by Tom Bale
It had startled Ruth, too. Perhaps there was an element of bravado in there, but if that statement held even a kernel of truth, then Laird would have few qualms about disposing of his own son.
Ruth said, ‘But people with lots of money and no scruples can get babies anywhere, can’t they? The world is awash with unwanted children.’
‘Yes, but this clientele tend to want healthy, white, European babies – and western European at that. No one wants Slavs, or gypsy cast-offs. And they can’t pass a brown one off as their own child, can they?’ He winked at her. ‘It’s not a politically correct business, you see.’
‘Loving parents, mostly,’ she quoted back at him. ‘So not in all cases?’
His shrug wasn’t quite as insouciant this time. ‘I make it a rule not to enquire too closely about the purposes of the adoption. I mean, they could always lie, if they were planning something unpleasant …’
‘And Renshaw was the doctor who helped with this operation?’
‘Until he retired. Then he got greedy, and he ended up with something he shouldn’t have.’ He regarded her thoughtfully. ‘And now I’m wondering how much you could tell me about that?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Well. Foster and Bridge are going to make sure.’
‘I don’t know anything. If I did, I’d use it as leverage.’
‘True.’ He sat back in the chair, raising the gun and taking aim at her mid-section. ‘Put the baby on the table here, and then we can talk about Benjamin.’
It was a shock just to hear his name spoken aloud. Spoken by his father, Ruth had to remind herself, as sickening as that was to acknowledge.
She obeyed quickly, before the guilt could prompt a rethink. The metal surface must have been cold. Evie wailed as she was set down, and Ruth shuddered with self-loathing. For betraying Harry and his wife like this, she ought to be shot on the spot.
‘Move back.’ Laird jabbed the gun and she retreated, aware that she had just surrendered her one and only bargaining chip.
She reminded herself that it would have been obscene to use Evie in that way. The likely outcome would have seen Laird kill them both. This, surely, was the least bad option.
All Ruth could do now was hope for a miracle.
Seventy-Seven
They were only a few minutes away when Alice noticed how tense Harry had become. At first she put it down to nerves; then she saw the way he was checking the mirror. She glanced at the wing mirror and saw a sleek black saloon, possibly a Mercedes.
‘Are we being followed?’
‘Maybe. He pulled out of a turning just now.’ Harry slowed from fifty to forty. The Mercedes gained on them a little, but not as much as it should have done.
‘Can you see who’s inside?’
Harry squinted hard at the mirror, then sighed. ‘I think it’s Warley.’
‘The fake detective?’ Alice felt her heart thumping: the onset of panic. ‘Do you think he was lying in wait for us?’
‘For Ruth, I expect. Hopefully that means she got past him.’
Alice felt there were quite a few optimistic assumptions in that statement, but she chose not to say so.
‘What are we going to do?’
Harry was examining the road ahead. It was a single carriageway on level ground, with trees and dense vegetation on both sides. Very little traffic.
‘This is risky,’ he muttered, ‘but worth a try.’
With a warning to hold on tight, Harry floored the accelerator. The Range Rover lurched forward and Alice cried out, grabbing the edge of her seat.
He was pushing the car up to seventy and beyond as they reached a shallow bend. Turning into it, he spotted a slight break in the tree line on the left-hand side, just before the end of the next straight section.
‘I’m going to pull in. When I do, dive out and hide in the trees.’
As they got closer he saw it wasn’t a proper lay-by, as he’d been hoping, but a narrow strip of earth and gravel, bordered by a steep wooded slope. Not much margin for error.
Despite that, he didn’t brake till the last possible second. The Mercedes was momentarily lost from view behind him when Harry slewed off the road, still travelling at thirty or more as they bumped and skidded over the rutted surface. He jammed on the brakes, and the rapid deceleration threw him against the steering wheel. Beside him, Alice was clinging to the seatbelt with both hands, her knuckles white.
The instant they were stationary Harry turned off the engine and removed the keys, undid his seatbelt and slipped out of the car in one easy motion. Alice was quicker: with the trees on her side she needed only a couple of steps to be hidden from the road.
Harry ran round the front of the car and glimpsed the Mercedes coming towards him as he darted out of sight. His impression was that Warley was peering over the wheel, confused by the sudden manoeuvre.
He leapt off the edge of the flat ground and slithered down the slope until he saw Alice, crouching fearfully behind a tree.
‘What are we doing, Harry?’
He put a finger to his lips, listening for the Mercedes even as he began scanning the ground.
‘Help me find something.’
He was like a man possessed. Alice still had no idea what he planned to do – though perhaps, she thought, it was better not to know.
The Mercedes was braking hard, tyres squealing as it overshot the lay-by, screeched to a halt and rapidly reversed on to the rough ground behind their Range Rover. Any moment now the driver would be coming after them, and Harry was still kicking frantically through the leaves, explaining nothing.
‘Find what?’
‘A heavy stick, or— ah!’ He scrabbled in the dirt and lifted a jagged lump of rock, the size of a cricket ball.
He started to climb back up. The driver was out of the Mercedes now; they heard the clunk of his door closing.
‘Harry, no …’ she whispered, but he shook his head.
‘We don’t have a choice.’
Harry moved slowly, careful not to make any noise. He was helped by the slow, rumbling approach of a lorry. He felt the vibration of its wheels through the ground, and by the time it had passed his head was almost level with the lay-by.
The Mercedes had parked just behind the Range Rover. Warley was making a slow circuit of the vehicle. He paused at the driver’s door, then moved round to the passenger side. Now he was less than two feet away.
As Warley peered into the car, Harry stepped up from the slope and brought the rock down on the back of his head. It was only as the man crumpled to the ground that Harry realised how easily he’d acted – without the slightest sense of remorse.
He called to Alice, then checked Warley for a pulse. The man was still alive, bleeding from a gash on his scalp. Alice joined him, briefly resting her hand on Harry’s shoulder.
‘I can’t believe you did that.’
‘Neither can I, actually.’
With her help, he dragged Warley along to the Mercedes, stopping once to crouch out of sight as a couple of cars drove past. Then Harry retrieved the keys from the ignition and opened the boot. Lifting the unconscious body proved to be a struggle; made worse when Warley began to stir. In desperation, they shoved him in and slammed the boot shut.
Harry locked the car and threw the keys into the undergrowth. He held Alice close for a second.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You know I couldn’t do this without you?’
‘I think you could,’ Alice said, and her voice held an uneasy mix of admiration and concern.
Back in the Range Rover, they checked the map and realised they must have gone past the property. Harry did a swift U-turn and drove back, Alice craning forward to see the turning that would now be on the right-hand side of the road.
Before they noticed the driveway, they saw the car screaming towards them. Another Mercedes.
Harry slowed, tensing as he waited for the car to rush past them. But the Mercedes was also braking; without indicating it veered on to
the wrong side of the road, then took a sharp left into an opening obscured by trees and a bank of grass. Harry spotted two men inside the car.
Alice gasped. ‘That driver was at Renshaw’s. I think he’s the one from the other night, with the knife.’
‘I guess this is the place, then,’ Harry said, and he turned across the road, following the other car on to the driveway.
Seventy-Eight
‘Did you get me pregnant on purpose?’
Laird was about to reach for Evie. Now he paused, giving Ruth a sidelong glance.
‘Say that again?’
‘I was always careful, when we were together—’
‘Sure you were. That was all part of the plan. To entrap me.’ He made sure she was at a safe distance, then put the gun down and picked up the baby, cradling her with a natural ability that cut Ruth to her core.
‘And you knew that, didn’t you? Right from the start you made sure I got nothing useful.’
‘It wasn’t straight away, but yeah, I had a feeling something wasn’t right.’
‘So you impregnated me, as punishment?’
‘What you did to me was no less brutal. Worming your way into my life. Pretending to care about me. I was only a young guy, and a lot more tender-hearted than you give me credit for. When I realised what you were up to, I hated you for it. I thought you deserved everything you got.’
Now he had Evie in his left hand, gently rocking her calm. His right hand rested on the table, close to the gun.
‘And what about giving Benjamin away? When did you come up with that idea?’
He shook his head. ‘You’re leaping ahead here. First, let’s talk about how quick you were to abandon your maternal responsibility.’
Ruth winced, as if slapped. ‘That’s not true.’
‘When I said I wanted him, you couldn’t get him off your hands soon enough.’
‘That’s not true! That’s a horrible—’
‘Bullshit, Ruth. I never for one second thought you’d agree to hand him over. Any normal mother would move heaven and earth to keep their kid in a situation like that. So what if a load of stuffed suits at the Met went ballistic? You shouldn’t have given a damn about that.’ He leaned forward, his gaze hard and unflinching, giving emphasis to his next words: ‘Your own flesh and blood, Ruth. That ought to have mattered more than anything.’
Ruth felt robbed of the ability to speak. Her brain was frantically winding back, trying to reassess. Could there be an element of truth in what he was saying?
She swallowed, dry-mouthed. ‘Are you telling me that you didn’t really want him?’
‘No, I did. Sort of. But not as much as I wanted to fuck with you. I never seriously expected to end up with him.’
‘I was scared,’ Ruth protested, her voice too high, too emotional, ‘because you’d made it clear you could come and take him any time you wanted. If I’d fought, there would have been reprisals. People I loved, people I cared about. That’s why I let him go – and I did it, believing you would let me have access to him, the way you agreed.’
‘If that’s what you tell yourself, fine,’ he sneered. ‘You’re good at seeing what you want to see.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Greg, for instance. He was quite happy with the arrangement.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘You think he wanted another man’s kid in the house? My kid? Dream on. All the time he spent later, sniffing round my businesses, that was just to earn brownie points. He’d have done anything to hang on to you.’
‘I’m only too aware of what he did for me,’ Ruth said bitterly.
She was bracing herself to accuse Laird of Greg’s murder when his phone bleeped. She watched him carefully, conscious that if he picked up the phone he wouldn’t have a hand free to grab the gun. But Laird was wise to the danger and adroitly touched a couple of buttons, putting it on to speaker.
McBride’s Scottish voice said, ‘Boss, I can’t get hold of Mark.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Laird muttered.
‘Warley’s not answering, either. He there with you?’
‘No. Just keep a close eye out for the cops.’
Laird ended the call before McBride could respond, then glared at Ruth. She sensed that he wanted to ask her about Warley, but instead he checked his watch.
‘Foster and Bridge will be here any second.’
She ignored the reminder – the threat – and responded with a question: ‘Did Greg know about this scheme of yours, to sell the babies?’
‘He might have got a whisper or two.’
‘And is this where the idea originated? With what you did to me? Taking Benjamin and selling him to God knows who.’
Laird frowned. Evie, now awake, reached out and tried to swat at his nose. He chuckled, and it made his reply sound all the more derisory.
‘I didn’t sell Benjamin. Where did you get that idea?’
‘So you still have him?’ Despite everything, she couldn’t keep the hope from her voice. It faded as she registered that he was shaking his head.
‘I considered it, for a while. A healthy baby, in many ways it’s an asset.’ He shifted Evie in his arm as if to illustrate the point. ‘But in the end I decided against.’
‘Then where … ?’
‘He’s with my sister. Well, half-sister. She had problems conceiving, though she’s since had two of her own. Both girls. They adore their older brother.’
Ruth let out a sob. She couldn’t help it. Tears made her vision swim out of focus, and she didn’t care that Laird was probably smirking at her reaction. Let him feast on it. Let his men beat the crap out of her. Let her world end now, if it had to.
‘Is he …’ She paused to compose herself. ‘Is he aware of what happened?’
‘Of course not. He thinks I’m his uncle.’
‘So he doesn’t know about me … at all?’
Laird shook his head. In a softer tone than she might have expected, he said, ‘Better that way, isn’t it?’
And Ruth, somehow, found it within her to nod. ‘I suppose it is.’
Laird’s phone buzzed again: a text. He leaned forward to read it, then grinned.
‘They’re here.’ He looked up at her. ‘I hope it was worth it, given what that information’s gonna cost—’
He broke off as a terrible booming noise came from the other side of the house. It sounded like a bomb going off.
Seventy-Nine
The driveway turned out to be longer and wider than some of the country lanes Harry had driven along today. It ran up a steep incline, veered right, then disappeared over a ridge. The Mercedes was already out of sight.
Harry came to a halt just inside a set of gates.
‘I need you to get out.’
‘What?’ Alice sounded angry as well as mystified.
‘There isn’t time to explain. Can you follow on foot? Please.’
The tone of his voice must have convinced her. She jumped out, swinging the door shut as he pulled away. If his insane idea had any chance of working, he had to put it into effect right now.
Harry gunned the engine, vaguely wondering if Alice had guessed his intentions. He was hoping this wasn’t as dangerous as it appeared. If it was, better that only one of them was hurt.
He barely made it in time. He came hurtling over the ridge and saw the house about fifty yards below him, positioned on a neat plot of land with wilderness on either side. The Mercedes had just pulled up alongside another car parked at the front of the house.
Harry stamped on the accelerator and heard the engine roar. He pressed himself back in the seat and tried to prepare his body for what was to come. By now the men in the Mercedes had heard his approach. The driver was staring at the rear-view mirror, while his passenger made the mistake of turning to glance over his shoulder.
Harry didn’t dare look away from his target as he raced down the slope, but he guessed that his speed on impact was around forty or fifty miles an
hour.
The noise was astonishing. Apocalyptic. But that was all Harry was able to register before the force of the collision knocked him out.
Ruth identified the ear-splitting crunch and grind of metal on metal as a car crash. A bad one. The odd thing was how close it sounded: not out on the road.
While her reaction was to freeze, Laird grabbed the gun and turned towards the house as if expecting to be attacked. He was holding Evie against his side, trapped beneath his left arm, and she started to wail. The distraction made Laird furious: for a second Ruth thought he was going to strike the baby.
She steadied herself, glad that his focus was elsewhere. She tried to gauge her chances of overpowering him before he opened fire. The honest answer was: not great. But she was also well aware that she had nothing to lose. Once Foster and Bridge got here they were going to kill her, slowly and painfully, while trying to extract information that she didn’t possess.
The problem was Evie.
Evie had everything to lose.
Alice ran up the drive, then cut across the grass bank on a more direct route towards the house. It meant she was just in time to see the Range Rover collide with the Mercedes.
Harry did it deliberately, there was no doubt about that. She watched in horror as the front of the Range Rover crumpled against the rear of the Mercedes, which was rammed forward and pushed side on to the house. The wheels hit a low step and the car tipped over, spun a half circle and slammed into the front porch, bringing down a shower of masonry and tiles on to the bodywork.
It seemed like neither of the men inside had their seatbelts fitted; their bodies were thrown around like clothes in a washing machine. As the door frames buckled and windows exploded, Alice saw an arm flop loosely from the passenger side. The sound of the impact slowly reverberated across the valley, and as it died away she realised there were no screams, no shouts or cries for help.
Harry too was slumped in his seat, his head forward on his chest. Alice thought she understood why he had done it – to put two very dangerous men out of action – but still it seemed like a suicidal gesture.
