Kathy had watched Brock’s expression freeze. He turned his eyes to her and she bit her lip and nodded. ‘It’s true,’ she said softly.
‘Ah, so you knew,’ Toby said to her. ‘Well, to the point. You, Brock, are in the position that I was in, though with rather more certainty about the outcome. You can go ahead and do what you believe to be your duty and arrest me, but if you do so you will know with absolute certainty, as I did not, that you will lose your son.’
‘What do you mean?’ Kathy made to get up but felt Garry’s hand on her shoulder, pressing her down. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘When he returned here last night, John became rather too inquisitive. He found something he shouldn’t, and I was obliged to take him into my custody. He’s still alive, I should think, but he probably won’t survive another night, which would be a shame. You have no chance of finding him without my help, which I will give you, by phone, two hours after Garry and I drive away from here, and provided you don’t raise the alarm in the meantime. You can trust me on that. I give you my word. What do you say?’
‘You can go to hell,’ Brock said.
‘Brock, I think we should talk about this,’ Kathy broke in.
‘Sensible woman,’ Toby said. ‘Listen to her, Brock. Just two hours. Garry and I will retire to the inner office there to let you discuss this in private, eh? You have three minutes to decide.’ He got to his feet and marched stiffly to the door which Garry held open for him.
Brock was staring at Kathy. ‘Is it really true?’
‘Yes, John told me. I had to let him speak to you first. He was hesitant, uncertain how you’d take it, but we agreed that he’d tell you over dinner last night. Only it didn’t work out for some reason.’
Brock swore softly under his breath. ‘I think that was my fault. Dear God, Kathy! I had no idea.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. So what are we going to do?’
‘We can’t agree to this. The man’s just admitted to murder. There was no evidence of a struggle, was there? He’s a killer.’
‘And ruthless enough to let John die. We can’t allow that, can we?’
‘He’s bluffing.’
‘I don’t think so.’
Brock put both hands to his face.
‘Forget he’s your son,’ Kathy said. ‘He’s a member of the public whose safety depends on our giving a self-confessed killer a head start. We have no choice.’
Brock took a deep breath and sat upright. He was about to speak when they heard the sound of a car starting outside in the street. Kathy ran to the window and saw Toby ease himself into the passenger seat and pull the door shut behind him. The car drew away from the kerb. She turned back to Brock.
‘They must have gone out the back way. What do we do?’
Brock nodded. ‘You’re right, we have no choice.’ He seemed momentarily defeated.
‘We could have them followed, but I think it’s too risky. I’ll get Zack to track them with cameras, shall I?’
She used her mobile to ring Queen Anne’s Gate, speaking urgently down the line, giving them a description of the car and its number, then listened while they got to work.
‘They’ve got them crossing the river on Chelsea Bridge,’ she said at last. ‘The roads are clear to the south. What do you think, Gatwick?’
Then, a minute later, ‘They’re turning west on Battersea Park Road.’
‘The heliport?’ Brock roused himself. ‘Come on, we’ve got to find John before they get away.’
‘How can we? They could have taken him anywhere.’
‘What could he have discovered that forced their hand?’
Kathy thought. ‘He’d been looking through their old records stored in the attic by his room on the top floor.’
They hurried out to the front desk, where Kathy grabbed keys from the pigeonholes and they ran to the stairs. When they reached the top floor they opened the door to John’s room. His bag was still there, the bed unmade.
‘So he went to bed last night. Then maybe he got up and started searching the attic again.’
They found the door nearby on the landing, opening into a narrow staircase that doglegged up into a cramped loft laced with rafters and beams. In the pale gloaming from a dusty roof light they made out boxes, piles of old books and several metal-bound trunks. They searched rapidly, peering into the dim recesses, accompanied by the muffled cooing of pigeons on the roof outside, but found no sign of John.
‘I wonder,’ Kathy said, trying to suppress a rising feeling of panic, ‘if they made that tape of Freddie Clarke’s confession? Perhaps John found some evidence of it.’
Her phone interrupted her, and she whipped it out and listened. Toby Beaumont and Garry had abandoned their car outside the London Heliport terminal on Lombard Road and were boarding a waiting helicopter.
‘An AgustaWestland AW109,’ Zack said. ‘The registered owner is Mikhail Moszynski’s company, RKF.’
Brock was thinking about what Kathy had said, the video of Clarke’s confession, the glimpses of old whitewashed brickwork in the background, like the cellar next door. ‘Perhaps they brought Clarke here. We should check the cellar.’
As they ran downstairs Kathy received another message. The helicopter’s reported route was to Biggin Hill airfield in Kent, a fifteen-minute flight away.
They found the door to the cellar beneath the stairs in the ground-floor hallway, switched on the light and saw the flight of stone flags leading down. ‘John!’ Kathy called. ‘Are you there?’ There was only a dead silence.
At the foot of the steps they paused and looked around-a bench, some steel shelving, a box of tools, a bucket, pickaxe and spade. Nothing seemed out of place. Through an arched opening another room was bare, smelling of raw damp. They looked into a third room and a fourth, all empty.
‘Nothing,’ Kathy said, feeling panicky.
‘Beaumont was enjoying that, upstairs,’ Brock panted, feeling the chill of the place. ‘He was excited, hyped up, alive. He was back in Riyadh, in the war room- gung-ho, as he put it.’
‘Let’s hope we can trust him. There’s no sign of John anywhere.’
‘Someone’s been down here recently,’ Brock said, pointing to footprints on the dusty floor.
Another call came in. ‘The helicopter is landing at Biggin Hill. There’s only one plane preparing for take-off at present, a Cessna Citation Sovereign jet, fuelled up, waiting on the tarmac for its final passengers. It’s privately owned. RKF again.’ She listened some more. ‘It has a range of five thousand kilometres. Flight plan to Lagos, Nigeria. Zack is asking if we want flight control to hold it up.’
Brock frowned. ‘We have no extradition treaty with Nigeria.’ He shook his head and kicked at the shovel in frustration, sending it skidding across the floor. Then he crouched down. Kathy saw that his kick had dislodged a lump of clay from the back of the shovel’s blade. He felt it, damp and sticky.
He straightened and said, ‘No. Tell them to stop the plane. Put a vehicle on the runway. Don’t let it take off.’