Stick or Twist

by Diane Janes

‘Exactly. The sort of result to be noted on file as unsuspicious. Every time Jerry checked in, as it were, there was nothing of interest to report. Eventually Jack came back, but by then it must have appeared as if all these people had been followed up and nothing had emerged to be concerned about. At first glance, taken separately, it looks like a lot of irrelevant dead ends …’

  ‘But in reality the whole picture taken together is dodgy, because what it really means is that no one checked out.’

  ‘Exactly. In this case a lot of apparently innocent negatives could add up to something. On the one hand, all these people may exist and be perfectly legit. They may have all led exemplary lives, have had nothing at all to do with the Thackeray kidnapping, and be able to vouch for Jude and her brother having lived just where they said they did, hung out with just who they said they did, and cetera and cetera.’

  ‘On the other hand, they may be people who’ve been chosen to provide a backstory, precisely because they’re all untraceable.’

  ‘A combination of people who’re known to have died, or have moved away, mixed in with one or two people that you’ve completely made up, who will therefore be absolutely impossible to trace.’

  ‘Would they gamble on us giving up when we couldn’t trace these people?’

  ‘If you turn that on its head,’ Hannah said, ‘if you were part of some kind of set-up where you wanted to cover your tracks, then you would have to take that gamble – because the other alternative is to give genuine contacts and risk them telling the police all sorts of things that you don’t want them to know.’

  ‘But what would they be hiding?’ Peter shook his head.

  They both raised their glasses and took another drink, unconscious that they were moving in perfect unison.

  ‘This is dumb speculation,’ he said after a moment. ‘Yes, the brother is a potential suspect, because he stands to gain a lot if his sister meets with an unfortunate accident that ends in a one-way ticket in the back of a hearse – but what does Jude Thackeray stand to gain? There was no insurance pay out, or anything like that. They didn’t sell their story to the papers. What possible motive would she have for faking a kidnap? If it was only the information from the brother that didn’t check out … but lots of these names and addresses came from her.’

  ‘I know. I don’t pretend to get it. But what we’ve got is two people whose background information couldn’t be verified, and I think there has to be a reason for that. There’s always a reason for everything.’

  ‘Might be nothing at all to do with the kidnap,’ Peter mused, peering into his glass, before upending the last of his drink into his mouth. ‘You might just be unlucky inasmuch that everyone you have ever dated or had any dealings with, just happens to emigrate or die.’

  ‘No one is that unlucky. Let’s have another drink – that was only a tintsy one.’

  ‘Coincidences happen,’ he mused doubtfully.

  Hannah raised an expressive eyebrow in response, before taking the glass from his hand and heading back to the kitchen. He heard the freezer door open and a moment later, the sound of ice cubes falling into glasses.

  ‘You know,’ Hannah called though from the kitchen, ‘I was thinking about something else too.’ Her words were punctuated by the distinctive shumph of the freezer door closing, then by the screw cap, gurgle, screw cap routine that meant gin plinking over the ice cubes, followed by the hiss as she opened the tonic bottle. ‘There’s the Thackeray money.’ She emerged from the kitchen with a glass in each hand, but before she had time to pass one over, her mobile began to ring.

  THIRTY-THREE

  ‘Listen,’ Jude said, waving her half empty champagne glass in the direction of the window. ‘The wind must have changed direction. I told you that you could hear the sea from the house, if the wind was blowing the right way.’

  Mark tried to look enthusiastic, though he couldn’t help thinking that the sound of the sea was small compensation for a particularly uncomfortable sofa. So what if you could hear the sea? He’d heard it loads of times. In fact when he was a kid, he’d had one of those shells which gave off the sound of the sea, when you put it up close to your ear. How did that work, he wondered? Aloud he said, ‘It’s a real hideaway. Pity there’s no phone signal.’

  ‘That’s the beauty of it,’ she said. ‘You can’t be disturbed. No one can find you down here.’

  ‘But it’s a bit of a pain when you need to make a call.’

  ‘You can get a signal back at the road, if you need to.’

  ‘I can’t believe your parents never had a landline installed.’

  ‘I told you – they wanted to keep the place simple and unspoilt.’

  He didn’t answer immediately. Something had chimed wrong about the cottage from the moment of their arrival. His own family had never gone in for second homes. His father’s preference had been for first-rate hotels, and in later years for luxury cruise ships, but as a boy at boarding school, Mark had sometimes been invited to the holiday homes of friends and these had generally fallen into one of two categories. There were the all-singing, all-dancing, jazzed-up properties of the arrivistes, with a cocktail cabinet springing at you out of every bookcase, and a kitchen so high-tech that it looked like something straight off the space shuttle; and then there were the much-loved summer homes out in the country, places which had been in the family for years – sometimes generations – where nothing ever changed, the stain on the dining-room wallpaper still bearing sun-faded witness to an accident with a bottle of wine a decade and a half ago, a long dead grandfather’s walking stick propped in the hallstand, alongside a selection of forgotten umbrellas, and a child’s shrimping net. There were dog-eared playing cards and an amalgam of assorted games and jigsaws stacked in the sideboard for rainy days and everything looked slightly battered after suffering the vagaries of several generations of holidaying kids. This place didn’t have the right ambience to belong in either category.

  It wasn’t just the house that was wrong, he thought. Jude too seemed different since their arrival. Not like she should be, if she were completely at home in this familiar environment. He tried to push the sense of unease away. It was probably him, projecting nervousness onto her, because the time was fast approaching when he would have to broach the subject of money, which was in its way an even harder subject than a proposal of marriage.

  ‘Oh well.’ He attempted a tone of cheerful resignation. ‘I’ll just have to walk across the fields again later on, because there’s a call I’ve got to make this evening.’

  ‘Oh no.’ She spoke so quickly that she almost startled him. ‘You can’t – not on the first night of our honeymoon. It’s not romantic. Who can you possibly need to call tonight?’

  ‘It’s business – and important. It won’t take me a minute. Or it wouldn’t, if I didn’t have to walk half a mile to make a call.’

  ‘Don’t go out again tonight. Stay with me.’ It was her needy voice, which had always conveyed an undercurrent of something sexy. For the first time he wondered whether she was conscious of the effect, and able to manufacture it deliberately.

  ‘I’ll only be gone a few minutes. It’s not a big thing.’ (It isn’t a big thing. Why is she so dead set against it?)

  To his surprise she put her glass down and advanced on him, embarking on a prolonged kiss. He kissed her back, uncomfortably aware that he was being deliberately distracted, manipulated into not making his call. He had never known her to behave like this before. There was definitely something different about her tonight. He was tempted to disengage, but he needed to keep her sweeter than ever because the question of some readily available cash was becoming urgent. Chaz had called him only yesterday and given him an ultimatum. His friend was expecting to receive a down payment. Time was running out. Mark had only got Chaz off the line by promising that he’d call back with some news, within twenty-four hours, not that he had anything to offer yet, but he’d thought of another ploy to buy time. He intended to explain to Chaz
that he and Jude had gone off to Cornwall for a few days but that he would have the money – some of it anyway – in Chaz’s hands by the following weekend. He figured that Chaz would understand the desirability of keeping Jude happy for a few days in order to ensure a steady stream of finance in the future, and he also assumed that Chaz and his heavies wouldn’t want to trek down to bloody Cornwall, just for the sake of another couple of days before they got a payment. However, being able to speak with Chaz again today was an important part of the plan, because he knew from past experience that Chaz didn’t like it if you went quiet on him.

  While responding to Jude’s enthusiastic endeavours on the kissing front, he considered his situation. If necessary he would have to make prolonged, passionate love to Jude, before shoving on a pair of jeans and hoofing back to the lane to make his call before it got dark. It was still relatively early in the evening and would be light for a good hour or so yet. Even if she managed to delay him until after dusk, there was sure to be a torch somewhere.

  To his surprise however, Jude left off kissing him almost as abruptly as she had begun. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she said. ‘I want to show you the beach.’

  ‘But we’ve only just sat down with a drink.’

  ‘We’ve got all night to drink and I want to show you the beach now. Come on …’ She stood up and held out her hand.

  He remembered in the nick of time that he was still being Mr Amenable. God, but this was going to take some keeping up in the long run. How long did you need to stay married to someone before you were able to claim half their assets? Fortunately she hadn’t so much as considered drawing up a prenup, and maybe he didn’t even need half. Once he had everything sorted with Chaz’s friends and had got himself back on the straight and narrow …

  It was a funny sort of time to take it into your head to go for a walk, he thought, as he shrugged on a jacket. The weather had turned grey and overcast, with massing clouds in the south west which suggested that there might be rain before too long. In spite of this, Jude appeared to be in the brightest of spirits. She took his hand as they left the cottage – assuring him that there was no need to lock the door behind them, as ‘no one ever comes’.

  They had hardly gone more than half a dozen steps when she started eulogizing about how beautiful it was and how much she had always loved it there. Mark responded with some vaguely enthusiastic noises, while mentally wondering what on earth she was going on about. There was nothing to see except for an expanse of windswept grass which sloped away from them, ending abruptly against the dark grey sky, and it was not until they had been going for a couple of hundred yards that he glimpsed the sea. It was not the bluey-green of his beloved Mediterranean, sparkling in the sunshine and dappled by rainbow spray; the sort of view which might have tempted him to reach for a pair of trunks and a towel. It was not even an awe-inspiring stretch of ocean, capped with dramatic rolling waves, but merely the grey-green water he associated with freezing on the margins of an East Coast beach, while older brothers goaded him for being a wimp.

  ‘It’s so romantic here, isn’t it,’ she said. ‘I always dreamed of walking hand in hand along these cliffs, with the man I loved.’

  ‘And now you can.’ Be grateful for small mercies he told himself. It could have been a lot worse. Imagine if she had demanded a honeymoon at the Hotel Danieli in Venice, or Sandy Lane in Barbados. Cornwall – with her providing the accommodation – was a let-off and no mistake. He slowed and drew her in for another long drawn-out kiss, but the wind spoiled it, whipping her hair around the side of his face, with the tendrils eventually working their way into his mouth, so that he was forced to stop and remove the strands in a singularly unromantic way.

  ‘I suppose there isn’t a phone signal out here,’ he mused, as they continued their walk.

  ‘No. Not until you get back to the road. Forget the phone. You’re on your honeymoon.’

  ‘Right. Sorry.’

  They were heading across increasingly uneven ground as their route came nearer and nearer to the cliff edge, and though he still couldn’t see the water actually breaking against the shore, he could hear it clearly now: the unmistakeable sound of waves whispering up a shingle beach, growing steadily louder. They were heading towards a couple of raised outcrops of rock, which protruded from the grass like a pair of crooked molars, right at the cliff edge, and when they reached the place he saw that it marked the top of a route down the side of the cliff, which comprised of a steeply sloping path, alternating with a series of rough steps and at one point a wooden stair, running between a couple of dodgy looking platforms, built into the side of the cliff.

  As they stood contemplating what lay below, Mark noticed several things simultaneously: first that this initial glimpse of the waves which were breaking on the beach suggested a drop of at least sixty feet or more to the shore; second that the beach – in spite of Jude’s requesting his confirmation of its loveliness – looked rocky and singularly uninviting; and thirdly that the way down looked almost as treacherous as an SAS assault course.

  ‘You don’t want to go down there now, do you?’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to share it with you. We’ll have plenty of time to spend on the beach in the next few days, and if it warms up a bit we can go for a swim.’

  He was tempted to retort that it would take several more years of global warming before that was likely to happen, but he settled for nodding and squeezing her hand instead.

  Having shown him the way to the beach, she seemed content for them to turn back. The wind had been on their backs, but now it was in their faces and he found it hard to swallow his irritation at her insistence on such a pointless errand. If he pushed her over the cliff edge, he thought crossly, he wouldn’t have to worry about keeping her purring, or negotiating any future divorce settlement.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Stefan was extremely familiar with the crack which ran across his bedroom ceiling. He reckoned that if he had to close his eyes and draw it, he would be able to reproduce every nuance, every single minute fissure which branched out from the main stem. Sometimes he imagined it as a growing, living thing. The slender grey stem of an exotic plant, creeping steadily across the room, instead of a titchy crack in the plaster.

  Soon he wouldn’t have to see it ever again. He could leave the room, the crack, the crappy job selling Cornish pasties to greedy tourists (talk about seagulls, you should see the way some of those whale-fat bastards golloped through a fistful of minced lamb and turnips). The high life awaited and then it would be him buying the pasties, except that he wouldn’t – ever – want to see a pasty again. Caviar and champagne, mate, that was what he would be buying. No mistakes this time. No mess ups.

  Lying flat out on the bed, with his hands behind his head, he stared at the crack in the ceiling until it opened up like the lid of a treasure chest, onto visions of palm trees, sun-soaked beaches, swimming pools – hell yes, even a yacht. He was good with boats, so why not?

  He turned away from these visions of the glittering life that lay ahead to spare a glance at his phone, which lay silent on the white chipboard cabinet which passed for a bedside table. Not long now. He wasn’t nervous. If he had cold feet, he told himself with an unconscious smile, it was purely because of the permanent chill in this dingy room. He would have complained to the landlord about the damp, but it didn’t do to draw undue attention to yourself. Turn up at the crappy job, pay your rent on time, and keep yourself to yourself – but not so much so that you get marked up as the lone weirdo. He wasn’t an amateur. He knew what he was doing. Once the business was done, he would have to come back here and carry on as normal, for three or four weeks at least. After that it would be heigh-ho for the bright lights and a brand new start for Stefan.

  Heigh-ho? What sort of weird expression was that? Isn’t it what the seven dwarves used to say to Snow White? No, come again, that was High-ho. Oh well, never mind. In Snow White didn’t the bad old crone give pretty little Snow
White a poisoned apple? The bad girls were all ugly ducklings in Disney. Poor old Cruella de Vil, with her funny hair, all of that lot. Yeah, well, sucks to Disney, because in real life, it was the pretty ones you had to watch.

  He shifted on the bed, and noticed that a sliver of sunlight had appeared next to the window frame. The room only got the sun for about an hour at the end of the day (not even that much in the winter) and it never penetrated more than a foot or so into the room. He considered standing up and crossing to the window, so that he could feel the warmth of the dying rays, but he couldn’t be bothered. It wasn’t worth the effort, and anyway, he ought to save his energy for what was to come later.

  On the other hand, he didn’t want to drop off to sleep. Not much risk of that really. He extracted one hand from behind his head and held it out in front of his face. Steady as a rock. It was only his subconscious which betrayed him. Bloody stupid dreams about collapsing sandcastles. Well, after tonight, he was sure that there would be no more of those.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Mark could feel his heart thumping as he headed away from the cottage and hurried across the field which led back to the lane; not exactly jogging, but moving well in excess of his normal walking pace. If Jude took a long time over unpacking her stuff, he might easily get the call over and done with and be back to the cottage with her none the wiser. He had decided that it would be better to take the opportunity to slip away while she was otherwise engaged, because for some reason she had been pretty miffed about the whole idea of him going out to make a phone call, and there was really no point in antagonizing her over nothing, and plus he didn’t want her getting curious about the nature of a call which was important enough to interrupt their first evening of marriage.

  Every few seconds he glanced down at the phone again, to see if he had managed to get within range of a signal. The screen glowed in his hand, emphasizing how dark it was getting. He wouldn’t be surprised if a thunderstorm was imminent. She had said there was a signal back at the road, but now he began to wonder whether by ‘the road’ she meant the lane where his car was parked, or the main road (well hardly a main road, but a wider lane than the other one) from which they had turned into the single track lane which led to the parking place. He tried to remember how far away that turn-off was. Distances which seemed relatively short in the car transformed into major hikes on foot. He wouldn’t have time to go any distance, if he was to have any chance of returning to the cottage before she had noticed that he was gone.