‘You don’t say?’ She shook her head in surprise, took the serving dish from him, helped herself to vegetables, then leaned over to deposit the dish in a neutral area of the table, but one already occupied by the Radio Times. ‘You’d have thought it’d be a mite easier than with an ordinary phone.’
‘The system operators would like it to be. Too many portables are stolen. Thieves use them with impunity till they’re reported, like the SAE are doing now, with no chance of their being tracked down. The system operators are working on a solution to that one. But it won’t be in time to help Dermot Hackle.’ He poured her some water as he spoke. She drank nothing else with dinner at home. He preferred to sip Scotch. As usual, he had brought his glass and the bottle to the table with him.
‘But what if you were to ring them? Is it the same? If you know Dermot’s number surely— ’
‘We’ve tried already. This afternoon,’ he interrupted. ‘For another reason. We got the standard message when a subscriber is choosing not to answer. They were obviously not in the business of accepting calls. In any case, the locating problem’s the same. Or nearly the same.’
‘His poor wife, Rosemary. She’s such a frail creature.’ Alison spooned some potatoes on to her plate from the other serving dish, recharged the spoon, considered, then put the second helping back in the dish. ‘What’s happening about her? She’s been told?’
‘Aye, and Mary Ricini’s moved into the house. It seemed the best solution. It’s hit Rosemary very hard apparently.’
‘What else would you expect, Hughie?’
‘I meant about it being the best solution. Because she might need sedation, and maybe medical counselling over the next few days. We couldn’t risk her taking herself off to her own doctor. Having to explain things. She understands that. And she gets on with Mary.’ He cut into his lamb chop.
‘And what about the Hackle children? Let’s see, the girl must be a teenager now. The boy about nine.’
‘They’re not to be told what’s happening. Not unless it’s absolutely unavoidable.’
‘Of course. But they must be told something.’
‘Only that their mother’s unwell, and that Mary’s staying because their father’s been caught up with meetings in the Midlands. That should hold them till Friday, if necessary.’
‘Is that when he’s to be released?’ Alison shook her head and gave a ruminative smile. ‘Rosemary wanted to bring the family here to the Festival on Saturday.’
‘I doubt they’ll be in the mood for dancing. But then, he could be freed earlier. If the kidnappers are satisfied, and Bob can persuade them.’
Alison looked up from her plate. ‘And if they’re not satisfied? Are they really going to harm him, or is it all threats?’
‘Threats, I hope. But we must still do as they order.’ He chewed for a moment while considering the prospect. ‘They don’t have the risks ordinary kidnappers run. For instance, they don’t have to pick up a ransom.’
‘Isn’t that when kidnappers are usually caught?’
‘I should think so. I’m no authority, but it stands to reason.’
‘It’s when they’re always caught on the TV. D’you suppose this SAE group is really not interested in money?’
‘We don’t know it’s them for certain, of course. They haven’t admitted it.’
‘But who else could it be?’
‘You’re right. Bob’s assumed it’s them, like the rest of us. But he won’t accept they’re not on the make. Not in some way.’
‘But they don’t have to be out for money. Not if they’re people committed to a cause.’
McFee dabbed his mouth with his napkin. ‘Bob’s not the sort to get committed to a cause beyond self-interest, so he’s not really in the market for people of the other kind,’ he observed cynically.
‘But what can the SAE stand to gain, except better treatment for animals?’
‘It’s difficult to say exactly.’ His eye roved from his now empty plate to the dish of apple crumble Alison had brought in earlier.
‘We’re going to lose a great deal?’
‘Aye. Not the lot, but a great deal.’
‘I suppose it’s only money. And money canna buy happiness,’ she added. It had been a favourite phrase of theirs in the early days of their marriage.
‘And we’re paying to save a life.’ McFee looked solemn. ‘I just wish it was a life worthier of the sacrifice.’
‘Every life is worthy of saving, Hughie.’
‘But this one less so than most. You’re very forgiving.’
‘So are you or you wouldn’t be ready to help.’
He didn’t respond directly. ‘The SAE have told us we have to sell twelve million, eight hundred and fifty thousand shares. Beginning at ten in the morning. A million shares every fifteen minutes. On the open market. Till they’re all gone.’
‘That’s a very exact figure?’
‘And they knew it exactly. Of course it was in the prospectus for anyone who could add up. It’s the total number of shares held by all the directors. It’s just short of sixteen per cent of the whole company. It’s going to be a terrible jolt.’
‘You mean the price of the shares will drop?’
‘Like a stone. And when it’s known it’s the directors who are selling, the stone could turn into a bomb.’
‘So the two-and-a-half million pounds our shares were worth on Friday— ’
‘Could fetch less than half that, I’m afraid.’
‘A million and a quarter’s still a lot of money.’ Her tone allowed that they were not about to be reduced to penury. ‘Have some apple crumble.’ She removed his dinner plate, stacked it with her own, on top of the seed catalogues, before passing him a dessert dish. ‘I still say you’re a good man, Hughie McFee. To give up so much for someone you don’t care for at all.’
He poured some Scotch into his glass. ‘If anything happens to stop Dermot Hackle becoming Managing Director when the time comes, I wouldn’t want the cause to have been my doing. Not in any way.’
‘Because you’d be made Managing Director instead?’
His eyebrows lifted. ‘That doesn’t follow.’
‘But you always wanted that. You know, I hadn’t thought … ’ She hesitated, absently helping herself to an overgenerous portion of the pudding. ‘That couldn’t be why Dermot’s been kidnapped? Dermot as opposed to Bob for instance? Or any of the other directors?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’ The sharpness of his comment surprised her.
‘Neither do I really.’ But his response made her want to try again. ‘Because Dermot has more enemies in the company than anyone else? More rivals, maybe? Could that have anything to do with what’s happened? Or what will happen next?’
‘Certainly not,’ he said, again with untypical fierceness.
Alison absently added more cream to her crumble.
Chapter Nine
‘Is Mummy very ill, Emma?’
‘Just an upset tummy.’
Tim Hackle, who was only just nine, lined up his mouth over his plate before disgorging another cherry stone on to it. ‘Will she stay in bed for the rest of tonight?’
‘Probably. Doctor Ricini’s giving her something,’ said his sister. The two were finishing supper in the kitchen.
‘So why have we got a doctor living with us?’
‘She isn’t living with us. Just a couple of nights while Daddy’s away. D’you want some more cherries?’
‘Oo, yes please, Emma. Did the doctor bring the cherries?’
‘I think so.’
Out-of-season fresh fruit was not a regular feature of the Hackle family diet. Emma put a handful of cherries on to Tim’s plate. Resisting a desire to take some more for herself, she then rose from the table, picked up the dish of fruit and put it in the refrigerator.
‘Are the cherries a present for letting her stay?’
‘Perhaps.’ Emma returned to her seat and poured herself another cup of tea.
‘That’s right.’
Thirteen year old Emma was very like her mother – quiet, self-denying and self-effacing – but quite capable of supervising the household when her mother was indisposed. Mary Ricini had already said as much, approvingly, a few minutes earlier, before she had gone up to sit with Rosemary.
Tim pulled away the stalk from a cherry between his teeth. ‘Why didn’t Daddy say he wasn’t coming home?’
‘He didn’t know till it was too late.’
‘But if he was going to Nottingham, why did we see him at Heathrow in the afternoon? He doesn’t fly to Nottingham. Not usually, does he?’
Since almost every one of Tim’s utterances ended in a question, it was surprising that over the course of time he hadn’t become at least marginally better informed.
‘We didn’t see him. Not for sure,’ said Emma.
‘Twenty-three.’ Tim had been counting his cherry stones. He was a good-looking child. Mary Ricini had remarked that he’d inherited his father’s captivating smile, while silently judging that a match for his father’s bedroom eyes was coming along nicely too. ‘I saw him,’ the boy offered, in a contrary half-whisper.
‘You only thought you did.’ Emma looked troubled. ‘You haven’t told Mummy?’
‘’Course not. You gave me l0p not to.’ The hurt look would have done justice to a bishop wrongly accused of misquoting the Lord’s Prayer. ‘It was him though. With that lady.’
The two had taken a bus the few miles to the airport after lunch on the previous afternoon so that Tim could see the new Aeroflot airliner take off. He was an avid plane spotter. They had been waiting for a return bus at the terminus in the centre of Heathrow when Tim had spotted a familiar-looking car. It had certainly seemed like the one their father drove, and it had been heading for Terminal Two.
‘We never saw the faces,’ said Emma.
‘I saw Daddy’s. I’m certain. Nearly certain anyway. And I saw the number plate,’ he ended with a rush.
‘No you didn’t.’
‘Some of it.’ He rubbed his nose. ‘Most of it. Why can’t I tell Mummy?’
‘Because, I don’t want you to. And you promised not to.’ She knew that the promises he made for money were the ones he honoured: in so doing, he kept the way clear for negotiating similar contracts in the future.
‘Is it because she’s got a tummy upset? She didn’t have that yesterday. Not when you said not to tell her.’
Emma was a sensitive creature, as well as an observant one. She had grown up a good deal in the previous year. There were many things she knew about that depressed her mother. She sensed that her father’s being with a pretty young woman at Heathrow, an hour after he’d left the house to drive directly to Nottingham, would qualify as another of those things. ‘Mummy doesn’t like Daddy flying. She worries. In case there’s an accident.’ It was a good try.
‘We’d know by now if there’d been an accident, wouldn’t we?’
‘If he hasn’t got the car he’ll be flying back. She’d worry about that too. And it probably wasn’t him we saw anyway.’ She looked at the time pointedly, got up, and began to clear the table.
Tim brushed the hair from his eyes and gave his sister a bright-eyed smile. ‘Can I watch telly till half past then?’ he pleaded.
Emma nodded, relaxing inside herself. Reason had triumphed where bribery hadn’t totally – with his favourite programme providing the coup de grâce.
She knew it had been her father’s car all right, with her father driving it. She had seen him quite clearly, also the woman in the passenger seat, before Tim had even noticed the car.
There was no way Emma could know that by declaring what she and Tim had seen, she might have reduced the danger for her father. No one had told her he was in any danger. That being so, you could understand why she deemed it important not to report something she was instinctively certain would make her mother miserable.
Something similar had happened before. A friend had told her mother she’d seen her father with a woman going into a London night-club. Unknown to the others, Emma had overheard the conversation. Her mother had dismissed the report saying the woman had been a customer of Closter Drug, that it had been a business date, that she’d known about it. But her mother had been sad for days afterwards, and Emma believed she knew why.
So Emma’s reticence now was not only innocent but also maintained with the best of intentions.
In contrast, there was someone else closely connected with Closter Drug who, unlike Emma, knew about the kidnap and who had been with Dermot Hackle after the children had seen him. That person had no justification for remaining silent – but plenty of reason.
‘Thank God that’s over,’ Jane Larden sighed and fell back into the front passenger seat of the Mercedes. ‘I don’t know how you managed to be so cool all evening.’
‘With some effort.’ Larden started the engine, then moved the car towards the exit in the nearly empty underground carpark of the National Theatre on London’s South Bank. Their guests of the evening had driven out just ahead of them.
‘I wasn’t any help, was I? I’m sorry, darling, I’m just numb still.’ She leaned across and kissed him on the cheek, her hand moving to caress the inside of his thigh.
‘You were fine,’ he replied, only half meaning it, but as always affected by her touch. The news about Dermot Hackle had moved her deeply – much more than he had expected. He had realised too late that it would have been better to have delayed telling her anything until the evening was over.
‘It’s just as well it was theatre and dinner after, not just dinner. I don’t believe I could have coped with Roger and Sybil through a long meal tonight.’
‘They’re not an easy pair. But he’s an important customer. I thought of cancelling, but it seemed the wrong thing to do. For a lot of reasons. They enjoyed themselves, at least. It was a good play.’
‘Was it? I couldn’t concentrate.’
The two had met earlier as arranged at one of the theatre bars. She had arrived by cab. He had driven directly from the factory. There had been a few minutes to talk before their guests had appeared. He had given Jane the bare bones of the kidnap story then. They had not been alone since. Their meal at Ovations, the theatre restaurant, had ended a few minutes before this.
‘So when exactly did they take Dermot?’ Jane asked as he was swinging the car into York Road.
‘We don’t know. Some time last night probably. He’d rung Rosemary. From Nottingham we assume. He said he’d have to stay over. Hughie McFee did a discreet check on all the places where he might have stayed. He wasn’t registered at any of them, and there was no reservation.’
‘What about the person he went to see? You said it was a business trip?’
‘There was no appointment in his diary. Nothing his secretary knew about.’
‘Was it someone who rang him at the weekend?’
‘Could have been. His wife doesn’t remember any particular call. We’ve a number of major customers in the area. But we don’t know which one it was, and we could hardly ring them all asking if they’d seen him.’
‘Because they’d know he’d gone missing?’
‘That, and because we simply don’t know whom we can trust.’
She gave a little shiver. ‘So it’s possible Dermot didn’t go to Nottingham at all? I mean it could have been a ruse to get him away from home?’
‘Possibly.’
‘In which case no one there’s going to know anything about him anyway.’ She paused. ‘If the SAE are using his car telephone, I suppose it means they’re using his car too?’
‘Not necessarily. It’s a portable phone like this one.’ He nodded at the instrument below the dashboard. ‘They’re more likely to have abandoned the car.’
‘So can’t you report it as stolen? If the police find it, you’d have an idea where to start looking.’
He shook his head. ‘So far we’ve avoided any contact with the police. The Irishman was adamant about that.’
She nodded understandingly. ‘When Dermot spoke, did he sound normal?’
‘Normal, but his voice was faint. He could have been some distance from the phone. Maybe tied up with someone holding it for him. That’s just guessing.’ He had caught a new look of distress on her face.
‘But they haven’t hurt him?’
‘He said not.’
‘But they’ll kill him if you don’t do what they say?’
‘That was the threat. I don’t believe they would.’
‘But you can’t be sure. And there were other threats, you said?’
‘If we tell the police.’ His tone was purposely dismissive. ‘Since we haven’t, there shouldn’t be any danger.’
‘And you’ll sell the shares?’
‘You realise what that’ll mean?’
‘The price will drop afterwards?’
‘Not just afterwards. As soon as we start selling. In those sorts of quantities. The exercise could cost me five million.’ He looked grimly at the road ahead.
‘Over half the value of your holding?’
‘That’s my estimate, yes. But only an estimate.’ His knuckles were white as his grip tightened on the wheel. ‘It could be worse than that. The reward for five years’ grinding effort more than halved in one day.’
‘But you can buy back the shares?’
‘No one’s to buy back this week. Or to let anyone else buy for them. That includes bank nominees. Otherwise the deal’s off.’
‘But how can these people know who’s doing the buying?’
‘They say they can. Because they have moles everywhere. So far we’ve accepted that much as fact.’
‘Because of the risk to Dermot otherwise?’
‘Yes. They won’t release him till after the stock market closes on Friday. To make sure we’re held to our word.’
‘So you can buy back on Monday? Won’t the share price be low then?’
‘It may be. It depends on what game they’re playing.’
‘But isn’t their game what you said? To hurt Closter directors? Like the demonstration last week was to spoil the flotation?’
Prescription for Murder Page 9
