Fifth Victim

by Zoe Sharp

  He bridled at that, a tall tanned figure I recalled from the charity auction, who had allowed his hair to grey a little around the temples, but drew the line at actually looking his age. He was wearing an open-necked shirt with a pale-pink sweater draped around his shoulders, and loafers with no socks. His face showed distinct signs of regular Botox injections, which made his micro-expressions difficult to read. Nevertheless, gentle provocation always seems to get people to reveal themselves.

  ‘Look, Miss Fox, I fail to see what business this is of yours, but Orlando left here only yesterday morning for one of our other properties, and she accidentally left her cell behind. It’s on the desk in my study. What can that possibly—’

  ‘Orlando’s cell number was used to lure Dina away from her close-protection officer, and into a successful kidnap,’ I said, piling over his bluster, shutting him down completely. ‘Her bodyguard was shot trying to prevent her abduction. He’s still critical. You know what happened to Torquil Eisenberg, only a few days ago. If your daughter knows anything that might save Dina’s life, we need to know.’

  ‘Of course she doesn’t know anything!’ he snapped, and though his face betrayed nothing, his voice told another story. Stress, guilt, and just an underlying trace of anger. But not, interestingly enough, directed at me. Not all of it, anyway.

  As if realising how much he’d inadvertently given away, he sighed, aimed for a more reasonable tone. ‘Look, Miss Fox, I can appreciate your concern, but Orlando’s cellphone hasn’t been outside this house, and my daughter is not available. She’s in shock about the death of the Eisenberg boy, of course she is. Orlando’s a sensitive girl. I will not have her disturbed.’

  There was going to be no moving him. Even the prospect of FBI involvement had not shifted him. But he was rattled, and it showed.

  My turn to sigh, but quietly, under my breath. Always best to leave of your own volition before you were thrown out. I got to my feet, dug in my jacket pocket for a business card.

  ‘If you won’t put me in touch with your daughter direct, then at least please tell her I’d like to talk to her – urgently,’ I said, handing him the card. He took it by the edges, as if it were dirty. ‘The office number is on there. It’s manned twenty-four hours a day.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, his relief plain. He put the card down on the side table and rose to shake my hand, going for the elbow clasp with his left, to show what a sincere kind of guy he was. ‘I hope Dina is returned safely, I really do.’

  He showed me out into the tiled hallway, where Jasna reappeared instantly to shepherd me to the door. I wondered how much stick she was going to take for letting me through it in the first place.

  The business card I’d given him remained on the side table, and I would have taken bets that’s where it would stay until the cleaning staff swept it away.

  I still wasn’t quite sure who’d come out of the encounter ahead as I reached the end of the long straight driveway, and the gates drew slowly open. It was only as I reached them and pulled through that I found another car waiting, pulled up on the other side of the road.

  I stopped to catch the number on the front plate, and as I did so the driver climbed out and waved in greeting. I dropped the Navigator’s window and watched him stride across the road towards me.

  ‘Hey, Charlie,’ he called when he was halfway there. ‘You’re looking good.’

  ‘Hi, Hunt. If you’re here to see Orlando, you’re out of luck. According to her folks, she’s gone away.’

  To my disappointment, Hunt did not fall into my cunning plan and reveal Orlando’s present whereabouts. Instead, he pulled a wry face.

  ‘I’ve been getting the runaround from her folks, too,’ he said. ‘I was hoping that by hanging around here I might spot her coming back.’ He looked a little shamefaced as he said it, like he was embarrassed to be caught mooning over a girl. ‘I don’t suppose they told you where she is?’

  I shook my head.

  Hunt was in jeans and a sports jacket, and looked a lot younger, dressed like that, than Orlando’s father had managed. ‘I’m worried about her,’ he admitted. ‘She took Tor’s death rather hard. I’m not surprised her parents are trying to protect her from the press and stuff like that.’

  I looked at him, then said dryly. ‘Yeah, I suppose they might have a bit of a field day when they find out she fixed her own kidnapping.’

  Hunt stared at me for a moment, then gave a crooked grin. ‘Ah, so you know about that, do you?’ he said. ‘I thought you’d figure it out eventually.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  ‘I didn’t meet Orlando until after her kidnap,’ Hunt admitted. ‘I was at some party last autumn and she arrived. I found out later it was the first time she’d been out since it happened, and everyone was making a big fuss of her.’ He gave a small rueful smile. ‘I thought she’d been ill or something.’

  We were sitting in a pair of matched leather armchairs in the bar of the tennis club, which happened to be a short hop down the road from Orlando’s home. Hunt was a regular, it seemed, and was greeted with deferential respect by the staff, which they temporarily extended to me.

  Hunt had ordered a pot of Queen Anne blend tea rather than the usual coffee, explaining that they brought it in from Fortnum & Mason in London, and the kitchen here actually knew what to do with it once it arrived. The tea was presented on a silver tray, in translucent china and a strainer provided, just to show it was none of your bagged rubbish.

  The atmosphere was calm and exclusive, and the only similarity with the grubby little bar in Bushwick, where I’d had my chat with Ross, was that – apart from the two of us – the place was deserted.

  I kept my face and hands steady, even though I was only too aware that time was ticking on. It was now 9.40 a.m. and Dina had been missing for just shy of twenty-four hours.

  ‘How did you find out?’ I asked, as Hunt sat forwards in his chair and poured milk into the cups before giving the teapot a gentle swirl. ‘That it wasn’t a genuine kidnap, I mean.’

  ‘She told me – eventually,’ he said. ‘I was pretty dumbstruck, to be honest.’ His voice hushed, even though the staff were too far away to overhear. ‘I mean, who arranges to have themselves kidnapped, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Bored rich kids,’ I said, accepting the cup he offered. ‘How else can they get their kicks?’ I took a sip and discovered he was right about the tea-making abilities here, raised my cup to him in salute.

  He nodded in a distracted way, still frowning. ‘She said she was going to confess everything to her parents. I’m afraid I tried to talk her out of it on the basis that what was done was done. No point in making trouble for yourself if you don’t have to, eh? But I’d guess she went ahead anyway, and that’s why they’ve whisked her away somewhere out of reach, until all this dies down.’

  ‘Torquil Eisenberg is dead,’ I said. ‘I don’t think it will simply die down. The Feds will catch up with her eventually.’

  His handsome face stayed grave, hands fiddling with his teacup. Eventually, he looked up. ‘And now Dina’s been kidnapped … I mean, for real, do you think?’

  ‘They shot her bodyguard,’ I said. ‘I’d say that makes it pretty bloody real.’

  ‘I thought you were her bodyguard?’

  My turn to drop my gaze. ‘Yeah, so did I.’

  He was silent for a moment. ‘I suppose … Mrs Willner will have to pay them, won’t she? I mean, what choice does she have – after what happened to Tor?’

  I took a breath, put down my cup and rubbed a tired hand across my eyes. ‘It may be a case of willing but not able,’ I said. ‘Her ex-husband’s been bleeding her dry over the past few years.’

  ‘So, what are you saying?’ He gave a half-hearted smile. ‘That she’s all fur coat and no knickers?’

  ‘There’s a phrase you don’t hear much on this side of the Atlantic. But yeah, that’s the gist of it.’

  ‘Dina must know what her mother’s situation is. What
on earth made her want to get involved in … all this?’

  ‘Mrs Willner had kidnap insurance, but Dina’s activities make it void. She realises she can’t claim on it.’ I checked my watch, but only a few minutes seemed to have inched by. ‘Look, I’m sorry but I need to go—’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, signalling for the bill. One of the hovering staff hurried over to comply. When the waiter had gone, Hunt said, ‘Hell, Charlie, I’m sorry for the kid. But, if anyone can get her back, I’m sure you can.’

  Grateful for his apparent confidence, I closed my mind to any other possibilities. ‘We’ll do our best.’

  ‘Yeah, you don’t give up easily, do you? Even after they wrecked your bike and shot you, you’re still determined.’

  I stood. ‘Well, maybe I just hate to lose.’

  We shook hands. He had a firm dry grip without the fake sincerity antics of Orlando’s father.

  ‘If you find Orlando, tell her I’m thinking of her,’ he said, giving me a lopsided smile. ‘Tell her I miss her like hell.’

  After the reaction of Orlando’s father, I wasn’t expecting much in the way of cooperation from the other families, but Benedict Benelli’s parents had no such qualms about keeping me away from their son.

  I gathered shortly after being shown into the art-cluttered living room of the family’s palatial home that the cops had already spent most of the morning interviewing Benedict, and if his parents didn’t know about the kidnapping scam beforehand, they certainly did now.

  The two of them sat one on either side of their son on an oversize sofa, as though to prevent him making a break for it. If the sulkier-than-usual look on Benedict’s face was anything to go by, that was a distinct possibility.

  He sprawled between them with his arms folded and his fists tightly clenched, staring resolutely at a huge art deco tome on the coffee table in front of him, as if he’d developed a sudden fascination in the work of Clarice Cliff.

  Even without their surname, Mr and Mrs Benelli were clearly Italian, from their Mediterranean skin tone and stature, to their clothing style and temperament. Mrs Benelli, in particular, could have been listed as the simple dictionary definition of voluble.

  ‘Tell her!’ she snapped now, and when that didn’t produce instant results, she leant across and cuffed him across the back of the head with her open palm. Serious injury would have resulted if she’d used the back of her hand instead. She wore gold rings on every finger, like some kind of ornamental gemstone knuckledusters.

  Benedict flinched away from the blow with more annoyance than pain. His mother was barely five feet tall, even in her stout heels, and probably almost the same in circumference.

  ‘Tell her that you cut off your own finger, that you disfigured yourself! And for what?’ She appealed to me, talking with her hands as much as her voice. ‘So he wouldn’t have to work hard, that’s what!’ She shook her head, dabbed at her eyes with a lace handkerchief. ‘Your father and I, we came here and we started from nothing. Nothing! We worked our hands to the bone, and for what? To give our family the chance of a better life. And this is how you repay us? You bring the police to our door!’

  ‘Mama, I never meant—’

  That was as much of a protest as Benedict managed before his mother was off again, jewellery vibrating like a seismic recorder in an earthquake zone.

  ‘To what?’ she shrieked. ‘To cheat money out of us? Is that how we brought you up? To lie to your own flesh and blood? To steal from us? Already today we have lied to the police for you. We told them you had an accident with your hand, that it was nothing to do with these kidnappings.’ She slapped her hand down on the arm of the sofa, punctuating her words. ‘No. More. Lies! The girl is missing. She is in danger. You tell her what she wants to know, Benedetto.’

  Mr Benelli, meanwhile, sat in glowering silence at the other end of the sofa. His dark eyes flicked occasionally to his son and reminded me of a Rottweiler – capable of intense emotion and also of showing no humanity at all.

  I waited a beat to see if Benedict’s mother was going to launch another broadside, or his father was going to bite somebody, before I turned my gaze onto the boy himself.

  ‘Was it you who originally made contact with Lennon?’ I asked. I’d chosen the question carefully, intending to drip onto him how much I appeared to know, without giving away how little that really was. It didn’t quite get the reaction I’d been hoping for.

  ‘Who?’ Benedict demanded, with enough genuine confusion and anger to ring true.

  ‘Answer her!’ Mrs Benelli yelled, fetching him another stinging blow round the back of the head.

  ‘Mrs Benelli, please,’ I protested, torn between letting her beat some sense into him, and managing to get some sense out of him before brain damage set in.

  ‘I don’t know any names,’ Benedict muttered, trying to rub his sore scalp and make it look like he was smoothing his hair down instead. ‘Manda knows. She got me into this.’ As he spoke, he flicked his eyes towards his mother. Her lips thinned expressively at the name and she folded her hands under her ample bosom. I found myself mentally wanting to do the same thing.

  Manda Dempsey. No surprises there. I might have known that new leaf was just a version of the old one.

  ‘How long have you known her?’

  ‘I guess she was around, but I never noticed her ’til after she was kidnapped. She was … different afterward.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know – kinda empowered. We got to be friends.’

  Mrs Benelli restricted herself to a powerful harrumph.

  ‘So, she talked you into it.’ I tried that one on him to see how it fit. He grabbed the metaphorical lifebelt with both hands.

  ‘Yes! She kept on about how easy it was – to gain independence. Not to have to go crawling to anybody for money.’

  ‘Like normal people have to,’ I said dryly. ‘Who crawl to their bosses, or their customers, every working day of their lives.’

  ‘Benedict will be working from now on, and he will be working hard,’ his mother said fiercely. ‘He will start right at the bottom, like his father, in the factory. And he will work his way up. Any money he gets from now on, he will earn!’

  I suppressed a sigh as Benedict’s face closed up again. Reminding him of what he’d lost – and what he had to lose – was not going to get him to talk more openly. The Benellis were, I reflected, as protective and obstructive in their own way as Orlando’s father had been.

  ‘So, did Manda also recruit Dina and Torquil, or was it your turn?’

  Colour lit along his cheekbones. ‘I knew Dina wanted to get involved,’ he admitted. ‘That’s why we went to that stupid party – to meet with her and talk about it. And that was our big mistake.’

  I wondered briefly how he managed to narrow down one error among so many others. ‘In what way?’

  ‘That’s where Tor found out what we’d been doing. How were we to know he had that goddamn stateroom wired?’

  His mother made another protest, but a more automatic one this time, more at the language than the meaning.

  I remembered Orlando’s flustered reaction, the day she and Manda had come to see Dina after Torquil had been snatched, when I’d told her he liked to record what went on aboard the family yacht. I’d thought that, like Nicola Eisenberg before her, Orlando might have been caught in some kind of compromising position of her own. But it was clear Torquil had captured more than just sexual indiscretions.

  ‘So he knew about the fake kidnaps and he tried to blackmail you, is that it?’

  There was a flash in Benedict’s eyes. ‘He wanted in, but of course he wanted his to be bigger and better than all the others,’ he said, bitter. ‘But we knew we couldn’t trust him not to shoot his mouth off. Especially after the fiasco at the riding club. He was gonna blow the whole—’

  He broke off suddenly, realising that what he’d been about to say sounded very much like motive for wanting Torquil out of the way. Permanently. Mr Benelli’s eyes flickered i
n his direction, and I swear I heard an almost subliminal growl start up somewhere deep in the man’s chest, although it might simply have been the air con cycling.

  I asked quietly, ‘So, what did you decide to do about that? Kidnap him to keep him quiet, and then shut him up for good?’

  ‘No!’ The fear in Benedict’s face was stark and uncompromising, but I didn’t necessarily take it as a sign that he was innocent. ‘I had nothing to do with that.’ It seemed to be a company line.

  ‘So, who arranged the “fiasco” at the riding club? How did you get in touch with the guys who made the attempt?’

  He shrugged. ‘I didn’t. Manda and Orlando handled it. They told the guys where and when, gave them the details. I didn’t know any of it.’

  Didn’t want to know. Hmm, maybe Benedict wasn’t an entirely lost cause. His mother’s plan for hard labour might either break or make him.

  ‘And Torquil?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ His voice was almost a shout, eyes darting towards his mother as if expecting to dodge another blow. She kept her hands clasped in her lap with an obvious effort of will. ‘I swear! I. Don’t. Know.’

  I stared at him for a long time, but his gaze remained defiant and unblinking. I wondered, if he’d been alone, how long it would have taken me to get any more out of him. Too bad I wouldn’t find that out.

  ‘OK, Benedict,’ I said wearily. ‘Just remember, though, that the cops will be back, and they really don’t like being lied to. Try it with the Feds and you’ll find yourself on the first plane to Cuba. And people like the Eisenbergs will not let things like this go unpunished.’ I rose, gave him a last hard stare. ‘There are worse places to spend the next twenty-five years than the factory floor.’

  It was just before noon. Dina had been missing almost twenty-six hours. I was willing to bet that, wherever she was right now, it had to be worse than anywhere Benedict’s parents could devise.