by Tom Bale
She rose slowly, took one last look around, then sprinted to the entrance, stepping lightly from grass to the stone paving that led up to a small open porch. An old pair of boots and a broken umbrella had been left to the mercy of the elements.
The front door was as sturdy and well-protected as Ruth would expect of a holiday home in a remote location. There was no way she could break in without making a lot of noise.
She put her head to the door and listened carefully, but heard nothing inside. Keeping low, ducking beneath a couple of windows, she crept to the far side and listened again, then risked a quick look round the corner. A path ran beside the house, bordered by bushes and a few thin trees. There were soil and water pipes fixed to the wall, suggesting that the bathroom and kitchen were on this side.
Better still, about halfway along she could see a doorway, and a vertical sliver of timber that might be the edge of a door, suggesting it was open.
Ruth was about to investigate it when her senses picked up a threat from somewhere. She moved back out of sight. Moments later she heard the soft thud of footsteps on grass. Someone was approaching the house, possibly from the summer house in the garden.
A louder tapping sound as the shoes hit the path for several paces, and then stopped. She waited to hear a door open or close, but nothing happened.
She counted off five seconds, then decided to take a look.
It was Mark Vickery. Fortunately he had his back to her. He was wearing the same shirt and trousers as this morning, with the addition of a grey silk waistcoat. He seemed perfectly relaxed, anticipating no danger as he loitered on the path.
She watched him take a small box from his pocket and consider it for a moment: cigarettes. With a gentle sigh, he flipped it open and upended the box, tapping a cigarette into his palm.
‘Can’t quite kick the habit?’
Vickery jumped, the box falling from his hand as he spun, completely unprepared, and Ruth landed a savage punch to the side of his neck, just below his left ear. She followed up with a kick to the groin, and then a blow to the temple as he was falling. Vickery went down like a sack of cement.
Wasting no time, she grabbed his feet and dragged him into the bushes. Cut a length of the rope and used it to tie his hands and feet. He was already coming round, trying to speak, so she sliced through his waistcoat, removing a long strip of material to use as a gag.
He stared at her, wide-eyed and struggling to focus. Even with the gag, he was making a lot of noise, whining in his throat.
‘Bad idea.’ Ruth jabbed the knife at his forehead, opening a small but nasty cut. ‘One more squeak and I’ll come back and kill you.’
Vickery flinched, squinting at her as if he was only now registering who she was. Evidently he took her threat seriously, for he shut up.
As she’d guessed, the back door was standing open. Ruth scooped up the cigarettes and tossed them into the bushes, then stepped into the house.
The kitchen was a good size, a bit dated, and hadn’t seen much use lately – other than today’s visitors helping themselves to tea and coffee. A couple of dirty mugs sat on the unit, and there was a sprinkling of sugar on the counter next to a recently boiled kettle.
The kitchen door was open, showing a gloomy hallway. As she moved towards it, the floor creaked beneath her foot. She almost stopped, but knew that would make it worse.
‘Mark?’ It was a woman’s voice: Sian Vickery, Mark’s sister.
Knife at the ready, Ruth hurried along the hall and saw four rooms leading off it. Two doors were open and two were shut.
The first doorway revealed a dining room. The body of a plump, dark-haired woman was lying on the table. This must be Renshaw’s former colleague, Nerys. Both the table and the floor below it were splattered with blood, but Ruth wasted no time checking to see if the woman was alive.
The other open door led to a lounge at the front of the house. There was a TV playing quietly – a property show – and another sound which Ruth couldn’t place at first. Then she realised it was a baby, grizzling in a sort of low-level way, as if too weary to make a proper fuss.
More of the room came into view, but she couldn’t see Sian Vickery. She could, however, see the baby, lying on a hard wooden floor in front of a stone hearth. The fire wasn’t lit, but still it shocked Ruth: the image it evoked was that of an offering, a gift to placate a higher power.
What she did next was foolish in the extreme. Obeying some long-dormant maternal impulse not to leave an infant where it could come to harm, she strode into the room and had fully cleared the doorway before her other, more primitive instinct reasserted itself.
Trap.
Sian had hidden behind the door. A neat move on her part, but she probably hadn’t had time to find a weapon: she would have to hit or claw at Ruth, maybe try to wrestle her to the ground.
With yesterday’s humiliating ambush sharp in her mind, Ruth darted to her left and turned side on, raising her right arm across her chest. As Sian blundered towards her, Ruth planted her feet and jabbed her elbow with maximum force, catching Sian on the temple. It was a clean, hard strike that felled the woman like a rotten tree in a storm.
Ruth used more of her rope to bind Sian’s hands and feet. The woman remained deeply unconscious, so Ruth put her in the recovery position, in spite of a conviction that such care was more than Sian warranted.
The room had been recently colonised, by the look of it: there were nappies and wet wipes and a bottle of white wine, half empty. It must have got boring, watching the baby while the others tortured their victim in the dining room.
Evie had gone quiet. She was lying still, as if concentrating, alert to the change of circumstances. Ruth smiled. Smart cookie, this little girl. Harry and his wife should be proud.
She knelt at the baby’s side, moving slowly so as not to startle her. Whispered a greeting, and then gently eased her hands beneath the tiny body before lifting her and holding her against her chest. It felt alien yet completely natural, a long-neglected but never forgotten ability, like swimming. Like riding a bike.
Mother love.
She carried Evie into the hall and stopped, listening hard. She didn’t think there was anyone else in the house. She could leave now, she realised.
She should leave now, because she had what she came for. The promise to Harry: she’d find his daughter, and keep her safe.
But.
Ruth remembered that glimpse of a figure by the summer house.
She wasn’t going anywhere. Not yet.
Seventy-Five
Harry had swiftly adjusted to driving the Range Rover, though the higher centre of gravity had nearly caught him out a couple of times. They’d also had a horrible near miss – pulling out to overtake just as a car came out of a junction towards them. Alice had to remind him that dying en route wouldn’t help Evie at all.
Forty-five minutes after leaving Cranstone, they were skirting around the village of Coleford, approaching Symonds Yat from the south. Michael’s map had indicated that this was a quicker route than the A40 through Ross-on-Wye. Harry hoped that wasn’t a lie.
In any case, they still weren’t going to get there until about thirty minutes after Ruth. By which point anything might have happened.
He hadn’t said as much to Alice – in fact they’d hardly spoken at all – but he knew she was thinking the same thing. Their silence had an intimacy to it; the sense of an almost psychic connection that made him feel closer to her than he had in ages. Of course, this was virtually the first time since the birth that they had been together without Evie. Even when their daughter wasn’t in the same room, they would be listening out for her on the baby monitor; fretting over the timing of her next feed, her next change; worrying that the snuffling they could hear meant she was coming down with something … always a thousand tiny anxieties to occupy their minds, and now all those mundane concerns seemed laughably trivial.
Was Evie alive? Would they ever see her again? Those questions,
those fears, were so all-consuming that they could not be voiced. The closest either of them came to it was when Alice said, ‘I keep trying to picture her, and I can’t, somehow. I can’t see her face in my mind.’
‘That’s normal when you’re under stress,’ he said, though in fact he had no idea what was normal in a situation like this.
Alice put her hands to her cheeks, pressing almost savagely against the skin.
‘Those nightmares we talked about on Thursday, they’re going to come true. Every bad thing all at once.’
‘No, they’re not. You can’t think like that.’
‘Why not? Aren’t you thinking that way?’
He sighed. ‘Yes, I am. But you have to stop me from being negative, and I have to stop you. That’s how we’ll get through this. It’s our only chance.’
He didn’t have to add: It’s Evie’s only chance.
It turned out that the woman in the dining room, Nerys, was still alive. Ruth heard ragged breathing, then a feeble cry.
She entered the room, carrying Evie at her shoulder to spare her the sight of what had been done in here. Nerys saw her, though, eyes focusing weakly then widening with … what? Hope?
This was someone who had offered sanctuary to Renshaw and then betrayed him. A woman who had snatched a baby from its mother and brought it here to sell or bargain with.
Nerys tried to speak, coughing up pinkish bubbles as she managed a few words, none of them clear enough to decipher. Ruth was no expert but she could see that Nerys was in a very bad way. Even with urgent medical treatment she might not make it.
But Ruth couldn’t ring 999 now, any more than she could walk out of here and return Evie to her parents.
Did that make her, in her own way, just as bad as Nerys? Ruth deliberated for a second and decided that she didn’t care what the answer was.
Nerys tried again, her hand beckoning Ruth closer, but Ruth didn’t move.
‘My son,’ Nerys said. ‘Son.’
Ruth guessed it was a plea for help – having extracted some information from her, perhaps Foster and Bridge had been despatched to find the man who had helped his mother.
She regarded Nerys for a few seconds, then shook her head.
‘You need to keep very quiet. When this is done I’ll bring help if I can. But not now.’
Ruth ignored another weak plea as she left the room. She climbed the stairs, confident that there was no one up here but needing to be absolutely sure.
Her intuition was right. Three bedrooms and a bathroom, all empty, the beds stripped for winter. In the room above the kitchen she walked over to the window and carefully peered out. The summer house lay about thirty feet away, facing across the valley. A light from the front was spilling on to the grass.
She descended the stairs slowly, the baby an encumbrance she could do without. She was outwardly calm, as she knew she had to be, but inside there was a degree of turmoil – quite understandably, she thought. The question was: to what extent could it impair her judgement?
Maybe it already has, she reflected as she stepped out of the back door and walked across the garden, helpless with Evie in her arms. Maybe it already has.
Seventy-Six
The summer house was a long low building, clad in timber but not dissimilar in size and shape to the shipping container in which Ruth had spent the previous night. The front section was almost entirely made of glass, with a set of double doors in the middle. It was lit by a single lamp.
The interior was large enough for a sofa and a set of aluminium furniture: four tubular framed chairs and a small round table. Nathan Laird was sitting on one of the chairs, a bottle of Evian on the table in front of him, along with a phone and an iPad.
He was wearing a dark grey suit and a white shirt; no tie. His hair was shorter than he used to wear it; close-cropped and greying at the temples, with a pronounced widow’s peak. A few lines and wrinkles that hadn’t been there before, made more obvious by a deep tan. But the grey hair offset the tan nicely, so although he was looking his age, he was, if anything, even more handsome than before.
He reacted to her approach as if he had fully expected it. As if he had known that his precautions would fail. He studied Ruth in much the same way that she was studying him. He seemed about to rise to greet her, but settled for lifting the Evian in a kind of toast. His other hand went for the phone, tapping a couple of times as he lifted it to his ear.
Someone answered straight away and he told them: ‘Get back here. Now.’
Ruth waited in the doorway. ‘One to one no good for you, then?’
He absorbed the taunt with a lazy smile, and pointedly didn’t ask what had happened to Mark or Sian Vickery.
‘Come in. Sit down.’
She accepted only the first invitation, moving to the opposite side of the table and standing behind the chair.
‘Where are the others? Warley, is it? And the Scottish one.’
‘Keeping watch, north and south. I can call them back as well, but Foster and Bridge are the specialists.’ He grinned. ‘They won’t be long. Five or ten minutes.’
‘I know. I saw them leave.’
‘Well, you were lucky.’ His eyes narrowed as he regarded Evie. ‘If it’s her you came for, why are you still here?’
‘You know why.’
He looked genuinely baffled. ‘You’d put your head in the noose for something that happened over a decade ago?’ Then another unexpected question: ‘Where’s your friend?’
‘What?’ For a mad second she thought of Greg, and felt a rush of grief and guilt. But Laird gestured at the baby.
‘This one’s dad. The family Renshaw used as a cut-out.’
‘Harry? I convinced him that he stood more chance of getting his daughter back if he left me to do it.’
‘And where is he now, this trusting father?’
Ruth shrugged. ‘Waiting for my call.’
Laird looked sceptical. He leaned towards the seat next to him and picked up the gun he’d been keeping out of sight.
This challenged a lot of Ruth’s assumptions. She knew Laird as a man who took the utmost care to avoid incriminating himself. To see him armed, at the scene of a violent crime, was completely out of character.
‘Oh, really?’ Ruth thought this a fair effort to sound cool, given the circumstances.
‘Unavoidable,’ he said. ‘These are dangerous times, Ruth.’
The gun was a Glock, semi-automatic and lethal at close range. With the garden furniture between her and the doors, she stood no chance of running.
Laird said, ‘Why don’t you sit down?’
‘I’m okay here.’
‘Well, you don’t look very comfortable with that baby. Why not hand her over?’
‘And then you shoot me?’
The question seemed to induce a sudden cry from Evie. Whatever the reason, it caused Ruth to step back, the baby wriggling and kicking with surprising strength.
Laird tutted. ‘Give her to me.’
Ruth wanted to call his bluff, counting on the fact that he wouldn’t risk shooting when the baby would almost certainly die in the process. But she had underestimated Nathan’s capacity for cruelty on more than one occasion, and she was not about to do it again.
‘It’s a simple choice, Ruth. Both of you in the firing line, or just you. What’s it to be?’
Evie yelped again: Ruth had no idea why. Was she hungry, or wet? Or was she scared? Could they sense the threat of violence at this age? Ruth didn’t know: she’d been a hopeless mother.
And Laird could read her mind. He watched her clumsy attempts to placate the child and offered a patronising smile.
‘What is there to decide?’ he asked, his tone vaguely pitying. ‘After all, you’re not here for her, are you?’
The sly look in his eyes was one she remembered well. She felt humiliated by her own need for answers. That she would submit herself to this – and with much worse to come. All he had to do was keep her dangling until Foster
and Bridge returned.
Was she really prepared to give up her life, just to know the truth about her son?
She gazed at Evie, whose cries of displeasure had now been reduced to a low-level grizzling. Ruth’s arms were aching from the effort of jiggling her up and down.
‘What do you want her for?’
Laird looked amused. ‘What do you think I want her for?’
‘I heard something in Downview.’
‘Prison gossip. A lot of stupid people cooped up together, spinning fantasies to pass the time.’
‘Maybe. But what I heard was that your girls occasionally got pregnant. Instead of terminations, you “encouraged” them to go to term.’
He laughed at the euphemism. ‘They didn’t all need “encouraging”. Not when there was a very significant bonus to be had.’
‘So it’s true? And the babies were sold?’
‘Adopted, is a better word. Only without all that bothersome paperwork. The girls were consulted.’
‘Always?’
‘Almost always,’ he conceded, with a glint in his eye.
Ruth felt dizzy, the blood roaring in her ears. She shifted her weight, made sure Evie was secure in one hand and grabbed a chair for support.
‘Why did you do it?’
‘If you spot a gap in the market, it’s crazy not to fill it. A lot of wealthy people out there who want to adopt without all the usual rigmarole, the state interference.’
‘Or people who’d been turned down as unsuitable?’
‘Maybe. They seemed like genuine loving parents, mostly. Desperate for a child they could call their own.’ He sniffed. ‘Can’t say I understand it myself, all this “son and heir” stuff. I couldn’t give a toss what happens to a world without me in it. Could you?’
He laughed, boorishly, obscuring any answer she might have given. It startled Evie, who turned towards the source of this noise.
