by Rae Shaw
‘He’s been very generous,’ Mark said.
‘What do you think happened to Freddie?’ The helicopter pitched forward and Ellen grabbed her seat. ‘Would they have got him, too?’
Julianna cringed a fraction. How to tell Ellen that she had nearly been sold into slavery by a man she thought was her friend?
Mark answered. ‘He isn't who you think he is. You've been misled. How did you meet him?’
Ellen explained, taking them back three years to when she was seventeen and filled with rage and loneliness. She painted a story that began so innocently that only now, as she described how she thought he was a counsellor, a priest, a friend, did she begin to realise her naivety. Tears streamed down her face and Mark handed her a tissue.
‘Don't say anything, not if it hurts this bad,’ he said. ‘All I need to know is at what point did he know about Dad?’
‘Early on.’ She sniffed and blew her nose.
Julianna inhaled deeply. For years, unwittingly, Ellen had fed Zustaller information about Bill's appeal. Of course Zustaller was happy for Bill to be locked up for murdering his cousin. He probably could have arranged for Bill to have an unpleasant accident, too. But, he hadn't. Perhaps Zustaller didn't want to reveal the extent of his criminal network by ordering a hit inside a prison. However, if Bill had been released, the story might have been different. So why had Bill maintained his innocence? Why risk leaving the relative security of a prison when the outside could be equally, if not more dangerous? Retribution had played out differently: abducting Ellen was Mark's punishment, not Bill's. Although Bill was hardly blameless, nothing untoward had happened until Mark instigated Haydock’s downfall in Manchester. Jackson had predicted Mark would be held accountable, and once Zustaller knew his name, the Deliverer tailored his revenge perfectly.
‘Ellen.’ Julianna leaned toward the snivelling girl. ‘You've heard of Haydocks?’
Ellen nodded.
‘You told Freddie Mark worked for Haydocks. When?’
Her long eyelashes blinked as she concentrated on recalling what must be a complicated history of messaging between her and Freddie. ‘After the wedding, when Mark went to that charity thing. I got drunk. I nearly slept with this man and Freddie was pleased I hadn't... Oh, shit.’ Her head lolled forward into her palms and the tears returned.
Julianna's thin veneer of professional detachment splintered, and she wrapped her arm around Ellen’s hunched shoulders. Neither woman said anything. It wasn't necessary. Mark stared into Julianna's eyes and he mouthed a thank you. Julianna thought his gratitude misplaced. He seemed unable to offer his sister any emotional support. Jackson was right – the girl needed a different mentor.
For the next two hours, Ellen remained uncommunicative, almost unreachable, swept away by the trauma of the last twenty-four hours and also, Julianna believed, a degree of shame at her gullibility. Like many young adults, Ellen probably considered herself worldly and invincible. Julianna had been just as naive at a similar age, falling for Alex's debonair charm.
The helicopter landed and they cleared the arrival procedures – the trappings of somebody else's wealth helped considerably. Julianna and Mark kept Ellen between them, supporting her as she swayed. Her dull eyes barely focused on anything. A car was waiting for them. Inside wasn’t Chris, but Gary Maybank, his deputy and a reliable ex-copper whom Julianna respected.
The journey from the airport to Fasleigh House unfolded in parallel to Ellen’s emergence from her state of shock.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘Fasleigh House, Jackson Haynes’s home,’ Julianna said from the front passenger seat.
‘Why there? I mean I would like to thank him of course.’ Ellen peered out of the window.
‘He’s going to take care of you now, Ellen,’ Mark said.
‘Why him? Can't I stay at yours? What about Nicky. Oh, God, Nicky! I have to ring—’
‘I've done it,’ Julianna said. She had texted Nicky in Dublin. ‘He's so relieved you're okay. He'll come and see you here, he promises.’
‘You can't stay with me, Ellie,’ Mark said. ‘I'm not the best person for you right now. You need time away, doing stuff you like, and I need to sort out things, too. With Mum. And Dad. Jackson will keep you safe.’
From Freddie, Mark wisely didn't say. His nemesis, and Jackson's too, was hungry for revenge, more so than ever.
The car passed through the magnificent gates of Fasleigh house. Gary parked by the front door and straight away, Jackson appeared and opened Ellen's door.
Mark released her seat belt. ‘I never intended for you to get caught up in all this. I wish you could have trusted me with your secret. I’m sorry, Ellen, so sorry. It's my fault.’
‘You're fault? I let Freddie—’
‘I mean, I started all this, not you. I failed you. More than any other person, I let you down. I ignored all the danger signs. I left you alone to deal with things back at home. I'm sorry. One day, I'll tell you everything about Haydocks.’
‘Mark.’ She opened her mouth and he pressed his finger to her lips. Julianna turned away and faced the windscreen. It was none of her business.
Ellen struggled to stand upright on the driveway. Jackson folded his arm around her shoulder, supporting her.
‘I know you don't know me well, Ellen, and after what you've been through, this might be difficult to believe, but you can trust me. Come and see Hettie and the kids. They're always excited about visitors.’ He guided Ellen towards the door. Gary had already dealt with the suitcase.
Jackson turned on the doorstep. ‘Go!’ he urged. ‘I’ve got her.’
30
Mark
Gary Maybanks drove away from Fasleigh at breakneck speed.
‘Your place?’ Gary asked Julianna.
‘Yes, please.’
The tension in the car was razor sharp. Mark had put Julianna in a dangerous situation, required her to fight for her life, and all he had done was stand there with sweat dripping down his back. He wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t want to invite him into her house and he expected she might try to find a way to dissociate herself from him. She was entitled to end things between them.
The silence was unending. With each mile, Mark's throbbing headache intensified, numbing his senses and altering his perceptions of light and darkness. What seemed dull, became vivid and colourful: sunlight bounced off car bonnets and targeted his eyes with searing brightness. Approaching the densely populated outer precincts of the city, the traffic became heavily congested and the noise thundered around the car. Mark felt sick and closed his eyes.
‘This was meant to be my day off.’ Gary slammed his hands on the steering wheel. ‘My wife is so pissed off.’
Mark didn’t know what to say. Jackson had arranged the cars, helicopter and hotel. The costs were mounting and he wouldn't be able to pay Jackson back on an accountant's salary. He sweated profusely.
‘It’s just an unusual set of circumstances,’ Julianna said, her voice distant. ‘I’ll do a shift for you, Gary, make it up to you.’
Julianna was paying his debts, too. The misery deepened.
Gary parked outside her mews terrace house. ‘Julianna, how could you afford this?’
‘He’s a successful commercial lawyer, my ex, but he sucked when it came to divorce law.’
Gary laughed.
Mark couldn't string a sentence together and Julianna said nothing, not even a goodbye. He was merely a passenger in the back seat, and she and Gary were used to ignoring the passengers in the car with diligent expertise. She opened her front door, crossed the threshold and closed it behind her without looking back at the car.
‘Where now, Mr Clewer?’ Gary asked. ‘Home?’
Mark gave his address, yawned and slumped into an unexpected nap.
The jolt of the car halting outside the entrance to his apartment block woke Mark. As graciously as possible, he thanked Gary, who promptly drove off. Mark paused by the main door and fumble
d for his keys. The fatigue in his muscles and the painful throbbing in his head reminded him he hadn’t slept properly for over a day. As he leaned against the door, somebody shoved him in the back between his shoulder blades. Turning to complain, he was confronted by four men dressed in biker’s leathers and carrying helmets. A gang, a herd of glaring eyes and snarling lips, and they stood shoulder to shoulder, with the exception of one younger man with dyed hair and a fierce expression. His hair was spiked up with gel and there were earrings in both earlobes.
‘Nicky?’ Mark backed further into the dark lobby.
‘Yep, that’s me,’ said Nicky. ‘I'm here to pay you a visit. Been waiting.’
‘How did you find me?’ Ted wasn't amongst them.
‘Been here before. Ellen gave me your address. We scoped it out, Ted and I, a while back, because I'm curious like that when it comes to kids who live on their own, and Ellie is just a kid, isn't she?’
‘What do you want?’ The nausea intensified and his stomach shrivelled into a knot.
‘Don't mind if we go for a chat. How about the basement?’
There was nothing in the basement except a broken washing machine and the bicycles belonging to the other residents.
He had no choice. Nicky grabbed his arm and propelled him towards the stairwell. ‘Keep a look out,’ Nicky said over his shoulder to the others.
31
Ellen
Ellen slept solidly for a couple of hours and woke up feeling refreshed, although stiff. She needed to move. With a boldness she had lacked in the hotel, she crept out of the bedroom and explored. The vast house had begun its life a couple of centuries ago. Consequently, the floorboards creaked beneath the plush carpets and a few of the inner walls bowed a little in places as if overburdened. Downstairs, the kitchen was unoccupied. Hettie was with Luke and Sophia, playing catch with the kids outside.
Ellen wandered through the house not daring to open closed doors – perhaps due to a lingering fear of what might lie on the other side. One was slightly ajar, and she peered through the crack. Haynes was behind a desk, reading something resting on his knee. The concentration was vivid on his face. As she tiptoed past the door, a noisy floorboard betrayed her. He called to her and asked her to come in.
The room was lofty with a wall of shelves housing leather-bound antique books that were probably for impressing visitors and not reading. On the wall, there were several framed pictures of contemporary landscapes. The artist had captured an urban scape with skyscrapers. She recognised part of the City from her daily sojourn into work – something she wasn't required to do any longer.
He followed the line of her sight. ‘They're Hettie's. The advantages of having an artist as your wife, you get to commission whatever you like.’ Jackson rose to greet her. ‘Please, sit. You slept well?’
The chair faced the desk. It reminded her of visiting the doctor, but not the counsellor whom she had consulted at the request of social services. He had always put her on a couch surrounded by cuddly bears. Those soft, inert objects were supposed to comfort her. She had despised the man for treating her like a child. Freddie had never… she inhaled and cleared her dry throat.
‘Yes. Thank you for helping me. The helicopter and everything. I’m very grateful.’ She clasped her hands. ‘I have questions.’
‘Ask them,’ he said kindly.
‘Was Freddie ever real? A real person?’
Jackson paused before answering. ‘Freddie Zustaller. His surname means deliverer in German. He isn’t German. His nationality is no longer significant. He moves about Europe and rarely meets people face-to-face. He uses others to do his dirty work. Mainly Eastern Europeans or other ethnic groups. He's probably not in Ireland. If he is, he would be far away from where you were.’
‘I don’t understand. Who is he then?’ Freddie had never stated his nationality.
‘Zustaller is a career criminal who ran his shady accounts through a firm called Haydocks. You've heard of it?’
Ellen covered her mouth. ‘Mark worked for them. He didn't do anything—’
Jackson interjected. ‘No. Absolutely not. I never suspected him. Quite the contrary. Mark reported illegal practices to the police and the money was confiscated. Mark made a very bitter enemy. What I don't know is how Zustaller found you.’
She explained in a faltering voice how Freddie had tricked her by posing as a victim support counsellor.
Jackson pursed his lips. She waited for a rebuke, but it didn't come. ‘I'm sorry, Ellen. Freddie's name was a cover for a sinister operation. Whoever you communicated with was after information about Mark and also your father. You were groomed to get at Mark.’
She opened her mouth, wanting to confess further, all the things she passed onto Freddie in her ignorance, but she shouldn't be apologising to Jackson for revealing information she should have kept secret. Somebody else deserved that apology.
‘Zustaller is a trafficker,’ Jackson said slowly. ‘He sells women, men too, to others and on again.’
Prostitutes. She didn't need to hear the word – she knew what went on in that so-called hostel. Freddie had wanted to pimp her. Bile stuck in her throat, layering the parched surface thickly with an acrid taste. The trembling was hard to control. She weaved her fingers, locking them into a knot.
‘Would you like a drink?’ Jackson asked.
She shook her head. ‘He is, was, convincing.’
‘Ah, don't judge yourself harshly. And, to be frank, given what we know, that is the charitable foundation I run, they are good at this. Zustaller would not have involved himself if it wasn't so personal. Would you say you were always dealing with the same person? In retrospect, is it possible that you were communicating with—’
‘Yes,’ she said. He waited as she pressed the heel of her palms against her wet eyes, hiding the tears that dangled on her eyelashes. ‘Sometimes he treated me like a kid sister, other times friendly, calling me sweetie. Occasionally, he pissed me off. I thought he was a priest.’ Dropping her hands, she laughed; the sound stuck in her throat and fizzled out. ‘He told me he was a social worker. He knew I'm not a fan of them. Bizarrely, it convinced me that he was real... I didn't even question the details of the dig. A fake dig. It's so obvious now.’ She slumped. How stupid she must appear to the man behind the desk – a chief executive who made important decisions on a daily basis and probably was a better judge of people than she ever would be.
Jackson moved out of his imposing chair and chose another nearer to her. She remembered him at the nightclub. A commanding presence; the host who circulated effortlessly, dipping in and out of conversations while she drank herself into oblivion. Across the expanse of the club, she recalled the blur of his face harbouring the two sharp pinpricks of his eyes. He had been watching her.
‘Why are you so interested in me and Mark?’ she asked.
He leaned back in his chair, and sighed. He spun the yarn out in a dispassionate voice. The efforts of Opportunitas in uncovering the network controlled by the Deliverer, her Freddie and his many voices. Then her father, Bill, who murdered somebody significant, deliberately provoking conflict. The tangle Mr Haynes described weaved its way toward her, she could sense the direction as the threads of his story came together. As for Mark, he unwittingly spoiled things further for Freddie Zustaller. She noted Jackson always called him Zustaller.
‘He’s got other names. It surprised me he used that particular version with you, because it’s the one I first heard years ago, when I disrupted his supply chain. I had my suspicions.’ Jackson tapped the tips of his fingers together, the lines of his forehead furrowed. ‘But it was the witness that Sophia found and Julianna's investigations that made them concrete. Julianna in particular you should thank. She realised you were directly in danger and came to me for help. I mistakenly assumed it would be Mark who would suffer the consequences.’
‘The needle...’ How close it had come to slipping into her vein. She was supposed to have suffered.
&nbs
p; ‘Drugs. Something to make you pliable and easy to transport. Eventually heroin so you would become dependent on them.’
Strange things started to make more sense. Freddie had asked her to tell Mark where she was going and he even insisted she spoke to her mother. Both conversations would have left clues to her disappearance. She wasn't supposed to simply vanish. Zustaller wanted Mark to know her awful fate.
Jackson’s face softened. ‘You’re safe now. Both you and Mark have learnt a lesson the hard way.’
She blinked several times, processing too many emerging thoughts, but one in particular filtered through: Freddie had asked a great deal about Mark and Bill, about the appeal and whether it would be a success or not.
‘I... I kept a secret. I shouldn't have done.’
‘What secret?’ Jackson asked.
‘That I knew my father is a murderer. I saw the knives in his coat. I never told anyone.’ She hung her head.
‘But you told Mark before you left,’ Jackson said. ‘I saw the letter you left for Nicky. Julianna brought it to me as it contained the address in Ireland.’
Ellen closed her eyes. She had written some terrible things in that letter to Mark. Her reaction to Mark’s benign response to Freddie's scheming was to accuse him of wilful neglect, of ignoring her self-harming incidents, and that he had aided her father's guilt and pandered to their selfish mother. She had spat words onto the page without considering why she blamed him and not herself.
‘He didn't know about Freddie? Who Freddie is?’
‘No, Ellen. He was beside himself with shock and despair when he found out what was happening. He's learnt his lesson, hasn't he?’
She opened her eyes and nodded. ‘Yes. We both have. What do I do now?’
‘Tell me about yourself.’
Ellen relaxed. Mr Haynes was quite an easy man to talk to. A passive, non-judgemental face, he occasionally prompted her with a question as he encouraged her to open up about her dreams, her aspiration to be an archaeologist. Her hobbies too.