It was afternoon when his phone rang. It was Jessica, sounding in a high state of agitation. ‘Where are you?’
‘Still in Dover,’ he replied. ‘Something came up.’
Strange that she didn’t seem interested to ask what, he thought. In the next moment, he understood why.
‘We heard from Carl.’
Ben’s eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean, heard from him? When?’
‘He phoned us. Just half an ago.’
‘You talked to him?’
‘No,’ she groaned. ‘We weren’t here. We were only gone twenty minutes, to get some shopping because there wasn’t a scrap of food left in the house. When we got back, there was a message on the answer machine. We’d only just missed him. We tried calling the number back but it didn’t come up. It sounded like a mobile.’
‘He didn’t say where he was calling from?’
‘He wasn’t on the line long enough. We called the police right away. They’re working on tracing the call. Ben, you’ve got to get back here.’
This changed everything.
‘I’m on my way,’ he said.
‘The police just left a few minutes ago,’ Jessica told him when he arrived at the house just over three hours later. He wasn’t entirely sorry to hear that he’d missed them. Cops were as uneasy in his presence as he felt in theirs. It wasn’t a harmonious relationship he had with them, never had been, never would be.
‘There have been developments since I called you,’ she said. Jumpy with contained excitement, she led him into a huge, plush living room where a phone sat on a low table. Moments later, Mike joined them. ‘Ben, thank Christ you’re here. Sorry we had to call you back from Dover so urgently, but under the circumstances…’
‘What’s happening?’
‘Since we called you earlier, lots. The mobile number turned out to be a foreign one. Interpol are involved now. They’ve traced the phone’s owner. It’s registered to a man called Barberini. Gianni Barberini. Apparently, he’s a doctor in Turin.’
‘A dermatologist,’ Jessica corrected him.
‘What do the police make of it?’ Ben asked.
‘They seem as baffled by it as we are,’ Mike replied. ‘Last we heard, they were still trying to track down this Dr Barberini’s whereabouts. He’s not at home. They said he was away at some conference, or something. We’ve been waiting for more. And hoping you could make sense of this.’
‘Let me hear the message,’ Ben said.
Mike replayed it from the answerphone. The line was a bad one, with an echo and lots of background noise. ‘Mum? It’s me,’ said a boy’s voice.
‘That’s definitely him?’ Ben asked Jessica, and she gave a quick, certain nod.
‘Mum, I’m …I’m okay,’ Carl blurted, speaking in hesitant snatches over the background noise, which sounded to Ben like voices, as if the boy had been calling from the middle of a crowd of people. But there was another noise too, distorted and hard to identify. A kind of screech, followed by what sounded like a muffled bang. Ben couldn’t make it out at all.
‘I just wanted to say …I love you, mum. I—’ Carl’s voice was lost for a second amid some kind of commotion. ‘I’ve got to go,’ he said suddenly. And there the message ended.
Jessica was looking fraught and gnawing at her thumb. ‘That’s all there is,’ Mike said anxiously. ‘What do you make of it, Ben?’
‘It’s definitely some kind of public place,’ Ben said. ‘Indoors, and crowded. A bar, maybe, or a café. But that other sound …let me hear it again.’
Mike replayed the message. Ben closed his eyes, concentrating hard on the strange noises in the background. They seemed to be coming from further away, which meant they must have been pretty loud. ‘What is that?’ he muttered to himself.
‘The police think it might be fireworks,’ Jessica said. ‘The high-pitched screech, then the loud bang. What else makes a sound like that?’
‘Maybe,’ Ben said. ‘But in the middle of the day?’
‘They have technicians working on it,’ Mike said. ‘Apparently they can separate out the frequencies or something, and use filters to clean them up.’
Ben looked at his watch. It was getting late, but there was still time if he hurried. He pulled out his car key.
‘Where are you going?’ Mike asked.
‘Italy,’ Ben said.
9
It was getting towards midnight by the time Ben’s flight touched down at the Aeroporto di Torino in the middle of a rainstorm. As he was leaving the airport, Jessica called again.
‘They found Barberini,’ she said, and for a second Ben thought she was going to tell him that he was dead, too. ‘Found him?’ he asked.
‘I mean, they have him. He turned up at his home in Turin at eight o’clock this evening, and the Italian police were waiting for him there. They took him for questioning. As far as we can tell, they’re still talking to him.’
‘Any feedback yet?’ Ben asked as he spotted the car rental place across the way and began heading for it, head down through the lashing rain.
‘They’re keeping us updated. I don’t think he’s been charged with anything. It’s been confirmed he was on the list of delegates at that conference, and his alibi checks out. He totally denies any involvement in the abduction. Says he’s never heard of Drew or Carl, and doesn’t know anyone from Jersey. But listen to this.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘They found fingerprints on his phone. The police faxed Interpol a set of Carl’s taken from his room, and we had a call twenty minutes ago saying they’re a match. So Barberini’s lying. He was involved.’
‘Or else Carl just used his phone to make the call,’ Ben said. ‘With any luck, we’ll soon find out. I’m in Turin now.’
‘Turin?’ Jessica said, sounding perplexed. ‘But I thought Drew had taken Carl to Milan. That’s where the call was from, wasn’t it?’
‘I’ll be in touch,’ Ben said, and cut her off.
At nearly twelve-thirty a.m., a very resentful and sullen Dottore Gianni Barberini was finally released from police questioning, demanding to be taken home in an unmarked car so that his nosy neighbours wouldn’t take him for some kind of a damned criminal. The pouring rain just pissed him off all the more. All the way from the Posto di Polizia to his villa in one of the more affluent neighbourhoods of the city, he grumbled sourly at the plain-clothes driver, who was just as irritable as he was for having to ferry this arrogant prick home, and made no reply.
It was ten to one by the time Barberini climbed wearily out of the car and tramped up his long, curving driveway, cursing the rain and glancing up at the master bedroom windows to ensure that Germana hadn’t stayed up waiting for him. The lights were all off — thank God. His wife could be a terrible bitch if she was disturbed late at night. In fact, he reflected sourly as he approached the house, she’d been a terrible bitch for most of the miserable thirty-two years he’d been married to her.
Rather than risk waking her and face all kinds of wrath and yet more goddamn inquisition that night, he made for the separate entrance to the suite of rooms he used for his private dermatology practice here at the villa. Above it was his little sanctuary, his personal den, where he often slept on the sofa bed after working late, or sometimes just to get away from Germana. He loved it in there, undisturbed, just him and his collection …He paused at the door, fumbling keys with one eye on her window, dreading that her bedroom light might come on at any moment. Where was the key? Ah — got it.