Never Coming Home

by Evonne Wareham

  ‘Thanks.’ Devlin gulped coffee. ‘Luce and I … ’ He looked for a while at the mug, then lifted his head. ‘My bosses kept us apart, which was fine by me.’ He lifted his hand to make a gesture, registered the weight of the cast, and put it down again. Kaz stayed where she was, waiting until he spoke again. ‘The stories about how Luce got results got worse – the things he’d begun to enjoy, with women especially. And the word went out. He wanted me. My people had stopped hiring him, and made sure I was well out of his way, but Luce wasn’t a fool and he was patient. He set up a scam.’ Devlin put down his mug carefully, so that it made no noise on the table. ‘Something he said today. About making preparations and us having a good time together before … before he killed me. I think that his plan then was to fake two deaths, his own and mine. That way I was his – for as long as he wanted. Didn’t work.’ Devlin’s voice was clipped. ‘He put me in the hospital, but he didn’t get me. Three people died. Officially, Luce was one of them. So was I. I suppose it should have tipped me off when they didn’t find Luce’s body.’ He looked up. ‘I’d been thinking for a while about quitting. Had a plan, for the security business. I knew Bobby was getting restless, too. Didn’t take much persuading to get him to come in with me. It seemed like the right time. We moved off the radar. New lives, new names.’ His grin had an edge to it. Not quite on the mark. ‘Hell – it worked for three years.’

  ‘Until I asked you to help me.’ Nausea made her stomach lurch.

  ‘It was a billion to one shot that Luce was involved in this and that he and I had history. Not your fault. He saw me, at the crash site, before I even knew you existed. He’d been looking for me ever since.’ His eyes looked very clear on hers, cool and steady. ‘None of this was your fault. Luce was hired. Someone bought all those deaths.’

  She couldn’t let it go. ‘And Bobby?’

  ‘Ah.’ He leaned back in the chair, head down, the thumb and forefinger of the good hand pressed above his eyes. Kaz gritted her teeth. What did she have to give him that could repair that hurt?

  The silence lengthened, barbed.

  Devlin straightened, dropped his hand. The stricken look on Kaz’s face caught him in the gut.

  ‘If Bobby is down to anyone, he’s down to me,’ he said softly. ‘Luce took him to get me.’ And if he’d known how things are, it would have been you. The chill hammering through him wasn’t like anything he’d ever felt before. Desolation.

  ‘I’m the one who has to live with that,’ he went on. ‘But Bobby was a pro. He should have been paying attention. He made a slip, had to have. When it comes down to it, all of us are responsible for our own lives and our own safety. Our own mistakes. Whatever Bobby did, or didn’t do, he paid.’ But way too much.

  ‘You really believe that?’ There was hope, laced with suspicion in her eyes. This woman was scary the way she could read him. And isn’t that why you’re in this mess? She was looking at him. He hauled himself back to her question. ‘I try to believe it. Mostly it works.’ He gave her the truth. ‘You have to have something, or you go nuts.’

  ‘I suppose you do.’ She was turning over an idea. When it came, it wasn’t what he expected. ‘Is there anyone else out there likely to be coming after you?’

  ‘What? No.’ He stopped, thought. ‘No. A couple I’ve pissed off maybe, but no one who’d want to see me bleed.’ The ones who might, those that are left, never knew who I was.

  He watched her curiously. There was still something going on in her mind, but she wasn’t sharing. When she got up and took the envelope from the counter something inside him closed down, cold. She upended it on the table. Papers spilled. She sat down and gathered them into a pile. Her fingers were jerky. Then she was looking at him again.

  ‘What is all this, Devlin? What does it have to do with Jamie?’

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Devlin hunched down on the cold feeling, pushed his thoughts away from the messy, touchy-feely emotional stuff. Debrief. Marshal evidence and present the conclusions. Oh, shit.

  No way out of this now. She’d seen. She’d kissed him, loved him, taken him into her body – was that going to be the last time? Was there still some way out? Never mind about saving your sorry ass. Doesn’t she have the right to know? No one here to tell her but you. So get your thumb out of your butt and do it.

  He shifted the papers. Start with what was written. And then … He didn’t want to think about ‘and then’.

  He pulled out the two key pieces. The bank statement and the phone account. The one she could see for herself, the other he’d have to interpret for her.

  ‘This –’ he tapped the bank account – ‘is what Jeff had in his checking account when he died.’ He watched her eyes go round with shock. ‘The farm, the vineyard and the car were also all his, all paid for. Cash.’

  ‘But that –’ Her voice faded.

  ‘Money from your wildest dreams.’

  ‘No.’ She was shaking her head, disbelief carving lines in her face. ‘Jeff never had that kind of money. Where could he get it?’

  Don’t go there. Not yet. Get to the phone bill. That’s the way in. He pulled the bill to the top.

  ‘See these three calls?’

  ‘Yes?’ Her face was shuttered, not hostile, but …

  He hesitated. Get the hell on with it. ‘This one –’ He pointed. ‘Last in the series to a-pay-as-you-go cell – virtually untraceable – except that the phone turned up in the Arno, the day after Jeff died. Caught up in debris under one of the bridges.’ He smoothed the paper. ‘Rossi located the police report.’

  Kaz took a breath. ‘You think Luce had that phone?’

  ‘It’s a pretty standard MO.’

  ‘For someone in your line of work?’

  He grimaced. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So, Jeff may have been calling Luce.’ Devlin could almost hear her brain leaping to connect as she studied the printout. Clusters of calls of short duration, one after the other. ‘Calling and getting voicemail?’ she guessed. ‘He was desperate.’ Her voice was low, talking almost to herself. ‘Trying to placate Luce, or to call him off from whatever he was doing?’ Her voice hitched. Devlin watched intently. She was pale, but her chin was up and steady.

  ‘Looks that way.’ He watched her swallow and put it aside.

  ‘What about the others?’

  ‘This –’ Devlin indicated. There was no good way to say it. ‘It’s a private line. To Scotland Yard.’ He waited, and saw realisation flair in her eyes.

  ‘Oh, God – That’s why Phil was killed.’

  ‘It’s a connection.’ Devlin reached over with his good hand to take hers, felt her relax instantly into his hold. ‘Maybe Phil found out something and tried to contact Jeff. Maybe Jeff was looking for help. We’ll probably never know exactly what the truth was. But there was a link.’

  Kaz shut her eyes, drawing in a long breath. ‘If Jeff was desperate – he might have thought Uncle Phil would help. Phil was quite old-fashioned. He’d have done what he could, even though Jeff and I were divorced. He didn’t deserve to die for it.’

  Devlin lifted her hand and brought it to his lips. Her fingers were cold. And there was more to come. And the last was the worst. He kept hold of her hand, jerking his head towards the papers that lay between them.

  ‘The third call – ’ he swallowed – ‘was to the château in France.’

  ‘The château. Oh. No.’ Kaz surged to her feet, eyes suddenly livid in a white face. ‘You think my father? No, oh no!’ She shook her head, violently. ‘That’s just sick, preposterous –’

  ‘Kaz!’ Devlin was up and round the table as she began to pace. He caught her and led her gently back to the chair, pushing her into it and standing over her. ‘Think about it. Who would want Jamie and who had the money to buy all this?’ He waved to the pile of papers.

 
‘But why? No, it can’t be.’ Her eyes were dark with disbelief.

  ‘It’s all circumstantial.’ He couldn’t lie and he couldn’t prove a line of it, but he hadn’t been out of the game so long that he did not know a pattern when it stood up and bit his ass. This one gagged in his throat like rank meat. ‘But it’s all there.’ He gestured to the papers.

  Horror and disbelief were battling in those pitch-dark eyes. He savaged his lip. Get this done.

  ‘The other little girl – Sally Ann, she was with Jeff and Gemma and Jamie for a couple of days before she died – staying at a motel, like a family. The maid remembered them. Sally Ann was a run-away and she suited their purpose. The whole thing was rigged – the crash, Sally Ann and Gemma dying. Jeff had professional help. Luce’s help. Luce rigged it. It was one of the guy’s specialities. Accidents.’

  It had always prickled on the back of his neck. Ever since he’d stopped beside that quiet road, as the sun set and a child died. That tiny feeling that something was off. That what he was seeing had been put there. He’d thought it was just that bloody sixth sense that had pulled him off the road in the first place, and made him an intruder in what he wasn’t supposed to find – and got him into this … morass.

  He looked up and froze. It was a toss up which was paler, Kaz’s face or the white T-shirt she was wearing. Spit it out, and be done.

  ‘Jeff didn’t do what he did for any insurance money.’ His vocal chords were gritty. He sounded as tired and as old as dirt. ‘I’m not even sure that there was insurance money. That was a cover. Jeff was paid. With this.’ He tapped the financial statement, with its column of unbelievable figures. ‘And then, once he was in – maybe he was blackmailed, probably threatened.’

  ‘And then we found him. Put more pressure on.’ Kaz’s voice wasn’t much above a whisper.

  ‘I can’t say that it didn’t happen that way.’ Devlin sat down slowly. His bruises were aching like a bitch, and there was still more of this to do. He pointed a finger. ‘No blame, Kaz. This was a guy who connived in the death of his lover and a child, for money.’

  ‘That’s what he couldn’t face. Why he killed himself –’

  Devlin shook his head. ‘Jeff didn’t kill himself.’

  ‘What?’ Kaz’s eyes flared open. ‘But – I saw his body. The police, they said he’d stabbed the waitress, and her little boy –’ She put her hands to her mouth.

  Devlin wanted to reach out to her, but her eyes were too dark, too huge. He had to get past this first.

  ‘Jeff didn’t murder them. That was the first scenario, but it didn’t stand up. There were other DNA traces on the scene. The police know there was another man, but they haven’t released that information. I’ve seen the report and the pictures. That crime scene had Luce’s hallmarks all over it.’ He clamped his jaw tight for a second. ‘Jeff didn’t kill Giuliana and her son, and he didn’t kill himself – it was murder made to look like suicide. Luce killed them all.’

  He watched as her eyes widened even further. She had to be reeling under the weight. ‘Did we make that necessary? Asking questions? Stirring things up?’

  Luce said so. But when did they make him the fountain of truth? He was goading you, wanting you to feel like this. Go with what your head is telling you, not with the guilt. She doesn’t need to share that burden.

  He shook his head. ‘We stirred things up, but the stuff was there to stir. Jeff was a liability, long before we showed up. While he was alive, there was always a possibility that he’d tell someone about what he’d done. Or demand more money. If I had to take a guess, I’d say it was always planned that way. He was going to die, whatever happened. Luce tidied house. He’d done it before, in almost exactly the same way. A hanging in a barn. When I saw Jeff, I remembered. That’s what first started me wondering … the way Jeff died.’ He gave a tight laugh. ‘What do they say – thinking the unthinkable? I asked Munroe and Rossi to dig. Things began to add up, but in the wrong way. It turned up your father, Kaz.’ Now he put out his hand to clasp hers. She didn’t pull away, but her fingers just lay, limp, in his hold. There was a deep, dark, cold spike, down into his rib cage. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No.’ Her eyes focused. She shook her head gently. Her fingers curled to close over his. Balm trickled over the pain in his chest. ‘It …’ She stopped. ‘You really are sure, about Luce?’

  Devlin looked away. If he’d been faster, slicker, better maybe Luce would still be around to talk. Except that he never would have.

  But he did tell you. He told you who died, but he never told you who paid. Fool.

  Memory of a lisping voice, triumphing in the half-light of early morning, threaded through his mind. ‘I’m as sure as I can be. He confirmed it, this morning, when he thought he was going to kill me. I can’t prove it – but it’s what he does – did. Arrange accidents. There was never any one better.’ He leaned away, detached himself reluctantly from Kaz’s hold. ‘The whole thing was a setup – Jamie was the prize. Someone was prepared to expend money and blood to get her. This kind of thing – any kind of crime. You have to ask – who benefits? We’ve been looking at this the wrong way round. Jeff didn’t need to go through all this to get his daughter. He could have challenged you in the Courts if he’d wanted more access. More access wasn’t enough. It had to be everything. If Jamie had simply been snatched, if Jeff had disappeared with her, would you ever have rested until you found them?’ He didn’t need Kaz’s vehement head shake to confirm it. ‘You had to believe it. That Jamie was never coming home. This …’ He put his good hand down on the pile of papers lying on the table. ‘It took planning and money. A whole heap of it. Jeff – I don’t believe he was up for planning something like this. But he couldn’t resist the money. Your father has the cash to fund this, the connections to find Luce. There’s some shady stuff in the art world. It would take a while to find someone with Luce’s talents, but if you have patience and money, everything is out there, to be bought. It all comes back to that. Who had money to buy this? It’s the only thing that fits. And Jeff tried to ring your father, just before he died.’

  ‘But …’ Kaz stopped. Devlin waited. Her eyes were turned inwards, to her thoughts. Terrible things that he’d put there. ‘This is difficult to say about my own father, but Oliver really has no time for children. Trust me on that.’

  Something that was the vestige of a smile twisted the edge of her mouth. Devlin felt the shudder run through him, the urge to kiss her, to blank out the anguish with something more powerful – except who said that it was more powerful? He looked away. What the hell are you thinking of?

  ‘Oliver has only ever remembered intermittently that I exist,’ Kaz said slowly. ‘He never really wanted me. Not me –’ Devlin heard old pain in the drawn breath. ‘Why would he want –?’

  He saw the payoff hit her, like the force of a blow. The answer to her own question.

  ‘Because Jamie had talent. I don’t.’ Her voice had hollowed out. ‘No.’ She scrabbled in the air, as if trying to clear cobwebs from around her face. ‘It can’t be – children get snatched, people take them, evil people –’

  ‘Kaz.’ Devlin rose and turned her, gently, towards him. ‘Jamie wasn’t snatched off the street, enticed into a waiting car. There was an elaborate plan to make it look like she was dead. The only person who could have set that up was Jeff. Everything points to him having expert help, and being paid to do it. Whoever paid him didn’t want just any child, they wanted your child. Insane as it seems, who else is there?’

  Kaz’s head was down. He watched the long shudder ran through her. ‘If it’s true …’ She raised her chin slowly. Her eyes had gone from bleak to fire. ‘He had all those people killed to cover up the fact that he’d taken my daughter – because he thought she could paint. He wanted me to give her to him – ’ Recollection spiked her voice with wonder. ‘I brushed him off. I thought he was
joking. I told him that maybe, when she was older, she could spend some of her school holidays with him. If she wanted.’ She made a choking sound. ‘He was angry, but that wasn’t anything new. That’s just Oliver. Oh, God … he took my little girl, just to feed his ego, and something happened and she died. She died in a strange place, away from me, away from everything she knew. She wasn’t even with her father.’