Never Coming Home

by Evonne Wareham

  Devlin gritted his teeth. Kaz’s face had set and hardened into something beyond pain. Her hand shot out, trapping his good arm. ‘Devlin, if that bastard took my daughter, we have to prove it. And then we have to make him pay.’

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Kaz stared down at the grey water. The delicate struts of London’s prettiest bridge soared above her, but she didn’t see them. She’d got here almost at a run, drawn by – what – the power of the water, the memory of her child? She’d had to get out of the house, to deal with the adrenalin rush of emotion that was threatening to burst right out of her skin. But now she was here – her limbs seemed leaden. All she could do was lean on the parapet and stare.

  A young man jogged by, then stopped, pulling earphones out of his ears. ‘Hey, I say, are you all right?’

  Kaz looked up at him blankly, then focused abruptly on the concern, overlaid by a heavy dose of alarm, in his face.

  ‘Yes.’ She dredged up a smile, wondering what it looked like. No, I’m not planning to jump off Albert Bridge. I’m just coming to terms with the idea that my father, a man I respected, even if he was difficult to love, is a kidnapper. Who hired a contract killer to cover it up. Oh, and I have another killer in my bed. An ex-killer, but maybe not too ex –.

  The escalating panic in her Good Samaritan’s face brought her back to her surroundings. His eyes were skittering all over the place, searching for help. He’d flipped, in a second, from fear for her safety to fear for his own. She made a gigantic effort at a smile that wasn’t just the baring of teeth. ‘Thanks, but I really am okay. Just trying to straighten something out in my head.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, well, if you’re sure –’ His relief was almost comical.

  Kaz watched him jogging towards the end of the bridge. The sun was going down and a cold, brisk wind had sprung up off the river. Gulls were diving on something embedded in a dirty tide mark of sand, at the lip of the water. She closed her eyes against a wave of desolation. Oliver. Her father. Could she really believe that he would do this? Had genius turned to madness? Had she signed her own daughter’s death warrant when she’d laughed in her father’s face?

  Her throat closed, over a bitter ache. She’d enjoyed it. Just for a second. She’d finally had something that Oliver wanted, so she’d enjoyed that brief, mean flash of power. Retaliation for years of trying too hard and being ignored, of never being good enough to hold her father’s attention. Small and petty and childish. If she’d known then what he would do –?

  She put out her hand, to feel the cold metal of the bridge. How could she have known? How could anyone? Even now she couldn’t be sure, but it made horrific, horrible sense. She trusted Devlin. That small shock, that wasn’t really a shock, went through her once more. The man was a killer, which made him just the man she needed. She could figure out what a killer was doing in her bed later. Sometime. Or you could just forget it. Take what the man is now, not what he was.

  She turned away from the water. This wasn’t just about her. Suzanne … would her mother believe it? She’d loved the man, lived with him … Kaz exhaled. No need to go there yet. Before she had fled out here, she’d asked Devlin for proof. Whatever they could get. She’d left him reaching for the phone. By now he might have something to tell her.

  Devlin stretched out on the couch, staring at the ceiling, the cast resting uncomfortably on his chest. The arm was awkward, but not painful. The rest of his body was doing overtime to make up. He had a bruise the size of Africa blooming, in a hundred shades of purple, on his hip, and the tenderness of his back and buttocks suggested that they were pretty much in the same state. He could get up and go in search of painkillers, or he could lie here and wait for Kaz to come back and hope she’d kiss it all better. She could just about kiss him every place she chose. Please.

  She might have decided to add a few bruises of her own. He’d asked her to believe incredible things about the man who’d fathered her. A man half the world venerated. She needed something more than gut instinct and patterns, if it could be found. He didn’t blame her. She’d asked for proof, then she’d lit out, at the speed of light, in what he hoped was just adrenalin rush.

  He dragged his mind back to the phone calls he’d just made. He’d done what he could. Now it was just a matter of waiting. Devlin shut his eyes. To sleep would be good. Classic avoidance tactic. Except it wasn’t working. His mind circled back to the dawn, to a derelict building next to a rail line. He scuffed his hand against his cheek. The kill had been virtually an accident, the desperate, gut instinct of an animal to survive. And there wasn’t a creature on the planet that would mourn for Luce. Hell – they’d be lining up and taking numbers to dance behind his coffin. But a kill was a kill. And it was the last.

  Devlin pushed his tongue up against his teeth, feeling the flicker of pain. He was reaching for unfamiliar emotions, exploring areas in his head he hadn’t visited in – Christ knew. Maybe never. It was like a minefield in there and he had a blindfold instead of a map. There was sweat on his face. Kaz knew he’d killed a man and she’d accepted it. More than that, she’d taken him – Hell! His body was getting hard just remembering where it had been …

  He’d told her things he’d never told a woman and the really crazy thing was, he didn’t care. But could he ask her –

  The phone rang. He almost fell off the couch as he reached for it. Behind him a door slammed. Unexpected relief flooded his body when Kaz called his name. She appeared briefly in the doorway and waved a hand when she saw he was occupied. He wrenched his mind back to the telephone call.

  When she came back, she brought more food. Sandwiches and a hunk of fruit cake and an enormous chrome teapot.

  ‘Afternoon tea?’ He consulted his watch. ‘At nearly nine o’clock.’

  Kaz had dumped the tray and was nudging his legs out of the way, so that she could sit. Her face was pale, but there was something in the set of it that told Devlin she’d come to some sort of resolution. He shifted his knees as he dragged himself into a sitting position. Kaz dropped a couple of painkillers into his hand. There was a glass of water on the tray. She wasn’t planning on slow torture then – except that the warmth of her bottom against his legs was making him twitchy. This had to be some sort of emotional release from nearly getting killed. Or it could just be old-fashioned, down-and-dirty lust.

  He accepted a sandwich when she offered it.

  Looking up at him, eyes wide against fragile skin, she looked almost the same age as her daughter – the child she’d now lost twice. A pain Devlin had never experienced before sliced into his chest, taking him unawares and unprotected. He could feel sweat forming again. He took a bite of sandwich and chewed. Kaz was still looking at him. ‘You’re not feverish, are you?’ she asked abruptly.

  ‘Eth? – no, or maybe, a little.’ Maybe that was it. Physical weakness. He was definitely getting too old for this shit. Or maybe it’s all this stuff waking up and moving about inside your head that’s making you feel like …

  Just making you feel?

  She finished her scrutiny of him and picked up a plate. ‘What have you found out?’

  He cleared his throat. ‘If anyone knows what Oliver’s doing now, they’re not talking. Not yet. I wouldn’t really have expected it. Maybe in a few hours …’ he said cautiously.

  She didn’t wince, or yell. Wherever she’d been, she’d made some decisions. He could feel it. Purpose was sparking off her in deep intense waves.

  ‘I do have something –’ He took another sandwich. ‘I got to thinking –’ He’d sifted every scrap of information she’d ever given him about Jamie and come up with a fragment that might just grow. ‘That reporter you told me about, the one who was so interested in Jamie’s drawings?’

  ‘Ye … es.’ She couldn’t see where he was going with this and it showed. Her eyes narrowed as she dredged up recollections. ‘His name wa
s Hugh, Hughes, something like that. I found him with two of Jamie’s drawings in his hands. If I hadn’t come into the kitchen when I did, I’m sure he would have taken them.’ She was frowning, digging cherries out of a slice of cake. Devlin tried not to watch her popping them into her mouth. That mouth. ‘You think he knew something? That he’d been told something?’

  ‘Could be.’ Devlin tried to force his eyes back to the sandwich plate. They didn’t want to go. He gave up the struggle. He might as well suffer the cake thing, along with all the rest. ‘Best way of finding out is to ask him.’

  Kaz’s eyebrows went up in a gratifying way. ‘You found him? When do we go?’ She was half on her feet.

  ‘Not tonight.’ Devlin grinned. ‘His name is Giles Pugh. He used to be a stringer for some of the nationals in London.’

  ‘But now?’

  ‘Art editor for something called the Western Daily Tribune, based in Cardiff. If we want Mr Pugh, we have to go west …’

  Kaz’s eyes were shining, with a disturbingly predatory gleam. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said softly. ‘We want him.’

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Devlin hunched over the computer. Above him he could hear the soft sounds of Kaz moving between bedroom and bathroom. He’d resisted the urge to join her. The woman needed some space. The phone was quiet. No one was ringing in to tell him anything. If he wanted information he’d have to go out there and get it.

  He tapped Olivier Kessel into the search engine and waited. The Wikipedia entry ran to six pages. The search engine cranked up ten pages and counting. Devlin got up to fetch a bottle of water from the refrigerator, and settled in for the long haul.

  After two hours searching, his eyes had begun to cross. What he was looking at was Kessel soup. Academic treatise, magazine articles, museum listings, blogs from critics and enthusiasts. The recent stuff was mostly puff pieces and speculation. ‘Kessel Heads in Bold New Direction’ ‘Now I’m 64 – Olivier Kessel to Embrace New Primitivism?’ ‘Kessel to Re-define Naive Art?’ Hints and teasers from ‘sources’, stirring the pot about the next big thing, stacking up the next ten million. Nothing concrete.

  Devlin leaned back, risking upsetting the chair he was sprawled in, staring at the screen. Kessel wasn’t just an artist, he was a showman. A media hound who didn’t seem to have given a direct interview in eighteen months. Devlin frowned. None of this stuff was going to take him anywhere. He tapped his fingers on the table. What had he expected, an internet confession?

  The man had planned the project down to the last inch. Like preparing a canvas for paint. Except he hadn’t counted on the wild card. Devlin grinned ferally at the screen. Him. Wrong road, wrong place, wrong time.

  Kessel must have nearly got a rupture from holding his breath. Nothing had happened for six months. Was the whole lot fucked, or not? Devlin picked up a pen and rolled it along the surface of the table. For six months after the accident there had been zip. Kessel had probably begun to breathe again. And then – hell in a hand basket. No wonder he’d sent Luce in. And then, after all, to lose the child. When did she die? Was Luce protection or merely damage control? Devlin slid away from that one.

  Idly he scrolled back the pages to Oliver’s bad boy years. Kessel in impossibly tight pony-skin flares and flowered shirts, making faces at the camera with his mates, falling out of doorways, drunk or stoned, snapped backstage at rock concerts, in fracas at high-price hotels and galleries, with his arm around a succession of doe-eyed, mini-skirted beauties, with endless legs and long, heavy curtains of hair. And with Suzanne. The most stunning of all, blonde and fragile and adoring, with a child in her arms.

  Devlin sat up straight. Kaz was looking directly at the camera, curious and unafraid. The dark hair was a wild circle around her head. Someone had plaited coloured ribbons into the front and tucked a flower behind her ear.

  Devlin turned off the screen and eased out of the chair. The adult Kaz was upstairs and even more beautiful. He lifted a flower out of a vase as he passed. If she was still awake, maybe he’d get lucky. It never hurt to be prepared.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  There was a sharp wind blowing. It carried the scent of the sea. Overhead, squalling gulls hovered, waiting for the platform to clear before they swooped on a discarded sandwich wrapper. Kaz looked at her watch. The train journey to Cardiff had taken a little over two hours. Services out of Paddington had returned to normal. If Devlin had been thinking about what had happened on the rail line the day before, he hadn’t mentioned it.

  Kaz surveyed him critically through lowered lashes. It had taken a while to get him dressed, not helped by the fact that he hadn’t wanted to accept her assistance. It was a lot easier getting his clothes off him than getting them on.

  In the end she’d left him to struggle, waited fifteen minutes and gone back into the bedroom. He’d been sitting at the end of the bed with an unbuttoned shirt, an untied tie and a neatly folded pair of socks, still beside him on the bed. She was very proud of the way she hadn’t burst out laughing at the expression on his face.

  Now he was smart and sinister in a dark suit. As well he might be, considering the designer label she’d spotted on the inside pocket and the bruises which had come out all along his jaw, in full multicolour glory. If you had a journalist to intimidate, it was a good look.

  ‘What?’ He was staring at her suspiciously.

  ‘Nothing.’ She looked away, sucking in her cheeks to control the grin. ‘Any idea where we’re going?’

  ‘Just across there.’ Devlin indicated the building that loomed next to the station.

  ‘What if Mr Pugh isn’t there?’

  ‘We wait.’

  ‘Would it be about an exhibition?’ The receptionist looked uncertainly at Devlin. ‘You can leave an invitation – or if it’s a book for review –’ She nodded towards a small pile of volumes on the shelf behind her. ‘Mr Pugh hasn’t collected them yet this week. I’m sure when he gets in –’

  ‘No.’ Devlin took a card out of his pocket. Kaz watched as he weighted it with the cast and jotted something on the back. He handed the card to the girl. ‘If you could see that he gets this?’

  ‘Um … yeah.’ The girl took the card, as if she was afraid it would sprout teeth.

  ‘Can you write with both hands?’ Kaz asked, as Devlin piloted her towards the pub that was almost opposite the entrance to the building. There were unoccupied tables on the pavement outside. ‘Only if it had been the other wrist you broke –’

  ‘Write, shoot, and punch out a guy’s lights, I do with either hand, otherwise I specialise.’ He gave her an evil leer, pulled out a chair and handed her a menu. ‘You want breakfast? They serve all day.’

  They gave their order and two unexpectedly good cappuccinos had arrived before Kaz gave in. ‘All right. What did you put on the card? And why are we sitting here?’

  ‘Something that should bring Mr Pugh to us.’ He looked at his watch. ‘He should be here to meet us in about – one minute?’

  ‘Not two?’

  ‘No.’ Devlin pointed a finger at a man standing on the opposite pavement, waiting to cross the road. ‘There he is.’ He grinned as Kaz raised her eyebrows. ‘The receptionist was doing her job, fobbing us off. He wasn’t out of the office. I figured five minutes to give him a message, two to come down in the lift –’

  Kaz squinted; the man looked familiar. ‘How you know things is creepy,’ she accused. ‘How did you guess he was in the building and that he’d come?’

  ‘I knew he was in the building, because I can read a list of names upside down.’ Devlin’s grin got wider. ‘The receptionist had a signing sheet – Pugh was marked in but not out. It wasn’t much of a long shot that Oliver’s name on the card would bring him.’

  ‘Huh!’ Kaz knew she was covering nerves by teasing Devlin. There was a coiled tension in him, too. ‘Simpl
e, when you know how.’

  ‘Giving away secrets here.’ Devlin reached over and took her hand, brief, warm, just right.

  She exhaled. ‘You didn’t explain what you expect me to do, when he gets here.’

  The lights had changed. Pugh was approaching.

  ‘All you need to do is look enigmatic. Inscrutable, too, if you like.’ Kaz kicked him under the table, but he moved his leg too fast. This anticipation of her moves was getting disturbing. Particularly the way she was enjoying it. She resorted to making a face at him. Devlin just gave her the wolf grin.

  Giles Pugh had almost reached the table. He was hovering three feet away. Kaz remembered the thin dark features and wary eyes.

  ‘Are you Devlin?’ Pugh covered the final feet.

  Devlin simply nodded, hooked out a chair with his foot and gestured for Pugh to sit. Kaz considered the move. A little over the top, but it had impressed the hell out of Pugh. There was an interesting mix of eagerness in his eyes and sweat on his upper lip. Kaz didn’t see a signal, but the waitress appeared immediately with another coffee. Pugh’s glance was flicking between her and Devlin.

  ‘I … You’re Katarina Elmore.’ Good memory, no fool.

  He rose and held out his hand. Kaz shook it. Pugh subsided back into his chair. Kaz sucked in a grin. He’d made no move to offer Devlin his hand.

  There was a pause. Pugh sampled his coffee, then sat back in his seat.

  ‘You have something to sell? Information?’ His eyes were still darting from her face to Devlin’s, and back again. The move didn’t quite fit the relaxed body language. The man was confused, but trying not to show it. Excitement warred with caution.