Echoes of Lies

by Jo Bannister

  Ibbotsen took a deep breath. “It was midnight when she called again. A woman - I suppose, the woman on the video. She must have thought that if she let us sweat a while we’d do anything she asked. It wasn’t a long conversation. She asked for half a million pounds in used, unmarked notes from a variety of sources. She said she’d call again in twenty-four hours with further instructions.

  “I said I wouldn’t do anything until I’d talked to Sophie, but she’d already rung off. The whole call couldn’t have lasted a minute.”

  “Any idea who this woman is?” asked Brodie.

  “I don’t think it’s anyone I know. We taped the call; a voice analyst said she was probably around thirty and came from the south east of England. That didn’t mean anything either to me or to David.”

  “Why did you speak to her?” asked Daniel.

  Ibbotsen frowned. “She asked for me.”

  “Why? You’d expect Sophie’s father would be keenest to get her back.

  Ibbotsen raised his head, glaring down his beaky nose. “When you’re old enough to have grandchildren, young man, you’ll know they’re as precious to you as your own ever were. She knew that.” He sniffed. “She also knew that I hold the purse-strings.”

  “I see.” Daniel’s tone was ambivalent. “So you spent Thursday visiting various financial institutions, filling a suitcase with notes, and at midnight they called again.”

  Lance Ibbotsen nodded. His gaze went between Daniel and Brodie and then off to the window. “Sort of.”

  Brodie blinked. “Either they did or they didn’t.”

  Daniel was looking at Ibbotsen’s face. The weathered skin was drawn tight over the high bones and the thin lips were clamped shut. It was the face of a man under a lot of stress - a desperate man, a man who could react with unpredictable violence. Daniel already knew that. But there was something else, something he couldn’t put his finger on. Anxiety, fear and … guilt? It wasn’t for what he’d done to Daniel: he regretted his error but not the choice he’d made. What could he possibly have done that was worse than that?

  And then Daniel knew. The knowledge crashed through him, bruising his heart, wrenching his gut, leaving devastation in its wake. His eyes widened, bottomless with disbelief. The healing that had begun in the last half hour was undone by the knowledge of the choice Ibbotsen had made next. “Oh, you bastard,” he breathed.

  Brodie stared at him, stared at Ibbotsen. “What? Daniel, what?”

  His voice was a whisper. “They called. No one answered.”

  “You don’t understand,” mumbled Lance Ibbotsen. Everything about him suggested he was more accustomed to shouting than mumbling; now he was too ashamed to raise his voice.

  “You’re mistaken,” said Daniel distinctly. “I understand perfectly. Your granddaughter’s life was worth burning the skin off me. It was worth inflicting the kind of pain you can only end with a bullet on someone you didn’t even know. But it wasn’t worth half a million pounds of your money.”

  “It wasn’t about money,” gritted Ibbotsen. “I’d hired every expert I could find, I had to listen to them. They told me paying the ransom could hasten Sophie’s death. When there was no reason left to keep her it would always be safer to kill her than to send her home.”

  “You thought they were more likely to return her safely if you refused to pay up?” Midway through the sentence Brodie heard the wonder in her voice and replaced it with disgust.

  “I thought they’d try to persuade me. Which they could only do if they could reach me. I thought if I avoided talking to them they’d have to keep her safe. Even a few days might be enough to find them.”

  “Enough to find me, anyway.”

  Brodie looked at Daniel in concern. All the colour had gone from his face again. He looked as if the draught from an opening door would knock him off the sofa.

  Ibbotsen wouldn’t look at him. “Once we had you, I thought we’d have Sophie within hours. But the hours turned into days - and then I was told it was all a mistake, you didn’t know anything after all.”

  “So you decided to kill him?” snarled Brodie.

  “I had no choice,” said Ibbotsen, almost plaintively. “The people you hire for jobs like that, they make the rules. He wouldn’t leave you alive. He said his own security depended on it.”

  “But it wasn’t him who shot me. Was it?”

  “Mr Hood,” the old man said, finally meeting Daniel’s eyes, “there is nothing in the whole of our association that I don’t regret bitterly. Shooting you? - yes, certainly; and what was done to you before. But most of all, I regret that you weren’t the man I took you for. If you had been, my granddaughter would be safe now.”

  It may have been luck, it may have been instinct, but honesty was a weapon against which Daniel had no defence. It was the one thing guaranteed to earn his respect.

  He bit his lip to still it. The shakes had returned with a vengeance. “Mr Ibbotsen, I don’t know how I feel about you. I hate everything you’ve done, and not just to me. I hate the kind of advice you buy, and the way that, having bought it, you feel you have to follow it. I hate the way you make big, important decisions with your wallet.

  “If I could hate you too, maybe I could pick up your phone and call the police. You hurt me, Mr Ibbotsen. You spent two days hurting me, and then you left me to die in a rubbish skip. I really want to hate you for that, and if I thought you’d done it to save yourself some money I would. All that’s stopping me is the possibility that you genuinely believed Sophie would be safer if you refused to communicate with her kidnappers.”

  “I did,” said Ibbotsen simply.

  “What if you did?” demanded Brodie roughly. “What difference does it make? You tortured a man to get information he didn’t even have, but when you had the chance to buy the child’s safety you turned it down. That’s the bottom line, and nothing you thought then or say now will alter it.”

  But Daniel was shaking his head. “What if his experts were right? What if Sophie’s alive now because her kidnappers haven’t got what they want? It does alter it, Brodie. Just because I couldn’t do the same thing, just because you couldn’t, doesn’t mean he was wrong. If Sophie’s alive because his experts gave good advice and he had the strength to follow it, doesn’t that justify what he did?”

  “To you?” Brodie’s voice soared. “Nothing justifies what he did to you. And we don’t know if his experts were right. All I know from the bottom of my heart is that he was wrong. He gambled with a child’s life, and he did it to save himself half a million pounds.”

  She couldn’t get past the money. She couldn’t forgive Ibbotsen for having the means to finish this and not doing. To Brodie the issue was not what the kidnappers did but what Ibbotsen had done.

  But Daniel was a mathematician, he had to accommodate all the factors. He couldn’t ignore an inconvenient one because it spoiled a neat equation, and he couldn’t get past the possibility that if Sophie Ibbotsen had been his child or Brodie’s she’d be dead now but because she was David Ibbotsen’s she might still be alive. If she was then her grandfather had made the right decision.

  Daniel wiped a dew of sweat from his upper lip. “I’m sorry: I can’t give either of you what you want from me. You” - he looked at Brodie - “want justice, but a justice that’s a hair’s breadth from vengeance and I daren’t go down that road. If I started thinking these people could pay for what they did to me, I think it would cost me my soul. I didn’t leave here with much: I don’t want to end up with even less. And you” - his gaze switched to Ibbotsen - “want absolution, and I can’t do that either. Time will tell if you were right. If you were, you don’t need my forgiveness; if you weren’t it won’t help.

  “All I can do is keep my promise. I said I wouldn’t go to the police till this was finished, and I won’t. But there is a price.”

  Ibbotsen was staring so hard he forgot to blink until his eyes started to burn. He nodded. “How much?”

  Daniel shut his eyes
for a second. When he opened them he was very faintly smiling. “You keep doing that, don’t you? Trying to buy us off. First Mrs Farrell, now me. The only people you won’t give money to are the only ones who actually want it.”

  A tic thumped above Lance Ibbotsen’s cheekbone. “Think what you like of me. It doesn’t matter: all I care is that you keep your silence. So let’s agree that I’m stupid and obsessed with money, then tell me what it is you want.”

  “I want what you want. I want to see Sophie safe home, and I don’t trust you to get that done. What’s happening right now? Have the kidnappers been in touch again?”

  “They tried. The calls are being screened - neither David nor I talk to them.”

  “Who does?”

  “A professional negotiator. All my calls are going through him.

  Daniel licked his lips. “What about … ?”

  Brodie knew what he wanted to know and couldn’t bring himself to ask. She asked for him. “And your … interrogator? Is he still on the payroll?”

  Ibbotsen shook his head. “No. That was - a mistake. I didn’t know what would be involved. I went along with it because I was desperate, and I kept thinking it would be over soon. I thought that for two days, then I was told we’d got it wrong - there was no information to be had, and because of that …”The horror of those two days was still keen after a week. It was a physical effort to control his breathing. “I did what I thought was necessary. But I couldn’t have done it again, not even for Sophie. I paid him and he left.”

  Daniel could only cope with this by focusing on the core issue. “Are you any nearer to getting Sophie back?”

  Ibbotsen’s glance was haunted. “I don’t know. He doesn’t talk to me - the negotiator. That was what I wanted, that was the deal - everything would go through him. The family would not be involved: if at some point he advised us that paying the ransom would bring her home we’d do it but not until he was sure. So far he must think she’s safer if we do nothing.”

  “You don’t know?” Daniel’s voice cracked. Brodie thought his heart had too. “You’re not even talking to him?”

  Ibbotsen stared him down. “If I knew what was going on, what was being said, I’d take over. And I’m too close, too involved - we both know my judgement isn’t reliable right now. I have to stay out of it, for Sophie’s sake. I’ve bought the best help I could find: I have to trust that whatever can be done will be done.”

  Daniel blinked and then nodded. “I see that. So all I can do to help is keep quiet.” Brodie heard regret in his tone, as if he’d hoped otherwise. As if helping save Sophie might ease the memory of what her abduction had cost him.

  Lance Ibbotsen seemed to understand. There was an unlikely gentleness in the gravel of his voice. “I don’t believe so. But it is the most important thing. If the police become involved, whatever’s been achieved so far will go for nothing. I have no right to ask you for favours. But if I had, that would be the one.”

  Daniel managed a tired smile. “You have it. Until it’s over: then I’ll have to talk to Inspector Deacon.”

  “I understand that.”

  “You’ll keep me informed? Do you have my number?”

  Ibbotsen winced and his voice was so low as to be barely audible. “Yes.”

  But there was no point him phoning Daniel’s number when Daniel couldn’t go home. Brodie said briskly, “Daniel will be staying with me for a few days. You have my number as well.” She stood up. “I don’t think there’s any more we can do here.” She headed for the door, Daniel in her wake.

  On top of the back steps, though, she paused and looked at Ibbotsen once more. “Good luck. Whatever’s happened … between us … there’s still a little girl out there who needs to be with her family. She doesn’t deserve what’s happened to her. Actually, neither do you.”

  Astonishingly, Ibbotsen’s eyes filled. “Thank you. And - I’m sorry.”

  “Let us know when there’s some news.”

  “I will.”

  He went inside then. Brodie started the car.

  But before she even had it in gear he was back, hurrying down the steps faster than was sensible for a man of his age, his face livid with fury. “You said you hadn’t called them. You said you wouldn’t call them!”

  Daniel and Brodie exchanged a puzzled glance. “What? Who?”

  “The police!” snarled Ibbotsen. “You promised you’d keep silent until Sophie was safe.”

  Brodie shrugged and Daniel answered. “We haven’t called the police?”

  “Then how come there’s a detective inspector at my gates right now?”

  Chapter 14

  Detective Inspector Deacon was not a quitter. In his own way he was as stubborn a man as Daniel. It was a long shot, but where the PNC had failed his policeman’s memory had dredged up a possibility. He knew of someone who had a daughter called Sophie, and the money to do something if she went missing, and the kind of morals to use someone who could help him find her as Daniel Hood was used.

  Driving up the gravel avenue onto the Firestone Cliffs, Deacon reflected sourly that the possession of conspicuous wealth was no guarantee of civilised behaviour. He wondered how many of these modern manor houses with their manicured demesnes had been built with blood-money by men who should be behind bars.

  Another thing about wealthy people was that they didn’t put numbers on their gates. Deacon drove along, searching, until he was stopped by wrought-iron. He thumbed the button on an intercom, announced himself and said who he was looking for.

  A woman’s voice directed him along an elegant sweep of gravel drive to a porticoed front door and a flight of steps Scarlett O’Hara would have killed for. Deacon trudged up them stolidly, giving his shoes every opportunity to shed any mud they might have collected on the way.

  The housekeeper answered his knock and showed Deacon into the library to wait. Sophie’s father was at home, then; which made the minutes that passed more than a little galling. Wealthy people always thought they had the right, if not the duty, to keep a public servant waiting. At the end of town he was more familiar with Deacon would have twiddled his thumbs for thirty seconds and then gone looking. But though he believed in one law for rich and poor alike, he couldn’t ignore the reality that behaviour which was grudgingly tolerated on the Wellington estate might, if duplicated here, reach the ears of the Chief Constable. He ground his teeth and glared at the Channel.

  Finally the door opened again and Deacon turned to see a face he used to know framed by a collar he used to dream of feeling. He nodded, expressionless, flicked his gaze around the room. “Terry. You’ve done well for yourself.”

  “Not bad,” said Terry Walsh with obvious content, “not bad. Mind you, Jack, neither have you. Chief Inspector, is it?”

  “Inspector,” ground Deacon.

  “Oh well,” said Walsh breezily, “that’s Sheehy for you. You’ll probably go straight to Superintendent.”

  “You could help,” said Deacon. “You could confess to everything we both know you did to afford this house.”

  Walsh laughed, the deep-bellied laugh of a man with either nothing to hide or the confidence that his secrets are safe. “I don’t know where you got this idea that I’m a leading light of the criminal underworld. I make paper: you know that. You’ve seen the factory; damn it, I’ll take you to Norway and show you the woods if you like!”

  It was a genuine offer: Deacon knew that if he accepted Walsh would whisk him off by private plane for an away-day among the fjords to watch great stands of timber being harvested by equipment with the man’s initials on it. It altered nothing. Jack Deacon knew Terry Walsh when they were boys in the East End of London, when his only use for paper was rolling reefers. The fact that Walsh had always managed to evade the long arm of the law didn’t alter Deacon’s conviction that his primary interest was still in drugs. All that had changed was the scale: he didn’t sell reefers on dancefloors any more, he shipped cocaine wrapped in tons of newsprint.


  “That’s all right, Terry,” Deacon said bleakly, “it’s not how you make your money I’m interested in today. It’s how you spend it.”

  Walsh not only had more money than Deacon, he also had more hair. It wasn’t as black as Deacon remembered, but if anything it was curlier. It danced when he shook his head, apparently perplexed. “Sorry, Jack - spend it on what?”

  Deacon sniffed. “Far as I remember it, the East End didn’t produce many intellectuals. We mostly spent money on having a good time and looking after our families.” He raised an eyebrow, seemed to change the subject. “You still smoke, Terry?”

  Walsh shook his head again, firmly. “Gave it up, Jack. Costs too much. And then I heard this rumour” - he looked round his library - “that you can’t take it with you. So I want to put off going as long as I can, just in case.”

  Deacon nodded, trying not to smile. Walsh had always had this effect on him. Even when you knew how he made it, even when you’d give your pension to see him banged up, it was hard not to like someone who so enjoyed the fruits of his labours. The neighbours must consider him deeply vulgar. But Deacon had a soft spot for honest-to-God vulgarity.

  On top of which, he was already thinking he was on a fool’s errand. Terry Walsh was too happy to see him. If he’d tortured a man, shot him and dumped him in a skip less than a week ago he’d be cagier than this. They didn’t get together to chat about the old days so often that he would think that was why the policeman had come.

  Still, he had to make sure. “What about the family? You’ve got a daughter, haven’t you - Sophie?”

  “And a son, Simon. Yourself?”

  “Nah.” Deacon pursed his lips. “Tell you why I’m here, Terry. It’s about your Sophie. She’s all right, is she?”

  In an instant Walsh’s expansive face tightened in fear. “What’s happened? Jack, tell me - for the love of God - !”

  Deacon took pity on him. “It’s all right. Nothing’s happened - at least, nothing you don’t know about. Somebody’s Sophie is in trouble, but she has been for a week or more - if you’ve seen her recently it’s not your daughter.”