‘I’m going to, I promise.’ He stared through the open window, feeling a warm breeze on his face. Looked at the covered barbecue beside the swimming pool. A glorious summer Sunday. Ordinarily he’d have had a swim. Perhaps played some tennis with Mungo, then a late barbecue lunch. Mungo loved his special burger recipe.
Stacey walked across and put her arms around Kipp, clinging to him like a drowning person clinging to driftwood. ‘Please. Please. Please.’
His heart felt like it was twisting, tearing at the sinews that held it in place. ‘Stace, I love him as much as you do.’
‘You don’t know how much I love him. He’s all we have in the world. I couldn’t bear it — if — if anything happened to him — I just couldn’t.’
He felt her tears on his hair, on the back of his neck. He found her fingers and squeezed them. ‘It won’t, trust me,’ he said. ‘Trust me, Stace.’
‘Trust Kipp?’ she said, disentangling herself and standing back, staring at a photograph of Mungo grinning, looking unsteady on a paddleboard. ‘Really? I should trust Kipp?’
‘Stace.’
She laughed, a hollow, mocking laugh. The laugh of a total stranger. ‘Trust Kipp! Of course! I’d trust you anytime. Why wouldn’t I trust a man who would put his business in front of his son’s life?’
‘Because I won’t,’ he said.
‘Then prove it, prove it now.’
A text came in on Stacey’s phone. She looked.
Tell your husband to go his office now. Await instructions and a package. Tell the police again and this time your boy does die.
‘Oh God no.’ She handed the phone to Kipp and sobbed while he read it.
A package.
What could that mean? he wondered.
An icy gust of fear swept through him.
What did a package mean?
Mungo parcelled?
Dead?
He sat still, struggling not to throw up. Then he stood, abruptly, grabbed his phone and headed for the door.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked.
‘To the office.’
‘To the office? Now?’
‘I’m going to do it, OK? I’ll pay the ransom, I’ll move some funds around, cover my tracks. I can check the client discretionary fund from here, but I can’t make any transactions — a security thing — it can only be done from a computer in the office, where the code changes daily.’
‘Be careful.’
He looked back at her. ‘You want me to be careful or you want me to get Mungo back?’
‘Both.’
‘It’s going to be one or the other.’
76
Sunday 13 August
11.00–12.00
‘How long have you worked for me, Dritan?’ Jorgji Dervishi asked with a kindly smile, soon after the police officers had left.
‘Ten years, sir, Mr Dervishi.’
Despite being a foot taller and weighing one hundred pounds more than his boss, Dritan was afraid of the man.
‘And in these ten years, have I ever given you any reason to be unhappy with me?’
‘No, Mr Dervishi.’
‘None at all?’
‘None at all.’
Dervishi lit a cigar. ‘Yet you wish to leave me and go home to Albania? You don’t like to work for me any more?’
‘It isn’t that. My girl — Lindita.’
‘She’s very pretty but she doesn’t like that you work for me, does she?’
‘Why you say that?’
Dervishi pointed at his own eyes. ‘I see it in how she looks at me. She thinks I am a bad influence on her sweet little man, yes? You want to go back home, where she is going to convert you into a good little citizen, eh? Run a little shop together — no — a coffee house, right?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But you have to go.’
‘Yes.’
‘But now you find out today that the cut you were going to get from my son’s plan with his friend is no longer going to happen, right?’ He blew a smoke ring. ‘Gone, yes, like a puff of smoke? You had plans for this money? Enough to start your own business with your sweetheart, Lindita?’
Again, Dritan said nothing.
‘This money would go a long way in Albania — much further than here, I think. It would buy you a very nice coffee house in Tirana, perhaps?’
‘Maybe.’
Dervishi smiled. ‘I think the timing could all be very perfect! Perhaps we come to an arrangement, a deal in which I forgive you, in return for a little favour. How would you like it if I fly you home tonight on my private plane, out of Brighton City Airport, with the £60,000 or whatever it is your friend Valbone has screwed you out of — would this be of interest to you?’
‘What would this favour be?’
‘Your colleague — friend — Valbone, did he ever say he was unhappy with me?’ he asked.
‘Never, Mr Dervishi.’
‘Never?’
‘Never.’
Dervishi drew pensively on his cigar. ‘You are very well acquainted with Thatcher, are you not?’
Dritan nodded. Thinking about Lindita’s text. He knew Thatcher was one of the things she had been referring to.
I don’t like some of the things you do, u know what I’m talking about.
‘You have seen, my trusted Dritan, how Thatcher likes human body parts, especially arms and legs?’
Dritan nodded, feeling a little sick with fear, wondering what was coming.
‘You would not like me to inflict one thousand cuts on you and then feed your right arm to Thatcher, would you? And watch him eat it? As punishment for what you and Valbone had planned?’
‘No, Mr Dervishi.’ He was trembling.
‘Of course you would not.’ Dervishi looked at his computer screen, momentarily distracted by something on it. Then he tapped deftly on the keyboard, before returning his attention to his employee. ‘How is your mother, Dritan?’ he asked, suddenly changing the subject.
‘My mother?’ Dritan frowned. In ten years his boss had never asked him any questions about his family, so why now? ‘My mother is good, thank you. She is well.’
‘She and your father in that village, they still work their little farm, don’t they?’
He hesitated. ‘Yes.’
Dervishi nodded. ‘Your gjyshe, too, she lives there and helps them. You are fond of her, are you not?’
‘I love my grandmother very much,’ he replied, curious that Mr Dervishi suddenly seemed so interested in his family. ‘Very much. She was always so good to me — and she looks after my kid brother.’
‘Your kid brother — he’s just eighteen now?’
‘Nineteen.’
‘Nineteen.’ Dervishi nodded. ‘Nineteen, in a wheelchair, with the mind of a two-year-old.’
‘My mother had a difficult birth with him, he did not breathe for too long — he got brain damage.’
‘That’s too bad. So, for your grandmother he will always be her little baby grandson?’
The bodyguard pursed his lips and nodded.
‘So, Dritan, all I ask you to do is to find Valbone. Find his associates also, the ones who arranged, behind your back, to take Mungo Brown. Find them and explain to them all I am not happy — am I clear?’
‘Explain to them?’
‘Explain. You understand what will happen if you do not, Dritan?’
‘I understand.’
‘You understand or you think you understand? You look a little confused to me.’
‘I understand, Mr Dervishi.’
Dritan’s phone beeped with an incoming text.
‘Please,’ Dervishi said. ‘Check your phone. I believe you have a new text.’
Dritan did as he was told. He saw a photograph of a small rustic dwelling taken with a telephoto lens. A pig was visible in the foreground and a farm dog in the distance.