‘Are you daring to blame me? It’s my fault, is it?’
‘I didn’t mean it like that. But I couldn’t watch history repeating itself with Mark, I couldn’t do it any longer. And as for Fred . . .’
‘How much does Mark know?’
‘I’m not sure. Maybe not much. He is aware that the company is involved in some security activities overseas. Not the exact nature. Not yet. He only deals with paperwork, and everything is camouflaged. That’s the name of the game. What we are all such experts at. But I could see Mark’s future looming, his grandfather talking him into believing he was doing something worthwhile. Working towards world peace, probably. The way he convinced me. Except now I knew what Mark’s life would be like: shrouded in mystery, fear of some kind or other always lurking. I should have done something to stop it, but now I’m afraid it’s already too late for Mark. He is so much in the clutches of his grandfather. I couldn’t watch any longer. I really couldn’t.
‘But I could still save Fred, provided I could get him away from your father. Away from all of it. That’s why I wrote you that letter. I waited and waited, but you made no move to get away. That’s when I decided I’d have to do something . . .’
Joyce thought he sounded lame, pathetic. She also felt, deep inside, that he still wasn’t telling her the truth. Not the whole truth anyway. That there was something else. And how had he known that she’d made no move to get away? Had he been watching the house? After dark, perhaps. She said nothing. She didn’t want to do or say anything that might stop him talking.
‘So I thought, well, if I took Fred, I stood a chance of getting all my family together again,’ Charlie continued.
‘You thought that removing our son from his home in the middle of the night was a way of getting your family together?’ Joyce stared at him in disbelief.
‘Well, yes, you s-see—’
‘You really are mad,’ she said again.
Charlie shrugged. ‘I had to do something.’
‘Well, you’ve done something all right.’
Joyce was incandescent with rage. She was also frightened.
‘First you staged your own death, then you abducted your son, and now you seem to have abducted your wife and daughter.’
‘No, it’s not like that—’
‘Isn’t it? In that case I’m going to ask you again, am I free to go? Free to take our children away from their crazy, deluded father, to the place that used to be our home? Where I will tell the police about everything you have done. And about everything that you have told me today. They can look into your claims. They can sort it out. All I want is for my children to be safe at home again. I’m free to do that, to take my children home, am I, Charlie? You wouldn’t try to stop me.’
Charlie shrugged.
‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ said Joyce. ‘I’m going to get the kids. Then I’m leaving with them.’
She reached for the door handle, pulled it, pushed the door open, and began to climb out.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t let you.’ Charlie made a move to grab her arm.
‘Don’t you touch me,’ Joyce snapped, shrugging him off.
But Charlie was quicker than her. He jumped out of his side of the car and ran around it so that he was blocking Joyce’s way before she even had time to stand up straight.
‘I can’t let you go,’ Charlie repeated.
‘Can’t you?’ Joyce remarked levelly, slamming the car door shut behind her. ‘Then you have abducted us. You are keeping me and my children here against our will. You must be out of your mind, Charlie.’
‘Joyce, you simply don’t understand,’ said Charlie. ‘I have to do this. Like I had to leave.’
He ran the fingers of one hand through his cropped hair and stared at her, his unfamiliar eyes beseeching her.
‘Listen, Joyce, I never wanted to hurt you, honestly,’ he pleaded. ‘Just listen. When I decided to stage my own death, I did it to protect you. There was no other way. You see, I found out something, something far worse and far more dangerous than anything I already knew about your father.’
He paused again. But he still did not attempt to move out of Joyce’s way.
‘Stop being so bloody melodramatic, Charlie, and get to the point.’
‘Your father has got greedy. Or should I say, even greedier. He’s been doing a bit of moonlighting, siphoning off some of the arms whenever we do an international deal. Only a few at a time. And then he’s been selling them to an organized crime syndicate here in the UK. That’s what he is, Joyce, not only an international supplier of ingredients for chemical warfare but an underworld arms dealer.’
‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Charlie!’ she said. ‘Dad would never get involved with criminals. Why on earth would he? He’s a wealthy man. And what other reason could there be, apart from money?’
‘Joyce, you don’t know your father. You really don’t. Trust me on that. There isn’t enough money in the world for Henry Tanner. Nor power. He lusts after power. I found out what he was doing by accident. I’d challenged him big time on the chemical warfare issue, and Henry doesn’t like being challenged. I was planning to go to the police without telling him. I think he would have known he couldn’t talk me out of it, not when he was involving the company and all of us in serious criminal activity. But he was a step ahead of me. As usual. I’d been cross-checking all the company records. I’d been using my laptop so my footprints wouldn’t show on the office system, because on that you can see straight away who has signed in and out and what they’ve been working on. But I think Henry had someone hack into my laptop. He knew what I was planning, and he knew he had to stop me.
‘I discovered that he was trying to take out a contract on me, like you said. He wanted me killed, and he knew the people to do it—’
‘Charlie, if there is any truth in what you say, how come it’s my father who got shot?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Charlie. ‘He was playing with fire and I guess he got burned. He was dealing with dangerous people. Gangsters. People who kill for a daily rate, for God’s sake. Maybe he couldn’t give them what they wanted. Maybe they thought he’d reneged on a deal. I don’t know.’
‘I’m sorry, Charlie, I can’t believe—’
‘Joyce, sweetheart, I know this is hard for you, but I honestly believe that if he’d had the contacts he has now back when you and I first met, I wouldn’t have lived to cause Henry any bother. I’ve always known he didn’t like me, he never rated me, never wanted me in his business or in his life. He thought I was weak. And he was right. He never wanted me to be part of his family. It was all a pretence. He only took me on because he feared that otherwise he would lose you. He could see how close we were. And then, after William died, he needed someone, some puppet he could mould. My weakness became attractive to him then. He thought he could turn me into whatever he wished. And for years I let him.
‘You must have known that I was the last man on earth he would have wanted you to marry, me with my left-wing ideals. Mind you, nobody would have been right for you, Joycey, not in Henry’s eyes. But did you never wonder why he changed his mind about me? What led him not only to welcome me as his son-in-law, but to take me into his precious business?’
Joyce said nothing. Of course she had wondered that, many many times. Her head was buzzing.
‘Only I turned on him in the end, and then he decided it was time to be rid of me.’
‘What on earth are you saying? You’re not making any sense, Charlie.’
‘Aren’t I? Don’t you remember all those accidents I had last year? Like the brakes failing on the car, slates falling off a roof right by me, oil on the deck of the boat causing me to slip. Did you think it was all just bad luck?’
Joyce supposed she had, at the time. And carelessness.
‘Well, I’d come to think those incidents may not have been accidental. I reckoned I was living on borrowed time.’
‘So you staged your own death, gave me – and your children –
months of grief and despair, and left us, if you are to be believed, which is highly fucking debatable, in the clutches of a man you say is so dangerous. Not only an arms dealer but a criminal. Is that what you are saying? You put your own safety ahead of that of your wife and children. And that is probably the least of your sins.’
Charlie shook his head.
‘No, you and the kids never were and never would be in any danger from Henry,’ he said. ‘You and Mark and Molly and Fred are his blood. That’s the most important thing in the world to Henry: family. His bloodline. More important to him than making money. That is how he justifies all that he does. He’s like a fucking Mafia godfather! I reckon that’s how the deluded old fool sees himself too.’
Charlie’s voice was harsh as he went on: ‘I am not Henry’s blood. He never gave a shit about me. I was always going to be dispensable in the end. When I was his pet poodle, as you put it so accurately, my darling, he put up with me. Once I started to nip at his heels, he turned against me as I suppose I always knew he would. Which is why I had to act.’
‘Act?’ snapped Joyce. ‘Is that what you call leaving your wife and children in such a cowardly way?’
‘I left you the letter. I thought you’d understand. I thought you would act on it. At least take it seriously. That’s why I put in the letter about us wanting to find our Shangri-La, and how it was still possible.’
‘What?’
‘I was hoping you’d guess from that that I was still alive. I couldn’t be too explicit in case your father got his hands on the letter. Not that I didn’t trust Stephen, but I couldn’t take the chance, knowing how devious your father is. I had to phrase it in such a way only you would understand.’
‘Charlie, were you that caught up in your stupid spy-master world? Did you think I was some sort of code-breaker? How was I supposed—’
‘I was watching you. All of you. I wanted you to make a move. I was going to find you, once you’d got away, so that we could plan our next move.’
Charlie’s eyes were unnaturally bright. Everything about him, from what he was saying to the way he looked, was unnerving.
‘I didn’t get the letter until this week, Charlie. A clerical error, Stephen said.’
‘That explains a lot. No doubt your father was behind that too, for some twisted reason,’ Charlie continued. ‘Maybe you would have done something about it if you’d got the letter when you should have.’
‘I’m not sure that I would,’ said Joyce. ‘I don’t think I could ever have taken the kids, walked out on my life. Not without a much better reason than some cryptic letter. That must have occurred to you, surely. So was this some mad contingency plan of yours, taking Fred?’
‘Well, I knew you wouldn’t rest till you found him. I thought if I had Fred then I could let you find me, when the time was right, and we could all be together again, somewhere away from your father’s clutches.’
‘So what changed your mind about that? You didn’t wait. You’ve snatched Molly and me too.’
‘It’s not like that, really it’s not like that. Fred wouldn’t come with me. He wouldn’t go anywhere without you two. Mark as well, Fred said at first, but I think I’ve talked him out of that.’
‘You’ve talked him out of that?’ Joyce queried, incredulous. ‘He’s an eleven-year-old boy – what did you think you were doing, putting him in a position where he was having to make such monumental decisions about his own future? Was he going to run away with Daddy or was he going to stay with Mummy? For God’s sake, Charlie, how could you?’
‘Look, I’ve told you everything. You know the truth about your father now. You know how he seduced me, and corrupted me—’
‘Don’t you take responsibility for anything, ever?’
‘I’m trying to,’ said Charlie.
He stepped back from her at last, everything about his body language unthreatening. She still felt threatened. She made no attempt to move away either from him or the car.
‘I came to my senses in the end. It took a long time, but I did it. That’s what this is all about. So now can we talk about the future? Our future. I want us to be together, away from all of this. That’s all. That’s all I have ever wanted. Now we can do it, get away from your father and everything that is Tanner-Max for ever. He doesn’t even know I’m alive. We can do it, Joyce, you and me and the kids . . .’
Charlie carried on talking, but Joyce stopped listening. She slumped against the side of her car. He had to be mad; it was the only possible explanation. She felt numb. She didn’t know what to believe.
She waited until the drone of his voice finally stopped.
‘Did you shoot Dad, Charlie?’ she asked.
Charlie looked aghast. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Apart from the fact that I don’t have a gun and wouldn’t know how to begin, I’ve been here, two and a half hours from Bristol, all day. Apart from driving over the moors to send those texts. Still miles from Bristol. And with Fred, the whole time. Ask him.’
‘I have no intention of asking our son anything. If you didn’t do it yourself, are you sure you weren’t involved in some way? Are you sure you don’t know who shot Dad?’
‘Of course not.’
Joyce thought Charlie didn’t look too certain, but he gave her no time to question him further.
‘I just want to look to our future. I want to take you and our children away. I want us to start a new life. That’s all I have ever wanted.’
Joyce was wondering how to end the conversation and get away from this place when a voice from somewhere behind her cut in.
‘Is it? Well then, what a fool I have been.’
It was the voice of a young woman, instantly familiar. But so out of context Joyce couldn’t place it at first.
She was still struggling with her memory when a female figure dropped athletically into the barn from the top of the broken wall upon which she had apparently been perched, listening to everything that had been said.
It was a young woman wearing grey jeans, grey jacket, and a grey woolly hat.
Monika.
Charlie took a single step towards her.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘I told you to stay in the flat.’
‘And you think always I am going to do what you say, eh?’ responded Monika.
She seemed to be seething with anger. Her English was not nearly as good as usual.
Charlie turned to face Joyce again. Joyce just stared at Monika.
‘What is the matter, Joycey, you never look at me before, is that it?’ Monika enquired, using Charlie’s name for Joyce, and loading it with sarcasm.
‘That is possible, no? After all, Mrs Mildmay, I am a servant only.’
Joyce stepped back and, out of habit, looked towards Charlie, seeking reassurance, or at least an explanation.
He seemed to be rooted to the spot. His mouth had fallen open. He said nothing.
Joyce turned towards Monika again. Her being there was so absurd, so ridiculously out of context that Joyce couldn’t make sense of it. Why would Monika be doing this? Speaking to her as if she had a nasty taste in her mouth. As if she hated Joyce. Monika, who came into her home and looked after her children and managed her affairs. But this was a different Monika. An arrogant, angry Monika. The look in her eyes was chilling.
Monika turned on Charlie then. ‘You bastard liar,’ she yelled, so angry she was trembling with rage. ‘I hear every word you say to your . . . your wife. Think what I do for you. The risks I take. I help you steal car. Because I believe you. I believe it is all for us. For you and me. The only way, you say. Now I know truth. You use me to get you out of fucking mess. That is what you do.’
‘No,’ said Charlie. He turned to Joyce. ‘You have to believe me, darling. I have no idea what she’s talking about.’
Monika narrowed her eyes and took a step towards Charlie.
Joyce wouldn’t have thought it was possible for him to look any more grey. But he did. He was standing qui
te still. She saw his Adam’s apple move, as if he was trying to swallow, but without much success.
Her own mouth was dry. No doubt his was too.
What had he done? What had Charlie got himself into? And how had she remained so totally unaware of it? Or was she kidding herself? There had been times over the years when she’d suspected that he was seeing someone else. Times when he’d disappear in the early hours or come home way after midnight without explanation. But she had not suspected anything like this. How could she? Never in a million years had she suspected that her husband might be engaged in a relationship with Monika. Neither had she suspected that Monika could be so full of hatred.
Suddenly she could contain herself no longer.
‘So this is the truth, then, Charlie,’ she said. ‘Nothing to do with your stupid conscience or my father’s alleged greed. You staged your own death to be with a girl young enough to be your daughter, a girl about the same age as your eldest son. Someone I trusted in my home. Now I understand.’
‘No, you don’t understand anything,’ said Charlie. ‘I never wanted to be with Monika. But I had to escape. I thought your father would find me wherever I went and whatever I did. Unless he thought I was dead. I couldn’t do it alone. I couldn’t. I used Monika – she’s right about that. I didn’t do it to be with her. I had no intention of being with her. It was you I wanted, Joyce. You and our children. I thought the letter would alert you. I suppose I put too much store on it . . .’
‘You say you had no intention of being with me?’ Monika stepped forward. ‘You use me? Now you tell me, yes, that is so?’
‘Shut up!’ commanded Charlie.
He didn’t even look at her. His eyes remained fixed on Joyce. Pleading eyes.
‘You betray me,’ said Monika. ‘I believed in you.’
‘I told you to shut up,’ Charlie shouted, still not looking at her.
‘Then that is it,’ Monika said. Her voice suddenly confident. ‘I go to the police. I will tell them everything I know. You will go to prison, Charlie. You commit many crimes. There is abduction, I think you embezzle money from your company. And, what is the charge? You pervert the course of justice. I think also there is more I do not know about. You will go to prison for long time, Charlie. And I will be glad.’ She gave a short bitter laugh. ‘I go to the police. I shall tell everything.’
Death Comes First Page 24
