by Jo Bannister
Before she could vent the anger, though, Daniel leaned towards the microphone. “Let us in. We have information on the whereabouts of your money.”
After the briefest pause, the gates swung wide.
As she drove Brodie cast Daniel a sidelong glance. “You don’t know that.”
“Neither does he. But he opened the gate.”
“Has anybody ever told you you have a ruthless streak?”
Daniel considered, then shook his head. “No.” He seemed neither pleased nor displeased so much as surprised.
Brodie drove round the back. The lights were on in the sitting room and the back door framed the rangy figure of Lance Ibbotsen. Already on edge, Brodie was prepared to be irritated by anything. “You own a shipping line, you shouldn’t open your own door. They have staff, don’t they?”
“I don’t suppose they want to involve them in what’s been happening,” said Daniel quietly.
“That’s pretty decent,” said Brodie, mollified slightly. “They don’t want to see them in the dock too.”
“Decency has nothing to do with it. They don’t want them selling the story to The News of the World.”
They weren’t up the steps before Ibbotsen began quizzing them. “You know who did this? Kidnapped Sophie?”
“Stole your money?” said Daniel, expressionless.
“You know?”
“Possibly.”
“Well?”
“I need David to see a photograph.”
The old man turned on his heel, ready to haul his son downstairs by the collar if need be, but David was in the hall. He smiled at Brodie. When she bit her lip instead of returning it, the smile died.
“What’s happened?”
“They know who has the money!”
David’s jaw dropped. “How?”
“Don’t look at me,” said Brodie indignantly, “I only do this professionally. Daniel does it because mysteries worry him. Give him an internet uplink and a return ticket to London and he’ll tell you what happened to Lord Lucan, who was on the grassy knoll and how to start a room temperature fusion reaction!”
Daniel bit his lip.
David frowned. “What are you talking about?”
Ibbotsen turned the searchlight of his gaze on Daniel. “You know, don’t you? You know what she’s talking about, and you know who has my money.”
“Possibly,” Daniel said again. They moved into the sitting room. Daniel passed the photograph to David. “Do you know her?”
David’s eyes flicked between the picture and Daniel’s face. “She did this? Kidnapped Sophie?”
“I’m not sure. Do you know her?”
“I - we’ve met.” His eyes went out sideways to Brodie and then dropped. “Well yes, actually I do. We went out for a time. But that’s months ago. Her name’s Melanie.” His brow gathered. “Are you seriously telling me she’s involved in this?”
“I’m really not sure. Do you know where she is now?”
“I think she went abroad.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know! We - parted, I didn’t watch to see what she did next. I heard she’d gone abroad.”
“So she could have come back.”
“I suppose so.”
“Is there anyone we could check with? Parents, a brother or sister?”
“She has a brother. I wouldn’t know how to find him.” Tiring of the cross-examination, he looked across at Brodie. “This can’t be right. We parted amicably enough, and she isn’t a vicious person.”
“You mean she wasn’t,” said Daniel. “Months ago.”
David looked down at him. “People don’t change that much.”
“No,” agreed Daniel. “So you don’t think we could contact her.”
“I don’t know how. Anyway, you’d be wasting your time. I told you, she wouldn’t do something like that.”
“Because you parted amicably. You stayed friends.”
“If you like.”
Daniel nodded slowly. He chewed on the inside of his cheek. He glanced at Brodie, and she saw neither disappointment nor relief so much as the burden of an unwelcome understanding. She wanted to ask him what he was thinking now but he looked away, his shoulders slumped.
Ibbotsen was watching too, his gaze switching rapier-like between them, impatience drawing the sinews of his body like bowstrings. “That’s it? That’s the great revelation? You thought it might have been my son’s ex-girlfriend, only there’s no proof and you don’t even know if she’s in the country or not? I’m missing The Ten O’Clock News for this?”
But Brodie knew him better. “Daniel, there’s something you’re not saying. I don’t know what it is, but I do know it’s time to put your cards on the table and never mind who gets hurt.” From the way he looked at her then she knew it was going to be her.
Daniel swallowed and nodded. “All right. If no one else has anything they want to say.” He waited a moment longer, carefully looking at no one in particular, but no one spoke.
He sighed, and looked for somewhere to sit. He chose the window-seat: he didn’t want to sit next to Brodie or any of them, and he wanted something at his back. “All right. I don’t know how much of this could be proven in court. Maybe all of it, maybe none; and maybe it doesn’t matter. You can hardly go to court with it.”
“Tell me who has my money,” said Ibbotsen tightly, “and I won’t need any court to get it back.”
Still Daniel prevaricated. He might have been bluffing, stamping around at random in the hope of driving a rabbit out of the hole, but Brodie really didn’t think so. His whole manner suggested that what troubled him was not the lack of an answer but the nature of the one he’d found. “I will,” he said quietly. “If I have to.”
Finally his gaze came to rest on David Ibbotsen. “Do I have to? Are you going to make me say it?”
David’s expression was like boards, impervious and unyielding. His eyes smoked. “What do you mean?”
Daniel nodded, a Rubicon crossed. “Sophie was never in any danger from her kidnappers because she was never kidnapped. She was taken out of school by her father and his girlfriend. They said they were taking her on holiday, but within a few minutes David had switched to his own car in order to be home when the news came through.” He glanced at Ibbotsen. “You were impressed at how quickly he thought up a lie for the school. But he’d had days, even weeks to plan what he was going to say.
“All he had to worry about was getting you to pay up quickly, and in fact that was the one thing he couldn’t do. As it happened he knew his daughter was safe in the country with Melanie Fields and the young man who was probably her brother, but it would have been just the same if she really had been kidnapped. You weren’t prepared to pay the ransom. Whatever your reasons, you were prepared to leave Sophie with her abductors rather than pay a sum of money you could lose through stock market fluctuations and never miss.
“I think that hit David harder than anything you’d ever done to him. He didn’t embark on this lightly. He was in real financial difficulties - he’d made some bad investments, the sky was about to fall on him, he needed to get his hands on a serious sum of money ASAP. Still, you don’t steal from your own father without agonising over it. He agonised, he looked for an alternative, but he couldn’t find one so he decided to do it.
“And you had a quick think about paying the ransom and decided not to. David knew he was behaving appallingly. He was shocked to the core when you behaved worse.”
Daniel’s pale eyes left Ibbotsen and found his son. There was compassion in the quiet of his face. “You were trying to strike out without him, weren’t you? To create a power-base independent of the Ibbotsen Line. But it turned out he was right - it’s not as easy as it looks, just because he could do it didn’t mean you could. You hadn’t his skill or experience and you quickly found there are more ways of losing money than making it. You were close to losing everything.
“You could have asked your father for the money. H
e’d have bailed you out, to protect his own interests and Sophie’s; but you’d never have heard the end of it. He hadn’t much respect for you before - if he had to salvage you from the consequences of your financial ineptitude he’d have made you cry blood.
“And maybe you reckoned you had a right to it. That it wasn’t just your inheritance, it was something you’d earned. That’s something you’ll have to hammer out between you. He might, in time, forgive you for taking his money. I’m not sure he’ll forgive you the rest.”
There was a longer silence then. Daniel was waiting for questions but no one asked any. No one spoke at all. Nor did they look at one another. To all intents and purposes, time stood still in the shabby, comfortable room.
Brodie was the first to find a voice, and a hollow, shaky thing it was. “You said we’d know, if we couldn’t set up a meeting with Melanie Fields. I thought you meant, if she did a runner. But you didn’t. You meant, if David prevented it.”
“Brodie!” The point which had loomed for days had finally come, where even-handedness would no longer serve, where she had to believe in one of them at the expense of the other. David thought she’d chosen to believe Daniel. Shock and anger warred in his voice. “It’s nonsense! A fantasy. None of it happened. You know what happened: you were there for most of it!”
She nodded slowly. “Yes. But nothing I saw or heard contradicts what Daniel just said. It makes sense, in the whole and in detail; and mostly when something makes that much sense it’s the truth.”
She looked at him with sorrow. “You say he’s got it wrong? That it’s a fantasy? Convince me. Please, David. Give me one reason not to believe him. One thing that happened that isn’t consistent with what he says. One thing you did or didn’t do that shows you didn’t hold your own daughter to ransom. Just one. Please?”
Desperation was thumping through David Ibbotsen with the racing beat of his heart. He’d only get one shot at this and Brodie was the key to it. If he could persuade her, she would persuade his father. “Listen to me,” he said urgently, leaning forward. “I know how it looks. I can see how he might come up with this - insanity - and how you might wonder about it. But I’m telling you, it didn’t happen. You have to believe me. Brodie, I think I love you. You have to believe that I wouldn’t lie to you, not about this.
“Damn it, you have to believe me before you’d believe Daniel! Look at him - he could give jumpy lessons to a grasshopper. His mental stability is on the point of meltdown. I know whose fault that is, and I’m sorry, but this is too important to humour him. You have to see what he’s doing. He hates me, and he wants you to hate me too. He’s put two and two together and come up with about fifteen.”
She shook her head. “Daniel wouldn’t do that. He’s a mathematician. You may be right about his mental state, though I don’t know how anyone in this house has the nerve to comment, but it isn’t actually relevant. The known facts support his version of events. What are you telling me - it’s a coinicidence?”
David came to his feet. For almost the first time she was aware how powerful a man he was: as tall as his father and twice as far round. And not all the bulk hung on the broad bones was business lunches - a lot of it was muscle. Two strides took him to the window. Hands fisted tight at his sides, he loomed over Daniel like an avalanche.
“Tell her you got it wrong,” he ground. “Tell her.”
Daniel shook his head. “You tell her I got it right. You owe her that much. You certainly owe her better than a Caribbean cruise.”
Like a catapult when the elastic snaps, one of the big fists flew. It wasn’t a punch: he backhanded Daniel across the mouth, knocking him off the window-seat onto his knees on the carpet. “Tell her!”
But he wouldn’t, and Brodie knew he wouldn’t. She rose swiftly from the sofa and tried to get between them. David pushed her aside, forcefully enough that she ended up back where she started.
The big hand fisted in Daniel’s clothes hauled him to his feet. David’s broad, handsome face was twisted with rage. “I’m sick to the back teeth with your spiteful interference. Who the hell do you think you are, to accuse me of kidnapping my own child? You think I’d put Sophie through that for money? You think I’d put my father through it?
“You’re right, I could use the money. I could still use the money. But there are limits to what decent people do to get what they want. They don’t use their own children for blackmail. And they don’t lie to take women who wouldn’t look at them twice away from better men.”
“I’m not lying,” gritted Daniel, pain in his voice. David’s fist against his ravaged chest pinned him to the wall.
Brodie was on her feet again. “Get away from him. I mean it, David - back off. Or so help me I’ll deck you!” She hunted the room for a weapon but nothing offered itself. No brass candlestick: the room was lit by wall-sconces and a standard lamp. Central heating meant no fire-irons. There wasn’t even the regulation bag of golf-clubs in a corner.
“Not till he admits he made it up.” It was no accident - David knew exactly what he was doing. He ground his knuckles into Daniel’s flesh until the younger man whined and his eyes closed.
“Put him down,” said Lance Ibbotsen in his teeth. “Now.” He still sounded as though he was talking to the dog.
“Not until -”
He never finished the sentence. Ibbotsen hit him behind the ear with a piece of scrimshaw like a belaying-pin.
Scrimshaw only looks delicate: actually it’s made from the bit that walruses fight with. David measured his length on the floor, rolled over once and lay still.
Ibbotsen returned the souvenir of his seafaring days to its home in the bookcase. He said heavily, “He never bloody listens.” For the moment that seemed to be all he could cope with. He hadn’t felled his son because of the allegation made against him. He’d done it because an order had been disobeyed.
Brodie sucked in a deep breath and went to Daniel, kneeling beside him. “Are you all right?”
His face was ashen. He plucked at his shirt-front with trembling fingers. “I think I’m bleeding.”
Brodie ushered him towards the nearest bathroom. “We’ll sort you out. Then we’ll come back and sort him out.”
The damage under Daniel’s shirt wasn’t serious. There was a little blood, and some seepage where blisters were protecting new skin, but all Brodie had to do was tidy up the dressings. She hadn’t looked this closely since the lesions were a lot worse. She made approving noises as she smoothed and patted him back into shape. “You’ll be as good as new.”
“I wish,” he said fervently.
Satisfied that she’d done all that was necessary, she rocked back on her heels and looked at him. Oddly enough, she felt quite calm. “What you were saying. About David. It’s not just a theory, is it? You’re sure?”
“Sure enough,” he said honestly. “There are too many things you can’t explain any other way.”
“Like what?”
She wasn’t arguing. She needed to know. He answered as best he could.
“There were two people in the car: the woman who got out and a driver we never saw. The woman was Melanie Fields. Sophie didn’t want to go with her. If she recognised her, it wasn’t a good enough reason to do what she must have been told a thousand times never to do - to go off with someone she didn’t know really well. But when she got close enough to the car to see who was driving, all that changed. The driver was someone she knew really well.”
“It didn’t have to be David. It could have been - I don’t know - the chauffeur?”
He regarded her with compassion. “Well, maybe.”
Brodie gritted her teeth. “Go on.”
“Sophie’s five years old. She’s not a baby. A five-year-old child may be useless as a witness, but she’s pretty good at absorbing atmosphere. She knows the difference between people who care about her and those who look at her and see pound signs. I don’t think she could have been kidnapped without realising it. She thought she wa
s on holiday because from her point of view she was. She was happy enough to stay with Melanie Fields because David said it was all right. I expect he was phoning, maybe even visiting, whenever he could.”
Then there was the box of hair. Brodie had thought it pointed to Sophie’s mother, but it could equally well indicate her father. She nodded to herself. She didn’t have to like it, but she knew the truth when it was put before her.
“And the timings were too - convenient,” Daniel continued quietly. “The day you went to France. I thought, what will Ibbotsen say if the kidnappers phone before she gets back? But they didn’t. But they did phone almost as soon as you returned and the decision had been taken to pay the ransom.
“And they asked for a woman to bring it. Why do that? Why not Lance, or David? Lance was the one with the money, David the father of the child. Why involve an outsider at all - and why stipulate a woman? It was as if they knew more about what was going on in this house, the alliances being forged, the confidences being established, than they had any right to - unless they had someone on the inside.”
Brodie shook her head. “If David was involved, he’d have opted to handle the hand-over himself. It would have been both simpler and safer. If Melanie had insisted on doing the exchange with him, no one would have been surprised. It would be the obvious thing. David was the one with most lose, therefore the one most likely to do as he was told and least likely to get creative. If she’d said he was to come himself, no one would have argued.”
But Daniel had worked that out too. “David needed to break his trail. As much as possible he wanted to stay in the back seat - avoid meeting the kidnappers, avoid talking to them if he could, certainly avoid negotiating with them. That’s why the woman always asked for Lance. Not just because he held the purse-strings but because David didn’t want his fingerprints on the deal. If the arrangements were handled by his father, or by you, no one was going to think he’d given in too easily and wonder why. For ten years being sidelined by his father was a source of deep frustration to him. This time it was his alibi. It kept him safe from suspicion.”
