by Zoe Sharp
‘No!’ I would have objected myself, but it was Dina, to my surprise, who dug her toes in first. She realised it had come out too stark and softened it down with a smile that held genuine regret. ‘I’m real sorry, Manda,’ she said hastily. ‘But I don’t want to spoil Torquil’s birthday, so we’ll—’
‘Oh, that’s so sweet of you,’ Manda interrupted. ‘Well, honey, our limo’s still here. Tell you what, why don’t the three of us go find somewhere to have a drink? Tor won’t mind if we skip out, I’m sure.’
But it didn’t take an expert in body language to tell that Tor did mind. He minded like hell.
The two security men he’d sent to escort us out were hovering with their mouths open, unsure what to do next. The other partygoers who’d received their special invitations had emerged from the yacht club and were closing fast on their way to the Eisenberg liner, with Hunt and Orlando in the lead.
Torquil must have known that for Benedict and Manda to leave now, so soon after arriving and with Dina so publicly in tow, would be the ultimate humiliation. He only had one realistic option, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.
‘It would spoil the party if you left, Dina,’ he said, with an almost credible attempt at sincerity. ‘Stay.’ I’m sure it was only shock that made her keep him waiting for a response, but he flushed at her silence and added through clenched teeth, ‘Please.’
‘I … er … yes,’ Dina said faintly. ‘Of course. Thank you, Torquil.’
He glared at her. ‘Don’t mention it,’ he said, his tone ominous. His gaze swung to me. ‘But your friend still needs to leave.’
CHAPTER TEN
There was a long pause after Torquil’s last statement. It was eventually broken not by Dina but by Manda, who threw her head back and began to laugh.
‘Oh Tor, honey, that’s just priceless,’ she said, indicating me with a languid wave. ‘But there’s no way she’s going to walk out of here and leave Dina behind to your tender mercies.’ It was the first time she’d acknowledged my presence.
Torquil subjected me to a rapid scrutiny as if afraid he’d missed something obvious. His mouth opened and closed a couple of times before he finally had to admit defeat. He knew the joke was on him somehow, but he couldn’t work out what or how. ‘Why the hell not?’ he demanded.
Manda laughed again as she removed her dark glasses. I caught the brief flicker of her eyes and realised she’d been waiting for the crowd to arrive. She wanted an audience.
Some things never change.
‘Because, honey, that’s not how professional bodyguards behave, is it, Charlie?’ she said, loud enough to carry. ‘And I ought to know, huh?’
If I’d been hoping for anything else, it was too late now. In my peripheral vision I registered shock in varying degrees. There was no point in denial. Suppressing a sigh, I agreed gravely, ‘Yes, Amanda, you ought.’
Her face twitched. ‘It’s Manda,’ she said sharply. ‘I haven’t been called that for years.’
Two years, certainly. Two years since Amanda Dempsey had briefly proved the bane of my life, trying to protect her old-monied family from threats largely manufactured by their own wilful teenage daughter. Caroline Willner’s fears for Dina, by comparison, were mild and unjustified.
I jerked my head towards the limo. ‘I see you’ve progressed from sneaking out over the castle wall at night.’
‘Yeah, my trust fund finally kicked in.’
I nodded slowly. ‘How is your father these days?’
‘He’s dead,’ she said with a ripe satisfaction, and when that failed to elicit the expected response, she added reluctantly, ‘Natural causes, I’m sorry to say. The old bastard had a stroke.’
Well, you’ve been doing your best to bring that on since you were fourteen.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be,’ she said with spirit that held more than a touch of bravado. ‘I’m not.’
Benedict made an impatient noise in his throat. ‘Sorry to break up the touching reunion,’ he said acidly, ‘but are we gonna stand around here all night, or are we getting on the damned boat?’
Torquil jerked out of stasis. ‘Yeah, uh, let’s go aboard.’ He brushed past me without eye contact and shook his head briefly to the two gorillas. They shrugged and turned away. Manda determinedly took Dina’s arm again.
With Torquil in the lead, we followed him along the network of jetties, through another security gate, and approached what must have been the largest and most luxurious vessel in the place. I let out a low whistle under my breath. With an unblemished dark-blue hull, white upper decks and tinted glass, the superyacht’s huge superstructure was raked back so that it seemed to be moving at high speed even lying graceful at its berth. It screamed of money and class.
The yacht must have been the best part of three hundred feet long. It was wider than a house. I counted about four separate deck levels, plus a helicopter pad. Every deck had big sliding glass doors that opened out onto private balconies, and most had a jacuzzi or a hot tub. Even by Long Island standards, the whole thing was a monstrous display of wealth.
As we neared it, the yacht suddenly lit up, underwater neon turning the surrounding water into an ice-blue glow and sending any aquatic life scattering. Deck lights blazed. There was an audible intake of breath from those approaching, and Torquil turned to catch the reaction. It must have been all he hoped for, because he treated us to a wide smile, the first sign of genuine pleasure he’d shown all evening.
Short of grappling hooks, the only way to scale the endless smooth sides of the yacht was via the lower deck area at the stern, presumably for diving or swimming – although why you’d want to get into the nasty old sea when there were so many private swimming pools on board was anybody’s guess.
Two crewmen wearing an approximation of naval officers’ white dress uniform were standing by to help us along the short gangplank. A gently curving staircase led to the next level, a pool deck, with yet more discreet neon under the water and flanked by sunloungers. I took one look at the acres of teak decking on view and was glad my evening shoes did not have the kind of spiked heels that would leave a trail of damage. Nobody else seemed to bother.
More crew appeared with trays of canapés and drinks, their faces carefully blank to the revelry winding itself into full swing around them. The yacht boasted a sound system with external speakers that must have had half the harbour reverberating to the beat. After about ten minutes, I began to wish I’d brought the ear defenders I normally reserved for visits to the gun range.
It was the kind of party where several people were bound to end up flinging themselves, shrieking, into one of the pools before the night was out – either fully clothed or completely naked, take your pick.
Nobody seemed to bother much about that, either.
I tried to keep a careful eye on Dina without gluing myself to her side, although the yacht had been designed with the privacy of its guests in mind. Every deck had its own personal sun deck, none of which were visible from the others. I was only too aware that things could very quickly get out of hand.
As standard operating procedure, I’d already identified myself to the ship’s captain, pointed out my principal and asked for notification if anyone tried to take her off the yacht without me in attendance. By his reaction, this kind of request was not unusual.
Still, she was my responsibility, and she didn’t need to be taken ashore in order to be taken advantage of, so I ended up doing a constant roving sweep, no mean feat on a boat that size. Dina, apparently oblivious, danced with various people on the pool deck, sat and chatted to others in the thickly carpeted main salon area below. If her earlier experience with Torquil and the glass of champagne had unsettled her, she gave no sign of it. I saw nothing to alert me that she was in danger.
I suppose it was inevitable, sooner or later, that I’d run into Manda Dempsey again as I prowled round the decks. I was up near the slim pointed bow, far enough forward to have a glimpse onto all
the balconies and where the volume of the music was less combative. She stepped out of one of the open sliding doorways and made a beeline for me. At first I thought it was purely coincidence, but I quickly realised she’d sought me out. I put my back to the guard rail and waited. She stopped a couple of metres away, took a sip from her champagne glass and said at last in a cool voice, ‘I always wondered if I’d end up meeting with you again, Charlie.’
Smiling to take the sting out of it, I said, ‘And I always wondered if you’d end up in gaol.’
She continued to regard me for a moment, her body swaying to the pulse of alcohol or music, I wasn’t sure which. Then she smiled.
‘That’s what I always liked about you. You were so damned unimpressed by this kind of thing,’ she said, nodding towards the magnificent yacht laid out behind us. ‘I may have despised my father and the sycophants with which he surrounded himself, but at least you were never in awe of him.’ She laughed. ‘You once told me, if I hated him so much, to stop taking his money and go make my own way, do my own thing.’
Her own thing, I recalled grimly in the face of this charm offensive, had included seducing a gullible boyfriend into an attempted hit on the old man. It hadn’t worked, and the Dempseys’ flat refusal to do anything constructive about their only child had been one of the reasons I’d asked to be taken off the job. A decision I’d never regretted.
‘Nice to see you took my advice to heart,’ I said dryly. ‘Trust fund, didn’t you say?’
She smiled again. ‘From my grandparents. So, technically, I did listen to you.’ She took another sip of her drink. ‘I wanted to let you know that you were a big influence, though I guess it didn’t seem like it at the time.’
I waited for the flash of guile, but saw enough apparent sincerity to deliver a cautious, ‘Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome,’ she responded. A girl with looks that were striking rather than pretty, with dark hair which – now she’d discarded the hat – I could see she’d had cut sleek and stylish, feathered in around her neck. The dress probably cost more than my entire annual clothing budget, and she wore it with the careless elegance of someone entirely used to such expense. ‘I’ve done some growing up over the last couple of years,’ she said, almost rueful. ‘About time, huh?’
‘You were kidnapped,’ I said, recalling the fortress-like parental estate, made even more secure by the installation of the electronic surveillance equipment and sensors that I myself had overseen. They should not have been able to get within a mile of her.
I cursed the sketchy reports, the lack of official investigation, and asked, ‘How did they get to you?’
Manda’s lips twisted. ‘Too easily,’ she said. Her eyes flicked across to me. ‘I was almost home. It was late, dark, and there was something in the road. I thought maybe someone had hit a dog, so I stopped and – just like you always told us not to – I got out of the car.’ She shrugged, her smile turning wan. ‘I don’t remember much after that. Apparently they had me for four days. I kinda lost track of time.’
She moved alongside me and rested her forearms on the polished mahogany capping rail. She leant out over it slightly, staring down into the artificial blue glow beneath the hull. ‘My father once told me I’d had everything I could ever wish for,’ she said quietly.
‘I remember.’ At the time, she’d flung back a furious denial. Told him that, on the contrary, she’d had everything money could buy and if he didn’t understand the difference, there was no point in her trying to explain. There had been more swearing and raised voices to it, but that was the gist.
She straightened, turned so her back was to the rail and gazed at the ongoing party with a cynical eye.
‘I guess you don’t appreciate what you have, until there’s the chance of losing it all,’ she said then. ‘Not just your lifestyle, but your life.’
‘They threatened to kill you?’ I said, keeping my voice absolutely level.
‘Oh yes,’ she said with a bitter smile. ‘They told me in great detail what was going to happen to me if the ransom wasn’t paid. And if my family went to the police, involved the authorities in any way, I’d suffer because of it.’
I thought back to the rebellious teenager I’d once known. ‘I can’t imagine you took that lying down, Manda.’
‘Oh, I tried to fight back, and after they beat me, they sent photographs of the bruises to my family,’ she said. Her voice was devoid of emotion, as though retelling a mildly interesting story of things that had happened to someone else. I’d used it myself as a natural defence mechanism. ‘For every delay, they said, they would … mark me. Somewhere permanent. Somewhere it would show.’
‘And did they?’
She gave a shrug. ‘I was lucky,’ she said. ‘My family paid.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
With very little prompting, Manda told me the story of her captivity and release. It didn’t take long. She had seen or heard nothing that would help to identify her kidnappers. She thought there were three or possibly four of them. They had been of similar size and weight, had spoken with no discernible accent, never used names, and had worn shiny chain store sports clothing and gloves and masks at all times.
In other words, they were professionals.
She recounted the tale with a dry wit, and a lack of self-pity or exaggeration that I found intriguing.
‘How much did they demand for your return?’
‘One million.’ She said it casually, as though it was too small a sum to be worth mentioning. ‘Wired direct to an account in the Caymans.’ She shrugged again. ‘My father had been dead six months by then. The trustees eventually agreed to pay half.’
Half a million dollars. Cheap, by heiress standards. Not much to split between three or four perpetrators, for four days of high tension and no doubt months of planning leading up to that. Perhaps that explained why they’d found another victim comparatively quickly.
‘Benedict was taken not long after me,’ Manda said, matter-of-fact. She had her hands wrapped around her bare arms, gently rubbing her own skin as if for comfort as much as warmth, but the night had begun to turn chilly so I couldn’t read too much into it. ‘I didn’t know him then. We didn’t get together until afterward.’ She smiled. ‘Not many people understand what you went through, unless they’ve been there.’
‘Was he taken by the same means?’
Manda shook her head. ‘Not really – car trouble. He’d gotten a flat and called OnStar assistance, and he was waiting for them to arrive when they grabbed him.’
‘He’d called out help to change a wheel?’ I queried, unable to keep the surprise out of my voice entirely, but Manda just gave me a wry glance where the old Amanda would have sulked.
‘His folks gave him a tricked-out Cadillac Escalade on these huge chromed wheels,’ she explained. ‘He said it was a two-man job, taking them on and off. And it was kinda dark, and raining.’
Another roadside ambush. I made a mental note to be particularly vigilant when Dina and I were out in the car. I’d arrived at the Willners’ place on my motorbike, a Buell Firebolt, and I’d been using whatever was in their garage since, like Dina’s Merc. Maybe I’d call Parker in the morning about using one of the company SUVs, which had a certain amount of non-standard reinforcement in the bodywork and chassis, and run-flat tyres.
‘Did his kidnap follow the same pattern as yours?’ I asked now.
‘If you mean did they threaten to kill him – slowly and painfully – if the police were called in?’ she demanded. ‘Then, yes, it did.’
‘And the amount they wanted was the same?’
Another head shake, harder this time. ‘This time, they wanted two million.’ She saw my reaction and added with a surprisingly resentful edge, ‘That amount is loose change to the Benelli family.’
‘And how much did they get?’
She gave me a cool straight stare. ‘Two million.’
‘They paid up the whole amount, just like that?’ This time I did
n’t bother to hide my disbelief. Such a move was not only practically unheard of, it was also unwise and possibly downright bloody dangerous.
Unless …
Manda was watching my face. She levered upright abruptly and began to turn away. ‘No. It wasn’t just like that at all.’
I heard something quiet and brittle in her voice, took a step after her. ‘Manda, what—’
‘Hey, Manda, what’s the matter – you don’t love me anymore?’
A figure had appeared from one of the brightly lit doorways and was standing silhouetted against the light, with a glass of champagne in one hand and the other still stuffed into his pocket. Benedict’s usual studied pose.
‘Of course I do, honey,’ she called, almost bringing off a relaxed drawl while at the same time shooting me a warning glance. ‘Charlie and I were just catching up on the bad old days.’
Benedict sauntered across the deck, looking darkly handsome and completely aware of his own animal magnetism. He draped the arm with the champagne glass around Manda’s shoulders.
‘Come,’ he commanded, giving her a narrow-eyed pout that, to my mind, made him look both sleepy and grumpy. Never two of my favourite dwarves. Each to his – or her – own.
I would have expected her to laugh off this display of machismo, but Manda gave me a vague smile and allowed him to lead her away. I watched their departing backs and wondered what the hell had been so different about Benedict’s kidnapping that his parents were prepared to pay up, in full, an amount that was four times what had been accepted before. And why Manda was so wary of talking about it in front of him. Not for the first time, I cursed the lack of investigation that had taken place into these crimes.
Shrugging off the irritation, I checked the time – a little after two – wondering when I could legitimately insist we pack it in. The night still classified as young, if this lot were anything to go by. I began to feel correspondingly old.
The watch was a cheap-and-cheerful model I’d bought to navigate by on a job in California. Sean had given me a beautiful Tag Heuer when we’d first moved out to live and work in America, twelve months before. The day they flew him back to New York, still in his coma, I’d put the Tag away in a bedside drawer and decided only to get it out again when he was awake to see it.
