guy Cliffe, I’ve known him for a long time. We were together in the Caribbean. For a long time.” Arjun knew his voice betrayed far more than he meant it to.

  “When you say ‘together’ you don’t just mean as shipmates or whatever it is you call yourselves, do you?”

  Arjun avoided Diane’s eyes. “He never told me about his family.”

  By not answering Diane’s question directly, and from his voice and what he did say, she knew her suspicions were correct.

  “What other things hasn’t he told you?” she asked, pressing home her advantage. “And I don’t just mean simple things like where are we heading now and why did he come to Cartagena in the first place.”

  Seeing that the seeds of doubt were firmly planted in Arjun’s mind she changed the subject. “Where is your family? You do have family, don’t you?”

  “I have a mother and father and five sisters,” he said with some pride and a great deal of relief that the subject had turned away from Guy. He did not want to think about the possibility that Guy did not care for him and was simply using him. “They live in Yorkshire.”

  “I guessed that from your accent,” Diane said kindly. “Do you still have contact with them?”

  Arjun shook his head.

  “When did you leave? Did you leave because you are gay?”

  Arjun looked up sharply.

  “I’m sorry,” Diane said quickly, “I don’t mean to pry, it’s just that you seem such a nice young man and I could think of no other reason for you to have got mixed up with a man like Guy other than that you are attracted to him physically.”

  Still Arjun did not trust himself to say anything.

  “Are you a Hindu?” Diane asked. “Is your father? Hinduism is known to be tolerant of homosexuality. Surely that could not be the reason for any estrangement.”

  “He’s Catholic.” Arjun could answer that question.

  “Then surely he would welcome the return of his prodigal son.”

  As Arjun left without another word Diane believed she had seen doubt b
eginning to cloud Arjun’s mind.

  From that moment on, every time he brought her food, she would play on those doubts until the time would come when he would not blindly obey his lover who, Diane knew, had to be the brains behind whatever it was they were up to.

  Diane was concerned when, three days later, it was Guy who came into her cabin without knocking.

  “What have you been saying to AP?” he asked brusquely.

  “To whom?” Diane asked with pedantic faux innocence.

  “Who the fuck do you think to?”

  “Ah! Arjun. What a nice young man. He’s been very good to me, you know. He knocks before unlocking my cabin door.”

  “So? What have you said to him?”

  “I’ve simply been making him aware of some facts you seem to have forgotten to tell him. It’s obvious why he does everything you tell him to do, and why he is so obedient—”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It is obvious the poor boy dotes on you. The very least you could have done was be honest with him.”

  “Honest?”

  “You should have told him who you really are, at the very least the truth of your relationship to Warwick Eden.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “You are his nephew. Probably, since he has no children as far as anyone can tell, his closest relative, after your father that is. Your father is Barford, isn’t he?” She paused, waiting for confirmation that did not come. “Whether you admit it or not he is.”

  “My father’s name is Brian,” Guy stated firmly, immediately wishing he hadn’t given the woman any encouragement.

  Diane ignored him. “I knew Barford very well, that would be before you were born. You are very like he was when I knew him. He would have been in his early twenties too, little more than a boy. How old are you? Twenty? Twenty-one? Just a boy, like him.”

  “I’m not a boy. I’m a man.”

  “You want to be seen as a man? Then act like one. Accept the inevitable and let me go.”

  Again she paused to give Guy a chance to reply but he said nothing. Nor, she noticed, did he leave.

  “I suspect you must be almost exactly the same age as Barford when I knew him. You look and sound very like he did then. There is definitely a family resemblance. I always believed inheritance was far more important than environment in shaping a man and his character.”

  Guy said nothing, but still he stayed listening to what she had to say.

  “Barford was a very strange young man but then he had had a dreadful head injury. His assailants had kicked his head repeatedly, fractured his skull, did you know that? Such an injury was never going to fully heal. He was always going to have a shorter life than would normally be expected. How old is he now? Fifty? He can’t have much longer to go and then all Warwick’s enormous wealth should come to you, shouldn’t it?”

  She noticed the sharp look he gave her. It lasted only a second but it told her she had hit her target.

  “Is that what you’re thinking? Is that what you were doing working on his yacht? You didn’t do him a mischief when you were in Dartmouth, did you? You did! That’s why you bundled me on board. I might have spilt the beans, warned him, buggered up your little plan. That’s it, isn’t it?” She saw by the expression on his face that she was right. “Are they dead already? Your uncle and your father?”

  Guy looked sharply at his prisoner. Her haughty expression made him think of a particularly supercilious teacher. It was almost as if it was beneath her dignity to be concerned about anything that was going on in the cabin.

  “You’re the one who killed Warwick Eden?” a voice from the doorway asked quietly.

  “How long have you been there?” Guy shouted.

  “Warwick is dead? Arjun? You’re saying Warwick Eden is dead?” Diane asked quietly.

  Arjun nodded. “It’s been all over the news. Did you kill him, Guy? You said you were going to steal from him. That was all. You told me you’d stolen money from him and even though it was all rightfully yours, that was why you had to get away.”

  “Shut up!”

  “You said that red-headed boy had seen you, you said we had to kill him because he’d seen you.”

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  “You made me hold the knife. Why did you put the knife in my hand?”

  “I said shut the fuck up!”

  “Why would you do that? Why?”

  Diane was thinking quickly, piecing things together, making assumptions but coming to the conclusion that Guy had killed Warwick and had then, jointly with a reluctant Arjun, killed Ryan. Ryan had to be the red-headed boy.

  Admitting nothing Guy pushed Arjun out of the cabin and slammed the door shut behind him.

  Diane sat down on her bed as she heard the lock turned.

  In the last few minutes so much had become clear to her but she had to accept that Arjun had probably signed his own death warrant and probably hers too.

  Now she knew what Guy had done he could not allow her to live.

  Perhaps he had kept her alive because he had wanted, eventually, to ask her to tell him everything she knew about his father. As long as she had known nothing about what had happened in Dartmouth she had been safe.

  But now he had every reason to get rid of her.

  She was unsurprised when, an hour later, Guy came to her cabin but he had no knife, no gun, nothing that looked like a weapon.

  “My father. Tell me how you knew him and what you know of him.”

  Guy suddenly seemed very young.

  “If I tell you will you let me go?”

  Guy’s head moved slightly, it was neither a shake nor a nod.

  “You know I can do you no harm.”

  “You could tell the police everything you’ve just heard.”

  “Indeed I could, but why would I? I have no evidence. It would be your word against mine and why would they believe the rantings of a silly old woman?”

  Guy sat down. To Diane he seemed not only young but vulnerable, needy, and she was struck again by how like his father he was.

  “Will you?” he asked, she thought somewhat plaintively.

  “Will I what?”

  “Tell me what you know of my father.”

  Diane could see no harm in telling him the truth. He would either kill her or let her go whatever she said and did now. She thought of Schrödinger’s cat, both dead and alive within the box.

  “I knew your father when he was recovering from his injuries. As I said before he was very badly damaged. Physically he had had many broken bones which had mainly healed before he came to me but also he had taken a very nasty blow to the head from which he didn’t, in my opinion, fully recover.”

  “He always had bad headaches,” Guy said, remembering how he had left his father, blood congealed on the side of his head from where he had hit the sideboard.

  “As he got better he talked a lot about his years travelling; I must say it all sounded very exciting. He told me about the girls he had known and those he had loved. He seemed too gentle and too nice to have got himself involved with the SDS. You know about that?”

  Guy nodded. “A bit.”

  “He said it was a dreadful mistake. After years of being part of what he called ‘a wonderful community’ your father turned informer and, even worse, an agitator. He made dreadful trouble for the people he had lived and loved among. He regretted it, and not just because they nearly killed him. He regretted it because it wasn’t ever something he wanted to do.”

  “He told me he did it because his brother screwed his girlfriend.”

  “Yes, he told me that too.”

  “He told me he had always loved a girl called Wave. He told me, in front of my mother, that she was the love of his life.”

  “How did your mum take that?”

 
“She just wanted to know everything about her.”

  “How did you take it?”

  “He called me a boy who didn’t understand how complicated life was so I hit him. He fell, hit his head against the sideboard.”

  “That won’t have helped his old head injury, will it?”

  “I didn’t know about that, did I? He just said he’d been beaten up.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “He told me he was in hospital for a long time. His father disowned him because he had been an informer. His father didn’t like informers apparently. But he said his dad pulled strings and he spent a long time with a woman who looked after him while his new identity was put in place. He said she was used to looking after hopeless cases, injured soldiers and people like that.” Guy looked up from the floor. “You?”

  Diane nodded.

  “He said he didn’t think you liked him very much.”

  “He was wrong. I became very fond of him. Too fond really. I was fifteen years older than him, but… Ah well… Never mind… It’s all ancient history now.”

  “Was my dad with you in Dartmouth?”

  “He was. I still live in the same house. By the way, you can clear a little mystery for me.”

  “I can?”

  “Yes, why did Warwick Eden go to Dartmouth? Why of all the ports he could have taken that yacht did he go to the one where his brother spent so much time?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Was any reason given? When he said ‘take me to Dartmouth’ did he say why? And then, when you had to leave because of the Regatta, you came back. Why?”

  “As I said, I’m not sure.”

  “But you have an idea?”

  “I thought it was because there were some important bigwigs who wanted to meet him, support him, that sort of thing.”

  “So it was politics? Nothing to do with his brother?”