Hostage to Fortune

by Carolyn McCrae

  “Twenty-seven,” Wave confirmed.

  For a moment Guy thought that she had looked much younger than that. “I do need to talk to her. She’s not a child, is she? She can make decisions for herself.”

  “You don’t look so old yourself,” Billy said pointedly. “How old are you, boy?”

  “Old enough,” he said, he hoped convincingly. Guy wanted to add, “and don’t call me ‘boy’”, but Billy was heavy, and had had a lot to drink, and he did not fancy his chances in a fist fight.

  He was becoming impatient. He had never been entirely sure how the interview with Billy and Wave would go but he had hoped, somehow, that they would tell him where to find Jenna.

  “If only I could speak to her I could explain everything.”

  “I could text her,” Wave suggested before Billy could stop her.

  “That would be great,” ‘Kevin’ said encouragingly. “Just say there’s someone who needs to talk to her. I can meet her anywhere she wants.”

  He watched as Wave picked up her phone and wrote a very short text.

  “I just asked her where she was. I said we were worried. I didn’t say anything about you or the money.”

  “Has it been delivered? Read?” Guy asked.

  Wave checked her phone. “Yes.”

  “Any reply?”

  “Give her a fucking chance.” Billy had not liked Wave being involved in the conversation but was as interested in the answer as anyone in the room.

  “Hang on, a reply is coming.”

  “What does she say?”

  “Spain. She’s in Spain.”

  “Spain? What the fuck’s she doing there?” Billy asked of no one in particular.

  The two men watched as Wave wrote another message.

  “I’ve just asked her where and why and is she okay.”

  It was only a couple of minutes before a reply came.

  “What’s she doing?” Billy asked impatiently. “Writing a fucking essay?”

  “She says she’s fine now. She had to get away from England. She said a man tracked her down in Valencia but a woman helped her get away and she’s now staying with her and some friends in a place called Altea.”

  “Did she say who the woman was who helped her?” ‘Kevin’ asked, quickly adding, “Was it someone from the press? A tabloid getting her exclusive story? You know that wouldn’t help anyone, would it? Least of all you.”

  He watched as Wave sent another text and the three waited in silence until the reply came.

  It was a few moments before Wave could answer. “She says it was a policewoman. They were concerned for her safety but I don’t understand, why would anyone want to harm her?”

  ‘Kevin’ tried not to show how much that reply had worried him.

  Everything was getting more complicated than he had thought. It wasn’t going to be a simple case of finding Jenna, getting her to trust him, getting her to like him so they could share Warwick’s billions. She would never trust him now the police were involved and the woman and her friends had, no doubt, been filling Jenna’s head with lies about him.

  He had really not wanted to have to do her any harm, but that now seemed unavoidable. It would be difficult. With people watching her. How could he get away with it? But had he got away with the others? Perhaps he had not covered all his tracks as well as he should have done. Perhaps, after everything, after all his planning, they knew what he had done.

  He remembered the man who had seemed so out of place at the funeral. Was he a policeman too? Was the woman he had been with the one who had spirited Jenna away from the Valencia hotel the previous day?

  “Will you ask her if she’ll meet up with me?” he asked as calmly as he could. “Tell her all I want to do is talk and sort this whole mess out so she can carry on living her life in peace.”

  He watched as Wave wrote the text.

  “There,” she said, handing her phone over to him. “That’s her number, she says phone her tomorrow and she might talk to you.”

  Guy put the number in his contacts.

  “Thanks. You know I’m only trying to do the best for everyone. Jenna as well as the Force.”

  “See you do or you’ll have me to answer to. Now piss off and leave us alone and tell that lot outside to piss off too.”

  Guy pushed his way through to his car, ignoring the questions and the phones thrust towards his face.

  He had taken a risk coming to see Wave and Billy; it was possible that some of these press stringers had taken a photograph of him, and it was possible that someone, somewhere would work out who he was and link him to the crew of Beausale and to Warwick Eden.

  He realised the risk he had taken in visiting Wave and Billy, but he had had no choice if he was to find Jenna.

  And he had to find Jenna.

  The next day Guy was back in Spain, sitting in a bar working out his next move.

  He had Jenna’s mobile number but he did not want to use it. He did not want her to know when her meeting with ‘Kevin Langley’ was to be. The policewoman would want to be with her and that would be a complication Guy did not want to have to deal with. But the town was sizeable and busy, and his chances of finding where Jenna had been taken were non-existent. He eventually decided that he would, after all, have to text her.

  Jenna, I’m Kevin. I’m in Altea. Can we meet?

  He had finished his beer and ordered another before his phone reverberated with the reply.

  Where When she replied almost immediately.

  Guy decided to try his luck Where are U

  Not here

  Bar?

  1 on Albir beach

  When

  6

  Alone

  Yes

  He closed his phone.

  It seemed Jenna wanted everything to be sorted as much as he did.

  He was sitting in the bar well before six o’clock. He had his back to the door but could see all comings and goings in the mirror behind the row of bottles behind the counter. He did not want to give Jenna the chance to recognise him as the man from the library in Valencia before he had made contact.

  He did not know what the policewoman would have told her about him. He did not even know if he was the reason she had been spirited away from Valencia.

  After fifteen minutes there was no sign of Jenna.

  After half an hour he was beginning to think she would not turn up when he saw two old women, one of whom he recognised, making themselves comfortable at an outside table.

  He looked sharply down into his glass. He should have known Arjun would not have had the balls to kill Diane.

  Guy remembered what he had thought that day in Cartagena nearly three weeks before: What can two old ladies do? Now he was beginning to fear that they could do rather a lot.

  He moved his position slightly, edging behind a pillar. He really did not want them to see him.

  His phone vibrated.

  Sorry can’t get away

  Another time? he replied.

  No. Sorry.

  Her message came as no surprise.

  Guy realised she must have talked to her policewoman, and to these two old biddies whose presence in the bar could not be a coincidence.

  They must know he was in the bar, why else would they be here, at this time, yet they made no sign of looking for him or confronting him. He ordered another beer, checking every minute that they had not moved. It was over an hour before they waved for their bill.

  He followed them out but his car was too far away for him to be able to follow them; besides he had had too much to drink to trust himself to drive on roads he did not know and which frequently were treacherous with steep, unprotected drops.

  He watched them get into a distinctive yellow car.

  Next time he saw the car in the town he w
ould follow it.

  For now, he had to be patient.

  Chapter 31: Skye and Fergal Back Off

  Two days after Warwick’s funeral Skye and Fergal were following the news as they made final preparations for their trip to Spain. There was a great deal about Jenna Freece and they were unhappy that Jenna had not been taken under Gordon’s wing, but was holed up in Devon, besieged by paparazzi.

  “You must get on to Gordon again, tell him Jenna’s in danger, and I don’t mean from the ruddy media,” Skye said as she left off packing for a moment to stare at the television news.

  “He must think she’s safe enough as long as she’s in the public eye.”

  “It can’t be very nice for her.”

  “Not nice at all. Remember what it was like for us?”

  Skye was about to argue that they had not been a lone vulnerable female when the press had besieged them two years earlier when her phone rang.

  The call was not a long one and Fergal took little notice; not every call Skye received was anything to do with him, though he did look up when he heard her mention Guy and Ryan.

  “That was really weird,” she said slowly and deliberately when the call had ended.

  “What was?”

  “It was Anne.”

  “But I only spoke to Gordon yesterday. What’s the panic? What can have changed in a day?”

  “She asked whether we had heard anything more about Diane.”

  “And?”

  “Obviously I said we hadn’t. I asked whether they had found her and she didn’t really answer, just saying they weren’t worried about her anymore.”

  “Odd.”

  “And then she asked whether we had strayed from our remit. Those were the words she used: ‘have you strayed from your remit?’ Of course I said you’d spoken to Gordon yesterday and told him we’d been looking at back stories.”

  “And?”

  “She asked whose.”

  “And you said?”

  “Guy and Ryan and Warwick and Barford.”

  “And?”

  “She said we should back off.”

  “Back off?”

  “I got the definite impression she was warning us off looking into the Eden and the O’Donnell families and anyone connected with either murder and stroke or Diane’s disappearance.”

  “Why would she do that when Gordon didn’t yesterday? All he said was we’d done all we could and could stop. If you remember, we agreed that he hadn’t really meant it and really did want us to carry on.”

  “Anne’s now gone a bit further. She’s saying give up, stop, back off.”

  “Do you think they really mean the opposite? Both of them? And Anne’s call to you is backing up Gordon’s message to me saying one thing but both meaning the opposite?”

  “I have no idea. Anyway, she finished the call thanking us for what we did, saying we were to leave everything in her hands and apologising that it seems to have all been a bit of a waste of our time but our fee would be in our bank within a few days. That isn’t the point though, is it?”

  “Not at all. I’m horrified she should say that.”

  “We won’t back off though, will we?”

  “What can they do to stop us? They can’t stop us looking into the Jiménez Rodriguez Martinez families. Nor can they prohibit us from going to Spain.”

  “We are free agents after all, we can do what we like while researching our upcoming book on the Spanish Civil War, can’t we?” Skye asked rhetorically.

  “Precisely,” Fergal replied, smiling.

  “You said you wanted to see some archives in Salamanca. What do you hope they’ll tell you?” Skye asked.

  “Salamanca was Franco’s capital during the Civil War, did you know that? Madrid was Republican right up till practically the end. They have set up an archive with records of trials, some details of who was fighting in which group, who were victims, that sort of thing. I’d like to spend some time there before heading for Granada which is where it all began.”

  “It? Do you mean the Civil War or the Jiménez Eden saga?”

  “Both.”

  “You’ve really got into this Civil War stuff, haven’t you?”

  “It’s something I am ashamed to admit I knew practically nothing about.”

  “And then Granada?”

  “Illora, the village where the Jiménez house was, it’s just outside Granada. There’s also a few local museums that might help. They’ll have a great many documents they won’t have put on the internet.”

  “And after spending a few days’ research we might just drive north to visit your friend Toby in Benidorm?”

  “And it would be rude not to call on Pat when we were in the area, wouldn’t it?”

  “Absolutely.”

  A little over a week later Skye turned off the main road and started the climb up the narrow winding road to the urbanizacion where Pat lived.

  “What do you think she’ll say when she sees us?” she asked.

  “I don’t think she’ll be all that surprised. Anne will have told her we weren’t happy with some of the answers we’d been getting.”

  “But we haven’t been in touch with Pat for ages; it must be the best part of a month since she called me to say she thought she had seen Diane in Cartagena.”

  “Not a month, just three weeks and two days,” Fergal corrected.

  “And we did leave it to Anne, didn’t we? We haven’t interfered, have we?”

  “No, we haven’t.”

  “We’ve been good little pawns, haven’t we?”

  “Pawns!” Fergal laughed. “Of course, that’s what Gordon implied we would be.”

  “What we have done in the meantime is learn an awful lot about the Civil War.”

  “And about the Jiménez family,” he added.

  “That was really interesting. What was his name? That old gardener chap, the one that the man from the museum put us in touch with, the one whose father had worked for the Jiménez estate?”

  “Fernando. And that was only one of the family’s legends he waxed lyrical about.”

  “You did buy him quite a few beers,” Skye pointed out smiling.

  “It was worth it, though I’m not sure we can rely too much on the idea of buried treasure.”

  “People do bury things in times of war and pestilence, don’t they? Remember Samuel Pepys buried his parmesan cheese in the Great Fire of London and there was that fantastic hoard of gold found in Staffordshire not so long ago.”

  “If Fernando’s story, and the inventory he gave us that his father gave him—”

  “That he said his father gave him.”

  Fergal nodded, accepting the qualification. “If he is to be trusted then our Luis Jiménez Martinez buried more gold than cheese. Anyway, we’re here now. Smile, be nice, don’t be inquisitive, don’t interrupt and don’t ask awkward questions.”

  Skye punched her husband lightly on the arm as she parked next to the yellow car in the drive that led up to Pat’s house.

  “Hi Pat.”

  “What on earth are you two doing here?”

  It was clear to both Skye and Fergal that not only was their arrival unexpected, it was unwelcome.

  “We were—”

  “Don’t say you were just passing. This is at least a thousand miles from your home, and you have my phone number. You should at the very least have called to let me know you were coming.”

  “We’re sorry,” Fergal explained. “It was rather a last-minute thing. We’ve been touring around southern Spain and were going to head back through Portugal but decided to come up the east coast instead.”

  “Really?” The length and detail of Fergal’s explanation served only to convince Pat that it had been rehearsed.

  “Yes, really,” Skye said. “And w
hen we saw the exit signs on the motorway for Altea we thought it would be nice to see you again.”

  Pat looked from Skye to Fergal and back to Skye, as she decided what approach to take.

  “I suppose you’d better come in,” she said eventually with obvious reluctance. “Though I have to warn you I have house guests.”

  “House guests?” Skye asked warily.

  “You know two of them and probably know of the third. Diane’s been here for a while but the other two not quite a week.”

  “Diane?” Skye mouthed silently to Fergal as they followed Pat through the kitchen onto the veranda. She was rewarded with an exaggerated shrug.

  “Anne, how nice to see you, and Diane. There’s a surprise.” Fergal was unsuccessful in keeping the sarcasm from his voice. “And you are Jenna Freece. I recognise you from the press photos. I’m Fergal Shepherd and this is my wife, Skye.” He held out his hand and Jenna shook it, appraising the good-looking couple and trying to work out where they fitted into everything.

  “Diane?” Skye asked, wondering what had happened that no one had seen fit to explain to her and Fergal. “How long have you been here? No wonder Anne called us off! She’s known where you’ve been all along, hasn’t she? And Jenna? Anyone who follows current affairs knows that just about every newspaper in the country is searching for you.”

  Since no one else seemed to want to give answers Fergal turned to his wife and offered his suggestions. “Diane could have been here for weeks for all we know. Though Jenna can’t have been here for more than a week or so because she was spotted in Kent. Anne, I have no idea. Perhaps she’s been here all along with Diane or maybe only recently arrived having taken responsibility for Jenna after recognising that it was likely she was in some danger.”

  “Is anyone going to tell us how this all came about or are we going to have to keep guessing?” Skye asked with heavy sarcasm looking from Anne to Diane and back to Pat. She didn’t expect Jenna to be able to give her any answers.

  “Before I say anything I need to know why you’re really here.” Anne took the initiative. “I heard your explanation about ‘just passing’ and it won’t wash but if you were ‘just passing’ may I ask what brought you to Spain?”